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I believe that there are deep connections between Heidegger’s metaphysics and the concerns of analytic metaphysicians. One of the things that I try to do in my book is to show that Heidegger’s metaphysics involved him in a kind of battle with language that was reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s early work. But that is just one example of very many. And it illustrates the point we touched on earlier: how profitable it can be to set non-analytic traditions alongside the analytic tradition.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews A.W. Moore.
From a sociological point of view, it’s almost impossible to imagine SNF emerging onto the screen today. For starters, there would be concerns that the final scene, where Stephanie lets Tony into her flat a few hours after he’s tried to rape her, would provoke a feminist backlash. Given current concerns about STDs the depiction of casual sex in the film’s pre-AIDS age would be difficult today, too, despite that fact that modern society is not exactly a casual shag-free zone (vide Grindr and Tindr). Additionally, the racism directed by Tony’s friends towards Puerto Ricans would cause problems, as would a homophobic incident in the film when a couple of gays are hassled on the street. Such features would be seen as giving aid and comfort to Trump-supporter populism, a criticism which avoids confronting the uncomfortable point that condemnatory populist views on racial and sexual matters may be more widespread than cultural and political commentators are prepared to admit. Yet such well-intentioned attitudes of metropolitan fear would be a corporate loss because they fail to face up to harsh realities which have to be faced down.
Nicky Charlish revisits Saturday Night Fever.
It has become my habit to read for the body of work, to regard each individual narrative as part of a larger whole and to engage in a concentrated – often chronological – reading of one author’s oeuvre. This approach seeks out the points of connection between each book and in these connections discovers a consolidation of allusion and theme, a slow accretion of meaning, tone, atmosphere. In Jones’s case this has led me to focus on love and violence, the hold of place and the desire to break free of it.
By Anna MacDonald.
‘There’s a knife in his mouth, and the knife is being plunged into the orange pumpkin. The boy has no arms. He’s sitting on the front steps of a little white house looking out on a yard with a scatter of yellow leaves.’
Fiction by Randal Eldon Greene.
A few overly literal critics have taken Waldo’s deliberately outrageous, lubricious musings at face value, lambasting Kureishi for presenting that bête noir of creative writing courses, the unsympathetic character. The “nothing” of the book’s title is clearly an allusion to the sixteenth-century slang for vagina (“No-thing”), as in Much Ado About Nothing. And while the explicitness of Waldo’s pronouncements is mostly predictably phallocentric (“He had an eager penis all his life”), some are comically poignant; reminiscences of an active amorous life that will never return.
Jude Cook reviews The Nothing by Hanif Kureishi.
The success of Trump in the USA was a Cow Clicker political success: no matter how dumb, nasty, inept and poorly designed, Trump understands where the new magic sources of power lie. It’s no accident that he tweets, cutting out the ‘normal channels’ of shared concern to ‘speak’ directly to the private space of (anti) social media. His genius has been to seduce and reach beyond both comprehension and knowledge, to harness some vast algorithmic political unknowability and ignorance. This is the new cultural landscape that Ed Finn’s timely and fascinating book investigates.
Richard Marshall reviews Ed Finn‘sWhat Algorithms Want.
Short story idea when watching Persona, but now it is gone. I think it had to do with people I know.
I hope when you are old you’ll read a Henry James novel and we will talk about it and I’ll remember that angry man I used to be, who thought this thought, and I’ll wonder, Why? Why, you mad fool, did you hope for something like this when old?
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by social media.
Nervous, I once asked Don DeLillo if kids had taunted him, calling him “Don Dildo.”
When I cry, my eyes burn. Does this happen to you?
Most people cheat on their lovers with another not because the other shines so bright, but because the lover dims. The heart wants twilight.
By Greg Gerke.
One can direct a performance totally separate from one’s body, using only one’s brain. To create a non-carnal space, a virtual performance or global catastrophe where performative activities start functioning on their own, disconnected from body. As brain is still a material part of one’s body, a thought originating from there is already a compromise between an idea and materialized reality.
Questioning everything is our main philosophy and it is also the difference between art and entertainment. Of course, I have grown up in one authoritarian regime and also seen its fall. In these systems your reality is twisted. Everybody knows that there is real life, which they live with their friends and families and then there is another one, the official artificial reality, in which you take part outside of the home. This experience has probably given me this attitude, to always be sceptical about surface issues.
Continuing the States of Anxiety series, Jana Astanov interviews Anonymous Boh.
As Debord said, theories are made to die in the war of time. They are of their era. There’s no shortage of cranky pro-situs who claim ownership of the Situationists, like petit-bourgeois shop-keepers. But I think it’s better to treat it as material to refunction rather than repeat. It’s not for imitating, it’s for treating as raw material. That’s why the hardcovers of my books on the Situs come with comic strips that I made with Kevin Pyle, as a bit of a hint about how to repurpose the material now.
Richard Marshall interviews McKenzie Wark.
I don’t think, and I don’t think that Plato thinks, that the questions human beings ask as they struggle to figure out what is just or beautiful or good—as they struggle to forge for themselves good lives—are susceptible to technical resolution. Human life cannot be mastered by an expert. It can surely be enhanced by thought, but it cannot be successfully engineered. In us there are too many powerful forces and desires, too much variability, contingency and sheer madness.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews David Roochnik.