January 2012
10 posts
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Beer in a Parking Lot
Behind an unimpressive construction vehicle —a small crane, a cherry picker, a German name on the side— sways an Hispanic man in his 20s. His eyes are wet and red; his face seems askew, holding an expression he cannot unmake until his task is finished: he is trying to drink a tall can of beer quickly. His jeans are clean, but his sneakers are dirty; he wears what could be a fleece or maybe a black...
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“The joy of bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of the C2H5OH on...”
– Walker Percy in “Bourbon, Neat,” quoted by Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Since I first read this essay, when I was perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, I have remembered that invaluable phrase precisely and used it on occasion: “hot bosky bite.”
For some time, I supposed...
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“The long sentence is how we begin to free ourselves from the machine-like world...”
– Pico Iyer, in a pleasant Los Angeles Times article noted by Schmudde, defending his use of “…longer and longer sentences as a small protest against —and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from— the bombardment of the moment.”
Iyer chooses two sorts of reduced expression as...
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-Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed. See also.
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“The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of...”
– Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death, the thesis of which can perhaps be summed thusly: humanity sublimates its fear of death through the causa sui project: the construction of meanings which are enduring and non-contingent despite our mortality and ludicrous, creaturely contingency. Society,...
December 2011
17 posts
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“The reason the philosopher can be compared with the poet is that both are...”
– Thomas Aquinas in Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, quoted by Josef Pieper, who adds:
And because of their common power to disturb and transcend, all these basic behavioral patterns of the human being have a natural connection among themselves: the philosophical act, the religious act,...
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“This is the problem: Many years ago I sat one day, in a sad enough mood, on the...”
– Franz Kafka in his diary, 1920, from Cosmopsis.
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"The Power of the Powerless" →
My friend Stuart Carlton —who writes here and at Wings of Reason— took the time to clean up and post a copy of Vaclav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless,” which is otherwise a bit hard to track down online.
Havel, who died on Sunday, was a surprisingly human figure for a man so heroic and transformative; he seemed, despite suffering imprisonment and terror after the...
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Consciousness, Interiority, AI
Perhaps there is a relationship between how interiority defines consciousness; how artificial intelligence has thus far failed to even approach consciousness and how it’s not even clear how it might; and how technologies that insist on the exteriorization of self reduce a sense of self.
Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, 2009 (quoted by the...
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“[We have forgotten] leisure as “non-activity” —an inner absence of...”
– Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 1948. This sort of leisure is the prey being hunted to extinction by technology in general and the Internet specifically, and it is this leisure which permits the creation of sustaining human meaning.
Leisure, Culture, Selfhood
Pieper’s thesis,...
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“As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved
in her laughter and being part...”
– T.S. Eliot, “Hysteria,” 1915.
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How to Listen to Jazz
Music’s great virtue is its great curse: a listener needs to understand almost nothing of a song’s art, meaning, intent, or contexts to react powerfully to it. The universality of music’s effectiveness is peculiar: people of every conceivable sort have musical preferences they integrate into their sense of identity —they argue about these pseudo-tastes, fight about them, draw...
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A Problem with Path
Path is an impossibly beautiful social-network and app for the iPhone and Android; it’s the sort of software one daydreams about creating, replete with delightful surprises and deeply-considered design. Quite apart from its many visual flourishes, some of its nicest touches reflect enormous amounts of cross-disciplinary work, too. Here’s an involved example:
When you begin using Path,...
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November 2011
7 posts
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“When mother smiled, no matter how nice her face had been before, it became...”
– Leo Tolstoy, Childhood.
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“The longing to become a source of events affects each man like a mental disorder...”
– E.M. Cioran in A Short History of Decay, quoted by Corner Lot.
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Sleeping & Waking on a Plane
I had fallen asleep, but somehow had not slept. I played with my eyelids, felt their lashes touch, measured the fading of what little light remained as they came close to closing; several times, they shut themselves totally, as if against my will, and I felt myself fade away again. When I woke, it seemed incredible to me that my unconscious hours should be precisely as inscrutable, confusing, and...
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Out
In a crowd of strangers, one feels somehow identifiable as even stranger: as the one for whom any eye contact is an occasion for momentary panic, as the one who isn’t sure where to stand, as the one who cannot piece together what everyone else inexplicably knows: which lines lead to which bathrooms and bars, whether the left or right hand should be extended for a stamp, how much things cost...
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“The longer one hesitates before the door, the more estranged one becomes. What...”
– Franz Kafka, Homecoming.
October 2011
6 posts
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Jellyfish at Sea
Everyone in the city has been torn apart. I gingerly step around torsos dragging their viscera along the sidewalks. The women in the financial district, in blouses more beautiful than the finest fabrics available to queens a century ago, look like jellyfish: stringy red and black tendrils of intestine slither after colorful caps. They move at half the speed of the men in their midst, for each...
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A Drunk Driver
I was nearly face down on our couch, reading something trivial and considering the large ink stain on the cushion beneath me. To cool our apartment, we’d opened the windows and were running an array of fans at high speed. I am at my most fatherly when attempting to cool our apartment: I pace around and attend to the imprecise temperature readings taken by my hands as I wave them in the air;...
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Design & Compromise
In a chapter on political systems in his remarkable book The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch notes that
…compromises -amalgams of the policies of the contributors- have an undeservedly high reputation. Though they are certainly better than immediate violence, they are generally, as I have explained, bad policies. If a policy is no one’s idea of what will work, then why should it...
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September 2011
15 posts
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“In quick time his interest flipped neatly from hard structures to the soft parts...”
– Distorte, in his excellent short story “Bones.”
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“I studied her knees, her legs, her ankles, her shoes. They were not particularly...”
– V.S. Naipul, A Bend in the River. The great fear —founded, unfounded, no one can say— of all easy hedonisms is just that: that they will take us “further and further away from the true life of the senses and [make us] incapable of that life…” The mysterious diminution of all...
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The Great Diversity of Flowers
Walking, weaving, a few drinks in to his evening —maybe more, but he doesn’t want to appoint this moment the end of the night when there is still love to be sought— he counteracts his listing with what he thinks is a confidently long stride. He wants to show everyone on this crowded street that there is a fierce, purposeful agency within his drunkenness: his face is stern, but with what he...
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“‘He is a very great friend of mine’, said Leonora,...”
– Barbara Pym, The Sweet Dove Died. My father sent this quotation to me this morning; it’s striking, sad, true. I sometimes think that Carson McCullers ought to have named her novel The Heart is a Solitary Hunter, since our isolation is less a question of loneliness than of the intractably...
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