A Few Small Links

...before the next post. Though today I discovered that teleology does not have to necessarily end in anything! See, the Marxist would critique that Freud's discussion of foreplay as a mechanism is automatically leading towards a teleological end of intercourse, BUT, there is also a pleasure in experiencing tension by itself, and a pleasure in practices like flirting where you don't know what the end is but you know there will be some end and all the joy comes from neither party having any preconceptions, and...okay, I'm talking like a grad student. I'm halfway between turning in my first paper and a potluck dinner. Give me a break! I could go on about how the desire to achieve an idealized sexual subject-object relationship is actually a desire to return to a state of non-differentiation when we had no concept of subject or object...fine, I'll stop.

All of these came from Arts & Letters Daily...

http://www.miller-mccune.com/news/this-is-your-brain-on-kafka-1474

Or, in my case, this is why I love Borges and why I get so much pleasure in dissecting Eagleton, Freud, Foucault, etc., for every hard bit of reading we do will force us to impose logic...will make us smarter.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23111

Andrew O'Hagan, who wrote a decent novel I read in the Pretty Pictures era, now offers up an appreciation of Samuel Johnson's 300th birthday much shorter than mine, and more informative. Another reminder that despite James Boswell's excellence, there is always much more to a life than one 1,000-page text can hold. I feel for Johnson, ambitious, determined to succeed as a scholar, trying to be a friend, hungry for female companionship and understanding...if only I could write a dictionary of my own.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/136084.html

Tribute to Ted Kennedy and link to article I haven't read yet but is on the Rostan mainframe...apparently, English professors discovered that in the Victorian novel, the agonistic (NOT agnostic) structure prevails of heroes v. villains, and the heroes are more often than not conscientious open-minded nurturers while villains are undisciplined self-centered social dominators. The idea is that this resembles the psychological evolution of humans from egaltarian to political, structured, altrusitic creatures, which makes sense for Darwin's culture and a progressive era. Trollope would have agreed...how much he would have been embarrassed by the extraordinary piece I just read arguing for the lesbian subtext of Can You Forgive Her? is another story.