I'll be on vacation next week, which means the blog will be inactive. However, there are plenty of subsections such as Puddles of My Podcasts, Puddles of My Miscellany and Puddles of My Guest Columnists to check out while I'm gone. You can also follow my Twitter account for all kinds of spur-of-the-moment nonsense. We'll hit the ground running when I'm back and we have a couple special feature guest columns lined up for you, so don't worry about a thing.
Speaking of Puddles of My Guest Columnists, it's Friday, so its time to shine the spotlight on Mark Jack who squeezes your mindgrapes tighter than anyone else on the planet earth. So, I step aside for a much needed vacation and allow Mark Jack to show you what's what:
-ISM
Mark Jack
More and more, less visibility troubles me, more or less. I have no idea about anything, and that feeling of ignorance, of profoundest ignorance is severely important to me.
At most we contort our faces away from the celebrity we are said to resemble and in our fear of recognition, define ourselves positively as some kind of opposition to an expectation; or, if subtly done, as Opposition in general
In order that our minds might separate the plethora of information—unformed and incoherent—in the world—which spatial definition, the world, is a priori dubious—we must admit to the existence of necessary archetypes. The celebrity, then, provides a ready and popular touchstone for description. One must not imagine, however, that any celebrity defines a certain navigational archetype more perfectly than any private individual. Of course, the more we perform departures—or similarly, comedic attempts at proximity[1]--and/or various escapisms, the more the navigational archetypes broaden and include more as mere variations on a theme.
We believe ourselves to be in an age incapable of total systems. We live in the age of monographs and specialization, of bits and pieces, of fragmentary Freud. Our philosophers are historians and our social critics think piecemeal Heidegger and Hitchcock. I am unable to see how this accomplishes anything other than a plastic totality, a tangle of tediousness.[2]
Basically, a man beside me looks like someone I should know, media-wise, and yet my only concern with him is that he has begun to cry after telling me that practitioners of the ghost dance were not made bullet proof as they believed.
In a few glances about, we find our ease in the familiarity to which our eyes conform the world, and we find that all these familiarities mean little and help us less and comfort us nearly none. For all these variations in the world, for all the difference that we cite in speaking of the world’s beauty, we remain idle Platonists.[3]
-Mark
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