Summer Reading List

Tommy Bahama Beach Umbrella

Summer is a great time to lie back and enjoy some of the books you might not have gotten to over the past year. Load your cooler up with your favorite drinks and snacks and lie back and enjoy Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics and Criticism for example or if your despondent about the current events and need to feel that there is an overarching meaning to all the suffering how about Hegel’s Phanomenologie des Geists. You might remember Hegel was the guy that Marx called upon for his dialectical materialism, e.g thesis, antithesis, synthesis. You take evil (Trump) and the worst of two evils (Clinton) and bingo you get…what? Well at least food for thought. Or let’s say the crazy lazy days of summer get you to wondering where does all this jihady terrorism comes from? Take a crack at the Egyptian philosopher Sayyid Qtub’s Fi Zilal al-Quran, In the Shade of the Qur’an. Or perhaps the cloudless skies and beckoning seas will make you wonder about the state of relationships. What better book for the beach than De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, which was the basis for Pasolini’s Salo, a favorite summer read for coprophiliacs. Or perhaps lying in paradise you’ll be reminded of Camus famous remark form the Myth of Sisyphus that “There is only one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” And if that’s too heavy a load to bear on an August afternoon why not settle back with either Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit or Sartre’s L’Etre et L’Neant?

The Best and the Brightest

In a recent Times piece “Third Gravitational Wave Detection, From Black-Hole Merger 3 Billion Light Years Away"(NYT, 6/1/17) Dennis Overbye says the following, “In the latest LIGO event, a black hole 19 times the mass of the sun and another black hole 31 times the sun’s mass, married to make a single hole of 49 solar masses. During the last frantic moments of the merger, they were shedding more energy in the form of gravitational waves than all the stars in the observable universe.” Overbye's piece was datelined June 1. June also happens to be the month that the Times wedding announcement section gets particularly active and Overbye’s description of the black hole may bear a striking resemblance to some of the couplings you have observed. You’ve certainly known young marrieds who seem to suck the air out of a room. But let’s translate. “Alice Swift, the daughter of Asa Swift and Melody Swift of Newton was married to today to Dr. Edward L. Saxby. His parents were the founders of Saxby Appliance Repair in Braintree. Asa Swift is an otolaryngologist in Newton. Alice Swift graduated Cum Laude from Skidmore and received her MA and PhD in Medieval Studies from Columbia. Dr Saxby, who graduated Summa Cum Laude from Yale, is a graduate of the MD/PhD program in neurophysiology at Cornell. He is currently a resident in the department of neurophysiology at Weill Cornell Hospital.” The only question is, besides dragging into its orbit every object in sight, will the combined mass of this new entity, what David Halberstam once described as The Best and the Brightest, generate more energy in the heavens or on earth?

The Final Solution: Is Kim Jong-un the Ultimate Bouncer?

Know those gigantic bouncers who stand in front of the velvet ropes outside bars and clubs? Have you ever wondered what you would do if one of those galoots were coming after you? You might feel like one of the Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels. If you remember the Disney cartoon, they succeeded in binding him up while he was soundly asleep. The fact is that there is always going to be someone bigger and stronger or even if they’re not stronger someone who threatens because they have more bravado, like the seemingly implacable Kim Jong-un. Lately president Trump has said some nice things about the North Korean tyrant, calling him a “smart cookie” for being able to hang on to power at such a young age, handling the generals and his uncle Jang Song-thaek (who he purged). Kim Jong-un is not one of those terrifying looking bouncers with the thick necks. He doesn’t look like Dwayne Johnson and yet he’s able to keep the world at bay. Can we conclude that the North Korean despot didn't appreciate the satire of his regime in Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's The Interview (which included a scene where his head was blown off)? Why else produce the kind of cyber threats that would cause the film to be pulled by major theater chains? Not bad, huh? Perhaps even though Kim is a rolly-polly little fellow, with a weird haircut and prominent front porch, he might easily find employment as a bouncer in some tony nightclub in London, NY or Paris, if he ever loses his current position.

Philosophical Adulthood

 anarchist adults in London (1912)

The nice part of childhood is the authority figures. The downside is that you have to behave and listen to them. The price you pay for the feel of being protected is your freedom. Conversely, it can be disconcerting to find yourself the master of your own fate, since it opens up a Pandora’s Box. If you're a philosophical adult (and the age at which you attain this status has nothing to do with any of the usual legal measures of adulthood such as being able to vote or drink), then you can say that only you know what is best for yourself and from this point on the integrity of the father figure, whether it be  your internist, your family lawyer, accountant, priest, rabbi or imam is immediately compromised. The reputation of the former mentor has to become tarnished for you to move past him or her and on to scale the heights of a professional career. If the world becomes your oyster then you lack the cozy feeling of being a clam, of residing under the wing of an all knowing master or leader. You may try desperately to recapture the feeling of invincibility you once both admired and resented in those individuals you deemed to possess greater knowledge, experience and skills than you had, i.e. those from whom you learned, but it's nowhere to be found. You’re like the seaman who’s been given shore leave and finds himself lost in a strange port. However, now it’s doubly hard to deal with the free time since you realize it’s going to last forever.

What's the Most Embarrassing Thing That's Ever Happened to You?

What is the most embarrassing thing that could ever happen to you? Is it seeing the look on your GI’s face as you wake up from a colonoscopy after having forgotten to do the bowel prep? What could be worse? Could it be attending the 50^th reunion of your high school class and finding that you're still considered the dork who all the cool kids refuse to talk to? Could it be losing your train of thought in the middle of the speech of your life? What about being vice president of the United States and confirming the National Security Advisor has not talked with the Russians about sanctions, when he has? Or what if you're President and insist there's massive voter fraud when there's no evidence to support this conclusion? But let’s get back to everyday life. What if you are taking a dump and this good looking guy or gal you're in love with accidentally pulls open the bathroom door, seeing you examine the toilet paper you have just wiped your ass with in the way that Hamlet examined the skull of Yorick? Most embarrassment centers around bodily functions, with pissing your pants and not being aware of the big green boogie in your nose high on the list. What if you forget to check out your merchandise and get arrested for shoplifting right in front of the president of the board of your coop who never liked you anyway? What could be more embarrassing than sitting in stirrups and finding yourself being looked over by a prodigy OBGYN, a pimply teenager who starts to giggle as he examines your reproductive system? Or what about not being able to differentiate between the husband and wife in a gay marriage?