Articles in the New York Times about underprivileged millionaires in Silicon Value who feel poor because someone else has more money than they do. If you have more material wealth that 99.99% of the world's population you should just SHUT UP about it already. People could live quite well on a fraction of what you live on.

Sans-serif fonts (except in appropriate occasions)

UPDATE: Of course, my blog appears in a sans serif. I meant I hate it in real books!

I hate that "Can it be a coincidence?" or "It can hardly be a coincidence that.." argument so beloved in "Cultural Studies."

If you want to argue for a correlation or a causality, just do it. Don't just assert a probable "non-coincidence."

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Still hating earnestness too.

I hate it when someone on "Goodreads" gives five stars to every book they've ever read.

I basically can't stand earnestness.

I know this is not very recent, but I didn't have a blog in 1995:

When the Academy of American Poets announced it was giving Merwin the Tanning Prize, some said Merwin's best work was behind him, that since his 1967 book, "The Lice," a gloomy volume about the destruction of nature, his work had become obscure and abstract. (The critic Helen Vendler once called Merwin "a lesser Eliot," and his poems "elusive pallors.") In addition, Merwin is a chancellor of the academy; the judges -- the late James Merrill, J. D. McClatchy and Carolyn Kizer -- were all friends of Merwin's.

Initially, Kizer wanted the prize to go to Gwendolyn Brooks, an African-American. "My qualm was it would look like the white male establishment handing around prizes to each other." But James Merrill was chairman of the jury. "We wanted to find a real master," he said last fall. "Gwendolyn Brooks would be very distinguished. But somehow I don't think she's a master." Kizer, herself a potential candidate for chancellor, was outnumbered and eventually voted with the rest. "I revere him," says Kizer. "Thank God it was Merwin, who has such enormous stature.".

Yeah, thank God it was Merwin, and not some OTHER white-male poet of lesser "stature." "Somehow" it's hard to see Brooks as a "MASTER." I wonder why that is? Not tall enough, maybe? It's a good thing that these Chancellors of the Academy have such a strong sense of ethics. Otherwise we would have them giving $10,000 prizes out to their friends. We couldn't have that.

We think of a colloquial, direct style as easy to achieve, but if that were true then anybody could write as well as Eileen Myles. But this is obviously not the case. Not even Eileen Myles can write like this--all the time and at will. The directness of WCW and some modernist prose writers too is an achievement. It isn't even that easy to imitate.

I was thinking about this because Lorca's biographer commits this fallacy of tracing his poetic style to the speech of his native community. The fallacy can be seen in the fact that there is only one Lorca, and that his mature style is an achievement. He had to work through a stage of late 19th-century symbolist decadence, in his juvenilia, then a stage of elegant Andalusian preciosity, in a second stage of juvenilia. Never leaving behind this preciosity completely is also a key factor, since it creates a kind of tension. At times the preciosity occurs as a kind of camp excess, baroque flourish, Andalusian picturesqueness, or morbose pathos. A really bare-bones purity reminiscent of the medieval lyric appears too, but it is a real achievement when it does.

So to say Lorca writes the way he does because that's just the way they talk in the province of Granada is unbelievable stupid. The idea that his language just emanates from the earth.

A gerund is not the same thing as a present participle, though the forms happen to be identical in English. A gerund is a noun, not a verb. Don't say "gerund" when you mean present participle!

"English is inherently mathematical, she noted, arming a writer with the perfectly precise word to match the meaning, while Turkish is an emotional, sentimental tongue, she said, better suited for writing about sorrow and the past."

So said a Turkish writer quoted in the New York Times. This kind of thing drives me crazy. One language is not inherently more mathematical or logical or precise than another. Obviously it is one's personal relation to a language that is infused (or not) with a certain degree of sentiment. To write about Turkey in English, as a Turk, implies a distancing effect, but one that should be separated from the Orientalist fantasy of an Eastern language particularly suited to the expression of sorrow. She should know better.

Never begin an essay or a talk by quoting the dictionary definition of a word, unless you are a high-school student or want to be mistaken for a high-school student.