… by the record water levels in Lake Champlain following this winter’s snows and this spring’s seemingly endless (and sometimes torrential) rains.
There is usually about 40 feet of beach at the spot pictured above, just down the hill from us, all of it now under water. Average water levels in the lake are around 95 feet above sea level. Flood stage is 100 feet. This year they hit 103.3 ft here in Burlington.
Posted in Visual culture | Leave a Comment »
An in-law sent me a PDF of this rudely hilarious little picture book that would warm the cruel heart (or maybe cruel the warm heart) of every new parent. Turns out the artist, Ricardo Cortes, does great little books like Sketches of the Drug Wars and the celebration of power blackouts pictured above (both links here are PDFs).
Posted in Politics, Visual culture | Leave a Comment »
Graham Harman’s note reiterating his position that Whitehead, Latour, Deleuze, Bergson, and Simondon (among others) do not make up a coherent philosophical “lump” — “pack” or “tribe” might be more colorful terms here (if philosophers were cats, how herdable would they be?) — makes me want to clarify my own position on these thinkers.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Continental philosophy, Deleuze, Harman, Latour, Stengers, Whitehead | 5 Comments »
Levi Bryant has a wonderful post up in response to my announcement of Stengers’s book. If mine was “less appealing” to him, as he puts it, this may not be a bad thing, as it seems to have elicited a shimmering cascade of resonating strings in his thinking. (Perhaps appeal has a devilishly indirect manner of working…)
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Bryant, object-oriented philosophy | 1 Comment »
Further on the integral theory front, I wanted to mention another angle on the Wilber-Whitehead conversation.
Bonnitta Roy’s article “A Process Model of Integral Theory” (pdf) in the December 2006 issue of Integral Review is a thought-provoking attempt to advance post-metaphysical integral theory further toward process thought and Dzogchen Buddhism (what better combination?). Continue Reading »
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged integral theory, Whitehead, Wilber | Leave a Comment »
Isabelle Stengers’s Thinking With Whitehead arrived in the mail today. The publication of the English translation of this tome, a long nine years after the French original, is a genuine Event in the world of process-relational philosophy (or whatever you’d like to name the “beatnik brotherhood,” as Harman calls it, of philosophers of immanence and becoming — a brother/sisterhood that Harman asserts does not constitute a counter-current to the hegemonic alliance of philosophies of essence, substance, and onto-theological transcendence, but that Deleuzians and others would like to think does).
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged beatnik brotherhood, Deleuze, Harman, Stengers, Whitehead | 7 Comments »
The artist of sublime faith (of the pantheistic, immanent kind) versus the artist of sublime cynicism. “Earth is heaven (and purgatory)” versus “Earth is evil.” With catastrophe and Kubrick’s 2001 lurking in the background of both…
http://youtu.be/fLPe0fHuZsc
Posted in Cinema, Visual culture | Tagged film, Malick, von Trier | 1 Comment »
Glad someone uploaded this to YouTube…
It’s, of course, the Heart Sutra via the Akron/Family.
“Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond…”
“Gone, gone, gone to the Other Shore, attained the Other Shore having never left. Oh what an awakening! All hail!”
Posted in Music & soundscape, Spirit matter | Tagged Buddhism, music | 4 Comments »
Just the facts, Z, just the facts…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xped7A8oecM
(from a three-month-old’s perspective)
Incidentally, if there’s a single small book I’d recommend on life from this kind of perspective, it’s Daniel Stern’s Diary of a Baby. Stern was a favorite of Felix Guattari’s. That book can be followed up by the more scholarly The Interpersonal World of the Infant; make sure you read the introduction from the 2000 edition, which updates the 1985 original. Stern’s The Present Moment and Forms of Vitality are in the same vein, and very relevant to a process-relational perspective on the human life.
And while I’m at recommending books on infancy, Alison Gopnik’s Philosophical Baby and Meredith Small’s Our Babies Ourselves are the other ones I’ve been consulting, in those rare moments of spare time.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged child development, development, infancy | 3 Comments »
In defiance of the idea that Nature — the thing, or the idea (capitalized or not), or both — is either dead or unnecessary, I feel like posting some favorite passages from “Nature Alive,” the second of A. N. Whitehead’s two 1933 lectures on nature, published in Modes of Thought (1938/1968), which you can read the full text of online.
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged nature, Whitehead | 6 Comments »
Whatever one may think of Brian Leiter as a philosopher (and I have no strong opinions, not having read any of his books), he has to be commended for having what may be the best philosopher’s blog for conversations on yesterday’s Canadian election.
Canadian election, you ask? The comments on his brief post on The Canadian Election: What the Heck Happened? have been extremely perceptive.
Posted in Politics | Tagged Canada, Politics | 1 Comment »
