Das Kapital
Jul 28, 2010 philosophy, reading
Watch this: I’ve given myself some homework; maybe some of you want to join in. The goal is to finish Marx’s Capital Volume I (a mere 1k pages) by Christmas, supplementing my effort with a concurrent reading of David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital. This blog may or may not turn into a Marxist [...]
Tags: Amazon, capitalism, communism, David Harvey, Marx, Marxism
Fiddler in the Subway
Jun 30, 2010 links, philosophy, reading
Michael Mechanic has an interesting interview up today on Mother Jones with Gene Weingarten: “Secrets of a Two-Time Pulitzer Winner.” Weingarten has a book coming out entitled Fiddler in the Subway, a collection of essays he wrote for The Washington Post and the WaPo magazine. After you read Mechanic’s piece, come back here to read [...]
Tags: anosognosia, black swan, Dunning-Kruger, epistemology, Errol Morris, Hardy Boys, irony, Joshua Bell, Mother Jones, paralysis, pulitzer, Taleb, Tokyo, uncertainty, violin, Washington Post, Weingarten
The Politics of Forgetting
May 13, 2010 politics, reading, theology
Tim Wise has been all over the Web lately with his article, “What If the Tea Party Were Black?” I had my dose of Wise last week via a six-part series on YouTube that contains his 2007 lecture, “The Pathology of White Privilege: Racism, White Denial, and the Costs of Inequality.” The videos are roughly [...]
Tags: Belgium, Christianity, colonialism, Congo, Glenn Beck, history, Hochschild, Joseph Conrad, Leopold, Mother Jones, privilege, racism, slavery, Tea Party, William Sheppard
Obamapocalypse
When the passage of H.R.3590 kicked up a shitstorm two weeks ago, I thought of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story entitled “The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro.” This 1911 piece tells of Arthur Orton, a ne’er-do-well operating under the alias of “Tom Castro.” When he meets fellow conman Ebenezer Bogle, the two men hatch a plan [...]
Tags: Borges, healthcare, Obama
2009 Book & Music Recap
This is the first part of my annual recap of my year in media. Tomorrow I will probably look back at the movies of ’09. I didn’t really keep up with music this year as much as I normally do. But in no particular order, the releases I was most fond of from this year [...]
Tags: Camus, fiction, Joseph Heller, Lopate, M. Ward, nonfiction, Vonnegut
Tricknology Built All This
A couple weeks ago I came across this really interesting photo of Detroit, taken in 1930: (Click for higher resolution awesomeness) Then just this week I started reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, where he has this passage: My grandparents’ eyes glazed over at the sheer activity, streetcars rumbling, bells clanging, and the monochrome traffic swerving [...]
Tags: Detroit, email, Jeffrey Eugenides, letters, Michigan, Middlesex, Rorty
Minimalist Readings With Chuck
Nov 24, 2009 reading
Yesterday I was skimming through Chuck Palahniuk’s Nonfiction when I came across him mentioning his two favorite short stories. The first, he said, was Mark Richard’s “Strays,” but I can’t seem to find it online anywhere. But in searching I came across someone else who said their favorite short story of all time was Richard’s [...]
Tags: Amy Hempel, Chuck Palahniuk, fiction, Mark Richard, short stories
Yanks in Yangon
Nov 23, 2009 personal, reading
Last week my father & I made a quick two-day jaunt to Myanmar to visit some local pastors and see their seminary in Yangon. It was a bit of a shock going from Bangkok to Yangon, a city which feels about 30 years behind the times (LCD TV stores notwithstanding). I couldn’t shake the feeling [...]
Tags: Buddhism, Denis Johnson, Myanmar, Philippines, Shwedagon Pagoda, Thailand, TinTin, Vietnam, Yangon
A Smattering of Readings
A few paragraphs that I found interesting, but didn’t merit a full post and were too long to quote on Twitter… Firstly, a particularly insightful bit from the always provocative Slavoj Žižek: “I’ve noticed how many of the people who consider themselves to be more radical than the liberal standard do not work in political [...]
Tags: AJ Jacobs, beard, capitalism, Communion, Eucharist, fundamentalists, leftists, moralism, Shirzadian, socialism, Zizek
Ocean of Noise
May 23, 2009 images, links, reading
J. Motta’s got me hooked on Swaptree and I’ve made a few trades already. One of my favorite swaps has to be getting rid of a neurotic alcoholic’s memoir in exchange for a tome on deconstructive religion & the meaning of forgiveness. No disrespect intended to Mr. Burrough’s, but he’s no Derrida. Question: if you had [...]
Tags: College Democrats, deconstruction, Derrida, Liberty University, poverty, Remy, Sean Hannity, Swaptree, torture, waterboarding
My Favorite Debt
Mar 9, 2009 hitchhiking, reading
I picked up a hitchhiker this morning and he identified me immediately: “You’re a Cedarville student, aren’t you?” Is it that obvious? Do I just radiate repressed fundamentalist vibes? But Samir assured me it was just a guess based on probabilities: C.S.U. students speed by, C.U. students pick him up. He’s living at Wilberforce but [...]
Tags: Cedarville, Central State, hitchhiking, Holocaust, luck, poker, randomness, Wilberforce, Xenia
Books Read in 2008
Jan 1, 2009 philosophy, politics, reading, theology
I tried to read a book/week again, which seems very reasonable, but fell short once again. I’m about halfway through a dozen other books, which I’ll probably just finish & count for ’09. Under each category, they’re listed in the order I read them. Incidentally, the first book I read in 2008 was The Audacity [...]
Tags: 2008, anarchism, Bush, Camus, capitalism, Christianity, consumerism, existentialism, hitchhiking, liberalism, Obama, Vonnegut
John Caputo Listens to Creed
The cake is a lie. This post title is also (probably) a lie. But I continue to find John D. Caputo one of the most interesting living philosophers. He’s written an interesting preface to the Chinese edition of his book What Would Jesus Deconstruct? Entitled “Why the Church Deserves Deconstruction,” it’s an interesting read even [...]
Tags: Creed, deconstruction, John Caputo, postmodernism
Poor People Suck
The must-read article of the month is Michael Lewis’ “The End of Wall Street’s Boom.” It is a superb account of our economic crisis and how we got here, as seen through the eyes of a handful of people who predicted it. I thought about quoting snippets, but decided I’d end up quoting most of [...]
Tags: capitalism, Cedars, class warfare, Darwinism, Eugene Debs, greed, Howard Zinn, Liar's Poker, Marc Clauson, Michael Lewis, poverty, Prosperity Gospel, socialism, Wall Street
The Culture of Fear
Nov 4, 2008 personal, politics, reading
I read Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things about a year ago. It comes in handy when I read things like this: Tragic Mistake in Halloween Shooting SUMTER, S.C. (Nov. 1) – An ex-convict who thought he was being robbed gunned down a 12-year-old trick-or-treater, spraying nearly [...]
“Creating is living doubly.”
Sep 22, 2008 philosophy, politics, reading
In “The Push to ‘Otherize’ Obama” Nicholas D. Kristof has a throwaway paragraph that’s better than the whole rest of the piece: Just imagine for a moment if it were the black candidate in this election, rather than the white candidate, who was born in Central America, was an indifferent churchgoer, had graduated near the [...]
Boy With Curious Sentences
Jun 27, 2008 reading
Here, for your amusement, is one single sentence from David Foster Wallace. It’s from the short story “Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR.” [The Account Representative] administered CPR, beating at the soft dent of a chest’s breastbone, alternating quartered beatings with infusions of breath down through the senior striken executive’s full but faintly blue lips [...]
Part-Time Hitchhiking For Fun And Profit
Jun 24, 2008 hitchhiking, reading, theology
I’m back in Columbus again after a weekend in Cleveland/Sandusky for Dan Gifford’s wedding. I hitched a bit both ways for a total of about 100 miles. The rest via rides with Katie, Kraig, and Brenton. I will do a trip report tomorrow since I’m too exhausted tonight. Here’s some Douglas Coupland (from Life After [...]
Tags: Dan, faith, hitchhiking, religion
The Gospel from Outer Space
Jun 17, 2008 hitchhiking, personal, reading, theology
Back to our regularly scheduled programming. Here’s an excerpt from Slaughterhouse-Five by the inimitable Kurt Vonnegut: …The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the [...]
A Young Person’s Guide to OMGWTF
Apr 23, 2008 Cedarville, images, personal, reading
Alpha Sigma hosted a used book sale this week to raise money for the org — and we earned enough extra to buy a llama, a goat, and two chickens through WorldVision. We named them Kierkegaard (llama), Nietzsche (goat), Plato and Aristotle (chickens), which is sure to thrill the 3rd world family that receives them. [...]
Tags: Aristotle, Jenna, Kierkegaard, Mallory, Missy, Nietzsche, Plato, sex