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Midweek Staff Meeting – They Can Take It Away Whenever They Want To


In the ‘cloud,’ corporations own everything you think own (and everything you used to own).

The next American winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Academic a–holes.

A very earthy sort of ‘vie boheme’ near Covent Gardens in the eighteenth century.

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Weekend Reading – What Use Are You?


The slow death of the humanities in the university.

I see nothing wrong with conflating coffee and sex. In fact, I’m also going to start using the word ‘coffee’ when I mean ‘sex.’ However, I will still continue to use ‘coffee’ to mean ‘coffee.’ I apologize in advance for any confusion this may cause.

Some suggested careers for me.

You have been reading it wrong this whole time. Unless you’ve never read Beowulf, in which case… well, really, the question becomes, why haven’t you? It’s a foundational work of western literature and it’s widely available. The late, Nobel prize winning Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, wrote a wonderful and, I might add, readable translation of the Old English poem. I know that the article this links specifically name drops Heaney as one of the translators who got that first line wrong, but even assuming this fellow is right, you can just redo those first lines in your head as you read it.

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Monday Morning Staff Meeting – From Beyond The Hallowed Halls


Why are people so concerned with a few hundred thousand dollars when I have uncovered the secrets of the universe?

There should be a punctuation mark for irony. Actually, there is. Or rather, there are several. But I don’t think my word processing program is familiar with them, so I never use them. But you can see how such a thing could be useful, especially in electronic communications, like email and text messages.

Everybody, and I mean everybody, or least, everybody who was anybody to having pretensions of intellectualism and were also under age twenty-five, none of which is intended as a knock on the book, had this book back in the early nineties. And probably before that, too, but frankly, I wouldn’t have known if they did. I mean, sure, I probably saw some of the shelves and was intrigued, with a cover like an oversized science fiction novel, but I really couldn’t have made any reasonable generalizations at the time.

I had no idea that Fanny Howe and Susan Howe were sisters. I love Fanny Howe and am always frustrated at how difficult it is to find her work. On the shelves where I had hoped to find Fanny was, instead, a poetry collection by Susan, instead. But knowing they are sisters doesn’t make it any less frustrating that the only bookstore in DC that seems to stock Fanny’s poetry is Bridestreet Books, which makes sense, seeing as they have, hands down, the best poetry selection… well, anywhere I’ve seen. And that includes the estimable Skylight Books in Los Angeles and even the serpentine stacks of the Strand in New York.

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Midweek Staff Meeting – The Newest Left


Marxism or bust!

How awesome is this? Paul Krugman writing about poetry! Not to digress, but an acquaintance of mine met him at a science fiction convention a few years and he admitted his great love of Isaac Asimov. Asimov spoke at my elementary school when I was kid. I mean, he didn’t speak to me class. The school was just the venue. My mother went. She said he came across as sweet, but a little too idealistic and a teensy bit wedded to traditional gender roles. But I digress. Let me digress some more. I was too young to go, but still disappointed, because, at the time, I was just beginning to raid my mother’s vast collection of Asmiov pulps. Everything from his terrible, early Lucky Starr novels to The End of Eternity (which is my personal favorite, if it’s the one I’m thinking of, which is the one where a mushroom cloud in a 1930s classified ad is the key to pinpointing where the lady has gone in time). But actually, Krugman only briefly touches on poetry and admits he doesn’t read it. May I humbly suggest something like The Displaced of Capital as being appropriate for an economist? It also relates to the link about, about the rise of young Marxist thinkers. Which I think is awesome. I am not now nor have I ever really been a Marxist (though I played at being one in high school and a bit in college, but I’m probably more like a Vermont Democrat and ,really, I always have been), but it’s good to see his ideas being debated again. Not only was he genius, but we need a counterbalance to the way blowhards like Mies and Hayek have pulled the conversation so bloody far to the extreme right. I’m not going to talk about Rand. She’s not a philosopher. And she’s only a novelist in the broadest sense that her books have words in them and things said are ascribed to people with names that we are supposed to believe are ‘characters’ but are only characters in the sense that the Grimlock, the leader of Dinobots, from the Transformers cartoons I watched in the early and mid eighties, was a three dimensional character. Hint: he wasn’t, because it was a show for nine year old boys. In Rand’s defense, novels like Atlas Shrugged are aimed squarely at slightly sensitive sixteen year old boys, who feel that maybe they are slightly smarter than their peers and know they are definitely less physical capable and are kind of hoping that their hoped for slightly more braininess will one day lead them a chosen land and here’s this Rand person telling them, that, heck yeah! You’ll go to a cool valley in Colorado and be super awesome and women will totally want to make sexy time with you! That’s totally awesome, right? Except then you turn seventeen and if you have any self awareness at all, you start to question this paradigm. You hear that, Paul Ryan? You lack the self awareness of a seventeen year boy. Yeah. I said it. So, in conclusion: educated people should read more poetry and should not read Ayn Rand after their seventeenth birthday.

Foreign affairs time? More like sexy time!

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Weekend Reading – Not The Same Thing At All


Club Monaco (which, is apparently, a women’s apparel store) is not actually a place for learning, reading, culture, and enlightenment. Go to a museum, folks and then go to a bookstore with your children to talk about their favorite exhibit. And buy them a book, too.

Add this to the list of things that Rick Scott doesn’t understand (list also includes ‘Why Medicare fraud is a bad thing’ and ‘Why eliminating people of color and seniors from the voter rolls makes people think you’re an a–hole’).

In other (former) Florida Republican Governor news, Jeb Bush’s education ‘foundation’ accused of selling corporate donors access to taxpayer funded, education dollars.

Gertrude Stein and modernist bookmaking/typography.

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Weekend Reading – The Library


I know that Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize, but I’ve never read, don’t know much about her, and don’t really have much to say. I was prepared for Haruki Murukami because, well, I’ve read several of his novels. Anyway…

A fraction of a Jewish sect’s library now a game of Russian-American political ping pong.

Screw the global novel – long live the region-specific political novel!

Books are not and should not be free.

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Weekend Reading – Rise Up, Ye Believers


Against ‘scientism.’

Not so fast! cries renowned scientismist, Daniel Dennett.

The internet has killed the public intellectual with the shameless, mind numbing craptitude of TED-ism.

A philosopher and his beard.

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Death Of A Typewriter Repairman


Manson Whitlock, Typewriter Repairman, Dies at 96 (from the NYTimess)

Obit-Whitlock-articleLarge

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Weekend Reading – It’s Happening Again


The book is dead. Again. Apparently.

Coffee cars.

DC has a whole lot o’ awesome jazz clubs (Twins Jazz is my personal favorite).

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Weekend Reading – Smackdowns


Poetry slams do nothing for poetry.

A well rounded education is useless! You must submit to the almighty market!

Someone’s got a problem with Kevin Young.

Death is helping to keep the typewriter alive.

The Chomsky-Zizek death match.