This was an interesting read and only strengthens my resolve to read most of the things Houellebecq has written.

It required no creativity, no imagination and only the most basic second-rate intellect.

It would be true to say that in the last years of Western civilization it contributed to a general mood of depression bordering on masochism.

Happiness is an intense, all-consuming feeling of joyous fulfillment akin to inebriation, rapture or ecstasy.

The girls who arrived at Big Sur were, for the most part, stupid little WASP bitches, at least half of whom were virgins.

Young, good-looking, famous, desired by women and envied by men, rock stars had risen to the summit of the social order.

In truth, he had always thought of Americans as idiots.

By the end of the first day, it was apparent that Catherine’s personality had aspects of the witch, but also of the lioness, which usually pointed to a career in sales management.

He doesn’t know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.

The vibrations drove the snake wild and it would throw itself against the glass until it knocked itself unconscious.

What had to be endured, he would endure.

She was forty-five years old and her vulva was scrawny and sagged slightly, but she was still a very beautiful woman.

All in all, nature deserved to be wiped out in a holocaust—and man’s mission on earth was probably to do just that.

The ambulance drove off in a howl of sirens. So ended Bruno’s first love.

Though unimpressed by the philosopher’s work, she was struck by his ugliness, which almost amounted to a handicap;

I tell you, I saw women with their legs wide open, wet and up for it, spending the whole evening masturbating because no one would fuck them.

If ever a country were loathsome, that country, specifically, was Brazil.

Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope.

All around him human beings were living, breathing, striving for pleasure or trying to develop their personal potential.

Was she masturbating while listening to Brahms?

customarily, after a number of hours, some of them would go into a trance—or pretend to.

He was the first of his generation to see beyond the ridiculous, contradictory and outmoded superstitions it adopted to the fact that New Age thought appealed to a very real suffering symptomatic of psychological, ontological and social breakdown.

He sometimes managed to coax a tit-job out of a girl, but as far as Bruno was concerned there were not nearly enough to go around.

He found in mathematics a happiness both serene and intense.

The broadcast, which lasted three or four hours, probably represents the culmination of the first stage of the great Western technological dream.

Children suffer the world that adults create for them and try their best to adapt to it; in time, usually, they will replicate it.

It has been surprising to note the meekness, resignation, perhaps even secret relief with which humans have consented to their own passing

I love that kid more than anything, but I’ve never even been able to accept his existence.

He wasn’t unhappy; the medication was working, and all desire was dead in him.

He had a sudden premonition that all his life would be like this moment. Emotion would pass him by, sometimes very close.

They would come to be rivals—which was the natural relationship between men. They would be like animals fighting in a cage; and the cage was time.

Their egotism knows no bounds—such is the nature of the individual.

Physical violence, the most perfect manifestation of individuation, was about to reappear.

He felt as though what was between his legs was a piece of oozing, putrefying meat devoured by worms.

Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved.

His eyes were wide open, but his expression was not one of grief, nor of any recognizable human emotion. His face was filled with abject, animal fear.

Cohen had no illusions about the depths to which the human animal could sink when not constrained by law.

She lost her virginity at the age of thirteen—a remarkable achievement given the time and place.

Oh, there are little moments of depression, of sadness or doubt, but they’re easily dealt with using advances in antidepressants and tranquilizers.

From the point of view of the good of the species, they were a couple of aging human beings of middling genetic value.

Ultimately, a society governed by the pure principles of universal morality could last until the end of the world.

Huxley, he would always remember, had seemed detached about the prospect of his own death, though perhaps he was simply numbed or drugged.

In the midst of nature’s barbarity, human beings sometimes (rarely) succeed in creating small oases warmed by love. Small, exclusive, enclosed spaces governed only by love and shared subjectivity.

After a couple of years of working, sexual desire wanes and people turn their attention to gourmet food and wine.

Metaphysical mutations—that is to say radical, global transformations in the values to which the majority subscribe—are rare in the history of humanity.

The couple quickly realized that the burden of caring for a small child was incompatible with their ideal of personal freedom

This vile, unhappy race, barely different from the apes, which nevertheless carried within it such noble aspirations. Tortured, contradictory, individualistic, quarrelsome and infinitely selfish, it was sometimes capable of extraordinary explosions of violence, but never quite abandoned its belief in love.

Despite the nights they spent together, each remained trapped in individual consciousness and separate flesh

Now and then the wind dies away and the silence is almost total, broken only by cries of pleasure.

Thirty years later he could not come to any other conclusion: women were indisputably better than men. They were gentler, more affectionate, loving and compassionate; they were less prone to violence, selfishness, cruelty or self-centeredness. Moreover, they were more rational, intelligent and hardworking.

All of the books I read are to be found on Goodreads but here is my year’s overview because it is customary to do these things. I count 23 which is not too shabby but should be improved upon (always).

The Sandman: Endless Nights Gaiman, Neil
Getting around to finishing all of the Sandman. Somewhat indulgent but still a very well done multi-mythology.

The Invisibles Omnibus Morrison, Grant
A hugely important graphic novel. Also mind expanding in all the good ways that are necessary for a broad view of the world.

Pump Six and Other Stories Bacigalupi, Paolo
More Bacigalupi. Even more please.

Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity and Meaningful Work and Play Scott, James C.
A short and proper introduction to anarchism, sociology, political science and history by James Scott. One of the most important scholars for our current age of odd and corrupt governance. 

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays Wallace, David Foster
Slowly getting around to reading everything by DFW. I might even finish Infinite Jest this year.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet Mitchell, David
Read during two intercontintental flights. Not the best of literature but still a tour de force by David Mitchell who makes everything look easy.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Thompson, Hunter S.
Another long overdue classic. Mind stretching.

Kill Decision Suarez, Daniel
A light but important technothriller featuring drone warfare.

Sprakeloos Lanoye, Tom
Too indulgent as is to be expected of Lanoye’s novels. We’re better off if he writes theater.

The Little Prince Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de
Another long overdue book. Read in French.

Common Sense Paine, Thomas
Highly readable and very stimulating. They don’t write ‘em like that anymore.

1Q84 Murakami, Haruki
Murakami is another of my indulgences however mixed his later books are becoming.

Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive Schneier, Bruce
A highly necessary game theoretical analysis of society’s processes.

Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing Bogost, Ian
The best introduction to OOO you could find anywhere.

Prince of Networks: Bruno LaTour and Metaphysics Harman, Graham
A very good introduction to Latour and the current speculative realistic vein in philosophy.

Koorddansen in de Kaukasus: Reis door Ruslands onbeheersbare achtertuin Koens, Olaf
Spectacular portrait of this inaccessible edge of Europe.

Essays in Love: A Novel Botton, Alain de
Forgettable.

To the Lighthouse Woolf, Virginia
Long overdue but a brilliant book.

Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames Bogost, Ian
It turns out that reading How to do things with videogames is the better choice.

The Windup Girl Bacigalupi, Paolo
Highly necessary future climate dystopia. Bacigalupian is definitely going to be a thing. Large parts of the world are already living it.

Beginning Iphone 3 Development: Exploring the Iphone SDK Mark, Dave
The book that got me into iPhone development (and did it quite well).

The Art of Travel Botton, Alain de
Entertaining.

Zendegi Egan, Greg
Some interesting ideas, but still not the hard Egan sci-fi one would want.

German friends some things need to be written but don’t take them personally. If anything, as I write below, this presents a very large opportunity for who will take it.

I had my misgivings about what passes for intellectualism in Germany both in the newspapers and in the public debate. Germans pride themselves on being a country of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers) but traces of both are thin on the ground.

I wondered about this a bit more after the Nexus Conference in Amsterdam last year which staged thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Rory Stewart, Roger Scruton, Evgeny Morozov. My Dutch friends who attended exclaimed: ‘Where are the thinkers of this calibre in the Netherlands?’ Suffice it to say there aren’t any. Nobody really expect Dutch people to be the source of great thoughts, so no loss there.

But when I then asked for contemporary German thinkers, who are read widely abroad, my friends on Twitter came up with this very thin list:

Contemporary German thinkers people came up with yesterday: Sloterdijk, Jelinek, Roche, Grass

— Alper Çuğun (@alper) December 16, 2012

I would say that Grass, Sloterdijk and Jelinek can just barely be called contemporary (the same with Habermas) and Roche hardly an intellectual.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one to notice it. Slavoj Žižek, however repugnant I find the man, mentions in a recent Salon interview:

That said, I quite admire the United States and Canada. In some ways, they are better than Europe now. France and Germany, for instance, are currently in a very low state intellectually — especially Germany. Nothing interesting is happening there. Yet it surprises me how intellectually alive The United States and Canada are. Let me give you an example: Hegelian studies. If Europeans want to understand Hegel, they go to Toronto or Chicago or Pittsburgh.

This may be a bit hard to stomach if you’re German, it isn’t too bad for aspiring thinkers. In a country where the point of everything is drowned out in a sea of pompous verbosity, opportunities abound for those with a fresh perspective and proper delivery.

Yesterday I learned that the German mail service has a special rate for mailing books because if you use normal package rates, shipping books becomes prohibitively difficult for more purposes. So there’s a special tariff for the “Büchersendung” and it is incredibly cheap: €1,00 for a half kilo book or €1,65 to ship a kilogram of paper anywhere you would like within Germany.

To be eligible for that rate you need to adhere to a very strict list of guidelines one of which is that you are not allowed to add any personal writing (i.e. a letter) to the package. You are allowed to add things such as advertisements and/or invoices. See here the updated (per 1-1-2013) list that aren’t allowed:

Adressierte schriftliche Mitteilungen (Briefe) sind weiterhin nicht zugelassen, z.B.:
individuelle Brieftexte aller Art, ob handschriftlich oder gedruckt,
Texte mit Anrede (z.B. “Sehr geehrter Kunde”),
Texte mit Höflichkeitsformel (z.B. “Mit freundlichen Grüßen”),
persönliche Mitteilungen (z.B. “Rest folgt”).

What struck me is how revealing this artifact is about German society.

The fact that there would be a special rate for books tells about the value attributed to books and the knowledge that is contained in them. Special facilities such as the Büchersendung needed to be created so even the more remote parts of the country could be connected to the book —which is to say knowledge— economy.

The fact that there are employees of the mail service who sample the shipments and check whether the criteria have been met —books have to be mailed in resealable envelopes— tells how resistent such institutions here are even to this day and how seriously they take their job. Comparing this to the Netherlands where such a system does not exist: such a rule would first not be enforced anymore and then when abuse became rampant it would be abolished.

And with that the fact that this institutional vestige still exists is a reminder of how many historic rights that serve no real purpose anymore still are upheld in Germany because there can always be found a vocal group of people somewhere who want to maintain it and are willing to spend the effort to campaign for it. I don’t know if that is the case with the Büchersendung right now but I’m quite sure it will be with us for quite some time still.

I read Consider the Lobster as a bit of a reprieve from the book guilt Infinite Jest still casts over my night stand and as a long overdue requiem to the literary colossus DFW is. Here’s the stuff I found noteworthy:

forked dorsally over the knee of a morbidly obese cellphone retailer

It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies

The impression is that of a very expensive thoroughbred being led onto the track under a silk blanket.

butane gas to be pumped via PVC into her lower colon and set afire on expulsion, resulting in a 3.5-foot anal blowtorch

wherein a starlet’s vagina and rectum are simultaneously accessed by two woodmen

a straight-on deep-focus view of a dilated and wood-ready orifice.

with everybody seemingly teetering right on the edge of coitus all the time

send everyone tumbling into a tangled mass of limbs and orifices

alliteration and anatomically mixed metaphor Schwartz’s

moments of near-Periclean eloquence

“I want to thank my mother, who spread her legs and made all this possible.”

the other famous phallocrats

the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself.

seem less like John Updike than like somebody doing a mean parody of John Updike.

It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.

the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.

That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward—we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.

Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?

somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn’t mind letting you know it.

the bland condescension with which he performs the two occult keystrokes that unfreeze your screen is both elitist and situationally valid

a three-week Emergency Remedial Usage and Grammar Unit, during which my demeanor is basically that of somebody teaching HIV prevention to intravenous-drug users

The kids end up scared, both of me and for me.

way the beloved English of their youth is being trashed in the decadent present

can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.

Without the existence of these external rules, there is no difference between the statement “I am in fact using tree consistently with my own definition” and the statement “I happen to be under the impression that I am using tree consistently with my own definition.”

it seems indisputable that we put some extra interpretive burden on the recipient when we fail to honor certain conventions.

People really do judge one another according to their use of language.

both are deficient in the same linguistic skill—viz., the ability to move between various dialects and levels of “correctness,”

like most dogmatists they’ve been extremely stupid about the rhetoric they used and the audience they were addressing.

This reviewer’s own humble opinion is that some of the cultural and political realities of American life are themselves racially insensitive and elitist and offensive and unfair, and that pussyfooting around these realities with euphemistic doublespeak is not only hypocritical but toxic to the project of ever really changing them.

Standard Written English, which we might just as well call “Standard White English” because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people.

PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact—in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself—of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo

censorship always serves the status quo.)

that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people’s sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

it’s tempting to think AE’s real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.

which was indeed a rhetorical boner.

His argumentative strategy is totally brilliant and totally sneaky, and part of both qualities is that it usually doesn’t seem like there’s even an argument going on at all.

Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.

that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel

the seductive immortality of competitive success and the less seductive but way more significant fragility and impermanence of all the competitive venues in which mortal humans chase immortality.
me, the real mystery—whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither.

the most complicated stuff also tended to be the most interesting

politicians’ statements of principle or vision are understood as self-serving ad copy and judged not for their truth or ability to inspire but for their tactical shrewdness, their marketability.

the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.

And we keep learning for years, from hard experience, that getting lied to sucks—that it diminishes you, denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world.

So who wouldn’t yawn and turn away, trade apathy and cynicism for the hurt of getting treated with contempt?

coffee that tastes like hot water with a brown crayon in it

By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thingas not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.

who knows she’s average and just wants a decent, noncynical life for herself and her family

But if you’re subjected to great salesmen and sales pitches and marketing concepts for long enough—like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let’s say—it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is a salesman and really ultimately doesn’t give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself

The answer depends on how gray-area-tolerant you are about sincerity vs. marketing, or sincerity plus marketing, or leadership plus the packaging and selling of same
whether he’s truly “for real” now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours.

but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way — hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all.

There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other

I recently discovered the fan fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by the esteemed Eliezer Yudkowsky (I used to read his friendly AI stuff back in the day) and having never read any Harry Potter I still immensely enjoyed this.

In science our powers wax by the year.

I don’t want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.

Star Wars was the only universe in which the answer actually was that you were supposed to cut yourself off completely from negative emotions

everyone in the wizarding world is completely stupid.

That your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality

“If you have not dealt with journalists before, take it from me that the world gets a little brighter every time one dies.”

But then human beings only understood each other in the first place by pretending.

and so it might not have occurred to you that to respect the truth, and seek it all the days of your life, could also be an act of grace.

So why would anyone possibly think any thought so silly as that death is a good thing? Because you’re afraid of it, because you don’t really want to die, and that thought hurts so much inside you that you have to rationalize it away, do something to numb the pain, so you won’t have to think about it -

I’m certainly becoming a bit frustrated with… whatever’s going wrong in people’s heads.

The Earth was what made the stars significant, made them more than uncontrolled fusion reactions, because it was Earth that would someday colonize the galaxy, and fulfill the promise of the night sky.

As though there’s something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness, not right away, but it seems to follow wherever science goes.

That was what it meant to be used by a friend, that they would want the use to make you stronger instead of weaker.

I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction.

A lot of common wisdom like that isn’t just mistaken, it’s anti-epistemology, it’s systematically wrong.

Or rather, cheating is what the losers call technique

He’d been struck, even then, by an essential emptiness in the indignation of politicians – though he hadn’t had the words to describe it, at that age – a sense that they were trying to score cheap points by hitting at the same safe target as everyone else.

How very sad, how very hollow the indignation, of those who refuse to say that money and life can ever be compared, when all they’re doing is forbidding the strategy that saves the most people, for the sake of pretentious moral grandstanding…

Hogwarts students don’t actually know enough cognitive science to take responsibility for how their own minds work.

And you have already witnessed, I wager, that their fondness vanished like dust in the wind once it was no longer in their interest to associate with you…

And now it’s waiting until new chapters arrive, a pleasure and torture at the same time.

I read this pamphlet (at Gutenberg) by Thomas Paine a while back on a mountain. However short it may be it packs a massive punch and is brimful with powerful rhetoric. It also contains a rather definitive argument against monarchy. Highly recommended.

First, Because it tends to the decrease and reproach of all religion whatever, and is of the utmost danger to society to make it a party in political disputes.

And the very publishing it proves, that either, ye do not believe what ye profess, or have not virtue enough to practise what ye believe.

We fight neither for revenge nor conquest; neither from pride nor passion; we are not insulting the world with our fleets and armies, nor ravaging the globe for plunder.

that either the doctrine cannot be refuted, or, that the party in favour of it are too numerous to be opposed.

No going to law with nations; cannon are the barristers of Crowns; and the sword, not of justice, but of war, decides the suit.

I have frequently amused myself both in public and private companies, with silently remarking, the specious errors of those who speak without reflecting.

To unite the sinews of commerce and defense is sound policy; for when our strength and our riches play into each other’s hand, we need fear no external enemy.

For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law OUGHT to be King; and there ought to be no other.

where a republican government, by being formed on more natural principles, would negotiate the mistake.

England consults the good of THIS country, no farther than it answers her OWN purpose.

In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet

there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.

This is my favorite:

Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men, who CANNOT see; prejudiced men, who WILL NOT see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves;

The first king of England, of the present line (William the Conqueror) was a Frenchman, and half the Peers of England are descendants from the same country; therefore, by the same method of reasoning, England ought to be governed by France.

we forget the narrow limits of three hundred and sixty miles (the extent of England)

But Britain is the parent country, say some. Then the more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families; wherefore the assertion, if true, turns to her reproach;

her motive was INTEREST not ATTACHMENT; that she did not protect us from OUR ENEMIES on OUR ACCOUNT, but from HER ENEMIES on HER OWN ACCOUNT, from those who had no quarrel with us on any OTHER ACCOUNT, and who will always be our enemies on the SAME ACCOUNT

Last weekend I finished the Prince of Networks (which is in fact available for free online and I recommend you read it, though Alien Phenomenology may be a more concise and lighter introduction into speculative realism) by Graham Harman.

I must say I’m quite impressed by the clarity and breadth of thought that Harman and many of the philosophers in that current express. This interview (my excerpts from it) with him contained some insights and phrases that I had not seen expressed before.

More generally speaking whether it is Harman or Bogost or DeLanda or any of the others, it is particularly nice to be reading the current philosophers of our age who right now are relevant, alive and online. This last bout of reading has finally made me reach the long overdue realization that philosophy need not be a dead pursuit nor that writings on philosophy need to be obtuse.

So here are my notes from the book which is filled with brilliance:

the engineer must /negotiate/ with the mountain at every stage of the project, testing to see where the rock resists and where it yields, and is quite often surprised by the behaviour of the rock.

it is impossible to derive one thing instantly from another without the needed labour

Actors become more real by making larger parts of the cosmos vibrate in harmony with their goals, or by taking detours in their goals to capitalize on the force of nearby actants.

It is never the actant in naked purity that possesses force, but only the actant involved in its ramshackle associations with others, which collapse if these associations are not lovingly maintained.

Harmony is a result, not a guiding principle.

Systems are assembled at great pains, one actant at a time, and loopholes always remain.

To see something ‘directly’ means following a lengthy chain of transformations from one medium into another and on into another.

Their main difference is that Plato’s metaphysics seeks reality at a layer deeper than all articulation by qualities, while Latour thinks there is no reality outside such articulations.

Yet they are allowed to enter only by virtue of their effect on other things, since Latour holds that there is never anything more to them than this.

The question is only whether we grant sufficient reality to objects when we say that a thing is not just /known/ by what it ‘modifies, transforms, perturbs or creates’, but that it actually is nothing more than these effects. If the pragmatism of knowledge becomes a pragmatism of ontology, the very reality of things will be defined as their bundle of effects on other things.

Latour does not mind defining an actor by what it affects, but he does not allow an actor to borrow its effects in advance. Payment in real time is demanded at every stage of the translation.

If not for this basic asymmetry between an actor’s components and its alliances, we would have a purely holistic cosmos. Everything would be defined to an equal degree by the actors above it as below it, and there would be no place in reality not defined utterly by its context.

Monisms are too pious and sugary in their holism, dualisms too static in their trench warfare, and triads too smug in their happy endings. But fourfold structures allow for tension no less than plurality, and hence we find Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle, Scotus Eriugena, Francis Bacon, Vico, Kant, Greimas, McLuhan, and others chopping the world into four.

Instead of an objective nature filled with genuine realities and a subjective cultural sphere filled with fabricated fictions, there is a single plane of actors that encompasses neutrinos, stars, palm trees, rivers, cats, armies, nations, superheroes, unicorns and square circles. All objects are treated in the same way. Latour justifies this with his broad conception of an actor as anything that has an effect on other things. […] Latour adds that if all entities are equally real, all are not equally /strong/. Fictional characters and myths have weaker legions of allies testifying to their existence than do lumps of coal. Hence, we can democratize the world of actors and still avoid the free-for-all of social construction.

In this sense, an object is a sort of invisible railway junction between its own pieces and its outer effects. An object is /weird/—it is never replaceable by any sum total of qualities or effects. It is a real thing apart from all foreign relations with the world, and apart from all domestic relations with its own pieces.

This interview with Graham Harman is filled with valuable tidbits, some of which I wanted to collect and share for your reading pleasure as much as mine:

And like it or not, Apple and Amazon are stirring up more interest, even among intellectuals, than most academic critiques of capitalism. Is that just because we are all a bunch of brainwashed idiots locked in on our own trivial conveniences? Hardly. It’s because these companies are also doing something exciting that addresses where consciousness really is today, and which it didn’t know that it wanted. Did I know in advance that my brain would catch fire as soon as I had a smartphone and a tablet computer? Not at all. I initially thought both of these things were consumerist pseudo-needs, just like the academic Left still does. But I was wrong, and so were they. To have the right electronic device in your hands can sharpen your brain as much as the discovery of an important new author.

Life has to be optimistic, or it becomes merely reactive. And I really fear that the Left is becoming the permanent homeland of the critics and the grumblers.

It is frankly a failure of imagination to try to explain away 1989 by griping about how Central Europe was simply recuperated into a banal consumer capitalism and nothing changed, or that at least political discourse mattered behind the Iron Curtain before ’89, and so forth.

And just goes on and on. The entire thing is worth reading and positions Harman as one of the more notable thinkers and philosophers we have right now.

I dived into my log to make the yearly tally of what I did and saw. All in all 2011 has proven to be a good year.

It was a bit of a slow movie year though. I only saw 56, the best of which were: “Drive”, “Melancholia”, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”, “Blue Valentine”, “Norwegian Wood”, “True Grit”, “Almanya”, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Kosmos”.

I went to 32 plays in 2011. The best ones:

• “Die Macht der Finsternis” in die Schaubühne
• “Het meisje dat teveel van lucifers hield” by NTGent in Frascati WG
• “Songs at the End of the World” by Wunderbaum in SSBA
• “De Russen!” by Toneelgroep Amsterdam at the Holland Festival
• “This is how you will disappear” by Gisèle Vienne in Stadsschouwburg Utrecht (back at the Kaai in February!)
• “Langs de grote weg” by de Vere in Frascati

I read 21 books in 2011. The most notable of those were:

• “The Life and Death of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs
• “The City & The City” by China Miville
• “De kaart en het gebied” by Michel Houellebecq
• “Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart
• “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell
• “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway
• “Unit Operations” by Ian Bogost

I started tracking the games I played around halfway through the year, so this is not an exhaustive list, but five games I really enjoyed last year were: “Where is my Heart?”, “Nidhogg”, “Space Alert”, “The Binding of Isaac” and “The Resistance”.