There is a book by Daniel Hurewitz called Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, and Martin Duberman has reviewed it. The review starts like this: What is the self? Do we all have one? Is it best treated with Botox or with books? Is it grounded in genetic concrete or manufactured by … More Bohemian Los Angeles
Here are some marvelous paragraphs from David A. Bell’s review essay, introduced in the last post. In the twenty-first century the Enlightenment appears anything but the triumphant imperial “project” denounced by vulgar postmodernists. Its heritage is fragile and endangered. Admittedly, its works remain in the “canon”–but perhaps only because they go largely unread in certain … More Profane Illuminations
Now I am supposed to be at a festival but it is raining I am still cleaning out my bookcases and files. I would like to be reading: 1. Richard Serrano, Against the Postcolonial: “Francophone” Writers at the Ends of the French Empire (Lexington Books, 2005). The publisher’s blurb says: Richard Serrano begins his provocative … More La Libre Pensée
If the globalized labor market is as good for people as its advocates claim, then why must films about globalized workers be shot on the sly? Films I would like to see include H-2 Worker, on the Florida cane fields, Mardi Gras: Made in China, on the conditions in which Mardi Gras beads are fabricated, … More Films
Once upon a time there was public ecstasy; then capitalism and Calvinism conspired to rout it out. […] Ecstasy and Enlightenment failed to hit it off. In the eyes of an emergent middle-class order, popular festivity was that most scandalous and opaque of all activities, that which is done purely for its own sake. All … More On Festivity and Enlightenment
A book to reread on poetry is Federico García Lorca, Granada, paraíso cerrado y otras páginas granadinas, ed., intro., and notes by Enrique Martínez López (Granada: Miguel Sánchez, 1989). Is poetry private or public, marginal or central, esoteric or communicative – expressive? Is poetic speech different from ordinary speech, or is ordinary speech actually closer … More Closed Paradise, Open Garden
One of my favorite academic articles, for the sake of literary style among other things, is Joan Dayan’s “Caribbean Cannibals and Whores” (Raritan 9:2 [Fall 1989]: 45-68). Here are a few passages from it: 1. In Haitian ceremonies of vodoun, the most spendid of the gods is Erzulie-Fréda. She is also known to be the … More Joan Dayan
Books I ought to read for recreational purposes include, but are not limited to: Bataille, Eroticism, which discusses the continuity and discontinuity of beings; Foucault, History of Sexuality, because I never have and because it might create an interesting combination with Bataille, and Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted, because if I am going to read some new-to-me … More William James
From Oxford University Press, on Jonathan Wolff, Why Read Marx Today? (OUP, 2003): Jonathan Wolff argues that if we detach Marx the critic of current society from Marx the prophet of some never-to-be-realized worker’s paradise, he remains the most impressive critic we have of liberal, capitalist, bourgeois society. The author shows how Marx’s main ideas … More Karl Marx V
I am writing an article on two new poets, who have been reviewed and discussed before, but who have not yet had research inflicted upon them. It is an interesting and for me, unusual experience to write about people on whom there is no critical tradition. I am also on a dissertation on a writer … More A Beginner’s Mind
coldhearted scientist وداد 