I Blog, Therefore I am

A WEST NYACK, N.Y. MAN was found dead at his computer apparently the victim of trying to keep up with too many professional forums. Childress H. Wanamaker, 54, an account executive at a New York-based new media company, died of starvation according to the West Nyack coroner's office. Wanamaker's emaciated body was found by Loraine, his wife of 26 years, who told MediaPost she had been bringing her husband meals on plastic trays for weeks, but that he never took the time to eat them.

"He was glued to his computer 24/7," she said tearfully. "He was so afraid he was going to miss an opportunity to contribute a comment or start a discussion, that he just stopped eating." She added that Wanamaker's last words were "OK Picard, stick that in your pipe and smoke it..." more here

Closing In on Stalin

There have been so many new biographies of Josef Stalin lately that we may almost be reaching the point of Stalin fatigue. Not that the subject has become fully comprehensible -- far from it -- or that any of the biographies has the instant-classic status of Ian Kershaw's two-volume "Hitler." Simon Sebag Montefiore's contribution from last spring, "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar," added a new dimension with his lively and highly readable, but still well-researched, portrait of Stalin in the company of his political associates and in his social and family milieu. Service, who thanks Montefiore in his preface and was warmly thanked by him in Montefiore's introduction, has taken another tack. Already the author of a history of Soviet Russia, Service sets out to give us Stalin in his historical context...more here

Sex after Fascism

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP between sexual morality and mass murder and its aftermath? In view of Nazism's horrific crimes, sexuality might be seen as a frivolous or inappropriate subject for scholarly study of twentieth-century Germany. Yet precisely the opposite is the case...more here

Don Quixote

In all the battles for the Enlightenment, one combatant's name is rarely mentioned. Don Quixote de la Mancha, icon of everything in humanity that is calamitously idealistic, is renowned for qualities other than rationalist courage: for kindness and foolishness; for unintended comedy and a refusal to be disenchanted; for clairvoyant lunacy and obstinate romanticism in a rotten, factual world. He rides out with Sancho Panza from his village in la Mancha to discover that the world is not as he has read about it in books of chivalry and, impervious to ridicule or failure, for 124 chapters seeks to live up to the pastoral ideal of the knight errant, that fiction of the good man. Only in the 126th and final chapter does he acknowledge the "absurdities and deceptions" of the books that inspired him and then, in an ending of unbearable sadness, finally renounces his world of fantasy, returns to his senses, and dies...more here
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Concert Review: The Arcade Fire

TORONTO - Montreal's Arcade Fire, the most-hyped indie rock darlings since Broken Social Scene, had no trouble living up to all the hype at the Music Hall Theatre Tuesday night.

It's no surprise that last night's Arcade Fire show, the first of three sold-out Toronto gigs, was a schmoozy who's who of the local indie rock scene. The shows have been stirring up a buzz for months...more here

Psst! Want a good wine?

There’s a secret to buying imported wines that I’ve come to rely on over the years — learning about the importer. Knowing his (or her) philosophy can greatly increase your chances of finding a superior wine...more here

Republic of Letters

We think of literature as a set of uniquely individual works, as randomly distributed as the stars. From time to time, however, a critical study comes along that steps back from Dante and Goethe, Balzac and Woolf, and views them, in a powerfully distancing move, as part of a meaningful con- stellation. Such is the virtuoso achievement of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, Georg Lukacs's The Historical Novel and Northop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. Although Pascale Casanova's new study is not exactly in this league, it is certainly in this dis- tinguished lineage...more here

Ancient Treasures

As you read this, criminals somewhere in the world are destroying portions of mankind’s past. With backhoe and shovel, chainsaw and crowbar, they are wrenching priceless objects from sites in the mountains of Peru, the coasts of Sicily, and the deserts of Iraq. Brutal and uncaring, these robbers leave behind a wake of decapitated statues, mutilated temples, and pillaged trenches where archaeologists were seeking clues to little-understood civilizations. The results of this looting include disfigured architectural monuments, vanished aesthetic objects, and an incalculable loss of information about the past. And it shows no signs of diminishing...more here

Depending on who you talk to, between 1½ million and two million people were killed, starved or worked to death during the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge. 

Does God Really Exist?

The Question of God | PBS

"People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering." - Augustine
 

Wizards of Moz

On one of the more recent rainy days in Manchester, a mixture of academics and civilians congregated in the atrium of a white-walled building at the Metropolitan University. From a distance this could have been a crowd at any academic conference, but a telling clue came from the state of the men’s hair. Amongst the styles were a suspicious number of quiffs in various states of elevation. (A quick definition: a quiff is “a man’s prominent forelock, worn elevated.” Quaff means drinking; quiff means hair like Elvis.)

These quiffs were meant to look like Morrissey, the lead singer of one of the most beloved bands of the 1980s, the Smiths. Some of the greying quiffs in the crowd looked ready to collapse, and were only standing thanks to a few stubborn upright hairs. The younger quiffs were sturdy. It was a hopeful sign. The hairstyle — like the Smiths’ music itself — had been passed with care from one generation to the next.  

....More here

In the desert

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

Stephen Crane,
"In the Desert" from Black Riders

The Wisdom of Rilke

Life and Living: “How good life is. How fair, how incorruptible, how impossible to deceive: not even by strength, not even by willpower, and not even by courage. How everything remains what it is and has only this choice: to come true, or to exaggerate and push too far.”

Art: “The work of art is adjustment, balance, reassurance. It can be neither gloomy nor full of rosy hopes, for its essence consists of justice.”

Faith: “I personally feel a greater affinity to all those religions in which the middleman is less essential or almost entirely suppressed.”

Love: “To be loved means to be ablaze. To love is: to shine with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to last.”

“You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but by plumbing its depth.”
–RAINER MARIA RILKE

Why Jon Stewart Is All the Rage

To say Jon Stewart enjoys an adoring press is like saying Bill Gates has a few bucks. In story after glowing story, the boyish 42-year-old host of Comedy Central’s hit fake newscast, The Daily Show, and author of the best-selling fake history text America (The Book) comes off as a lighthearted, twenty-first-century Diogenes: a fearless truth teller in an age of shameless pandering....(more here)

Hollywood

PREVIEW: Hollywood Means Business

The Big Picture
The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood
by Edward Jay Epstein
Random House, 416 pp., $25.95

Cinema

Metaphilm - Cinema—The New Cathedral of Hollyworld

How films are replacing religion in our cinematic age.

Double Murder in Cretone Castle

Excerpt from Love and Death in Renaissance Italy by Thomas V. Cohen

I’ve Got You Under My Skin

In October, the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of the VeriChip in humans. VeriChip is a microchip, the size of a grain of rice, which can be implanted under the skin with a simple injection. Like the bar codes on consumer products, it stores coded information that can be read with a scanner. It literally allows us to be “checked out,” like an interactive Social Security Number engrafted in the body.

The chip’s creator, Applied Digital Solutions, initially emphasized the device’s potential medical applications. For $150 to $200, it said, you could have your entire medical history—allergies, medications, previous ailments, and the like—encoded and implanted on your person, so that a doctor or other medical professional could, with a quick scan, have access to this information before treatment. The information could either be stored on the chip itself or in a separate secure database unlocked by scanning....(More Here)

The Book of Disquiet

"To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost." (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet)

"Could it think, the heart would stop beating." (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet)

Morrissey is God

Live at Earls Court finds British rock icon Morrissey and his band performing in London at the end of the You Are the Quarry tour. Not to be confused with the DVD Who Put the "M" in Manchester? recorded at the beginning of the tour in May, Live at Earls Court is a completely different concert from December 2004 and features a vastly different set list. While past live Morrissey albums such as Beethoven Was Deaf featured the singer's penchant for beautifully ragged ersatz rockabilly, Earls Court showcases the more polished group sound developed out of the You Are the Quarry sessions, which isn't to say that Morrissey has lost his edge. On the contrary -- such songs as "I Have Forgiven Jesus" and "The World Is Full of Crashing Bores" prove that his legendary wit and sardonic tongue are fully intact and as sharp as ever. Similarly, his burnished baritone vocals have arguably never sounded better and the lush, muscular band arrangements frame him with a glam regality befitting his late-career resurgence. Although newer songs off You Are the Quarry are the focus, longtime Moz fans will be delighted at the amount of Smiths songs included here. In fact, the mix of the old, the new, and the unexpected -- he also performs some rare B-sides -- makes Live at Earls Court one of the most successful albums of Morrissey's career. ~ Matt Collar, All Music Guide 

Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition

Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition by John Durham Peters

Books

Ten Things You Didn't Know about Your Books by Adrian Johns

"Those who live, live off the dead." (Antonin Artaud) 

Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.

When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.

Octave Mirbeau

Black Cat
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

 

A LITTLE OF THIS & A LITTLE OF THAT

A Little Definition: Faith - daring the soul to go beyond what the eyes can see.

A Little One-Liner: I date this girl for two years - and then the nagging starts: "I wanna know your name."


A Little Webbie: I wish life had an UNDO function.

A Little Confession: Who says nothing is impossible? I've been doing nothing for years.

A Little Pick-Up Line: I'm not really this tall, I'm just sitting on my wallet!

We must assume

"We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God. But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. "
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Reading

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.

Robert Louis Stevenson

One Day

I believe that one day the distance between myself and God will disappear.My only cure for the loneliness I go through.

"Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately rise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair." - Blaise Pascal
 

Pope John Paul II
1920-2005

One of the great men of our time has passed from the world's stage. Pope John Paul II, born Karol Wojtyla, was the visionary leader of the world's largest religious body, one of the century's most powerful defenders of religious liberty, the integrity of the family, and the surpassing dignity of human life, and one of its fiercest opponents of tyranny in all forms.

Read "Pope John Paul II: The Philosopher Pope" here.

Papal Power

Papal Power - What no one else will say about John Paul II. By Christopher Hitchens

Dumb Laws

According to a website devoted to "dumb laws," the following laws are among the 25 most absurd:

In Florida, it is illegal to have sexual relations with a porcupine.
In San Francisco, California, persons classified as "ugly" may not walk down any street.
In Alaska, it is considered an offense to push a live moose out of a moving airplane.
In Chico, California, you can be fined $500 for detonating a nuclear device within the city limits.
In Kansas, if two trains meet on the same track, neither shall proceed until the other has passed.
In San Francisco, California, it is illegal to wipe one's car with used underwear.
In New York City, citizens may not greet each other by "putting one's thumb to the nose and wiggling the fingers."
In Minnesota and Virginia, you're not allowed to park your elephant on Main Street.
In Oxford, Ohio, it's illegal for a woman to strip off her clothing while standing in front of a man's picture.
In California, no vehicle without a driver may exceed 60 miles per hour.
There's a lot more "so stupid it's hard to believe" laws out there. Go to the Dumb Laws website and have some fun looking around.