Technology – Page 4 – the coffee philosopher

Posted on February 12, 2014February 7, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Midweek Staff Meeting – Stop Screwing This Up!

Darn hippies aren’t doing it right!

It means that we’re going to hell in a hand basket!

Please be wrong.

No. And (if yes), the American reader.

Book of a lost village.

Ice-T is not a fan of Dungeons & Dragons.

Posted on February 5, 2014January 31, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Midweek Staff Meeting – Don’t Go Mistaking Me

We are not a southern city.

Build a better subway station and they will come.

‘Selfies’ and knowledge of the self. Not the same thing, apparently.

Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy

Books that changed people’s lives. We’ve all got them. But if you’re going to check this one out, I suggest you go down to Eileen Myles’ list. She’s a great poet and her opinions are worth listening to.

DC is good place to buy vinyl.

The (not so) strange friendship between Frank O’Hara and Amiri Baraka.

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 19, 2013December 19, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Midweek Staff Meeting – Cranky Poets

There be monsters still.

Nothing wrong with being a cranky old poet. It’s how I want to end my life.

‘We are not seen as the guardians of culture, but the greedy gatekeepers of knowledge. The majority of people do not know what publishers actually do.’ That was YS Chi, Chairman of Elsevier and President of the International Publishers Association. And I think it’s a valid point. I respect books published by actual publishers than those that are self published because some sort of gatekeeping process has taken place. Gatekeeping is not bad. And I’m not saying the publishing industry doesn’t often print absolute c–p (Dan Brown, cough, cough). But it’s something and it’s important.

This sounds less like a problem of French books and more of a problem of Anglophone readers…

For a country as surreal as America, we haven’t been very open to surrealism.

Posted on November 25, 2013November 22, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Monday Morning Staff Meeting – It’s A Comic Novel

Mental illness diagnostics as parody.

A conservative looks at the liberal critic’s critique of liberalism.

Ok, this is a rather neat bit of rambling, informal essay. An old fashioned sort of essay really. Sort of nineteenth century. But the idea of disassociation from process, which the author links to his relationship with music and the act of setting the needle on the record compared to the act of activating purely aetherially stored music on the world wide interwebs cloud.

Posted on November 22, 2013November 18, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Weekend Reading – A Place For The Soul

Milton thought that books made better receptacles for human souls than bodies.

The innocence of 1939.

What is he worth? Who decides?

Posted on November 18, 2013November 25, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Monday Morning Staff Meeting – Translating Tradition

Strategizing ways to export Korean writers.

Reading about the bad deeds of good poets never fails to titillate.

Fashioning the self.

Posted on November 16, 2013November 14, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Disconnecting

Parrhesia, truth and provocation.

Moralizing about disconnection (and, to be sure, I am among those who sympathize with the disconnection philosophy, even if I lack the strength of adopt it; have I been duped?)

Even among the doubters, warfare reigns supreme.