Paula Marchesini

I recently read the following passage: “Shakespearean English is an excellent vehicle for discussing the sport of falconry but not of football. The fact that Shakespeare’s plays contain fluent and complex treatments of falconry is due as much to the resources of Elizabethan English as to Shakespeare’s interest in the topic.” in “Michel Foucault: A Very Short Introduction”

This is built on the assumption that after a language is “ready to be used” we can look at it and measure its competence to discuss…

What does it mean for us to be determined by culture? It can mean a series of different things.

It can mean that there is a rich and powerful minority who establishes mainstream tendencies and sells it to a majority who wants to be tuned to the mainstream culture, whatever it is. The feeling of being tuned into what’s going on in the world is what they buy. This rich minority might establish these tendencies based on small niches of behavior that spread within other not so rich minorities. Culture…

Is this the right question? What are the assumptions or affirmations that make this question possible? First, that there is some sort of relationship between words and things.

And what is it to say that there is such a relationship? It is, first and foremost, to say that there are two distinct phenomena, words and things, and that they relate in a certain way, and that the way in which they relate is through reference.  Words are on the one side and things on the other, and lines are drawn to connect the…

I had a brief interaction with this book during my college days, that made a profound impression on me. But after that, for some reason, I never got back to it. Now is the time. 

These past 48 hours were amazing. My friend Faisal Aswat (Fez), who plays the bass guitar, is helping me to put a band together. So far we've had the honor of being joined by the great Scott Eisenberg (drums). Scott has been coming all the way from Brooklyn, NY to play with us. The three of us have been rehearsing non-stop at Fez's place since yesterday. The album is coming together really well and we have been having a lovely time. Yesterday rehearsal ended at 9:30pm and we went to the movies (we watched…

Last week I decided to start reading a book a week no matter what. Every Sunday I am gonna pick a book, divide the number of pages by seven and read the resulting number of pages every day. This is the minimum. Of course I will be reading a lot around that (newspapers, articles, novels, etc.). But every week I need to read one book that is actually relevant to my research about how a certain desire for eternity shapes artistic representation (more on it later...). So last week I read "The Varieties of…

Just a quick list of some weird books that I love and that people usually don't know about:

A Course in Hypnotism, found in my grandfather's library, written by some unknown dude who offered the course through mail. 

Pinpoint of Eternity by Peter Salm, about representations of eternal points in Western literature. 

Bartleby and Co. by Enrique Villa-Matas, about writers who almost never or never wrote. 

The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin, about how the laws of the universe might have evolved through some…

For those of you who haven't yet watched "Zizek!," the 2005 documentary about the Slovenian thinker, you should. It is a great introduction to his thinking. I have recently read his book "First as tragedy, then as farse," also very interesting. It is good that there is someone out there praising intellectual honesty above anything else (even above philosophical accuracy, if there is such a thing). I don't exactly agree with everything that he says (particularly, his reverence towards Stalin, though I…

Yesterday I found my school. If you read my previous post "Ph.D.?," then you got a feel of how disenchanted I am with the whole academic enterprise. But then I go online researching Slavoj Zizek (one of the living philosopher/theorists whom I admire the most) and I find that he teaches at the European Graduate School, this recently founded private university hidden in the Saas-Fee valley, among the Swiss Alps. They offer an amazing Ph.D. program in Media and Communication that is everything I ever asked…

Every once in a while I get blocked and decide that if I want to write better songs I need to learn new chords and play the guitar better. I get stuck around my A's, and D's and C's and start thinking that I have nothing left to offer. And then a simple two-chord song breaks me out of the spell and gets me writing again. The best songs I know, the ones that really touch me, could have been written by people who know very little about their physical instrument. This is because songwriting is, to some…