07w41-45 Roundup Posted November 11th, 2007 by timothy. 0 Comments Goodreads Roundup for the past month or so Dear Readers – Within the past month I began using Feedburner to deliver the RSS feed, and Feedburner offers the option of having the content delivered via email. Thus, the email list isn’t dead, it’s just now done automatically through Feedburner. If you’d like to continue to receive individual Goodreasds postings in your inbox, then re-subscribe at this link: http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/?page_id=20 You’ll receive some confirmation emails and then you’ll be good to go. Note: this doesn’t apply to people who’ve subscribed since October 18th, since you’re already on the new system. In the meantime, here is the roundup of what I’ve posted for the past month. In other news, I once again got hit with excess charges due to exceeding my bandwidth limits. I looked into switching hosts to get a better deal, but in the end it didn’t seem worth it. Bandwidth is just expensive, and there’s no real way of getting around that. I’ll just stop offering so many mp3 files. Afterall, Goodreads is an altruistic project, not a masochistic one, and so if in the future you find dead links to past mp3 files, you’ll know why. If you’re desperate to hear the file, send me an email.- Timothy 2007 week 41 (October 8 – 14) 4. MC B-Rabbit From Robot Chicken; Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in claymation 3-D, reenacting the climatic scene from 8 Mile 2007 week 42 (October 15 – 21) 1. Conceptual Terrorism The Onion replaces the word ‘art’ with ‘terrorism’: ‘According to a 2007 CIA executive summary, the terrorists responsible for masterminding the attack are likely hiding somewhere in Berlin’s vast labyrinth of cafés. […] “I’m no expert, but I know terrorism when I see it,” said Kathy Atwood, a Hyde Park mother of four. “Where is the devastating loss of life and massive destruction of infrastructure? This doesn’t move me to run for my life at all.” She added: “Real terrorism takes years of training and meticulous planning. My 6-year-old kid can make Jell-O.”‘ 2. The Rage of the Creative Class This article gave me this year’s occasion for future-shock. I read it as if it were 1983, and it had been beamed back in time with an intro that said: Here is an article from the year 2007, describing the future New York city and something called ‘blogging’. Apparently in the future, young adults will be totally pissed off and screwed. This is what awaits you when you grow up … dystopia! PS, the Loto numbers for November 19th 1983 are 4 14 16 30 33 38 22. 3. Hollywood’s Devices An article on the hip cell-phones of Hollywood and their semiotics. 4. 19 October 2007 On the movie Death of a President. 5. Richard Rorty Selections Two articles I was happy to find online to share, as I’d found them in his 1999 book, Philosophy and Social Hope. The Humanistic Intellectual (1989) I found to be an excellent manifesto for the type of activity I see myself engaged in, as well as having an accurate prediction that round about the year 2010, ‘the brightest new Ph.D.’s in English that year will be people who never want to hear the terms “binary opposition” or “hegemonic discourse” again as long as they live.’ Fraternity Reigns is a vision from the year 2096 of what kind of society the United States could aim for – one in which a concept of fraternity is dominant (common, Rorty argues, in America’s 19th Century). 6. Dors Lessing Selection An extensive excerpt from Lessing’s introduction to The Golden Notebook. 7. Chasing Transcendence: The Self Audio of a mediocre lecture, recorded at U of T. 2007 week 43 (October 22 – 28) 1. Fuck the Young, eh? It’s not only New York that’s screwing it’s young people; the same is true in cities all over North America (all over the West in general?) Vancouver is young-without-a-ton-of-money unfriendly, and in Toronto, the can-lit scene is still dominated by has-beens. Complaining about the Giller prize, Stephen Marche writes: ‘The danger is that the Giller, like the CBC, will become just another institution for boomer self-congratulation’. 2. Dasher A Google video presentation on an alternative text-input system. 3. The Cruelty of Kitakyushu’s bureaucrats People in Japan starve to death because welfare is treated as a shameful. Letting someone starve to death to uphold a social norm apparently is not. 4. A comparison between USA & Japan Immanuel Wallerstein’s Commentary on how the US lags behind other nations in terms of broadband access. 5. The Schøyen Collection ‘The Schøyen Collection comprises most types of manuscripts from the whole world spanning over 5000 years. It is the largest private manuscript collection formed in the 20th century. […] The present website comprises a selection of digital descriptions of manuscripts with sample images from The Schøyen Collection. The whole collection comprises about 13,600 manuscripts and inscribed objects, of which about 720 are available on the present website. The selection, descriptions and digitalisation are the responsibility of the owner of The Schøyen Collection.’ 2007 week 44 (October 29 – November 4) 1. The Alternative History of Martin Heidegger An extensive excerpt from Richard Rorty’s 1990 essay ‘Another Possible World’ republished in Philosophy and Social Hope. He argues and tries to show that although in our world, Heidegger was a Nazi, things could have been different (and that overall, this shouldn’t diminish his work. As Rorty said in a 1999 bio-documentary on Heidegger, ‘There are a lot of cases of bad men writing interesting books and Heidegger is just a spectacular case of that sort. He stumbled into a situation that he didn’t have the character to get himself out of, and for the rest of history he’s always going to be stuck in the trap in which he mired himself’). 2. Richard Florida on Toronto His article in the Globe & Mail, with Leah McLaren’s gushing and reader comments. 3. The Wander Years David Brooks writes in the New York Times: ‘There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. Of the new ones, the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood. […] Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, Wuthnow observes, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.’ 4. Twelve Thousand Nine Hundred Years Ago One day a long time ago a comet exploded over North America and killed everything. Thankfully the Bush Administration wasn’t around to declare a war on comets and use the subsequent chicken-little fears to create a police state to limit protest and consolidate power. 5. Dave Hickey Sheila Heti’s great interview with Dave Hickey. 2007 week 45 (November 5 – 11 ) 1. Charles Taylor on the Secular Charles Taylor recently published A Secular Age and it has been discussed on the recently launched blog The Immanent Frame. In this posting, Taylor responds to some of the cautious yet sycophantic critiques. 2. Barack Obama, or this week’s most popular article on the net Andrew Sullivan on Barack Obama, a must read. What I especially appreciated about this article was Sullivan’s arguments that Obama offers an alternative to the poison politics of the baby-boomers. 3. Dante’s Heaven and Canadian November A link to the CBC Radio 1 Tapestry podcast audio, a conversation about Dante’s Paradiso, introduced by my thoughts on the reading of Dorris Lessing’s Massey Lectures and our predilection for violence. 4. Neitzsche, Heidegger, Sartre Documentaries In 1999 the BBC broadcast three documentaries on the three philosophers, and they can now be found on Google Video. 5. Norman Mailer 1923-2007 Norman Mailer and I shared our birthday. Eighteen months ago, inspired by his having said things I’d never heard before, I wrote that when he died I’d consider it a diminishment of humanity. Humanity is thus diminished. Reviews I want to begin posting individual reviews of whatever from now on. To establish this, I reposted previous reviews of Mr. Mee, the shows of Darren O’Donnell and Zin Taylor last March, and the book version of Children of Men. There are others in the back-pages I plan to repost this way, but they can wait. ——————————- RSS Feed: http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/rss/feed/ Podcast Link: http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/rss/podcast.php Long links made short by using Shorty (http://get-shorty.com) To ADD yourself to this list, go here; to REMOVE yourself go here. http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com
