On Joseph McElroy’s Fiction as a lifelong, dramatic investigation of noesis - that abstract butevocative concept rooted in Platonic idealism and redefined(through Phenomenology) asthose ineluctable acts of consciousness that constitute reality.
Thomas Cohen on ecotourism in Bolivia and discovering the post-humans of the past.
What does it mean to tour, today, the outer reaches of the empire - which is an unnamed empire (America will not do, nor the West, and so on - as if some programming encompasses, now, this series of terms and its one-time others) legislating time and fashion as well as economy? When we go, say, as pleasuring witnesses to whatever still bears the trace of a certain otherness: a cultural imprint (Andean natives), the laws of a climate (tundra), a history so marked by recent disfiguration that we, today, seem to find comfort in the commodity of a readable catastrophe. Unlike several decades if not years ago (but what, now, is a “year”?), it is so easy to travel, to transfer oneself for brief episodes to distant points - which, in turn, appear woven, then, more firmly, as the mock-aura of a frontier of any sort recedes. What does it mean to write travel, today - and is not every genre of such invoked, every narrative twitch (anecdote, observation, description, rumination) mobilized, as obstacle, at the first rustling of intent?
Christopher Knight on Stanley Fish’s Professional Correctness.
In Representations of the Intellectual (New York, 1994), Edward Said writes,
The particular threat to the intellectual today, whether in the West or the non-Western world, is not the academy, nor the suburbs, nor the appalling commercialism of journalism and publishing houses, but rather an attitude that I will call professionalism. By professional I mean thinking of your own work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one ear cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior - not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and “objective.”
“amateurism, the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession” Edward Said.