cautionary note, new style

These notes average five hundred words or so, but they belabor points that longtime readers already know or are likely to contest (which latter would be great). So I'll probably post them in clumps (I've written more than these) and leave it up to the reader as to whether or not to click on the LJ-cut.

Except, of course, when I choose not to make an LJ-cut.

( 1 )

reading different books: two

( 2 )

definitions and family resemblances: three

( 3 )

our own selves most of all: four

We need to be able to look at the same phenomena as a source of endless aesthetic delight, a document of horrific social exploitation, and evidence of a profound truth regarding the place of the human being in the universe, plus, most likely, an example of deep individual pathology.

It is very hard to do this without seeming silly, a condition of overinterpretation memorably parodied by the opening shots of the film Adaptation, which start with the Big Bang and end up in the parking lot outside a Hollywood movie set.

Walter Benjamin is to be complimented for having tried to keep all these aspects in mind sequentially or simultaneously, but his documents are 75 years old. We must update his insights, strategies, and practices.

Like Benjamin, though, we have to look at contemporary research, our own most of all, as exemplifying all the variables heretofore mentioned.


It ain’t easy to do that. We are not gods or angels, not even fallen ones.