The righteous outrage of Norman Finkelstein
[A book review published at Common Dreams.] As I was reading Norman Finkelstein’s new book, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!:...
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Wright's Writing
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- Jul 30, 2022
- 7 min
Classical music vs. mediocrity
On one side is the mediocrity of all functionaries. All bureaucrats. There’s no point in my writing about bureaucrats in the ordinary...
- Jun 6, 2021
- 20 min
Reflecting on life at 40
…They accuse me -- Me -- the present writer of The present poem -- of -- I know not what -- A tendency to under-rate and scoff At human...
- Aug 30, 2020
- 37 min
Critical remarks on academia and philosophy
I was recently skimming old notes of mine and came across the following thoughts from a two-volume book on "humanism" I wanted to write...
- Aug 7, 2020
- 10 min
Detritus from a dead poetic imagination
Life in the 21st century as we all wait consciously or unconsciously for the apocalypse is boring and driven by distractions, an endless...
- Jul 30, 2020
- 16 min
The heartbreak of staggering self-consciousness
Today I came across a copy of Dave Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and was reminded of myself in my twenties, when I was...
- Jun 8, 2020
- 7 min
Appreciative and not-so-appreciative thoughts on cultural theory
[These notes, for what they're worth, are from, respectively, 2010 and 2018.] Reading Raymond Williams’ classic Marxism and Literature...
- May 26, 2018
- 3 min
Existentialist thoughts on David Foster Wallace
[From 2008. Copied here, somewhat irrelevantly, in recognition of the recent suicides that have been in the news.] Read an article in...
- Mar 23, 2018
- 1 min
The Destruction of Reason
Just a quick note: I recently posted a long summary of and commentary on Georg Lukacs' masterpiece The Destruction of Reason, which has...
- Nov 30, 2016
- 6 min
On Susan Sontag
[Notes from 2008.] Reading Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. It’s wonderful to think that the publication (in...
- Jul 29, 2016
- 4 min
Contemporary philosophy vs. sanity
[The following is a vignette I wrote years ago when studying for my Master's in philosophy. I was taking a class in contemporary...
- Jul 9, 2016
- 5 min
Elite pretentiousness
The following is the beginning of an essay I wanted to write years ago on the concept of pretentiousness, a phenomenon the ubiquity of...
- Jun 21, 2016
- 4 min
Notes on Theodor Adorno
[Old notes.] Reading Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Alex Thomson. I’m not very impressed with Adorno. Continental thinkers...
- May 5, 2016
- 2 min
Catholicism, an anachronism
In the Piazza of San Marco in Florence is a church in which lies the dried-out corpse of Saint Antonino from the fifteenth century, his...
- Aug 14, 2015
- 3 min
On late-19th-century decadence and its aftermath
What is the significance of the fact that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certain (semi-fascist) sections of the...
- Apr 11, 2015
- 5 min
The fraudulence of status
[The following is an excerpt from this book.] In order to determine someone’s intellectual or artistic integrity and acuity, a simple...
- Apr 5, 2015
- 2 min
Capitalist fratricide (i.e., neoliberalism)
The nation-state and capitalism were born as twins from the fertile, ancient womb of greed and power-hunger. They grew up together, were...
- Feb 22, 2015
- 2 min
The coming great depression
The following is a resolution proposed at a Chicago conference of the Communist Party’s Unemployed Councils in 1930, in the context of...
- Sep 20, 2014
- 1 min
Learning from history
The elite has the money, but the workers have the dignity. The elite consumes; the workers produce. Future ages always forget the past...
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