Have you ever started reading a book and it’s brought you to a quick realization, with a slap upside the head, that you’re not as smart as you thought you were? Okay, call it a reminder.

Theory, theory, theory!

And a lot of names I’ve either never read, or read and didn’t understand.

Oh Darling, will you promise to love me if I promise to never use/misuse ‘Lacanian’ in a sentence? Can you adore a man who’s got no clue who Baudrillard might be? Would you, could you appreciate a man who has lifted more cinder blocks than pithy books?

Camera pulls back from the back of a huge head, revealing a troubled man pondering not just his image but his very existence in a bathroom vanity mirror. He is frozen in space, anguished, with his 4-blade disposable razor in his hand. This… life… and the book sitting on his nightstand in the next room, is so much more than he bargained for. He had bought in for pop culture essays peppered with the odd generational diatribe. He imagined young bearded men glancing at him on the train and giving him nods of appreciation as he sat reading his 4-inch-thick tome. Ah, they might think, there sits a thinking man with his forefinger on the pulse of the very impulses and drives of our civilization.

There sits a man who probably should have plowed through all the assigned reading back in college.

No, to be fair, there sits a man who has reached a level of personal evolution where he actually appreciates knowledge and learning. He knows that education is often wasted on the young. He knows that he squandered a good part of his younger years driven by his very single-minded libido, and that what he knows thus far came in over the transom, largely by being just intelligent enough to recognize intelligent people and to pause every so often and listen to them. (He obviously didn’t learn much about run-on sentences.)

Mark Fisher is a very challenging read, for certain. It was before digging even a few chapters in that I found myself turning to Google to reference names of writers, theorists, psycho-analysts and assorted ‘great thinkers.’ I’ve started putting together a reading list, beginning with J.G Ballard and Michel Houllebecq. The odds are good that the list will become extensive in a very short time.

The forward alone, by Simon Reynolds (author of Rip It Up And Start Again which I enjoyed immensely), was a challenge. He laid it down seemingly with the assumption that the reader might be familiar with all the literary references. Take one guess who could barely scratch the surface.

So, more (maybe) as I delve deeper…