Against Everything is not what I was expecting / hoping for. The title and packaging lead me to expect a collection of contrarian essays on subjects of near-universal approbation; pieces along the lines of Philip Lopate's "Against Joie de Vivre" or Stanley Fish's There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (and it’s a good thing too). But only the first essay meets this description ("Against Exercise"), and only those in Part 1 encourage the reader to reconsider their attitudes toward commonly accepted practices.
However.
Greif covers a wide range of cultural subjects—food, music, policing, sex—from a mildly Continental point of view (the names Marcuse, Derrida, and Foucault come up). He shows how our ideas and practices reflect larger developments in the culture, noting for example the conservatism that underlay food science. Even the weakest essays (such as the one about YouTube) offer insights.
In the essay "Learning to Rap," Greif describes how he "came of age at the same time as hip-hop" (in New York City no less), but failed to appreciate it until years later. He ponders the reasons why he favored the contemporaneous post-punk over the "new world-historical form." This essay is a great companion piece to Carl Wilson's book Let's Talk about Love in exploring how our tastes interact with our personal identities.
However.
Greif covers a wide range of cultural subjects—food, music, policing, sex—from a mildly Continental point of view (the names Marcuse, Derrida, and Foucault come up). He shows how our ideas and practices reflect larger developments in the culture, noting for example the conservatism that underlay food science. Even the weakest essays (such as the one about YouTube) offer insights.
In the essay "Learning to Rap," Greif describes how he "came of age at the same time as hip-hop" (in New York City no less), but failed to appreciate it until years later. He ponders the reasons why he favored the contemporaneous post-punk over the "new world-historical form." This essay is a great companion piece to Carl Wilson's book Let's Talk about Love in exploring how our tastes interact with our personal identities.
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