Carl > Recent Status Updates

Enjoying this one.

I am almost done with the audiobook version of this one, borrowed via the Enoch Pratt Library Hoopla app. I also have a print copy, an advanced proof dated 11.29.22, purchased from Normals used bookstore in Baltimore in the last days of December 2025. I am flipping back to the section concerning Acker's second novel, I Dreamt I Was A Nymphomaniac Imagining, which I am just starting in the Portrait of An Eye book.

What can I say, I am a slow reader. I just finished the first 90 or so pages of Portrait of An Eye, which contain Acker's first novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by The Black Tarantula. It was published in serial format in 1973. Acker would mail out the chapters one by one to a mailing list of friends and literary influences / influencers. It is stream of consciousness style writing.

First book of 2025 conquered. In, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution and Moral Progress, Singer engages with the view espoused by scientists such as E.O. Wilson in the 1970s and Robert Sapolsky today that as science continues to explain human behavior, we will soon have no need for concepts such as free will or prescriptive moral reasoning. He forcefully defends the idea that values cannot be inferred from facts

Chapter 5: Reason and Genes. Singer attempts to reconcile altruism for those beyond self and kin with theories of evolution which suggest such has no evolutionary value or purpose by suggesting such impartial altruism is the end result of reason, and that it has flourished because the advanced reasoning capabilities it requires are useful in other domains of evolutionary competition.

Discussion of various views and speculation on the Catalhoyuk people who existed in Turkey about 7,000 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87a...

Singer discusses implications for ethical philosophy of ideas in the scientist E.O. Wilson's books Sociobiology and On Human Nature. Singer's conclusion is that while science can supply information relevant to making ethical judgments, it cannot replace or supplant the work of philosophy in thinking about how we should or ought to go about making those judgments.

p.106: "Hamlet's hyper-self-awareness of grief as conventional behavior attacks those gathered to mourn. In the process, he upstages the deceased in a willfully shocking and attention-seeking manner."

"Hamlet's historically situated sense of generic auto-belatedness is that he fails to live up to the codes proposed by the heroes and heroines of ancient Greek tragedy. In private he collapses in disgust at his incapacity to align himself with the unworkably distant yet emotionally powerful patterns modeled by the megethos of the agents within the Greek tragic art that precedes him;"

"Deploying gender travesty, tavern slumming, "turning Turk," or other feigned religious conversions, early modern plays stage decorum as a dialectic of norms and exceptions across typological boundaries, allowing early modern authors and audiences to put selfhood's fungibility to the test." p96-97

"Precisely because of the standing tensions provided by decorum's pretended fixity, early modern plots draw power from the delicious spectacle of relentless cross-class and cross-gender and cross-confession masquerade." p.96

"These acts of valedictory tenderness transmute obedience into pathos so that we within the audience can admire and invest in the muffled thrill of subjection unto death, perhaps finding in our own sobs as we watch this scene a tender tightening of the chains that bind us to our children, our partners, our work colleagues, our bosses, our leaders, our nation. [65]" p.88

"But neither Langley nor Freud are quite adequate to the sheer flippancy of Sidney's achievement here at the level of tone: the weird joy of self-satisfaction that thrums within this witty verbal display at the prospect of self-killing. This perverse affective fold of extreme self-regard in the midst of apparent self-hatred registers the comedic work of genre as it modulates a tragic action with comedic potentiality"