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Showing posts from April, 2011

Virtuous Prick

(Songs of Nietzschean virtue) On Spotify Here 1. HONESTY "No Children" by MoGos (or "Honest to A Fault" by At the Drive-In) 2. COURAGE (Bizarre amount of Nietzscheanism in the Shins, it's worth an essay.) Shins, "Sleeping Lessons" and Manics, "Judge Yrself" 3. EXUBERANCE " I don't know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish to be more than a dancer ." "I See the Light" by Paradise, "Customer" by Replacements 4. HUMOUR 5. HEALTH (!) 6. FATALISM " Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égal ..." 7. AESTHETICISM 8. HARDNESS 9. GENEROSITY 10. POLITENESS 11. FRIENDSHIP 12. PRIDE ("I'm So Glad, So Proud" by Link Wray, and Electrelane. Honorary mention for absurdity: " Forefather ") (Also, Pride comes before the Fall ) 13. SOLITUDE (All illustrations randomly generated here .)

INTERVIEW: John Emerson, ex-medic, ex-Zizka, ex-oaf, ex-wimp, troll

Philosophy is good advice, and no one gives good advice at the top of his lungs... I should like those subtle thinkers to teach me this: "what are my duties to a friend and to a man?" rather than "what number of senses is the expression ‘friend’ used?" It makes one ashamed that men of our advanced years should turn a thing as serious as this into a game. - Seneca In short, no one knows WTF is going to happen. Praise the Lord, we’re all brothers and sisters in ignorance! (And you needn’t fear the economists – they’re as frightened as you are, and only the Chicago School economists have a taste for human flesh) . - John Emerson John Emerson has been posting "peasant wisdom" (freelance scholarship) in print and online for about ten years now. He traffics in crafty political radicalism and what he calls generalism, against the reigning academic milieu of specialisation and analyticity. He's a self-described "economic nihilist", and write

Pop Portrayal of Vegetarians

" TURNIP PIE AND PEANUTS - THAT'S THE SORT OF FILTH I EAT! ANY SORT OF RUBBISH THAT'S WHOLESOME AND DISCREET! WHY DON'T I ADMIT THAT MY HYPOCRISY'S COMPLETE? IF I SHOULD LIVE TO BE A CENTENARIAN - BECOME OUR MOST ADORED HUMANITARIAN - I'LL NEVER MAKE A DECENT VEGETARIAN !" - Dr Doolittle (1967) Oh, you're into that no-meat diet stuff? Which flavour are you: spiteful, weak, voguish, sentimental or neurotic? Vegetarians get slandered all over the place in pop culture. Even now, I'm struggling to list many positive portrayals. The battle happens over and over, and vegetarians invariably lose. The holy grail of the matter would be the philosophical vegan who doesn't even like animals (rare in life, but unimaginable in fiction). When visible at all , vegetarians are 2D stereotypes, The Vegetarian Character and little else. Let's hunt: Militant: As humourless piousness, absolutism, blind countercultural anger. (Let's lay aside whether t

notes on Infinite Jest

(c) Cody Hoyt 2009 "... I am just about the world's worst source of info on [ Infinite Jest ] ." - Wallace, letter to fan Infinite Jest is a book. I am a reader of such. What could go wrong? But it's hard to say things about IJ because, despite that ^ epigram, in a real sense you are competing with Wallace if you do; IJ has already Freuded, Hegelled and problematized itself, not least in its 200pp of (plot-endogenous) footnotes. And its reputation obscures it, already, only fifteen years in. (e.g. As well as the usual exhaustive cult attentions , there's a series of wacky blogs and a support group devoted to how gruelling it is.) We view length as pretentious in itself. This speaks little for our generosity, motives or attention spans. And but the fact is that the book isn't really over-written or gratuitous: that it's 1200 pages of drum-tight shit, staggeringly funny and human to boot. It reports in on a dozen things I'm not interes