“Do you know the philosopher Slavoj Žižek?” asks John Jeremiah Sullivan in his interview for the LA Review of Books. “He has this thing about love, the evil of love, and he says, I really don’t like love, because what love says is: I pick you out from everything, and I’m going to give you special attention, meaning that everything else is denigrated, and he says there’s something a little evil in that, and in the same way I think that there something a little philistine about lists.”
JJS to LARB
A Gut-Wrenching Account and an Ethical Nightmare
A dissection of Jonathan Franzen’s recent New Yorker essay on David Foster Wallace finds Franzen’s wires showing.
Matters of Public Safety
Last week, Kyle Boelte reviewed On Immunity by Eula Biss, delving into its lengthy history of inoculation and public health. At the Harper’s blog, Jeffery Gleaves talks with Biss as part of their Six Questions feature, asking her about Susan Sontag, public versus private danger and the relationship between capitalism and anti-vaccination sentiment.
●
●
Storytelling Addict
“Storytelling, she added, is a central part of Native American life, and, inevitably an obsessive part of hers. ‘It’s probably the most selfish thing I do,’ she said. ‘Truly. I don’t do it for anyone else. I do it because I have the addict’s need to get lost in the story.’” Louise Erdrich discusses her new novel LaRose.
●
●
Teaching STEM: Comics to Video Games
While the federal government is turning to video games to get kids into the math and sciences, back in the day comic books provided a near-direct link to young minds. But the medium wasn’t warmly received by the older generation (sound familiar?), and the company debated whether it was worth taking a hit with parents in order to appeal to their kids.
Kafka’s Dogs
Recommended Reading: On the subject of dogs in Kafka’s works at Queen Mob’s Teahouse. Our own Matt Seidel rereads The Metamorphosis in different places, letting his setting shape the reading of the text.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Occupy Lessons
Does Washington D.C. still have enough revolutionary spirit to drive the Occupy movement to the impossible-to-ignore phase of Resurrection City? Even after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, his message of economic equality presses on.
●
●