I’m fond of taking hyperbole literally. In Eliot Weinberger’s piece on Sontag, he writes Yet “Notes on ‘Camp’” inadvertently became Sontag’s most influential essay. Its fifty-three-point structuralist analytic overkill on a minor pop phenomenon—an ironic fad among certain witty gay men—was something new in the US, though the French had been doing it for years. [...]
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My laptop died. (There’s more of a story here, and, if you live in Greenville, NC, and would like some advice about where not to take your electronics equipment to be repaired, please let me know.) Yoko’s knitting blindfoldedly in the background, etc. So I ordered one of these Dell laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed. I [...]
I delivered pizzas during the summer as an undergraduate. I enjoyed it more than you might suspect, largely because you never knew what to expect. I certainly never would have guessed that this could happen: The bizarre case unfolded in August 2003, when Mr Wells, a pizza deliveryman, was called to deliver two pizzas to [...]
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I was just reading this SEP article on the problem of evil. The temperature is currently 99°. It feels more like 92-93°, though, with the humidity. The water in the air cools things down, you see. I thought of doing a search-and-replace operation (s/evil/heat) and reposting it as a conceptual art object. You could mention [...]
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I’m going to teach this in just a bit. Could you avoid telling the class that Nietzsche first applied “Uebermensch” to Manfred, to this hapless soul?
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Had they called themselves “Lou Andreas.” Observe As it is, “Rainer Maria” invokes scribbling one of the Sonette from a facing page, sending a young nursing student to the Wake Forest library for the translation—an injudicious, pretentious, and all-too-sophomoric act. Ween would have worn that title better, for no other reason than you’re unlikely to [...]
Ross Douthat, displaying exoteric scorn for Christopher Hitchens’s atheism, writes that Hitchens notes that “the book on which all four may possibly have been based, known speculatively to scholars as ‘Q,’ has been lost forever, which seems distinctly careless on the part of the god who is claimed to have ‘inspired’ it”—a good line that [...]
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