- Yegorushka looked about him, and could not make out where the strange song came from. Then, as he listened, he began to fancy that the grass was; in its song, withered and half dead, it was without words, but plaintively and passionately, urging that it was not to blame, that the sun was burning it for no fault of its own; it urged that it ardently longed to live, that it was young and might have been beautiful but for the heat and the drought; it was guiltless, but yet it prayed forgiveness and protested that it was in anguish, sad and sorry for itself.
More Chekhov! The brilliant Janet Malcolm comments that there are two layers of anthropomorphism here -- Chekhov is giving the young boy thoughts that he wouldn't normally have, and of course the grass is so human and just begging to be empathized with. I've just been rereading Do Androids Dream, which rather wonderfully toys with that idea of empathy and self, so this quote struck me hard.
The differences between variable capital and constant capital could be exemplified in the variation between minimum wage and rent.The human being is no longer a component of the machine but a worker, a user... Of course, it was the modern State and capitalism that brought the triumph of the machines, in particular of motorized machines...; but what we are referring to now are technical machines, which are definable extrinsically.
[...]
The wage regime can therefore take the subjection of human beings to an unprecedented point, and exhibit a singular cruelty, yet still be justified in its humanist cry: No, human beings are not machines, we don't treat them like machines, we certainly don't confuse variable capital and constant capital...
-_____-Physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont allege that A Thousand Plateaus contains many passages that use pseudo-scientific language.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/06/interstellar-new-space-race Something about this idea really irks me, that funding for space exploration is now reduced to advertising revenue. As if that's now the only way to really make any money.One innovation Lansdorp has come up with is the business model. He intends to finance Mars One by selling the global TV rights. “The Olympic Games and the Fifa World Cup make about $4bn in broadcast and sponsorship,” Lansdorp points out. “That’s roughly the same as the cost of our mission.” And who wouldn’t tune in to watch the first Mars landing? “This is one of the most exciting things that will ever happen on the planet – or the solar system, I should say.”
OH MAN. I've been reading the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and loving it. - But your yourself sucks! - It is, lamentably, all I have.- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself.
Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.
It's never the changes we want that change everything.”
Frank O'Hara, "Song (I'm stuck in traffic)," 1960. I simply love the way this guy talks. Thanks _refugee_.
Note: The German bit "Muss es sein," which is also famously used in the great novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, is to the effect of "It must be," or "So it goes," "C'est la vie," etc. So "Muss es sein? it must not be so, I tell you." SONG (I'm stuck in traffic)
I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab which is typical
and not just of modern life
mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves must lovers of Eros end up with Venus muss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you
how I hate disease, it's like worrying that comes true and it simply must not be able to happen
In a world where you are possible my love nothing can go wrong for us, tell me.
IT WAS 3 AM IM SORRY (and to be fair, I always confuse the title with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I haven't even read/watched yet.)
Oh my god thenewgreen formatting this to look remotely readable took me 15 minutes and at least a year's worth of stress out of my lifetime :D There's gotta be a better clearer way (or at least directions in the markup tab) to make gaps between text on different lines, and blocks of text that are separated by an extra line. Also I feel bad for only being able to do it in a way that made my post unnecessarily ginormous and imposing.
insomniasexx, mk and forwardslash are hard at work rewriting the entire site. Markup is going to get a reboot for sure.
Wowee, that's a big project. Godspeed, ye pioneers!
I think you can kinnear[1] it with quotes. Lemme try: [1] This word is really a last name which has been made into a verb because of a lovely woman, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, who is also known as the Yarn Harlot. I completely bastardize the verb and use it to mean "rig" or "work in a way it is not supposed to work [surreptitiously; to bypass through crafty methods the way something is supposed to work]."SONG (I'm stuck in traffic)
Put it in quotes and put two spaces before each line and it looks easier. I've found that putting stuff in quotes tends to override some other native formatting (like line spacing) a little bit.
I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab
which is typical
and not just of modern life mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves
must lovers of Eros end up with Venus
muss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you
how I hate disease, it's like worrying
that comes true
and it simply must not be able to happen
In a world where you are possible
my love
nothing can go wrong for us, tell me.
Aha! Thanks for the tip. I will be sure to stick that word somewhere in my next English essay to make my english teacher squeal in delight.
"The United States will share a 2,000 mile border with a narcostate controlled by powerful transnational drug cartels that threaten the stability of Central and South America." - Robert Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography Finished this one yesterday. Also finished Mother of Storms by John Barnes same day. Started danah boyd. Hating it less than I expected to; taken as a gestalt rather than tasty tidbits, it seems to be the kind of grindingly obvious book that your average precocious 14-year-old wants her mom to read so she'll STFU and let her go to the mall. We'll see what I think when it's done.
Yeah, I figured you'd say that. What are the original thoughts to be had about social media? I met this guy a couple weeks ago, for example. That paper interested me, but also seemed like navel-gazing. I am often accused of being an old man in a young man's body, though, so don't take me too seriously.
The Book Thief, Markus ZusakA snowball in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship.
-Paul Stoller, Excerpt from Stranger In The Village Of The Sick
We just finished this book in my Medical Anthropology class, and Stollers descriptions of his treatment for lymphoma evoke a very poignant empathy. Whats most interesting to me is the perspective of an educated adult who is otherwise healthy, learning they have a chronic illness. In contrast to my own experiences with intensive medicine in my childhood, Stoller expresses significant distress over what I would have considered unpleasant, but simple, procedural things. There is certainly a small amount of brutality involved in western medicine even in the best scenarios, but I think understanding the why of the medical process makes that easier to deal with.American culture is an exceedingly optimistic one. We expect good news. We prize people with sunny dispositions. We accentuate the positive. We avoid discussion or acknowledgement of serious illness. If you are ignorant of trouble, we reason, you are freed from its burdens. The prospect of death is frightening. In mainstream American culture, as sociologist Arthur Frank argues in his noteworthy book The Wounded Storyteller, a lack of optimism leads to pessimism. Pessimism then leads to alienation, which in turn leads to a lack of well-being, which in the end makes us sick. If you get something as insidious as cancer, it must be your fault.