Rory

If someone at Faber & Faber wants to give me advanced copies of Calculation of Volume III and IV, I’m just saying they’d get thanked in my thesis acknowledgements…

Autumn is nearly in full force in Edinburgh, and remains one of my absolute favourite things about my home. Some say dreary, I say comforting.

The ability of Hegel to cause the eyes to wander from the words on the page to stare longingly out the window or become fascinated by the dust particles in the air is unparalleled and should be studied.

I’m still reeling from the Dramione fanfic turning into a millions of united states of america dollars seven movie deal.

I also just want to talk more about Le Guin’s contributions to philosophical thought more because she’s so woefully ignored as a philosopher in her own right.

Intermedial or comparative approaches to pedagogy just seem like not only a great place to start, but a relatively simple way to encourage students to call upon interesting resources in their work or in class, and set a groundwork for deeper, creative engagement with whatever the core material is.

I’d love to know why early undergraduate ethics courses don’t make use of Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, because it seems like such fantastic entry material into ethical enquiry—virtually all ethical schools of thought could be applicable or related to the story in a practical way.

It’s either that, or Terry Pinkard loves italics. I choose to believe Hegel loved italics though, just like I choose to believe that I understand Hegel with a once in a generation nuance and complexity in spite of the fact I’m commenting on his possible overuse of italics to procrastinate.

Every time I begin to feel self conscious about my liberal use of italics in my work I just read Hegel for a bit and feel better by contrast. Our brother in Christ loved emphasising words, sometimes every second or third word in a page-length run-on sentence.

a real unplug then plug back in if ever there was one even

A soft restart even

Found my teen reading Hegel. After throwing up and having a fetal cry in the shower, I went to Best Buy and got him a PS5. Please. Your kids might be reading philosophy. GERMAN philosophy.

Leave church now and go check your kids’ rooms and hard drives. These perverts have pdfs.

I don’t know when we decided that the Miller translation of Phenomenology was old hat, but I’ll admit, the Pinkard translation, above all, does have far nicer feeling paper.

If you would like to arrange to meet me in Greyfriars Kirkyard for a meeting you can get my in-grave-out-of-office hours by asking one of our local corvids.

My phone just reminded me during the extended strike action of ‘23, I occasionally arranged meetings to be in Greyfrairs Kirkyard for a more informal, off-campus meeting spot, and I have to say, that was a pretty dark academia way to avoid crossing a picket line.

Thoughts and prayers will warm your heart and stop the cold I am very smart

I’m growing more and more tired with the people who are pointing at things and saying it’s the harbinger of doom when, like, the doom is here. It’s been here for a long while. And pointing and saying “uh oh that looks doom” is just an anaemic way to signal awareness without following it with action.

I’m still thinking about the Nicki Minaj feature on “Side to Side” when she envisions Ariana riding a ‘dick bicycle’ which I imagine will someday be taught about in undergraduate metaphysics courses.

It was a very cool touch for the café I was in to have a playlist that entirely consisted of Ariana Grande music pre-pandemic and to change the song every time she started singing or rapping about sex. It was like the Hit Clips version of Ariana Grande—about twenty seconds of each song.

And of course Cesar and Julia’s baby is immune to time too, because why not throw some biological essentialism into the mix. What a strange, strange film with a baffling, utterly incoherent philosophy.

A debate about the future also seems pointless if, like me, you don’t mesh with a metaphysical past or future, but also because if there is something even close to a future it’s surely something we build in the present, and in the present those people have no homes and Cesar wants to…debate.

Aw god, who am I kidding, I have more to say. Cesar is giving a speech right now about the need to have a debate about the future to a crowd of people who have been made houseless by his project and an unrelated series of satellite crashes that he did nothing to prevent. Probably not very helpful.

Excellent! Thank you, I’ll look into that.

I’m just going to go ahead and say philosophically Megalopolis is incoherent, and whatever the film is trying to say or do it fails at, and leave it at that. Yikes, bad.

I liked the bit where the guy who paid the kid to kill Cesar proudly told Shia LaBeouf what he did, presumably expecting a high five, and yelled “sic semper tyrannis” before Shia LaBeouf punched a wall.

Cesar got near-assassinated by a twelve year old boy (humiliating) but it’s okay because he’s a great visionary and the bullet will not kill him because he’s too great and brilliant to be murdered by a twelve year old.

I know I haven’t commented on how Cesar is able to sometimes stop time by actually saying “time, stop!” but that’s because as far as I can tell narratively it’s pointless, and as far as a superpower of sorts goes, he never uses it to do anything cool or interesting.

The other thing about Megalopolis which is really interesting is that you can feel every second of its 138 minute runtime feels like an eternity and around the halfway mark you start to wonder if you actually died and this is what purgatory is like.

What if the real Megalopolis was the friends we made along the way?

Megalopolis definitely should have been a musical, and specifically the musical I want it to be is La La Land, except instead of Ryan Gosling saving jazz from the dastardly John Legend, it would be Adam Driver building Megalopolis through the magic of song.