Here’s some stuff I’ve been reading lately:

• Over at The Hog’s Head blog, it is Lovecraft month, and Dr. Amy Sturgis has a post which includes a really cool virtual tour of a bunch of the sites in Lovecraft’s hometown, among other things such as links to some good essays and some funny quotations about Lovecraft and his influence.  E.g., “Lovecraft is a resonating wave. He’s rock and roll.” – Nail Gaiman.
• The latest Unger Report: “Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin accused Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama of hanging out with terrorists. Just how does a busy candidate find the time for terrorist pals these days?”
• Make-Believe Maverick: A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty.  Bonus silly linkage: A couple of embarrassing misspellings of the word, one, two. (yipes)
• Damn it feels good to be a banksta
  
• “Spinoza’s Anti-Modernity” by Antonio Negri.  Negri’s particular reading of Spinoza was suggested to us by Michael Mack in our Aesthetics module as some “fun” and “mad” reading to give us a recent appropriation of Spinozist thought.  A very interesting read, for sure.

  The relevance for the module lies in the following: “Spinoza’s first reception within Romanticism was thus an aesthetic reception, a perception of motion and perfection, of dynamism and forms.  And it remained such, even when the general frame and the particular components of Romanticism were subjected to the labor of philosphical critique.  Fichte, the real philosophical hero of Romanticism [my note: just ask Schlegel!], considered both Spinoza’s and Kant’s systems to be ‘perfectly coherent,’ in the incessant ontological movement of the I.”

  Most interesting conclusion regarding Spinoza contra Hegel: “[I]n Spinoza’s substance Hegel (1) recognizes the capacity of representing oneself as the boundless horizon of the real, as the presence of being in general; (2) he confirms the immediate and insoluble aesthetic power of Spinoza’s substance, by insisting on its “in itself” character; (3) he attributes to Spinoza’s substance a fundamental inability to fulfill itself in Wirklichkeit, that is, to resolve itself in the dialectical dimension of the reconciliation of the real.  This means that for Hegel the Spinozist conception of being is Romantic, but for that very reason, unmodern.  Without Spinoza it is impossible to philosophize, but outside of dialectics it is impossible to be modern.  Modernity is the peace of the real, it is the fulfillment of history.  Spinoza’s being and its power are incapable of providing us with this result.”  Negri affirms this Spinozist incapability to ultimately be modern.

• Part 3 of Ron Kuiper’s interview with Charles Taylor in The Other Journal: “Accommodation, Islamophobia, and the Politics of Mobilization: An Interview with Charles Taylor.”  It ends in a near endorsement, I think?
• Kierkegaard and the Common Man, by Jørgen Bukdahl (trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse).  This was recommended by my friend Mike, and it’s excellent so far.  I think it would go great alongside Jon Stewart’s Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered for the historical Danish stuff.  –no, not that, Jon Stewart.