Friday, October 27, 2006

An invitation by way of introduction

The stereotyped blog contains one person's thoughts on all sorts of matters. This one will fit that description--but only up to a point. In my eyes it won't be successful unless it attracts other people's thoughts. I'm looking for a few good correspondents.

I'm a writer--what most people would call an independent scholar--who works as a lawyer in Rochester, New York. A year ago Monthly Review Press published a book of mine, The Fiction of a Thinkable World: Body, Meaning, and the Culture of Capitalism. I'd worked on this project for some years with very little feedback for others, and I joked with friends that I'd written it to find the people I should have talked it over with before I wrote it.

With a few exceptions my hopes remained unfulfilled. I'm still working in almost complete isolation, and that's not good for any writer, or any person. I needed different way to find those same people. This blog may be it.

I'm the first to deride the idea of an internet community; putting visual representations of words on a screen is a very inadequate substitute for the complex and multidimensional thing we call communication. But it's sometimes the best we can do.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've read " The fiction...".I read it like one does a novel, hating to put it down. I've also written a review that is expected to feature in 'Social Scientist' an academic left journal from India.I liked the essay,"Do our pets love us?" the most.We used to have a cat and it brought back her memories but most of all it seemed to talk of love in ways that was so unlike what i had assumed until now.
But there is a question. When discussing the Tao,you describe it as the harmoneous attunement with the flow of transformation, but isn't an attunement with the nature of ‘things as they are’ in modern capitalism precisely the impossible thing?

9:27 PM  

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