“The entire world exists only in order to be televised,” Steven Shaviro writes in “Connected: what it means to live in the network society“. “Today, we are inclined to see nearly everything in terms of connections and networks. The network is the computer, we like to say. We think that intelligence is a distributed, networked… Read More Regulating the Connections Regulating Us
Digital media analyst Hito Steyerl in another context has stumbled onto important, undeniable truths. She writes, In this new age of artificial stupidity, technological disruption has turned destructive. Its greatest victim is reality itself. “This rise of artificial stupidity is the antithesis of, or rather the millions of shabby little cousins to, artificial intelligence. Just… Read More The rise of artificial stupidity
The late philosopher, William Barrett, in his famous book on Existentialism entitled Irrational Man, writes on faith and reason, “THOUGH strongly colored by Greek and Neo-Platonic influences, Christianity belongs to the Hebraist rather than to the Hellenist side of man’s nature because Christianity bases itself above all on faith and sets the man of faith… Read More Whose Wisdom? Whose Reason?
“When The Waste Land was published in 1922, T.S. Eliot changed the course of literary history. Hailed as the most influential English-language poem of the twentieth century, this masterpiece of modernist poetry was born not only from a shattered world—but from Eliot’s own psychological collapse. In this in-depth lecture, we explore the rich historical, philosophical,… Read More April is the Cruelest Month
…. and Fr. Gerald Murray on the new “altar” of the new Notre Dame Cathedral. If the altar is absurdist, “unworthy, unsuitable, modernistic” does it not mock the very beauty which is supposed to enshrine it? Making war on the Catholic Tradition. Catholic thinker and apologist Trent Horn writes, “Pope Francis announced that he would… Read More Pope Francis and The Two Minds of (Cardinal?!) Timothy Radcliffe
By Norman Podhoretz. Sex, drugs, America, the middle class, and “poetry power”: reflections on a literary entanglement of 50 years’ duration. by Norman Podhoretz, 1997. “Allen Ginsberg, Master Poet of Beat Generation, Dies at 70,” proclaimed the headline on the front page of the New York Times for April 6, 1997. Reading it, I was moved more deeply… Read More My War With Allen Ginsberg
Before there was Gloria Steinem or Michel Foucault, there was Dada. And it was deadly serious. Kickoff, Demolition time. “Dada thrives on contradictions. It is creative and destructive. Dada denounces the world and wishes to save it.” So says one narrator of journalist-filmmaker Mick Gold’s Europe After the Rain, a 1978 Arts Council of Great Britain documentary… Read More 1914. Europe After the Rain.
For some reason I thought it was another book about our frivolous TV shows and general culture (Seinfeld, Larry David’s vicious Curb Your Enthusiasm —pick your nonsense— and I already knew this about the culture. But then things got darker. Very recently I somehow bumped into this reading. I listened. I couldn’t have been more… Read More I’ve had the book for decades. But I never read it. “Shows About Nothing.”
Or, there are many ways to resent and persecute that which is hated. Originally Titled: Modern Art. The Goldsmith Company Lecture David StarkeyGoldsmith Lecture2017 The Inquiring Mind writes “Starkey is in great form in this lecture where he excoriates conceptual art “For the inaugural Goldsmiths’ Company lecture, Dr. David Starkey spoke on the subject of… Read More How Modern Art Took a Dump on Christian Western Civilization
Gregory Dipippo, New Liturgical Movement “… A fascinating documentary broadcast on NBC in mid-1968 about “The New American Catholic”, which proves the truth of the adage that nothing goes out of fashion so quickly as modernity. “As someone raised in the Church in the 1970s, I found all the talk here about “renewal” (et similia)… Read More The New American Catholic Documentary, 1968
Catholic Critique 