04w24:2 Og Caligula Posted June 8th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 24 number 2 (Oh Caligula) ——————————————————————— Bush’s Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides | Doug Thompson http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/printer_4636.shtml “President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind. […] ‘It reminds me of the Nixon days,’ says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. ‘Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That’s the mood over there.’ […] Aides say the President gets ‘hung up on minor details,’ micromanaging to the extreme while ignoring the bigger picture. He will spend hours personally reviewing and approving every attack ad against his Democratic opponent and then kiss off a meeting on economic issues. […] Among top officials, Bush’s inner circle is shrinking. Secretary of State Colin Powell has fallen out of favor because of his growing doubts about the administration’s war against Iraq. The President’s abrupt dismissal of CIA Directory George Tenet Wednesday night is, aides say, an example of how he works. “ —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 08 June 2004 @ 3:52 PM
04w24:1 Posted June 7th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 24 number 1 ——————————————————————— Truth & Beauty | Harvey Blume http://tinyurl.com/26y6s “…two Cambridge-based scientists — Felice Frankel, a research scientist at MIT, and Eric Heller, a particle physicist at Harvard — couldn’t be farther apart. While Frankel and Heller know and admire each other’s work, they take diametrically opposed positions on whether the imagery they produce is art and what its relationship is to science. […] Frankel’s insistence on — almost a fiercely protective attitude toward — scientific truth, makes her impatient with artists who ransack science for imagery and metaphor without taking time to understand it. ‘I get angry,’ she says, ‘at artists who create one-liners, who take a sentence from a textbook and make an installation out of it.’ […] When it comes to the art world, however, Heller considers himself an outsider. But he’s a savvy outsider who diagnoses art-world behavior as he might a peculiarity of particle spin. ‘The universal thing in avant-garde modern art is newness,’ he says. ‘Many artists think that if they do the next shocking thing, they’re going to be in the history books.’ His point of view is in many ways that of an aesthetic conservative, who respects beauty and traditional values that the art world in recent years has tended to treat as old-fashioned.” A bastion against cultural obscenity | Robert Hughes http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1230169,00.html “By the time I first came to live in England, and for years thereafter, the obsoleteness of the Royal Academy as a benign factor in the life of contemporary art was simply assumed as a fact. […] Nevertheless, one went to its shows, which were sometimes complete eye-openers.[…] The chance to see shows like that, I realised, was one reason why I had wanted to leave Australia in the first place. Anyway, as the years wore on, it began to seem a bit absurd to bear the Academy ill-will for things that happened in Burlington House when you were less than 10-years-old, or even not yet born. […]The idea that a revived Academy would or could clamp an iron fist of conformity on English painting and sculpture is simply absurd. It did not do that even in the 18th century. But there are quite clear and to me convincing reasons why we need such a revival today. […] An institution like the Royal Academy, precisely because it is not commercial, can be a powerful counterweight to the degrading market hysteria we have seen too much of in recent years. I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between, and what else is news? I know, as most of us do in our hearts, that the term ‘avant-garde’ has lost every last vestige of its meaning in a culture where anything and everything goes. […] The scientific metaphors, like ‘research’ and ‘experiment’, that were so popular half a century ago, do not apply to art. We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures.” How to Determine the Business You’re REALLY In | Mark Federman http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/BusinessYoureReallyIn.pdf “What haven’t you noticed lately? Determining the business you’re really in requires developing an awareness of the dynamics and effects that emerge from the business when considered as a McLuhan medium. McLuhan’s Laws of Media are a particularly useful tool that provides non-judgemental clarity of perception into these effects. IBM’s initial success, loss of industry dominance and subsequent recovery is a prime example of how the company’s nominal business differs from ‘the business it’s really in’ when viewed through the McLuhan lens, an insight that is applied as well to Microsoft, Amazon.com and GroceryGateway.com. Examples of how ‘creating an culture of innovation’ requires one to use the media law of reversal to break through conventionallytrained business thinking are demonstrated among some of the most successful companies in computer software, food service and electronic component manufacturing. ‘To be able to perceive 21st century dynamics is to … change the tools with which we perceive the world and thereby restructure the way we think about our business.’” NOTE: PDF file (347K) —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Monday 07 June 2004 @ 10:47 PM
04w23:1 Bacteria Posted June 1st, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 23 number 2 (bacteria) ——————————————————————— Autopoiesis and the Grand Scheme | Greg Bear http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/gregbear/autopoiesis.html “…bacteria engage in sex for the sheer desperate necessary joy of it – sex is their visit to the community library, the communal cookbook. They wriggle themselves through seas of recipes, little circular bits of DNA called plasmids. […] In the very beginning, for bacteria, this was sex. This was how sex began, as a visit to the great extended library. I call this data sex. No bacterium can exist for long without touching base with its colleagues, its peers. […] In the Library of Congress, every single book, every item, began with an act of reproductive sex, allowing the author to get born and eventually to write a book. That book now acts as a kind of plasmid, reaching into your mind to alter your memory, which is the con-template — my word: the template, through cognition , of behavior. The medium of course is language. Sex is language, and language is sex, whatever form it takes. […] Like the bacteria, as social animals, we engage in communal sharing of information. We call it education, and the result is culture. The shape of our society relies on spoken and written language, the language of signs, the next level of language above the molecular. […] Culture from very early times was as much a factor in human survival as biology, and today, culture has subsumed biology. The language of signs inherent in science and mathematics has co-opted the power of molecular language. […] Unfortunately, in the ocean of empty space, we have yet to receive packets of data from other planetary cells. We are like a single bacterium squirming through a primordial sea, hoping to find others like itself, or at least find recipes and clues about what to do next. […] We send out spaceships between the planets, the stars, containing our own little recipes, our own clues, like hopeful plasmids.” The Bacteria Whisperer | Steve Silberman http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/quorum.html “The notion that microbes have anything to say to each other is surprisingly new. For more than a century, bacterial cells were regarded as single-minded opportunists, little more than efficient machines for self-replication. Flourishing in plant and animal tissue, in volcanic vents and polar ice, thriving on gasoline additives and radiation, they were supremely adaptive, but their lives seemed, well, boring. The ‘sole ambition’ of a bacterium, wrote geneticist François Jacob in 1973, is ‘to produce two bacteria.’ New research suggests, however, that microbial life is much richer: highly social, intricately networked, and teeming with interactions. Bassler and other researchers have determined that bacteria communicate using molecules comparable to pheromones. By tapping into this cell-to-cell network, microbes are able to collectively track changes in their environment, conspire with their own species, build mutually beneficial alliances with other types of bacteria, gain advantages over competitors, and communicate with their hosts – the sort of collective strategizing typically ascribed to bees, ants, and people, not to bacteria.” Article Date: April 2003 | This is a followup to a profile on Bonnie Bassler published in Scientific American earlier this year and that was part of Goodreads posting 04w3:2 —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 01 June 2004 @ 4:32 PM (
04w23:1 Jon Stewart's Commencement Address Posted May 30th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 23 number 1 (Jon Stewart’s Commencement Address) ——————————————————————— Jon Stewart’s (’84) Commencement Address | Jon Stewart http://www.wm.edu/news/index.php?id=3650 “I am honored to be here and to receive this honorary doctorate. When I think back to the people that have been in this position before me from Benjamin Franklin to Queen Noor of Jordan, I can’t help but wonder what has happened to this place. Seriously, it saddens me. As a person, I am honored to get it; as an alumnus, I have to say I believe we can do better. […] I’m sure my fellow doctoral graduates -who have spent so long toiling in academia, sinking into debt, sacrificing God knows how many years of what, in truth, is a piece of parchment that in truth has been so devalued by our instant gratification culture as to have been rendered meaningless – will join in congratulating me. Thank you. […] Lets talk about the real world for a moment. […] I don’t really know to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it. Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry. I don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately, but it just kinda got away from us. Somewhere between the gold rush of easy internet profits and an arrogant sense of endless empire, we heard kind of a pinging noise, and uh, then the damn thing just died on us. So I apologize. But here’s the good news. You fix this thing, you’re the next greatest generation, people. You do this – and I believe you can – you win this war on terror, and Tom Brokaw’s kissing your ass from here to Tikrit, let me tell ya. And even if you don’t, you’re not gonna have much trouble surpassing my generation. If you end up getting your picture taken next to a naked guy pile of enemy prisoners and don’t give the thumbs up you’ve outdid us.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Sunday 30 May 2004 @ 12:07 PM
04w22:3 The Week in Art Posted May 29th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 22 number 3 (the week in art) ——————————————————————— No sketch please, we’re British | Peter Goddard http://tinyurl.com/2jaaa “On Saturday, Jason Witalis was happily sketching an ancient head at the Eternal Egypt exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum. It would help him remember what he’d seen, he says. ‘I get more out of it.’ Then a ROM guard came up and stopped him flat. Busted. The 29-year-old Toronto intern architect was nabbed by the ROM no-sketching police, caught red-handed with his crudely drawn outline of Mentuhotep II, founder of ancient Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, in his hot little hand.” When drawing art is outlawed, only outlaws will draw art | Franklin Einspruch http://www.artblog.net/index.php?name=2004-05-28-07-44-drawing “If I were in Toronto, I would get every artist in town I could to go down to the ROM, sit down in the British Museum exhibition, and draw. Call it a Draw-In. The fact that the British Museum is willing to cut off this ancient method of learning for the sake of its intellectual property rights, or whatever this is about, is vile. It is anti-art. It is vandalism against our tradition. “ A Bonfire of the Vanities | Eric Gibson http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110005138 “Art disasters normally have a visceral impact. Such incidents as the looting of the Baghdad Museum last year and the ravaging of Florence’s art treasures by floods in 1966 set the mind reeling at the thought of pieces of man’s cultural patrimony permanently lost or damaged. This time, though, I was strangely unmoved. It’s not that I think incinerating art is a good thing. It’s just that the work of these artists–as of all contemporary artists–is too new and untested to have acquired the cultural heft that makes it seem an indispensable part of one’s existence. I regret the fire happened, but I can’t quite see it as a body blow to civilization.[…] another critic, Danny Serota (no relation to Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota), suggested the burned-out warehouse be preserved as a ‘shrine’ to conceptual art. You’d expect this kind of ditsy hyperbole from art dealers (who are paid to be enthusiastic) or from Mr. Saatchi himself. Instead it’s come largely from art critics. “ Is this Britart’s ground zero? | Adrian Searle http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1225496,00.html “They will see it as divine retribution, and perhaps feel a pleasurable little glow, not from the radiated heat from the fire, but of schadenfreude, especially as so many of the destroyed works are in the collection of Charles Saatchi. A rumour circulating yesterday suggested that Saatchi has been trying to buy the site, though one can’t imagine exactly why, and it is being talked of as Brit Art’s ground zero. A generation has not quite gone up in smoke, though there are those who will see it thus. ” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Saturday 29 May 2004 @ 8:29 PM
04w22:2 Fat Posted May 27th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 22 number 2 (fat) Highly recommended code red. The first one’s title is coloured red today because I’m trying out a new rating system. I’ll admit that some of these good reads have only really been interesting, while others are “must reads” since they’re so educational and enlightening. How do I distinguish them from the rest? Well, today I’ll try colouring their titles red. The first article to be so endowed comes to us from Harvard magazine; so we know that it’s intellectually nutritious, beyond it’s subject matter, tracing America’s – and humanity’s – relationship to food and the current obesity issue. This one had a startling breadth of coverage, explaining not only why the waistlines are expanding but why our wisdom teeth are impacting and I can’t recommend it highly enough. In keeping with the concept of this posting and it’s amazing bites, it is quoted a bit more heavily that usual. – Timothy ——————————————————————— The Way We Eat Now | Craig Lambert http://www.harvard-magazine.com/on-line/050465.html “Many foreigners already view Americans as rich, greedy over-consumers, stuffing themselves with far more than their share of the planet’s resources, and obese American travelers waddling through international airports and hotel lobbies only reinforce that image. Yet our fat problem is becoming a global one as food corporations export our sugary, salty, fatty diet: Beijing has more than a hundred McDonald’s franchises […] Personal responsibility surely does play a role, but we also live in a ‘toxic environment’ that in many ways discourages healthy eating […] you’d want to make healthful foods widely available, inexpensive, and convenient, and unhealthful foods relatively less so. Instead, we’ve done the opposite.’ Never in human experience has food been available in the staggering profusion seen in North America today. We are awash in edibles shipped in from around the planet; seasonality has largely disappeared. Food obtrudes itself constantly, seductively, into our lives?on sidewalks, in airplanes, at gas stations and movie theaters. ‘Caloric intake is directly related to gross national product per capita,’ says Moore professor of biological anthropology Richard Wrangham. […] This represents a drastic change from the 1950s, when people ate far more of their meals at home, with their families, and at a leisurely pace. The 1950s were also an era in which the kitchen?not the television room?was the heart of the home. […] The old order Amish of Ontario, Canada, have escaped much of that advertising, and the TV viewing as well. They have an obesity rate of 4 percent, less than one-seventh the U.S. norm. Yet the Amish eat heartily, and not all health food: pancakes, ham, cake, and milk?but also ample amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables. It seems that the secret to the ‘Amish paradox’ is their low-technology lifestyle, which entails vastly more physical activity than its modern correlate. […] ‘The Amish are not freaks,’ says professor of anthropology Daniel Lieberman, a skeletal biologist. ‘They are just anachronisms. Human beings are adapted for endurance exercise. We evolved to be long-distance runners?running a marathon is not a freak activity. We can outrun just about any other creature.’ “ The Starving Criminal | Theodore Dalrymple http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_oh_to_be.html “From the dietary point of view, freedom has the same effect upon them as a concentration camp; incarceration restores them to nutritional health. This is a new phenomenon, at least on the scale on which I now see it. Last week, for example, I treated in my hospital a skeletal man who had been released from prison only two months before and had in that short time lost 44 pounds. A recidivist, he had served many short sentences for theft, and his weight went up and down according to whether he was in prison or at liberty. This is a common enough pattern of weight gain and weight loss among the males of my city?s underclass. It has a meaning quite alien to those who believe that modern malnutrition is merely a symptom of poverty and inequality. […] Not all the malnourished are drug-takers, however. It is when you inquire into eating habits, not just recent but throughout entire lifetimes, that all this malnutrition begins to make sense. The trail is a short one between modern malnutrition and modern family […] In fact, he told me that he had never once eaten at a table with others in the last 15 years. Eating was for him a solitary vice, something done almost furtively, with no pleasure attached to it and certainly not as a social event. The street was his principal dining room, as well as his trash can: and as far as food was concerned, he was more a hunter-gatherer than a man living in a highly evolved society.” When Real Food Isn’t an Option | Donald G. McNeil Jr. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/weekinreview/23mcne.html?pagewanted=print&position= “In a world where the rich spend millions on ways to avoid carbohydrates and the United Nations declares obesity a global health threat, the cruel reality is that far more people struggle each day just to get enough calories. In Malawi, children stand on the roadsides selling skewers of roasted mice. In Mozambique, when grasshoppers eat the crops, people turn the tables and eat them, calling the fishy-tasting bugs ‘flying shrimp.’ In Liberia during the 1989 civil war, every animal in the national zoo was devoured but a one-eyed lion. Dogs and cats disappeared from the streets of the capital. ” NOTE: The New York Times requires registration; but if you’ve looked at NYT content before and haven’t deleted your cookies, that may not be necessary. However if prompted, use the following username: goodreader100 and password: goodreads (courtesy of goodreads.ca). The big fat con story | Paul Campos http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1200549,00.html “In 1853, an upper-class Englishman could be quite unselfconscious about the fact that the mere sight of the urban proletariat disgusted him. In 2003, any upper-class white American liberal would be horrified to imagine that the sight of, say, a lower-class Mexican-American woman going into a Wal-Mart might somehow elicit feelings of disgust in his otherwise properly sensitised soul. But the sight of a fat woman – make that an ‘obese’ – better yet a ‘morbidly [sic] obese’ woman going into Wal-Mart… ah, that is something else again. ” ‘Soft flesh feels very, very good’ | R.M. Vaughan http://tinyurl.com/26cla “Anti-fat hysteria is everywhere. A Canadian chain of health clubs has a catchy radio jingle that features the mean-spirited lyrics, ‘Don’t wanna be a fat guy, a fat guy — jiggly, wiggly, Jello-y fat guy!’ Even more staid institutions, such as the Canadian Paediatric Society, have joined the anti-feeding frenzy, releasing a shrill, overwrought report last fall that called childhood obesity an ‘epidemic.’ The report was endorsed, not surprisingly, by various physical-education lobby groups — the same folks who tortured you with chin-ups and ‘shirts v. skins’ games in Grade 7. Large folks looking for relief from the ostensibly more open-minded art world have found little to comfort them on the gallery walls. When not presenting fat people as grotesques, the Western art world tends to represent body fat as a metaphor for all that is wrong and decadent in our affluent society. ” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Thursday 27 May 2004 @ 2:26 PM
04w22:1 Followups Posted May 23rd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 22 number 1 (followups) ——————————————————————— Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection | Indiana University http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/cushman/index.jsp “Charles Weever Cushman, amateur photographer and Indiana University alumnus, bequeathed approximately 14,500 Kodachrome color slides to his alma mater. The photographs in this collection bridge a thirty-two year span from 1938 to 1969, during which time he extensively documented the United States as well as other countries.” Followup to the posting (04w20:2) on pre-1945 colour photography. Virtual Worlds | Edward Castronova http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=294828 “In March 1999, a small number of Californians discovered a new world called ‘Norrath’, populated by an exotic but industrious people. About 12,000 people call this place their permanent home, although some 60,000 are present there at any given time. The nominal hourly wage is about USD 3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of Norrath’s currency is traded on exchange markets at USD 0.0107, higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to many. The population is growing rapidly, swollen each each day by hundreds of emigres from various places around the globe, but especially the United States. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the new world is its location. Norrath is a virtual world that exists entirely on 40 computers in San Diego. Unlike many internet ventures, virtual worlds are making money — with annual revenues expected to top USD 1.5 billion by 2004 — and if network effects are as powerful here as they have been with other internet innovations, virtual worlds may soon become the primary venue for all online activity.” Followup on the Walrus Article by Clive Thompson (04w21:1) on the economics of internet gaming. (The paper that started it all). Sticking up for painting | Franklin Einspruch http://www.artblog.net/?name=2004-05-19-16-38-painting “I could go on, but my point is that even someone as pro-painting as I am recognizes that art is not a zero-sum game between painting and all other media. Maybe this Gopnik article is a reaction to David Hockney’s recent statements about the superiority of painting, but Gopnik’s thesis is flawed for the same reasons that Hockney’s is. Every medium has particular strengths and weaknesses – otherwise artists wouldn’t prefer one over the other – and all media can be used well or used badly. Gopnik’s attitude is as conservative as Hughes’s, just the other way around. To praise art for being unlike painting is as ridiculous as criticizing it for being unlike painting, and the Post article full of ridiculousness […] Gopnik has an additional problem here that makes him sound desperate while Hughes sounds authoritative – Hughes is writing about a committed painter, Gopnik is not.” Followup to the last posting loosely related to painting. —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Sunday 23 May 2004 @ 2:23 PM
04w21:2 Thoughts on Painting Posted May 21st, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List 2004 week 21 number 2 (thoughts on painting) ——————————————————————— The next big thing? There isn’t one | Adrian Searle http://tinyurl.com/3y2o5 “Current art is marked, if anything, by its plurality. One might also talk about there being many art worlds: international and local, the world of alternative spaces and that of museums; and all those galleries that specialise in their different ways, and who sell to very different kinds of collector. And all those tribes of artists, with their friendship patterns, animosities, their competitiveness and career jealousies, their divergent beliefs and world views. There is less conformity than one might think. […] There are good figurative paintings and bad (often good or bad for very different reasons), just as there is good and bad video art, photography, sculpture and so on. The assumption that figurative painting in particular is under threat, or somehow ignored by public and private institutions[…]is actually a nonsense.” Embracing the Art of Hacking | Michelle Delio http://tinyurl.com/2c6zt “…a new book by programmer Paul Graham gives the concept a fresh twist by advising hackers to improve their skills by borrowing creative techniques from other artists. Billed as a guide into the minds and motivations of hackers, Hackers & Painters, [is] due to be released by O’Reilly Media later this month […] Graham slams the artistic conceit that all art is good and taste is purely subjective, pointing out that if you aren’t willing to say that some creations aren’t beautiful then you’ll never develop the aesthetic muscles necessary to define and develop good work. Graham steers programmers, writers and other artists toward simplicity, making the point that ornate stylistic embellishments often cover up lack of substance, whether you are writing a computer application or a novel. He urges anyone who is involved in creative work not to get pretentious and to retain her or his sense of humor, noting that ‘good design may not have to be funny, but it’s hard to imagine something that could be called humorless also being good design.’ ” Hackers and Painters | Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html “When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting. They seemed to think that hacking and painting were very different kinds of work– that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge. Both of these images are wrong. Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I’ve known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Friday 21 May 2004 @ 1:56 PM
04w21:1 Posted May 18th, 2004 by timothy. 1 Comment Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 21 number 1 Never mind goodreads, these articles are so hot that if they were women I’d flirt with them. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Game Theories | Clive Thompson http://www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid=04/05/06/1929205&tid=1 “As Castronova stared at the auction listings, he recognized with a shock what he was looking at. It was a form of currency trading. Each item had a value in virtual ‘platinum pieces’; when it was sold on eBay, someone was paying cold hard American cash for it. That meant the platinum piece was worth something in real currency. EverQuest’s economy actually had real-world value. […] When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. – higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. […] The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia. It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn’t even exist.” Lessons from Homer | Ian Brown http://tinyurl.com/2tcb7 “I was reading Homer’s Iliad when the pictures from Abu Ghraib began to appear. […] One moment I was swimming through 15,693 lines of hexametric verse — long stretches of which-god-did-what-infantile-thing-to-whom, interrupted by splurts of eye-poking gore and knockout stanzas of shattering beauty about rage and revenge. The next I was trying to decipher a digital snapshot of — well, what was that square of interlocking human flesh supposed to be? […] As war atrocities — next to, say, King David’s habit of collecting the foreskins of his victims, or the 500 innocents slaughtered at My Lai in 1968, or even compared with the Chechen trick of sniping at Russians from behind a wounded Russian prisoner strung up in a window — the abuses at Abu Ghraib seemed relatively mild.[…] All over the United States, intellectuals of once-firm conviction, from Michael Ignatieff on the left to Andrew Sullivan on the right, were having meltdowns. […]I read the passage one last time, and put the The Iliad down. Already the moral valence of the Abu Ghraib affair was reversing itself, as the al-Qaeda beheading of an American named Nicholas Berg darkened the Internet. The Abu Ghraib jailers were creepy, but America’s enemies were judged creepier. “ A Troy boy’s epic pecs | Rick Groen http://tinyurl.com/2uvwu “Troy takes all the wind out of Homer’s sails. This is an epic made by a modernist who doesn’t believe in epics. Doesn’t believe in the honour of battle, or the status of a tragic hero, or the ideal of romantic love, or the dictates of an omnipotent god. What’s left? Not mythology, to be sure, but a rather bland sociology lecturing us on the realpolitik of power and the human waste of war. Now, such a contemporary sermon is well and good…” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 18 May 2004 @ 1:24 PM
04w18:4 Party Hardy Posted May 10th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 18 number 4 (party hardy) ——————————————————————– The rise of (p)arty monsters | R.M. Vaughan http://tinyurl.com/29rpm “‘While the social aspect of displaying art has always been an important part of the process, the rise of art spaces that are more like hipster Romper Rooms makes many in the art community nervous — is their work becoming mere decoration for an inattentive crowd of fun seekers? And what happens when the party winds down? Does anyone even remember the work? Ottawa-based artist Eliza Griffiths worries about the decline of conversation at openings — even in Ottawa, the capital of chit-chat. ‘It’s not as bad here as Toronto, yet, but I’ve noticed this party atmosphere happening more and more in Ottawa. And I love to party, but in a club or somebody’s home. These party-openings do a disservice to the art, and for the actual artist, it’s sometimes a letdown, because when you show new work you want to hear feedback, watch people’s reactions, eavesdrop, but now you don’t get that because people are there for the event. Call me old-fashioned, but I like talking about the work. I can go to a club for music and dancing.’ ‘” “Islets” and Utopia | Nicholas Bourriaud http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/bourriaud.html “‘It is not for the artist to determine the modes of application of the spaces they build: they do nothing more than build ‘models’ which are either realized or not. (…) This time does not lack political projects, only the means by which to implement them. The dominant form during the French Revolution was the ‘assemblee’, and during the Russian Revolution, the ‘soviet’. Then there was the demonstration, the sit-in, etc. Our time lacks the forms necessary to express our political projects, or to even bring them forth. Today’s dominant form -which is not political – is that of the ‘free party’ or ‘rave’, that of a spontaneous and momentous assembly of individuals around the same goal, who occupy a place not envisaged for that purpose’.” Translated from French by Timothy Comeau. Original article here. —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Saturday 01 May 2004 @ 4:54 PM
