Lee Konstantinou
(Crossposted at Arcade.) In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called "Why We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading," Alan Jacobs argues that "’deep attention’ reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit." The inevitable minority status of deep reading "has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in … Continue reading Alan Jacobs and the Rise of the Reading Class
Over at io9 you can read a short article I wrote on William S. Burroughs’ relationship to Scientology. In 1959, the same year Olympia Press published his most famous novel Naked Lunch, the writer William S. Burroughs visited the restaurant of his friend and collaborator, Brion Gysin, in Tangiers. There, Burroughs met John and Mary … Continue reading William S. Burroughs’ Wild Ride with Scientology
(Crossposted at Arcade.) In a fascinating parable, “A Story In Two Parts, With An Ending Yet To Be Written,” posted on the National Humanities Center’s On the Human Web site, Paula Moya tells the tale of a researcher named Kitayama who travels from the land of Interdependence to the land of Independence, conducts research into … Continue reading Biological Universals as Authenticity, or, What’s the Matter with Steven Pinker?
(Crossposted at Arcade.) I. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek famously lays out his analysis of claims that we* find ourselves in a postideological age. Žižek doesn’t exactly mean “postideological” in the sense of Daniel Bell or Francis Fukuyama. For Bell or Fukuyama, postideology is characterized by the rise of technocracy, the transformation of … Continue reading The End of Ideology (Critique)?
(Crossposted at Arcade.) January was apparently Andrew Ross month over at Dissent. Two articles, Jeffrey J. Williams’s “How to be an Intellectual: The Cases of Richard Rorty and Andrew Ross” (in the Winter 2011 issue of the magazine) and Kevin Mattson’s “Cult Stud Mugged” (an online original), track Ross’s evolution from a so-called cult-stud into someone … Continue reading 13 Ways of Looking at “Pac-Man”
(Crossposted from Arcade.) I’d like to point my loyal readers to the amazing introduction Charlie Kaufman wrote for Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script, which is available over at The Rumpus. I would summarize the introduction and analyze it — I am almost unable to resist the temptation — but to do so would ruin the … Continue reading The Postironic Art of Charlie Kaufman
(Crossposted at Arcade.) I’d like to use my bloggy pulpit to draw your attention to a draft of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s essay, “Infinite Summer: Reading the Social Network,” which discusses the origin and signifiance of an online effort to read Infinite Jest the summer after David Foster Wallace’s suicide. This essay is destined to become part … Continue reading Infinite Summer and New Models of Online Scholarship
(Crossposted at Arcade.) In the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith has written an interesting review of Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network that doubles as a critique of Facebook. Smith rhetorically positions herself as a sort of luddite or dinosaur, a defender of what she calls "Person 1.0" against the debasements wrought upon — … Continue reading Zadie Smith, Facebook, and the Game Layer
(Crossposted at Arcade.) I’d like to post a few comments on Mark Greif’s excellent essay, "What was the Hipster?" which was published in New York magazine and is part of a new book of the same name put out by the n+1 Foundation. I. Greif’s essay has led me to reflect on some theories I’ve … Continue reading Hipsters and the New Gilded Age
(Crossposted at Arcade.) In the spirit of continuing the conversation we have been having on Arcade about Stanley Fish, the recent axing of French, Italian, classics, Russian, and theatre at SUNY Albany, and the future of the humanities, I’d like to present this video (h/t Mark Vega). This is a video created using "xtranormal," a … Continue reading The Xtranormal Future of the Humanities