TITLE: Old Ideas and New Words AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: February 16, 2018 2:54 PM DESC: ----- BODY: In this Los Angeles Review of Books interview, novelist Jenny Offill says:
I was reading a poet from the Tang dynasty... One of his lines from, I don't know, page 812, was "No new feelings". When I read that I laughed out loud. People have been writing about the same things since the invention of the written word. The only originality comes from the language itself.
After a week revising lecture notes and rewriting a recruiting talk intended for high school students and their parents, I know just what Offill and that Tang poet mean. I sometimes feel the same way about code. -----