[gallery] Love House, Takeshi Hosaka, architect
Accurate Post Titles
I Paid an Obscene Amount of Attention to Something Stupid But I Had an Emotionally Complex Response to It So It’s Totally Worth Your Time to Read This Post
I Confirm All Your Worst Suspicions About Some Group of People You Viscerally but Vaguely Dislike
I Describe Something I Mildly Dislike as the Worst Thing in the World Because Clicks
I Describe Something I Mildly Like as the Best Thing in the World Because Clicks
Something Terrible Happened to This Celebrity and While I Won’t Say So Directly I Am Really Glad About It and You Will Be Too Because It’s Not Like They Deserve To Be Richer and More Famous Than Us
Žižek himself is a curious mixture of illusion and reality. In Trouble in Paradise, he speaks of Hamlet as a clown, and he himself is both intellectual and jester. Shakespeare’s jesters are conscious of their own unreality, and Žižek seems to be, too. As a man for whom the adjective “colourful” could have been specially invented, he is a cult figure who sends up his own cult status, a man in deadly earnest who is also an accomplished self-parodist. There is something fictional, larger-than-life, about his constant globe-trotting and flamboyant antics, as though he has strayed out of a David Lodge novel. His gargantuan appetite for ideas is admirable but also faintly alarming. One would not be altogether surprised to hear that he was put together by a committee and consumer-tested on various student focus groups.
When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid. For to occupy every spare moment in reading, and to do nothing but read, is even more paralyzing to the mind than constant manual labor, which at least allows those engaged in it to follow their own thoughts. A spring never free from the pressure of some foreign body at last loses its elasticity; and so does the mind if other people’s thoughts are constantly forced upon it. Just as you can ruin the stomach and impair the whole body by taking too much nourishment, so you can overfill and choke the mind by feeding it too much. The more you read, the fewer are the traces left by what you have read: the mind becomes like a tablet crossed over and over with writing. There is no time for ruminating, and in no other way can you assimilate what you have read. If you read on and on without setting your own thoughts to work, what you have read can not strike root, and is generally lost.
[gallery] morning walk along the Brazos
[gallery] still life with lizard
[gallery] abandoned house, Namibia
ProTip: Don’t use 4square to checkin to the location you admin your darkweb drug marketplace https://t.co/vaXz0qCAvS pic.twitter.com/ByEC9QTSLO
— the grugq (@thegrugq) November 6, 2014
I have a reinforced understanding of medical tv shows as America’s primary expression of horror fiction. On any number of levels.Related: the whole thing is really an extended meditation on death. And, remember, this was one of America’s most popular tv shows. When you’re ignoring the plots and just half-listening to the dialogue, it becomes a weird endless sequence of studies on the permanent fog of death, how we approach it, how we prepare for it, and how there is nothing beyond it. House, the mighty atheist explorer, even goes there to look at one point, sticking a knife in a power socket to peek behind the veil and ensure the room beyond is empty. For eight years, America told itself a long story about death and the ways in which it comes, using the body of an English comedian to do it. And the wondrous, awful thing about it is that it never really backs off. House is always a brutal Modernist hero, the idealised American hospital (that most Americans will never see anything like) is still a waiting room for the graveyard, and death is always a hopeless final function that brings no peace. It is a hundred and seventy hour long dialogue on the end. That is an almost magically nihilist thing.