Jenny Diski stares the muddle into existence
The first lesson: finding. Actually, the only lesson: what you do when you find what you want is another lesson entirely, and not one that will be taught. Finding is a question of looking, my child. Of looking in the right way. That’s looking not to see, do you see, but to allow what you want to present itself to your vision.
Read MoreHow could someone as smart as Freeman Dyson be so wrong about the environment?
Kenneth Brower has a number of theories: 1. Contrariness 2. He doesn’t really mean it 3. Educated fool 4. Old age 5. Collision of faiths From The Atlantic: In August 2009, Dyson appeared on the Charlie Rose show. His inimitable voice—somehow both diffident and firm, its original British...
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No one can love anymore because of an overabundance of reaction formation. No one wants to owe anything to their desire(s); to other people’s...
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How could a man born on a Greek island in 1850 be a household name in Japan today? The answer lies in the story...
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Jean Améry titled his renowned book on voluntary death, Hand an Sich Legen – To lay Hands on Oneself. Beyond the argument of Amery...
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Several months ago, I wrote a long letter by hand to a young woman I barely knew. That sounds pretty dubious, if not to...
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In a move that might strike readers as odd, Derrida spends most of these lectures not on the case made by death penalty proponents,...
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Although Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff’s translation of À la recherche du temps perdu is considered by many journalists and writers to be the best...
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It all started with cellphones, a long time ago. No student, and few teachers, would make voice calls from class, but in the early...
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Three of America's most famous poets announced today the immediate availability of new, moderately priced "diffusion lines" based on their celebrated high-end works to...
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When Johannes Climacus defines Christianity in the Postscript, he writes:
Christianity is spirit; spirit is inwardness; inwardness is subjectivity; subjectivity is essentially passion, and at...
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On May 31, two weeks after his death, and the day before Orlando was sent to the printer, Woolf noted his death as follows:...
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A while back I found an online edition of Anouck Durant and Gilles De Rapper's monograph Ylli: Les couleurs de la dictature.
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OK, I've been outed as a noise nut and it's true. I am crazed by noise. I have to put my fingers in my...
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I, myself, was barely six months old when Twin/Tone put out The Mats’ Let It Be. The day, they say, was Orwellian: Tuesday, October...
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When Yaweh advanced into Ezekiel in the form of penetration, the four wings of the chariot became instantly erect and bloodshot and then fell...
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Berfrois Digs
Murder is nearly always understood as an individual event and the criminal justice system reinforces this notion: there is an artifact, a body, that needs accounting for, and the medical examiner measures, weighs, dissects and categorizes the body as to age, race, gender and cause of death. The police scramble to find clues, to discover a likely motive, and then to close the case by making an arrest.
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In an effort to be interdisciplinary, and to keep up with the current trend for all things neuroscience, I recently attended a conference in Berlin on neuroaesthetics. One of only two philosophers in the room, I found myself on the receiving end of an incredibly hostile attack after asking a question of the founding guru of the discipline, the neuroscientist Professor Semir Zeki of University College London.
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Near the end of Susanna Clarke’s magical history, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, comes a peculiarly chilling scene. A magician named Childermass, riding through a wood festooned with corpses, arrives at the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart.
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Lynch included pieces about a character who was not contemporary, not one of us, but a historical, fictional, marginal, half-pagan figure whom he names Argyle. Somewhere back in Irish history—the eighteenth century? The nineteenth? Argyle is a rural community’s “sin-eater,” the shaman-like man who takes on himself the sins of the dead by drinking from a bowl of beer and eating from a loaf of bread over the corpse and taking a few pence for his services.
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