Momus (musician)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
For more than twenty years he has been releasing, to only marginal commercial and critical success, playful and transgressive albums on labels in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan. In his lyrics and his other writing he makes seemingly random use of decontextualized pieces of continental (mostly French) philosophy, and has built up a personal world he says is "dominated by values like diversity, orientalism, and a respect for otherness." He is also known in certain circles outside the U.S. as a producer.
He wears a patch over his right eye because he lost use of it from contracting acanthamoeba keratitis from a contact lens case washed with Greek tap water.
On meta-reading
- "As a student of literature, something you find yourself doing a lot is reading books about books -- narratives which tear through the plot outlines, critical receptions and choicest quotes of other books, giving you some kind of rapid gist or taste of hundreds of titles you'll probably never read. What I've always liked about these books-about-books."
He mentions
He also mentions the fact that the paratext is often better than the text itself
- "In a weird, inverted way, some of the books which must be most hellish to read in real life, in real time, turn out, in these metabook accounts, to be the most entertaining to read about" (see paratext).
Example of the latter:
via The dream life of metabooks
This reminds me of the following quote of O. Wilde:
- "I never read a book I must review, it prejudices you so." --Oscar Wilde
and my own recent research in thematic literary criticism and my earlier praise of secondary literature
Also this brings us to reviews of books we've never read. Stanislaw Lem wrote a few sets of introductions to and reviews of fictional books here. Borges has?
Interesting review in the latest Times Literary Supplement by Adrian Tahourdin of 'Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus?' by Pierre Bayard.
