A Zibaldone for the Twitter age.
An Anatomy of Mischievous Melancholy.
A Commonplace book of uncommon opinions
An avalanche of apposite apercus.
An inventory of inappropriate malaproprisms.
Buying raw milk from the back of a truck in Manhattan is a bit like a drug deal in Breaking Bad, except instead of guns and gangsters you find tote bags and yoga moms.
Walked past a salad-bar-restaurant-concept BS thing downtown, with “architectural” highline-type seating, filled with yoga pants start-up people with dead eyes, munching on kale as if it were joyless crack. We’re truly living in a bad mashup of Soylent Green, Stepford Wives, Nathan Barley, Perfect, and They Live.
So You Think You Can Dane (a competition reality show that pits potential Hamlets against one another).
Socrates: the original mansplainer.
The Humid Condition continues on the clicking heels of Dominic Pettman’s Humid, All Too Humid (2016), providing a companion volume of pithy and witty observations for our overheated age. Covering topics from pop culture to academia to romance to politics to human mortality to everything in between, this collection of pointed musings aims to amuse, edify, instruct, provoke, tease, caution, and inspire. As with the first installment, the spirit of this book represents a fusion of Montaigne and Wilde; a mashup of Adorno and Yogi Berra; a parallel channeling of Marx and Marx (both Karl and Groucho). No doubt, Hannah Arendt would be appalled at the irreverence on display within these pages. Then again, “Heidegger has left the bildung.” And as the author himself notes: “I have nothing new to say. And I’m saying it!”
About the Author
Dominic Pettman is Professor of Culture & Media at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. He is the author of numerous books on technology, humans, and other animals, including Creaturely Love (Minnesota, 2017) and Sonic Intimacy (Stanford, 2017). Previous books published by punctum include In Divisible Cities, Humid, All Too Humid, and Metagestures.