The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Category “Uncategorized”
Ball-Games and Politics: A Brief Rant about the Shutdown
The government shutdown that has rendered me unemployed and given me time to catch up on my blogging has gotten me thinking about maleness. Seeing through the smokescreen of party politics and the ideological conflicts that have riven this nation and now stalled our government, there’s a more fundamental problem that no one talks about […]
I Heart Megalithia (review of The Megalithic Empire)
Anyone with even a passing interest in Stonehenge or prehistory in general “knows” that the megaliths that pepper the British Isles (and to a lesser extent parts of Continental Europe and the Mediterranean) were probably religious in nature—sites for rituals, probably having to do with solstices, etc. “Ritual purposes” is the standard explanation for archaeological […]
Grazia Toderi’s Alien Homeworlds
If you want to see where they come from, and you happen to live in Washington, DC, check out the exhibition called “Directions: Grazia Toderi” at the Hirshhorn Museum. Grazia Toderi is an Italian artist who does massive video projections built from collages of cities at night. Fragments of these vast vistas of light fade […]
Unbelievably Cool Identified Flying Object
Jeb Corliss wing-suit demo from Jeb Corliss on Vimeo.
Seeing and Knowing: UFOs and the American Religion
“If a UFO lands in a forest and there’s no one there to see it, was there ever really a UFO?” – Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men The American religion, wrote literary critic Harold Bloom, is only superficially Christianity or any of its mainstream varieties. If you look under the surface of the diverse varieties of […]
Secrecy and Truth
Call me crazy, but I think that the age of open, free publication has done something to debase or weaken the domain of thought in the West. Where are the really powerful and amazing ideas? I want to Prague in 1990 because I was in love with the idea of samizdat, of an underground culture […]
In Denmark, No One Can Hear You Scream (or, Is Beowulf a Forgery?)
M.J. Harper and others at the lively and interesting site Applied-Epistemology.com are more than a little suspicious that Beowulf, and with it most if not all of the texts written in Anglo-Saxon (“Old English”), are forgeries created in the 16th century. It’s a really interesting argument. The Tudor period was a time of incredible cultural […]
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 […]
“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 […]
