Category: Criticism
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political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level
After getting irked by reviews of Oppenheimer, Adam Kotsko wrote a short thing that feels to me like it’s the missing piece to that Sam Kriss essay I excerpted last week, which has been—as the kids say—living rent-free in my head ever since. Kotsko has an interesting and very valuable insight into “culture war” stuff,…
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an entire industry to cater to your whimsical myopia
Ron Horning has been on what I suspect was a much needed holiday, but—delightfully, but perhaps also tragically?—Horning clearly didn’t get much of a holiday from being Horning. But then, of who among us could it ever be said that &c &c? Anyway, the first half of Horning’s latest reminded me of thoughts I had…
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being a nerd has always meant being a machine for liking things
Via yer man Jay Springett, a gloriously excoriating piece of writing by Sam Kriss. After quoting a Warhol interview snippet which ends with Andy agreeing with the interviewer that Pop Art is all about “liking things”, and that liking things is being like a machine, “because you do the same thing every time. You do…
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Coming to terms with learning to listen: Adam Soto’s This Weightless World
On New Year’s Day 2012, the SETI people finally receive an incontrovertibly extraterrestrial signal, which they announce in a hastily convened web-broadcast which, true to the time, much of the world does its best to watch despite the bandwidth issues. As one might expect, the enormity of this interjection into the rolling drama of human…
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the pursuit of absolute predictability renders its practitioners foolish
A conference paper transcript from Terence Blake, in which he smashes together Deleuze and Dune, which results in a much more interesting (and far less reductive) reading of the latter than I’ve seen heretofore. A snippet: Frank Herbert indicates that the « central paradox » of Dune turns on the human perception of time. Paul’s prescience first…