5 octaves

Via Milla via Mark via Jaime

The ascendency of the practical

An interesting (if reactionary/old-codgery) article by William Chace about the "decline" of the modern English department. Among its highlights:

An argument to re-institute the canon?

"What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture)."

Hm. Sounds a lot like someone else I know.

Some post-"post-structural" angst:

"You need not even believe that works of literature have intelligible meaning; you can announce that they bear no relationship at all to the world beyond the text. Nor do you need to believe that literary history is helpful in understanding the books you teach; history itself can be shucked aside as misleading, irrelevant, or even unknowable."

History chucked aside? Maybe in the 60's, but now?

ORDER PLEASE:

"In short, there are few, if any, fixed rules or operating principles to which those teaching English and American literature are obliged to conform."

The answer? Oh, yeah, of course, let's teach Western things!

"First, several of my colleagues around the country have called for a return to the aesthetic wellsprings of literature...They urge the teaching of English, or French, or Russian literature, and the like, in terms of the intrinsic value of the works themselves, in all their range and multiplicity, as well-crafted and appealing artifacts of human wisdom."

The Scariest Kind of Capitalism

This weekend, over some whisky and a campfire, our camping group had a stimulating conversation about - you guessed it - Capitalism. Matt Prewitt astutely noted that corporations are most threatening when they co-opt the rhetoric (or equity) of their detractors (see: PepsiCo Amp debacle - PepsiCo is also the parent company of Dove and its True Beauty Campaign).

This nifty infographic gives a good idea of the common-ness of such behavior in the Organic food industry.

Philip Spooner

Further thoughts on arguments and convictions

"Levin had often noticed in arguments between the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, an enormous number of logistical subtleties and words, the arguers would finally come to the awareness that what they had spent so long struggling to prove to each other had been known to them long, long before, from the beginning of the argument, but that they loved different things and therefore did not want to name what they loved, so as not to be challenged. He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other way round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent would suddenly agree and stop arguing."

-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

The river carves out the valley by flowing beneath it.
Thereby the river is the master of the valley.

In order to master people
One must speak as their servant;
In order to lead people
One must follow them.

So when the sage rises above the people,
They do not feel oppressed;
And when the sage stands before the people,
They do not feel hindered.

So the popularity of the sage does not fail,
He does not contend, and no one contends against him.

-Lao Tsu, Verse 66 of The Tao Te Ching

Shy not being a word we would use

Richard Rorty on religious fundamentalism:

“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ ... It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own ... The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... You have to be educated in order to be ... a participant in our conversation ... So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours ... I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents ... I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”(2000)

Enthusiasm for Guitar Defeats Existential Fear

Wayne earned money in high school as a fry cook for Long John Silver's. During his second year of employment, there was a rash of robberies in Oklahoma City. During his work, the restaurant was robbed. Wayne and other employees were held at gunpoint and forced to lie on the ground. Wayne was certain he was going to die. Although the assistant manager couldn't open the safe, the robbers eventually fled. Wayne believes "this is really how you die...one minute you're just cooking up someone's order of french fries and the next minute you're laying on the floor and they blow your brains out. There's no music, there's no significance, it's just random."

At age fifteen, Coyne purchased his first guitar.

-from the Wikipedia page on Wayne Coyne (Flaming Lips frontman)

Sigan mamando

Maradona to the press, after Argentina qualified for the World Cup 3 days ago:

"It's all good, because I have memory and right now, I'm going to remember more than ever. For those who didn't believe in this selection, for those who treated me like garbage, today, we are in the World Cup, in, without help from anyone...to those who didn't believe: that they suck it, that they keep sucking it."

Where the wild things are

Apparently "Where the Wild Things Are" just came out in the States. I'm terribly jealous I can't see it - watch it and tell me how it is. I have been listening the wonderful Karen O. soundtrack.
(especially the track "rumpus reprise")

Hurry boy its waiting there for you

Don't you think so?

Dream song 14 (very end of video) + David Foster Wallace's Kenyon graduation speech.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

Like David Lynch in real life

Ever dream this man?

Having a coke with you

Librivox

Anyone who has ever slept over my house will understand why finding this website made me pee my pants a little. Check the Willa Cather section (not to mention the Count of Monte Cristo!)

And Now for Something Heartwarming

For the optimist/cheesy crowd (myself included). Be sure to watch the first one all the way through.

Dispatches from Mythology

If you haven't already, check out my friend George's blog, Drowned by Kappa. George is spending a year (or two) in Kochi City, on the island Shikoku in Japan. The blog is replete with excellent photographs and words like "Prefecture."

Besides George, Kochi City is (was) also home to the legendary Sakamoto Ryoma, one of the samurai who embraced Western influence and carried a sword AND a pistol (his nickname was "Quentin Tarantino's Wet Dream").

Meaty Stuff

Paul La Farge eating a bowlful of wasabi

While researching Meat, I came across an excellent piece by Paul La Farge.

I think the pocket door dilemma strikes a chord with everyone who lives in an apartment in San Francisco.

Also:

"That same year, or was it the next year, we took out the bottles and the newspapers. Some of them were so old they were beginning to be interesting again. Paul’s girlfriend broke up with him and Paul moved out."

This is the pace of the rest of our young lives.

Spring in Russia

"Under the mist waters flowed, ice blocks cracked and moved off, the muddy, foaming streams ran quicker, and on the eve of Krasnaya Gorka the mist scattered, the dark clouds broke up into fleecy white ones, the sky cleared, and a real spring unfolded. In the morning the bright sun rose and quickly ate up the thin ice covering the water and the warm air was all atremble, filled with the vapours of the reviving earth. The old grass and the sprouting needles of new grass greened, the buds on the guelder-rose, the currants and the sticky, spiritous birches swelled, and on the willow, all sprinkled with golden catkins, the flitting, newly hatched bee buzzed. Invisible larks poured trills over the velvety green fields and the ice-covered stubble, the peewit wept over the hollows and the marshes still filled with brown water; high up the cranes and geese flew with their spring honking. Cattle, patchy, moulted in all but a few places, lowed in the meadows, bow-legged lambs played around their bleating, shedding mothers, fleet-footed children ran over the drying paths covered with the prints of bare feets, the merry voices of women with their linen chattered by the pond, and from the yards came the knock of the peasants' axes, repairing ploughs and harrows. The real spring had come."

-Count Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina