Just quickly, some excellent posts that I have read of late:
k-punk on "Carrie versus Dido: Consumerism and Existentialism". An excellent and timely comparison/statement... Also not to be missed is his recent one against pot-smoking, which is a response to the this one at Infinite Thought. Isn't it nice when blogs challenge popular assumptions? &so this is christmas says Yes, it is. There's also a thread happening in response to these latter two posts over at Dissensus, which looks to be growing fat with, well, dissent. I must mention that I make a cameo in this.
The strange thing about Dissensus is the number of non-theory afficianados that seem motivated to post on its boards (more specifically, on theory-ish 'Thought' threads) and, moreover, seem motivated to post aggressively in response to posts containing theory/philosophy. Though I'm sure I've done it in the past (back when a young whipper-snapper, and all that), it really irks me when people respond to difficult/unfamiliar ideas by labelling it all as crap and/or nonsense. What ever happened to open-mindedness? What's with this knee-jerk conservatism? Or is it just that two years of reading theory and other difficult texts has just made me less likely to freak out when I read things that are not written in the style of either a) a newspaper article, or b) a nineteenth century work of prose? Has the Derrida freakout that I had in second year innoculated me against the threats of intractable texts, so that I can sit through Russian Ark or Samuel Beckett's Molloy without getting antsy because "nothing's happening"...?
It's at times like these that I imagine the idealist, socialist-leaning eighteen year-old that I once was as a flower, whose petals are slowly falling off... (But I'm turning into a beautiful butterfly, I promise! A beautiful butterfly who enjoys mixing metaphors...)
If I seem somewhat perky then I'm going to attribute it to beginning Spinoza's Ethics. Yes yes, k-punk sycophantism, there's no need to go on about it. Goodnight.
k-punk on "Carrie versus Dido: Consumerism and Existentialism". An excellent and timely comparison/statement... Also not to be missed is his recent one against pot-smoking, which is a response to the this one at Infinite Thought. Isn't it nice when blogs challenge popular assumptions? &so this is christmas says Yes, it is. There's also a thread happening in response to these latter two posts over at Dissensus, which looks to be growing fat with, well, dissent. I must mention that I make a cameo in this.
The strange thing about Dissensus is the number of non-theory afficianados that seem motivated to post on its boards (more specifically, on theory-ish 'Thought' threads) and, moreover, seem motivated to post aggressively in response to posts containing theory/philosophy. Though I'm sure I've done it in the past (back when a young whipper-snapper, and all that), it really irks me when people respond to difficult/unfamiliar ideas by labelling it all as crap and/or nonsense. What ever happened to open-mindedness? What's with this knee-jerk conservatism? Or is it just that two years of reading theory and other difficult texts has just made me less likely to freak out when I read things that are not written in the style of either a) a newspaper article, or b) a nineteenth century work of prose? Has the Derrida freakout that I had in second year innoculated me against the threats of intractable texts, so that I can sit through Russian Ark or Samuel Beckett's Molloy without getting antsy because "nothing's happening"...?
It's at times like these that I imagine the idealist, socialist-leaning eighteen year-old that I once was as a flower, whose petals are slowly falling off... (But I'm turning into a beautiful butterfly, I promise! A beautiful butterfly who enjoys mixing metaphors...)
If I seem somewhat perky then I'm going to attribute it to beginning Spinoza's Ethics. Yes yes, k-punk sycophantism, there's no need to go on about it. Goodnight.
1 Comments:
I'm surprised at how aggressive dave is on that dissensus thread. He's usually such a sensible and right-thinking sorta person, or maybe used to be. There's this weird predilection among British blog personalities for having "difficult" phases.
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