I’m disappointed when I look back at the contents of this journal. Several things I wanted to write but didn’t. This has been a bad four months, overextended, overbooked, overtired.
Here are some of the things I meant to write but didn’t:
A discussion of men and feminism. Why did nearly all of the men in our [...]
“The world has surely become unhinged, and only violent movements can put it back together. But it may be that among the instruments for doing so, there is one — tiny, fragile — which requires to be wielded delicately.”
Bertolt Brecht, cited by Roland Barthes in Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes
Is law a greater force than culture?
Law: can be said to transcend activities within society — no matter what your specialization, you are still subject to the law. Culture: can be said to envelop or encompass activities within society.
Culture: varies according to class, career or area of endeavour, geography, ethnicity. Law: one law for everyone [...]
“Nothing is idiotic if you use your imagination. That’s what being a scientist is all about!”
Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Next Friday’s issue of Science, “a respected journal”, has been anticipated for a very long time now. It will continue to be anticipated, as long as next Friday looms before us — the near future, with the promise of novelty-almost-coming-in-to-being, is even more exciting than the new. The new, after all, is only new once. [...]
Nussbaum, 451: “When we see Nazis depicted without disgust, as human beings who share common characteristics with us — whether the emphasis is on the capacity of all human beings for evil or on a universal submissiveness to distorting ideologies — this is alarming, because it requires self-scrutiny, warning us that we might well have [...]
geddy lee, alex lifeson, neil peart
OK, so I missed post-modernism a bit. I didn’t realize how much until I started reading this Lyotard. After a long absence, even some of the things that are highly annoying about it seem cute and endearing. The selective use or misuse of terms, the relentless scare quotes indicating ironic detachment, the odd neologistic constructions [...]
One of the things that strikes me about Freud is that the mental universe is a bit Newtonian. There are certain things that don’t work that way — like early in Civilization where he describes two psychic objects occupying the same space (but then admits his city-of-the-mind metaphor is not really useful). Aside from that:
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I had thought by now that reading Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus with an eye to the social and political context, especially the French revolution, would be fairly commonplace. Me, I was wrong.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s letter from Paris about the mob calling for the head of the King. Mary Shelley’s fixation on her absent mother. Percy [...]