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 […]
Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ category
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 […]
Non-event in a locationless place:
I love airport bars – not only because they get me though the horror of flying – I love them because they are the true crossroads of America. Around me are some of the regulars: the guy wearing an earpiece and an embroidered polo shirt who loves his sales job, the guy sitting next to […]
… unless by “radical” you mean “really awesome.”
When Walter Benjamin wrote in 1938 that one may understand the problems associated with a society through a reading of its consumer goods, even his best friend and fellow Frankfurt School thinker, Teddy Adorno, thought that he was taking the whole Marxism thing a little too far. When Herbert Marcuse wrote in 1964 that advanced […]
The Apple of My Eye
After I moved to Los Angeles last spring, I soon learned that people don’t communicate here quite like they do in Washington D.C. I’m not talking about think-tank dissertations, multi-footnote policy papers or the monotone dronings of C-Span speeches. I’m talking about text messages. In D.C., people picked up the phone and called each other. […]
You Be Bad
“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” – Anne Frank “People are inherently evil. Religion is the only civilizing force; without it, we’d all be reduced to a savage state, a state we’re really on the brink of all the time.” – My brother (paraphrased) My brother recently […]
What we can conceal
I don’t own a pet, but my roommate has a cat who pesters me when I’m home and a coworker has a chocolate Lab who pesters me when I’m at work. It’s now to the point where any smallish, annoying thing, including a child, gets marked in my mind with the dog’s name. We’ll call […]
What I did on my summer vacation
Cue Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died.” It began on my way to the bus, with a phone call from my oldest, dearest friend, Meghan, who, through static interference and intermittent service, told me that our friend Q had died. For some reason I continually misunderstood her – I kept asking “who?” – for some reason […]
