What was the 10s’ as a decade? My pat answer: a seismic shift in American culture. What used to be nerd culture went mainstream, or more accurately, became gentrified. The Internet Lost Its Joy. Smartphones and social media fed off each other, stuck in one gigantic circle-jerking feedback loop. We are all online all the time. No such thing as AFK.
Continue reading Best Films of the 2010s: A Retrospective
At 46 years of age, David Foster Wallace hung himself in his basement.
Continue reading David Foster Wallace
In Waiting for Godot, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, kill time on an open, empty road waiting for Godot, who never comes, and who they suspect may not exist. They quarrel, make up, contemplate suicide, try to sleep, eat a carrot, and gnaw on some chicken bone. An oppressive air of desperation and panic lingers over all of their activities because nothing actually happens. The play ends where it began – it goes nowhere.
Continue reading Beckett
In 1979, the French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard explained postmodernism as an “incredulity towards metanarratives,” those predominant illusions by which we make sense of the world, the myths of progress, liberty, and rationality.
Continue reading Nothing Original
During the final years of his life, Twain’s writings echoed a rancorous pessimism and a palpable misanthropy.
Continue reading Mark Twain
Gustave Flaubert’s classic of realism, Madame Bovary, signifies the beginning of a new fashion in literature.
Continue reading Flaubert
By the second half of the 19th century, scientific progress was adding to a persistent pessimism, and it was becoming more and more difficult to affirm life. The theories of Charles Darwin, for example, played an important role in discrediting more of the myths that human beings relied on. The insulting description of Homo Sapiens proposed in Origin of the Species destroyed once and for all the belief that man occupied a dignified position in the order of things and ruined the hope of cosmic purpose.
Continue reading …and Nothing besides!*
Charles Baudelaire seems to have foreseen his early and unpleasant death after a depraved and brutal life when he wrote “I believe that my life was damned right from the beginning, and that it is so forever.”
Continue reading Baudelaire
God does not insulate his believers from the Void, for he often exposes them to it.
Continue reading Kierkegaard
Max Stirner‘s The Unique and its Property is the creation of an conceptual insurgent.
Continue reading Max Stirner