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Blue Notes
BLUE NOTES: When I was seven-years-old, my uncle Nigel was kind enough to take me to the movies with his two kids (my cousins). Apparently my running commentary was maddening. I talked so much through the movie that my frustrated five-year-old cousin Louis-Nicolas started crying. He turned to his father and said: -Does he ever shut up?- I like to think I've changed. But I doubt it. Because this book is largely a product of me being unable to shut up on Facebook. At present, Facebook's character limit on status updates is 63,206. Calling this a -limit- is vaguely ridiculous (like calling a big guy -Tiny-). You can now cut and paste the first 20 chapters of The Bible into a Facebook status upd...
Social Media Land
The promise of Social Media Land was always, to some extent, an imperialistic dream. The geeks who created this online world were all, to a man, urban liberals who hoped the Internet would bring the light of civilization to Sameville, a mythological small town where everybody’s white and wrong. The enlightened minds of the multicultural metropolis were going to bring the true gospel of diversity and tolerance and freedom to the benighted citizens of Sameville. If these guys had a theme song, it would be a cover of Walter Donaldson’s Jazz Era classic “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” (1919) entitled “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down in Stupidlandia...
Twilight of the Idlers
The Philosophical Epistle Lives. — This book stands in a long historical tradition—that of the philosophical epistle—and shows that that tradition still has much to offer us. Hamer does a bang-up job presenting himself: his life, his history, and his personal philosophy for coping with the particular challenges put to him by mortality. What makes the book so engaging is the way that Hamer makes it both intimately personal (his own insights into himself, really) and broadly relevant (to the reader, whose particular experiences with mortality are not Hamer's). Hamer passes judgment on himself and society without succumbing either to objective hybris (I have solved the riddle of the Sphin...
From Here
In 1881, Mark Twain described Montreal as a city “where you couldn’t throw a brick without breaking a church window.” Today, we might describe Montreal as a city where you can’t throw a brick without hitting something beautiful. Seriously, you can’t even walk to the pharmacy, on a warm June night, to pick up some garbage bags, without being left speechless again and again and again. The beauty of this great city isn’t the natural, and thus accidental, beauty of BC or Banff; it’s deliberate. Vanity’s a virtue here in Montreal, and the city’s beautiful because it wants to be. Something wonderful is happening in this city. Despite corruption scandals that would make a Latin American dictator blush. Despite crumbling municipal infrastructure that’s made much of downtown look like the perfect place to shoot a post-apocalyptic disaster movie. Despite all of these things, and against all odds, there’s a buzz of creativity here right now unlike anything I’ve seen before in my lifetime.
Social Distancing
Just as a sacred relic isn’t inherently sacred, and your special dishes aren’t inherently special, the techniques of poetry are not poetry. They are but a means to an end. Calling a piece of writing poetry is like putting your favorite salamander on the Endangered Species List, or getting UNESCO to declare all of your favorite places World Heritage Sites. Poetry is what we do to words when we want to make them holy again. Poetic language is the spirit that moved across the face of the waters; it is language with the talismanic power to illuminate the world around us. This makes it as essential as a face-mask at the moment, and as useful as hand-sanitizer. For it is in the darkest hours t...
Love is Not a Liquid Asset
Sex is love’s fast-forward button. If you’re normal, sooner or later, you’re going to fall in love with the person you’re sleeping with, or they’re going to fall in love with you, whether you like it or not. “Passionate love,” as Jonathan Haidt rightly observes in The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), “is a drug. Its symptoms overlap with those of heroin . . . and cocaine . . . . Passionate love alters the activity of several parts of the brain, including parts that are involved in the release of dopamine. Any experience that feels intensely good releases dopamine, and the dopamine link is crucial here because drugs that artificially raise dopamine levels, as do heroin and cocaine...
The Goldfish
LAST JUNE, DEP'T: Last June, I made the acquaintance of John Faithful Hamer. (Yes, his middle name is "Faithful," and he cheerfully goes by all three.) We met on a warm summer evening behind Fred Serre's home on Laval Avenue. In the lane. John was accompanied by his equally astonishing friend Meredith Evans. There was an old couch someone had thrown out and a low table. John and Meredith had brought along a bottle of Jameson to explore the lane, and Fred and I had a bottle of wine at our own disposal. So we sat there on the couch in the lane and quickly became friends. John teaches philosophy at John Abbott College and turned 40 just a week or so ago. At his own home on Laval Avenue, I met his extraordinary wife, Anna-Liisa Aunio who teaches sociology at Dawson College. Their home is frequently visited by students, past and present, who apparently share my appreciation for the aura of passion, intelligence and lunacy that hover in their vicinity.-David Lieber, Montreal writer [PLEASE NOTE that THE GOLDFISH is not a new work; it is, rather, a compilation of the poetry and proverbs found in two previously published works: BLUE NOTES and TWILIGHT OF THE IDLERS-JFH]
Autobiographical Reflections on Southern Religious History
Invoking the strong ties they sense between the courses of their lives and their careers, the sixteen historians of religion who have contributed to Autobiographical Reflections on Southern Religious History share their thoughts and motivations. In these highly personal essays, both pioneering and promising young scholars discuss their work and interests as they recall how the circumstances of their upbringing and education steered them toward religious history. They tell of their own time and place and of their growing awareness of how religion ties into larger social issues: gender, class, and, most notably, race. Indeed, one essay begins, "I was asked to write about why I came to study re...
Futures of the Contemporary
Transdisciplinary approaches to the notions of “the contemporary” and “contemporaneity” Futures of the Contemporary explores different notions and manifestations of “the contemporary” in music, visual arts, art theory, and philosophy. In particular, the authors in this collection of essays scrutinise the role of artistic research in critical and creative expressions of contemporaneity. When distinguished from “the contemporaneous” of a given historical time, “the contemporary” becomes a crucial concept, promoting or excluding objects and practices according to their ability to diagnose previously unnoticed aspects of the present. In this sense, the contemporary gains a cr...
Beads, Bodies, and Trash
Beads, Bodies, and Trash merges cultural sociology with a commodity chain analysis by following Mardi Gras beads to their origins. Beginning with Bourbon Street of New Orleans, this book moves to the grim factories in the tax-free economic zone of rural Fuzhou, China. Beads, Bodies, and Trash will increase students’ capacity to think critically about and question everyday objects that circulate around the globe: where do objects come from, how do they emerge, where do they end up, what are their properties, what assemblages do they form, and what are the consequences (both beneficial and harmful) of those properties on the environment and human bodies? This book also asks students to confront how the beads can contradictorily be implicated in fun, sexist, unequal, and toxic relationships of production, consumption, and disposal. With a companion documentary, Mardi Gras Made in China, this book introduces students to recording technologies as possible research tools.
