One of my favorite cultural critics is Slavoj Žižek, from Slovenia. He’s sassy, has an inimitable style and is really witty; kind of like the Oscar Wilde of postmodern Marxist philosophers. Here’s a Žižek linkdump for everyone.
First of all, he’s on Twitter. Or it may be him, at any rate. It’s not listed as a “verified account,” [...]
The Onion: New Nietzschean Diet Lets You Eat Whatever You Fear Most
Yes, I realize that it’s been a month since I’ve posted. No, I don’t find it acceptable either. More soon; it’s not as though I don’t have ideas for posts or anything.
The first two tales are from John Cage’s book Silence (Cage was a practicing Zen Buddhist), and the third was spotted in a thread at MetaFilter.
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A young man in Japan arranged his circumstances so that he was able to travel to a distant island to study Zen with a certain Master for a three-year period. [...]
Because, you know, fuck actually reading Das Capital, Phenomenology of Spirit or Ecce Homo in the internet age. Some of these Twitter feeds aren’t in English.
Karl Marx: @charles_h_marx (deutsch)
Sigmund Freud: @sfreud
Friedrich Nietzsche: @nietzsche_f (deutsch) and @nietzsche_bot
Slavoj Žižek: @zizekspeaks
G. F. Hegel: @GeorgHegel
Carl Jung: @thecarljung
(That’s a sentence I never thought I would type.)
This blog is named for 4′33″, John Cage’s famous “silent piece” and a work with which I’ve been mildly obsessed ever since reading Cage’s book/manifesto Silence as a college freshman. Today, iTunes offered part of 4′33″ as a free download. Which, of course, is awesome. If you [...]
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Kafka-related links from McSweeney’s:
Adjectives Rejected in Favor of “Kafkaesque”
Kafka at Camp: The Lost Diaries
Iris’s Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa, Coach
Social Security Denies Gregor Samsa’s Disability Claim
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“Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named ‘World’s Most Alienating Airport’” (yeah, the embedded video breaks my layout, but this is a post about Kafka after all so fuck it):
Seen on MetaFilter: Write Your Own Irish Memoir
Via gnat: The Rev. Ivan Stang, founder of the satiric Church of the SubGenius, is running an online course called “Running Your Own Cult: Dos and Dont’s.” Best quote: “At the end of the course, students will have designed and developed their own religious cult to the point of marketability.”
I dislike the “lolcats” aesthetic with some intensity… but Яolcats is pretty funny. (As posted by Gnat on the facebooks.)
The Schopenhauer-on-LSD-sounding title of this post is also the unlikeliest line to ever appear in a low-budget comedy film. Ninja Bachelor Party, co-written and co-starring Bill Hicks, was filmed over the course of a decade and was completed in 1991. I’d never seen it, but we have the youtubes now, so yay!
Bill Hicks is [...]