Rush Rankin
IN THEORYISBN 1-879378-53-1 (paper)
135 pages, $15Short and beautifully crafted literary and philosophical meditations which, when taken together, constitute a critique of post-modernism and nihilism, and affirm a commonsense aesthetic. Frequent reference is made to the works of René Descartes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Jacques Derrida and other radical thinkers.
The author is a poet and essayist who teaches philosophy and creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institue. His earlier works are The Failure of Grief (2001) and Bene-dictions (2003), the latter the winner of the Vassar Miller Prize.
Chapter headings: Knock, knock — Swimming lessons — Love's theory lost — The 10,000 things — The mind/bodies problem — Nothing ends when you think — The vice versa of hypertext — Form and pressure — Who's there?
REVIEWEinstein's theory of relativity, abstract and ethereal though it may seem at first, revolutionized physics precisely by returning it to earth, by issuing a clear reminder that there is not absolute space, that every event happens in a context, in relation to other events, revealing therefore such insights as the equivalence of gravity and acceleration. Rush Rankin here performs a similar service in the realm of axiology, issuing a reminder that we are not Cartesian thinking beings, pure minds in absolute mind. We have bodies, we are bodies, we think in, through and about scenes, and those scenes give us, or impose on us, the pain and lust and hunger about which only we can think. As Newtonians missed the connection between gravity and acceleration, a disembodied Cartesian mind would miss any connection between French theory and copulation, but Rush Rankin does not. In this book the philosopher's ideas speak through the poet's words, the mind speaks out of the body. Why is no one else writing as Rush Rankin writes? ~ H.L. Hix
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