Currently viewing the tag: "John Berger"

How to Listen to Thunder

By On March 29, 2018

I’m absolutely struck by the intensity of the conversation between these two heroes of mine, Susan Sontag and John Berger. There is this wonderful tension simply in the manner in which these two listen to each other.    How on earth do these two great minds not roll over each other?  Where is the Nietzschean will to power ?

The cynic in me thinks: perhaps it is the performative nature of this conversation which brings such restraint. Perhaps it is the knowledge that they are actors on a stage and it is in their best interest to compliment each other’s “brand.”

More romantically,  I’d like to think that it is their sincerity which allows them to explore a topic not in primitive debate, but as socratic dialectic.  Argue to understand.  Argue to experience.  Argue to impassion.  But never argue merely to win, for that is the central decadence of our age.

How I long for an age of sincerity.

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Worth Watching: John Berger’s Ways of Seeing

By On March 28, 2016

Former students of mine might recall that we used to read selections from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing in class.  I can’t remember a time when we made it very far into the text.  The discussions would grow so animated that we’d read a few pages and then lose the lesson in endless spirals of debate.  Certainly, not the model lesson, but good fun all the same.  Anyway, the movie preceded the book. (and that is a sentence that English teachers do not get to say very often.) Take a look at the four part series which aired on the BBC in 1972.

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Fashion Police

By On April 26, 2012

Men’s fashion presents an exciting mixture of both the political and the aesthetic; aesthetic because the way all fashion excites the senses; political in the sense that Mary Louise Pratt means it: the body is a contact zone, a social space in which culture meets and grapples with itself.

Looking at sites like MaleFashionAdvice or shows like Queer Eye makes me think that now more than ever men are liberated to openly embrace fashion—or more precisely—liberated to now speak of the conscientious fashioning of their appearance.  It wasn’t so long ago that GQ was an industry magazine meant for the wholesaler and haute couture was the language of the privileged class.  In some ways we have see the democratization of exclusiveness, if for no other reason than it is better for the bottom line.

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