The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
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“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 […]
Dune / LOTR
On the back cover of my Ballantine paperback edition of Dune, by Frank Herbert, is a review that sticks in my mind from my childhood: “I know nothing comparable to it except … the Lord of the Rings.” That ellipsis, I always imagined, was a dramatic pause. Is Dune comparable to Tolkien’s masterpiece? In the […]
Welcome to The Nightshirt
Welcome to The Nightshirt, my workbench for thinking about mysteries, mysticism, mind, and the human future. We can’t hope to understand our minds without addressing the places where our understanding breaks down—dreams, mystical experiences, and phenomena like UFOs and ESP that defy explanation. But it goes both ways: We won’t get very far understanding those […]
