Where a google search for “necrobes” turns up about 90 results and one for “x-ray porn” has roughly 162,000?
Monthly Archives: March 2005
Codex Sinaiticus Digitization Initiative
From The Economist.
I found this to be curious:
According to Scot McKendrick, curator for classical, Byzantine and biblical manuscripts at the British Library, only four researchers in the past 20 years have been allowed access to those parts of the original that are in London.
Academic Self-Help
Here I’m reading a book on scholarly publishing. It may contain–I don’t remember–but it may contain the Tony Robbins Corollary: “first, you must do something rather than nothing.”
Fargo
It’s a fine movie. Here’s a picture of Clancy and me trying to figure out how to see the extra features on her DVD player.
Peter Abrahams and John Banville
There’s a paper to be written.
Note also
Certainly not a conservative in the way the term is today used in American politics, Kennan is a classic, organic conservative, the intellectual companion of such other historical romanticists as Ortega y Gasset and Spengler. What he deplores is the messiness and leveling of mass democracy, where the median is often the lowest common denominator. What he admires is order, tradition, and an aristocracy of taste and values. Naturally communism is even more abhorrent to him than mass democracy or untrammeled capitalism, for it compounds the sin of leveling by stifling expression.
Goety at the World Bank
I’ve been extraordinarily successful at getting questions answered from the readership, so I’d thought I’d cast this one before you: can anyone think of fictional representations that specifically relate finance to necromancy? I do not mean in a symbolic sense.
Aretalogy and Its Consequences
History, figurant of deeds. Simon Magus, distiller of private infinities. Comma, mediator of clauses.
Origins of this idea: Peter only thought he won. Correspondence with encratism, docetism. Cf. Vance, Rhialto the Marvellous.
Speech, spells, routinization. Transhumanism. Solipsism. Generation and corruption. Spengler. Organic historiography.
Danish Break-Dancing
An early and definitive source is Lisbet Torp’s “‘Hip Hop Dances’: Their Adoption and Function among Boys in Denmark from 1983-84.” Yearbook for Traditional Music. 18 (1986): 29-36.
World’s Most Disturbing Book Cover
Bonus points if you can make an Oscar Wilde connection.
Three Books of Shame
Here’s the game we’re playing.
- Lem’s Summa Technologiae. Ok, it’s never been published in English; but I could work my way through the German or finally learn Polish. What better place to start?
- Waugh’s biography Edmund Campion. To quote Carl, “classic. Total classic.”
- Le Carré’s The Naive and Sentimental Lover. I once claimed to have read this, falsely. It, along with the most recent book, is the only Le Carré I haven’t read, though I do own it.
Resolution
I have decided to derive the 230 space groups using Hamiltonian quaternions.
Problems with the ODNB
This Guardian article points out some unpopularities, but there’s no mention of the fact that there’s still no Olaf Stapledon entry.
It’s still on my Amazon wish list, linked over to the right there, and please feel free to start gifting anytime now, please.
Thirty Flasks of Shame
“He was ill-informed about foreign affairs—he did not read newspapers— but that suited the State Department well enough.”
Coetzee on Faulkner.
Zizek Reminder
Half the Slovenian government seems to have studied Lacan at the university, including the former General Secretary of the ruling party, Gregor Golobic, who wrote, for his thesis at the University of Ljubljana, a Lacanian critique of the philosophy of Cratylus. (“He is my best friend! I love him!” Zizek says. “He is the future Slovene Stalin. He is a man of power. He is the kind of guy who, when I am in his office and talking with him and a minister calls, he says to the minister, ‘Fuck off, I don’t have time to talk to you.’ “)
From Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker profile.
Weatherlock
I have my radio alarm tuned to a ghastly station, for predictable reasons. The morning show in particular would probably give me a nosebleed if I listened to it for more than three minutes. This morning, I awoke to some kind of power-country warbler that sounded very much like it had the following lyric: “If you’ve got some blue jeans, you can predict the weather.”
Very good. Next week in Minneapolis will be mostly sunny with highs in the 70s, clear and cooler at night.
Hethor Lives!
But is this one as useful of a thaumaturge?
Listen Here
I enjoy watching Adult Swim very much, thank you; and, contrary to the sentiments expressed here, I spend my spare time not in casual regression, but rather contemplating how “when earth produces water something is taken away from the earth, for the process is one of excretion” (De Caelo 305 B) might be regarded as symbolic prophecy.
So there. And the ant-chase mentioned above is obviously about a certain Eleatic paradox