I’m reading the excellent Capitalist Realism, by Mark Fisher of k-punk, and came across a great bit that I wanted to share. Fisher writes, What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. As Marshall Berman explained, describing Stalin’s White Sea Canal project of 1931-33: Stalin seems [...]
Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ category
Breathing the World Around Us
About a week ago my mother was hospitalized after a rare reaction to the antibiotics she was given for pneumonia which caused her lungs to seize and interrupted her breathing. She was shopping with a friend of hers when she collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital. Thankfully she’s making a full recovery [...]
Music, Weightlessness, and the Waking Dream
I used to wake every morning to soundtrack of Gattaca on my cd-player/alarm clock. The incessant call in the music evoked something both melancholy and haunting. The dark tones of the string instruments resonated with something deep inside me, striking some blend of longing and worry, as if I weren’t quite certain where or who [...]
The Beautiful Glimpsed in Unexpected Places
People give me a strange look sometimes when I tell them that I used to be a computer games programmer. The idea that a poet might have a technical background seems odd at first — in large measure because we’ve been brought up to believe that there is a great divide between the sciences and [...]
Unexpected Cosmologies
I’m a believer. I believe in numbers. In textures and lines. I believe in shadow and light. How the grade of darkness is sometimes tied to the word value. I believe in beginnings. In origins. I believe in ruptures and faults. In borders and intersections. I believe in pattern and chaos. Sitting in a restaurant [...]
Moving Poetry
It seems that I’m always moving, leaving one place behind to begin again at another. Some moves have been over international borders, sometimes even oceans, others a few blocks into a new part of a neighborhood. I’ve left cities, countries, cultures, and languages behind. Forgotten to pack a piece of art or a box of [...]
Sontag seminar discussion questions
“Something new each weekday.” To that end, Susan Sontag in Aspen magazine: Every era has to reinvent the project of “spirituality” for itself. (Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at the resolution of painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.) In the modern era, [...]
Speak, memory
Each of us has foundational moments in his or her childhood that were both traumatic and instructional. We return to these moments again and again, both consciously and unconsciously, in our dream lives and while waking. We gnaw on them like an ever-present bolus, trying to glean just one more scrap of meaning, one more [...]
The great prostitution debate
From Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish: A reader has an interesting point: 1. Why is it illegal for me to pay a prostitute for sex, but it’s NOT illegal for a film director to pay two people to have sex in front of a camera and then make money for his product in the form of [...]
