Saturday 4/27/24 Hello from a Saturday afternoon. Whoever you are and wherever you are, I hope you're doing well. Top of Mind I've been reading The Iliad. I just finished book one (of 24), and there is a scene in it that I keep thinking
Top of mind: Wednesday 28/2/24 | Storms, Doom-Music, Anne Carson, Rage, Grief, & Castration Yesterday was a very warm day. As I was wrapping up my work day, the sky filled with huge thunderheads that were filled with lightning. When the sun went down, the sky was like a strobe light. I stayed
[Re-Description] Bittersweet Reading Anne Carson's Wikipedia page, Eros the Bittersweet – Carson's first book of criticism, published in 1986 – examines eros as a simultaneous experience of pleasure and pain best exemplified by "glukupikron", a word of Sappho's creation and the "bittersweet" of the
Anne Carson on why we should read classics today Here is an excerpt From Anne Carson/Antiquity, a collection edited by Laura Jansen. This is Carson being quoted from an interview she gave, where she responds to the idea that teaching classics is relevant because it can teach us to recover something we need today. I don’t feel
Pro wrestling & jouissance From an article on Wrestling Inc. on the work that Al Snow is doing at OVW: I'm also doing something here that no one's teaching anymore. I'm teaching the art of how to work a professional wrestling match — not wrestle a professional wrestling match
Compasses, then & now On the back of Desire and Its Interpretations: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI Jacques-Alain Miller writes: Up until recently, all of our compasses, no matter how varied, pointed in the same direction: toward the Father [the Law]. We considered the patriarch to be an anthropological invariant. His decline
QTS-012 | Minimalism & desire In her post titled Don't make simplicity complicated, Clare Devlin writes: Anything taken to the extreme can be complicated. And simplicity is no exception. Minimalism is, I think, about not being tormented by the insatiability of desire. However, the desire to become more minimal can become as distracting
The fantasy of an evil Other Writing in The Atlantic, David Brooks focuses on a turn in how people “self-identified” and calls our attention to the following: Sometime around 1970, the American personality changed. In prior decades, people tended to define themselves according to the social roles they played: I’m a farmer, teacher, housewife, priest.
Debt Ceiling Ezra Klein writes (behind NYTimes paywall): Defenders of the debt ceiling will tell you that the limit has been around a long time and has largely operated to the good. America has never defaulted on its debts, but the debt ceiling has often motivated compromise between the two parties. That
Hysteria plus cruelty David French in his most recent NYTimes column (article is behind the paywall): Hysteria plus cruelty is a recipe for violence. Well said. Reading this made me think of the concept of ordinary psychosis. I rephrased the sentence to read, ”Delusion plus certainty and cruelty is a recipe for violence.