Five topics from chickenfeet2003

ImperialismA recurrent theme in human history - except, empires are all different, and even the nominally same empire is different at different points in its chronological existence. The only thing they have in common (I hazard) is that they are not monolithic, that they represent at any given point an equilibrium of balancing ( Read more... )

In this case, I feel that I ought to be reading up for my Wiscon panels (either checking back over my shelves for useful examples, or scurrying round checking out New and Good and Recommendable). However, what has been my major reading over the past week was Susan Pedersen's Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (2004), which I have been ( Read more... )

Of course they'd rather sit back with Plato's Symposium or Frege's theorem, but intellectuals have some less elevated tastes, too - cable TV wrestling or rap, anyone? Philip Oltermann confers with some great brains about their guilty pleasures.

Note how they tend to say something that proves they are 'just folks' (or in spite of their Grayt Braynz ( Read more... )

So I'm playing with this lovely set of ideas encountered via ericaceous: a twist on that perennial favourite, the Five Things Meme:

Things I don't like even though they seem like they are a natural fit with my aesthetics:

Dance. I'm v picky about opera, but dance doesn't seem to do it for me at all, at least classical/modern-style dance doesn't.

Most modern ( Read more... )

Last night was, in spite of my tiredness, one of those times when Morpheus necks a fistful of uppers and goes out to boogie, so not feeling at my best and brightest today.

Probably fortunate, therefore, that I was scheduled to attend symposium co-organised by learned society with which I am associated, on Nature, nurture, neither?: genetics in the ( Read more... )

Thinking further about this discussion of guilty reading pleasures over on chickenfeet2003's lj. I'm not sure there are categories of book I consider to be guilty pleasures in themselves*: my current 'dare I indulge' conscience is about re-reading, now that so many previously hidden favourites have finally come once more to light, including a great number of ( Read more... )

Tagged by londonkds
( The Film Meme )