United States

Regarding a monumental work on race, time, and classical music that does not lose sight of individual, localized lives.

A Review of Malise Ruthven’s A Fury for God: The IslamistAttack on America, from Tim Keane.

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Christopher Knight on Stanley Fish’s Professional Correctness.

In Representations of the Intellectual (New York, 1994), Edward Said writes,

The particular threat to the intellectual today, whether in the West or the non-Western world, is not the academy, nor the suburbs, nor the appalling commercialism of journalism and publishing houses, but rather an attitude that I will call professionalism. By professional I mean thinking of your own work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one ear cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior - not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and “objective.” 

First, IN.S.OMNIA operates from the premise that the domain of literature as such is no longer in synch with cultural experience in contemporary America. Rather than “look for ‘the next big thing’ in literature,” IN.S.OMNIA asks, “What if the next big thing already surrounds us, embedded in small gestures we perform every day? What if the next big thing is the realization that we have changed the way we use culture - remapping, rewiring, renetworking the same old pool of elements in new ways, adding to them furtive scribbles, seeking pleasures without naming them?