searching for the ineffable
Bet you didn’t know all this about frogs.
Tomorrow will mark my first ever paid holiday. Amen.
Our house is relatively clean, my housepaperwork-related conscience is perfectly clear, and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, with its hypnotic filth and alien science, is calling my name.
“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re at war.”
Worthy read, this article here, if you are interested in an impassioned view of what’s going on in academia. This goes nicely with the Salon article link I posted recently, the one about Lynne Cheney and the NEH.
A bit lengthy, but worth a read. Thanks, George!
I’ve got a few invites. Leave me a comment if you want one, with your e-mail address please — or e-mail me, vika-wordsend-org. I’ll edit this post when they’re gone.
Looks like Mrs. Cheney is pretty ruthless in showing her disapproval of academic dissent with conservatism.
Disgusting and dispiriting. And this, just an hour after I read Allen Renear on getting government and university funding in humanities computing, from 2000:
But we must also be prepared for these efforts to fail. And if they do fail, when we fail at them, it must be with the grace that allows us to at once fail, and at the same time remain in the game, continuing our work. This means that we must give up the ‘everlasting delusion… [the] utopianism’ and instead ‘…cheerfully accept [our] inexorable destiny’. That destiny being that we will have to make our own way in the world, sustained by our conviction, courage, and skill, by our colleagues, students, and friends… and, above all, by the never-failing excitement of the work.
This is from “Humanities Computing 2000: Passion and Authenticity,” pp. 27-39 in: Domenico Fiormonte, ed. Informatica umanistica. Dalla ricerca all’insegnamento (Humanities computing. From research to teaching), Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 2003. Renear quotes from J. Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University, London: Routlege, 1998.
I’ll be drinking to that tonight. It’s been a day of extremes.
Beware the thunder of teenage sexual activity. For it is a Dangerous and Bad thing.
I feel like screaming.
Fritz Hugh Ludlow’s 1857 The Annotated Hasheesh Eater is now out on CD-ROM. There’s a sample annotated chapter on the site, and it’s pretty fascinating.
The CD’s reading interface, if the sample web page is anything to go by, isn’t terribly pretty. But the book seems interesting enough that I might just get it. Apparently, there are some other 19th-century works about cannabis on the CD. Good going for the editor: in this age of renewed “reefer madness” scaremongering and awful levels of misinformation, I love it that books like this are still coming out.
Even with an election looming, apparently we have no intention of stopping spouting inanities.
You tell me, who are we to tell Japan to not be pacifist? What business do we have telling another world power to change its constitution to a more war-loving one or be excluded from playing policeman to the world? And anyway, doesn’t the world need some peace-loving policemen at this point?..
And in the same breath, he takes a jab against one of his own [previously-] enlisted men, presuming him guilty and a deserter before proven so. Un. believable.
It’s a nice article. Of course, it doesn’t – can’t – communicate the utter quiet of the huge valley surrounded by mountains on all sides, in the middle of which are you, with your four hundred lightning rods and your cabin. There were grey rabbits, or maybe hares, living underneath the stairs of the cabin last August, reasonably cautious but unafraid of people.
No TV, no computers, no telephone service except for an emergency landline. Huge orange moon looking in the window, and in the morning, cicadas and a groundhog eight feet away from you, going about his business. Twenty-four hours of stillness.
Because, come on! How can I avoid the daily temptation?
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we,” Bush said. “They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
