January 2010
57 posts
“Social communication arises out of the fact that people cannot experience how...”
– Wolfgang Iser, “Interaction Between Text and Reader”
4 tags
[image by Olivier Van Zeveren]
“People today who still have time for boredom and yet are not bored are certainly just as boring as those who never get around to being bored. For their self has vanished - the self whose presence, particularly in this so bustling world, necessarily compel them to tarry for a while without a goal, neither here nor there.”
Siegfried Kracauer,...
Some longer (maybe) thoughts to share:
Currently reading yet another section from The Culture Industry by Adorno. Dude says he doesn’t have any hobbies. At first, methinks, this is ridiculous theory arrogance - of course everyone has at least one or two hobbies. But, here’s what he means, and I think there is something quite beautiful about it:
“Not that I am the kind of...
3 tags
3 tags
fingerstachin' →
3 tags
Fun stuff about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:
He was trained first as a doctor, but couldn’t get enough patients, so he started writing mystery stories. He decided to kill off Holmes a few years after his creation because he felt Holmes was keeping him from doing more ‘important’ things.
Doyle made about L500 per episode of his Sherlock stories in the Strand. (If you convert that...
“apotropaic”
– intending to ward off evil
1 tag
for all you grammar geeks →
1 tag
2 tags
3 tags
5 tags
Turns out, my granddad was kind of the shit. I don’t know how many of you can tower two grown men on your shoulders. TRY THIS AT HOME - I double dog dare you.
3 tags
Here’s something to stir the pot:
“The development of modern culture is characterized by the predominance of what one can call the objective spirit over the subjective […]. If we survey […] the vast culture which during the last century has been embodied in things and in knowledge, in institutions and in comforts, and if we compare them with the cultural progress of the...
4 tags
“boustrephedon: the practice of writing an a vertically back and forth direction,...”
–
2 tags
BHAG →
(via hannahjenkins)
For Hannah, and because I’m a no-it-all.
I really want[ed] to see the Maritimes this...
“… those who don’t bore themselves usually bore others, while those...”
– Either/Or, Kierkegaard
4 tags
Last night, I started reading The Holy Longing: the search for a Christian Spirituality by Ronald Rolheiser. This is the poem he places in the front of the book.
The Holy Longing, by J.V. Goethe
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent, because the mass man will mock it right away. I praise what is truly alive, what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of the love-nights, where you...
themumbling:
Did you prefer the old Canada with it’s inferiority complex? http://bit.ly/8vIAMt
4 tags
“First of all, those glasses. E-w-w-w. Do we really want to have to put on...”
– David Pogue, “Want It or Not, TV Goes 3-D” from the NYT
2 tags
““Antebellum” - before the war; “Antediluvian” - before...”
4 tags
5 tags
Google’s apologizing while it pulls out.
3 tags
This semester, I am studying print culture and history, and the theory of boredom. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely - the two have already overlapped in several of my readings and thoughts. I guess sometimes we read because we’re bored, and sometimes we write out of malaise.
Here’s an article from the NYT about why authors answer emails from people they’ve never met, and a...
3 tags
ever think of living in a caboose? →
4 tags
4 tags
5 tags
One day, down by a slow-flowing river, an ancient Anishinabe (Ojibwa) man was sitting under a tree, teaching his beloved grandchildren about the ways of life.
He said, “Inside of me, a fight is going on. It is a terrible fight between two wolves.
“One wolf is evil - he is fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false...
3 tags
4 tags
Totally Overrated & Underrated Beautiful People
Overrated: Musicians
I am uber creeped out by this Justin Bieber kid. Saw his music video on TV today during a reading break and decided that I would never want to go to a laundromat ever in my life if it meant that Usher’s twelve year-old guitar-touting girlfriend would be sitting there watching me and taking polaroids of herself with...
3 tags
