thinking out loud

In the very early days of the web, when I was learning rudimentary html and constructing my first web site, I expressed the concern to a friend and colleague that the web would allow anyone to construct and present an identity that was in some way inauthe…

This is another post about Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, once again inspired by my reading.

I’ve just started reading Janna Malamud Smith’s book An Absorbing Errand: How artists and craftsmen make their way to mastery.

Over breakfast each morning I read news about the world, thinking each morning that it surely couldn’t get any worse, seeing on many mornings that, in fact, it could — and, in fact, has.

I decided earlier this month to pay more attention to how I discover books that I’m interested in reading.

Jennifer Szalai concludes her recent NYTimes column, Hannah Arendt is not your icon (gift link), with this paragraph: For Arendt, loneliness was dangerous; it was precisely under conditions of isolation that one’s imagination could untether itself from re…

Hannah Arendt: Our most recent experiences with totalitarian dictatorships … have clearly shown us, if one is serious about the abolition of political freedom, that it is not sufficient to prohibit what we generally understand by political rights; that it…

I’ve just finished reading Bill McKibben’s book Here Comes the Sun.

Margaret Canovan: The USA in particular, after being spared the desperate poverty that wrecked the French Revolution, had become the most advanced example of a society devoted to consumption.

This past fall I was lucky enough to have lunch with a dozen or so of our extended family members and long-time friends.

Some notes about books I finished reading this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Pria Anand: The term complaint seems to have entered the medical lexicon even earlier than deny, first documented in a seventeenth-century monograph on surgery in which patients “complain” of everything from vertigo to blindness to “an ill night’s rest.”

In yesterday’s missive, Joan Westenberg explores the difference between thin and thick desires.

Christian Wiman: There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular rel…

Karl Ove Knausgaard: School is a place where we teach our children how things are.

Jenny Erpenbeck: Why did people always pronounce the word ‘freedom’ with such enthusiasm, as they continue to do today, whenever they speak of the collapse of East Germany, whereas when people from other countries — from countries like Mali, Niger, Afghan…

Books I’m currently reading Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, by László Krasznahorkai.

Karl Ove Knausgaard: Our own time, the change we are able to register as we stand here in the midst of the world, is, apart from the movements of the body, almost always bound up with water and wind.

Jim Nielsen has some good thoughts in which he builds on a post by Mandy Brown.

Last week my wife looked around our living room.

I first read Alfred North Whitehead over fifty years ago, in a college Philosophy of Science class.

Siri Hustvedt: In a 1995 essay on memory, ‘Yonder,’ I wrote the following sentence: ‘Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.’

I suppose that almost everyone has a tale to tell in these digital times about a crucial file or two lost in a hard disk crash or some other malfunction.

Alexander Kluge: It is a mamtter of observation that there are limits to what people will put up with.

Jeanette Winterson: Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate.

Jenny Erpenbeck: It would be nice if the university weren’t something like the gateway to a career, some sort of dues paid to the outside world where you have to succeed if you want to pay your rent, if it didn’t just give you time to learn how you work,…

I began work on this post over a week ago.

Beryl Markham: You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.

Since I’ve rambled on much longer than I’d planned to in this post, I’ll move the punch line from the end to the beginning.

Just a brief post about a today I learned something about emacs experience.

Zadie Smith: …if you grew up online, the negative attributes of individual humans are immediately disqualifying.

Some notes about books I finished reading this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Christine Webb: To cut a long story short, there is no universally accepted definition of “intelligence,” or way to measure it.

You’ll note that many of my blog posts are tagged as commonplaces.

Jenny Erpenbeck: The illnesses that begin to afflict us take us by surprise, they set our bodies in motion in different ways than we intend, slowing them down, speeding them up, disturbing their rhythm.

Perhaps this post is mistitled.

Jenny Erpenbeck: Time has the power to separate us, not only from others, but also from ourselves — a fact that’s hard to grasp.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my time at a symposium dedicated to honoring and responding to the work of my dissertation director, Schubert Ogden, and one of his students.

Some notes about books I’ve finished reading this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

I know.

Zadie Smith: Any essay that includes the line “It’s really very simple” is never going to be the essay for me.

Yesterday’s post about the challenge of deciding what I’m going to read next was in the back of my mind when I stumbled on What Dan Read, a scanned copy of the list of 3,599 books that Dan Pelzer read from 1962 until shortly before he died this past July.

I’ve written more than once — see here and here and here and here — about my struggle to decide what to read and why to read it.

Walter Benjamin: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.

Siri Hustvedt: Experiences of powerful emotions linger in the mind; experiences of tepid ones don’t.

While speaking to a rather large public gathering of folks a couple of decades ago, my wife announced that there were two times that she had seen me excited.

Lydia Davis: Did you know that gregarious and egregious both have the word for “flock” or “herd” at their origins?

Harriet Rix: In a book of 80,000 words there is an enormous amount of trapped energy: a library of borrowed tree stability.

Hi, there, world.

Some notes about books I’ve finished reading this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)