05w17:2 Di Seximus Grandis Posted April 26th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 17 number 2 (di seximus grandis) ——————————————————————— Pornography in Clay | Matthias Schulz http://tinyurl.com/948et “According to Staeuble, the fragments show that the man was standing with his pelvis at a slight angle. The woman in front of him was bent forward, almost at a 90-degree angle. Another indication that the two figures belong together is the fact that they are both made to the same scale — both figures were originally just under 30 centimeters (11.7 inches) tall. The only depictions of sexual activity known until now were Greek paintings, but they were created more than 4,000 years later. Given this enormous difference in time, the Saxony find has created some confusion. Some believe it was a toy. Archäo, a professional journal, speculates that it may have been ‘chic’ to display these types of sculptures in the ‘houses of the first farmers between the Saale and Elbe rivers.’ Researchers speculate that the figure could also be evidence of a ‘fertility cult’ — a theory that sounds as straightforward as it is vague.” Japan’s virgin wives turn to sex volunteers | Justin McCurry http://www.guardian.co.uk/japan/story/0,7369,1451704,00.html “The men love their companies; they live for work,’ Mr Kim said. ‘Men don’t even think it is a problem if they don’t have sex with their wives. They have pornography and the sex industry to take care of their needs, but their wives have nowhere to go. They just suffer in silence.'” “Libido Meter” May Be First True Sexual-Arousal Gauge | Stefan Lovgren http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/02/0207_050207_libido.html “The research team has informally called their test the ‘libido meter.’ So far, only people without sexual dysfunctions have been tested. Tests still need to be made with people suffering from dysfunctions. Keeping track of sexual desire may be a more serious health issue than many people realize. Sex contributes to the overall physical and mental health of a person, researchers say. ‘I think having frequent, satisfying sex keeps the hormone levels up and keeps us young, both physically and mentally,’ said Barbara Bartlik, a psychiatry professor at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York State. ” The Porn Myth | Naomi Wolf http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/index.html “Porn is, as David Amsden says, the ‘wallpaper’ of our lives now. So was she [Dworkin] right or wrong? She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic. […]But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as ‘porn-worthy.’ Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention. “ —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 26 April 2005 @ 9:47 PM
05w17:1 The Power of Nightmares Posted April 26th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 17 number 1 (The Power of Nightmares) CBC Newsworld began broadcasting this 3 part series last night, albeit massacred by adverts for the Bowflex walking machine and McCain crispy taters. The host of the Passionate Eye, Michaelle Jean, noted that this had been a big hit in Britain when it came out last October, and that it was a cult classic on the Internet… …meaning, it’s viewable at the Information Clearing House Link below, streamed as a Real Media file embedded in the page (although I recommend you right/control-click on it to play in Real Player). Information Clearinghouse has also provided transcripts of the episodes. – Timothy ——————————————————————— The Power of Nightmares | Adam Curtis http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1037.htm NOTE: Part I, with links to Part II and III, with transcripts and Real Video presentation The Exorcist | Tim Adams http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1334518,00.html “Curtis’s original idea led him in typically unexpected directions. In particular, to developing a fearful symmetry between American neoconservative thought and Islamic fundamentalism. In looking back he discovered that the progenitors of each of these movements – the American political philosopher Leo Strauss, and the Egyptian revolutionary Sayyid Qutb – had been responding to similar observations. They had both been at American universities just after the Second World War – Strauss as a professor, Qutb as a student – and what they had seen there had convinced them that within American prosperity lay the seeds of its moral destruction. ‘Everyone was thinking Truman’s America is great and these two completely obscure figures were looking at it, in 1949, and thinking no, there is something wrong with this; they were both pessimists. We now live in a world that is shaped partly by the results of their thinking.'” The making of the terror myth | Andy Beckett http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1327904,00.html “In one sense, of course, Curtis himself is part of the al-Qaida industry. The Power of Nightmares began as an investigation of something else, the rise of modern American conservatism. Curtis was interested in Leo Strauss, a political philosopher at the university of Chicago in the 50s who rejected the liberalism of postwar America as amoral and who thought that the country could be rescued by a revived belief in America’s unique role to battle evil in the world. Strauss’s certainty and his emphasis on the use of grand myths as a higher form of political propaganda created a group of influential disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz, now the US deputy defence secretary. They came to prominence by talking up the Russian threat during the cold war and have applied a similar strategy in the war on terror. As Curtis traced the rise of the ‘Straussians’, he came to a conclusion that would form the basis for The Power of Nightmares. Straussian conservatism had a previously unsuspected amount in common with Islamism: from origins in the 50s, to a formative belief that liberalism was the enemy, to an actual period of Islamist-Straussian collaboration against the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan in the 80s (both movements have proved adept at finding new foes to keep them going). Although the Islamists and the Straussians have fallen out since then, as the attacks on America in 2001 graphically demonstrated, they are in another way, Curtis concludes, collaborating still: in sustaining the ‘fantasy’ of the war on terror.” Interview with Adam Curtis | CBC http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/powerofnightmares/interview.html “VIEWER: Are you saying that there is no threat? DIRECTOR ADAM CURTIS: No, the series did not say this. It was very clear in arguing that although there is a serious threat of terrorism from some radical Islamists, the nightmare vision of a uniquely powerful hidden organization waiting to strike our societies is an illusion. As the films showed, wherever one looks for this ‘al-Qaeda’ organization – from the mountains of Afghanistan to the ‘sleeper cells’ in America – the British and Americans are pursuing a fantasy. The bombs in Madrid and Bali showed clearly the seriousness of the threat – but they are not evidence of a new and overwhelming threat unlike any we have experienced before. And above all they do not – in the words of the British government – ‘threaten the life of the nation’. That is simply untrue. “ —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 26 April 2005 @ 12:40 PM
05w15:2 Rosemary's Babies Posted April 12th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 15 number 2 (Rosemary’s babies) ——————————————————————— Generation Y embraces choice, redefines religion | Cheryl Wetzstein http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050412-121457-4149r.htm “‘Generation Y,’ born between 1980 and 2000, is ‘bringing [media] industries to their knees’ by embracing IPod, TiVo and other technologies that allow unprecedented consumer choice, said Roger Bennett, co-founder of Reboot, a Jewish group that is examining generational issues. […] Reboot’s study, ‘OMG! How Generation Y is Redefining Faith in the iPod Era,’ was released yesterday in a press conference at the Brookings Institution. The study is based on a survey last year of 1,385 persons ages 18 to 25. To add depth, samples of black, Muslim, Jewish, Asian and Hispanic youths were included, said Anna Greenberg, vice president of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a firm known for its work with liberal political groups. […]The Reboot study found that 23 percent of Generation Y, like Generation X, do not identify with a religious denomination or don’t believe in God. This is more than twice the number of nonbelievers among baby boomers, or those born between 1946 and 1965, Ms. Greenberg noted. Generation X was born between 1966 and 1979. […]The Reboot survey further found that Generation Y was ‘more liberal and progressive’ than older generations, both in political leanings and on social issues such as homosexual ‘marriage’ and immigration. Fifty-four percent of voters younger than 30 voted for Sen. John Kerry last year — the only age group the Democratic presidential candidate carried, the study noted.” More and More, Kids Say the Foulest Things | Valerie Strauss http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44779-2005Apr11.html “‘The kids swear almost incessantly,’ said Horwich, who teaches at Guildford High School in Rockford, Ill. ‘They are so used to swearing and hearing it at home, and in the movies, and on TV, and in the music they listen to that they have become desensitized to it.'” America, Fuck Yeah! http://tinyurl.com/44mt4 NOTE: A remix of this, Quicktime Mov, 5.6Mb —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 12 April 2005 @ 12:30 PM
05w15:1 Art Stars Posted April 11th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 15 number 1 (art stars) ——————————————————————— Ken Lochhead, an apolitical portrait | Tony Martins http://www.getguerilla.ca/issue4/lochhead/index.html “In a country composed of powerful regions, Lochhead feels the key challenge for Canadian artists and cultural innovators is ‘to make our way through political boundaries? The arts world is loaded with politics, unfortunately. Everybody?s fighting for power, and not just between east and west but also between north and south.’ […] Though his teaching career is over, Lochhead is not in line with the current direction taken in university art programs, where ‘history is quite second fiddle to theory now.’ For Lochhead, this theoretical emphasis also spills over into much of contemporary art, where irony-rich postmodernism means ‘we’re explaining the jokes.’ Lochhead prefers an approach to meaning that is more coherent and yet more veiled. He offers a telling quotation to help explain: ‘If you want to be a painter, you must first cut off your tongue.'”RELATED: Kenneth Lochhead at the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art database site. Rajkamal Kahlon http://www.ratio3.org/kahlon_3.htm “For this body of work, Rajkamal Kahlon has created a series of paintings using Cassell’s Illustrated History of India, published in 1875. Employing the book’s illustrations as a base, Kahlon paints on the actual book pages, creating a charged, fragmented narrative about Indian history and its colonial past. By unbinding the pages from the book, Kahlon’s gouache paintings tell a new story of brutality, power, and the possibilities of survival.” The only thing I can really paint well is anger | Hanno Rauterberg http://www.signandsight.com/features/92.html “But he was never someone to paint for himself alone, for the sake of his soul. ‘I’m no loner. I want my pictures to be seen. I want them to provoke.’ He says this with such certainty that one might conclude he was a painter of solutions, that his art was one of formulas and rousing public appeals. […] ‘Avant-garde,’ he scoffs, ‘has long been a pallid cliche. The idea of the artist as outsider and genius, a fountain of creativity, with no need for teachers or rules, spurting originality till he drops, is complete nonsense!’ […] Heisig’s personal artistic biography is a story of vicissitudes: obstinate forging ahead and abrupt falling on his face. ‘I was a sort of child genius’, he explains. ‘Even before I could read and write, I could draw brilliantly. So well that my father, a painter himself, found it almost impossible to teach me anything.’ Of course it made sense, once the war was over, to apply to art school.”NOTE: This is a profile on the German painter, Bernhard Heisig, included here as FYI, answering the question: what’s up with ex-Nazi artists? Worth it for the laugh of its internal contradictions, as noted above. Betelgeuse http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980419.html “Here is the first direct picture of the surface of a star other than our Sun. Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, the atmosphere of Betelgeuse reveals some unexpected features, including a large bright hotspot visible below the center. “ —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Monday 11 April 2005 @ 12:41 PM
05w14:3 French Thinking Posted April 7th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 14 number 3 (French thinking) ——————————————————————— Death is Not the End | n + 1 http://www.nplusonemag.com/theory.html “Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French.” Introduction, Dissemination, and Education | Tim Clark http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/timclark/ “My paper examines some of the reasons for, and consequences of, the introduction and dissemination of Michel Foucault’s work in the context of writing on the visual arts in English Canada. I based my research on the premise that writing on the visual arts in Canada denotes a discursive/ socio-institutional practice. In conducting this study, I wished to know whether there are economic, political, and discursive factors that affect the productive activity of universities, museums, and serial publications. With respect-to those who incorporate the thought of Foucault in their work, I query whether their positions reflect, at the level of the narrative and argumentative structure, reading and writing patterns promoted by these institutions? Finally, I am interested in whether links can be made between economic and political factors mediated by these institutional contexts.”Article date 1991 The Order of Words | Walter Klepac http://www.ccca.ca/c/writing/k/klepac/klep001t.html NOTE: referred to in Tim Clark’s article, from 1984 —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Thursday 07 April 2005 @ 4:43 PM (Permalink)
05w14:2 Economics Posted April 6th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 14 number 2 (economists) It’s funny how economists talk about human beings as if they aren’t human themselves. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Why Logic Often Takes A Backseat | Peter Coy http://tinyurl.com/4emr4 “According to the new science of neuroeconomics, the explanation might lie inside the brains of the negotiators. Not in the prefrontal cortex, where people rationally weigh pros and cons, but deep inside, where powerful emotions arise. Brain scans show that when people feel they’re being treated unfairly, a small area called the anterior insula lights up, engendering the same disgust that people get from, say, smelling a skunk. That overwhelms the deliberations of the prefrontal cortex. With primitive brain functions so powerful, it’s no wonder that economic transactions often go awry. ‘In some ways, modern economic life for humans is like a monkey driving a car,’ says Colin F. Camerer, an economist at California Institute of Technology. Until recently, economists contented themselves with observing people from the outside.” One Small Step for Man ? | Steven E. Landsburg http://slate.msn.com/?id=2070182 “I am privileged to teach in one of the world’s most respected economics departments. We’re on pretty much everyone’s top-15 list, and by a lot of measures, we’re considered top-five. I mention this by way of pointing out that this is not some bunch of bozos we’re talking about here. And yet somehow last summer, we managed to spend a week in a state of collective befuddlement, obsessing over a seemingly impenetrable conundrum that came up over lunch: If people stand still on escalators, then why don’t they stand still on stairs?”NOTE: Article date 28 Aug 2002 —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 06 April 2005 @ 5:05 PM
05w14:1 John Paul II 1978-2005 Posted April 6th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 14 number 1 (John Paul II 1978-2005) Some popery … I was impressed by how quickly the Vatican website was modified, and how quickly they had up the special commemorative site, linked below. BTW, also dead – Saul Bellow and Mr. Grace Kelly. – Timothy ——————————————————————— The strange death of Protestant England | Mark Almond http://www.guardian.co.uk/monarchy/story/0,2763,1452368,00.html “Who would have thought the death of Rome’s supreme pontiff would interfere with the marriage plans of the next Supreme Governor of the Church of England? Until now, the royal family, prime minister and the whole establishment – defined by the 1701 Act of Settlement’s ban on anyone ‘reconciled to the bishop of Rome’ – would always have put an English wedding ahead of any Roman funeral.” John Paul II, we loved you | The Vatican http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/special_features/hf_jp_ii_xxv_en.htm The Vatican http://www.vatican.va/ —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 06 April 2005 @ 4:26 PM
