I’ve noticed that both The Sopranos and The Wire have throwaway references to Gainesville (vending machine falls on someone in the former, Bunk’s wife visits family there in latter). Given that every other college graduate, roughly speaking, is from Ohio State, Florida, or Arizona State, I’d guess that some company gaffer or another’s having a [...]
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[well, one comment: I've heard that you can still do this here in Louisiana...]
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From the OED entry on “ignis fatuus”: “It seems to have been formerly a common phenomenon; but is now exceedingly rare.” Why? Because it was what it was thought to be, and has sensibly sublimated to a different medium? Did McLuhan write anything about this? I’m pretty sure he must have. I’m also coming round [...]
Clancy and I watched Sunset Blvd. a few nights ago, and I wondered then why Miss Olsen didn’t have the career for which she was obviously suited. I own several volumes of Hollywood Babylon, and she checks out clean. (That’s from memory. I could be wrong.) She could have played Galadriel in the film version [...]
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From the previous, re Adorno’s potential attitude toward The Pick-Up Artist, I think that he would have continued the line of inquiry began in the essay on Odysseus and started here: “Non formosus erat, sed erat facundus Ulixes/et tamen aequoreas torsit amore Deas.” Kierkegaard quotes that bit from Ovid in Diary of a Seducer.
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“Coming in at an exhausting 7,000 years long, music is weighed down by a few too many mid- tempo tunes, most notably ‘Liebesträume No. 3 in A flat’ by Franz Liszt and ‘Closing Time’ by ’90s alt-rock group Semisonic,” Schreiber wrote. “In the end, though music can be brilliant at times, the whole medium comes [...]
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Conrad, in his magisterial post on the Mayday Matter, advanced two complementary ideas: 1) that the ads themselves are the expression of an aesthetic sensibility and have no other discernible purpose and 2) that the community of random annotations that has arisen at Bryan Hance’s site is in itself perhaps more noteworthy and interesting than [...]
I doubt that anyone has, but if you’ve been following my citeulike page, it may seem as if I dropped off the bookmarking face of the world a few months ago. What actually happened is that I started using zotero instead. I’ve now gone back to citeulike. Zotero, I’ve discovered, is not properly parsing JSTOR [...]
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This piece [JSTOR] in Science from 1892 describes how a grapevine beetle came to love and obey a young woman, until it was accidentally dropped. Poor grapevine beetle. (I know that the chances of Kafka having read this are almost nil, but still.)
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I only saw it last week. Circumstances permitted a discussion with film scholar Chuck Tryon over the weekend, and I told him that I was overwhelmed by the film in divers ways. In particular, Poland. I’ve been reading reviews, and the one cogent comment on that aspect seems to be from Carina Chocano’s LA Times [...]
