Now that my degree is complete, and I haven't started back in on RFB&D, my readings are assigned by me. I finally finished Le Guin's Unlocking the Air. I actually understood one of her stories better because of my degree. I'd managed to remain ignorant of the key business in the Velvet Revolution until I read Joseph Hurka's Fields of Light for my ( Read more... )

If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer.

-Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (If This Is a Man) p.130

Primo Levi, let us just say, apparently did not turn to religion to survive Auschwitz. He's referring to Kuhn, a man thanking God aloud because he was not selected for the gas chamber that day. A man surrounded by men who were selected.

"After slapping Alexei Tolstoi in the face, M. immediately returned to Moscow."

Nadezhda Mandelstam, decribing her husband's smackdown of Tolstoi in her memoir Hope Against Hope. I would point out that this is the opening line - the lady knows how to start a scene. What she fails to explain is that the reason her husband Osip was that mad at ( Read more... )

The subject line is actually taken from some spam I received this morning. Not apropos, just lightly entertaining. On to our sentence.

"But academic writing is based on the idea that we read texts differently."

-Joseph Harris Rewriting: How to do things with texts. Utah State UP. 2006. p. 20.
(  This is not the venerable Joseph )

I was at Trendsmap, which maps Twitter topics geographically. It found me Fake AP Stylebook, which is funny if you've taken a copyediting class. My favorite was "Only use the word 'proactive' if it will dynamically impact your synergistic throughput paradigm." However, I still prefer the non-fake Chicago manual of style FAQ, because the snark and ( Read more... )

Now God knows there are too many open-mike readings in the world; but better drivel at the open mike than silence from a closed mouth.

Ursula K Le Guin, "Off the page: loud cows." The wave in the mind. Shambhala: Boston, 2004.

Exhort while you smack down - way to go, UKLG. And, bonus -- mooing.

You philosophers ask questions without answers, questions that have to remain unanswered to deserve being called philosophical.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, from The Inhuman (1991) in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader 2nd ed p.221 ( Read more... )

Working-class culture, in the stage through which it has been passing, is primarily social (in that it has created institutions) rather than individual (in particular intellectual or imaginative work).

-Raymond Williams, from Culture and Society 1780-1950 in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. 229.

Glee as "working-class culture." Hmm...

I'm not sure what this episode is actually called, but I think I'm going to refer to it as "One False Note after Another." The Gay Kid squashes himself for the sake of his father's fragility after singing "Defying Gravity." The Wheelchair Kid gets thrown under the bus on two issues so that he can generously do one thing that he should have sued for ( Read more... )

Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of thirty-two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note.
-Theodore Adorno snarking "On Popular Music" (1941) in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader p. 212

Hmm...not familiar with that one.