Posthuman Blues

I like John Shirley's blog because I always find myself in adamant agreement with it. Of course, agreeing with something isn't an automatic reason to necessarily like it; if you only read what you like -- what makes you feel good and presents only minimal intellectual strain -- then you wind up like so many of the functionally brain-dead among us, poring over the latest "Left Behind" installment and glazing over as "American Idol" materializes on the screen.





Happily, I enjoy disturbing things. Things that give epistemologists headaches and send "skeptics" running for the nearest cognitive fallout shelter. Franz Kafka, for example, saw no point in books that failed to disturb; to Kafka, a book should be "an ax to break the frozen sea within us." The same applies to memes in general. I take special pains to purge my brain of the ordinary. It's like wringing some noxious liquid from a sponge . . .

Having said that, I really like John's latest. I spend extended periods in the clinical mind-frame depicted in John's vignette about the prostitute; sometimes it's difficult to see people (myself included) as anything but fleshy anthropoid machines, governed by the hermetic interplay of genes, synapses and endorphins.