The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Author Archive
Juniper of Pistoia (or, sex and the art of memory)
Lately I’m obsessed with Peter of Ravenna. All the histories on the art of memory mention him as the first profit-minded memory wizard to actually write a popular manual on the subject (late in the 15th century) — a book aimed at regular people trying to get ahead in business, law, or whatever. His book, […]
The Experiment
I was walking to Whole Foods to get lettuce, and just after I rounded the corner onto P Street I saw some bills on the ground: $12. My first thought was that it was a practical joke: a couple of those fake bills you put on the ground to seduce and disappoint passersby. So I […]
Werewords
As a Wargo, descended from the Eastern European hinterlands, home of the original Indo-European culture from which all European languages (as well as Sanskrit) derived, I am naturally drawn to the wer- family of words—one of the main word families of that ancient language, with descendents still in the Slavic, Germanic, and Latin tongues. The […]
“There is no center” (The Parallax View Pt. 2)
Parallax is really not new. In its social implications at least, it’s just a restating of the postmodernist truism: “There is no center.” That was always the motto, right? But we – or at least, I – always took that to mean a lack of a privileged social viewpoint, a lack of some Archimedian position […]
The Parallax View
Reading Slavoj Zizek’s “magnum opus” The Parallax View. Mixed feelings, disappointment at its difficult philosophical tone, different from his more accessible early books. The main thing, though, is his “strategic decision” to use the term “parallax” to denote the discontinuity at the heart of being, the nonidentification of an object with itself (or a subject […]
The Vanishing
Everyone has those thoughts, but no one ever jumps. I told myself: “Imagine you’re jumping.” Is it predestined that I won’t jump? How can it be predestined that I won’t? So, to go against what is predestined, one must jump. I jumped. The fall was a holy event. I broke my left arm and lost […]
Star Wars is a remake of Ordinary People
Some films get sort of obscured, in hindsight, not only by their own famousness or popularity, but also by standard interpretations. Rashomon is one example: The handy notion that Kurosawa’s classic is about relativism, different people having multiple points of view, has essentially controlled our viewing of that film since it was released. Yet the […]
Kubrick, Lynch, the Bardo
David Lynch seems like someone who gets possessed by a question and won’t let up until he tires of the question (not, that is, until he answers it—the questions he asks aren’t answerable, probably). The question in his recent films, at least, seems to be: What is Woman made of? Or maybe it is some […]
The black monolith
Well, there are many kinds of films. Most of them, nowadays, don’t demand much thinking. That makes me very, very upset. It makes me upset that they think the audiences have grown unused to thinking and that they only want things spelled out for them, in a platter. That’s bullshit, and a big one. People […]
Eternal Sunshine
The inspiring American story is that we can put the past behind us and reinvent ourselves and our lives. It is the subtext of most American movies, and our heroes, the characters played in films by guys like Tom Cruise or George Clooney, are ones who don’t let themselves be burdened by the past. There […]
