Several days ago I offered a short quote from Baudrillard in an email to several friends. The objection was made that I had not given a context to ease understanding of the admittedly obscure lines. Once again here is an excerpt from Baudrillard’s essay Radical Thought. Added context would not make his words more…
A received a loan of three books from a friend yesterday. The books were from her library, offered because she wished me to look them over. I am a book lover. One important axis of my life are books which I choose to read, usually purchased from Amazon. I read to live and live…
Some days ago in conversation with a friend here at Starbucks, Alex insisted that knowledge was possible without the symbolic representation of reason. I thought to myself, “What a radical thought.” I think of “knowledge” as what can be diagrammed, presented in the form 2+2=4, or encoded with words and grammar. On the other…
It was an orange 2022 Corvette. That’s me waving from the drivers side, ready for three laps around the race track. The C8 Z51 model Corvette makes 475 horsepower. The jaunty wave of the hand from the car toward my daughter taking the picture, was but a small part of the story. I have…
The Tears of Eros will remain as a barb in my consciousness, or better, a striation layer of my unconscious. The truth, always there, undisclosed by daylight – is like the black-backing of a mirror. I continue on to a second book by Georges Bataille, The Theory of Religion. What do I expect to…
Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been. -José Ortega y Gasset The typical greeting for encounter of any sort is “How is your day?” The expected reply is a chipper “Just great!” To answer simply “good” is sometimes received…
René Descartes is often quoted to emphasize reason as the hallmark of Enlightenment based culture of the West. Cogito, Ergo Sum. A pithy saying indeed, “I think therefore I am,” with Latin lending the words a patina of sophistication. Descartes by profession a mathematician naturally would be inclined to believe the clarity of reason…
Tuesday morning after Independence Day 2022, is overcast with intermittent sunshine. Is today the beginning of a new week, or a continuation of the week that was, a week that seemed compressed into one day? I refer to the mass murder that occurred yesterday at the Highland Park Independence Day parade. A young man,…
Polaroid’s SX-70. It won’t let you stop. Suddenly you see a picture everywhere you look… now you press the red electric button. Whirr…whoosh …and there it is. You watch and your picture comes to life, growing more vivid, more detailed, until minutes later you have a print as real as life. Soon you’re taking…
Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death… Sexual reproductive activity is common to sexual animals and humankind, but only humankind appear to have turned their sexual activity into erotic activity. Eroticism is assenting to life even in death. [A] gulf exists, for instance, between you, listening…
