Alaska photos 2021
Read more...Author: Albert
Hyperreality
A couple of brags, and then we’ll get down to business. I had a short story, Exit and Return, cited for Honorable Mention by The New Millenium. It was also short-listed in the Fish Publishing short story contest for 2020. Another short story, The Train, is soon to be published at Fiction Attic Press. […]
Read more...Finitude
This is a review of This Life/Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by Martin Hagglund. Two stars for a reasonably well stated vision of reality in the introduction. I can’t recommend the book otherwise. It is repetitive; it rests on counterintuitive definitions for words and phrases, except when definitions are entirely absent; and it doesn’t fulfill […]
Read more...Escalante’s Nightmare
A review of Escalante’s Dream, by David Roberts. I was really looking forward to reading this book. It was talked up in a big way in the literary press and it’s about a Spanish mission to Pueblo Indians in 1776 in the four corners area of the Southwest, a subject I am very interested in. […]
Read more...Unnameable Present
The Unnamable Present, by Roberto Calasso, is curious and compelling. The first half is about the features which render the post-millenial age “unnameable.” In it, Calasso connects otherwise disparate strands of thought, in very interesting ways. The presentation of these series of connections together characterize the unnameable present. In the second half, Calasso presents […]
Read more...Resurgent Paganism
A review of Pagans & Christians in the City/Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac, by Stephen D. Smith Stephen D. Smith is the author of several works concerning secularism and religious freedom, some of them from a Constitutional and legal perspective, as befits a law professor, as he is. In this book, […]
Read more...Postmodernism 101
In my ongoing effort to try to figure out why half the world has lost its collective mind, I read Postmodernism 101 by Heath White, and offer here a few thoughts about it. Very readable, first of all, which is not so for many tomes purportedly about postmodernism. I attribute the usual lack of […]
Read more...Brain-eating Drug
One of the blogs I pay pretty close attention to is Rod Dreher’s. On December 17th, one of his topics was porn. You may have intuited there must be a connection between porn and sexual dysfunction and perversion of various kinds; that it might not be an innocuous activity, even putting moral considerations aside. […]
Read more...Fideism and Empiricism
Apostrophe Abuse I have affirmative proof of the imminent collapse of civilization. In Britain there was something called “The Apostrophe Protection Society.” They just announced: “We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won.” In case you think I make this stuff […]
Read more...Overton Window
The Mind Friday’s (11/22/10) Wall Street Journal article by Robert Lee Holtz: Music’s Universal Pull Studied by Algorithm. Turns out there are some “universal patterns” in music, even correcting for biases of culture, perception, and the findings appearing in Western scholarship. Music apparently has “bedeviled” Darwinian biologists. Luke Glowacki of Pennsylvania State University […]
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