True Story: The Death of a MacBook Pro

The specs: 17" 2008 Aluminum MacBook Pro; 2.5 GHz; 4 GB RAM; 200 GB hard drive. But, that's only the hardware. The truth is ...

I loved my Mac as much as a human being can possibly love a machine. My friend Bonnie says people are growing up with attachments, not with people, or pets, but with machines. She says this is the cause of the proliferation of Autism.

Maybe she's right. We're more fond of our binary buddies then we are of our flesh and blood compadres.

I know it's not "right" to have loved a machine. To use the word "love" is sacrilegious when what I really mean is what Aristotle meant by storge. A kind of love that is built on use and use alone. I love my Mac cause I used my Mac.

What I miss is not the machine itself but the use of the machine which fired my loins and made me whisper, "Mac ... Mac ... Light of my life ... Fire of my loins."

(Mac is not my Lolita. I just couldn't help but use a Nabokov reference.)

The practical loss is I'm bereft of a machine.

The iPhone is my primary computer now.

The good news is I'm backed up on Carbonite. If you don't know, it's a nifty online storage solution that backs up your files in the background to the Cloud.

I'm thinking my next Lolita will be a Mac Mini. I'm fond of its portability. I thought maybe I would go bold with the iPad but I'm still not rogue enough to give up the traditional computer. Besides, I don't think the first-generation iPad is capable of replacing a computer 100%.

What I miss most about my Mac in its absence:

1. My cute Finder boyfriend.

2. iWork: and how the only library computer lab with Mac's exclusive productivity suite is Bobst.

3. Movies: But, hey I'm reading
more. Last night I finished Lyotard's Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime.

4. BitTorrent (Using Transmission). On an iPhone, I can't download an entire Season of Dobey Gillis.

5. Google Docs. I can't edit Docs on a smartphone. :-(

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Walking to Work on a Sunday

How I walked to work on a Sunday (thinking it was Monday) and what this says about my current state of being . . .

Walking to work on a Sunday, thinking it was a Monday, but then realizing it was Sunday and not Monday. What finally tipped me off that it was still the weekend (and not Monday like I had thought) was the discovery that the M train to Brooklyn through the Chrystie Street Tunnel and over the Williamsburg Bridge was not running (because it does not run on weekends). *puts the shape of an "L" on my forehead*. Well, at least on my walk through Lower Manhattan I took the above shot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Do you like my photograph? Let me know in the comments!

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A New Year from the Perspective of a NYC Blizzard

Snow piled in a heap in front of the Century 21 store entrance on Broadway and Cortlandt Street, Lower Manhattan, Financial District:
I write the first entry of the new year from the point of view of a blizzard's detritus.

Stones of Erasmus is a blog ostensibly devoted to good writing, in whichever modality that can be articulated.

My primary focus is to reach folks who enjoy good writing, no matter your class or by how many bad pieces of art you have hanging in your house, or the number of pulp fiction titles that adorn your bookshelf.

People say fine art and quality literature are in their final death throes. I'm not sure if that is an accurate assessment or not.

I do know that we can only focus on the particular in art or in a narrative to seize in an aesthetic object something autonomous and not subsumed by overarching dumbness.

I credit Kant's aesthetic theory in opening my eyes to the muscle inherent in art and not merely art as sensation, which is how it's too often presented in the manifold of visual pleasure found replete in kitsch media, shallow status updates, Tumblr, what have you.

Please, fellow readers, continue to read Stones of Erasmus, offer comments. I want 2011 to be another successful year for this blog.

Hey, maybe I'll post more than 300 posts.

Peace, love, and tomatoes.

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Aesthetic Thursdays: Two Versions of Judith Slaying Holofernes

Judith Slaying Holofernes
Judith is a hero of late Jewish antiquity who slew the Assyrian dictator Holofernes, by first seducing him, then decapitating him while he slept. Check out these two very different artistic representations. What do you notice?

⬆️ Artemisia's version in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy

⬆️ Caravaggio's version in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome

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Derrida's Definition of Western Philosophy

Derrida writes in "La Différance," in Margins of Philosophy, "For the middle voice, a certain nontransitivity, may be what philosophy, at its outset, distributed into an active and a passive voice, thereby constituting itself by means of this repression" (9).

Christmas Post: If Jesus were Albrecht Dürer

Self-Portrait of Albrecht Dürer

The twenty-fifth day of December is an odd time to commemorate an incarnation of a God? I agree with T.S. Eliot, though, "satisfactory." (the best use of that word in a poem is reprinted below).

Jesus, a rabbi from the first century (a century named after him, so to speak, in the year of our Lord) was born in Palestine, in the Northern Hemisphere, correct? So, he came into the world at the eclipse of the sun’s strength. The Winter Solstice (which by the way, this year was also marked by another eclipse, a lunar one). If he had born in Australia, however, he could have at least eschewed swaddling clothes. And there would have been more reason for sheep(or kangaroo) to be lowing.

How do the Australians celebrate seasonal Christian feasts? I suspect their Christmas's are void of hot chocolate and burning fires. More like surfing and tan lines to fête the baby Jesus.

And their Easter has to be a mess? But, that’s another story. Just suffice it to say, it’s a difficult stretch to celebrate new birth when everything around is falling into winter.

Aesthetic Thursdays: Medusa

If the canvas is Perseus's shield, then this is Medusa's last stare.

Caravaggio, Medusa, 1597, Oil on canvas mounted on wood

Perseus, a son of Zeus, an epic hero of Greek myth, was locked in a chest as a boy by his grandfather with his mother inside and thrown to sea, because an oracle foretold he would kill the king Of Argos; he was saved by a fisherman and raised to manhood. His most famous deed: he sought to behead the Gorgon Medusa, partly from a wager with Polydectes the King of Seriphos, his mother's husband, and partly out of despair, for he knew Polydectes wanted to get rid of him. Perseus traveled to the edge of the world to find the Gorgon, one of three Gorgons, who were sisters, Medusa was the only one mortal. The Graeae, nymph sisters, helped him, as well as several gods and goddesses. To kill the Gorgon, Perseus had to avoid eye contact with her lest he turn to stone by looking her directly in the eye. So armed with a shield, bequeathed to him by Athena, and a scimitar, from Hermes, and a cape of invisibility, and winged sandals, he was able to peer on the Gorgon indiscreetly in her lair without looking at her directly, and slew her with his blade. When Perseus slew the Gorgon she was pregnant, and out of her belly flew Pegasus, the winged horse.

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NB: If you want to check out the real shield, haunt the Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy.
image credit: New Crafts, Co.