A few things.<\/p>\n
t r u t h o u t has an interview with Simon Critchley here<\/a>. Note that Critchley has been inspired by the Australian pamphlet series cum<\/em> book How To Make Trouble and Influence People<\/em><\/a> and titled his next book How to Stop Living and Start Worrying: Conversations With SC<\/em>.<\/p>\n Speaking of Critchley, a recent issue of Critical Horizons<\/em> (Volume 10, Number 2, 2009<\/a>) is dedicated to him. (And his worries<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Speaking of crackademics, Benjamin Kunkel<\/a> helped me to understand (whichever drugs) Frederic Jameson (is imbibing when he writes) in his review<\/a> of Uncle Fred’s latest smash hit Valences of the Dialectic<\/em>. Choice quote:<\/p>\n In Late Marxism<\/em> (1990), his book on Adorno, Jameson wrote of Dialectic of Enlightenment<\/em> that \u2018the question about poetry after Auschwitz has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to read Adorno and Horkheimer next to the pool.\u2019 With Jameson the question has been whether you could avoid reading him on a university campus, or continue reading him outside one. In Jonathan Franzen\u2019s The Corrections<\/em> (2001), Chip Lambert, a former associate professor of literature in his thirties, decides to purge his library of Marxist cultural critics in order to raise some funds with which to indulge the yuppie tastes of his new girlfriend, Julia. Each of these books, Chip recalls, had once \u2018called out\u2019 to him \u2018with a promise of a radical critique of late capitalist society\u2019. And yet: \u2018Theodor Adorno didn\u2019t have Julia\u2019s grapy smell of lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didn\u2019t have Julia\u2019s artful tongue.\u2019 Unburdened of his Marxist texts and their \u2018reproachful spines\u2019, Chip proceeds to buy Julia a fillet of \u2018wild Norwegian salmon, line caught\u2019 for $78.40 at an upmarket grocery store Franzen calls the Nightmare of Consumption, a name to suggest that faced with the brazenness of yuppiedom (as by the 1990s it was no longer even called; it was just the way that almost anyone who could afford to be, was) all satire or cultural criticism met defeat. Jameson\u2019s Postmodernism<\/em> had concluded with a call to \u2018name the system.\u2019 Ten years later, the system seemed to reply cheerfully to any ugly name you might call it. Hi, I\u2019m the Nightmare of Consumption. Nice to meet you!<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Doing Modernity is a blog in which A Sociologist Looks at Everyday Life in Contemporary Society. On it, Wayne(?) — who is A Sociologist — writes about Anarchism: A Radical Critique of Modernity<\/a> (among other things). Speaking of blogs, Aragorn! has one here<\/a>.<\/p>\n