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×Writing
Essay on Akutagawa's Spinning Gears
On 'Spinning Gears' (Cogwheels) — Akutagawa's hallucinatory final story, paranoia and dread circling the edge of a breakdown.
×Reading
Liturgies of the Wild — Martin Shaw
Acclaimed mythographer, storyteller and Christian thinker Martin Shaw argues that we live in a myth-impoverished age, and that such poverty has left us vulnerable to stories that may not wish us well. Drawing on the 'ancient technologies' of myth and initiatory rite, he offers a road to wholeness, maturity and connection.
×Reading
The Need for Roots — Simone Weil
Written in 1943, when Weil — unable to join the French resistance — worked in London for the Free French government in exile, commissioned to outline a plan for Europe's renewal after Nazism. She seized the chance to denounce the false values of contemporary civilization, seeing in the cult of material things a devastating loss of spirit, and of human values.
×Writing
The Library of Babel through Camus' Myth of Sisyphus
Reading Borges' infinite library as an absurdist universe — and asking whether Sisyphus, wandering its hexagons forever, must be imagined happy.
×Writing
Neurodiversity and Zapffe's The Last Messiah
Writing about my own experiences of AuDHD through the lens of Peter Wessel Zapffe's famous essay on human consciousness and the burden of self-awareness.
×Reading
The Scent of Time — Byung-Chul Han
Drawing on Heidegger, Nietzsche and Arendt, Han argues we can overcome our temporal crisis only by revitalizing the vita contemplativa and relearning the art of lingering.
×Reading
Short Stories — Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) is one of Japan's foremost stylists — a modernist master whose stories are marked by original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour. Tales like 'Rashōmon' and 'In a Bamboo Grove' turn morality upside down; in later works such as 'The Life of a Stupid Man' and 'Spinning Gears' he drew on his own life to devastating effect, revealing his melancholy and terror of madness.
✓ Finished×Reading
Saving Beauty — Byung-Chul Han
Cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han reinvigorates aesthetic theory for our digital age, interrogating our preoccupation with all things slick and smooth — from Jeff Koons's sculptures and the iPhone to Brazilian waxing. Beauty today is a paradox: ubiquitous but stripped of transcendence, reduced to the aesthetic dimension of consumerism, its sublime and unsettling aspects giving way to corporeal pleasures and 'likes' — a kind of 'pornography' of beauty.
✓ Finished×Writing
Essay on Byung-Chul Han's Saving Beauty
Writing on Han's smooth beauty — what art loses when it can no longer disturb, only please.
✓ Finished
×Making
Video essay on my dogs & I/Thou by Martin Buber
Animating and filming footage for a video essay exploring my relationship with my dogs through Buber's philosophy of I/Thou.
✓ Finished