more leftovers!

More leftovers, I'm afraid. And where are those editing jobs that my readers were supposed to find me, eh? Poor LI, mired in poverty and an article about the philosophy of economics!

So, if you want more interesting fare, go to UFOB, where Mr. Scruggs is lamenting the decline of the yellow ribbon industry, or go to IT, for the post on Jean Baudrillard's death. Or go to the KinoFist essay on Brecht, which I would probably be writing about except that I'm not. It is long and well argued, yet it contains a couple of assumptions that I'd like to thrash out - but I can't! Gotta run.

And now, without further ado: a post from October of 2001!

Sometimes you come upon a fact that you know has an essayistic depth to it, if you only had the time, or the mental capacity, to write the essay. For instance: last night I read this anecdote about Hans Christian Andersen. Since he lived in fear of awakening in a coffin, "he always carried a card with him saying, "I am not really dead," which he put on the dressing table whenever he stayed at a hotel abroad, to prevent some careless doctor from wrongly declaring him dead." -- Buried Alive, by Jan Bondeson.
Now the Walter Benjamin in me takes that as an image applicable to every modernist artist -- didn't they all carry with them, at least metaphorically, some card saying 'I'm not really dead?' And what kind of sentence is that, anyway? Who, after all, is the speaker? What kind of truth claims can the dead make? There's a good reason that wills begin with a declaration of health -- we only trust the living.