PhD Dropout / Master sounds better than Doctor anyhow, right? / Comics / Illustrated Read-alongs / Currently The Anatomy of Melancholy
Whatever you call it, “overmuch Joy” and love of “immoderate applause” being my personal favorites, pride is no good thing: “This acceptable disease, which so sweetly sets upon us, ravisheth our senses, lulls our souls asleep, puffs up our hearts as so many bladders.” I really wanted to draw a puffed up bladder for this […]
Yup, I am still hung up on the devils section: And yet for all this Thomas, Albertus, and most, hold that there be far more angels than devils. I was at a party recently where everyone knew each other very well, and I knew only two people and not very well. Also I was grumpy. It […]
Suggestions? It’s been keeping me up nights. Not my best work, but this week has been a little bit of an asshat. Instagram, anyone? Facebook?
The Entscheidungsproblem, Computer Science: This one was a doozy. But the main reason I started this website was to champion intelligence in a fun way, in the angry face of the stupidity that seems to be swallowing America. Well, trying to understand the Entscheidungsproblem sure as heck was fun. I emerged a little smarter even if […]
For 75% of the year I really love NYC. The other 25% is mainly about survival. While I have your attention, please follow me on Instagram. I am using the only five minutes of daily free time that I have to hone my skills as an illustrator. In this day and age, however, one cannot […]
I live in a gentrifying urban neighborhood. A new restaurant named The Gentry just opened here. I wish people would think about their words more. I probably will not eat there. Do you like seeing my pictures but clicking around on the Internet to see them is HARD? Follow me on Instagram, devon_isadevon! Or Facebook, […]
As always, an “actually real” transcription of a conversation with my kid. “Actually real” is another thing she says a lot that I love. She might have gotten that one from me, actually. We have absolutely no idea where she heard the name Dennis unless she has been sneakily listening to us watch It’s Always […]
1. Matthew McConaughey: Episode 141 (Season 5, Episode 12) 2. Daniel Dae Kim: Episode 169 (Season 6, Episode 5) 3. Cheryl Hines: Episode 278 (Season 9, Episode 15) Link to Matthew McConaughey’s segment here but fyi I think this particular unsolved mystery is really kind of disturbing even when delivered via a cheesy reenactment starring the “alright alright alright” […]
This little section is about sinking into a transient melancholy due to, say, a fleabite versus the “continuate disease” of melancholy. Burton does not have much patience for “errant,” or transient, melancholy, and he would prefer people stop calling “oops I stubbed my toe and it sucks” melancholy at all: Melancholy in this sense is the character […]
My daughter really likes ghosts. I don’t know where she gets it from. More pictures from parenting here. Do you like pictures? Follow me on Instagram or Facebook. I have two children. One is smaller and one is bigger. THIS IS NOT A MOMMY BLOG.
Word for word, this is a conversation I had with my daughter a few days ago. She really knows how to hurt. More pictures from parenting here. Do you like pictures? Follow me on Instagram or Facebook.
At last we come to the end of “Democritus Junior to the Reader.” After over one hundred pages of introduction, what parting thoughts does Burton have for us before embarking on the real book? I have overshot myself, I have spoken foolishly, rashly, unadvisedly, absurdly, I have anatomized mine own folly. And now methinks upon a […]
Language Acquisition Device (LAD), Linguistics: First proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is a component of the nativist theory of language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the instinct or “innate facility” for acquiring […]
Deconstruction, literary studies: Deconstruction is a method of literary analysis with roots in the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida. According to Wikipedia, “This article has multiple issues.” Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. – J. Hillis Miller, “Stevens’ Rock […]
When a giant angry turnip was elected president of the United States in the apocalyptic year that was 2016, I started to feel a little down. Naturally my response was to buy an unabridged copy of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. My get-out-of-bed-without-crying-plan is to read a little piece of this gargantuan lump of knowledge daily, and I will illustrate it as I go.