Posted in Philosophy on October 30, 2007 | 9 Comments »
Some time ago I told my sister about seeing an episode of Sesame Street in which Cookie Monster expressed a fear of monsters. But how could this be, she asked, when Cookie Monster is himself already a bona fide monster? Here is how Hegel might have answered:
Self-consciousness is both a subject and object to [...]
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Philosophy, Popular culture on October 28, 2007 | 6 Comments »
List making can be infectious. The Observer Music Monthly has made a list the top 10 right-wing rockers. It’s a rather motley crew and the definition of “right-wing” is somewhat elastic. Eric Clapton is on the list for drunkenly yelling out “Throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white!” Ted Nugent is quoted as saying about the war [...]
Posted in Literature, Philosophy, tagged Jesus Christ, Terry Eagleton on October 26, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Verso is publishing a series of books reprinting classic radical texts under the umbrella title “Revolutions Series”. My favorite of the batch is the one listed in the Verso catalogue as “Jesus Christ / Terry Eagleton The Gospels (Revolutions Series).” It must be nice to share a by-line with Jesus. Closer inspection reveals that the [...]
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature on October 26, 2007 | 2 Comments »
For centuries, classical scholarship was fueled by homoerotic desire. The Greeks, as every school boy who paid attention knows, didn’t have the Jewish, Christian and Islamic prohibition against same-sex desire. Because the church respected the ancients despite their vices, Latin continued to be taught into the monotheistic centuries and ancient Greek enjoyed a rebirth. Hard-won [...]
Posted in Media, Personalities, tagged altruism, blog, Stephen Fry on October 25, 2007 | No Comments »
I am thrilled by Stephen Fry, across a whole spectrum of attributes — merely the latest of these being his blog (creatively subtitled “blessays, blogs, and blisquisitions”), which, while being wonderfully witty and spontaneously stylish (not to mention almost completely free of low-brow alliterations), is also — praise the lord – overlong and extremely tardy. In [...]
Posted in Animal rights, Personalities, tagged Henry Mark Holzer, Santeria on October 24, 2007 | 3 Comments »
The following two-part interview is one I originally conducted for Herbivore, an animal-rights magazine based in Portland, Oregon. The magazine declined to publish it, for reasons they never shared with me. Given that Herbivore readers were the original audience, most of the questions focus on animal issues. However, I am posting it here on the [...]
Posted in Animal rights, Personalities, tagged Ayn Rand, Henry Mark Holzer on October 24, 2007 | 2 Comments »
Ayn Rand postage stamp, released in 1999.
For part one click here.
Do you remember the context in which Rand made her (surprisingly sympathetic) comment? I don’t take you to be trying to turn her into a posthumous champion of animal rights. Yet her remark would seem to suggest she was not as dismissive and hostile [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on October 23, 2007 | No Comments »
J.K. Rowling’s decision to reveal that Albus Dumbledore , the beloved and deceased headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay reminded me of something George Orwell wrote in his great essay “Boys’ Weeklies”. That essay dealt with the once popular genre of the public school story, a form of children’s literature that focused on the adventures of rich boys attending private boarding schools. The Harry Potter novels, as I once [...]
Posted in Philosophy, Popular culture, tagged Rawls, The Wire on October 23, 2007 | 1 Comment »
John Rawls, son of Baltimore: 1921-2002 (photo: Steve Pyke).
Recently I’ve started renting episodes of The Wire, the brilliant series first broadcast on HBO. The show is set in contemporary Baltimore, and revolves around of a group of police who struggle to reign in a drug-dealing gang. The program is extremely well-written (particularly the authentic inner-city [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on October 22, 2007 | 6 Comments »
Other people’s delusions can be revealing, especially when they have an unsettling resemblance to our own mental habits. The latest issue of the avant-garde graphic arts anthology Kramers Ergot features a brilliant and disturbing war comic book done in 1937 by master Japanese cartoonist Shuiho Tagawa (1899-1989). (A sample panel is here).
The story, which appeared in the magazine Shonen Kurabu (”Boys’ Club”), shows a [...]
