Hi, everybody! Nice to see you all hanging out here again. Here’s some stuff I’ve been thinking about recently: Is Homeland good, bad, offensive, or some combination of all three? I can’t help but think that if I were (a) Pakistani, (b) bipolar, or (c) CIA agent, I’d really hate this show. It’s so completely divorced from reality […]
Archive for the ‘Mind & Brain’ category
Our stupid awesome inevitable Afterlife
Why do I want to write about Kenneth Goldsmith and Sheila Heti and Social Media and The Afterlife? Cause they all add up to this really hot sweaty tangled love story. With a surprise ending. Here, come with me… I’ve been running along this intellectual trail for a few months. It’s got some awesome leaps […]
Sunday WTF
Here’s a picture of an ad that’s all over the Boston subway system: WTF? Is this viral marketing for a new movie based on a Philip* K. Dick novel? What is a peace paramour? *Also, how often is this first name spelled with one “l” and how often with two?
Make love not war
Some days I am haunted by the “for richer or poorer, sickness and health” dichotomies of the marriage vow. Some days the good to bad range extends to unreasonable expectations. This was one of those days. “So let me get this straight. You wear a red vinyl penis on the outside of your clothes, use a walker […]
Real life
Hey y’all! I’m not dead! I was moving. Now I am moved. A couple of days ago I posted on FB, as many did, in reaction to this super-dumb op-ed about how no one uses algebra in “real life” and everyone is terrible at it, so we should stop requiring algebra and above of college […]
Ten hours
I recently stumbled across this video: ten hours of Darth Vader’s wheezing. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc1Zc4qsTQk[/youtube] Hypnotic! Weird! Fabulous! But then things got even more hypnotic, weird and fabulous when I discovered that the “ten-hour video” is a bona fide Interwebs phenomenon. People are looping together short clips to make ten hours’ worth of all kinds of ridiculous […]
How’s that fugue state coming along? *
Last week Swells mentioned a tune she’s currently digging so much that she claimed, “I might need to ease up on the rotation soon so I don’t forget all the other songs I know.” That got me thinking a lot about repetition, particularly as it concerns art and our experience of it. How and why […]
Till human voices wake us, and we drown
Because of a family medical history predisposing me to cancer, I have an MRI screening at least once a year, sometimes twice. Most people I mention this to express a claustrophobic terror of this experience, but I find there’s something perversely peaceful about it. Getting tucked into a heavy double layer of blankets, I start […]
Pedagogy of revision
No one’s students are sadder than mine right now. Around the middle of the semester, everyone is getting back grades for their first really major assignments, and no one’s particularly joyful about them. College is hard! And we should be challenging them to raise the stakes; that’s our job. I take that task seriously, in […]
