December 2008
12 posts
I’ve come to believe that vulgarity often requires as much finesse as...
– The Affected Provincial’s Almanack
November 2008
30 posts
Tonight’s distraction…
“Loos was a tiny prodigy. She sold her first scripts at age nineteen, with the third, The New York Hat (1913), directed by Griffith, earning her twenty-five dollars. (Her punctilious account book is reprinted in her 1974 autobiography Kiss Hollywood Goodbye.) After writing scores of shorts, she moved into features in 1916… Loos would hobnob with the...
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—The radically democratic essence of carnival is a cliche of academic discourse on Bakhtin, at least in the United States. But an essay by Boris Groys, “Between Stalin and Dionysus” (1989), suggests that things are not so simple: “One should not even speak of democracy here: no one is given the democratic right to shirk carnival, to not take part, to remain on the...
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dust and the everyday
“…the everday is modernity’s embarrassing underside.”
“The value of a certain kind of memory […] is that it can denaturalize the everday and render it visible[…] The memories it evokes are likely to be fragmentary and elusive […] involuntary memories which emerge at unexpected times and places […as…] the return of the repressed, the...
from You Are Jeff by Richard Siken
“You are playing cards with three men named Jeff. Two of the Jeffs seem somewhat familiar, but the Jeff across from you keeps staring at your hands, your mouth, and you’re certain that you’ve never seen this Jeff before. But he’s on your team, and you’re ahead, you’re winning big, and yet the other Jeffs keep smiling at you like there’s no tomorrow. They...
…Poincare, who was doing pioneering research at the time on three-body...
– The Landscape of History: How … - Google Book Search
The determination of the positions and motions of three bodies in a mutual...
– three-body problem from The Penguin Dictionary of Physics
John Hodgman’s brief digression on Lost Time | Video on TED.com
“A boss piece of detective work.”