(Via the Library of Congress.)
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TCM Remembers 2025
My dad loved watching the Academy Awards’ in memoriam segment, and I do too, but TCM does a better job with their corresponding video now, and they put it out months earlier. If one of the ways we mark time is by the deaths of famous people, I wonder how true that will still be as monoculture crumbles. I also wonder, as I first did in 2014, whether good people are dying faster than new people are becoming good.
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We Alter Ourselves in What We Do
Interviewer: Your intellectual journey has been marked by several shifts. You’ve moved from Derrida to neuroscience, and your thinking has evolved to encompass the threats posed by artificial intelligence (AI). This is quite rare among philosophers…
Catherine Malabou: In an interview published in Dits et Écrits, Foucault makes a magnificent statement: “I don’t care at all about the academic status of what I do, because my problem is my own transformation. That’s why, when people tell me, ‘You thought this a few years ago, now you say something else,’ I reply, ‘Do you think I’ve worked so hard, all these years, to say the same thing and not be transformed?’ This transformation of oneself through one’s own knowledge is, I believe, something quite close to the aesthetic experience. Why would a painter work if he isn’t transformed by his painting?” We alter ourselves in what we do. This isn’t necessarily the result of a sudden decision or revolution; it happens through successive shifts that, paradoxically, weave together fidelity to oneself.
—2017 Philosophie Magazine interview (French to English via Google Translate)
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Read
“When young directors come to me, I tell them: Read, read, read, read, read. If you don’t read, you’ll presumably make films anyway, but they’ll be mediocre at best. If you don’t read, you’ll never make anything great.
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What a Delight
We plan, we toil, we suffer — in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol’s eyes? The title deeds to Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake up just in time to smell the coffee and bacon and eggs. And, again I cry, how rarely it happens! But when it does happen — then what a moment, what a morning, what a delight!
—J. B. Priestley
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Why Art Is Important
One of the things I believe about art is that we have art because there are situations that are so difficult and complex that they defeat all our other tools for thinking.
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Cormac McCarthy’s Library
“He never left the house without a book. He never left the house without a gun. Both were equally unthinkable.”
(Via Smithsonian magazine.)
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Why Are Movies About Research So Addictive?
Came across and liked this video essay by Patrick Willems, who is new to me, especially the contrast it makes between what research looks like in real life and what research looks like in the movies.
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Second Nature
When I was in the eleventh grade, I went on a field trip to the University of Miami to hear a very aged Robert Frost read his poetry. After listening to his melodic recitation, I went up to meet him and noticed that his book was upside-down. He hadn’t been reading at all.
—Fredlyn Rosenfeld, 55, Teacher, Miami Beach, Florida, as quoted in Americans’ Favorite Poems, edited by Robert Pinksy and Maggie Dietz, 2000.
Submitted For Your Perusal 