I had been wanting to read Fredric Jameson’s Fables of Aggression (1977) for a while, but as enticing and timely as the subtitle sounded to me — “the Modernist as Fascist” — I could never talk myself into plunging into a deep study of the works of misogynist Nazi sympathizer Wyndham Lewis, whose books I knew nothing about.
Not long ago I revisited my copy of BF Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" and was newly struck by a parenthetical line I'd highlighted when I first read it in 2018 or 2019: "The machine is the enemy of the word." The context was obviously different in the mid-1950s—but it's one of those serendipitous aphorisms that develops a resonance unrelated to circumstances to which it originally spoke.
Not long ago I revisited my copy of BF Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" and was newly struck by a parenthetical line I'd highlighted when I first read it in 2018 or 2019: "The machine is the enemy of the word." The context was obviously different in the mid-1950s—but it's one of those serendipitous aphorisms that develops a resonance unrelated to circumstances to which it originally spoke.