Blog Posts by Subject: Criticism and Theory

Jurgen Habermas famously addressed the controversial subject of post-secularity  in his "Notes on a Post-Secular Society." Therein, Habermas concludes to think and understand the post-secular concludes with a Kantian limit, "So, if all is to go well both sides, each from its own viewpoint, must accept an interpretation of the relation between faith and knowledge that enables them to live together in a self-reflective manner." This is all well and good.

I had not seen my friends S. or F. for quite some time.

We were standing outside the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 5th Avenue; traffic buzzed and halted around us. Sitting on the steps like the boys and girls in Rome who hang around the Spanish Steps, smoke cigarettes and behave like the images they see on television who are modelled after them, I think to myself, we are encumbered in one city by Ghostbusters, in fiction parading out before us, haunted in another at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Citizens take heed of your cities that hallmark events that never happened, I think. I see a stray dog wander by; perhaps it had found some undiscovered corner of Bryant Park to 

Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical, stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth. We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if that beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and that all we had to do was to keep pulling until 

 "What ails you, Polyphemos? Why do you cry so sore/in the starry night? You will not let us sleep./Sure no man's driving off your flock? No man/has tricked you, ruined you?/
Out of the cave/the mammoth Polyphemos roared in answer:/
'Nobody, Nobody's tricked me, Nobody's ruined me!'"

—The Odyssey, Book IX

In Chapter 18 of Candide, our hero and his valet Cacambo arrive in the utopian kingdom of El Dorado, where the streets glitter with precious stones. The people of El Dorado speak Cacambo's mother tongue, a Peruvian dialect indecipherable to Candide, and Cacambo becomes the sole communicator and interpreter. Candide relies on his valet to communicate with the natives of this strange and beguiling country.

Now that the art economy has collapsed and followed the mortgage derivative finance home boom bust buy now pay later consumption as a way of life whatever whatnot economy into the dumpster of ideas, I’d like to recommend a very sound investment for the young artist class: Get a Library Card and check out Lunar Follies by Gilbert Sorrentino. Or if you need a place to keep warm,  come read it here. & if you’re a contemplative fellow or gal and find yourself mulling over the heroic American Art-Culture Scene of the 50’s & 60’s: read Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.

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