Posts Tagged “History”

07w42:4 19 October 2007

by timothy. 0 Comments

Last year’s documentary, Death of a President, depicted the events of this day, 19 October 2007. I recently found the film on Google Video.

Death of a President | Google Video
Link

My thoughts/review from last year:

The Language of Quotation | Timothy Comeau
http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/?p=402

07w40:3 A googolplex of megabytes

by timothy. 0 Comments

The World of Star Trek: The Next Generation | Patrick Daniel O’Neill
http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/stng/
“Perhaps the biggest change on the Enterprise is the sophistication of its computer. It has access to the entire library of recorded human knowledge (probably a googolplex of megabytes) and can present any desired information almost instantly upon request.” [emp mine]

07w38:1 Police State

by timothy. 1 Comment

Arrested for asking the wrong question in the land of the free.

And the home of the brave. Why did the other students just watch? What ever happened to that good old ‘my fellow Americans, let’s roll’?

Why did John Kerry let it happen?

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‘I was grabbed and thrown in U.S. jail for crossing road’
A distinguished British historian claims he was knocked to the ground by an American policeman before being arrested and spending eight hours in jail – all because he crossed the road in the wrong place.
Link
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From Boing Boing 29 August 2007:

Moment of TSA surrealist zen @ LAX: Xeni
I flew from JFK to LAX today, and something really weird happened when I arrived (at about 230PM local time).I walked from the arrival gate towards baggage claim, and when I was about halfway there, all of a sudden about a dozen or more TSA personnel and private security staff appeared, shouting STOP WHERE YOU ARE. FREEZE. DO NOT MOVE. Not just at me, but all of the travelers who happened to be wandering through the hallway at that moment.
Link

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From Boing Boing 1 September 2007:

Papers Please: Arrested at Circuit City for refusing to show ID, receipt
Boing Boing reader Michael Amor Righi says, “Today I was arrested by the Brooklyn, Ohio police department. It all started when I refused to show my receipt to the loss prevention employee at Circuit City, and it ended when a police officer arrested me for refusing to provide my driver’s license.”
Link

07w37:3 The President of 9/11 and the 9/11 of Britney

by timothy. 0 Comments

President of 9/11
President of 9/11 | The Onion
Link

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Martin Amis on 9/11The summary: ‘Our correspondent contends that our response to September 11 has been deficient. Radical Islam, he argues, must be recognized as a fanatical death cult, such as Nazism or Bolshevism’ Blah blah blah, haven’t heard that before. I didn’t read far enough to get to that, I only read over the ruminations on the naming of the event.Meanwhile, Matt Drudge at the Drudgereport had this headline: ‘KID’S BBC SITE OFFERS CURIOUS 9/11 EXPLANATION…’. This curious explanation reads:

Why did they do it?

The way America has got involved in conflicts in regions like the Middle East has made some people very angry, including a group called al-Qaeda – who are widely thought to have been behind the attacks.

In the past, al-Qaeda leaders have declared a holy war – called a jihad – against the US. As part of this jihad, al-Qaeda members believe attacking US targets is something they should do.

When the attacks happened in 2001, there were a number of US troops in a country called Saudi Arabia, and the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, said he wanted them to leave.

But who cares right? That shit was six years ago. This is much more important:



07w30:1 The Notebook

by timothy. 2 Comments

 

Truth be told, I prepped this Goodread a day before the hardrive on my notebook computer crashed, and so I’ve had to do it all over again. Which I think is worth sharing, given the subject matter of this GR – the traditional paper notebooks, a medium endangered by fire but not by mechanical failure and magnets. It’s now become a cliché statement to say that as our the data of our world moves further and further toward the digital, the danger of losing it all one day becomes greater and greater. Nevertheless, it is statement worth repeating given that notebooks have always been about the repition of passages and quotes that can become cliché through their preservation.

This GR is celebrating the digitization of some notebooks, particularly those of Leonardo Da Vinci, a hardcopy of which is now viewable at the Art Gallery of Ontario over the summer. This notebook (Codex Forster I) having achieved Da Vinci’s dream of flight to arrive here from London’s Victoria & Albert Museum last visited our city when it was exhibited at the ROM during the summer of 1998, where I first got the chance to see it. Going by the poster and mismemory, I thought the AGO was exhibiting the same spread as the ROM had, and yet, through one of the links below, I was able to remember correctly and see that the AGO is exhibiting pages 6v|7r while the ROM had shown 15v|16r. Further, the ROM had kept the pages open with a clear vinyl strap, whereas the AGO has the book displayed in an angled cradle, in its own illuminated box, beneath a piece of glass without a transparent vinyl holder. At the AGO it is accompanied by a flash animation (‘Geometrical Solids’), which can aslo be accessed at the same link.

Secondly, a section on commonplace books, the old name for what we now call notebooks, or as some have argued, blogs. This selection was inspired by hearing Anthony Grafton’s wonderful lecture on the Slought Foundation website, which is there available as an AAC file, and which I’ve also made available as an MP3.-Timothy

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Leonardo’s Notebooks

Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks | V&A Museum
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/ac/forstercodices/

e-Leo | Biblioteca Leonardiana
http://www.leonardodigitale.com/login.html
// sign in (‘accedi’) with user: goodreads pass: goodreads and then click on `sfoglia i manoscritti` and the chose the notebook from the left hand menu (`Madrid I, Madrid II, and Atlantico)

Commonplace Books

Literary Honeycombs: Storage and Retrieval of Texts
Before Modern Times | Anthony Grafton

AAC file (from Slought Foundation)
MP3 file (Goodreads Mirror)

Commonplace | Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace
“Commonplace books (or commonplaces) emerged in the 15th century with the availability of cheap paper for writing, mainly in England. They were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests”.

Long S | Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
The long, medial or descending s (Å¿) is a form of the minuscule letter ‘s’ formerly used where ‘s’ occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example Å¿infulneÅ¿s (“sinfulness”). The modern letterform was called the terminal or short s.

From Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library

Commonplace Books | Beinecke Rare Book Library
http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/compb.htm

Osbourne b205 | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/Osbourne/

William Hill’s Commonplace Book | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/hill/

Sartaine most holsome meditations | Peter Mowie
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/sartain/

Johann Sigmund Kusser’s Commonplacebook
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/Kusser/

Tobias Alston’s CPB | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/alston/

Robert Herrick’s CPB | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/herrick/

Richard Cromleholm’s CPB | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/Cromleholm/

William Camden’s CPB | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/camden/

The Book of Brome | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/bookofbrome/
Manuscript Guide

MS327 | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/ms327/

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http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com

07w09:1 Chomsky, Hardt & Negri's Multitude, Poster Art and News

by timothy. 0 Comments

 

Hello. I have some news.

1. A week and half ago I updated the Goodreads website to take advantage of a WordPress backend, so take a look around if you’d like. Much easier to find and browse the back issues for example, and to see the list of selected content, to which this posting is making some substantial additions.

As well, the ability to comment is turned on, so if you have any thoughts, disagreements or whatever about the links, feel free to give me something other to process than comment-spam.

2. I was asked to be part of a panel talk on art criticism on Monday (26 Feb) at Gallery 1313 from 7-9. So come on by if you’d like.

Special Content
Today’s GR includes an article by Nadja Sayej on poster art that appeared in last weekend’s Globe & Mail. It is here for archival purposes since it’s something I both wanted to make available to future reference and to share with the mailing-list, since the G&M archives are both difficult to search and cost money to access.

This Goodreads also includes a Google Video compilation page featuring Noam Chomsky’s 1988 Massey Lecture, Necessary Illusions. Basically, somebody videoed his talks by filming still images of Chomsky on their screen while Chomsky’s lectures play on iTunes. I guess we’ll take what we can get.

I’ll admit that I put together this page rather quickly and haven’t yet sorted out whether the videos are in the correct order (I worked from how they were listed on Google Video) which is only to say that the layout may change a bit over the next few days.

The Friday before last was Noam Chomsky day at work: as I typed away at my computer, I streamed audio talks available from chomsky.info and particularly appreciated his 2006 Amnesty International Lecture delivered in Dublin. However, for whatever reason, the original mp3s were cut up into sections (I guess for bandwidth consideration) so I decided to reassemble them to make available from Goodreads. Below is both an mp3 and an indexed AAC file.

As well, the week before last I finished reading the Hardt/Negri book Multitude which I enjoyed far more than I expected to. Also available is an audio from Michael Hardt’s 2005 Ioan Davies Memorial Lecture Lecture at Toronto’s York University, The Politics of Love, Evil, and the Mulitude. Note that the clicking sound heard occasionally during the talk is of Hardt fiddling with his pen’s cap. – Timothy

———————-Poster Art———————-

Making art that sticks | Nadja Sayej
http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/nadjasayej/

———————-Noam Chomsky———————-

Necessary Illusions | Noam Chomsky
http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/noamchomsky/massey1988.html

The War on Terror | Noam Chomsky
http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/The_War_on_Terror.m4a (AAC)
http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/The_War_on_Terror.mp3

// Chomsky also appeared on a Dublin radio program after the lecture, and that conversation is available here:
http://www.newstalk106.ie/podcasts/library/nced.mp3

The Life and Times of Noam Chomsky (Part 1) | Democracy Now!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpbBn_vznT4
The Life and Times of Noam Chomsky (Part 2) | Democracy Now!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWo_NhH4s6k

The Foucault Chomsky Debate of 1971 | Google Video
http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/noamchomsky/foucault1971/

And for something more interesting than vulgar politics:

Linguistics and Philosophy | Noam Chomsky
http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/linguistics_philosophy.mp3
// I forgot where I found this originally, so I’m making a copy of my copy available rather than send you the unknown source. The website this is attached to, Radio Free Maine (obviously the orginal source from the audio’s intro) hasn’t been updated since 2003.

———————-Hardt & Negri’sMultitude———————-

The Politics of Love, Evil, and Multitude | Michael Hardt
http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/michael_hardt_20050915.mp3

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http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com
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07w07:1 The Podern

by timothy. 2 Comments

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The Cultural Environment at the turn of the 21st Century | Timothy Comeau
http://timothycomeau.com/blog/?p=334
“The Podern was so called because P followed O which followed N which followed M; so wrote the historian who coined the term. But a rival school of thought argues that the Podern is specific to the autumn of 2001 when Apple Incoperated introduced the iPod, which became the defining artifact of the time. As the iPod allowed for the assembly and playback of a vast amount of files (which hadn’t been possible before, and the iPod’s storage capacity at the time was unique) it is seen to be an appropriate term for this period since its culture consisted to a large extant of reassembly and recontextualization.”

Apple Music Event 2001-The First Ever iPod Introduction | Apple Inc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN0SVBCJqLs

Original iPod Introduction | Apple Inc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSqNHGJw2qI

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http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com
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07w04:1 The Confusion of Memory with Thought

by timothy. 2 Comments

This Goodreads is based around the current confusion between memory and thinking, which I began to notice after reading a footnote in Voltaire’s Bastards a year ago. Describing the character of Simon Reisman, who was once a Liberal Party honcho and who negotiated Canada’s free-trade deal with the United States in the late 1980s, Saul quote from the phone conversation in which he interviewed Reisman:

“Our conversation began civilly. Gradually Reisman’s voice rose and his tone became more vociferous. Eventually he was shouting about the Europeans…[etc]…and eventually, about the person he was talking to, ‘You’re looking for sensationalism! You describe yourself as an historian! [emphasis mine] More likely you’re muckraker!”1 [1: JRS, VB, p.638, itself footnote 20 to Chapter 4]

I found this to be a very revealing quote, because what it says is that at the time Saul was writing his magnum opus, he was describing himself as an historian, and presumably, thought he was writing a history book. Yet, three years after the publication of Bastards, and on its strengths, Saul was asked to deliver the 1995 Massey Lectures. In the process, Saul’s went from being a self-described historian to being a media-described philosopher. Simply, this is because there has been a confusion between the capacity for memory with the capacity for insightful thought.

In the January 16th edition of The Globe & Mail an image of a snow filled street was captioned this way:’…Ottawa enjoyed weeks of unseasonably warm weather before the snowfall,’ of the day before. Even if I was living in Vancouver I’d have known about this already, and I wonder why the editor chose remind us as if we’d suddenly forgotten our ‘unseasonably warm’ winter. Perhaps, as a suggestion, it is because in this culture we are trained to forget, or at least, to be forgetful. It helps to sell us the DVD release of stuff we’ve already seen, for example. Further, we aren’t supposed to know the contexts that shape our lives and the politics of our societies. Diary keepers and bloggers can be dismissed as narcissists and who wants to be a narcissist? Isn’t there a party to go to? Isn’t there some hot indie band at the club singing what we’ve heard sung before? Can’t we drink ourselves into another night of ringing-eared forgetfulness?

And so, given the pressure to ignore context and to be forgetful, it’s no wonder than anyone who can string together the connections between last week’s event and today’s seems a little smart. Intelligence is thick on the ground; as John Taylor Gatto once wrote, ‘genius is as common as dirt’. And especially in today’s culture, when any bum probably knows more than Galileo ever knew about Jupiter, the problems of inadequacy have little to do with raw intelligence or access to information. Rather, it may have something to do with our relationship to memory.

Modern Social Imaginaries | Charles Taylor & David Cayley
http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/taylor2005-12.mp3 [Goodreads Mirror]
http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/ideas_20070115_1553.mp3
“What makes modernity different from all previous ways of life? Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor talks to IDEAS producer David Cayley about what makes us modern.”

I was happy to see this show up on the CBC Ideas podcast, saving me the trouble from excerpting the recording I already had. Charles Taylor speaks of our society’s relationship to memory through our need for a ‘special time’, a ‘time outside of regular time’. He brings up the popularity of Proust in this regard, and what he calls an unprecedented interest in biography. This begins around the 45.00 minute mark.

To be specific, Taylor is referring to our ‘tremendous preoccupation with memory’ and raises Proust as an example of the modernist and pomo-version’s need to fetish-size history. Which raises another article I sent out on Goodreads before, and deserves to be included here again:

The Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory | Pierre Nora
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/iwm/memory/

Nora’s essay really gets going in the third part, in which he speaks of ‘the age of commemoration’ (my example: the ceremonies in 2005 to mark the 60th year since the end of World War II, as if the one’s from 1995 weren’t good enough, and I suppose we can look forward to the next generation of political leadership at their 75th anniversary photo ops in 2020) and our current attitude toward stockpiling the present:

Broadly speaking, the future could be interpreted in one of three ways, which themselves determined the image people had of the past. It could be envisaged as a form of restoration of the past, a form of progress or a form of revolution. Today, we have discarded these three ways of interpreting the past, which made it possible to organize a “history”. We are utterly uncertain as to what form the future will take. And because of this uncertainty, the present-which, for this very reason no doubt, now has a battery of technical means at its disposal for preserving the past- puts us under an obligation to remember. We do not know what our descendants will need to know about ourselves in order to understand their own lives. And this inability to anticipate the future puts us under an obligation to stockpile, as it were, in a pious and somewhat indiscriminate fashion, any visible trace or material sign that might eventually testify to what we are or what we will have become. In other words, it is the end of any kind of teleology of history-the end of a history whose end is known-that places on the present this urgent “duty to remember” (devoir de mémoire) that is so much talked about.

You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t have, or were at least seated at, a computer, which is a remarkable machine for memory. It’s search function has made finding those half-forgotten tidbits effortless, and it’s capacity to store the raw information we collect in our lives means that as a personal library it easily beats the old analogue cut-n-paste scrapbooks. What then does the future hold? Gordon Bell is trying to find out. Working for Microsoft, he’s been pushing the limits of digital memory by trying to input everything so that Microsoft can develop the ‘organize your life-memories!’ software they’ll later try to sell to you.

My Life Bits | Gordon Bell et al
http://research.microsoft.com/~jgemmell/pubs/MyLifeBitsMM02.pdf (PDF 445k)

The Persistence of Memory | Gordon Bell on On The Media
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/01/05/07

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Mr. Mee by Andrew Crumey (2000)

Proust has already come up twice – first in Taylor’s discussion, but also it the title of the Gordon Bell presentation. What better way to introduce Mr. Mee? The truth is I wanted to publish a review of Mr. Mee in the summer of 2005, and it is a novel I read in the summer of 2004, but obviously didn’t get around to it until now. Mr. Mee is a novel of three story-lines, with two of the major players being Rousseau and Proust; Rousseau as a character, and Proust as an idea. It is set a decade ago, in 1997, during the early years of the internet – which is an important element to the fiction. The eponymous character of Mr. Mee is a retired, naive academic who buys a computer in order to use the nascent World Wide Web to try and track down an obscure book. In a Borgesian allusion, Rosier’s Encyclopaedia has been referenced in the bibliography of a book he brought home from a leisurely afternoon at the used bookstore.

Andrew Crumey shifts the scene to tell us more about the Encyclopaedia by bringing us back to 18th Century Paris, and introducing us to two characters, Ferrand and Minard, two down-on-their-luck copyists who are commissioned to copy a bunch of nutty writings by a Mr. Rosier. F & M are named after two people who Rousseau wrote about in his autobiography, and Crumey’s speculation on their backstory, and its consequences were outstanding. This novel is simply intellectually delightful in that regard. Perhaps they had something to do with Rouseau’s famed paranoia? Maybe they thought Rousseau a murderer? And perhaps their paranoia was fueled by their work fair-copying this work of an 18th Century genius who’d thought up 20th Century quantum physics and binary computers in 18th Century terms? (One of my favorite parts of the book describes Minard’s construction of a digita-binary computer out of string and bits of paper, and he is heard to complain about needing more memory. It seems that even in the 1760s, it was desirable to have more RAM).

In the 1990s, a professor lies in a hospital bed, contemplating his life over the past several months, and the possibility of his death. He had been a professor of Proust, and had come to teach this work of autobiographical literature after an adolescent infatuation with the work of Rousseau. And so, as he writes his memoir, he reflects both on Rousseau and on Proust. This is the tour-de-force of the novel. I found this the most satisfying, and appreciated it’s intricate subtleties. The professor comes across as just another dime-a-dozen mediocre academic who live their quotidian lives a students and commentators of past human achievement. The Proust-bug has not yet bitten me, and it was here I learned of how Proust described his magnum opus as being ‘about an I who isn’t I’. The introduction of this thought in the professor’s memoir raises the question of how much of his text is about an I that isn’t he. The overall impression is that, faced with impending death, Dr. Petrie has at last given it a try, written his work of autobiography about and I who isn’t I, inspired by his mastery of knowledge of these two masters of the art. Dr. Petrie ignores whatever sense of failure that has brought him to this point – the broken heart, his cancer, the sense that it was his attempt to initiate an affair with a student which brought on the illness. Instead of being cowed by a sense of mediocrity in comparison to his literary heroes, he gives it a go and in so doing constructs a literature of the self. The added poignancy comes from the embarrassed recounting of the infatuation which he blames for the illness out of a sort of hubris, and it is perhaps through this honest memory that his work becomes literary and becomes the final accomplishment of his life.

And perhaps here it is worth remembering that a year ago, James Frey was in the news for his book of autobiography, and it should be an embarrassment to anyone who claims to run a book club to not understand the need to embellish, to lie, to cheat the details as (what used to be called in a more literate age) poetic license.

Crumey’s skill is seen in his ability to weave together the tale of naive Mr. Mee, the octogenarian centre of the story, with the dying professor and the story of Rouseau’s Minard and Ferrand, and in the process, imagine 20th Century theoretical physics in 18th Century terms, remind us of what the internet was like a decade ago, muse on human foibles and the nature of autobiographical literature. Perhaps an even more central thesis to the story is that consciousness comes from writing, or at least, from the type of contextualization of memory that can come from writing. If we are not telling the story, than it didn’t really have to happen. Ultimately it ties into the nature of memory in our lives and the nature of identity as a narrated self.

Mr. Mee on Amazon.ca
http://goodreads.ca/shorty/amazon/mr_mee/

As I Was Saying to Rousseau … | Hilary Mantel
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/01/reviews/010401.01mantelt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
April 2001 Review of Mr. Mee in the New York Times

The segments from Rousseau’s Confessions on which
the Ferrand-Minard chapters of Mr. Mee are based

http://www.hum.aau.dk/~i12bent/Rousseau-MrMee.html

And finally, you might remember last week I noted I was working on a website that I wasn’t yet ready to promote. I now am. After several years of hosting my artistic/narcissistic portfolio first as a subsite of Instant Coffee, and than as a subsite of Goodreads, I now have a dedicated eponymous url: timothycomeau.com.I expect the visitor-stats to be low and the blog comments to continue to be nil, yet perhaps it is a way – or simply my way – to construct something about an I who isn’t I in the 21st Century.

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Long links made short by using Shorty (http://get-shorty.com)
To remove or add yourself to this list, go here
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emailed by Timothy on Sunday 21 January 2007 @ 3:45 PM