February 2012
1 post
January 2012
1 post
Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble...
November 2011
2 posts
The chief thing I’ve learned so far is: If you don’t know much—well, nobody else knows much more. And nobody knows half as much about your own interests as you know.
If you believe in anything very strongly—including yourself—and if you go after that thing alone, you end up in jail, in heaven, in the headlines, or in the largest house in the block, according to what you started after. If you...
When I was in college, and for many years after, I liked the natural world. Didn’t love it, but definitely liked it. It can be very pretty, nature. And since I was looking for things to find wrong with the world, I naturally gravitated to environmentalism, because there were certainly plenty of things wrong with the environment. And the more I looked at what was wrong — an exploding world...
April 2011
2 posts
“‘Most men will not swim before they are able to.’ Isn’t it witty? Naturally,...”
– Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf (via isitnoise)
Then, something moved me. Then, I wakened up More slowly than I verily write now, But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wide The window and my soul, and let the airs . And out-door sights sweep gradual gospels in, Regenerating what I was. O Life, How oft we throw it off and think,–’Enough, Enough of life in so much!–here’s a cause For rupture; herein we must break with Life, Or be...
March 2011
1 post
Brendan O'Neill on New Atheism →
Our atheism is in many ways the least interesting thing about us. It merely indicates what we don’t believe in, rather than saying anything about what we do believe in […]
That’s the trouble with the new atheism of the Dawkinite, occasionally ranting, intolerant variety – it is seeking to create a movement based on a non-belief, based on the absence of something (belief in God) rather...
February 2011
1 post
George Orwell, "Politics and the English... →
This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and...
January 2011
1 post
the essence of parody →
From the endlessly amazing Dinosaur Comics
December 2010
2 posts
“And there will, finally, be readers who claim to find Morley’s extravagant prose...”
– Stephen Poole, The Guardian
Almost exactly 2 years ago my friend Chris and...
November 2010
5 posts
Pitchfork's Seven Swans Review →
Religion has always served as an inspiration and benefactor of art, a fact which has made it all the more amusing when people criticise The Passion as an awful film purely because of its religious content— they might as well pass over, among others, the Laocoon statue, the Sistine Chapel, Bach’s St. Matthaus Passion, and practically every Dostoevesky or Joyce novel.
That said,...
Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go →
Thomas Benton in The Chronicle, with a few so-scary-it-might-just-be-true reasons to skip the ever-tempting masters.
They are excited by some subject and believe they have a deep, sustainable interest in it. (But ask follow-up questions and you find that it is only deep in relation to their undergraduate peers — not in relation to the kind of serious dedication you need in graduate programs.)
...
Christopher Hitches: choose your future regrets →
“The banality of cancer seems to irk him almost as much as its lethality. Lacking any dialectical substance, it affords few opportunities to escape platitude or avoid cliche. It’s a big subject, but it’s essentially small talk, and Hitchens’s style requires the elevated registers of the epic and the ironic.”
What he says about “chemo brain” being the absolute worst is true too. I...
WatchLoving this. Nice little analysis of Frankie Boyle in there too.
“I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms...”
– Kierkegaard
October 2010
5 posts
“Only an academic would undertake a study like this, defining happiness as...”
– Jennifer Lawler, “For Jessica”
“But magic has above all a psychological effect whose importance should not be...”
– Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self
““Though I am speaking about sensibility only — and about a sensibility...”
– Susan Sontag, “Notes On Camp”
Cold and Timid Souls
There are a lot of so-called parodies on the internet, and an amazing amount of an effort goes into some of them. Imagine, for instance, how many hours went into making this shot-by-shot recreation of a fight scene from the Matrix: Reloaded with video game characters. Internet parodies are mostly about The Matrix or Mario. But what is it for? Is it funny? Is it better than the original as an...
August 2009
1 post
I don't think I will post here often lol
Sorry for not posting much lol