“The general public is seizing on the Web as a way to have a conversation,” he said in our own chat this week.
Archive for January, 2004
Interviews Galore
Wednesday, January 14th, 2004Welcome to Mars
Tuesday, January 13th, 2004
“I believe in the things that were done, and there are evidence of many things done on Mars. There are streets and houses, and there are books, I imagine, and big canals and clocks and places for stabling, if not horses, well, then some domestic animal, perhaps with twelve legs, who knows? Everywhere I look I see things that were used. They were touched and handled for centuries.
“Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I’ll say yes. They’re all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we’ll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we’ll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we’ll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.
Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. NY: Batam, 1979. p.54.
Dos p
Para ya sabemos quien…
Sunday, January 11th, 2004
Widely recognized as a major figure in twentieth-century American art, Leonard Baskin embodied the essence of the artifex (Latin for “creator”) in blending the roles of master craftsman, artisan, and artist. His sculptures, prints, books, and drawings can be found in the collections of nearly every major research library and art museum. Among his many commissions were a thirty-foot long bas-relief for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., and a Holocaust Memorial statue, erected on the site of the first Jewish cemetery in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Although he is best known as a sculptor, Baskin had a lifelong passion for collecting, illustrating, designing, and printing books. His favorite subjects included notable figures from the history of art and bookmaking, natural history, the Bible, and mythology.
A cornerstone of Cornell University Library’s book arts collection, Baskin’s books represent the apex of contemporary letterpress printing. The exhibition features books and fine prints from Baskin’s private press, the Gehenna Press, including wood engravings, woodcuts, and etchings. A collection of Baskin’s own working materials, lent by his wife, Lisa Unger Baskin, enhances this exhibition. These unique sketches, wood blocks, and proofs provide a rare glimpse into the creative process, and illustrate the physical and conceptual construction of books from cover to cover.
Enlace cortes
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Sunday, January 11th, 2004Le sperme est-il kosher?
Sunday, January 11th, 2004My so-called Blog
Sunday, January 11th, 2004
If this new technology has provided a million ways to stay in touch, it has also acted as both an amplifier and a distortion device for human intimacy. The new forms of communication are madly contradictory: anonymous, but traceable; instantaneous, then saved forever (unless deleted in a snit). In such an unstable environment, it’s no wonder that distinctions between healthy candor and ”too much information” are in flux and that so many find themselves helplessly confessing, as if a generation were given a massive technological truth serum.
A result of all this self-chronicling is that the private experience of adolescence — a period traditionally marked by seizures of self-consciousness and personal confessions wrapped in layers and hidden in a sock drawer — has been made public. Peer into an online journal, and you find the operatic texture of teenage life with its fits of romantic misery, quick-change moods and sardonic inside jokes. Gossip spreads like poison. Diary writers compete for attention, then fret when they get it. And everything parents fear is true. (For one thing, their children view them as stupid and insane, with terrible musical taste.) But the linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy — a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison.
El suplemento del NY Times trae un largo art
For the Record, 2
Saturday, January 10th, 2004Gu Ta Gutarrak
Saturday, January 10th, 2004
Los baskos nada tenemos de racistas. No somos raza, sino especie. Una especie que al mezclarse con la otra sigue dando como resultado baskos
puros. El Evangelio dice algo sobre levadura y mostaza que no recuerdo
bien, pero que creo tiene con esto algo que ver. Me basta considerar mi
propio caso, pues por la ascendencia me corresponde s
Ingeniero acaricia la desnudez del emperador post-moderno
Saturday, January 10th, 2004Y cito:
My success in my job depends to a large degree on my success in so communicating. At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I’m doing is worth having them pay for it.
Contrast this situation with that of academia. Professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies in their professional life find themselves communicating principally with other professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They also, of course, communicate with students, but students don’t really count. Graduate students are studying to be professors themselves and so are already part of the in-crowd. Undergraduate students rarely get a chance to close the feedback loop, especially at the so called “better schools” (I once spoke with a Harvard professor who told me that it is quite easy to get a Harvard undergraduate degree without ever once encountering a tenured member of the faculty inside a classroom; I don’t know if this is actually true but it’s a delightful piece of slander regardless). They publish in peer reviewed journals, which are not only edited by their peers but published for and mainly read by their peers (if they are read at all). Decisions about their career advancement, tenure, promotion, and so on are made by committees of their fellows. They are supervised by deans and other academic officials who themselves used to be professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They rarely have any reason to talk to anybody but themselves — occasionally a Professor of Literature will collaborate with a Professor of History, but in academic circles this sort of interdisciplinary work is still considered sufficiently daring and risqu
