Brian Patrick Eha
@brianeha
Essayist, journalist, author, critic | CUJ grad | Tweeting literature, history, ideas | Connecting dots | Essays upcoming on Celan, Emerson, Malaparte, the moon
Unlike most editors, Greg really allowed me to take the limiter off (both substance- and style-wise) in this essay. Please read and support his cutting-edge lit mag.
Please enjoy Brian Patrick Eha's stunning essay "Contra Sartre: Proust and Other People" @brianeha socratesonthebeach.com/brian-patrick-…
My mom died two years ago and her absence has taught me a terrible lesson, which is that if you don't get cracking and follow through on all the creative things you want to do then the people you want to share your success with the most won't be around to enjoy it with you
The partisan is valuable. The man without a side is invaluable.
"And it was there that I began to understand that everything which I had thought had made me powerless in the world had also made me of value, and that to the American I was of interest precisely because I was what I was, a man without a side." V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
I asked if she would trade her condition for mine but she doesn't seem interested.
I guess they decided that the education system today is still *not unfriendly enough* toward introverts, brilliant nonconformists, and neurodivergent, especially autistic, kids.
Elite universities are going to start using peer-scored civility ratings for admissions?! Sorry, that’s a terrible idea. Why not just admit people based on their scores and then teach them to debate and dialogue? You don’t need to go full CCP to solve this problem.
Anyone looking for a real-time way to track your net worth: I have been using @KuberaApp for over a year now and recommend it. It's straightforward but powerful. It links to your FIs and aggregates everything, making it easy to get a summary view or drill down on specifics. No…
"Whatever work [the contemporary writer] does must proceed from a reckless inner need. The world does not beckon, nor does it greatly reward." —William H. Gass
![brianeha's tweet image. "Whatever work [the contemporary writer] does must proceed from a reckless inner need. The world does not beckon, nor does it greatly reward."
—William H. Gass](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gv74wCNWkAAOEcv.jpg)
This is great listening. The reading list grows ever longer
My episode of @madmethodpod is out from behind the paywall. Listen to me chat with @bradkelly about Flaubert's dual legacy, Alfred Hayes, Under the Volcano, and my own writing. With digressions into Borges, AI, the power of the English language, and more! Episode link below 👇
True of essays as well. The writer who composes essays (to take Duras's terms) with extension, with darkness, with silence; essays that "toll the black mourning for all life," finds all too often that what editors want instead are essays "for daytime, for whiling away the hours."
Marguerite Duras...
Something important to realize about normies is that they will change their minds but almost never change their mindset. They will support something they once opposed, for instance, not because their mindset has changed but because it has now become "normal" to oppose that thing.
The obsessive architectural model builder is a now exceptionally rare type of guy. A Sebaldian hero.
this guy spent 21 years building a miniature version of nyc consisting of almost a million buildings, the full model is 50 feet long and 30 feet wide, and he first announced it on tiktok like this:
On how literature will survive w/@brianeha [link to full episode in comment]
You are just a troubled guest on the dark earth. —Goethe
Perennial truth from Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer explains how to deal with the social web. (h/t @m_clem)
I would say that you are missing the word "it" from "that [it] is all but an absolute certainty."
Artists: What would you say if I told you that is all but an absolute certainty that no one on earth will be thinking about your work in 100 years.
You think this sort of snippy, holier-than-thou retort makes you sound smart. It doesn't. Anyway, you didn't denigrate the anthem itself. All you did was imply that the guy who wrote it once upon a time was a Very Bad Person (and so therefore... what?). Yawn.
Good old reliable memes to the rescue when the poetry of slave owning attorneys is denigrated on this the day of our nation's birth
It's a good thing when flawed people manage to leave a beneficial legacy, actually
Francis Scott Key, who wrote "The Star Spangled Banner," was an attorney who owned slaves until his death
This must have been what it felt like in late antiquity as the Roman empire fell apart and people gradually lost the ability to read classical texts