I mean, at least when Minneapolis decided to build a train they made it a Light Rail that goes to useful places, like the airport, and the Mall of America.
viernes, octubre 29, 2004
Big Time
Little Rock has now joined the likes of Memphis and Providence with the completion of its own novelty trolley. The trolley goes to North Little Rock! And the Clinton library! (Which looks, incidentally, like a large traileron stilts.) It is so heartening to see municipalities around the country taking genuine steps toward better public transportation.
I mean, at least when Minneapolis decided to build a train they made it a Light Rail that goes to useful places, like the airport, and the Mall of America.
I mean, at least when Minneapolis decided to build a train they made it a Light Rail that goes to useful places, like the airport, and the Mall of America.
jueves, octubre 28, 2004
The Robot Hall of Fame "recognizes excellence in robotics technology worldwide and honors the fictional and real robots that have inspired and made breakthrough accomplishments in robotics."
From the NYT:
Scientists Find Skeletons of Miniature People
"Once upon a time, but not so long ago, in a tropical island midway between Asia and Australia, there lived a race of little people, whose adults stood just three and a half feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty hunters. They made stone tools with which they speared giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons, and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world.
The island of Flores is very isolated and, before modern times, was inhabited only by a select group of animals that managed to reach it. These then became subject to unusual evolutionary forces that propelled some toward giantism and downsized others.
The carnivorous lizards that reached Flores, perhaps on natural rafts, became giant-sized and still survive, though now confined mostly to the nearby island of Komodo; they are called Komodo dragons. Elephants are excellent swimmers; those that reached Flores evolved to a dwarf form the size of an ox."
Emily B. always mails me the best articles. I would l like to live on a magical island with large lizards rafting into the sunset and mini-elephants populating its forests. I have also, since moving to the South, become very adept at spearing giant rats.
More.
Hurrah for the Red Sox.
Scientists Find Skeletons of Miniature People
"Once upon a time, but not so long ago, in a tropical island midway between Asia and Australia, there lived a race of little people, whose adults stood just three and a half feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty hunters. They made stone tools with which they speared giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons, and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world.
The island of Flores is very isolated and, before modern times, was inhabited only by a select group of animals that managed to reach it. These then became subject to unusual evolutionary forces that propelled some toward giantism and downsized others.
The carnivorous lizards that reached Flores, perhaps on natural rafts, became giant-sized and still survive, though now confined mostly to the nearby island of Komodo; they are called Komodo dragons. Elephants are excellent swimmers; those that reached Flores evolved to a dwarf form the size of an ox."
Emily B. always mails me the best articles. I would l like to live on a magical island with large lizards rafting into the sunset and mini-elephants populating its forests. I have also, since moving to the South, become very adept at spearing giant rats.
More.
Hurrah for the Red Sox.
viernes, octubre 22, 2004
Memorial event
For Joanne. Monday, October 25, 5 pm, at the new MCM building (135 Thayer St.) in Providence.
miércoles, octubre 20, 2004
Gorrillas in the Mist
Louis is in Rwanda and he finally has a a blog of his own. One step closer to becoming a khaki-wearing, gunshot-scarred, Graham Greene-reading mercenary of a dispatching expat. DO IT!
miércoles, octubre 13, 2004
Moving up in the world
Last Sunday's New York Times was scattered around the house and I was going through the morning cereal ritual when I see the Sunday Styles section on the floor with a picture of Evan Rock. Or at least it looks like Evan Rock. And then I notice the caption, and it is indeed Evan Rock. Not only that, the story is by Elana Berkowitz, and she quotes Jordan Carlos too. Isn't everyone so young and fabulous? The story.
lunes, octubre 11, 2004
For meanings differ and defer
Perhaps in my last posting I quickly hopped over Derrida's death to complain about my undergraduate institution, but in all fairness today I feel compelled to praise one of my favorite academic personalities, who I learned about, of course, in the same room I denigrated in my last posting.
It is raining today. I wore sweatpants in solidarity with the weather, which was banging "stay in bed!" against the windowpane this morning. Unfortunately, the sweatpants have gone to my head, leaving me in a sort of sweatpants-like mindset that demanded I read every obituary about Derrida I could find on the internet instead of writing a challenging article about elephants that I assume will never be published.
As a person who writes, I know it is possible to execute a moderately successful article about a subject you don't attempt to understand by describing the controversy around it. This was the case in the majority of Derrida articles and obituaries that have been printed in the past few days, most of which devoted much more ink to the academic squabbling surrounding his various theories than the theories themselves. A number of publications brought up a New York Times interview where Derrida had refused to provide a definition to the concept of deconstruction, responding instead with the question, "Why don't you ask a physicist or a mathematician about difficulty?"
Without a small statuette in one's hand, it sounds silly to thank one person for the influence they have had on one's work, but I and many other people I know owe a debt to Derrida for teaching us about language. Rare is the day that I do not think about the concept of différance, not directly perhaps, but through the ability to articulate what exactly is wrong (or perhaps right) with the linguistic process behind a phrase like "the war on terror." It's what I wrote my first one-act play about, and he said it, there is nothing outside of text.
Having gone through a fair amount of obituaries, this one, appearing in the Guardian, was the most comprehensive:
"He argued that understanding something requires a grasp of the ways in which it relates to other things, and a capacity to recognise it on other occasions and in different contexts - which can never be exhaustively predicted. He coined the term "differance" ( différance in French, combining the meanings of difference and deferral) to characterise these aspects of understanding, and proposed that differance is the ur-phenomenon lying at the heart of language and thought, at work in all meaningful activities in a necessarily elusive and provisional way...
Derrida moved easily among French, English and German writers, and his favourites included James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Celan. Although his name is often coupled with the term "postmodernism" (sometimes with a suggestion of moral relativism), his allegiance was much more to the strenuous aesthetic experiments of the modernist writers. For him, the fact that moral values cannot be expressed as simple rules of conduct increased, rather than decreased, the importance of our ethical responsibilities."
It is raining today. I wore sweatpants in solidarity with the weather, which was banging "stay in bed!" against the windowpane this morning. Unfortunately, the sweatpants have gone to my head, leaving me in a sort of sweatpants-like mindset that demanded I read every obituary about Derrida I could find on the internet instead of writing a challenging article about elephants that I assume will never be published.
As a person who writes, I know it is possible to execute a moderately successful article about a subject you don't attempt to understand by describing the controversy around it. This was the case in the majority of Derrida articles and obituaries that have been printed in the past few days, most of which devoted much more ink to the academic squabbling surrounding his various theories than the theories themselves. A number of publications brought up a New York Times interview where Derrida had refused to provide a definition to the concept of deconstruction, responding instead with the question, "Why don't you ask a physicist or a mathematician about difficulty?"
Without a small statuette in one's hand, it sounds silly to thank one person for the influence they have had on one's work, but I and many other people I know owe a debt to Derrida for teaching us about language. Rare is the day that I do not think about the concept of différance, not directly perhaps, but through the ability to articulate what exactly is wrong (or perhaps right) with the linguistic process behind a phrase like "the war on terror." It's what I wrote my first one-act play about, and he said it, there is nothing outside of text.
Having gone through a fair amount of obituaries, this one, appearing in the Guardian, was the most comprehensive:
"He argued that understanding something requires a grasp of the ways in which it relates to other things, and a capacity to recognise it on other occasions and in different contexts - which can never be exhaustively predicted. He coined the term "differance" ( différance in French, combining the meanings of difference and deferral) to characterise these aspects of understanding, and proposed that differance is the ur-phenomenon lying at the heart of language and thought, at work in all meaningful activities in a necessarily elusive and provisional way...
Derrida moved easily among French, English and German writers, and his favourites included James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Celan. Although his name is often coupled with the term "postmodernism" (sometimes with a suggestion of moral relativism), his allegiance was much more to the strenuous aesthetic experiments of the modernist writers. For him, the fact that moral values cannot be expressed as simple rules of conduct increased, rather than decreased, the importance of our ethical responsibilities."
sábado, octubre 09, 2004
Which internet did you hear that on?
I'm in Memphis with the Oxford American for a literary conference of sorts. I watched the debates last night in a little broken bar with a pool table and christmas lights just one block from where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Passing by the Hotel Lorraine on our way to dinner (decision to eat determined via gut check) made me sad. Downtown Memphis is old ornate buildings interspersed with late 1970s monoliths, it feels rather dead but ornamentally so. Like every city suffering a renaissance for its blighted downtown, there is a novelty trolley. Somehow urban wastelands looked for redemption and were presented with apparitions of novelty trolleys that have since been worshiped as false idols. We had ribs from Rendezvous, and I really wanted to Fed Ex someone a package of ribs. It's a pretty penny though.
So Jacques Derrida has died. I imagine there have been various candlelight vigils and memorial panels at Brown. Ugh. Sometimes I daydream about going to an MCM class and sitting on that big wooden table at the Malcolm S. Forbes Center and vomiting on the best-dressed student in the discussion section.
Today I also fell in love with James Ellroy. He asked me what my name was. I said Emily. He looked me in the eye and said, "Emily, history rages." Then took my copy of American Tabloid and signed it, "To Emily. History Rages! J.E." He did this for no-one else that I saw. I was pleased.
He's pretty crazy. He said something along the lines of "I always tell writers not to write from their own lives," and yet at the same time he talked at length about growing up in L.A., about how his mother was murdered in 1958 when he was ten, "an unsolved body dump sex crime," and how all his best friends are cops. This is a person whose life and experiences are totally inseprable from his fiction, to an uncanny extent. He's also a total populist, all his favorite books were released as trade paperbacks and he was very up front about only writing film scripts (none of which have ever been made, excluding adaptations of his own work) for money. He think films are a lesser art than literature. He hopes to die without any money, except enough to build an auditorium at his old junior high in L.A. (where he says he spent a few happy years). And in the James Ellroy Auditorium he would erect a statue of himself with the words "Read motherfuckers!" inscribed at the base.
He "dreams of a new language for popular American fiction.''
It's been a day surrounded by the middle-aged however, and the maroon and forest green motifs of my hotel room in the "Sleep Inn" are beginning to swim before my eyes. I must go take the novelty trolley to trays of canapes and small tarts and Edward P. Jones accepting an award.
So Jacques Derrida has died. I imagine there have been various candlelight vigils and memorial panels at Brown. Ugh. Sometimes I daydream about going to an MCM class and sitting on that big wooden table at the Malcolm S. Forbes Center and vomiting on the best-dressed student in the discussion section.
Today I also fell in love with James Ellroy. He asked me what my name was. I said Emily. He looked me in the eye and said, "Emily, history rages." Then took my copy of American Tabloid and signed it, "To Emily. History Rages! J.E." He did this for no-one else that I saw. I was pleased.
He's pretty crazy. He said something along the lines of "I always tell writers not to write from their own lives," and yet at the same time he talked at length about growing up in L.A., about how his mother was murdered in 1958 when he was ten, "an unsolved body dump sex crime," and how all his best friends are cops. This is a person whose life and experiences are totally inseprable from his fiction, to an uncanny extent. He's also a total populist, all his favorite books were released as trade paperbacks and he was very up front about only writing film scripts (none of which have ever been made, excluding adaptations of his own work) for money. He think films are a lesser art than literature. He hopes to die without any money, except enough to build an auditorium at his old junior high in L.A. (where he says he spent a few happy years). And in the James Ellroy Auditorium he would erect a statue of himself with the words "Read motherfuckers!" inscribed at the base.
He "dreams of a new language for popular American fiction.''
It's been a day surrounded by the middle-aged however, and the maroon and forest green motifs of my hotel room in the "Sleep Inn" are beginning to swim before my eyes. I must go take the novelty trolley to trays of canapes and small tarts and Edward P. Jones accepting an award.
martes, octubre 05, 2004
Suscribirse a:
Entradas (Atom)