Postmodernism

It is the spring of 2003, midway through my first year in graduate school, and my friend Nathan had earlier that day acquired a used vinyl copy of David Bowie’s Station to Station from Amoeba Music. Some months later, we are driving down Sunset Boulevard listening to the song “Negativland”…

Do you have a rodent problem? — When I got home, the posse of glue-sniffers was making themselves at home on my cigarette-burned chaise lounge. They were a dastardly horrible bunch, pupils dilated like black holes where time and matter ceased to be relevant, their mouths encircled by aggressive and persistent red chemical rashes. I have always…

Reading Baudrillard through Ontological Obesity Part 1: Introduction Throughout Jean Baudrillard’s America (1988) are references made to concepts often entwined in Fat Studies — the topics of fitness, fatness, obesity, and anorexia are too common that it forces a revalidation of Jean Baudrillard and how we can read his theories…

In the mid-1990s, the science journalist John Horgan interviewed various physicists (including Sheldon Glashow, Edward Witten and Steven Weinberg) who spoke both for and against the strongly speculative (or “nonempirical”) nature of much contemporary physics and cosmology. After Horgan wrote The End of Science, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin, the writer…

And how to defend yourself against them. — Yes, they can hurt you The first mistake we make is to think that we cannot be hurt by our interactions online. After all, they are two separate worlds: the real one, where we live under our real name and interact with our friends and families, and the one behind our computer screen. In it…

The compulsion for illusion is growing exponentially, generating an existential risk. “It is rather our frenzy of communication and information that makes things disappear. Information, that is, non-things, is placed in front of things and makes them pale. We do not live in a realm of violence, but in a realm of information that poses as freedom.” — Byung-Chul Han Those…

Chapter 1. Tools Easy to see. A strength. To wield the concept in space. To have the object in a proper time. Astonishingly connecting the two and removing from yourself a sudden impassable. The problem showed as an immoveable force, at least once. Now the past. Silly to think that all we saw…

Chapter 2. How to Make a Useful Tool Be in this world. Think as that which is, where thought is different than action. Insurmountable the dichotomy of two actions. One is to be, to breathe, to see, to move. Two is to have a choice. A choice is given between a knee-jerk from the fire that burns, or…

Chapter 4. Measurement Past the mind. Past the body. Beyond the soul. From here in the pit of the gut, outward to the limits of existence. The tiniest quarks which dance about in harmonious rhythm expand the reason of space upward. Outward. The speed of light not so fast to undermine the reality…