Lecture

Notes

Quotes

Though a reader might assume that my sources are in evidence as citations, my thinking, just like yours, actually derives from a mostly invisible "uncommon archive" —my pet phrase—or what Barthes would call a plurality of desires and reservoir of perversions that lay at the heart of any creation and must be allowed free play.

Quoted on July 21, 2026

Midway between a sermon and a bedtime story, the lecture is knowledge’s dramatic form.

Nonfiction’s lost performance: the lecture.

Quoted on July 21, 2026

… that though we consider the note the most natural recording device, it is hard to know whether we note to remember or note to forget

Quoted on July 21, 2026

TED Talks give me the creeps. Please do not confuse them with lectures. They all have a whiff of organized religion about them and the feel of the sermon on the infomercial mount.

Quoted on July 21, 2026

I say this, and yet I admit a nostalgic fondness for the thing that one must always say in a lecture, the phrase, "As we all know..." followed by a list of books and references that you know nothing about and after which you run out to find. Or, "As we will all remember ..." It is an arrogant presumption, but, at the same time, I have to say I love the share of knowledge it tries to dream: the lecture as a rite of passage into a readership or a community or, well, I hope not, a club? Perhaps this is where the lecture fails, but if it makes us want to run to a library, (ok, or to the Internet), or run from it, or toward something we didn't know enough to want to run toward or away from before we heard it, that may be all to the good; if it tempts us to move differently, maybe that is all good.

Quoted on July 21, 2026