I was reading an interesting article in the travel section of the NY Times yesterday about Nabokov’s journeys with his wife Vera across some of the more desolate parts of America, which form the basis for the extended sequence in “Lolita” in which Humbert and Lo desolately crisscross the desolate country. It occurred to me […]
We need a meme to express what seems to be happening to people’s brains. The internet has created, along with other cultural forces, a certain type of mind, which affects even people who should be immune to it. I propose to call them “Net Heads”. We can also speak of having “net head” or being […]
I just read a rather silly review of my book Inborn Knowledge by Peter Carruthers. Was he even trying to get the point? I make it a policy not to reply to reviews, especially silly ones, but there is a point I would like to correct because it concerns a friend of mine: Jerry Fodor. […]
I’ve started to think that the customary way we divide up the mind into the conscious, the unconscious, and the preconscious is too crude and unrevealing. The connection between, say, a perception and an immediate memory of it is far too close to be captured by these categories. Isn’t it the same thing that exists […]
Tom was a feral cat that lived on my property. I fed him every day for two and a half years, two or three times a day. He was half blind and quite lame; he often had wounds on his head. I used to pat him occasionally, but then one day he bit me, so […]
The world has been becoming steadily more insane for the last few years, but the era of the Great Orange Blob marks a new high. It would be funny if it weren’t so scary. Are we seeing the dawn of a new fascism or is it just a passing phase of the overheated media? I […]
I just want to note the death of Prince. I found him quite possibly the most brilliant pop artist of the last thirty years–as a songwriter, performer, and guitarist. “Kiss” is one of the greatest pop songs of all time. I also liked his look and height. I have nothing original to say about him, […]
For those wondering where I’ve been recently the answer is that I’ve been working on a collection of new papers which I intend to publish soon. The thing is there are 125 of them, so it took a lot of work to finalize them.
It ended and we must go back to reality. What the show was really about, though I have never seen it mentioned, is virtue. It was about good and bad people doing good and bad things. It was about personal vice–greed, lies, envy, malice–and dealing with it. And it took a very literal and direct […]
I was watching (as is my wont) another nature program yesterday, about penguins. Among many marvelous things I was struck by one scene in particular: after showing the remarkable parental devotion of the parents, the camera caught them feeding their chick for the last time and then waddling off to leave it to fend for […]