Pangs of a Time Traveler
Human requirements change. People who lived centuries ago would marvel at our technology, and yet we look beyond our own creations today. The accumulations of the past have entered into Nature, into...
View ArticleOn an Interview with Eduardo Maura of Podemos
The Platypus Review recently published an an interview with Eduardo Maura, the spokesperson of Podemos. Two major themes in Maura’s responses are tied up confusingly: democracy and identity. In answer...
View ArticleSuffering
Contentment with life cannot be reduced or found only in the practice of having the right thought. Adorno and Horkheimer noted that today’s anti-intellectualism can in part stem from resentment of...
View ArticleThe Promise of School
What is it that one must ask of schools today? Academia is in the strange positon of offering the means by which we might pursue bourgeois ideals on the one hand, and on the other hand offering—because...
View ArticleDialogue on Water
“It seems like everyday the lake is a different color.” “That’s because the sunlight changes.” “It’s also because we change.”
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The Engines of God vs Deepsix
Covers of McDevitt’s Deepsix and The Engines of GodThe story of Jack McDevitt’s novel Deepsix takes place about 20 years after the events of The Engines of God, to which it is a sequel. They’re both...
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Childish Imagination via MTV
Still of an episode of Viva La Bam, in which Bam Margera buys a new houseThe popular television show Viva La Bam aired on MTV for four seasons from 2003 through 2005. It starred Bam Margera, who,...
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South Carolina
I realize I haven’t posted much to the blog recently, and I’d like to change that. I’ve been up to a lot in the last few weeks, and I figure it’s worth showing. I went on vacation with my family in...
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The 606
The weekend of June 6–7th marked the official opening for a new stretch of park through Chicago now called the 606. I checked it out on the 7th and caught the pancake breakfast.
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Art Stolen, Art Broken
Last month I visited the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago for a panel on archeological looting with Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, and Lawrence Rothfield, professor of...
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Corona Solaris
The sun’s corona seen during a solar eclipseIn “Corona” by Paul Celan: “we love one another like poppies and memory, we sleep like wine in a seashell, like the sea in the moon’s bloody rays.”1 Even in...
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Maybe a New Individual
Art by Andy GoldsworthyPaul Celan’s “Psalm”: “Praised be you, noone. Because of you we wish to bloom. Against you.”1 Thought’s movement begins from the contradictions of the world,2 even from the...
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Descending into Individuality in Adorno’s “Lyric Poetry and Society”
p#p01 {font-size: 75%;} Henri Matisse, La Desserte rouge (1908) [detail]Theodor Adorno’s opening paragraph1 addresses any apprehensions his readers might have concerning the discussion of lyric poetry...
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Terror and Fear
Neolithic ancestor masks found in the Judean Hills (ca. 9,000 BC)Could an image be made that mimics terror? Or is the mimetic act itself a function of the transformation of terror into fear? The...
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Fragments
[Left:] Marble Torso, Roman Imperial, ca. 1st or 2nd century AD; [Right:] Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk (1964-67)In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno writes: The truth content of art, whose organon was...
View ArticleCredentials
Recently at a gallery, a lauded music critic was asked about operating in her newly acquired position at a media conglomerate. The questioner was specifically curious if she felt an increased...
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Flowers and the Division of Labor
Rachel Ruysch, Roses, Convolvulus, Poppies and Other Flowers in an Urn on a Stone Ledge (ca. 1680) [detail]A flower is beautiful for Kant because it presents itself as having a self-determined...
View ArticleReading Aloud in Alexandria
It is said that when an ancient Greek, and perhaps members of other ancient civilizations, would read a text, they always read it aloud, regardless of whether there were an audience there or not....
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Sunsets
Still from Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977)Riding on Chicago’s “L”, among office workers and students, two teenagers use social-media applications to record videos of the sunset as it flickers...
View ArticleBars
In a bar, two women embrace, stumble, and fall down laughing. A frowning bartender removes their drinks from the table. This attitude can be found in any bar. There is a feigned air of dismay or shock,...
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