Month: January 2022
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a form of therapy against the sleep of reason
How should we deal with intrusions of fiction into life, now that we have seen the historical impact that this phenomenon can have?…Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters. Umberto Eco Via Big Other, a timely…
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out of the valley
Day four, and it feels like I’ve turned the corner on this virus: I tend to measure such things by the point at which I actually feel like it’s worth wearing more than PJs and a dressing gown, and after a passable (though not great) night of sleep, I’m dressed properly. (Or, given my benchmarks…
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repeating falsehoods like incantations
From Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud: An irony of our technological advancement is that it has created a society that is in many ways scientifically more naive than the preindustrial world, in which no citizen who learned physics through backbreaking work and understood climate through subsistence agriculture would have assumed that he or she was exempt…
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the negative positive
Well, then—that’s the agenda for the next week determined, I guess. Had a lousy night last night, all roiling guts and mild fever, and got out of bed this morning feeling like I’d been gargling glass (and sounding like the whitest of all Barry White impersonators). Those two lines have just confirmed my suspicions as…