Will Tom continue in 2019?
Yes, at least one more book, as he promised to see if Stephen Hicks would redeem himself after his book about Nietzsche and the Nazi[‘]s [iconography] in which he proved to be even more aesthetically ignorant than in his blog about modernist art. This trend would suggest he doesn’t redeem himself, but stay tuned to find out for sure!
In the meantime, feel free to answer Tom’s questions (he doesn’t pose them rhetorically): do Americans hate continental philosophy out of jealousy? Is Karen Pryor as great a romantic as Beatrix Potter is a renaissance man? Can enthusiastic narration save an otherwise pointless or even a brain-damaging book? Is aesthetic evolution arbitrary? Is the Soviet adaptation of Winnie the Pooh true to the melancholic spirit of the original?
To better understand these questions, please read the final installment of Tom Towers’ reading adventures in 2018, which you can find here, before answering. But please do answer.
One of Baetrix Potter’s beautiful botanical illustrations.
Full list of the literature covered in this last installment:
Nietszche and the Nazis by Stephen Hicks
Like a Thief in Broad Daylight by Slavoj Zizek
Survival of the Beautiful by David Rothenberg
Reaching the Animal Mind and Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor
The Art of Beatrix Potter by Emily Zach
The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Two Bad Mice, The Tale of Tom Kitten, The Story of Miss Moppet, The Tailor of Gloucester, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny by Beatrix Potter
The Moomin comic books and Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove and Lars Jansson
Whinnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth (uh, sort of)
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems as well as The Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats (I mean, maybe?)
Of course the melancholia of the Soviet Adaptation has less to do with the inevitable loss of childhood (from a father’s perspective) than with the inevitable existential crisis to which this loss leads (from a peasant’s perspective).
Bonus question: does refusing people visas on the basis of what propaganda (from anti-vaxx to anti-blacks to anti-APAC) they spread constitute a breach of free speech? If so I should probably have written something about that, too, but personally I couldn’t think of anything more Australian than this. The only way it could be handled more patriotically would be to send them to an off-shore detention centre!