Month: February 2011

• February 5, 2011

  On Bloomberg’s self-love and our narrow political imagination

  Update: A revised version of the essay is available here at Counterpunch. * * * Mayor Bloomberg is featured on the cover of the Feb. 7 New Yorker. Entitled “Bloom in Love,” the watercolor depicts our vain mayor smitten with his image. It is Valentine’s Day (or perhaps, it’s implied, every day for Bloomberg is…
• February 4, 2011

  On O’Keefe’s unknown infinity and Pascal’s eternal silence

  Georgia O’Keefe has ventured out of doors and there finds the “sun under the clouds.” But not some dull thing this, not ennui loitering behind the shed. No, for O’Keefe, this is a painter’s sun. She recalls later, “[T]he color effect was very strange–standing high on a pale green hill where I could look all…
• February 3, 2011

  Rita Koganzen heaps scorn on “emerging adulthood”

  In her polemic entitled “Slacking as Self-Discovery,” Rita Koganzen calls into question the view that “emerging adulthood” is a vital exploratory period in the life of twenty somethings. I think Koganzen’s article is smart, albeit one-sided. Smart: Like Michael Sandel, she argues that the conception of the “voluntarist self”–a self unencumbered by external influences and concerned…
• February 2, 2011

  On Gregory’s spiritual exercise

  In Letter 31, the 4th C. Archbishop of Constantinople Gregory Nazianzen writes, On the contrary, you must do philosophy in your suffering. Now more than ever, this is the moment to purify your thoughts, and to reveal yourself as superior to your bonds [which tie you to your body]. You must consider your illness a…
• February 1, 2011

  On Plath’s muscular owl

  It could have been 1962 when Sylvia Plath, then 30, set down in her journal a very dark thought: “I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering. As if a great muscular owl were sitting on my chest, its talons clenching & constricting my heart.” 1963 was the year her…