Kevin Karpiak > Recent Status Updates

"All I must do now was stay sound and good in my head until morning when I would start work again."

I haven't even reached the recipes yet, plus I'm full from my last meal, but still this is making me hungry

"Homer can be analyzed... but he cannot be interpreted."

Like any collection of essays like this, some are a miss. But others remain tremendous hits. Marcus' evisceration of Phil Caputo's cynical militaristic artfulness in contrast to John Cale's equally artful but honest performances feels especially pertinent for those of us trying to find a way out Trump's America. As does the essay drawing a parallel between the LA of Raymond Carver and the punk band X

Books about alcoholic rock stars and how they got "over it" (get it? Cured?) are not interesting. There are done moments here and there that are evocative and even approaches insight into a time and place, but they're few and far between and the music itself seems rigorously not the point for the author. Too bad.

“the hurried and superficial literature that the taste for exoticism and the ease of communication have so regrettably made fashionable.” --Paul Rivet, preface to Une Civilisation du miel: Les Indiens guayakis du Paraguay, by Jean-Albert Vellard (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), xx.

"One could, if one so desired, make out of this a longing for freedom. But perhaps it did only represent a wish for music and beer."

"What the modern ecological movement has forgotten was well known to Weber: the ideal of 'a life in harmony with nature' originated in the ancient Stoa, and the nature in question was not only 'blossoming nature' but also 'the nature of things' and nature in man, including his own death."

Weber had almost nothing to do with his own marriage engagement; it was negotiated between his mother and fiancée. Brotherhood, not heterosexual conjugality, remained his model of sociality.

"Bathing in the surf, that libidinal foundation of overseas naval imperialism, was not one of Weber's pleasures in life"

The nine pages of Chapter 16, "The Mineralogical Conception of Society" may be my favorite history of science piece ever

The chapter "The mineralogical conception of society" may be my favorite history of science piece ever

"I am not a historian but a philosopher with a strong after-taste of positivism. I differ from my colleagues who practice analytic philosophy chiefly over the question of history." --Ian Hacking