2025-10-02 Paris Review notes

some excerpts and notes from The Paris Review, Fall 2025

The Art of the Essay No. 4: Eliot Weinberger

page 71: (responding to critics who suspect that what he writes is not strictly factual)

... I did include a bibliography in An Elemental Thing, to show that everything in my essays comes from somewhere, and that whether or not we would consider the information true is not the point -- somebody believed it.

page 77:

... my vision of the world was completely formed by Mad magazine. Mad was the only place that told the children of the fifties, Your parents are idiots, your teacher is an idiot, the president is an idiot, and the Lone Ranger is a racist. The ideological bedrock of the sixties counterculture is not Marx or Mao, but Mad.

The Art of Nonfiction No. 13: Maggie Nelson

page 149: (responding to a question about The Argonauts)

There needed to be connections along the way, and a rising sense of stakes, to make it interesting not just as writing but as a series of thoughts.

(responding to a question about her work consisting of arranging)

... If Bluets and The Argonauts work, it's because of the plotting that's not visible, the order in which information is dispensed.

page 156:

... There's a push and pull between being a good observer and asking, What is the rhythm of my attention telling me about myself?

[ this seems right in line with Hospicing Modernity and the exercises suggested about getting to know the world I inhabit, create, and then re-inhabit;-- maybe that itself is a habit? ]