decadence | Wright's Writing

Feb 3, 202321 min read

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!:...

Jul 30, 20227 min read

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, 202120 min read

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, 202037 min read

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, 202010 min read

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, 202016 min read

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, 20207 min read

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, 20183 min read

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, 20181 min read

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, 20166 min read

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, 20164 min read

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, 20165 min read

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, 20164 min read

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, 20162 min read

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, 20153 min read

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, 20155 min read

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, 20152 min read

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, 20152 min read

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, 20141 min read

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...