syllabi April 02, 2012

Hobo Lit

America’s attitudes toward its most destitute citizens have always been sharply polarized. Consider, for instance, the philosophical divide between Emerson’s uncharitable self-reliance (“Are they my poor?”) and proto-liberal Thoreau’s opinion that “none can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.” Yet the ideas of self-reliance and voluntary poverty often converge in the classic American “bindlestiff” (or hobo) figure who hops trains or hitchhikes across the country, forever living on the margins of an unforgiving

culture May 03, 2011

Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

Once-roguish writer Will Self has come a long way from his days of bragging about snorting smack in the toilet of Tony Blair’s jet. His latest dispatch finds the Brit-lit luminary blending a real-life non-narcotic obsession, walking, with his usual sesquipedalian flights of comedic fiction.

Once-roguish writer Will Self has come a long way from his days of bragging about snorting smack in the toilet of Tony Blair’s jet. His latest dispatch, Walking to Hollywood, sees the Brit-lit luminary blending a real-life non-narcotic obsession, urban psychogeography (the notion of walking as a subversive act), with his usual sesquipedalian flights of comedic fiction. But where his serrated satirical voice in 2009’s story collection Liver (mostly about habits that led to the detriment of the titular organ) sliced through page after page with deadly precision, Walking to Hollywood’s simplistic

culture January 05, 2011

Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche by James Miller

In his concise bio of twelve essential thinkers ranging from myth-shrouded ancients like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to the early moderns like Kant, Emerson, and Nietzsche, James Miller approaches philosophy as a “way of life,” in which rigorous self-examination and integrity are pitted against the discipline’s current incarnation as a willfully obscure logician’s sport.

James Miller teaches “liberal studies” at New York’s New School, and his publishing history neatly embodies the interdisciplinary nature of his trade: He’s penned a social history of rock n’ roll (Flowers in the Dustbin), a study of Foucault (The Passion of Michel Foucault), and a history of social protest (Democracy Is in the Streets). Now, in Examined Lives, he explores questions related to what he deems “the problem of philosophy” in concise bios of 12 essential thinkers ranging from myth-shrouded ancients like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to the early moderns like Kant, Emerson, Rousseau,

culture October 16, 2009

Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman

After his scrappy and occasionally amusing head-banger memoir Fargo Rock City hit stores in 2001, Chuck Klosterman soon morphed from bucolic hair-metal apologist to city-slicker pop anthropologist: The native North Dakotan moved to New York and become the voice of anti-elitism at elite print-media juggernauts such as Spin, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated. This privileged position required him to dive deeper for salvageable meaning in the Dumpsters of popular culture, even while continuing to reject anything reeking of “alternative” exclusivity.

In 2004’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, he picked

Michael Sandlin