AT THE STOA

It's ultimately funny how I ended up reading  No Longer Human  by Osamu Dazai. It was recommended to me by an acquaintance who loves Japanese culture more than I do, and I put off  reading it for nearly a year. Then last night I started to write in my journal, with my beer-addled brain, "There is a strength that you get from needing no one. But it comes with a price: you will no longer be human. I will continue this thought when I have read Osamu Dazai's work. That phrase just leapt up in my mind, and that work called me."  So I read it, leaving that stupid introduction to a journal entry justifiably unfinished. Offhand, I could compare its atmosphere slightly to Camus's The Stranger , only more surreal (as only the Japanese can be - think Haruki Murakami without his gentleness of cadence, and instead of turning to the fantastic as Murakami does, Osamu Dazai turns to the psychological). Nuanced, this book is either a pull under the rug so massive you will fee...

On the way to the house I was remembering one of the things I blurted out in classes yesterday, said in the context of Marx's self-affirming labor in contrast to alienated labor, that because of the capitalist mechanisms that breed the latter we perhaps don't value durability the same way we did, perhaps in the context of when the former was possible.  I told students I love that word (and in that moment, I did, for it was only then that I realized) because what is durable might share its roots with duration , which might be dura (I was close, the Latin is durare , to harden, dura is the feminine of the masculine durus ), pertaining to what is hard. Hence the Filipino word for it: matibay , in turn connoting matigas , which makes the etymological root split, but somehow regains itself in Ilocano, natibker . In Ilocano it regains this unity of atmosphere, implying something that endures while still being battered by time, for it is time that truly batters.  Or there is nothi...

If you read  this , you will have a very sedate and overall substantial argumentation as to why the Batman v Superman movie will suck, probably. If you frequent 9gag, especially a few weeks back, you will be treated to all sorts of idiots who say that the movie sucked, without bothering to flesh out arguments (unless you scroll ten miles into the comments section). Allow me to mount a drunken defense why most of the said article's fears may be unfounded in some perspectives, by introducing those very same perspectives. I just have watched the movie, and it was good. Not amazing, not earth-shattering, but it was solid, it was good. Not like the Deadpool movie was good (because it's entertaining), however, and not like the Avengers franchise has been good so far (because it's been operating on a well-established shared universe, and the scriptwriting is witty).  If you take the perspective of someone who, like the article writer in the link above, noticed that DC...