Tag: writing
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Are Ideas Serious? (Zizek in Jonestown)
Perhaps philosophy today has taken its cue from a world that believes ideas need not be taken seriously. They can be replaced, the policy goes, with stuff like enjoyment, the market, and values. Or else, ideas are simply a subset of those. I myself have argued at times that philosophy might simply be reducible to…
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Reading Everything (and More)
Reading David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ at once reminds me why I write in the first place while also being so good as to tempt me to give up and quit trying. The book tells the story, starting with the Greeks, of how Cantor ended up developing a set…
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The First Journalist
Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus came to me as a birthday present in the beautiful Adirondacks in August. Not till the last couple of weeks, while traveling in Turkey and Jordan, did I get the chance to read it. The timing, as it turned out, was just about perfect. I wouldn’t call it a great…
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Clarify Your Position
This passage from Henry Miller’s late book, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, has long spoken to me. I first found it when I was eighteen, the summer of a month-long solo road trip across the United States and back, the climax of which was the discovery of Big Sur. Those were my…