Kojin Karatani on the Will to Architecture
Kojin Karatani’s “will to architecture” surfaces in disciplines ranging from literature and psychoanalysis to anthropology and mathematics.
2019
John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row Literary Tour
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
Paul Valery on the Common Material of Poets and Philosophers
Paul Valery challenges the arbitrary divide between the poet and the philosopher while considering the intellectual rigor of the poet.
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Independent Scholarship: Joseph Campbell on Reading Nine Hours a Day
Joseph Campbell discusses independent scholarship and the admirable discipline of reading nine hours a day for five years straight.
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Clive Thompson on the Creative Imagination of Coders
Clive Thompson explores the origin stories of coders and recognizes they share one common character trait: a creative imagination.
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Susanne Langer on Creative Philosophy in a New Key
In Susanne Langer’s 1942 book, Philosophy In a New Key, the first American female philosopher challenges thinkers to embrace a new creative philosophy.
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The Invisible in Haruki Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
In Haruki Murakami’s short story, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, he offers insight into the phenomenology of sound taught by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
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Walter Benjamin on Explosive Reading and the Storyteller
Walter Benjamin considers The Storyteller an artistic observer capabale of seeing and communicating beauty in a way that transforms readers and listeners.
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Ernst Cassirer on the Gift of the Artist
Keywords Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, Lewis Hyde, Seeing, Artistic Observation, Gift, William Blake “The past is preserved only in darkness, the future is not raised to the level of an image, as something which can be anticipated. It
Ludwig Wittgenstein on the Ladder Illusion
Keywords Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus “Pay attention to the patter by means of which we convince someone of a truth of a mathematical proposition. It tells us something about the function of this conviction. I mean the
Kate Mascarenhas’s The Psychology of Time Travel
Four women will invent time travel. Three will make their mark on history. Two will do anything to be remembered. One will not survive. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIME TRAVEL Summer is here and we are cracking open a new book
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Narrative Architecture in Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode
Keywords Jane Alison, Narrative Architecture, Meander, Spiral, Explode “The wave is one. There’s a reason we’re drawn to it, whether viewing or watching entranced as one wave after another breaks on shore: a wave is a clear instance of energy
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How to Read More by Creating a Reading Habit
“The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.” Anthony Trollope For most teachers and professors wondering how to read more books, establishing new routines, resolutions, and goal-setting
How Time and Space Converge to Evoke Walter Benjamin’s Aura
“The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close
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Walter Ong’s Psychodynamics of Orality and the Reader
Keywords Walter Ong, Psychodynamics, Orality and Literacy “Until writing was invented, men lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart
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