Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens:A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. 1944. New York: Roy, 1950. Did you know that the odds on Anne Boleyn’s brother Rochford’s acquittal were ten to one? Regarding the previous Homo book I wrote about: I know of no sadder or deeper fall from human reason than Schmitt’s barbarous and pathetic [...]
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Polymath Cosma Shalizi has an entertaining review of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. I have a paper in various stages of revision on the rhetoric of Wolfram’s book, and Shalizi’s discussion of Wolfram and the taxonomy of crankishness is very apt there. In fact, I invoked his guano comparison in the version I [...]
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Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, 1998) invokes Hegel on the perfectability of language: “[it] is the perfect element in which interiority is as external as exteriority is internal.” A pregnant statement, to be sure. I haven’t read Kantorowicz’s (mentioned by Agamben on p. 91) The King’s Two [...]
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I began Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina while waiting on some comforters to wash and dry last night. Just so you know, “spoilers” are coming. Early in the game, you find the following written on a blackboard: 11426 34041 + 6505 2431 —————— 21234 42022 I thought–and immediately rejected–that this might be base-related. Why I [...]
Paul Laity on Lee Clarke’s Worst Cases and John Christensen on Raymond Baker’s Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System. I’m curious if there has been a sustained fictional treatment of a culture/civilization steadily planning for a highly improbable total disaster scenario chosen randomly from a field of many. Posner’s [...]
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Upton Sinclair published Mental Radio in 1930, a curious work describing his wife’s telepathic abilities. There are more drawings and transmitted drawings per page than you’ll find in in the average Sinclair. There’s a mention of the late professor Quackenbos of Columbia, author of many books on hypnotism (32), and a description of how Craig, [...]
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