Recording Surface

There so much in these few quotes that’s awful, but I get the feeling that even in his “clarification” he doesn’t recognize half of it. I especially like that he plays the some-of-my-best-friends-are-black card. Or rather, and worse, the some-of-my-favorite-entertainers-are-black card. (more…)

(Another in my intermittent series of notes on Badiou. I swear, all this is leading somewhere. I think.)

In his essay “Politics as Truth Procedure,” Badiou asks the question “When, and under what conditions, can an event be said to be political?” He answers that it must meet three basic conditions: it must consist of or be formed by a collective; it must create and display an infinite character; it must summon the infinity of the state of the situation, which the event then must overcome. In this post, I’ll look at the first of these. (more…)

Anyone visited Generation Online lately? I was able to load a page on Thursday, but when I tried to reload on Saturday because of a program crash, I got the message that’s still up there today. I’ll be very, very sad if this is a permanent thing.

Am I being churlish — especially on this beautiful Thanksgiving morning where the temperature is holding fast at a perfect 40 degrees and the sun is mostly hidden — to be kind of annoyed by the following, the first paragraph from Mark Devenney’s “Thinking the Postcolonial as Political,” in the most recent issue of Borderlands? (more…)

The jazzist take on the relationship between Bix Beiderbecke’s biography and his music goes something like this: While Bix suffered lots of insecurities, doubts, disappointments, and despair in his life — all of which gave rise to the alcoholism that killed him at the age of 28 — he was able to overcome these once he stepped on stage or into the recording studio. (more…)

Famous Names edition: (more…)

…But just because they are avenues of escape and not fantasies doesn’t mean they are all the same, or that they are all desirable. It seems to me there are two kinds of escape, at least, and here again, D.H. Lawrence’s stories in The Woman Who Rode Away outline the contours of each of them. (more…)