#9 (22.11.25)
cavell, drugs, antwerp
SEE
Stanley Cavell: Conversations with History.
UCTV/YouTube
You can only watch so much while boxing up a flat; last weekend I listened, among other things, to this great interview with Stanley Cavell. As he describes his childhood, parents, schooling, his movement towards philosophy, his dedication to film, I felt enchanted — by a mind, but also by a voice. Cavell speaks as he writes, or as he reads on the page: like a patient, agile bear. Since I was a graduate student, I’ve struggled with analytical-adjacent philosophy, finding it prone to the wrong sorts of doubt; but I hold the exceptions dear. And as with Wittgenstein, a Cavellian lodestar, here you see a performance — of a man, of a thinker — that’s also the real thing. Thought, life, style.
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READ
On Drugs, by Justin Smith-Ruiu.
Liveright
The first thing I read after moving house was this book-length essay on the philosophy & psychology of drug use. I’m less interested in pharmaceuticals than in Justin, who edits The Hinternet, a pocket of strange & beautiful thought. (Bias: I’m a contributing editor there, & recently wrote on how we should feel towards the Sun, an essay that must at least count as “strange”.) I took On Drugs from the shelves we’d just put up, & settled in by the open fire at our local. It’s an absorbing mix of history, analysis & personal account — or, as Justin puts it, “auto-experimental analytic phenomenology”. Every inquisitive strand of any value, you learn, has hung around the doors of perception. Consciousness means range, experience means flux.
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LISTEN
Skin, by Flume.
Future Classic
Oddly, I was reading Cavell the last time I listened properly to this album. That was nearly 10 years ago, at a graduate conference in Antwerp, which was held on Samuel Beckett’s work & (for the most part) at a grungy bar. Some people seemed to stay till dawn in the jaundiced smoking-room, then re-emerge in time for the morning’s proceedings: then rinse, repeat, go on. The conference was indifferent, in every sense. Skin has about three good songs, ‘Never Be Like You’ the best, but there’s something about them. In their thudding sheen, they seem so rooted in the mid-2010s: slightly breathless, slightly anguished, a culture on the turn.