The agreeable eye

an eudæmonistarchives

More specifically concerning: taste

Rasselas

26 March 2004, around 19.06.

a philosophical expedition to Abissinia

experimentalist

21 April 2004, around 8.15.

…the judgement that someone is unliterary is like the judgement ‘This man is not in love’, whereas the judgement that my taste is bad is more like ‘This man is in love, but with a frightful woman’. And just as the mere fact that a man of sense and breeding loves a woman we dislike […]

all the baggage

25 March 2008, around 17.38.

So I was reading Paul Fussell’s book about travel, Abroad. Of course it’s not just about travel, though he does spend some thirty-odd (or more or less, I’ve returned it to the library and cannot refer to it now) pages lamenting the impossibility of true travel1 in this degraded age of tourism, it’s about literary […]

elusive taste

29 January 2010, around 0.20.

Muriel Barbery. The Elegance of the Hedgehog & Gourmet Rhapsody. trans. Alison Anderson. New York: Europa, 2008/2009. I’ve stayed in much richer ones than that. I’ve stayed in one so rich that when you pulled the lavatory-plug it played a tune… Rich people – you have to be sorry for them. They haven’t the slightest […]

paper bullets of the brain

3 September 2011, around 8.04.

After a while books grow matter of fact like everything else and we always think enviously of the days when they were new and wonderful and strange. That’s a part of existence. We lose our first keen relish for literature just as we lose it for ice-cream and confectionery. The taste grows older, wiser and […]

Citation (47)

20 September 2012, around 21.30.

on architecture, art, busts, and weight…

in a style to endure

1 June 2014, around 11.42.

In the world of literature and art, Goldsmith and Johnson had gone; Cowper was not yet much known; the most prominent poets were Hayley and Darwin; the most distinguished prose-writer, Gibbon. […] Miss Burney, afterwards Madame D’Arblay, surprised the reading world with her entertaining, but somewhat vulgar novels; and Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, and […]

Crambe repetita (34)

15 January 2015, around 5.17.

Virginia Woolf, ‘Four Figures: Beau Brummell’ from The Second Common Reader.

A Feeling for Books

20 March 2015, around 5.04.

By Janice Radway, Univ. NC Press, 1997.

non disputandum

19 August 2016, around 12.45.

One might be tempted to think this is merely the result of a false sort of conjugation, something along the lines of: ‘I have taste; you have preferences; s/he has an unfortunate partiality’; except I would be the first to admit that I have no real taste – it has been rarefied out of me […]

politesse

1 August 2020, around 10.11.

Despite a subscription to one of the noteworthy review periodicals, I have mostly given up reading book reviews. They never really manage to tell me what I want to know, the information that a blind, intuitive reaching for the shelves will provide – what do I want to read next? Indeed, looking at book reviews […]

rudimentary

8 January 2021, around 5.47.

The other day I happened see something about a fashion photographer’s memoirs and was bored and the ebook was available from the library, so I succumbed to the temptation of my phone and looked. It had the expected condescending, self-assured tone, with a rhythm to its prose like the jolting trot of a school-horse (willful, […]

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