Children are among the most expensive purchasesthat average consumers are likely to make in the course of their entire lives.In purely monetary terms, children cost morethan the most luxurious state-of-the-art car, a round-the-world cruise, even a mansion to be proud of. Worse still, the total cost is likely to grow over the years,and its…
Advertising is one of the cultural mediums that has the most sanctioned lying. Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy. Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism. And lies strengthen the world of predatory advertising. — Excerpt, All about Love, New Visions by bell hooks p. 47…
Our epoch does not love itself. And a world that does not love itself is a world that does not believe in the world: we can believe only in what we love. That is what makes the atmosphere of this world So heavy, stifling, and anguished. The world of the hyper-market, which is the…
Yesterday in the morning I took a walk in Braeburn Marsh. I returned at the end of the day, as the sun was setting. Luck is being at the right place at the right time. I feel lucky when I experience beauty, or a moment of extraordinary accomplishment. Venturing off the path, the ground…
I have signed up for a seminar course on May 22nd, so I am pressing forward to finish a book that will be central to the topic of discussion. Eric Fromm was referred to in the chapter entitled, Love as Praxis: Critical Theory and Pscyhoanalysis, which I am reading. I have not read Eric…
Jesus is not coming back! Is that statement ironic, troubling, laugh-out-loud funny, or simply nonsensical? It depends entirely upon the reader. What do you bring to those words arranged in syntax? What mental image forms, involuntarily? Do you experience a strong emotional response: relief, dread… The meaning is involuntary after all, the effect of…
Where did One go? Am I still One when I analyze, or am analyzed? Yes, but with an unidentifiable identity, without a fixed center, or mortiferous* repetition; serial music rather, a dance improvised and yet supported by an underlying, open order. …a long history that never stops coming back, catching up with us. p….
From this Thursday morning’s New York Times: Biden plans to declare that the Ottoman killings of Armenian civilians during World War I were genocide. It could fray relations with Turkey, which rejects the designation. This up-welling of truthful, coherent speech has been long in coming. No other president has was able to overcome the…
Today promises to be gray and chilly. Rain and snow is predicted, — spring in the Midwest. I plan to be out and about, walking with my camera. This is the time of birth in the cycle of the seasons. Who would not wish to be on hand when new life is emerging to…
My reading in Julia Kristeva’s This Incredible Need To Believe continues. Here are some quotations from the book that are particularly arresting this morning. What is art? …adventures of immanence. Infinite intellectual love (literature, art, etc.) when they are carried out and received not as “objects of consummation” but as the very being of…
