too much world, not enough time

Hence cometh the crime of coyness, to finish the literary allusion. Only in this case the coyness is with regard to so many topics that ought to be explicated if there were not a living to earn and a life to clean up on the literal level.

I am stunned, for example, that Cornel West would find it in his heart to praise Hans-Georg Gadamer for anything (Gadamer's hermeneutics having for so long been tarred with the Heidegger brush): http://nymag.com/news/features/cornel-west-2012-5/index2.html

For the record, I still prize West's essay on African-American perspectives on the Frankfurters and the French Freudians, originally a handwritten page that he dashed off for the January/February 1986 issue of Art Papers, "The Crisis in Knowledge: Poststructuralism, Postmodernism, Postmodernity." Never republished in his collected essays, it was a top-of-the-head jeu d'esprit written at my request, so I'm prejudiced in its favor.

And this short exchange in the Guardian is illuminating but fails to get at why David Eagleman's misleadingly-named "possibilianism" is so much more intriguing an interdisciplinary point of entry into the nexus between neuroscience and the humanities than it might seem at first encounter. Its soberly epigrammatic nature, however, at least provides succinct evidence that Eagleman is not actually as sappy as he can sometimes make himself sound in his more self-consciously[!] over-the-top provocative moments: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/29/neuroscience-david-eagleman-raymond-tallis

And this business of neuroscience and the humanities feeds into the peculiar debate wherein China Miéville is reported (by Jeffrey Cohen) to have recently trashed Quentin Meillassoux in a keynote address "On Monsters": http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2012/03/monstrous-fantastic.html . The only extensive discussion of Miéville's related ideas I can find online, however, is a lecture on "The Weird" that takes us in considerably different epistemic directions (today's hyper-hippest philosophers love H. P. Lovecraft): http://hypertiling.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/thats-weird/. An interview with Miéville, however, offers clues as to where the keynote address was presumably going, starting with the sublime vs. the beautiful (with the weird as the backwash of the sublime) and going from there: http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/03/china-mieville-and-monsters-unsatisfy-me-frustrate-me-i-beg-you/.

This whole business has been recognized to tie into the stuff of the Eagleman-Tallis debate (and by implication into Barbara Maria Stafford's take on neurology and the humanities in her anthology A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field) as long ago as 2008, in the "Concept Horror" volume of Collapse: http://urbanomic.com/pub_collapse4.php. Collapse is an interdisciplinary journal, the driving motives of which I celebrate highly even as I disagree with the premises of their brand of philosophy. (They were prescient in singling out Deleuze as the poststructuralist who actually had useful things to say about how the world works—if only because he acknowledged that there is a world in which historical events diverge in multiple directions simultaneously from a single causative root, with the result that divergent strands survive and send out multiplex strands of their own when severed from the original cause. This rhizome metaphor helps us comprehend the dynamics of any number of present-day social phenomena—which are grounded in physical needs as mediated by socially inherited...oh, hell, let's not go there right now.)

Clark Atlanta University launched In the Eye of the Muses: Selections from the Clark Atlanta University Art Collection (Tina Dunkley's book to which I contributed the section on "Hale Woodruff's Art of the Negro Murals") yesterday with a ringing keynote address by Johnnetta Cole on the collective ownership and need for conservation of the art collections of the HBUCs (Historically Black Universities and Colleges). So now that enterprise is properly underway. I recommend the volume highly, and hope it stimulates renewed scholarship on the legacy of Hale Woodruff, whose role in the birth of Abstract Expressionism—at the very moment that he was working on the proto-globalist Art of the Negro murals—has been insufficiently analyzed. (Woodruff was right re those murals, which were unveiled almost exactly sixty years ago, a time when murals were out of favor: "They were either behind their time, or way ahead of it." They were and are both at once, a remarkable harbinger of things to come even as they made use of a then-unfashionable medium of expression.)

Next for me comes "From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again," the art exhibition I am curating for Susan Bridges' gallery over on Edgewood Avenue.

Now I gotta go try to empty out some boxes. I wish there really were world enough and time.