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Notebook

Notebook

This category is stuff that I come across in stuff I read, or watch, or listen to, and don’t want to forget. It’s also a record of thoughts that make up my head noise.

Self-awareness is good, but…

Self-awareness is good, but…

From What Sam Shepard Couldn’t Outrun in The Atlantic, By Michael O’Donnell. Self-awareness will take a man a long way, off setting his pride and blunting his tendency to become ridiculous. [Yet] Knowing who you are does not mean knowing what to do. Yeah.

Paul Kingsnorth's Four Ps

Paul Kingsnorth's Four Ps

From a post by Paul Kingsnorth on his Substack. A culture is not the same as a civilization. The latter is built from the top-down, by the use of coercive power. The former emerges from the bottom-up, from a combination of what I call the Four Ps: people, place, prayer

Moving from posistion of castration

Moving from posistion of castration

From a post by Paul Kingsnorth on his Substack. Christianity turns power on its head. This is not the same as rejecting power. It is, instead, transforming it. God’s power is not human power. Our petty little attempts to impose our will by dominance, force and violence mean nothing

Passion & Analysis

Passion & Analysis

From Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feelings of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.” Yeah.

Close Reading & Psychoanalytic Listening

Close Reading & Psychoanalytic Listening

In the article Close Reading Is For Everyone, Dan Sinykin writes, So what is close reading? As my co-editor and I write in our book, “Close reading is the practice of paying attention to a passage of text to account for at least one aspect of its meaning and to

Access to healthy communities

Access to healthy communities

In this post on his Substack, Chris Arnade makes the following observation about men today. If they don't have access to healthy communities, they will find unhealthy ones. The term I've used for the phenomenon of unhealthy communities welcoming people who can't find a

Curiosity, Judgment, Mia Khalifa, & Bella Freud

Curiosity, Judgment, Mia Khalifa, & Bella Freud

Speaking in an episode of Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud, Mia Khalifa says: I think, as I’ve grime older, desire doesn’t mean anything. I think curiosity means a lot more than desire. That’s what moves me, when someone is curious, that when someone […] desires me [in a