“One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.” David Foster Wallace Who’s there? The famous words Shakespeare pens at the beginning of Hamlet are answered 387 short years later in the first two words of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: I …
David Foster Wallace and the Utter Hell of Solipsism 🔥 Read More »
Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life. Charles Scribner, Jr. When we trace language from orality, characterized by the pre-socratics and the passing of tradition from one mouth to the next, to literacy made possible by writing on clay …
The Muse Learns to Read: Trace the Process of Intellectual Becoming 🦋 Read More »
“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation To understand the weight of …
Jean Baudrillard and the Complicated Evolution of Hyperreality 🗺 Read More »
“Camerado, this is no book, who touches this, touches a man, (Is it night? Are we here alone?) It is I you hold, and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms…” Walt Whitman, So Long! In William Covino’s book, The Art of Wondering (1988), he advances Plato’s definition of rhetoric that he develops …
On the Energy of Language and the Rhetorics of Reading 📖 Read More »
“My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.” Mark Z. Danielewski In an interview with Google, Mark Z. Danielewski comments on the didactic way he writes his novels. This might come as a surprise if you …
Mark Z. Danielewski on Changing the Way We Read 📚 Read More »
“To be creative a person must exist and have a feeling of existing, not in conscious awareness, but as a basic place to operate from. Creativity is then the doing that arises out of being. It indicates that he who is, is alive.” D. W. Winnicott, Living Creatively I was invited to present at a …
Trickle Down Pedagogy and Creativity in the Classroom 🎨 Read More »
On January 12, Haruki Murakami turns 70, and we are going to celebrate now because it’s already his birthday in Japan. Murakami’s been writing novels, short stories, and essays for the last 40 years. He’s translated more than 100 novels and short stories into Japanese, including authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, and Raymond …
When you think of Neverland, you probably think of adventure and fantasy and infinite play, but there is a dark, irredeemable side of Neverland that we rarely confront. Wendy and her brothers leave their comfortable and familiar home in London for the adventures that await with Peter Pan and the Lost Boys in Neverland. So …
Escape the Dark Side of Neverland and Play/Write With Purpose Read More »
“We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.” ~Carl G. …
Roland Barthes on Photographing the Unconscious 📷 Read More »
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” Carl Jung Using Greg Ulmer’s concept of electracy, Jan Holmevik explores the tension between absence and presence in his 2012 work, Inter/vention: Free Play in the …
Structure, Sign, and Hacking: Free Play in the Age of Electracy With Jan Holmevik 💡 Read More »
“Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you.” ~Saint Augustine Americans celebrate Thanksgiving this week, a holiday Abraham Lincoln designated in the midst of the American Civil War to pause and …
“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” Albert Camus In an insightful early collection of essays, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus recognizes that when a person confronts the absurd circumstances of life, they can react in one of two ways. Either they fall into despair, which most of us …
Jesper Juuls in the Art of Failure Teaches How to Imagine Sisyphus Happy 🙃 Read More »
“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.” ~Albert Camus In a 2009 interview with Reuters Magazine, Kanye West says, “I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life,” which he ironically shares while on a tour promoting his own …
Make America Read Again: Take the Factory Model Out of Education 📚 Read More »
“The individual’s biography, if she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day world, cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’ about the self… Feelings of self-identity are both robust and fragile.” Gregory L. Ulmer Gilles Deleuze and …
Greg Ulmer on Developing Your Singularity Instead of Your Self 🧩 Read More »
“The reconciliation of nothing and reality and the suspension of time and space by high velocities replace the exoticism of journeys with a vast expanse of emptiness.” Paul Virilio Paul Virilio is a French media theorist, intrigued by speed and technology and the ways advancements in these areas challenge the logic of our perceptions related …
Paul Virilio Teaches Us to Fall Upward and Swim in the Ether in Open Sky ☁️ Read More »