Hope has become a term that can be used like ketchup: With everything. Unless of course you are dining with a hoity-toity foodie friend. Or someone French. But behind its increasingly common usage for everything from the personal to the political, hope has a lot more layers than most words being bandied about in the […]
Ideas
Homage to Sedgwick and the Evolution of Queer Theory
I was so sorry to learn of the passing of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. If you are not familiar with her work, this piece by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times puts her work and contribution into perspective. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who died last week at 58, co-founded the influential scholarly field known as queer […]
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Have it Your Way: Modern vs PoMo
How heartening it is when you find a passage that captures the essence of some of your internal floaters—those inchoate, imprecise concepts that circumambulate in the mind and never quite land on two feet. I had the settling sensation of an exhale that comes when order has been brought to a previously perceived chaos when […]
Karassing
The mystery of connectivity. The human kind, not Ted Stevens’ infamous series of tubes. While I am entertained by way cool tools like Facebook, it is the more esoteric pathways that exist outside the realm of linearity that are most compelling to me. I’m often reminded of the whimsical distinction made by Kurt Vonnegut in […]
More Ways to Get at Slow
Slow. It’s a concept dear to my heart and the core idea behind the blogs I started several years ago. So when I found an entire series of slow vignettes in Best Life magazine, I couldn’t help but be intrigued. Hugh O’Neill has looked at how slow can be applied to everything, from investing to […]
All About the Gist
God bless Natalie Angier. One of the Times’ best science writers, her topics are so, well, topical. She reassures me time and time again by stepping up and owning her mental failings—which often correspond to those I possess as well—and thereby soothing my concerns that if she can still be scintillating and bright in spite […]
Moving the Meat
Some things we only figure out after the fact. I wish this weren’t the case, but the evidence in my life is too strong to argue otherwise. It’s more than the wisdom of hindsight or Monday morning quarterbacking. It is the state of mind that cannot be recognized and named until its absence gives it […]
Adieu Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton’s death this past week seems to have been lost in the protracted celebration around Obama’s victory, but his passing is worthy of a pause. I was never a big fan of his novels but like many other culture watchers, have been flabbergasted by the prodigious scope of his interests, intellect and output. I […]
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Making Strange
It has been three full days since I saw Guy Maddin’s “documentary,” My Winnipeg, and the ambience still hasn’t left my consciousness. It is quixotic and visually arresting, preposterously absurd and yet quite tender, both epic and lyric at the same time. I was enchanted. My Winnipeg, by Guy Maddin And as the critic Peter […]
Meaning and Presence
I found an article in The Independent yesterday that I posted on my filter blog Slow Painting. It has dominated my thinking all day. In a singularly succinct manner, it captures a core set of issues that are at the center of my disaffection with a number of trends in contemporary art. These are some […]