February 23, 2016
Postscript to My Kanye West Posts
I’m a human being. . . I’m an artist, bro . . . —@kanyewest, February 13, 2016 Since I wrote about Kanye’s arrogance, based mainly in interviews and lyrics from […]
July 30, 2015
The Invented Antagonism
The hallmark of a 19th or 20th century (or 21st century) debate about religion is a focus on origins. This began with Darwin’s The Origin of Species, in relation to […]
July 15, 2015
Old News: The Consequences of our Cultural Obsession with Newness
There’s nothing new about our love of newness. “Men love that song which is newest on their ears”—that’s Homer, writing as early as Europe’s second epic poem. The problem […]
May 7, 2015
How the West Inverted its Literary Values
In a true missing-the-forest-for-the-trees phenomenon, modern literary criticism has left unremarked, to my knowledge at least, the totally anomalous body of “great literature” that has come out of Europe and […]
April 16, 2014
Magical Mystery Tour: Science as the New Authority
In Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” passage from The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor’s plan to “correct” the work of God (in a sense, to establish the Church) was based on […]
November 29, 2013
About the “Singularity”
To decide whether Kurzweil’s idea of the Singularity is “true” or an “accurate” depiction of our future is to mistake the nature of prophecy. Imagine someone in 1914 predicting the […]
November 23, 2013
Turning (Back) to Performed Language
Why sit down and read quietly? Is this really the only way, or even the best way, to experience language? The three central works of Western literature were never, and […]
November 16, 2013
The Scripture Reads You
Scriptures, because they are bound as books, are considered to be books; and the metaphor that extremists of any stripe (religious or antireligious) have in their heads is that of […]
October 19, 2013
Why I am Inherently Evil
The idea of karma—the moral effect of your actions, good or bad, following you across births—suggests that even a newborn has some inherent guilt. In this Eastern model of […]
October 8, 2013
The Endgame and the Spin
In all high-minded or “holy” group violence, you’ll see two factors at play: The Endgame and the Spin. (Which one of these two gets emphasized and reviled depends on […]
September 24, 2013
Against Histrionics: On Deaths and Afterlives
Compare the deaths of Socrates and Christ: They mirror each other in the setup (thinker put to death for subversion of the established order), but Christ’s death is physically painful […]
July 16, 2012
Make it New While Keeping it Old
When it comes to translating a work that is, at once, radically different from what we are used to reading, as Greek tragedy is—both in its (multiple) tones/registers and its […]