What is “nanophilosophy”? Nanophilosophy is the search for and study of very, very small philosophical questions. It was begun by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo in an attempt to drag our age-old discipline kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. The Century of Very Small Things. I think this is a…
Read MoreToday is a two-fer in the Just Ask Challenge! In response to my ealier post about Burger Friday, I received another Just Ask query from Ideas Man (who also wrote an entire post about this on his blog). Leave it to Ideas Man to skip the whole romantic story there and instead ask: How does…
Read MoreI read Don DeLillo’s 1985 masterpiece White Noise as an undergraduate in an American Lit course at the University of Memphis about ten years ago now. I was still developing my postmodern muscles at the time, and I loved DeLillo’s novel, despite its overly stylized and sometimes too-precious prose. In particular, I loved the very…
Read MoreRemember Han Solo? That smarmy, proud, devil-may-care mercenary from the “Stars Wars” movies? As best I can remember, I think he’s the first “anti-hero” I loved. After Han, I think the next one for me was the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. Since then, I’ve been collecting them like some sort of neurotic hobbyist….
Read MoreAnyone who’s ever read Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, one of the greatest books ever on secrecy, has certainly had to grapple with the aporia of the secret. Of course, the “secret” of that text (such that there is one) is that there is no Secret. This is partly true because, structurally speaking, someone…
Read MoreSeveral years ago, when I used to manage an independent bookstore/cafe in Midtown Memphis, I had the pleasure of reading the book to your left, How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction. (Hey, what can I say? A woman cannot survive on Derrida alone!) The book doesn’t include a single hint of irony in all…
Read MoreI want to present an award. I’m calling it The Most Ridiculous (Yet Still Frightening) Article of the Week. And the winner is…. drumroll…. The Next Five States by Thomas Barnett (in Esquire magazine) The author begins his essay by bemoaning the fact that he will be the first Barnett in several generations to be…
Read MoreMy friend Kyle and I used to make up these games, in which we would try to list the top ten songs/artists in an invented category, mostly to keep us occupied in the culturally-vacant wasteland that was State College, PA. Often, determining the category was as fun as filling it out, and Kyle was particularly…
Read MoreThis past Sunday, on my radio show “Americana the Beautiful” (which you can listen to Sundays from 7-8 Central Time on Rhodes Radio), I did a themed show featuring “answer” songs. Answer songs are, as the name suggests, songs written in response to a previously recorded song by another artist. They were popular in blues…
Read MoreI run the “Philosophy Film Series” (and the corresponding “Pub Talks”) at my college, a task I enjoy so much that it doesn’t even seem like work. I’m always pleasantly surprised to find that our students are very sophisticated film viewers, and my job as the facilitator of our discussions is often impeded by my…
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