by Belle Waring on September 14, 2006
C’mon it’s The Weblog. You’re missing out on insightful posts like this one from Dominic, on how Fay Weldon is the antichrist:
The model of libidinal economy endorsed by Weldon is essentially that of middle-class parenting: let your children have the smallest possible amount of what they clamour for – sweets, television, computer games – and make their access even to that conditional on an unremitting parade of good manners and the assiduous consumption of vegetables. In such a manner is exorbitant desire acknowledged through gritted teeth – when it is not being exploited to secure obedience. All of this is fair enough in extremis, which is where most parenting of small children is done, but it is nauseating to encounter an adult person still willingly enthralled by such a ruthlessly petty system of restraint and reward. If adolescence has any purpose at all, it is to shatter those bonds.
Read the whole thing, because it really is an excellent little essay. On a lighter note, you can be astounded by the unparallelled quote-mining skills of Adam Kotsko:
In Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), Reinhold Niebuhr quotes a Southern politician protesting against suffrage tests for black voters “on the ground that they would discriminate in favor of the educated Negro against the servile, old-time Negro”:
Now, sir, the old-time Negro is assassinated by this suffrage plan. This new issue, your reader, your writer, your loafer, your voter, your ginger-cake school graduate, with a diploma of side-whiskers and beaver-hat, pocket pistols, brass knucks [sic] and bicycle, he, sir, is the distinguished citizen whom our statesmen would crown at once with the highest dignities of an ancient and respectable commonwealth.
I think I speak for all of us when I say, humina whatsa ginger-whisker beaver-hat whaaaaa? The Weblog has many other fine posters, too; I’m sure your life needs more Ben Wolfson. McLemee may be shy to hype The Weblog, but I’m not. Go ye, and read of it. Also, ginger-cake.
by John Holbo on September 1, 2006
I don’t know how long this will last so I took a screencap.
Yes, that’s right. Amazon’s book bundling AI has determined, for reasons best known to itself, that Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? goes best with Alan Moore’s Lost Girls Collected. Ah, we always knew THAT was what was liberal about the liberal arts. Porn! High concept porn! This can only provide terrible confirmation of Ross Douthat’s worst fears.
Honestly, I’d be so honored if a book I wrote went better with something by Alan Moore. Maybe he can write, like, The League of Extraordinarily Liberal Gentlemen next.
by John Holbo on August 15, 2006
Which famous philosopher was accused of being all of the following (answer under the fold):
lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fibre.
[click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on August 9, 2006
Scott McLemee’s “column”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/09/mclemee today is on a new collection of essays by George Scialabba. I’ll be getting the collection – everything by Scialabba that I’ve read I’ve enjoyed – but I want to take issue with Scialabba’s very interesting “essay”:http://www.nplusonemag.com/hitch.html on Christopher Hitchens for _N+1_ last year. The burden of the piece is that Hitchens used to seem like a brilliant essayist when he agreed with Scialabba, but now seems anything but; less because of his disagreement than the manner of it, a form of argument which is, in Scialabba’s lapidary phrase, “a tempest of inaccuracy, illogic, and malice.” After having thought about it on and off over the last year, I think that this is right in broad outline, but it doesn’t get at the root of what’s wrong with Hitchens’ writing. Hitchens can be a brilliant stylist (less so today than he used to be, but even now a beautiful sentence occasionally pierces through the fog), but he doesn’t seem to me to be a political thinker. Which is to say that the political positions that he takes seem to me to be grounded more in a sensibility than in a coherent view of politics. This was as true when he was unambiguously on the left as it is now – his earlier essays are sometimes wonderful taken one by one, but they really don’t add up to a whole. Hitchens is notoriously fond of comparing himself to George Orwell, but the better comparison is with Orwell’s friend, “Cyril Connolly”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Connolly. A bit of a waster, with a prose style to die for, but not much at all in the way of political _nous_.
by Henry Farrell on August 2, 2006
Via “Larry Solum”:http://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2006/08/iris_marion_you.html, Iris Marion Young died two days ago, on July 31. I had known that she was ill with cancer over the last couple of years – it doesn’t seem to have slowed her writing down. She criticized liberal theory from a perspective that seemed to me to be both tougher and more attractive than communitarianism, focusing on the ways in which liberal remedies failed to address enduring structural inequalities. She liked the ways in which cities fostered diversity – her best book, _Justice and the Politics of Difference_, drew as much on sociologists of the city like Richard Sennett as on political theory. I don’t have any personal anecdotes – I never met her – but I liked and admired her work very much indeed.
Update: obituary “here”:http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060802.young.shtml (thanks to David Kahane in comments)
by John Holbo on May 3, 2006
It seems to me that 50 SF films for $16.47
is a good deal [Amazon]. Anyone care to comment on the various titles? It’s got classics like “Teenagers From Outer Space” and “Destroy All Planets” and “Phantom Planet” and “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”. Everything. (Nothing good, of course.) It’s got John Agar and Basil Rathbone and Steve Reeves. How well do I remember the Young Fresh Fellows singing “The New John Agar”! Well, sort of well. It was long ago. Discuss! (Someone should start a roll-your-own MST3K mp3 commentary track project.)
This collection of 100 cartoons seems likely to be good as well. How can a badly made cartoon from the 30’s entitled “Professor Ya Ya’s Memories” be bad?
I know it seems terrible that I’m always flogging stuff from Amazon. But is it?
UPDATE: As is pointed out in comments, there is in fact a a whole series of 50-packs: mystery, horror, comedy, musical, drive-in, martial arts, historical, dark crimes, pastoral-comical, tragical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral, robot monsteral-pastoral, santal clausal-tragical, teenageral-historical and so forth. Also, some intrepid/damned soul has reviewed every single item in the SF 50-pack!
by Belle Waring on April 8, 2006
I think this is my best spam email ever. It’s part Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and part Russian sci-fi:
“Why is it,” Jonathan puzzled, “that the hardest thing in the world is profoundly serious work, since every bent line illuminates a straight one. They were all just watching and grunting words of welcome, but not one was swift wind. Yet he felt guiltless, breaking the promises he had made.”
Bullshit stock hype, if you wondered. And I can hardly blame my mail; perhaps the coming AI kernel is building in the relentlessly negative spam-filter hive mind. Each time a nonsense phrase is chancily uplifted to poetic virtue the filter “stumbles” and allows it through.
by John Holbo on April 4, 2006
Scott Kaufman has an interesting distributed intelligence project. He’s soliciting suggestions for ‘best introductions to’ various standard topics in literary studies. Feel free to contribute. It’s a nice project. Lots of subjects could do with good lists of this sort.
by Brian on April 3, 2006
by Chris Bertram on March 25, 2006
I had tickets to “Welsh National Opera”:http://www.wno.org.uk/ ‘s production of “The Flying Dutchman”:http://www.wno.org.uk/what.opera.106.html last night (my second trip in a week, having seen “Figaro”:http://www.wno.org.uk/what.opera.107.html on Wednesday). We Bristolians had been feeling slightly sore, since “Bryn Terfel”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/music/sites/brynterfel/ had sung the lead in Cardiff but had been replaced by Robert Hayward for later dates on the tour. Just before the was due to rise there was an announcement: Hayward was unwell and couldn’t sing. So now we get the third choice….? Not a bit of it! They had located Terfel on a golf course in North Wales that afternoon, put him in a car and rushed him down the M6/M5! Apparently it was touch and go whether he would make it in time. When the announcement was made the audience went wild (which made me feel extra sorry for poor Hayward). Terfel was, naturally, simply fantastic. A great singer with a tremendous presence. And a great guy … thanks for stepping in.
by John Holbo on March 21, 2006
Fellow Timberteer Maria is visiting Singapore on her way to some important meeting. She and Belle ran off to Little India today. I had to work. It is left to me to memorialize their shopping trip, based on its products. What can I say?
My work is done. You, our readers, shall now compose the screenplay/libretto of a Bollywood musical, based on Donnie Darko. (Click for larger image.) Since I am an incorrigible Amazon whore I cannot refrain from noting that the director’s cut is marked down 50%. If you don’t go for that, this Hank Thompson collection is only $4.97. (You’re saving $1.01!!) For some reason, when I was a kid, I had a record with “Whoa Sailor” on it. I played it over and over but turned out straight. The man who is tired of Donnie Darko and Hank Thompson is tired of life. (Don’t miss the slideshow.)
by John Holbo on March 4, 2006
Kevin Drum mocks Hugh Hewitt for his ‘it was in a PDF file that we were only able to read after downloading a new version of Adobe’ defense. But the proper pop cult reference is not Perry Mason. Allow me. Look to the man’s own site: "Hugh Hewitt is the Jack Bauer of talk radio and the blogosphere." This is actually a good idea for a show. ‘In the next 24 hours, terrorists will make a major strike against an American city. The only thing between all of us, and just a few of them … is a complacent, partisan hack.’ In 90 minutes or less you could play it strictly for Man Who Knew Too Little laughs. Subtler and ultimately more satisfying would be a genuine, 24-karat gold-plated imitation 24. In the first episode, "Download PDF For Murder", terrorists have encrypted their plans in an email attachment that can only be read using the latest version of Adobe Reader. Sweaty ‘which wire do I cut?’ tension as the heroes race against time to crack the main Adobe site. ‘This mouse has TWO buttons!’ ‘Just PICK one!’ [Adobe Acrobat Reader starts dowloading, to the "Hackers"-inspired strains of The Prodigy’s "Firestarter".] But then it all goes crazy. In the end they confront a nail-biting moral dilemma. Should they torture the Adobe executive, kidnapped in a daring, extra-judicial raid. He’s screaming "Just DOUBLE-click!" The agents scream back: “You’re lying” [click to continue…]
by John Holbo on February 24, 2006
I must confess: since I can’t really tell the difference between the method these folks used and the method these folks used, I should probably just stop having intuitions about the universe since “often deviates from intuitive reasoning, leading to some surprising effects” isn’t the half of it. Because, granting that they did what they did, my intution is that they can go on to develop infinite improbability computing, relying on the fact that their experiment cannot be scaled up to cause the scaled-up algorithm not to run, thereby producing the answer. Am I right (or am I right or am I right?)
Here’s a link to the Nature paper. (above link via boingboing.)
by Henry Farrell on February 23, 2006
“Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html#006036 touts Robert Charles Wilson’s _Spin_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=robert%20charles%20wilson%20spin, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=henryfarrell-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F076534825X%2Fsr%3D8-1%2Fqid%3D1140750256%2Fref%3Dpd_bbs_1%3F%255Fencoding%3DUTF8 ) as “one of the finest science fiction novels of the last decade” and he’s right; I finished the book yesterday, and was enormously impressed. I’ve been a fan of Wilson’s work for a long time,1 but as Patrick says, this is on a different level to his earlier work, good though it is. Its conceit is classic science fiction – the earth is suddenly and mysteriously enshrouded by a barrier which blocks off the stars. Inside the barrier, time passes far more slowly than in the outside universe; one year on earth is the equivalent of one hundred million years outside. A single generation is likely to see the death of the solar system. But Wilson doesn’t treat this set up as a classic SF problem to be “solved” (as in Poul Anderson’s somewhat similar but more conventional _Tau Zero_). Instead, he wants to examine how people react when they are forced to think in cosmological time,directly to confront the fact that just as they are mortal, so too is their species, their world, their sun and even the stars in the sky. It’s a wonderful, subtle book, a love-song to scientific curiosity, with some clever, canny things to say about the deep currents driving contemporary debates over science in the US (Wilson’s a Canadian, and comes at this from outside). Strongly, no _vehemently_ recommended.
1 I’ve a particular fondness for Wilson’s _Darwinia_ which begins when Cork disappears to be replaced by an alien jungle inhabited by feral predators. Skeptics might fairly ask how anyone could tell the difference.
), showing why socialists needed a moral theory and glimpses of what it might be.
