An Homage to Walter Benjamin: Arcades, Barricades, and Public Sex

The exiled German philosopher Walter Benjamin, 48 years old, portly and with a heart condition, joined a hiking tour group in Banyuls-sur-Mer on the French side of the Pyrenees on September 24, 1940. He had no backpack, only a briefcase. He let the group return without him and spent the night on the open hillside. The next morning, two women and a boy set out from the town in the early dawn and met Benjamin on the mountain. He had managed the previous day to cover the first half of the trip over the Pyrenees into Spain and now set off with the small group to complete the border crossing.

Benjamin's breath was short, and he needed to stop and rest every ten minutes. He did not let the briefcase out of his hands, though the others offered to carry it. One of his companions later recalled that his life seemed of less value to him than the briefcase. In the briefcase were his pipe, spare glasses, and a manuscript...more here

Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'

RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society...more here

This Week in God

At the sight of Stephen Colbert the studio audience begins cheering with anticipation: It's time for "This Week in God." Colbert calls up the "God machine" and gives it a tap, and a window begins spinning to the most unholy sound as a panoply of religious symbols and images—the pope, believers in the shroud of turin, assorted rabbis, imams, ministers,
priests, creationists, spiritualists, even those those professing secular humanism and atheism ("The religion devoted to the worship of one's own smug sense of superiority")—flash on the screen. Finally the machine comes to rest on a particular target. We see a Jerusalem rabbi, imam, and priest set aside their mutual hatred long enough to denounce that city's gay-pride parade. Or we watch Colbert conduct a blind taste test to see whether he can tell the difference between holy water and Pepsi. Through it all he pokes fun at faith itself, sparing no religion and no holy man (in Blasphe "Me!!!" he takes on deities themselves, challenging, say, Quetzalcóatl to strike him dead by the count of five). Watching "This Week in God" on Jon Stewart's Daily Show, we are, it might seem, witnessing the culmination of a historical progression, from Robert Ingersoll, the great nineteenth-century public unbeliever, to Clarence Darrow, who in the 1920s and '30s would debate a rabbi, priest, and minister during a single evening...more here

I think, therefore I am an entrepreneur

What can philosophy tell us about business? Brian Bloch looks at how Germany is profiting from enlightenment

Philosophy and business have never been bosom buddies, or at least, that would have been the common perception. However, in recent times, businesses are being confronted by problems that can be understood or solved though philosophy...more here

What is Life?

And what is Death? is still the cause unfound?
That dark, mysterious name of horrid sound?
A long and lingering sleep, the weary crave.
And Peace? where can its happiness abound?--
No where at all, save heaven, and the grave.

Then what is Life?--When stripped of its disguise,
A thing to be desired it cannot be;
Since every thing that meets our foolish eyes
Gives proof sufficient of its vanity.
Tis but a trial all must undergo;
To teach unthankful mortals how to prize
That happiness vain man's denied to know,
Until he's called to claim it in the skies.

John Clare (1793 to 1864)

Lolita

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."

That's the opening line of Vladimir Nabokov's groundbreaking novel Lolita -- the story of a 37-year-old man's emotional and sexual love affair with a 12-year-old girl.

When the book was first published 50 years ago, it was considered by some to be obscene, to others a masterpiece of fiction. Over the course of five decades, the "masterpiece" vote has won out, more or less -- but even two generations later, there's still a lot of debate...more here

Absinthe

As the British journalist Jad Adams shows in his fascinating, richly detailed book Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle (University of Wisconsin Press), the lore surrounding absinthe is far more important than its taste, which is similar to those of other anise-flavored drinks, or its special psychoactive effects, which remain a matter of dispute. In the emerald green liquid devotees see visions of poets and painters in Parisian cafés who stirred together genius and madness along with absinthe and water. And while La Fée Verte is right that some contemporary brands are closer than others to the original Swiss recipe, there has always been wide variation in formulas and production techniques—one reason the hazards and benefits of 19th-century absinthe are hard to pin down.

The question of absinthe authenticity is also complicated by the fact that even in its heyday, absinthe was often a deliberately chosen prop. For calculatedly unconventional figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, Oscar Wilde, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, absinthe was a symbol as well as an intoxicant. By imitating the habits of such well-known nonconformists, second- and third-rate talents hoped to look the part of the cutting-edge artist...more here

Modern Man

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

Albert Camus
--The Fall

Readers

"Readers may be divided into four classes: 1. Sponges, who absorb all that
they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 2.
Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for
the sake of getting through the time. 3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the
dregs of what they read. 4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who
profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Donnie Darko

Originally released in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Donnie Darko sank like a stone. That was not a propitious moment for a movie in which a jet engine comes crashing through a suburban house. But DVD gave the film new life—so much so that it enjoyed a limited theatrical re-release in 2004 in a director's cut, now available on DVD as well. The film is particularly popular among college students. Like The Matrix trilogy, another campus favorite, Darko taps into the common adolescent experience of the falsity, the inauthenticity, of the external world. Unlike The Matrix, however, Darko maintains a certain ironic distance from its protagonist.

The film starts and culminates in Donnie's house with a jet engine dropping directly into his bedroom. But the result is not a standard flashback, ending exactly where it began. For example, Donnie's location is different in the two crash scenes. Donnie's fascination with time travel suggests an explanation for the altered ending. And the possibility of time travel turns out to be a clever way of posing the issue of divine determinism and human freedom...more here

New Orleans

Don’t be shocked at the sad fate of the Big Easy. Our history is littered with ‘eternal’ cities brought down by flood, pestilence or man-made disaster, says Felipe Fernández-Armesto

THE SURPRISING THING about New Orleans is not that the city should have been engulfed, but that it took so long for it to happen. Cities do not last. Those built in precarious places collapse. The rest are doomed to decay or suffer humanly induced destruction. It is only our historical myopia, which prevents most of us from seeing much of the past at once, that makes us think our cities are solid or enduring...more here

Guilty

Blameless, shameless. The more desperate the eroticism, the more hopelessly women show off their heavy breasts, opening their mouths and screaming out, the greater the attraction. In contrast, a promise of light awaits at the limits of the mystical outlook. I find this unbearable and soon returned to insolence and erotic vomit - which doesn't respect anybody or anything. How sweet to enter filthy night and proudly wrap myself in it. The whore I went with was as uncomplicated as a child and she hardly talked. There was another one, who came crashing down from a tabletop - sweet, shy, heartbreakingly tender, as I watched her with drunken, unfeeling eyes.

Georges Bataille
--Guilty

Find Blogs

The race is on to become the Google of blogs.

Web logs, online diaries written and published by everyone from college students to big media companies, are being created and updated at an astonishing rate -- and established search companies such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. don't always catch them fast enough. Now, a handful of closely held upstarts such as Technorati Inc., Feedster Inc. and IceRocket.com LLC see an opportunity: Build a search engine that can track the information zipping through blogs, nearly in real time.The new sites are gaining traction with users looking to sample what people are talking about online, from the fallout from Hurricane Katrina to silly celebrity gossip. As free tools make it easier for even the most technophobic to publish online, there's a growing demand for services to sift through the clutter...more here

Undoing Darwin

On March 14, 2005, The Washington Post’s Peter Slevin wrote a front-page story on the battle that is “intensifying across the nation” over the teaching of evolution in public-school science classes. Slevin’s lengthy piece took a detailed look at the lobbying, fund-raising, and communications tactics being deployed at the state and local level to undermine evolution. The article placed a particular emphasis on the burgeoning “intelligent design” movement, centered at Seattle’s Discovery Institute, whose proponents claim that living things, in all their organized complexity, simply could not have arisen from a mindless and directionless process such as the one so famously described in 1859 by Charles Darwin in his classic, The Origin of Species...more here

Guess which side George Bush is on?

A SIGN in the Natural History Museum proclaims that the dinosaur skeleton in the foyer is a century old. This is odd, because it looks much more ancient. And of course, it is. The 26-metre-long fossil remains of the Diplodocus may have been gifted to Britain in 1904, but the creature – a long-necked, long-tailed vegetarian – lived around 150 million years ago, which is bad news for creationists labouring under the biblical belief that the Earth is just 10,000 years old. While the planet spins on and the United Nations warns that the great apes will be extinct within a generation, Britain is on the brink of a major ideological battle over whether mankind came down from the trees millions of years ago, or was created by a divine force with a handful of dirt and a spare rib just a few millennia past.

Ever since Galileo was imprisoned for successfully arguing that the Earth revolved around the Sun, the question of man’s origins has been a breeding ground for scientific controversy. In the battle of the Bible against science, however, the evolutionists had always won hands down. Now, however, in America, more than a century of scientific orthodox evolutionary theory is being challenged in an evangelical fight for the souls of the nation’s children...more here

A LITTLE OF THIS & A LITTLE OF THAT

A Little Bumper Sticker: Save the whales. Collect the whole set.


A Little Quip: Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.

A Little Confusion: A hungry baby in a topless bar.

Accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're the statue.
Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.
Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
Drive carefully. It's not only cars that can be recalled by their maker.
If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.
If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
Never buy a car you can't push.
Never put both feet in your mouth at the same time, because then you won't have a leg to stand on.
Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.
Since it's the early worm that gets eaten by the bird, sleep late.
The second mouse gets the cheese.
When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
Birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live.
You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.
Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.
We could learn a lot from crayons. Some are sharp, some are pretty and some are dull. Some have weird names, and all are different colors, but they all have to live in the same box.
So : "Life is short. Enjoy it!"

What would you tell him?

"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?"
"I...don't know. What...could he do? What would you tell him?"

"To shrug."

— from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged