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I’ve recently added a search function so that you can limit your Google search to just the blogs that are members of MetaxuCafe. I think that will be a good resource for everyone looking for literary topics online and you’ll find it right on the front page as well as other places on the site. Now if you want to read about, say Orhan Pamuk, but only want to search the litblogs you trust, you can narrow your search right here.

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Aesthetics of Process

by Jacob Russell on March 30, 2008

I’ve been perplexed by the problem of how to write a review, the kind of review I want to write, the kind of review I would like to read. I have something in mind, but I don’t know what it is.  I launch an effort to write about a piece of fiction and come to a dead end before I’ve filled a page. There are reviews I greatly admire--but at the same time, I hear myself say as I read them--this is very good, but it isn’t it. This isn’t what I’m looking for. Clavdia Chauchat’s recent post on Letters from a Librarian, Notes on Valéry’s Aesthetics, touches on a matter central to my problem: the difficulty of articulating an aesthetics of process--the difficulty of writing about those slippery choices that go into the making of any work of art, choices that have been erased by other choices, and which are themselves erased in turn, until the making comes to an apparent conclusion and nothing remains of the making itself. And yet, I’m convinced, that the very thing that engages us is what we don’t see or hear, and yet calls us back into that invisible process when we confront the work… read the rest HERE

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