In a recent post and a comment in response to the Michael Vick dog fighting scandal, E Hayot raised the question of animal suffering, and the way that the contradiction between the sentimentalizing of household pets and the ignorance of, and consequent indifference to, the suffering of farm animals is a reflection of the fundamental contradictions that define our relationship to animals. This reference to the treatment of the animals we eat ha...

My enduring memory of my grandmother: stooped and frail, unreliable bladder, fading eyesight, tendency to repeat the same things over and over, but so intent upon the conservation of water and electricity that she’d leave the door open while using the bathroom (to avoid turning on the light) and purposefully neglect to flush. This drove my mom crazy, as my grandma had to stay on the ground floor when she visited and would often do this in the ...

Time-out time. I kneel down in front of W (age 6), eye to eye, naming my emotions and trying to foster empathy in him. “Let me explain why I am frustrated. I am frustrated because... blah blah blah...” His eyes wander, he wiggles around, his arms, searching for activity, automatically run through the taekwondo forms. Or his nervous habits appear: biting his nails, picking his fingers, blowing spit bubbles. This drives me nuts. Can’t you listen...

Or: “What traveling means to me” I have returned home from my trip and am unpacking. Home’s familiar textures and smells are comforting and reassuring if a little dull. After three weeks of imposing on people with more real estate our apartment feels smaller than I remember but my hands, with memory of their own, can still find the light switches in the dark. Each trip is an emotional journey, beginning with excitement, anticipatio...

It sounds like a job for Franco Moretti, champion of “distanced reading” (see his “Conjectures on World Literature”): what do blurbs tell us about the institutions of world literature? Who has described the poetics of the blurb? Its interpellation of an implied reader? The degree to which a well-phrased back cover can replace the book in a hurried reader's experience?

I recently took advantage of a student-centered bus line for a trip to Minneapolis. A string of events caused me to arrive at the student union of my university just as the bus was pulling away from the curb. While I was exactly on time for the bus' departure, I was not appropriately early, and seriously irked the bus driver. As I dashed from a friend's car to the bus, which thankfully stopped for me, and scrambled up the steps, the driver ga...

At the end of yesterday's post (see below), I promised to followup my summary of Giorgio Agamben's historical theorization of the state of exception by addressing the proposals he makes for moving beyond the historical trap within which contemporary thinking about sovereignty (including the thinking embodied in the verbal form of legal constitutions) finds itself. Before I get to that, I want to note that Charlie Bertsch in the comments remind...

Part of what makes Battlestar Galactica such an interesting show has to do with the way it invokes and works through the contemporary American political situation. The human race, under attack from a terroristic threat of robots that appear human, finds itself in a situation in which the difference between friend and foe becomes impossible to articulate. The war situation produces--as it has these days, and perhaps as it must inevitably--a gre...

A couple of years ago I picked up a copy of The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right in the 25 cent bin of a used bookstore. The book has sat in the “educational” section of my home library––shelved alongside German for Business and my copy of Strunk & White––for as long. This weekend I got curious and finally cracked the spine. Wanting to see how the other half lives, I also bor...

One of the many surprises between the covers of the 1984 volume Breakdancing: Mr Fresh and The Supreme Rockers Show You How to Do It! is the revelation that – counter to popular wisdom – talking the talk is valued nearly as highly as walking the (moon)walk. As throughout the book, the chapter on “How To Talk like a Breakdancer” is practically focused. The book is unashamedly devoted to a project of reader transformation, imagining a reader w...

This morning when I stepped out of my apartment to head down to campus I noticed the imprint of a solitary and apparently naked foot in the snow near the bottom of my steps. Though a balmy 31 degrees out this morning, the shoeless footprint struck me as an odd occurrence. Riding the bus it continued to perplex me, and all my thoughts of the day ahead were replaced by a curiosity about the foot. My mind assembled a variety of associations dur...

Does anyone "do" theory anymore? Depends on what you mean by "do," I think--with a wink to my favorite ex-president--and also on what you mean by "theory." But the answer is more or less, "no," no one does theory, if by "theory" you will allow me to mean something a little bit different than it usually does (and the same for "does," I guess). I'm also not sure--even though I love theory and lots of the people who did it--that this is such a te...

The other day, sitting at the local Barnes & Noble café in the mall (yes, I live in the suburbs), I caught sight of a display that I hadn’t seen the last time I was there. It was an entire bookcase full of “Chicken Soup for the ______ Soul” titles. Somewhere in the recesses of my memory, I knew that the original Chicken Soup book had been a big deal, but not being much of a self-help book buyer, I didn’t pay much attent...

Right now many of us are watching to see who will be chosen to fill the vacancy on the supreme court left by Sandra Day O’Connor. But another pressing question comes to (my) mind: who will fill Mark Martin’s place in the No. 6 car next year if Jamie McMurray isn’t switching from Ganassi to Roush until 2007? In recent months the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing has dominated my media intake. I’ve found mys...

I’m about 100 pages from the end of De Kooning: An American Master, the biography I’ve been reading for the past few weeks. It’s still a gripping read, even though there’s inevitably some repetition of themes and the writing occasionally gets carried away by its own dramatic flourishes, especially when the authors pause to describe de Kooning’s paintings in detail. Instead of trying to do a grand summation of the ...

<%image(20050713-deK-Valentine1947.jpg|299|450|Willem de Kooning, Valentine 1947)%> Valentine 1947 I&rsquo;m nearly half way through the 600+ page Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of 20th-century Dutch-born American painter Willem de Kooning, written by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan and published last year. Apparently, the project took over 10 years to complete, and you can see why: the authors seem to have scoured the archives for both publis...

There&rsquo;s a new book out called The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient by business journalist Sheridan Prasso, who was based in different Asian cities for over fifteen years (this, of course, makes her an expert). Clearly aimed at a Western (read Caucasian) audience, the book claims to debunk the persistent stereotypes about the Orient, particularly about its women. According to an L.A. Times ...

In a short essay first published in 1953, now appended to the 50th anniversary edition of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach defends his book against its critics with wit and verve. In a section devoted to defending his choice of figura as his major trope for medieval realism, he remarks that his project depended at some level on what books were available to him in Istanbul. He then offers this fabulous footnote: I was able to write the works on figura ...

The major example of bullshit Harry G. Frankfurt uses in his essay On Bullshit (written in 1986, recently published as a book by Princeton University Press) involves a story Fania Pascal once told about Ludwig Wittgenstein: I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nurshing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: "I feel just like a dog that has been run over." He was disgusted: "You don't know what a dog that has been...

My tooth hurts. Not unbearably, not excruciatingly. But it&rsquo;s letting me know it won&rsquo;t be ignored for long. A couple of weeks ago, a different tooth on the other side of my mouth had started hurting, to the point that for the 24 hours before I could get in to see my dentist, I couldn&rsquo;t eat any solid food because it was too painful to bite down. (I am now in the multi-step process of getting a root canal.) And now this other to...

-- first in a series of entries on academic writing -- For starters, his use of "here" and "now": “The former work of ours, in other words, has now turned out to be a text…” (31). “Elegance here consists in constructing bridge passages between the various concrete analyses, transitions, or modulations inventive enough to preclude the posing of theoretical or interpretive questions” (188). “What looks like the unconscious or instinct is here...

So a few weeks ago when I claimed I was reading Paris Hilton is a Fool I actually wasn't really reading it, just planning to. But now I actually have read it. I'm not sure it's worth $1.99; it's only nine pages long, the tone is fairly pedantic, and I'm not getting a lot of emotional traction out of deciding whether Paris Hilton is actually a fool or not (not sure comparing her to the dictionary definiton gets me anywhere). But, there is this ...

This week, something a little longer, over in the articles section.