The home page of my introductory graduate course in the study of culture and religion.
The connection may not be immediately clear to you, but by using a blog to teach and manage my college courses I have been experimenting with what Caterina (oh, Caterina!) described as the internet’s mode of dwelling.
Those of us who labor in the academy are familiar with the backwardness and, well, the clunkiness, of institutionally supported course management systems like Blackboard.com and Campus ... Read Full Story
This is for my old friend the Village Scribe, with whom I have been having a great conversation on this blog about home buying and home sizes. I don’t really know what to say, Scribe, except that there may not always be, as it would be comfortable to think there is, a conscientiously correct choice in the matter. There may be no right way to live in a wrong world…
It’s also for my new friend David Richardson (please check out his incredible furniture, linked in my blogroll... Read Full Story
Our economic recession was ignited by a mortgage crisis. Behind the wheel of the mortgage crisis, a reckless consensus said that we should own bigger homes and more cars, live far from where we work, buy lots of disposable stuff, and shop at big box stores.
It said that we should have TV’s in every room of the house, eat out often, live in gated communities and drink lattes at cafes that arrived on site in a box one day, down to the last caramel-colored teardrop pendant lamp and the ove... Read Full Story
Caterina - cofounder of flickr, writer, blogger, and a lot of other things - swept me off my feet with this blog. She has this elegant way of writing about Heideggerrian dwelling, for one thing. I also wonder who wants to chime in about her thesis, rather innocuously placed near the end of the blog, that the internet has become for us (in a way that TV never could) a kind of dwelling?
from caterina.net:
Heidegger, Dwelling Television, Weblogs
Stewart and I talked about getting a TV last wee... Read Full Story
I’ve been posting on two fronts of late - about highways and automobiles and sprawl and such things, and, on the other hand, I’ve been continuing to make my case that Adorno is a highly relevant and readable philosopher, no matter what you’ve heard. My latest post followed Adorno to America, and what is included below is still in that spirit.
Here’s another aphorism (see the first one I posted) from Minima Moralia (Adorno) that bridges both fronts. Adorno is complainin... Read Full Story
At the end. – The only philosophy which would still be accountable in the face of despair, would be the attempt to consider all things, as they would be portrayed from the standpoint of redemption. Cognition has no other light than that which shines from redemption out upon the world; all else exhausts itself in post-construction and remains a piece of technics. Perspectives must be produced which set the world beside itself, alienated from itself, revealing its cracks and fissures, as needy ... Read Full Story
I’m infatuated with David Maisel’s aerial photographs of Los Angeles. I included one of them in a recent post about infrastructure spending and sprawl, and I’m including a link here for Maisel’s collection, ‘Oblivion’. Will someone tell me why these are so mesmerizing? Read Full Story
Photographer David Maisel, Los Angeles
Dean Baker, econoblogger, makes the following point about the right and wrong kinds of infrastructure spending in ‘Road to Hell’ (the guardian):
While not all highways are bad, highways that promote the pattern of sprawl that we have seen in many metropolitan areas over the last 30 years are bad.
We should not be making it easier for people live long distances from their jobs, so that they have lengthy commutes each day. This would directly c... Read Full Story
I was recently asked to write something (for one of those old school ‘paper’ journals) about Adorno’s time in America, and I’m going to share, here, some tidbits of what I decided to do with that.
It centers around two very obscure little references in Adorno’s writings to an equally obscure tail-end to one of Kafka’s novels. Sounds obscure, I know. The novel was Amerika, and the tail-ending has to do with the ‘Great Natural Theater of Oklahoma’... Read Full Story
