All Bad Poetry Is Sincere.

Oscar Wilde. Something’s been bothering me lately about the “sincerity defense”: “yes, I’m misreading and misrepresenting your position, but I’m sincere in my efforts” or “my ideas might not make any sense, but I’m sincere in my affirmation that I am indeed correct” – not that I’m against sincerity, but there’s something fishy about this [...]

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(Im)morality of Walking Away

An interesting piece in L.A.Times today: Professor advises underwater homeowners to walk away from mortgages. Brent T. White, a University of Arizona law school professor, says that it’s in the homeowners’ best financial interest to stiff their lenders and that it’s not immoral to do so. Reporting from Washington - Go ahead. Break the chains. Stop [...]

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Holiday Music

I watched a great film – Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould – the other day and since I’ve been listening to Gould non-stop (I think my brains twist into a weird knot after several hours of things like French and English Suites). In any case, I found these clips of him playing Goldberg [...]

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Where We Belong

I had to post this one, although until just now I had no idea who these cultural icons are:

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Pynchon Grafitti

Reading Against the Day.  I think it just may contain one of the best lines in the history of literature.  It’s some graffiti written on a wall in Denver: Roses is red/shit is brown/nothing but assholes/live in this town. I think it may one of those funny because it’s true sort of things…

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Foucault and Lacan Walk Into A Bar…

Here’s an interesting piece from Global-e: One day, way back in the 20th century, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes sat under an equatorial tree, living in their own imagined primitive past, discussing Global Studies. “What,” asked Barthes, “might the four of us contribute to a field that analyzes the world as [...]

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More Zizek

Looks like it’s Zizek all the way these days: Apocalyptic Times. There’s a variety of reactions to Zizek’s appearance on HardTalk. Some are interesting, some are silly. I was particularly disappointed by comments like this: It is sometimes too easy for us to think that Zizek was misunderstood or stitched up but we are still [...]

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Refutations

I’ve been reading through the two volumes of Rosenzweig’s letters and diary entries here and there for good while, but  in a footnote in the first chapter of Benjamin Pollock’s so far quite interesting Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy I came across an something I haven’t yet seen.   As Pollock notes, [...]

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Of People and Things.

Back to book reports then [at least we don't pretend to do "real" philosophy this way, right?] I’m reading Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom, a book entirely dedicated to Kant’s Rechtslehre. So far I like it quite a bit, particularly the very simple and exegetical presentation, even if somewhat unexciting in terms of possible connections [...]

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Zizek on Hardtalk

It’s here for 7 days, but you have to be in a certain area to watch it online. I’m sure there’s a YouTube video somewhere out there. Whoever the guy interviewing Zizek is kind of annoyingly interruptive, but Zizek needs that sort of person, otherwise he will talk forever. I mean the interviewer’s obvious bias [...]

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