04w14:1 Blogs Posted March 30th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 14 number 1 (blogs) ——————————————————————— On Blogging, Paul Martin and Changing the World | Mara Gulens http://tinyurl.com/2ry9q “Much more than simple online rants, Web logs actually fulfill the primary role of the Internet, claimed Mark Federman, chief strategist at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and the co-author of the recently published McLuhan for Managers — New Tools for New Thinking. […] Blogs are an example of the new reflexive response to globalization. Connected individuals respond to what they see and make their views known. At times they even organize themselves into instant masses of people, sometimes with powerful effects.” Notes on blogging | Terry Teachout http://tinyurl.com/2uejj “1. It’s almost impossible to explain what a blog is to someone who’s never seen one. That’s the mark of a true innovation. […] 6. Blogging puts professionals and amateurs on an even footing. That’s why so many professional writers dislike and distrust it. […] 10. Blogs will be to the 21st century what little magazines were to the 20th century. Their influence will be disproportionate to their circulation.” Guest Posting — Toby Thain | Michael von Blowhard http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/001375.html#001375 NOTE: This post is about digital photography, as Michael has posted an email he recieved from an Australian professional photographer on the difference between digital vs. film. However, the thoughts expressed in the intro are interesting in themselves, and from that I take this teaser. – Tim “In my years of following the arts, the biggest story has seemed to me to be the digitification of culture. […] I went into the culture field wanting to yak about books and movies (etc), and to add some product of my own to the culture stream. Instead, wham: along came computers — and for the last 15-20 years, what’s been most visible in the arts is the way that the various fields are reconfiguring themselves as digital waves sweep through them. We wouldn’t have rap music if music hadn’t gone digital. Magazines, ads and television wouldn’t look the way they do if it weren’t for computers. Bookselling superstores depend on databases. Copyright, distribution, the final experience of culture itself — all are up for grabs because of digital technology.” Tables of Contents | Michael von Blowhard http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/001340.html “Before it’s useful, a ToC now has to be its own intense media experience. I’d argue that these super-ultra-hyper ToCs are also intense electronic-media experiences. Their values — flash, twinkle, fwoof — aren’t the values of traditional magazines; they’re values that come from TV and computers. Tatyana may disagree with me on this, but I’ll also venture that the newfangled ToCs are functions of the computer age. In the first place, of course, Quark and Photoshop are the tools that make this kind of layout possible. In the second place (and as a simple fact of the media biz), the computerizing of the corporate media has given concept people — producers, editors, and designers especially — more power than they used to have, while it has taken power away from such content people as directors and writers. A consequence is that boxes, graphics, visuals, and themes — stuff that producers, editors and designers love — have become an ever more prominent part of our media life. When you buy a big-budget magazine, you’re buying boxes, graphics, etc: a lot of overproduced showbiz, an artifact akin to what the contempo moviebiz is selling.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 30 March 2004 @ 4:11 PM
04w13:2 Nipples Posted March 25th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 13 number 2 (nipples) ——————————————————————— Lennon art trial secrets revealed | BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3561607.stm “The newly-released papers show the initial warrant was issued under the Obscene Publications Act. And a letter from prosecuting counsel Kenneth Horn suggests a prosecution under this act would have a good chance of success. […] But the file also preserves a letter from artist PFC Fuller of Maidstone, Kent, warning of the potential impact of a guilty verdict. […] The artist even warns that the monarch could end up being prosecuted if such a precedent was set: ‘I understand that HM the Queen has some highly erotic work by Fragonard.’ ” Transatlantic cleavage | The Economist http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2405081 “This seems odd to Britons, whose smaller broadcast channels keep themselves afloat on a sea of smut. Not only tabloid newspapers, but also the Times and even the Daily Telegraph (average age of reader 55) showed the star’s spangled nipple, waving joyfully in the wind. Why the difference? Maybe because secular Britons are no longer shockable, while Americans have clung to their religion and associated puritanism. But the difference does not seem to be one of demand. Miss Jackson’s breast topped internet search subjects after the incident was reported. The structure of the media market seems a likelier explanation. Britain has ten competing national newspapers. Sensationalism jostles with pornography in the pages of the tabloids; softer versions of both infect the broadsheets. America’s papers, which tend to be local near-monopolies, can afford a loftier attitude. Newspapers set the tone for television, and the regulators’ attitudes. ” Verrocchio in Washington | Charles T. Downey http://ionarts.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_ionarts_archive.html#107990382323128583 “A fourth famous statue of David, by Andrea di Michele Cione (known by the nickname Verrocchio, c. 1435 – 1488), was cast in bronze around 1466. About 47-1/4 inches tall, this statue is now in the collection of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, in Florence, but for the past several months it has made an unusual tour outside of Italy, for the first time since a trip to the United States in 1939 and 1940. It was on exhibit at the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, Georgia, from November 18, 2003, to February 8, 2004 (their Web feature on the sculpture is remarkably well done and very informative: if it is kept online, I will assign it to my Humanities students next year); […] On a completely different note, could the attire of Verrocchio’s David (see detail at right) have been the inspiration for Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl?” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Thursday 25 March 2004 @ 1:11 AM
04w13:1 Dirapideerap Posted March 22nd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 13 number 1 (dirapideerap) ——————————————————————— Rap’s last tape | Nick Crowe http://tinyurl.com/3727b “[…] even farmers in Devon have swapped their overalls for Adidas trainers and puffa jackets […] For a genre that is 25 years old this year, hip hop has little to show for its maturity. While its influence has stretched into the shires and beyond, walk down any megastore hip hop aisle and scowling back at you is a line-up of the same kind of hardmen as a decade ago. […] Repetitive images of material excess and recidivism continue to dominate the commercial rap market, and while production techniques have evolved to become the most sophisticated in pop music, rapping itself – the essence of hip hop culture – has not developed in at least a decade. […] In an essay last year in the Hudson Review, the poet (and head of America’s National Endowment for the Arts) Dana Gioia deconstructed rap’s prosody, holding up its rhythmic vitality as a contrast to the weakness of free verse. Gioia argued that rap represents a reconnection with fundamental principles of rhythm that literary poets – in their effete self-consciousness – have long since abandoned: ‘Rap characteristically uses the four-stress, accentual line that has been the most common meter for spoken popular poetry in English from Anglo-Saxon verse… to Rudyard Kipling.'” Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture | Dana Gioia http://www.hudsonreview.com/gioiaSp03.html “The end of print culture raises many troubling questions about the position of poetry amid these immense cultural and technological changes. What will be the poet’s place in a society that has increasingly little use for books, little time for serious culture, little knowledge of the past, little consensus on literary value, and—even among intellectuals—little faith in poetry itself? […] No driver can negotiate a sudden turn in the road by looking backward, and neither can a critic accurately see what is most innovative in contemporary poetry through the now-antiquarian assumptions of Modernism and the avant-garde. Those powerful ideas once produced great art, but now nearly a century old, they reflect a culture without radio, talking-films, television, videocassettes, computers, cellphones, satellite dishes, and the Internet.[…]Roland Barthes, a creature of print culture, saw the world as a text and announced ‘the death of the author.’ Anyone attentive to the new popular poetry sees the antithesis—the death of the text. American culture conditioned by electronic media and a celebrity culture based on personalities has given birth to a new kind of author, the amplified bard ” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Monday 22 March 2004 @ 1:54 PM
04w12:2 Posted March 17th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 12 number 2 ——————————————————————— The Perpetual Adolescent | Joseph Epstein http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/825grtdi.asp “The people in those earlier baseball crowds, though watching a boyish game, nonetheless had a radically different conception of themselves than most Americans do now. […] they thought of themselves as adults, no longer kids, but grown-ups, adults, men. How different from today, when a good part of the crowd at any ballgame, no matter what the age, is wearing jeans and team caps and T-shirts […] Life in that different day was felt to observe the human equivalent of the Aristotelian unities: to have, like a good drama, a beginning, middle, and end. Each part, it was understood, had its own advantages and detractions, but the middle–adulthood–was the lengthiest and most earnest part, where everything serious happened and much was at stake.[…]Today, of course, all this has been shattered. The ideal almost everywhere is to seem young for as long as possible […] One of the many tenets in its credo–soon to become a cliché, but no less significant for that–was that no one over 30 was to be trusted. (If you were part of that movement and 21 years old in 1965, you are 60 today. Good morning, Sunshine.)” Marketplace of Ideas: But First, The Bill | William Osborne http://www.artsjournal.com/artswatch/20040311-11320.shtml “As an American who has lived in Europe for the last 24 years, I see on a daily basis how different the American and European economic systems are, and how deeply this affects the ways they produce, market and perceive art. America advocates supply-side economics, small government and free trade – all reflecting a belief that societies should minimize government expenditure and maximize deregulated, privatized global capitalism. Corporate freedom is considered a direct and analogous extension of personal freedom. Europeans, by contrast, hold to mixed economies with large social and cultural programs. Governmental spending often equals about half the GNP. Europeans argue that an unmitigated capitalism creates an isomorphic, corporate-dominated society with reduced individual and social options. Americans insist that privatization and the marketplace provide greater efficiency than governments. These two economic systems have created something of a cultural divide between Europeans and Americans.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 17 March 2004 @ 10:54 PM
04w12:1 The Corporation Posted March 15th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 12 number 1 (The Corporation) ——————————————————————— Review of “The Corporation” | What is The Message? http://tinyurl.com/2q2mm “First, let me say that the film is worth seeing for a lot of reasons. […] While I wouldn’t call the reportage exactly balanced – this is a film promoting a definite point of view – it isn’t all Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky all the time either. In particular, the testimony by Ray Anderson, Chairman of Interface, Inc., one of the world’s largest carpet manufacturers, clearly demonstrates the good that corporations can do, and provides part of the answer to the problem proposed by the film’s premise. […] The widely-publicized set piece is the ‘diagnosis’ of an archetypal corporation as a psychopath. […] But the examples are clearly selected to prove the point, essentially begging the question. What struck me as ironic was how the film decried corporations for using manipulative advertising and marketing techniques to attract customers, while simultaneously using the same methods to make its own points, especially the incriminating diagnosis.” What CEOs can learn at daycare | Jim Stanford http://tinyurl.com/3ae3c “In fact, my only disappointment was the gradual realization that this nurturing and generally peaceful environment was completely different from the real world that my daughters were destined to inhabit. At daycare, they learn to be compassionate and co-operative human beings. But capitalism does not reward compassion and co-operation; it is driven by acquisitiveness and individualism. The rules of the game change once you leave daycare, and so do the teachers who enforce them. […] How ironic that we train our children first to be good, social human beings, only to later demand that they act like acquisitive, hard-hearted machines. Personally, I prefer the approach that rewards co-operation and compassion, and that produces an environment in which everyone succeeds. If toddlers can learn to do it, why can’t the rest of us? ” How to Lead Now | John A. Byrne http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/73/leadnow.html “In truth, this is the stuff of Leadership 101: drawing the very best out of people by making the emotional bond every bit as important as the monetary one, feeding the soul as well as the wallet. But as profits have plunged and unemployment has soared, nurturing and innovative approaches to leading have fallen by the wayside, replaced by tougher, more autocratic, and more egocentric styles. Inspirational leadership has come to be lumped in with the fripperies of the bubble: the snazzy dotcom digs, the office concierge, the take-your-dog-to-work days. In many workplaces, the message has changed from ‘What can we do to keep you happy and keep you here?’ to ‘You’re lucky to have a job, so sit down and shut up.’ […] But if the recent period of excess and arrogance has taught us anything, it’s that leadership must return to the principles that are practiced by people like 49-year-old Cadagin. […] Katzenbach, who has long studied high-performing organizations, thinks that it comes down to one core issue: building pride. ” The Morality of the Market | Jerry Z. Muller http://www.techcentralstation.com/011504A.html “One perennial pitfall in thinking about the moral effects of capitalism is issue of comparison. When philosophers ask about the morality of capitalism, they too rarely ask ‘compared to what’? Of course capitalism is morally inferior to many a philosophical utopia. […] But the flip side of the cash nexus is first of all the freedom and self-determination that comes from having cash, and second the fact that relations based on cash do not involve the total subordination of one individual to the will of another […] there are plenty of good arguments about the moral hazards of a market society. But there are also good arguments about its moral advantages, and these should not get overlooked in discussions about globalization. Many of the moral advantages and conceptions of selfhood that those in capitalist societies take for granted are due in no small part to capitalism itself. ” —————————————- Long urls made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Monday 15 March 2004 @ 10:48 PM
04w11:3 Photo vs. Painting Posted March 12th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 11 number 3 (photo vs. painting) ——————————————————————— The Richter Resolution | Jerry Saltz http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/jsaltz/saltz3-9-04.asp “In defense of the staggeringly radical act of really looking, the wildness of the imagination, and the limitlessness of pictorial invention, I propose a 48-month moratorium on the reproduction of photographs via overhead, opaque, or slide projectors in paintings (this means tracing too). Call this the Richter Resolution […] Like brushes and rulers, projectors are tools. This is about how these tools are used, which lately has become unadventurous.[…] By now, almost everyone would agree that the traditional Warhol-Richter-Walter Benjamin defense of the use of photography in painting, the Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction argument, and the chatter about ‘interrogating representation’ or ‘investigating the problem of the photograph,’ isn’t just dated, it’s shtick. We all know that photography is a remarkable and remarkably complex way of seeing and picturing the world; that the space between the photograph, the photographer and the thing photographed is incredibly rich; that the graphic field of the photograph is often scintillatingly alive, specific and very post-Renaissance; and that reproducing photographs in paintings once represented a significant repudiation of dearly held beliefs.” The camera today? You can’t trust it. | Jonathan Jones and Gerard Seenan http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1161737,00.html “David Hockney, the celebrated pop artist who has worked extensively in photography, has fallen out of love with the medium because of its digital manipulation and now believes it is a dying art form. […] ‘We can’t go back: Kodak got rid of 22,000 people when it ended its chemical developing. You’ve no need to believe a photograph made after a certain date because it won’t be made the way Cartier-Bresson made his. We know he didn’t crop them – he was the master of truthful photography. But you can’t have a photographer like that again because we know photographs can be made in different ways.’ […] The impact of computerised images was most strongly brought to his attention much closer to home: ‘My sister, who is just a bit older than me, she’s a retired district nurse, she’s just gone mad with the digital camera and computer – move anything about. She doesn’t worry about whether it’s authentic; she’s just making pictures.’ ” Disposable cameras | Jonathan Jones http://www.artdaily.com/news.asp?gid=393 “It adds fuel to his belief that painting can do things photography can´t, even when it comes to telling the truth about war. Everyone used to assume photographs of war were ‘true’ in a way photography can´t be. But Hockney argues that the digital age has made such a conception of photography obsolete. You can change any image now in any way you want. He once saw what a famous LA photographer´s portrait of Elton John looked like before it was retouched. The difference, he says, was ‘hilarious’. And now everyone can do this. […] If photography is no longer blunt fact, why not accept that painting has equal status? War photography is as fictional as painting, but painting can express profound insights denied photography. The famous photograph of a Russian soldier placing the red flag over Berlin is an example: ‘With the man putting the flag on top of the Reichstag – how did the photographer happen to get there first?’ wonders Hockney. By contrast, Goya´s image of the executions of May 3 1808 has a truth that transcends whether or not he was an eyewitness. Hockney thinks Picasso, when he painted his extremely anti-naturalist Massacres in Korea in the 1950s, was making this very argument against photography: instead of random glimpses of violence, Picasso´s painting presents his understanding of the war. ” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Friday 12 March 2004 @ 4:08 PM
04w11:2 Art Chairs Posted March 8th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 11 number 2 (art chairs) ——————————————————————— Good, better, best | Artblog.net http://artblog.net/index.php?name=2004-03-05-08-31-good “John Massengale (‘a recovering architect’) has an interesting post that talks about connoiseurship. Even though the topic is furniture as it relates to urban design, it has a few points that could be applied to art and art criticism. […] Most art schools teach how to invoke unprecedented reality, which is a better term for what this is usually called: originality. An artist ought to be generating at least some unprecedented reality or he’s not doing his job. But by emphasizing the novel, the art world has become fashion-driven. The cutting-edge art school experience has the students graduating with little more skill than they entered with, but with a finely-tuned art-world fashion sense. The blows to sincerity and integrity have been palpable. This is why I favor craftsmanship and connoiseurship – I believe human concerns ought to be addressed by art not just intellectually, but formally. Otherwise, you get the results that you often see on the gallery wall: art that does to your soul what sitting in the Mies chair does to your back. ” A Bag Is a Bag Is a Bag | Charlie Finch http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/finch/finch3-4-04.asp “Arties were lined up at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery on Saturday night to see the latest video from Alex Bag, whose droll, if increasingly formulaic, shape shifting was intercut with graphic, wallsize excerpts from the Paris Hilton sex tape. […] What makes this show worth seeing is not just the titillation, but the formal, esthetic dominance of the Paris Hilton sex video in a gallery context. […] Bag powerfully questions the whole fine-art enterprise, including her own efforts, that we art addicts experience today. On one wall, in one Chelsea cube, she argues that all the arch tributes to Kurt Cobain, all the Patty Chang-style contortions, all the Matthew Barney pinheaded grotesqueries are one raindrop compared to the cultural impact of a dick-hungry Hollywood heiress on the internet. ” A chance for amateurs to mumble ‘Huh?’ | Dave Barry http://tinyurl.com/yu4uh “Whenever I write about art, I get mail from the Serious Art Community informing me that I am a clueless idiot. So let me begin by stipulating that I am a clueless idiot. […] I saw ‘Chair’ at Art Basel, a big show on Miami Beach. It attracted thousands of Serious Art People, who wear mostly black outfits and can maintain serious expressions no matter what work of art they are viewing. This is hard, because a lot of Serious Art consists of bizarre or startlingly unattractive objects, or ‘performances’ wherein artists do something Conceptual, such as squirt Cheez Whiz into an orifice that has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for snack toppings. But no matter what the art is, a Serious Art Person will view it with the somber expression of a radiologist examining X-rays of a tumor. Whereas an amateur will eventually give himself away by laughing, or saying ‘Huh?’ or (this is the most embarrassing) asking an art-gallery person: ‘Is this wastebasket a piece of art? Or can I put my gum wrapper in it?’ ” http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com —————————————- Long urls made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Monday 08 March 2004 @ 9:28 PM
04w11:1 Patrick Moore vs. Vandana Shiva Posted March 7th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 11 number 1 (Patrick Moore vs. Vandana Shiva) ——————————————————————— Eco-Traitor | Drake Bennett http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/moore_pr.html “Patrick Moore has been called a sellout, traitor, parasite, and prostitute […] Moore helped found Greenpeace and devoted 15 years to waging the organization’s flamboyant brand of environmental warfare. […] He derides today’s activists as philosophically unmoored and blindly technophobic, and he offers an alternative philosophy that not only accepts but celebrates humankind’s growing ability to alter the planet. […] ‘As I like to say, maybe it’s time to figure out what the solutions are, rather than just focusing on problems.’ […] When I understood sustainable development,’ he recalls, ‘I realized that the challenge was to take these new environmental values that we had forged and incorporate them into the traditional social and economic values that drive public policy. In other words, it was a job of synthesis.’ ” Battle for Biotech Progress | Patrick Moore http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17889/article_detail.asp “The campaign of fear now waged against genetic modification is based largely on fantasy and a complete lack of respect for science and logic. In the balance it is clear that the real benefits of genetic modification far outweigh the hypothetical and sometimes contrived risks claimed by its detractors. […] For six years, anti-biotech activists managed to prevent the introduction of G.M. crops in India. This was largely the work of Vandana Shiva, the Oxford-educated daughter of a wealthy Indian family, who has campaigned relentlessly to ‘protect’ poor farmers from the ravages of multinational seed companies. In 2002, she was given the Hero of the Planet award by Time magazine for ‘defending traditional agricultural practices.’ Read: poverty and ignorance. It looked like Shiva would win the G.M. debate until 2001, when unknown persons illegally planted 25,000 acres of Bt cotton in Gujarat. The cotton bollworm infestation was particularly bad that year, and there was soon a 25,000 acre plot of beautiful green cotton in a sea of brown. The local authorities were notified and decided that the illegal cotton must be burned. This was too much for the farmers, who could now clearly see the benefits of the Bt variety. In a classic march to city hall with pitchforks in hand, the farmers protested and won the day. Bt cotton was approved for planting in March 2002. One hopes the poverty-stricken cotton farmers of India will become wealthier and deprive Vandana Shiva of her parasitical practice. ” Poverty & Globalisation | Vandana Shiva http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_2000/lecture5.stm “Who feeds the world? My answer is very different to that given by most people. It is women and small farmers working with biodiversity who are the primary food providers in the Third World, and contrary to the dominant assumption, their biodiversity based small farms are more productive than industrial monocultures. This deliberate blindness to diversity, the blindness to nature’s production, production by women, production by Third World farmers allows destruction and appropriation to be projected as creation. Take the case of the much flouted ‘golden rice’ or genetically engineered Vitamin A rice as a cure for blindness. It is assumed that without genetic engineering we cannot remove Vitamin A deficiency. However, nature gives us abundant and diverse sources of vitamin A. If rice was not polished, rice itself would provide Vitamin A. If herbicides were not sprayed on our wheat fields, we would have bathua, amaranth, mustard leaves as delicious and nutritious greens that provide Vitamin A. The devaluation and invisibility of sustainable, regenerative production is most glaring in the area of food. While patriarchal division of labour has assigned women the role of feeding their families and communities, patriarchal economics and patriarchal views of science and technology magically make women’s work in providing food disappear. ‘Feeding the World’ becomes disassociated from the women who actually do it and is projected as dependent on global agribusiness and biotechnology corporations. ” —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Sunday 07 March 2004 @ 12:48 PM
04w10:2 History Posted March 3rd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 10 number 2 (history) ——————————————————————— The Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory | Pierre Nora http://www.iwm.at/t-22txt3.htm “It is of crucial importance, for it has shattered the unity of historical time, that fine, straightforward linearity which traditionally bound the present and the future to the past. In effect, it was the way in which a society, nation, group or family envisaged its future that traditionally determined what it needed to remember of the past to prepare that future; and this in turn gave meaning to the present, which was merely a link between the two. 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. ” Artifact: Visionary Art | Charles Paul Freund http://www.reason.com/0402/artifact.shtml “These spectacles, auctioned in the fall by Sotheby’s, are said to have belonged to J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), the British painter whose wholly original treatment of luminosity late in his career inspired the Impressionists and revolutionized art. But British eye surgeon James McGill, a student of Turner’s work, believes the glasses are evidence that Turner’s late style was actually a result of his deteriorating vision. Turner ‘was painting exactly what he saw,’ McGill told Britain’s Guardian. ” Artifact: Webcam in the Round | Charles Paul Freund http://www.reason.com/0401/artifact.shtml “Behold the Tholos, where the webcam meets the circular, painted panorama of the 19th century. The device, which features a 23-foot wrap-around screen some 10 feet high, works in pairs: People gathered at one Tholos can see real-time, life-size HDTV images of people around a distant partner device, with microphones enabling users to converse.” —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 03 March 2004 @ 2:09 PM
04w10:1 Posted March 1st, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 10 number 1 I now find myself trying to please an audience; even though I know some of you personally, I also know I have never met some of you lucky enough to be part of this club. I say this because today’s selections border on being boring, but are paired as examples of the evolution of our language. Article One discuses the new standards imposed by the infamous American SAT test (and this dear folks I thought would only be interesting to one person I know, but I had to tell myself, ‘if it’s good enough for her it’s good enough for the rest’). Because the SAT’s aren’t an issue in Canada I found it a bit of a yawner, with its tone is somewhat haughty and mocking. However, the impression it left on me is how it illustrates what we consider good writing to be (and thus, what constitutes a good read) has, along with the lexicon and pronunciation, changed over the centuries. I was also left with the impression that such changes are marked by certain individual styles, whose novelty becomes influential. The second article is etymological: the question of why The Passion of the Christ is called such. There are a lot of articles out there on the film The Passion of The Christ and its supposed controversy, but I’ve been sparing you them since I find many of them slanted and unfair. But I am no censor: if you’re really interested contact me and I’ll send you some links. (Hint: there’s a lot on Slate.com, including a great critique by Christopher Hitchens posted this past weekend. The best thing I’ve read about the film is a partial translation from a French newspaper available here). Another note: due to server issues I have been unable to update my website (including the goodreads archive index) for the past month, but hopefully things will be back up and running in the next week or so. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Would Shakespeare Get Into Swarthmore? | by John Katzman, Andy Lutz and Erik Olson http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/03/katzman.htm “How several well-known writers (and the Unabomber) would fare on the new SAT […] Reader’s evaluation: This essay is poorly organized, with only one paragraph (though, to Mr. Shakespeare’s credit, the topic sentence does speak to what the rest of the sentences in his one paragraph are about). It is riddled with errors in syntax, incomplete sentences being the most noticeable problem. Although his supporting sentences are vivid in their description, they are vague and general, not true examples. And he unfortunately spells ‘honor’ with the extraneous ‘u.’ Grade: 2 out of 6” Why Is It Called The Passion? | Sam Schechner http://slate.msn.com/id/2096041 “The simple answer is that the English word passion referred to Jesus’ suffering long before it evolved other, more sultry meanings. Today, the word still refers to Jesus’ torments, as well as to retellings of the crucifixion in the Gospels and elsewhere, even in pieces of music. (Before Gibson’s Passion, for instance, there were Bach’s Passions.) But the Christian meaning and its modern, carnal cousins are not entirely unrelated. In fact, the more common meanings of the word passion—strong emotion, zeal, and sexual desire—grew organically from the Christian sense over the course of several centuries. ” —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Monday 01 March 2004 @ 3:03 PM
