Double Reading

I sent this email to a bunch of my friends earlier today and figured the rough form was worth sharing:

i think i’ve mentioned this zizek-ian idea to some of you about how right now most people cannot even fantasize about world peace or an end of capitalism or something like that (i believe he specifically [...]

I started writing this in May 2005 as part of my ongoing reviews of the book Mysterious Skin. Unfortunately I never finished this review…
Just as a note: I’ve already finished the book. It’s absolutely amazing and has, literally, disturbed me quite a bit. Tonight I am seeing the film version, so I want to get [...]

After seeing Children of Men the other month (a film which really deserves its own post and analysis…), I decided that I needed to see more movies by Alfonso Cuarón, which meant that I needed to break down and finally see the “darker” Harry Potter movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which I’ve [...]

A few weeks ago I sent my sister an email asking her why she became vegetarian (we both are and have been for roughly six years). In her response, she asked me why I am a vegetarian. I ended up writing more than I expected, so I figured I’d go ahead and post it for [...]

I’m sad to report that I was pretty disappointed with Brian de Palma’s The Black Dahlia. He’s one of my favorite directors (Femme Fatale is one of my all-time favorite movies and I also love Snake Eyes, Body Double [though I'm not sure it warrants a special edition], Scarface [which has an awesome special edition], [...]

As promised in my God Made Me Do It post, I went ahead and posted my college paper “The Problem of Faith and Reason in Brown’s ‘Wieland’; or a Kierkegaardian Critique of Wieland As a Knight of Faith.”
Keep in mind that this is probably what I consider to be my first “heavy academic” paper. I [...]

So far Did Someone Say Totalitarianism is proving to be one of my favorite Zizek books. It doesn’t use as much pop culture examples (jokes, Hitchcock movies, Kafka, etc.), but focuses more on politics and philosophy and ethics. It’s been a long time since a book has caused me to think so much, and that’s [...]

I just finished watching Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm and it reminded me of a lot of other family-oriented dramas — and it especially reminded me of plays from the 1950s.
I know it’s hardly profound, but I really like it in movies/plays/etc. traverse into the negative zone (as the movie calls it, borrowing from The [...]

About a month ago I started reading a book titled How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. More than any other book I’ve read recently, Posthuman profoundly changed the way I think about the world and sort of put into focus some themes that I have been interested in for a [...]

Thanks to Restless Reader (i.e. Molly), I found Time Magazine’s All-Time 100 Best Novels (published after 1923).
Of the 100, I have read 17… not too bad, but not great either. But then again, these lists are sorta silly and whatnot anyway. I have read:

Animal Farm
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
The Catcher in the Rye
The Corrections
The Crying of Lot [...]