Economics – Page 5 – the coffee philosopher

Posted on January 29, 2014January 27, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Midweek Staff Meeting – You Are Doomed To Failure

The soul crushing poverty of the humanities’ major has been overstated. Slightly. It’s not so bad, really.

But since you don’t read anyway… meh.

Can I just say that this a great little list of why D&D is awesome? You’re welcome.

So, yeah. The Gulf is still screwed. Good times.

Posted on January 18, 2014January 17, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Weekend Reading – But It’s Hard To Read!

Orhan Pamuk’s melancholy observations of a melancholy poet (Constantin Cavafy, the muse of Alexandria).

‘Difficult’ does not mean ‘not pleasurable’ when it comes to literature.

Jim Crow in Florida.

Poetry, finance, and Marxism.

Posted on January 15, 2014January 14, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Midweek Staff Meeting – A Different (Older?) Vision Of The Cafe

This a great idea. A cafe where you literally pay for time. The coffee is free, but you’re paying for a place to sit, relax, think, and discuss. Presumably, you won’t be getting a fancy coffee there, but mostly just regular and decaf. It reminds me of what a coffeehouse was in the good old days. Being just a shade under forty, the good old days, for me, are roughly the late eighties and early nineties. Coffeehouses multiplied, but they weren’t Starbucks, but independent places that focused on providing a public space, rather than on providing fancy or, in some cases, even good, coffee. You played chess with strangers. You wrote manifestos. Your plotted and planned. It wasn’t a place to quietly bring your laptop and steal wifi (the internet, much less wifi, being not widely available), but something closer to one of the places Samuel Pepys visited for useful gossip and political intelligence. Not very profitable, though, so it wasn’t so hard for Starbucks to kill them off. Hopefully, this model will work. And maybe come across the pond and into my neighborhood.

And speaking of coffeehouses, six indies in DC have banded together to create a ‘disloyalty card’ to encourage drinking one’s joe at somewhere other than a national chain. Good idea.

But this is just sad.

This is taking historicism to a whole new level. I’ve been to several theaters that attempt to recreate the Elizabethan/Globe theatrical experience (namely the Folger in Washington, DC and the Blackfriar in Staunton, VA), but to actually use candles and flame-based lighting! That is awesome!

Posted on January 10, 2014January 7, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Weekend Reading – The Existential Despair Of The Political Hack

This is just weird to read. A strange sort of interview/chronicle of the midlife crisis of Frank Luntz. But, I have seen that before among politicos. You dedicate yourself to the exclusion of all else and then, one day, you realize, you excluded all else and if you are unable to participate in the world you dedicated yourself too or if some existential crisis pops us, you lack something to fall back on. I saw this happen to a good friend. It’s never happened to me because I’m dilettante at heart, which has also held me back, careerwise. But I’ve also had ‘something else,’ which is, by definition, something. Anyway. Read this… whatever… about Frank Luntz.

The NYRB: in decline, in its pomp… or never actually in ascendance? Interesting article, but I wish they’d get some credit for the interesting books they are publising, beyond the magazine.

This is a tax cut I can support: a deduction for buying books! Forza Italia!

How to be a professional poet.

Where is the poetry high school? We have STEM and performing arts, so why not poetry?

If nothing else, this essay is worth reading for the concise definitions of economic terms related to the most recent/ongoing financial crisis.

Posted on January 6, 2014January 5, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Posted on December 27, 2013December 23, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Weekend Reading – A Physical Thing

Heidegger’s philosophical turn. Honestly, my reading of Heidegger mostly begins and ends with Being and Time. Yes, I read his books on Nietzsche, but it’s all about his first, great book. So I’m not so up on his philosophical turn. Certainly, it sounds disturbing. And there will always be over Heidegger the question of how should his personal actions color our judgement of his philosophical work? It’s not a simple question, really.

Poetry as objects.

Detroit needs writers! (And it’s taking concrete steps to recruit them!)

Some formerly online-only publications are doing what no one is supposed to be doing: going to paper. The Los Angeles Review of Books has been a must read website since it came online, but it’s now adding a print edition. So is the music website Pitchfork and other, formerly online-only entities. The nail is hit right on the head when Chris Frey of Random House’s Hazlitt website says that print is more ‘authoritative.’ And that’s not a bad thing. Cultural gatekeeping isn’t a bad thing. This is a good thing.

The demise of traditional publishing seems to have been overstated and the panic, thankfully, over.

Posted on December 23, 2013December 17, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Monday Morning Staff Meeting – The Trouble With Tribbles

W(h)ither the Catholic writer? The days of Evelyn Waugh, Allen Tate, Graham Greene, J.R.R. Tolkien, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Lowell, and Thomas Merton are long gone, it appears. When you read about a Catholic writer these days, it is usually in the context of explicitly leaving the Church. Anyway, you should also read it because Dana Gioia is not just a very good poet, he’s also one of the better essayists of the poetry world and it worth reading. And I had no idea he was Catholic.

But where will they drink?

Another paean to Seamus Heaney. He was not my favorite poet, but he was probably the last great, English language poet who came as close as it is possible (in this anti-poetic age) to the stature of his Irish predecessor, W.B. Yeats or Robert Lowell (who has fallen out of favor lately, in favor of his confidante, Elizabeth Bishop, but was held in high esteem in the years after Life Studies) or Robert Frost as a sort of tribal elder figure, held able to comment and illuminate broad truths. Does English language culture have room for another anytime soon? Also, Seamus Heaney liked to text. Yup.

I would say that I was shocked to learn that this incident occurred in Florida, but, really, it’s just kind of inevitable that these incidents take place in Florida. Awesome job, Florida Republican Party! You have used your control of every lever of state power to… I don’t know, wreck my home state? Compete with Mississippi and Alabama for 50th place (56th if we include the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas Islands, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Guam; that’s right, I said it, Florida, and, by the way, Guam is way out of your league; you’re not competing with Guam, you’re competing with countries emerging out of multi-decade civil wars… and you’re losing). I don’t blame Rick Scott: we knew when we elected him that he was nothing more than a high finance con artist bilking taxpayer funded programs out of their cash who also just happened to look like a Star Trek villain.

Posted on December 21, 2013December 16, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Saturday Post – Hacks

Online predators (it’s not what you think) disguised as missionaries.

Because pointing out that Thomas Friedman is vaguely racist (in a neo-colonial way) idiot whose grasp of current economic and socio-political realities is on par with a chimpanzee who has been locked in a room with a March 3, 1971 edition of Time Magazine.

Oracular revelations and the artist as mystic.

I’m not convinced by the author positing Norman Mailer as a great public intellectual (though, the author is very upfront about Mailer’s deep flaws), but it’s something I think about a lot. The idea of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert deliberately shrugging off the possibility of becoming ‘public intellectuals’ is interesting (and not something I would have thought of), but the point about Paul Krugman drills down to the real issue. Sort of. It’s not just that Krugman’s writing is typically specialized (I wish he would write more deeply about science fiction, apparently, one of his great affections). It’s that the ideal of the generalist is nearly impossible to attain. I read many years an essay where the author wrote that Goethe was the last Renaissance man (in the sense of being able to write and study and theorize as an expert in an incredibly wide range of human knowledge). He was not only a great poet, but one of the greatest novelists of all time. He was a scientist, who wrote innovative papers on meteorology. Too much is out there and available to humanity for someone to realistically be sufficiently well versed in a wide variety of intellectual fields (particularly the sciences) to contribute to a wide variety of fields.

Ooohhh… a new bookstore has opened up in Frederick, Maryland. Not so far away, or not so far away from my work. But otherwise, this is your standard (and, thankfully, accurate so far as I know) story about how indie bookstores are making a comeback.

Posted on December 20, 2013December 14, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Weekend Reading – Intentional Lives

Tintern Abbey

In hard times, it is good to turn to Wordsworth, the most boring and most satisfying of the Romantic poets.

Is the monastic life the way past late capitalism?

Reading poetry naturally leads to introspection. I didn’t really need a brain scan to know that, but it’s nice to be shown right. After all, reading poetry is a slower, more thoughtful process. Maybe that’s the difference. A collection of poetry is rarely very long. Most of the contemporary collections I have are under one hundred and fifty pages, but you can’t breeze through them like a Mickey Spillane novel. You have to move at the speed of the poet’s pen (some poets compose faster than others, it is certain). But what happens when you read poetry is ineffably different than when you read prose. And no, being able to brain scan it doesn’t make it effable. Did you see what I did there? Effable. That makes for a kind of sex joke, too. Doing double duty.

Posted on December 14, 2013December 12, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Saturday Post – Where Are All The Jobs?

The recovery of the arts economy is lagging well behind the rest of the economy. And how much of this is due to the growing idea that music and literature should be free on the internet? Because, that’s bulls–t.

Is Amazon even a good business? Not everyone thinks so. Maybe the model sucks. That would suck in a way: brick and mortar killed by a model that turned out to be bad and, presumably, unsustainable.

Maybe. But it would be nice to see both of them survive. But certainly, if, as the highlander says, there can be only one, I’d like it to be indies.