Hanging on …

… How to Endure - The Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… The Dead Ladies Project is less a series of pilgrimages than an exercise in what might be called “lived criticism,” the hidden thesis being that the stakes of our intellectual lives are high — life and death — and that the way to survive, to go on, is to embody the lives and ideas that make our own lives seem worth living. Which is another way of saying, I suppose, that even though The Dead Ladies Project is very much a book about books, it would be a mistake to say that it’s a book about reading. Rather, it’s a book about being — but to be, according to Crispin, you must read. Being requires a companion, a text, and texts also need a companion, a context — and that’s why a “lived critic” must venture out into the world.