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Essays

All your base are belong to us

I keep running into landscape, I reckon, on almost daily basis in some news outlet. It’s hardly all there is to news, but keeps cropping up, as I’ve mentioned at times in my essays that have focused on its visuality. It was late last month, February 20 to be specific, that I came across a […]

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Essays

Field rations and greasy hair

This will be the second essay on ‘Learning About Landscapes’ written by J.B. Jackson, as published in his 1980 book ‘The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics’. In the previous essay I looked at his presentation of landscape from the point of view of a traditional tourist, someone who, back in the day, was known […]

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Essays

Gran Turismo

I was writing certain segments of the summary part of my thesis, putting much of what I have written in these essays in the highfalutin lingo that academics indulge in (not because I want to but because, out of habit, others expect me to do so), which led me astray, to check something in the […]

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Essays

Time is of the essence

No, I have not abandoned this, whatever this is that I’m doing with this. It’s just that I’ve been fairly busy with work, thus having less time to write, except the stuff I need to do for work. The thing is that as I’m currently substituting, filling in for someone, I have to play catch […]

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Essays

Impressions and Expressions, Designs and Designations, the Elite and the Riffraff

So, I have about ten or so pages of ‘The Biography of Landscape: Cause and Culpability’ by Marwyn Samuels left to cover. I’ll go through these pages in this essay. But before I do that, I’ll summarize what I covered in my previous essay. Right, the gist of the essay is that we should not […]

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Essays

The (un)happy couple – When Athens met Jerusalem

In the previous essay I presented a list of excuses as to why I’ve been unproductive but finally managed to be productive. Anyway, I didn’t get far. The only thing I attended to was noting how perceptive Marwyn Samuels is in his essay ‘The Biography of Landscape: Cause and Culpability’. The gist of that essay […]

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Essays

Landscape and the Absence of Humans

You may have already thought that this month is going to be an exceptional month, that nothing is coming out in December. I’ve been busy, with a bit of this and a bit of that, attending a funeral, doing requested and suggested changes to a manuscript, that seemingly never ending task that it tends to […]

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Essays

Counterthoughts, Smooth Striders and The Art of Archery

I’ve brought up what Gilles Deleuze calls an image of thought in ‘Difference and Repetition’ on a couple of occasions. To be more specific, in that book he (131) zooms into a particular image of thought, should we, perhaps, even say the image of thought, considering that, for most people it is the only image […]

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Essays

Hmmm… ‘Boldt! How can you be Saussure?

Guess what! Okay, no need to guess, you know it. You know what it is (not black and yellow though). I’ll be, once again, focusing on Valentin Vološinov’s ‘Marxism and the Philosophy of Language’. Last time I looked into one of the chapters, the third chapter of the first part of the book, that pertains […]

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Essays

Interpenetration: The Ins and Outs of Social Intercourse

In the previous essay, like in multiple essays before, I focused on Valentin Vološinov’s ‘Marxism and the Philosophy of Language’. I was able to cover the second chapter of the first part of the book, as well as a large chunk the fourth chapter of the second part of the book. In summary, it was […]