If you haven’t visited my personal site recently, you don’t know that I converted it to Wordpress and started a category called “Fun Stuff” where I post videos and other treats. Since I’m currently “on hiatus” over here and generally devoting my time to larger writing projects, I thought I might as well cross-post when the content is relevant to the Refractor blog topics.
Posts under ‘philosophy’
Wagner’s Influence on Comics, Superheroes and ‘Indust-Reality’
On May 28, WBUR’s program “Here and Now” aired a segment about Wagner’s opera “The Ring” and its influence on comic books. (I’d embed it here, but they don’t let you download the MP3. You can listen at the link. Just scroll down the page when you get there.) Apparently many characters from graphic novels [...]
Thank Bog There’s No Religious Newspeak Here
Before I moved out of Michigan, I tried to connect with other Evolvers (that is, members of the site Evolver.net) in my area. I contacted Alan Scheurman, who leads the Evolver Detroit spore. He had listed EcoZoic Detroit as the spore’s website. The About page at that site is brief: We are a locally focused [...]
Mike Rowe Waxes Philosophical Over a ‘Dirty Job’
Wow, I need to start putting up some shorter posts, or I’m never going to get through the couple dozen draft posts that have accumulated on this blog! Clearly I haven’t stuck to my new year’s resolution of staying under 600 words. Whoops! With that in mind, I’ll keep this very brief. Back in December [...]
Never Let the Fire Go Out
I expect to be re-reading books more often in the years to come. So many that I’ve read seem distant and vague now, probably because I encountered them before I had gotten enough reading practice. If I haven’t explained it yet, I was a late-blooming reader. I never saw the point when I was younger… [...]
When the Going Gets Alien, the Humans Get Stupid
About a month ago I visited a local theater to see District 9, a “summer blockbuster” that I thought was directed by Peter Jackson. While I don’t give Jackson as much credit for King Kong as the rest of the viewing population did, his work on The Lord of the Rings was nothing short of [...]
We Must Give the Void Its Colors
We left Albert Camus as he was dispensing of all the leap-takers — the philosophers who, instead of bearing the weight of existence on their own, found some shortcut to assist them (I’m referring to the previous post, if you missed it). The most frequent of Camus’s targets here was Kierkegaard, who was reportedly a [...]
The Only Truly Serious Philosophical Problem
“Even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate.” Albert Camus clearly felt no need for an element of surprise in The Myth of Sisyphus, his long essay that won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. This statement appears in the first paragraph of the Preface, before the book even officially [...]
To Write for the Sake of Writing
Well ladies and gentlemen, apparently I’m having trouble keeping on schedule with these blog posts. I could make the argument that I have approximately three jobs right now, and that I’m only getting paid for two of them…but that’s a lousy excuse. And if I’m gonna slack on my blogging duties, the least I can [...]
Henry Miller: Prototype For a New Kind of Protest
In the introduction to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, C.M. Woodhouse points out (in a 1954 London Times Literary Supplement) that, in Orwell’s criticism of other authors, “his recurrent theme was their failure to protest against the world they lived in. This is the whole burden of his longest and most serious piece of literary criticism, [...]
