Mirsad Avdic

After a spell sitting on the porch, Charles Bowden finally figures out Edward Abbey's sly trick: he had something to say and simply said it.

A good alternative to the reflective style would be what Charles Bowden defined as "assaulting the reader."

It's also something that Javier Marías does, a good example is the beginning of Tomás Nevinson that leads up to "The distance is nothing, it’s only the first step that is difficult."

In his book Mezcal, Charles Bowden mentions that the deserts force us to think rather than argue.

The introduction to the essay collection To Begin Where I Am tells us to pay attention to the reflective style of Czesław Miłosz, it's a sharp contrast to the argumentative style we are usually accustomed to.

@jonathanbfine I don't read because it shows me that there are people out there who are smarter than me, which is obviously false. Thus I conclude, most of literature is simple sophism, I mean solipsism, yes, that's the word.

Intellectuals:

Behind their backs are not double beds for lovers, hard sleep, the past, or days in shrinking files backstretched—but, rather, huge clouds, circling together, of butterflies.

Rereading the part about the dreaming moths and the sentient life of lesser beings by Sebald made me think of the poem about butterflies from Brodsky. By reading the one with the other in mind, behind their backs are small fragments, tiny pieces of consciousness and dreams.

They all converge around the paragraph from St. Augustine about love and gravity, for the body is borne by its gravity, as the spirit by its love, whithersoever it is borne.

Czesław Miłosz names Simone Weil and Schopenhauer as the ones who influenced him the most. I followed his path with that in mind. I thought I'll manage to draw some parallels, what they all have in common.

@roryisconfused every time someone brings up Joyce I remember this paragraph from Zweig, he'd be tired of you all lmao, not sure how credible this encounter is though,

It’s all empty provocation I know, but still, it would be very weird to actually read Crime and Punishment and Ulysses and think that the former is more representative of a classical sense of “beauty”. It’s great, but it’s a fucking *ugly* book! It reads like a panic attack!

@jonathanbfine @DevinGoure I read half of his Communicative Action and then I remembered that I have a note somewhere that says, it says "Shestov Reason = Evil," so I never bothered continuing.

From my conversation with @DevinGoure for the Moral Minority podcast, where I talk about Habermas’s “fairy tale of Enlightenment.”

And the path? Like there's a path anymore, we simply walk around and hope that we're on the right one.

There's a short text by Robert Walser about snow, he writes about how when everything is covered in snow, the objects lose their color and one cannot get dirty, what was angular and pointed now owns a white cap and is rounded.

@jonathanbfine Er spielt mit seiner Flinte, Die funkelt im Sonnenrot, Er präsentiert und schultert -- Ich wollt, er schösse mich tot.

Every day I am grateful to have been spared from a tenure track position on account of my bad luck.

@kunktation @grok prove him wrong

One way to suggest the limitations of LLMs would be to compile a list of best AI jokes. See, there aren't any.

@jonathanbfine the F in Fine stands for... no, wait, we ain't doing that

The J in Jonathan actually stands for jenius.

@SedimentedGeist *screams in Schopenhaurian* absolute this, absolute that, what the fuck does that even mean?

gf just sent me this and we're cackling. i hope that helps!

@katherineveritt I really liked the presentation, Less Than Nothing is in my backlog for ages, I should move it forward a bit, how many languages do you speak?

Some of you asked for this talk. Here it is! "Can Philosophers Think Quantum Physics?" 🚀✨ youtube.com/watch?v=K9VZ2i…

@jonathanbfine cover image team fortress 2 vibes, daytona 500 vibes