Category: Religion

Posted on

What It Is: 8/16/10

What I’m reading: I finished Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, the Scott Pilgrim comics, and The Playwright, a comic written by Daren White and drawn by Eddie Campbell. I enjoyed The Playwright a lot more than I enjoyed Campbell’s last big comic that he wrote himself, The Fate of the Artist, and it was a much more satisfying book than the ill-conceived adaptation of The Black Diamond Detective Agency. I need to go back and re-read The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard to see if I was judging that one too harshly. Anyway, I also re-read Wilson, which I enjoyed just as much as I did when I read it in May, and went back to Matt LaBash’s essay collection, Fly Fishing with Darth Vader, but that’s partly in the interest of clearing off my nightstand. I haven’t thought about what book I want to commit to next.

What I’m listening to: A random mix of singles and albums, none of which are coming to mind right now.

What I’m watching: Greenberg, Notting Hill, Matchstick Men, and District 9. I’ll try to write about them tomorrow.

What I’m drinking: Whitley Neill and Q-Tonic.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Visiting their golden retriever cousins in Connecticut, then taking a long greyhound hike the next day up at Wawayanda state park.

Where I’m going: Nowhere! Amy managed to get Monday and Tuesday off, so I tweaked the remainder of my vacation schedule to match that, but I think we’re just gonna stay in and do some house stuff and otherwise try to take it easy.

What I’m happy about: Learning that one of my pals is the subject of a new Paris Review Writers at Work interview. And clearing out a shelf and a half of books by admitting to myself that I will never write a novel about the epistemological implications of the Enigma machine and what it means to decode something. Even though it means I have to give up on using the title Tales from the Cryptanalyst. Which I still think is awesome.

What I’m sad about: One of the people on our grey-hike learned she has throat cancer and is getting what sounds like pretty aggressive radiation treatment.

What I’m worried about: What I may find when I’m cleaning out the attic today.

What I’m pondering: How you separate the questions, “What is the meaning of life?” and “Do you believe in an afterlife?”, both of which were posed to me by another person on our grey-hike on Sunday. She’s “conducting an informal poll,” as she put it, on the former question, and it struck me that it’s difficult to talk about that without making assumptions about the latter question.

Posted on

What It Is: 5/17/10

What I’m reading: Fly Fishing with Darth Vader.

What I’m listening to: Bob Mould’s The Last Dog and Pony Show and Life and Times, Steve Earle’s I Feel Alright, ABC’s Lexicon of Love, and Madonna’s Like a Prayer.

What I’m watching: The Hangover, which was better than I expected it to be. Crank, which was worse that I expected it to be.

What I’m drinking: Aviator & Q-Tonic

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Going to a party thrown by one of our fellow Sunday greyhound-hikers. There were a dozen or so greys and one black lab in attendance. Sadly, Ru got spooked by some hunters shooting way off in the woods, and spent some time curled up and cowering in various spots, including the bottom of a concrete stairwell off the patio. The other owners were sad that Ru was so skittish about that noise, but I figure it’s better to be nervous about guns than blithe. Otis, on the other hand, just puttered around the yard (2 acres, fenced in) all day, hoping to get food from our plates. On Sunday, they went on their first greyhound hike in a while. Otis was obsessed with a year-old pit bull that one of our group brought along (with her three greys), and was ready to choke himself trying to get to her. Eventually, I asked her owner if I could walk the two of them together, since that might make it easier. From there on, Otis became Daisy’s shadow, trotting alongside her at an even pace, his tongue lolling onto the top of her head. It was pretty funny to watch.

Where I’m going: Nowhere!

What I’m happy about: Getting some grey-social time in this weekend. Also, working at a relatively small (12 magazine) B2B company.

What I’m sad about: Not getting more of that Weakly series of posts written, because the memories are already fading.

What I’m worried about: Getting the June issue together this week. It feels like there’s no break from one ish to the next.

What I’m pondering: All those stories that are lost when we die. Also, that Kabbalistic notion that the world is a broken vessel and that our role is to contribute to its repair.

Posted on

Being Out Of Time

Apparently, there’s a kerfluffle going on about whether Martin Heidegger’s philosophy should be shelved alongside Nazi history books and Mein Kampf. See, Heidegger was an ardent member of the Nazi party, and the argument is that his philosophy is Naziïsh, too, and Nazis are bad so his books shouldn’t be available without a warning label! Or something.

Tim Black at Spiked! does a great job of exploding that argument in this article, showing how the philosophy has no fascistic trend in it at all, and in fact lends itself more to left-wing, anti-modern thought. In my experience, Heidegger’s pretty difficult to explain in layman’s terms, but Black does an admirable job of portraying both Heidegger’s philosophy and the impact it had on 20th century thinkers.

What is “my experience,” you ask? Well, despite having virtually no background in philosophy, I studied Heidegger’s main book, Being And Time, for a semester at my wacky hippie-trippy progressive college. Our professor, Tsenay Serequeberhan (now at Morgan State), was late to class every single time, leading us to rename the course to Being On Time.

Given Heidegger’s dense prose (translated from German, the densest language known to man), my aforementioned inexperience, and our professor’s Eritrean accent, I did not have an easy time of things in that class. Still, Tsenay did his best to convey something of Heidegger’s philosophy to a novice like me. (He also told us at the outset that he didn’t want to discuss Heidegger’s role in the Nazi party, especially since Being and Time was published long before Hitler’s rise, and should stand on its own.)

In one of the more concrete (albeit limited) examples, Tsenay addressed Heidegger’s contention that animals do not have emotions. “Here, I disagree with him,” he said. “You see, I believe animals have strong emotions. However, Heidegger is right to say that animals are not people, not da-sein; that is because they do not possess anxiety, the awareness of being-toward-death.

“When I was a Ph.D. student at Boston College, I had a little cat in my apartment. Every morning when I headed out to class, he would follow me out the door and down the street for a while. But every Tuesday, the garbage men would be outside with their bigbig trucks! And my cat would hear them and runbackinside as fast as she could.

“So, you see, when she runs from the garbage men, here the cat is demonstrating fear. But she is not evincing anxiety. If she were, then she would be sitting up every Monday night, worrying about the garbage men!”

For the rest of the session, I envisioned a housecat chewing away on its claws all night. I was not exactly living up to my utmost potentiality for being.

Just kidding: see, utmost potentiality for being is actually Heidegger-code for death! Now you’ve learned something! So go read Tim Black’s article already!

(Bonus Tsenay anecdote! He and I talked about Israel’s airlift of Jews out of Eritrea following the civil war there. I marveled over the concept of taking all the seats out of a 747 and jamming as many people as possible in per flight. He said, “They don’t understand, the Israelis. Eritrea is not Europe. In Africa, we do not have a revolution and then decide to kill all the Jews.” He had a way with words.)