Friday, September 22, 2006
Every so often I need to listen to this, and in lieu of my appreciation of Spike Lee’s documentary on the wake of Hurricane Katrina, now is as good a time as any.
Friday, September 8, 2006
I have to thank Perc’s resiliency for bullying me into reading Borges for my own good. I have just finished reading his short story collection, ‘The Aleph’, and while not every story resonated with me, the majority did. My prior knowledge of Borges was nil so I came in fresh and read the [...]
[yeah it is a repost, but a damn good one]
Eighty pages from the end of ‘The Idiot’, and I need to say something about the Russian novel, or rather, the “Russian novel as idea”, for what can I honestly say about the Russian novel – I am not Russian, know not a word of the [...]
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
There is what I can only describe as a flutter of emotion each time I sit down and read a novel by Dostoevsky; he is, for an atheistic existentialist like myself, perhaps the closest thing to holy that I may ever come to understand. In both ‘The Idiot’ and, this, my latest read, ‘Demons’, [...]
This year I volunteered to lead one of the book club sessions at my library. My first task was to offer a couple book recommendations in the hopes that they would be voted on and approved for one of the sessions. Of my selections only Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest novel, ‘Extremely Loud & [...]
About a year ago I happened across a snippet of an interview with author Malcolm Gladwell on a local talk show. Somewhat taken with the bushy Sideshow Bob haircut the author was sporting, I lingered on the channel perhaps longer than I would have normally. Gladwell spoke in a gentile eloquent way about [...]
Incessant reading has led to incessant writing about reading. This week’s book is ‘1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus’ by Charles C. Mann. One advantage of working in a library is that the new acquisitions entering into the library go by me before they make it to the stacks. Both [...]
Monday, November 28, 2005
After hearing a radio program on the history of pragmatism I decided to read ‘The Metaphysical Club’ by Louis Menand. The Metaphysical Club at the center of the book consists of an array of intellectuals (primarily in and around the Boston area) who through a series of informal meetings at one another’s home came [...]
Some days I feel shrink-wrapped in my existence, and today is one of those days. Periodically this nausea surfaces in me as I evaluate my role in this society. I remember the earliest moment being a time I was eating yogurt out of a plastic container watching a wildlife program on a Saturday [...]
The ‘Blue Book’ is a rare gift for enthusiasts of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy: a lucidly conveyed articulation of some of the philosopher’s key arguments during his tenure at Cambridge, dictated from his lectures and endorsed by Wittgenstein himself as a satisfactory prelude to his ‘promised manuscript’, the posthumously published ‘Philosophical Investigations’. Admittedly I [...]
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