I continue to read On Photography by Susan Sontag. Today I finished the essay entitled, America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly. There Sontag surveys the intent of a number of well known chroniclers of our grand experiment, beginning with Walt Whitman, concluding with commentary on the life work of photographer Diane Arbus. Sontag is a…
Photographs …a way of giving information to people who do not take easily to reading. In a world ruled by photographic images, all borders (“framing”) seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous, from everything else: all that is necessary is to frame the subject differently. Photography reinforces a nominalist view of…
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still recycling, it’s age-old habit, in mere images of truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then about everything…
II There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing, No end to the withering of withered flowers, To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless, To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage, The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable Prayer of the one…
“But, friend, when you know certain things: these things lead to dispassion not to passion; to detachment not to bondage; to diminution not to accumulation; to having few wishes, not to having many wishes; to contentment not to discontent; to seclusion not to gregariousness; to the arousing of energy, not to indolence; to frugality…
This morning’s New York Times report on the war in Ukraine is a meditation upon the logic of war. “Stand with you, period” President Biden, in a passionate speech from Warsaw on Saturday, proclaimed the West’s complete support for Ukraine. “We stand with you, period,” Biden said. “Not doing enough” The next day, Ukraine’s…
I watched the 94th Academy Awards last night, a bit reluctantly. The Academy Awards show, as such shows go, become absurd in the bid to out-do themselves. Each year the aspiration is for more of a spectacle than anything done in the past. The need to produce “a show” to attract advertisers competes with…
“Even if you’re alone, you’re destined to do it…” Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, 46, the lead singer of Okean Elzy and perhaps Ukraine’s biggest star, was supposed to be preparing to play the band’s latest album to packed venues across the world from April… Since, he has sung in Odessa near the Duc de Richelieu monument…
What does it take to become human, to bridge the gap between… zoe and bios, physiology and biography, nature and spirit, the somatic and symbolic? For us life is meaning and meaning is life. —Inner Experience and Worldly Revolt; Arendt’s Bearing on Kristeva’s Project by Noëlle McAfee, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy The…
It is Friday morning. After rising, switching on the iphone, a text message was waiting. A friend asked if I could meet him at Limestone Coffee Shop at 7. I had ten minutes. I pressed ahead with the bowl of cheerios, grabbed my coat and was out the door. Arriving at the coffee shop…
