fresh pomes:

Not that these heights are so high, but still. . . sheesh

2012-01-15T21:34:00.001Z

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

-M. Kundera

A List of Don'ts for Women on Bicycles in 1895

2012-01-10T06:43:00.002Z

Don't Be a Fright

Don't wear a man's cap

Don't cultivate a "bicycle face"

Don't boast of your long rides.

So much more here.

GET IN THE LLAMA

2011-12-22T03:36:00.001Z

Spit Take

2011-12-10T19:51:00.001Z

This one is called Spit Take. It is from the comic called Three Word Phrase. If you were wondering what the funniest thing ever is to me. These six squares might be it.

google translate this review

2011-11-28T16:31:00.004Z

"Declaration of intent about an interpretation that the dessert was certainly controversial and even controversy. Furman is an artist and intense visceral radically, in clear contrast with its frail and often. A kind of punky trapped between positions of classic rockabilly that immediately release any possibility that his own thing would be a traditional acoustic performance. . .

Accompanied only by guitar (and harmonica), the artist despises the most melodic of his recordings as well as belonging to a gender specific stylistic, making the anarchy a philosophy which transforms the compositions in rough, heartfelt and deliveries had loudly publicized them."

this is part of a review about ezra's show in spain, translated by google. it sounds like his tour is going great.

Simen Johan

2011-11-27T19:06:00.002Z

Simen Johan

Happy Thanksgiving! Trinkets!

2011-11-24T04:02:00.000Z

It's that time again.

Wittgenstein Inspiration

2011-11-18T21:05:00.002Z

"When we think about the future of the world, we always have in mind its being at the place where it would be if it continued to move as we see it moving now. We do not realize that it moves not in a straight line, but in a curve, and that its direction constantly changes."

"Philosophy has made no progress? If somebody scratches where it itches, does that count as progress? If not, does that mean it wasn't an authentic scratch? Not an authentic itch? Couldn't this response to the stimulus go on for quite a long time until a remedy for itching is found?"

Hard Wood Pornography (SFW)

2011-11-10T05:01:00.003Z

Cabin Porn

Even more photos of this particular cabin here. I just, oh. is it real?

Top Ten Places I'd like to go over Winter Break

2011-11-02T15:05:00.003Z

1. Galilean Moons

2. Mars

3. Our Moon

4. Around our planet

5. Galapagos

6. Antarctica

7. Russia

8. Fyords

9. Israel/Lebanon

10. Mount Kilamanjaro

I Want and Fear this more than anything

2011-10-25T07:34:00.003+01:00

From The Awl, kayaking with blue whales. or something. maybe you dreamed it. How can something be so great and scary? and big?

I Ran Out Naked In the Sun

2011-09-12T18:51:00.003+01:00

I ran out naked

in the sun
and who could blame me
who could blame

the day was warm

I ran out naked
in the rain
and who could blame me
who could blame

the storm

I leaned toward sixty
that day almost done
it thundered
then

I wanted more I
shouted More
and who could blame me
who could blame

had been before

could blame me
that I wanted more

by Jane Hirshfield

from today's Writer's Almanac.

Change is gonna come

2011-08-29T17:32:00.002+01:00

i'm getting hair-restless and internet-daydreamy.

Violence For Beginners

2011-08-25T04:04:00.001+01:00

THAT’S WHEN IT HIT ME by Ezra Furman (Reblogged from his blog)

and splintered my collarbone like a melody, I was in love
with the world, liquefied in a blender and poured through the funnel
of your eyes into an incredible little jar which I have come
to refer to mistakenly as my life. Such a revelation blacked
my eyes and threw me against the wooden door, I was bleeding
a little bit from a cut near my eyebrow. My mouth fell open
at the sight of a violent beauty and I drooled a sweet liquid
onto the carpet. I think you can see oh darling that it hurts to split open
your sleep at five a.m. but love breaks into your heart in the early
early morning and does the Charleston on your face

Your eyes were black from the sun when I fell down the stairs
getting up to go to work, I wanted to bring you some money
to show you that you had held a gun to my eye and made me fall
in love because this was something I could not put into words
at the time. Thank heaven the cuts are clean and ugly now
and I’m drinking breakfast through a straw for you my coney island gal

I suspect we could have done it all night and all the next day, but you get tired so
we got some black thread and sewed it all up and went to bleeding sleep
in your bedsheets but I didn’t tell you I stayed up aching at the ceiling
touching a black and yellow bruise on my thigh I will never forget—
so do you think we can do this for the rest of our lives, isn’t the world
just dripping through the pipes we knocked my teeth out on and please
can we be in love again tomorrow night if we don’t make too much noise;
at two-thirty somebody was banging on the door and talking about calling the cops,
somehow we made it out of that one baby, let’s get cleaned up and do it once more, ohhhhhhhh shit

I assume that if you read this you are one of four (six?) people, but in case that's not the case, I recommend you read Ezra Furman's blog where sometimes he publishes his poems, which are great. Also, he's recording an album right now about violence and sadness and connecting with people.

David Foster Wallace, Google, and Hobbes

2011-08-22T22:41:00.003+01:00

"This idea that the internet's gonna become incredibly democratic- I mean, if you spend any time on the web you know that it's not gonna be, because that's completely overwhelming. There are four trillion bytes coming at you; 99% of them are shit, and it's too much work to do triage to decide. So it's very clearly, very soon, there's going to be an economic niche opening up for gatekeepers, or, what do you call them, wells, or various nexes, not just of interest but of quality. And then things get Real interesting, and we will beg for those things to be there, because otherwise we're going to spend 95% of our time bodysurfing through shit that every joker in his basement, who's not a pro. . . I'll tell ya, there's not a single more interesting time to be a live on the planet earth that in the next 20 years. It's gonna be- you're gonna get to watch all of human history played out again real quickly. . .

If you go back to Hobbes, and why we ended up begging. Why people in the State of Nature end up Begging for a ruler who has the power of life and death over them; we absolutely have to give our power away. The internet is going to be exactly the same way. Unless there are walls and sites and gatekeepers who say, 'Okay, you want fairly good fiction on the web? Let us pick it for you.' Because it's gonna take four days to find anything any good, through all the shit that's going to come. We're going to beg for it. We are literally going to pay for it."

This is DFW discussing the Web in 1996.

This is from David Lipsky's book, Although of Course you End up Becoming Yourself. I got it through Audible and listened to it on a roadtrip, and the whole thing is this unraveling interview that happens on a book tour for Infinite Jest. Anyway, I'm reading things by writers and academics now to gird my loins for graduate school, and came across this.

For the Fun of It

2011-08-20T21:34:00.000+01:00

Adorable

2011-08-20T21:16:00.001+01:00

How people love each other

2011-08-18T20:16:00.002+01:00

This is from a great webcomic, A Softer World

What things are like when you're in a new place that might become your home

2011-08-03T21:49:00.003+01:00

I've moved, I am trying to settle in a new place, and I had a very thoughtfully worded and personal account that was mostly a list of the boxed lunch my mother made me for the 8 hour drive from San Diego to Berkeley, CA (excerpt: "four fresh figs from a friends garden, 2 whole cobs of corn, boiled and chilled by being pressed up against an ice pack, 3 small tomatoes from her garden. . . ). Instead I will post this, as it is much better and more accurate. Please to enjoy.

Your New Daily Mantra

2011-06-12T15:20:00.001+01:00

Mary and Max: a movie to see, really

2011-06-11T17:48:00.003+01:00

I just saw this movie; it's currently available on Netflix Instant (but who knows for howw longg?).

This movie is sad, but I feel pretty confident it's the best movie you're going to hear about this week, this month? Oh, I don't know how many movies you hear about.

It's a great movie. Studying the ways in which people become lonely, and then less lonely. It's wonderful and, like I said, sad.

Somerville Residents, and the happiest picture

2011-04-21T14:48:00.003+01:00

A picture by Steve, that captures just how happy we were that early spring day, now representing the city of Somerville!

Why I like being homeless. . . a story of touring

2011-04-13T00:31:00.003+01:00

I am a tour manager, currently. I do things like scheduling and selling merchandise and driving and eating fast food. And taking pictures and facebooking and largely making/editing things like you see below. More to come! I hope you like it.

All six of you who read this, I'm sure you know the band I am tour managing for, Ezra Furman & the Harpoons. They have some very exciting new music videos coming out soon, I can't wait for you to see them.

How We Become Who We Are

2011-03-29T18:08:00.002+01:00

Most things about a person can probably be explained in ten minutes, if you can just find the right pubescent memory. Louis CK explains:

Uma Thurman's Family Background

2011-03-25T05:13:00.004Z

Excerpted from Wikipedia. This is insane. What stock.

"Thurman's mother, Nena von Schlebrügge, was a model born in Mexico City in 1941. Thurman's maternal grandfather was Colonel Baron Friedrich Karl Johannes von Schlebrügge, a German military officer who had become one of the senior Nazi spies in the Americas but who was also jailed by the Nazis for protecting Jewish friends. Thurman's maternal grandmother was Swedish-born Birgit Holmquist, from Trelleborg, who in 1930 modelled for a nude statue that overlooks the harbor of Smygehuk, Sweden. Thurman's mother was introduced to LSD guruTimothy Leary by Salvador Dalí and became Leary's third wife in 1964. She wed Thurman's father, Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman (b. August 3, 1941), in 1967; he was born in New York City, to Elizabeth Dean Farrar, a stage actress, and Beverly Reid Thurman, Jr., an Associated Press editor and United Nations translator. He was professor of religion at Amherst College from 1973 to 1988, when he accepted a position at Columbia University, where he was a professor of Tibetan Buddhism. Robert Thurman was the first Westerner to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk."

Where Children Sleep

2011-03-15T06:59:00.002Z

Photographer James Mollison, a project on children's rights that focuses on the special space a childhood bedroom has in a person's life.

Style, and Fashion Photography

2011-02-16T21:12:00.005Z

There's this new documentary coming out about Bill Cunningham, who is a very famous fashion photographer. This trailer was just posted on The Satorialist

I'm not going to try to talk about fashion because I'm going to sound like an imbecile. But it is important to me in the same way that being armed with a sense of humor, or a sense of wonder, is important to me. I'd really like to see this movie.

[oh, and of course, the greatest thing about this movie seems to be Bill Cunningham's delightful sensibility and how he spends his whole life amidst New York Elite without being one of them in most ways]

Akron/Family

2011-02-14T00:09:00.004Z

I really liked Akron/Family's album Love is Simple because it seemed joyful and unabashed verging on scary and creepy. I just got their new album yesterday. It's called S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT. Shinju is the volcano on the japanese island where I suppose this album was written. It sounds completely different from Love is Simple. As of this moment this is my favorite song on the album is called 'Another Sky':

"we begin

making ghosts of the familiar

mapping the wilds of our hearts"

Born too soon

2011-01-31T15:06:00.000Z

Poetry and/in Chicago

2011-01-17T18:36:00.014Z

Two big things are happening in my life: 1.) I am moving to Chicago in 2 weeks from Wednesday, and 2.) I, in being at my parents' house and being surrounded by my high school books, am having a renaissance of poetry in my life. It's great, it's so great. I'm making my way (haltingly and out-of-orderly) through my Norton's Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Therefore, I give you Chicago, by Carl Sandburg.

Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your

painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen
the gunman kill and go free to
kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women
and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my
city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be
alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall
bold slugger set vivid against the
little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted
against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his
ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,
sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

[i apologize because blogger refuses to let this be anything other than horrific formatting, so, that's that i guess]

The Long Goodbye, on grieving in Modern America

2011-01-12T19:46:00.003Z

I was recently reminded of this piece in Slate by Meghan O'Rourke. I read it when it first came out last year and it blew me away, now I think O'Rourke is coming out with a book on grief. The piece is a long series, and it is deeply (uncomfortably) personal, but is also just a very interesting look at the sociology of grief and our rituals (or lack thereof) surrounding death in America. A little excerpt from the first installment in the series:

"Since my mother's death, I have been in grief. I walk down the street; I answer my phone; I brush my hair; I manage, at times, to look like a normal person, but I don't feel normal. I am not surprised to find that it is a lonely life: After all, the person who brought me into the world is gone. But it is more than that. I feel not just that I am but that the world around me is deeply unprepared to deal with grief. Nearly every day I get e-mails from people who write: "I hope you're doing well." It's a kind sentiment, and yet sometimes it angers me. I am not OK. Nor do I find much relief in the well-meant refrain that at least my mother is "no longer suffering." Mainly, I feel one thing: My mother is dead, and I want her back. I really want her back—sometimes so intensely that I don't even want to heal. At least, not yet. . .

I say this knowing it sounds melodramatic. This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands. I am aware that I am one of the lucky ones. I am an adult. My mother had a good life. We had insurance that allowed us to treat her cancer and to keep her as comfortable as possible before she died. . ."

I will definitely buy the book when it comes out in April, even though the cover is almost unbearable ugly.

Also, I was reminded of this lovely series by today's Slate Culture Gabfest, which is a podcast I never miss listening to every week.

Appropriateness of Chewbacca Impressions

2011-01-11T03:59:00.001Z

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Advertising and Modern Art

2010-12-19T23:01:00.002Z

"The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative, and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little." -Banksy

Just the Right Amount of Wrong

2010-12-16T14:44:00.001Z

Anthropology is 'true' even if it's not 'science'

2010-12-02T20:45:00.002Z

So, the AAA (American Anthropological Association) recently created a new mission statement that purposefully omitted any reference to Anthropology as a science. A nice blog called Inside Higher Ed ran an article about it, and then lots of other blogs ran articles criticizing the move and talked a lot about the postmodern shift in so many disciplines and the changes many 'social sciences' have gone through. I thought this article on an Anthropology blog called Savage Minds is nice and interesting.

"The narrative at work seems basically to be this: for decades real, objective, scientific anthropology has been under assault from interpretivists like Clifford Geertz who do not believe in truth. With the new language in the AAA mission statement, anthropologists have given up on truth altogether.

I wish that this were a parody or simplification of the argument, but it is not — this is honestly as it good as it gets from the critics of the AAA: Clifford Geertz is the thin edge of a wedge inserted into the social sciences by Creationism, Sarah Palin, etc. etc.

The fact that the model used by ‘scientific’ anthropologists has as much complexity as an average episode of WWE Smackdown — with a distinction between the evil ‘fluff-head’ cultural anthropologists and the good ‘scientific’ cultural anthropologists — should be the first sign that something fishy is going on. Is it true, as they claim, that anthropology will lose its public credibility, commitment to accuracy, and claim to speak the truth if the knowledge that we produce is not ‘scientific’? Obviously: No. To see why, consider. . . "

Anyway, read the rest here, it's short and it's always interesting to dip into someone else's coversation like this, and PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE IS SO COOL.

[On a related(?) note, my mom (who is Not an anthropologist) was in UCLA class of '73, BA in Anthropology! So anyway, she was studying it when it was Very much nestled in the vocabulary of the hard sciences, and she stands by it. Now I wish I had a copy of that picture of my mom in front of Lucy.]

I Live Real Close to Where you Used to Live

2010-11-29T21:32:00.002Z

"You are eating 100% healthy. Can you put my dad in a job?"

"I think that you should shut down cigarette and liquor companies and try to keep drugs off the streets. Robots may be able to help you."

Here are excerpts from a huge collection of letters written to the First Lady by kids. [There's a whole book you can buy, proceeds go to 826, you know about 826?]

Have you seen this cat?

2010-11-22T21:06:00.000Z

My Top 50 Favorite Albums

2010-10-19T05:24:00.003+01:00

Joni Mitchell-blue
Weezer- The Blue Album
Radiohead- Kid A
Camera Obscura- Let’s Get Out of This Country
The Unicorns- Who Will Cut Our Hair When We Are Gone?
Wolf Parade- Apologies to the Queen Mary
Dirty Projectors- Bitte Orca
The Beatles- White Album
Neutral Milk Hotel- In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
Sunset Rubdown- Shut Up I am Dreaming
Frightened Rabbit- The Midnight Organ Fight
Pixies- Surfer Rosa
CocoRosie- La Maison de Mon Reve
Violent Femmes- Violent Femmes
Grizzly Bear- Horn of Plenty
Yeasayer- All Hour Cymblas
Paul Baribeau- Grand Ledge
Wild Beasts- Two Dancers
Explosions In The Sky- The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place
Ani Difranco- Little Plastic Castles
Ani Difranco- Ani Difranco
M Ward- Transfiguration of Vincent
Magnetic Fields- 69 Love Songs
Animal Collective-Strawberry Jam
Yo La Tengo- And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
Neko Case- Middle Cyclone
Joanna Newsom- Ys
MGMT- Oracular Spectacular
Sonic Youth- Daydream Nation
Belle & Sebastian- Tigermilk
Television- Marquee Moon
My Bloody Valentine- Isn’t Anything
Radiohead- OK Computer
Weezer- Pinkerton
Pixies- Doolittle
White Stripes- White Blood Cells
Regina Spektor- Begin to Hope
Nirvana- In Utero
Ok Go- Ok Go
Yeah Yeah Yeahs- Fever to Tell
Miles Davis- Kind of Blue
Akron/Family- Love is Simple
Talking Heads- Talking Heads: 77
Bright Eyes- Lifted or The Story is in The Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!
Yo La Tengo-Summer Sun
The Beatles- Abbey Road
Lucinda Williams- World Without Tears
The Beach Boys- Pet Sounds
The Flaming Lips- The Soft Bulletin

I have so many disclaimers I have exhausted myself over the past 3 days mentally wording them. Here it is. No one cares. I have been obsessing about it with excruciating detail and I still know it's all wrong. So many did not make the list so I'm Sure it's wrong. . . but just to say it, Sneaker Pimps- Becoming X is 51st, and The Notwist- Neon Golden is 52nd. Also Soviet Kitsch should be on there. . . and all the camera obscura albums, and all radiohead albums, and nirvana's Nevermind, and Art Brut, and White Rabbits, bon iver. . . i need to stop thinking about this and do something useful.

And I am completely unprepared to do any kind of gender and racial breakdown.

It's good to pray before you eat

2010-10-16T21:31:00.001+01:00

Johnny Appleseed Grace

The Lord is good to me
And so I thank the Lord
For giving me the things I need
The sun and the rain and the apple seed.
The Lord is good to me.

And every seed that grows
Will grow into a tree,
And one day soon there'll be apples there,
For everyone in the world to share.
The Lord is good to me.

When I wake up each morning,
I'm happy as can be,
Because I know that with God's care
The apple trees will still be there.
The Lord's been good to me.

Seahorse Silhouette

2010-10-05T01:19:00.004+01:00

I just thought you should know about this photo.

I was thinking that I liked the way 'seahorse silhouette' sounds. so i google image searched it and found this magic.

let's go swimming!

if you can't tell, i'm having trouble being serious.

oh yes and this was all started by this post on the flickrblog

Faces of the Last Season of Oprah

2010-09-21T15:41:00.002+01:00

Faces of the Last Season of Oprah: screen shots of women losing their shit.

The Drums, 'Let's Go Surfing'

2010-09-20T06:35:00.000+01:00

"We only write about two feelings: one is the first day of summer when you and all of your friends are standing on the edge of a cliff watching the sun set and being overcome with all of your hopes and dreams at once. The other is when you're walking alone in the rain and realize you will be alone forever."

Girl Scouts breed "pro-abortion" lesbians

2010-09-10T13:38:00.007+01:00

Hans Zeiger, Republican Representative hopeful, argues the Girl Scouts "have become a pro-abortion, feminist training corps. If the Girl Scouts of America can't get back to teaching real character, perhaps it will be time to look for our cookies elsewhere."

FEAR US, HANS!

I listen to podcasts

2010-09-09T12:12:00.005+01:00

Due to a confluence of events [moved to a new city, general obsession with time spent alone, distaste for silence, extreeeeme motion sickness] I listen to a lot of podcasts. Many of them I recommend on a regular basis, even to people who don't seem to like podcasts very much. This is them, It's hard to categorize them sometimes.

I don't know how to categorize these:

This American Life*

The Moth*

Stuff You Missed in History Class*

Philosophy Bites

A History of the World in 100 Objects

Speaking of Faith

Astronomy Cast

NYC Radiolab

Intelligence Squared

Savage Love

Violet Blue's Open Source Sex

Friends talking to each other while I listen and laugh and pretend I'm friends with them too (many, many podcasts technically fall under this category)

You Look Nice Today*

Cockails for Two

Live, from a Shoebox

Music-ish

Classical Performance (WGBH) Podcast*

The Noise Pop Podcast*

The FADER podcasts

B96 OFficial Flipside at 5 podcast

News-ish

Slate Political Gabfest*

Slate Culture Gabfest*

Double X

Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! Podcast

The New York Review of Books

Global News

The Economist/Economist Special Reports

It's All Politics

On Point with Tom Ashbrook

Planet Money

The World Next Week

There are a few others I have listened to, and I'm not currently subscribed to all of them because I switch on and off... so this is a selective list I guess. Why did I write this? I'm not sure-- if you were looking for a good podcast, all of these are good.

*These are my favoritest.

Iggy Pop, the sweetheart

2010-08-27T15:41:00.004+01:00

". . . but most of all I want to see you take a deep breath + do whatever you must to survive + find something to be that you love."

Iggy Pop, in a letter to a fan.

(from Ezra Furman: A Guide for the Perplexed)

[originally from Letters of Note, which I hope you already know lots about, but if not, now's a good time to start]

American Hardwood

2010-08-23T09:48:00.006+01:00

CAPITAL sunglasses.

They've launched their website. It's pretty slick. I recommend the 'About Us' page.

Capital sunglasses are:

Made of beautiful 'American hardwood', handmade in the USA, delivered in 100% recycled cardboard packaging. Their first style of sunglasses is called 'Bonnie/Clyde' and you might not be able to tell from the photos but they defintiely don't look like just another pair of wayfarers. They're put together in the good ol' US of A, and you have a 33% chance of having your pair be made by my cousin!

Anyway, I like the 'Walnut Stained, brown polarized' pair. And yes I'm just writing about my cousin's new company, but he and two other strapping young men in the woods of montana are crouched over, forging these artisinal shades, and I think you should consider making them wildly rich and famous!

The best dance video on youtube?

2010-08-21T21:45:00.001+01:00

McSweeney's is doing it again

2010-08-20T15:09:00.003+01:00

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2010/8/20contest.html

be a writer! do you have tales to tell?

[About this time last year I was going to submit a column idea to mcsweeney's for this open contest. But I didn't because the alternative option of feeling self-pitying about it combined with the draw of months of quiet regret was too much for me. But alas! they've decided to do it again. I theenk I will be submitting the idea I never turned in last year, which will undoubtedly take a few turns before I turn it in, but in its fetal (fecal?) state it is 'Chapters from Unpublished Textbooks'. Originally it was only science textbooks and it might still be that. ]

Very relatedly, I have less than two weeks to complete my Master's dissertation.

I AM THE KWISATZ HADERACH!

2010-08-20T08:28:00.003+01:00

It is 5 days until the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago announces who moves onto the next round for their Month at the Museum contest. As I told my friend Lauren, since I heard that 1000+ people applied, and since I have been watching lots of lovely application videos on youtube, I have been trying to slowly disengage my heart a bit. BUT that doesn't mean I'm gonna stop dreaming about it, riiight? Here is my application video.

Relatedly, I just wrote my first cover letter. And, as per my previous post, asked my parents to look it over for me. Really I asked everyone to look it over--one could argue I don't know what I'm doing.

Also, here is my favorite lol cat:

'Emerging Adulthood' as a new life stage

2010-08-18T15:37:00.003+01:00

'JEFFREY JENSEN ARNETT, a psychology professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., is leading the movement to view the 20s as a distinct life stage, which he calls “emerging adulthood.'

'DURING THE PERIOD he calls emerging adulthood, Arnett says that young men and women are more self-focused than at any other time of life, less certain about the future and yet also more optimistic, no matter what their economic background. This is where the “sense of possibilities” comes in, he says; they have not yet tempered their idealistic visions of what awaits. “The dreary, dead-end jobs, the bitter divorces, the disappointing and disrespectful children . . . none of them imagine that this is what the future holds for them,” he wrote. Ask them if they agree with the statement “I am very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life,” and 96 percent of them will say yes. But despite elements that are exciting, even exhilarating, about being this age, there is a downside, too: dread, frustration, uncertainty, a sense of not quite understanding the rules of the game. More than positive or negative feelings, what Arnett heard most often was ambivalence — beginning with his finding that 60 percent of his subjects told him they felt like both grown-ups and not-quite-grown-ups.'

In the New York Times today, addressing the question of why we're all moving back in with our parents.

re: The New Yorker cover for May 24, 2010. I won't link to it because they. . . seem scary. By which i mean rightly protective of their digital property.

'learn to use a micro-computer' actual LSE advice

2010-08-17T10:09:00.003+01:00

Excerpt from the book recommended to Master's students in my program:

'If your dissertation is the first occassion when you have produced a sizeable piece of typescript, you should consider seriously learning to use a wordprocessing system on a micro-computer.'

Honestly.

Philosophy, Imagination, Poetry, and being Fallen

2010-08-17T09:46:00.003+01:00

'The gift of the greatest literature--of poetry--is a gift of imagination. Its effect is an expansion of our faculty of dreaming. Under its inspiration the familiar outlines of the common dream fade, new perceptions, and emotions hitherto unfelt, are excited within us, the till-now settled fact dissolves once more into infinite possibility, and we become aware that the myth (which is the substance of the dream) has acquired a new quality, without our needing to detect the precise character of the change. But from a book of philosophy, when it reaches the level of literature (as it sometimes does), a more direct, a less subtle consequence may be expected to spring. Its gift is not an access of imaginative power, but an increase of knowledge; it will prompt and it will instruct. In it we shall be reminded of the common dream that binds the generations together, and the myth will be made more intelligible to us. And consequently, we must seek the meaning of such a book in its vision of the myth. . .

'. . . it recalls man to his littleness, his imperfection, his mortality, while at the same time recognizing his importance to himself. . . And what makes Leviathan a masterpiece of philosophical literature is the profound logic of Hobbes's imagination, his power as an artist. Hobbes recalls us to our mortality with a deliberate conviction, with a subtle and sustained argument. He, with a sure and steady irony, does what Swift could do only with an intermittent brilliance, adn what the literature of Existentialism is doing today with an exaggerated display of emotion and a fals suggestion of novelty.'
1947

Michael Oakeshott: 'Leviathan: a myth' in Hobbes on Civil Association

(Thanks Harrison)

I read Bukowski for these bits

2010-08-16T10:13:00.002+01:00

Excerpt from 'two nights before my 72nd birthday' by Charles Bukowski

this has to be some kind of goddamned
miracle!
just another old guy
blinking at the forces,
smiling a little,
as the cities tremble and the left
hand rises,
clutching
something
real.

(from today's Writer's Almanac)

The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D

2010-08-16T08:52:00.003+01:00

An illustrated guide to higher education and what it means. This is not a joke. It is charming.

(via @nealsonmunn)

Month at the Museum

2010-08-08T19:39:00.002+01:00

I entered a contest. The coolest contest that has ever existed. You get to live in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago for a month, and play and do experiments and blog the heck out of it all. Then they give you gadgets and a lifetime membership and $10,000. WHY HAS EVERYONE IN THE WORLD NOT ALREADY ENTERED THIS? what's that? because you're gainfully employed? Because you have families? Psh.

Anyway, I entered and immediately remembered the things I forgot to say in my application. . . but that's what happens when you're working with a swiss cheese brain on a sixteen lane highway. Also, I am in the Pellston, MI Airport, and from where I am sitting I can currently see 16 taxidermic animals. Oops, 18. oh 19.

This is not a joke.

Anyway, All I'm thinking about is this contest and my dissertation, and I only have it together enough [see swiss cheese, above] to talk about the MSI Chicago contest.

Apply here!

Newt Gingrich and Albert Camus

2010-07-31T15:11:00.002+01:00

Gingrich gave a speech called, "Camus, National Security, and Afghanistan" and it is nice to read people thoughtfully destroying the ways in which politicians misappropriate beautiful things for their various purposes.

"In other words, just your basic neoconnish scare-mongering talking points gussied up with a quote from a man [Camus] who would have been appalled by virtually everything Gingrich stands for. Throwing Orwell in there is a gimme. It's so obvious that Orwell would have found Gingrich a reprehensible monster that it isn't even worth wasting time debating."

From the Guardian (and Foreign Policy)

As a man I don't date people who don't date men

2010-07-29T23:29:00.001+01:00

Zoolmpire

2010-07-16T04:47:00.003+01:00

"If I had to choose between a twilight movie or this for two hours, I'd choose this."

delightful

yeah it's 4:48am. why, what do you do when you have a paper to write?

Martha Nussbaum Demands Apology from Mike Huckabee

2010-07-11T15:18:00.002+01:00

Dang. Mike Huckabee somehow horrifically mis-cited Nussbaum while trying to cover himself in a discussion of whether he is or is not and how much he is or is not disgusted by the idea of Gay Sex. This sounds like a train wreck from start to finish. Nussbaum, however, comes out of it looking just as sharp and full of grace as I dream of her being by using the opportunity to not only explain that she was mis-cited, but to go somewhat in-depth into her actual theory. . . and in so doing accuses Huckabee of a kind of retardation in his sexual and personal growth. but tastefully!

Huckabee, gay marriage, gay sex, the 'ick factor', and projective disgust:

article here through TPM

Feminist: Pick your definition

2010-07-09T16:09:00.003+01:00

I feel that I have to blog this. Nancy Bauer, of Tufts University's Philosophy Department, has written this great article in the NYT that is now delightfully being blogged about by other people who delight me.

Here's the article: Lady Power, It's on Lady Gaga and young-lady-feminism

There are lots of interesting things, but the main thing running through it that I like is the idea that it is all too easy to let 'feminist' collapse into 'man-hater'. Also, Nancy focuses on the main question that is mostly all I think about when I look at Lady Gaga doing anything:

"Is this an expression of Lady Gaga’s strength as a woman or an exercise in self-objectification?"

Trying to Tell a New Story about the Crisis

2010-07-09T15:34:00.004+01:00

Amazing Graphic artist has created this beautiful illustration of a talk by David Harvey (one smart Marxist). If nothing else, just watch a minute to see how cool his comic art is.

I recommend min. 3:30-5. If nothing else. My lovely school gets

a name drop.

and this is just a goofy snippet of a comic strip I found online. also did you know there's an entire Manga version of Das Kapital?

'Don't Listen to Harold Bloom' T-shirts on the way

2010-07-06T16:46:00.006+01:00

“…don’t feel bad. Read whatever you want. Don’t listen to Harold Bloom, that sour-mouthed crypt-keeper of the canon. Books are books. . . They are not obstacles to conquer, or props for intellectual macho contests.”

-Benjamin Law

(bookworm)

film of ireland

2010-06-22T09:08:00.000+01:00

I went to Ireland

To instruct myself over and over in joy, and acclamation.

2010-06-22T09:02:00.004+01:00

A few years ago I had the deep pleasure of reading [some of] Mary Oliver's Why I Wake Early, and now RevMolly has drawn my attention back to her. Also, Molly's writings are really something special and I recommend you try letting her keep you company on the internet and maybe keeping her company.

Mindful, by Mary Oliver

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for -
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant -
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

Climb the walls of the Sistine Chapel

2010-05-30T13:31:00.003+01:00

Listen to Gregorian Chants while you clamber around the sistine chapel and zoom in to see the ceiling. A Renaissance Roller Coaster! (I got this from 11D)

http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html

Emerson and Carver

2010-05-25T07:50:00.004+01:00

Literary Birthdays Today

Ralph Waldo Emerson (b. 1803)

"Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote those books."

Raymond Carver (b. 1938)

Where Water Comes Together with Other Water

I love creeks and the music they make.

And rills, in glades and meadows, before

they have a chance to become creeks.

I may even love them best of all

for their secrecy. I almost forgot

to say something about the source!

Can anything be more wonderful than a spring?

But the big streams have my heart too.

And the places streams flow into rivers.

The open mouths of rivers where they join the sea.

The places where water comes together

with other water. Those places stand out

in my mind like holy places.

But these coastal rivers!

I love them the way some men love horses

or glamorous women. I have a thing

for this cold swift water.

Just looking at it makes my blood run

and my skin tingle. I could sit

and watch these rivers for hours.

Not one of them like any other.

I'm 45 years old today.

Would anyone believe it if I said

I was once 35?

My heart empty and sere at 35!

Fiver more years had to pass

before it began to flow again.

I'll take all the time I please this afternoon

before leaving my place alongside this river.

It pleases me, loving rivers.

Loving them all the way back to their source.

Loving everything that increases me.

Thanks Writer's Almanac (i recommend the daily email). Also, see? not everything about Raymond Carver ends in quiet desperation, sheesh. Have a good day!

Here Comes the Sun. . . I hope

2010-05-12T19:26:00.004+01:00

"If the Eskimos have 400 words for snow, the English have 700 words for 'it’s dark and cold.'

. . . The message in “Here Comes The Sun” is clear, and it was apparently heard by its intended recipients.

Dear John and Paul,

I have had enough of your constant power struggles. I am old enough now to take care of myself. Thanks for everything. Bye.

George"

From The Beatles Complete on Ukulele. This cover and essay on Here Comes the Sun is a delight. Sometimes this guy's essays are crazy, sometimes the covers aren't awesome, but mostly it's all totally and completely amazing. And, ahhh George.

Wait, just to be clear, because I wasn't, this guy is recording covers of every single Beatles song ever, and he plays ukulele with the band on each song, and then he posts mp3s of the song on this blog with the most heartfelt little essays about the song and where the Beatles were in their lives when they wrote/recorded it and how he feels about the songs.

( oh and the photo's mine )

Email Exchange with my mother

2010-05-11T22:13:00.004+01:00

This is our email exchange today.

Mom:

Hi there,

I need your name as it appears on your passport for the airlines-is it: Rogera Emma Weismann? Or Rogera E Weismann?

Thanks,

Mom

Me:

Oh! I forgot to tell you, I had my name legally changed a few months ago so my passport now reads:

CLIFFORD PEONY MCCOY.

Just kidding. Rogera Emma Weismann.

Love!

Mom:

I had a brief tachycardia. . .

Charles Taylor and what's missing

2010-05-05T11:08:00.005+01:00

"But this line of questioning is symptomatic of a certain ambivalence, a tension between purported intellectual commitments and the performance of scholarship. The line of questioning is animated by a desire for completeness, by the fantasy that, once all of the data is accounted for, we can rest assured that we will get the world right. . ."

A discussion of the will to truth and the role of rhetoric, scholarship, and how secularism/ bourgeois virtues all wrapped up in a sort of meta-review of Charles Taylor's book. Gosh, The Social Science Research Council's blog, The Immanent Frame, is really good.

". . . Simon During, in 'Completing Secularism: The Mundane in a Neoliberal Age' charges that Taylor makes this same mistake. Taylor’s oppositions of religion vs. secularism, enchantment vs. disenchantment, and transcendence vs. immanence elide the mundane. While Taylor writes of the “ordinary,” he portrays it as always already colonized by a social imaginary. I am skeptical of much that During writes, but the possibility that what Taylor misses isn’t additional data but something else entirely, something which we are all familiar with and which goes under the radar of a social imaginary, seems quite right. Taylor’s notion of a social imaginary binds together social practices, the images ordinary people have of how those practices fit together, and the ideas and theories that elites create that authorize those practices. These components all function in complex relationships with each other, supporting each other but also having the potential to shift the others. But something is missing."

I recommend this article. read it here

Policy and the Social Fabric

2010-05-05T07:13:00.003+01:00

David Brooks in the NYT . My favorite part is "studiously ignore". Thanks to people who sent this to me.

". . . So when we’re arguing about politics, we should be aware of how policy fits into the larger scheme of cultural and social influences. Bad policy can decimate the social fabric, but good policy can only modestly improve it.

Therefore, the first rule of policy-making should be, don’t promulgate a policy that will destroy social bonds. If you take tribes of people, exile them from their homelands and ship them to strange, arid lands, you’re going to produce bad outcomes for generations. Second, try to establish basic security. If the government can establish a basic level of economic and physical security, people may create a culture of achievement — if you’re lucky. Third, try to use policy to strengthen relationships. The best policies, like good preschool and military service, fortify emotional bonds.

Finally, we should all probably calm down about politics. Most of the proposals we argue about so ferociously will have only marginal effects on how we live, especially compared with the ethnic, regional and social differences that we so studiously ignore."

May the Fourth be with you

2010-05-04T23:31:00.006+01:00

Happy Star Wars Day!

Things you might not know. There was a Star Wars holiday special filmed for TV in 1978 that involved celebrating 'Life Day' on Chewie's home planet,

That scene at the end The Empire Strikes Back where Leia says "I love you" and Han says "I know" was an outtake. UNSCRIPTED. he was supposed to say "I love you too". *

Have you heard the dirty rumor that at no point in Return of the Jedi are the ewoks referred to by name? Well, this is just not true because, C-3PO says "I believe these are ewoks" BUT it is true (I think) that none of them are ever referred to by name but their individual names [eg. Winda, Weechee, Cheirpa] are in the stage directions and the GL empire later made zillions selling named ewok dolls. (Steve, did you tell me that ewok thing? I think you did and I believed you. you're a filthy Jawa).

These are awesome headphones I will buy for myself some time very soon. (I found them through here)

Also, I bet this is actually a lego commercial or something, but I just want to BELIEVE it was made my some kid and his dad:

*this is in no way verified but one time someone told me this and i want it to be true.

I wish I had an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. I mean it: May the 4th Be With You!

The Alot Monster, or, How to Cope

2010-05-03T21:09:00.003+01:00

How to cope with the excess of syntactic slaughter on the internet? Draw cartoons to explain otherwise inexplicable actions or incomprehensible fragments. So says Hyperbole and a Half . It's the only way to get any sleep at night. This is the Alot Beast.

"The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people's grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I'd normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world.

For example, when I read the sentence 'I care about this alot,' this is what I imagine: "

Cyndi Lauper on Lady Gaga

2010-04-29T18:32:00.005+01:00

From Time's 100 people who affected us most

". . . People forget how young she is. She is barely 24 — much younger than I was when I became famous. It's very tough being where she is right now. People are pulling her in all different directions. It's hard to navigate that. Try to imagine what you were like at her age, if you still can. I can't wait to see how she grows and what she decides her next act will be. She only has two albums out, but already she is inspiring other artists to go further in their own work.

When I see somebody like Gaga, I sit back in admiration. I'm inspired to pick up the torch again myself. I did an interview with her once, and she showed up with a sculpture on her head. I thought, How awesome. Being around her, I felt like the dust was shaken off of me. I find it very comforting to sit next to somebody and not have to worry that I look like the freak. She isn't a pop act, she is a performance artist. She herself is the art. She is the sculpture."

"It rained outside, so we camped inside"

2010-04-27T12:02:00.002+01:00

May I recommend spending a few minutes being delighted by Tim Walker's Photography?

[sometimes the whimsy goes a little too pastel and high fashion for my taste, but. . . little lit up tents in a library? yes please. blue elephants and animals in doors and strange pictures of English countryside.]

A Protrusion of a Philosopher

2010-04-24T13:20:00.003+01:00

Jonathan Wolff (Philosophy at UCL) wrote a little thing in the Guardian about what it means to be a successful academic, how to play by the rules, and how it sort of sucks.

"I was amused to be introduced recently as a "prominent" political philosopher. Not eminent, not famous, but prominent. What does that mean? Conspicuous. Sticks out. Maybe a bit too much. Like a protruding forehead, which, come to think of it, is another of my characteristics. A sign of intelligence, apparently. . .

For years there was virtually no reaction to my work. But as time wore on, a few PhD students sent me bits of their theses where I was ground into the dust. So they thought. Ha! And then a few published papers mentioning my writings began to appear. At first, the only form this took was simply to quote my crystalline summaries of well-known ideas. Quite flattering, but, at the same time, an insufficient boost to the academic ego. After all, one wants to be known as a great original thinker, not as someone with a flair for precis. . .

hould I hang my head for not playing the game? Well, as the comedian Paul Merton puts it, I must have been off school the day they taught the rules. You have to pretty much make it up as you go along, including working out how to allocate your time. Much of mine seems to be spent booking yet more train tickets to go off and deliver yet more talks at yet more meetings. There doesn't seem to be a rule about how many speaking invitations you should accept, or how many PhD theses you should examine, or how many papers you should read for journals, or, indeed, how quickly you should respond to emails. . .

The only rule, it seems, was formulated by Spinoza. Every determination is a negation. Or, in other words, any decision to do something is a decision not to do something else. Accordingly, a central task for academics these days is managing negation. And the greater the prominence, the greater the negation. (I think I'm finally getting the hang of how to write like a French philosopher.)"

What's my profit on it?

I can't believe they're real

2010-04-20T23:04:00.004+01:00

Let's not forget, Toucans are Awesome.

'How to Do Life Right'

2010-04-20T20:44:00.004+01:00

My blogging friend, Noelle, continues to delight and embarrass with her Blog, 'How to do Life Right', whose tag line is

'A SATIRICAL BLOG PEPPERED WITH HONESTY REGARDING THE FEMALE MIND, SEXUALITY, AND THE WOES OF BEING YOUNG, DRUNK, AND PRIVILEGED IN LOS ANGELES.'

I invite you to read of her exploits, better than celebrity gossip and just as efficient a waste of time as scrolling through unhappyhipsters.com, or whatever your drug of choice may be.

This is an open letter to herself the morning after working coachella: 'Please please please don't ever drink tequila again. You think you're "hilarious" but you're not. The only reason you get away with half the shit you do is because you have breasts. Realistically, you only have five good years of perky youth left in you. . . I heard you did some freaky ass shit this weekend.'

(You might think it's not funny or weird or bizarrely heteronormative and misogynistic and degrading. . . but you also might find it every bit of a guilty pleasure as I do. Not you, Steve. You won't. Don't even bother. Everyone else, you might.)

What a Pleasure and Relief

2010-04-18T17:36:00.001+01:00

"I was warned that as i got older i would lose the youthful feeling that i'm particularly special, but no one told me what a pleasure and relief it could be." - Laura Gillespie

Why Andrew Sullivan won't come to the Tea Party

2010-04-18T12:49:00.003+01:00

I'm really not such a dailydish fan as it might seem, but for this Andrew Sullivan's opinion was exactly the one I wanted to hear, a nice succinct outlining of why some of the underlying ideas of The Tea Baggers are fine and well but they are still a joke.

"When they propose cuts in Medicare, means-testing Social Security, a raising of the retirement age and a cut in defense spending, I'll take them seriously and wish them well.

Until then, I'll treat them with the condescending contempt they have thus far deserved."

Nietzsche's Poetry: The Peacock and the Buffalo

2010-04-18T11:49:00.003+01:00

The Peacock and the Buffalo: 'the first complete English translation of the poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche, from his first poems, written at the tender age of 14, to his last writings - that's 275 poems in all!'

I've only read one poem 'Homecoming', and I believe it was written by a 14-year-old. Whatever I won't waste a single breath being snarky about this, I am really excited.

From continuum

Runaway Shadow in Math Class

2010-04-16T12:37:00.002+01:00

I can't wait to be a teacher.

As Patrick said, "Super nerdy and super awesome"

"the guy that wrote it told you it was dumb"

2010-03-28T20:26:00.004+01:00

What do you do when you keep having nightmares? Even worse, when your daughter has nightmares? This is a story about how Kelly Oxford brought in the writer of Monster House to fix the nightmares brought on by his movie. His letter is the bestest.

"This is a story about the nicest thing a non-relative has taken the time to do for one of my children without getting paid for it.

When Salinger was 7 she became plagued with nightmares about the film ‘Monster House’. Strangely, through a friend, I knew the screenwriter Dan Harmon (@danharmon, Creator of ‘Community’ on NBC).
So one day, in early 2008, I wrote to him:

Dear Dan,
Salinger has watched Monster House twice now.
Both times she has been plagued by nightmares for at least a week following the viewings.
She only watched it the second time because she was struck by the fact that 4 year old Henry was completely unfazed by it and figured it couldn’t have been so scary.

Me- What is the part that scares you so badly?
Her- That the woman is so evil that even after she’s dead and none of the kids care about teasing her anymore…she turns into a house and chases them. She’s too crazy, that’s pure evil.
Me- Is it the animation that’s creepy?
Her- No, it’s scary that someone is so mean that they could come back from the dead, become something that should not be alive and then try to kill people.
Me- yeah.
Henry- I think it’s AWESOME

It’s been 3 nights of her waking up crying and I totally blame you.
You should come over and rationalize the entire thing to her.
Okay, maybe you could just write her a note because she doesn’t believe I know the creator of her nightmares.

Kelly

Here was his immediate response…….
Dear Salinger:

Your Mom told me about Monster House scaring you. It sounds like one of the things that upset you is the fact that the house kept wanting to hurt people even after nobody wanted to hurt it anymore.

I will tell you a secret that sounds so silly, you might not believe it, but this is true: I never finished writing Monster House before my bosses turned it into a movie. And then different writers, people I don’t even know, changed the story in lots of ways, and the movie that you saw was not the story I wanted to tell you.

I think a good story, even if it is sad or scary while you’re watching it, should always make you a little less scared after you’ve seen it. Because even a scary story, if it’s a good scary story, takes us into strange, dark places that don’t make sense at first, and helps us see that they do make sense, and are therefore not so scary.

And that didn’t happen in Monster House. The kids go inside the house, and everything’s scary in there, but nothing starts making more sense. I don’t know about you, but when I go inside a giant scary monster, I expect to be rewarded for my bravery. There should always be something inside a monster that helps you understand it, and makes you less scared of it, and able to make the monster go away. Not just a bunch of stuff that makes you more confused and scared.

And why, after they escaped the house, did that old man tell them another scary story about a mean fat lady that didn’t make very much sense either? I’ll tell you why. Because Gil Kenan is a hack and Steven Spielberg is a moron. But hey, I shouldn’t be dumping this stuff on you.

Let’s just say, Salinger, that I have a lot of questions about that movie, too. And because I saw them making it, I know it’s not real, so it doesn’t scare me, but it makes me mad that it scared you, because I tried to tell them they were making a bad movie that was going to confuse and frighten smart children, instead of making children more brave, and they acted like I was stupid for being afraid that would happen.

I guess you and I are just smarter than other people, and I guess part of being smart is being scared of things that don’t scare other people. Henry’s a little younger than us and he just thinks the movie looks cool, which it does. And we won’t take that away from him. But you and I are looking at the movie through smart, sensitive, older eyes, and we can see how confusing it is.

The good news is, although our smart, sensitive, older eyes will probably always see more reasons to be afraid than other people’s eyes, we also have smart, sensitive older brains that can make sense of scary things, and make them less scary, not only for us, but for everyone else. Who knows what kind of amazing things you will be doing as you live your life. Maybe you will tell stories, or paint pictures, or sing songs, or climb mountains, or clean streets, or study insects or rescue elephants. But we know one thing for sure: you are going to be very special while you’re doing it, and you’re going to remove a lot of fear from other people’s lives, because you’re smart enough to see it, which means you’re smart enough to conquer it.

I hope one day I can finish writing a movie that they don’t change so much, and if you see it, I hope it makes you happy. Until then, I heard that Wall-E is very good, you should go see that. And next time Monster House is on, just remember that the guy that wrote it told you it was dumb.

Dan"

If you tweet, you probably already know @kellyoxford, but if you don't I recommend her for following. Sometimes she's not my taste but in general, if you can write "Sometimes I think the moon is the earth from the future and it's there to scare us but we're not scared. We are so stupid." then I will follow you wherever you go.

Other Criteria, Sadder, More Limited

2010-03-26T21:08:00.006Z

"Morality, then, as the channel to individual self-fulfillment--yes. Morality as the foundation of civic virtue, and accordingly as a condition precedent to successful democracy--yes. Morality in governmental method, as a matter of conscience and preference on the part of our people--yes. But morality as a general criterion for the determination of the behavior of states and above all as a criterion for measuring and comparing the behavior of different states--no. Here, other criteria, sadder, more limited, more practical, must be allowed to prevail."

George F. Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy, p. 49.

(Reprinted at the beginning of Charles Beitz's Political Theory and International Relations)

Your new iPhone won't save you from Death

2010-03-22T21:25:00.002Z

"You’re gonna die. You’re gonna die. And nobody’s gonna care which version of the iPhone you used to make something on Twitter, or to go and post about your bowel movement on Facebook. And I’m not even talking about legacy; I’m talking about the fact that I personally feel most alive when I’m making something, and I feel least alive when I’m being led around by some obnoxious use of my attention that I wasn’t aware of. To me, that’s the thing. You can buy the jogging shoes and you can buy the Runner’s World, but until you put them on and walk out the door every day, you’re just a fat man."

from Merlin Mann's interview on Marketplace of Ideas

(also, i hope you already listen to the You Look Nice Today podcast- it's the funniest thing that ever happened to me [thanks steve])

Reasons to Date a Geek Boy, and Why Cosmo is the Worst Thing for All of Us

2010-03-22T16:53:00.005Z

picture of Jean-Michel Cousteau from nerdboyfriend.com

warning: the links in this post have a 50/50 chance of taking you to pornography.

Violet Blue of tinynibbles starts off trying to give women's magazines a fair shot. . . maybe we're just picking on them, maybe they don't love to construct/reinforce sexual behavior that seems everyday more and more alien, maybe they aren't "missing the mark by oversimplifying male sexuality, and trading on female insecurities to move magazine". Anyway, Violet Blue (VB) does a lovely translation of a recent Cosmo Post "7 Reasons to date a Geek Boy"

"1. He’s capable of memorizing every line of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings so he shouldn’t have trouble remembering your birthday and favorite kind of flowers.

[VB translation: Real men are callous and don't care about things that are meaningful to you. If you want a real man you will put up with this: geek boys are intellectual and like carefully crafted fantasy storytelling, which means they are effeminate and think details, such as paying attention to yours, are important.]

2. Sure, he may secretly want to get it on with his super hot neighbor, but knowing that you’re the hottest girl he’s ever been with will probably keep him from cheating.

[VB translation: Like all men he will always be on a callous pussyhunt to reinforce his shaky masculinity. But because he is a geek he *must* be desperate -- why else would a man have passion about anything but money or sports? -- and his desperation is something you can trade on like currency. This reminds you that women don't have sex for love or pleasure, but only to get things from men.]

3. Geeks tend to be tech-savvy. Which means not only will he be able to fix a computer problem and upgrade your software, but he’ll actually enjoy doing it.

[VB translation: Men are meant to be used, not loved, and sex is the currency to get whatever they can do for you. No woman knows how to fix anything technical. Trading sex for IT service is acceptable, and you should have no guilt about this.]

4. Although the dumb jock thing is a total cliche, you’re unlikely to meet a dorky guy who can’t string together a sentence and carry on an intelligent conversation.

[VB translation: Jocks are generally dumb, and geeks never do sports. A dorky guy won't ever have a hot body but this is a trade-off for having a man actually talk to you.]

5. Since he’s supersmart and probably already making a ton of money, he won’t think being a roadie for Vampire Weekend is a great “career opportunity.”

[VB translation: All geek dudes are smart and rich, you little gold digger.]

6. He was probably bullied during high school so he’ll be sympathetic when you vent about the office bitch…and help you plot a plan to bring her down.

[VB translation: Being nerdy means he's used to being some guy's bitch, just like a woman. You two can relate on this. Bonus: feminized men make great pets.]

7. He’ll never hog the bathroom to manscape.

[VB translation: While real men smell Monster Truck Rally fresh, geek boys are pigs because they never got dates. Everything we know about geeks we learned in Revenge of the Nerds 30 years ago, so we know they have no social and therefore sexual skills or intelligence, nor do they have good hygiene. This is another trade-off for all that money.]"

There is much more here, including parts of a wonderful reply from John DeVore which starts off as a critique of whoever wrote the quoted article, but is mostly a delicious and feverish defense of nerds and their right to self-define: "Allowing these sorority girl scribblers to explain nerds is like asking a Klingon to explain The Force."

I'm Here: A Robot Love Story

2010-03-21T11:00:00.006Z

1. You can go watch it here: http://www.imheremovie.com/

2. You can do this strange thing where, through facebook somehow, you sit in a virtual movie theatre and get a little movie ticket, I did it and it got me!- i thought it was charming.

3. the movie: it's great, the beginning was the saddest part- no one wants to see a sad robot with big pale eyes taking the bus alone. as a love story i found it unsettling. as a robot story it is one of my favorites.

4. It is really fun to see a robot movie outside the big cold futuristic cosmopolitan new york city setting. Robots can live in Southern California too, and there are pictures of the bleak modern world more heartbreaking than anything in this film.

5. Also, there's music by Nick Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and Aska Matsumiya (Moonrats)

(and here are REAL robots being worked on at MIT: 'Mobile, Dextrous, Social Robots to support Complex Human-Robot Teamwork in Uncertain Environments')

Yeasayer- Brainmelting new video

2010-03-16T14:44:00.001Z

I can't think of a single thing I don't like about this band, or this video, or this bright blue sky outside.

Yeasayer "ONE" By: Radical Friend from ODDBLOOD on Vimeo.

Virtue of Friendship, Natural Law, and Gay Politics with Andrew Sullivan

2010-03-14T20:56:00.005Z

Andrew Sullivan speaking at Princeton, what has in some ways become a home for a sort of new natural law-- answers a question from the audience about the grounds of defending homosexuality on grounds of desire. What's so special about this desire that it merits others' respect? Firstly, it isn't desire, it's love. Secondly, it's love for another human being, with a soul (from God). He goes on and I, for one, enjoyed the full 7 minutes thoroughly and will now go on to listen to more of him and his funny naturalized accent.

Things to note: Andrew Sullivan wrote his PhD dissertation on Michael Oakeshott, on whom two of my dear friends at LSE are now preparing to write Master's dissertations on. We are all currently reading H.L.A. Hart's theory of natural law and debating the moral content of coercive laws, and at the very end of this talk Sullivan talks about the virtue of friendship, which is one of the loveliest things in Aristotle I have ever been lucky enough to read and write a paper on.

. . . you're asking the way to your own house

2010-03-14T06:15:00.004Z

Carol Ann Duffy, British poet laureate, created a sort of conference of 'senior' poets in which she asked them all to write something about aging. As she says, "I invited the poets here to write, in any way they chose, about ageing. Our society, I believe, is turning gradually away from its obsession with "yoof" and "slebs". We are beginning to realise that we face, at the very least, an uncertain future, one in which wisdom and experience – and respect – will need to be accorded a more important role."

Her article and a whole list of the poems, a lot of which are really wonderful are here at the guardian.

Mrs Baldwin
By Fleur Adcock

And then there's the one about the old woman
who very apologetically asks the way
to Church Lane, adding "I ought to know:
I've lived there since the war". So you go with her.

This comes with variations, usually leading
(via a list of demented ancestors)
to calculations of how much time you've got
before you're asking the way to your own house.

But it's not so often that you find the one
about how, whenever you hear of someone
diagnosed with cancer, you have to hide
that muffled pang that clutched you, at fifteen,
when you saw Pauline Edwards holding hands
with the boy from the Social Club you'd always
fancied.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

2010-03-05T08:34:00.003Z

This best webcomic you don't read yet.

This Tornado Loves You

2010-03-01T23:00:00.002Z

This is the perfect video (clips from 1932 film Tombstone Canyon) to go to

Neko Case's This Tornado Loves You.

New Paul Baribeau

2010-02-28T23:57:00.003Z

Paul Baribeau has two new songs up: How Could That Be True and Blue Cool.

http://www.myspace.com/paulbaribeau

If you do not know Paul Baribeau's music, I recommend Christmas Lights as a good thing to listen to most every day, especially if winter weather or nameless fears are getting you down.

And here's a funny show poster.

The David Foster Wallace Audio Project

2010-02-28T14:48:00.005Z

David Foster Wallace is great. Additionally, he has a great voice. And this website is great.

A collection of all the audio they could find, from readings to interviews. I particularly recommend his second appearance on Charlie Rose. And it's all free and right there!

Also, there is an audiobook of DFW reading his collection of essays Consider the Lobster. Yes, it is abridged, but it is still worth it. Also surprisingly, the footnotes translate well to audio. . . although the abridged version has neither "Up,Simba" (that first great essay he wrote about McCain and the media monsters of political campaigns) and "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed" (which I quoted here), it does include lots of other great things, including "Consider the Lobster" and "The View from Mrs. Thompson's" (This story is very short and continues to be the most moving account I have read about 9/11 and what it feels like to be an American with other Americans watching that on TV and walking through that day and the next).

If you've never read anything by David Foster Wallace, his non-fiction is a good place to start, and it's great to hear it read by him. His voice is quiet and sometimes sounds exhausted and a little defeated but always a little excited and he can't seem to get through an interview without commenting on how bizarre it is to have to pretend like you're having a regular conversation in front of cameras and stage lights.

What an Economist thinks poetry is.

2010-02-23T19:00:00.002Z

Describing why Paul Krugman got a Nobel Prize:

“It’s poetry,” Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard, says. “I mean, you go back to his first book and there was this beautiful chart about what the Volcker contraction did to output that swept aside so much—he just drew this little graph which really cleared the air. I’ve heard economists use the word ‘poet’ in describing him for decades.”

This is actually a nice little write-up and has a link to a great profile of Paul Krugman from The New Yorker.

Porn has no soul, and neither does Mickey Mouse

2010-02-23T16:33:00.004Z

Porn has no soul

from The Conflicted Existence of a Female Porn Writer (McSweeneys).

About Charles Bukowski, Pop Culture, Porn, Shame. . .

"Maybe the thing that Bukowski was really saying wasn't that there's no hope in reality, but rather that the parts of reality that we try to ignore because they are less perfect-looking are the ones most full of the magic we forget to see when we're looking for magical sparkles like in Disney movies. The funny noises and the stray pubic hair and the hangnail, the giggling and the playing, the level of hotness that can spring up between two people doing something that doesn't look very pretty but feels fantastic: these are things that have real humanity in them—souls. They're sadly lacking in most high-budget mainstream porn films, and that lacking makes me feel like I'm watching robots going at it. It's more a feat of engineering than of passion, and it feels sad sometimes.

Sad like looking through Bukowski's eyes at two people whose surgically enhanced bodies are meeting intimately, but whose eyes never lock. Like that three-fingered son of a bitch had his way with both of them first, gave them gloves for hands and big black dilated pupils for eyes, and convinced us they were ideal. It makes me ache."

Memorization and Recitation

2010-02-19T14:32:00.006Z

Committing poems to memory is a new project. Just one, every now and then.

Here's the first one: [Hope is a thing with feathers] by Emily Dickinson.

Hope is a thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm

I've heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

Roger Ebert, On dying slowly

2010-02-19T14:28:00.003Z

I recommend this to you.

Hey, remember Sylvester and the Magic Pebble?

2010-02-16T18:33:00.004Z

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, written and illustrated by William Steig.

Today I was reminded of Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, about the wonder of finding a teeny tiny object that only you noticed because you're small and were walking around alone and then find out it has all the magic in the world. And then you have all the power to do anything and be anything. And then you realize that power disturbing and no little donkey should have it AND that really your own self is the only thing you want to be!

And this book got banned because all the characters are different kinds of animals and police are portrayed by big pink pigs.

Well, I was reminded, so here's a reminder for you.

Who authorized this voice actor?

2010-02-04T10:20:00.002Z

A totally ridiculous political ad:

(Giannoulis is running to fill Obama's Senate seat in November, the little baby face has his work cut out for him)

about him winning the Democratic Primary and the race from The Economist.

"And I thought they smelled bad on the outside"

2010-02-02T01:39:00.002Z

Man I want one of these. I mean, don't you? Question 1: DOES IT COME WITH THE HELMET?

(thank you, steve, for informing me of this.)