April 2014
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April 2014 Highlights
What is philosophy still excluding?
What is wrong with philosophy? This question has been tearing the community, such as it is, of professional Anglophone philosophers apart over the past few years.
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April 2014 Highlights
Suzanne Ruta: Raubkunst
In 1914, my husband’s uncle Gustav Kirstein bought a lovely painting from the German impressionist master, Max Liebermann – a cheerful summer scene, clearly influenced by Renoir, of rowboats on Hamburg’s Alster River. In 1943 the Nazis stole the painting, along with the rest of Kirstein’s estate.
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April 2014 Highlights
Giorgio Fontana: Invisible Agony
Jean Améry titled his renowned book on voluntary death, Hand an Sich Legen – To lay Hands on Oneself. Beyond the argument of Amery (who killed himself in 1978), I’ve always found this image very appropriate. It describes with precision and grace a terrible gesture.
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April 2014 Highlights
Daniel Tobin on John Donne
Today because I am sufficiently connected here in my book-glutted home in Boston I have decided to make my little room an everywhere. As it so happens, I am hovering now above an area of greater London known as Mitcham that four-hundred years ago was an outlying village backwater away from the teeming intrigue and bustle of King James’ city and his court.
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April 2014 Highlights
Death and Derrida by Peter Gratton
In a move that might strike readers as odd, Derrida spends most of these lectures not on the case made by death penalty proponents, with whom he clearly disagrees, but on demonstrating that abolitionists borrow from the same language and historical sources as their avowed enemies.
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Winnie Mandela?
Graphic by Michelle Jia. Image via Knoxville Museum of Art. by Ato Quayson I just finished reading a fascinating appetizer to John Carlin’s new book on Nelson Mandela, Knowing Mandela, and it set me wondering what might be the place of solitude in the narration of South African history....
Read MorePartia Demokratike e Shqipërisë Can Has Cheezburger? by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei
A new government also brings new protests. Now that the "Democratic" Party is in the opposition, it has tried at several moments in the past few months to use the momentum of seemingly unorganized and seemingly spontaneous protests to fire up a large popular movement against the recently installed...
Read More‘Germany will one day yield a crop of wits’
Ewald Brandner by George Eliot “Nothing,” says Goethe, “is more significant of men’s character than what they find laughable.” The truth of this observation would perhaps have been more apparent if he had said culture instead of character. The last thing in which the cultivated man can have community...
Read MoreIs philosophy more like ballet or more like dance?
On a certain plausible --but ultimately unsatisfactory-- definition, ‘philosophy’ is simply a proper noun. It describes a particular tradition, just like the terms ‘ballet’ and ‘butoh’. It would be odd to claim that there is an indigenous tradition of Polynesian ballet, not because anyone believes that Polynesians are inherently...
Read More“Wearable lines that bring venom in denim”
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 be sold online and at mainstream retail outlets such as Walmart, Costco, Sam's, Target, and Barnes & Noble. Representatives of K2 by Kay Ryan, Frederick...
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The tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
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The thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
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I spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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The tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read More
The thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read More
I spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read More