In an essay about writing essays, Virginia Woolf offered a handy, pocket-sized comparison of some of the different types of writing. Essays, she argued, are distinct from other types of writing in terms of their formal properties. For Woolf, it simply doesn't have any. Poetry has rhythm and rhyme to carry it along, a novel…
I'm reblogging this partly because I think it's interesting, and also partly because I'm not sure I agree with it, but not for the most obvious reasons. What the authors argue for here is a form of what's called "accelerationism". This is the theory that argues that the only way to actually achieve fundamental change…
Choose Your Dystopia
Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death", published in 1985, argued, somewhat persuasively to my undergraduately beer-addled brain, that the dystopia we were inhabiting wasn't the Orwellian nightmare many had assumed was the most accurate premonition of the future, but the one that Aldous Huxley imagined in his tonally-ambiguous "Brave New World". In 1985, five years…
The Culture Wars
The quite-right-wing-and-revealed-to-be-a-giant-piece-of-shit David Brussat, who ostensibly writes a blog about architecture, but used it (past tense applies), like a Trojan Horse, to blow his dog-whistle (confession: I have an interest in theories of architecture, and Brussat did write some interesting stuff, at least a couple of years ago, that was relatively tame). Given the events…
This is another repost, this time of something written by Chris Hedges. I'm doing this because I think that what's happening in the US now is more important for the world at large (and especially the English-speaking parts of it) than anything I feel particularly qualified to talk about. Chris Hedges, who is a writer…
A good deal of what I’ve been seeing of late on social media – but also in mainstream journalism – revolves around the notion that the Covid-19 pandemic will be the trigger for a shift away from the neo-liberalism that has characterised leading western economic policies since the early 1980s. That might be right. Back […]…
Tolstoy Got it Right: Children and Lockdown
If you meet someone who says that they "like" Tolstoy's books, they probably have (a) a lot of time on their hands, (b) a penchant for self-aggrandisement, and (c) a fairly snobbish view of "literature", refusing to accept that books like "Harry Potter" and "Game of Thrones" qualify as literature. You'd better believe that I'm…
Foucault Would Have Had a Field Day with Coronavirus: Technology.
This is the fourth time (read one, two, and three by following these links if you're really that bored) I've decided to bloviate with all my lack of expertise on the topic of coronavirus. "Why are you doing this?" nobody asks. Truly, we are reaching peak saturation with commentary on this topic, and I'm contributing…
Foucault Would Have Had a Field Day with Coronavirus (3)
The last time I posted, and the time before that, I wrote about how Foucault would have gone to town on the Coronavirus thing (not literally, of course, because of social distancing). And first off, I think I should clarify a couple of points, particularly in the last bit about medicine, and particularly in my…
Foucault Would Have Had a Field Day with Coronavirus (2)
I like to write long, unfocused essays, about something that interests me. I always keep them to (give or take) 1,000 words, because like most people, I don't read stuff on the internet like I read novels. If the topic is larger than 1,000 words, then I break it up into a series. Which I'm…
