Amongst a few things, 2009 for me will be the year of the lists. Becoming familiar with any community of interest requires information, and the best way to “inscribe oneself” into a narrative is first of all through the opinion of others. Over time we can question those bias and change ourselves, but [...]
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It’s difficult to find anything humorous or ironic in Switzerland’s decision to change their constitution to ban the construction of new minarets in any of their cantons. Crooked Timber has an intelligent insight. But overall it’s an appalling and worrying precedent. It’s targeted discrimination against a religious minority. As Doug Saunders in [...] Interesting turn of events. I mentioned recently a post about eBook anxiety, which ended with the author Adam Robinson saying tongue-in-cheek he wanted to seclude himself in the Heimat of Heidegger somewhere online. As sometimes happens, he had a drive-by shot of lulz in the comments when someone asked why bother [...] It’s all around us this market changing world of ours. Or is it? A couple of hundred years ago our dear forebears of English went ice cold thick banana-whips (to quote Douglas Adams) when Parliament forgot to renew the monopoly of the Stationer’s Company and people were able to print whatever they [...] Yesterday the Guardian reprinted from its archives an original note from 1958 about Pasternak’s refusal to leave the Soviet Union to receive his Nobel Prize. It’s terrific newspapers take the time to sometimes show their historicity (even if a lot of it is pre-conceived). It is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language’s own nature. In the meantime, to be sure, there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in [...] As a student — maybe at any age — it’s really hard to determine the end point of an historical movement to understand what followed. This is a concern because ultimately one wants to know what is going on “now”, and what will be next. An example most young writers have [...] Historical note today with the passing of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1909-2009). A detailed obit in the NYT helps summarize his impact on Western culture as an academic. Le Fig has a better review en francais with some video interviews. The SLOG is more succint. Today’s XKCD reminds us all of the legacy of scientific interpretation. Hermeneutics has finally come full circle into everydayness. Munro must have spent some time obsessing over those films. I wonder which axis gave him the most trouble. Maybe choosing the legend, and thus the vocabulary, was the hardest exercise. Another famous height creation [...] Is it true? Is it necessary? There’s a new book for the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy written by YA author Eion Colfer? I can’t imagine what he will do with the franchise, since Adams seemed to have exhausted any other possible plot developments. The series is quite uneven. The original trilogy is [...] |
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