Category: Poseur Alert

"YOU GUESSED IT: We switched to iPhone yesterday. Cold turkey; no training wheels; bye-bye BlackBerry; be a man; take the plunge; no dual devices. BlackBerry was amazing over several jobs and three presidents. We have had one for so long that we remember the days when people would say: “Your calculator is ringing.” (hat tip: Michael Kennedy). But BlackBerry stopped serving us: The last several models we tried would freeze all the time, held only a couple of photos, and were set for some foreign alphabet, producing odd automatic accent marks. (That’s why Bob Barnett still uses his ancient version, with the wheel.) More and more, folks regarded our trusty ’Berry with bemusement, condescension — even pity," – Mike Allen.

There are times when the royal "we" can work in terms of a rhetorical device in a column like Playbook. Not this time.

"The shining light of pastoral charity and a unified heart is sacerdotal celibacy and enshrined virginity," – Pope Benedict XVI.

“Life and death coexist in complex and subtle ways in the penis and testicles, telling a story of triumph and tragedy,” – Colin McGinn, The Meaning of Disgust.

One of many ridiculous quotes dug up (pdf) by Nina Strohminger in an entertainingly brutal review.

"The stubbornness of resistance can becomes [sic] constitutive of an identity outside of neoliberalist rationalization, which inculcates us with an individualistic and ultimately antihuman ideology of convenience that prompts us to neglect our inescapable, Levinas-ian 'infinite responsibility to the other.' Presumably we can never be truly happy on a personal level as long as we are operating as de facto deputies of neoliberalism, but it is impossible for us to will an alternative subjectivity to what it engenders, minus the crucible of precarity. Via precarity we can answer the 'call to life,'" – Rob Horning. 

"Through cupcakes, seemingly innocent little ‘treats,' we can project fantasies of who and what we desire to be. Instead of connecting us to others, however, cupcakes keep us separate and add to our sense of isolation. … [C]upcakes evidence the narcissism born of the Internet by feeding us in shallow and un-nutritious ways. Similar to the way we cruise the Internet looking for bite-size and delicious bits of information, cupcakes enable us to cruise the sugary world of self-indulgence," - Paul Hokemeyer, psychotherapist.

"My creative process is like making a wild ferment. It starts with the process of making the conditions correct. The next moment is some kind of magic thing, not unlike how ideas form or creative impulses arrive. The Invisible Allies, or microscopic "insects," come and enliven the condition. At this point, the work enters a different stage and it becomes more about making the idea happen and doing the steps to follow the creative idea-notion.  It becomes much more concrete, but still with room for not knowing and playing, and things find their place," – Sartoria, a featured Etsy seller.

(Hat tip: Helen Killer of Regretsy)

"While the Occupy movement excavates its history of successful political actions, as Julie McIntyre points out we should also incorporate into this narrative the "libidinal disruptions" and cultural productions that characterize interventions into militarized space. The golden age of rave is over (many claimed it was over by the Nineties), but squat raves persist, while sloughing off some of the more carnivalesque trappings of old. Whereas the early squat ravers’ militancy was mostly semiotic, in the language of their flyers and track titles, a generation growing up under the militarized police forces of neoliberalism often take things a step or two further," – Gavin Mueller, Jacobin.

"Along the coast, it was the sort of morning one can describe only as “Homeric.” You know what I mean: rhododactylic Dawn rising from her loom to spread her shimmering gossamers over the shadowy mountains and echoing sea, dark-prowed fishing-barks drawn up on the milky strand and caressed by the golden foam, the distant thunders of enosigaean Poseidon and argikeraunic Zeus vying above the wine-dark waves, and so on. Or so I imagine. I was actually a few hundred miles inland, in a montane grove of loblolly pines and mixed deciduous trees, awash in flickering sunlight, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. But I had Homer on my mind just then, for various reasons, and so was in a somewhat epic mood: overflowing with an unwonted sense of animal vitality, the world about me all joy and power, terror and fluent beauty, I was Diomedes upon his day of glory . . .

Such moods are fleeting, alas," – David Bentley Hart, First Things.

"Whether ribbons of light that streak and fold, frantic zooms through a brick maze, or an inexorable volley into the Milky Way, the screen saver’s most insistent optical illusion is infinitude. Reaching beyond dead opaque surface and deadpan document glare—as if receding behind, sinking into the depths of true aliveness those occlude—its generous spaciousness seems to redeem work’s merely serial endlessness. The screen saver is comfort food for thought the way pop chaos theory is: it lets us believe we are more linked by the serendipities of a butterfly’s wings than by finance capitalism. As tasks await amid cascading windows or avalanching paper, the screen saver’s immersive depths unfurl the cosmic picture that keeps the job in perspective, outsourcing gripes to karma, converting tedium into trance. It acknowledges, and briefly gratifies, one’s drowsy desire for not-work," – Chinnie Ding.

A reader adds:

Any 2200-word essay having a 4th footnote that compares Smurfs to "today’s bathetic incarnations of, say, Stakhanovite miners in Soviet Ukraine" is a total win.

"Today it seems language is completely packaged on a level of thought-utterance. Recovering the dignity and nature of authentic speaking, or dare I say 'organic' voice, is a move toward smashing historical determination. From the inside-out language seems ripped apart from being; conversely, from the outside-in death is inhaled through endless objects of commoditized life. Aisle after aisle of produced thinking we ceaselessly inhabit a neo-bourgeois ideology of moderation. Profane thinkers of the day have yet to turn to novel tactics that are sustaining fronts of resistance. How does one address something that we cannot even see?" – A. Staley Groves, Berfrois.

Dish award glossary here.