[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.
[gallery]
an update
… on some things:
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A while back, I decided to ditch the New York Times — and I’m still regularly infuriated by the bigotry and ignorance of its coverage of religion. Twenty-five years ago Alasdair MacIntyre referred to the NYT as “the parish magazine of self-congratulatory liberal enlightenment,” and that’s as true now as it was then. But … but … I got so tired of clicking on links (Twitter, RSS feeds, random webpages) only to be told I had used up my quota and would need to subscribe if I wanted to read more … and eventually I weakened and resubscribed. I am a worm and no man. I would feel better if Get Religion would go full-time as an exposer of the NYT’s manifold abuses of reason, evidence, and charity.
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I’ve complained a lot — too much, honestly — about Twitter, and even wrote a kind of eulogy for it. I now rarely visit what I call Big Twitter — which, by the way, explains why you are unlikely to hear from me if you send me an @-message there: I probably won’t see it. I have moved primarily to Little (i.e. private) Twitter and am much, much happier. I found myself on Big Twitter earlier this week and did not enjoy it at all. Why is it so hard for me to remember that that’s the way it goes?
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I love writing for Books & Culture, so after a few months away I’m pleased to say that I will have some pieces coming in in the near future: reviews of Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage and Italo Calvino’s Complete Cosmicomics, followed (eventually) by my responses to Adam Roberts’s marvelous new edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and Les Murray’s New Selected Poems. Keep your eyes peeled!
[gallery] austinkleon:
René Magritte with Dominique de Menil (and his dog Lou-Lou) at a rodeo in Simonton, Texas, 1965Today at the Magritte Museum in Brussels I learned that not only was Magritte a huge fan of the tv show Bonanza, he also visited the Menils in Houston, went to a rodeo, and picked up a big ol’ cowboy hat.
See also: George Grosz in Dallas
Filed under: Magritte
A final thought on the cultic. The word has a primitive feel. This is intentional. Christianity should be far better at foregrounding its exotic otherness. For it is interesting, and engaging – this business of worship. At least in theory! Why is it that religious worship seems duller than more limited cultural expressions such as art and literature? Why is that people are fascinated by dismembered aspects of religious worship – theatre, carnivals, icons, meditation, performance art – but seem to have little desire for the form that integrates these things in a supreme performance of meaning? Why have the churches not learned to be culturally exciting places? A reinvented liberal Christianity needs a new sacramentalism, which should seek the attention of the secular world. Perhaps the medieval feast of Corpus Christi should be the churches’ model: worship should spill out from churches into the streets and nurture busy amateur creativity. Why hasn’t this sort of thing happened to any large extent? There remains a strange failure to notice that religious worship is the highest possible state of cultural creativity and also, dare one say, of grown-up fun.
From these simulations, the logic of the game goes, you can abstract urban design principles. Where our cities appear unpredictably chaotic and impossibly complex, SimCity harmoniously tames this uncertainty into a manageable landscape. It offers a micropolis (as it was originally titled) to serve as a model for our own. It represents our cities not as they are but as they could be: calculated, optimized, controlled.That vision is rapidly becoming our reality. The game’s simulational thinking has restructured how we relate to our politics and ourselves, to our work and our play — in short, to our social space. So-called “smart” cities have already started to deploy its techniques as Silicon Valley — home to Wright as well as Cisco and Microsoft — moves into the business of constructing cities.