CentersofAttention

Japanese Man Group

2011-08-26T07:01:00.000-07:00

I thought these guys were pretty cool.

-Sleepy Fire

Yelawolf

2011-08-15T19:06:00.000-07:00

Just found out about this guy and that he was signed into Shady Records along with Slaughterhouse.

People saying he's the next Eminem, white rapper from the south. He's pretty good.
-Sleepy Fire

Tumble and Tubing

2011-08-04T16:09:00.000-07:00

Hell spawn

Big mac and fillet of fish, quarter pound of french fries, icy cold milkshakes, sundaes and applepies~

Sexy

-Sleepy Fire

The Hype Machine

2011-07-26T00:55:00.000-07:00

Tekken movie: Tekken Blood Vengeance (short fight scene)

Street Fighter X Tekken character reveal (sick cg)

Deus EX (live-action)

Get your human augmentations now at http://sarifindustries.com/

And 12 New Marvel 3 characters

Yay new Last Airbender series

2011-07-25T02:28:00.000-07:00

Korra's cool

-Sleepy Fire

Help me out, VOTE

2011-07-18T17:41:00.000-07:00

So I entered a silly contest: Dub over the conversation in the background, funniest wins. The judges couldn't decide so they need the people to sway the decision. Help me out by Liking the video ^^b. Post a comment, give the other entries a negative review, lol.

It would be even better to post a comment,"vote video 2," on the site SRK, but you have to register if it's not too much trouble.

-HulkGreenRanger

Simply a bit more Music

2011-07-04T19:13:00.000-07:00

I know Chiddy Bang isn't a new artist, but I just got his album and really like it

Their first single was Opposite of Adults:

I heard the song when I watching some guys skate on an MTV rebroadcast over here. That Rob Dyrdek show.

one of my friends in England showed me this video that probably isn't available for you guys over there, but here's the song "Mountains" by "Biffy Clyro" of Scottland

The actual video has a chess references and shao lin martial arts. P nice.

So what's good with you my amigos?

-NP

Literature

2011-06-30T22:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.transformer-ivan.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/100pushups.jpg

http://www.27bslash6.com/missy.html

RPG Idea and a Word I Remembered

2011-06-22T17:54:00.000-07:00

Holy crap my friends! It seems inspiration has hit us in these past couple of days. Here is the long-ass post I composed for you!

This time I post as with every other time I have posted, it is the middle of my night. On a schedule where 7pm-7am is when I'm awake and the time after is generally consumed by sleep, It is 0825am. But In this hour or in the minutes past I have done a bit of thinking!

I was thinking about the creation that some of our friends have endeavored to create- An RPG! A thing we had only dreamed of creating earlier in life - now a possibility! Perhaps it's still a pipe dream or a fleeting whim partially made manifest, but perhaps it will be the greatest of it's kind! Better even than Tales of Game's Presents Chef Boyardee's Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa !

While cutting my hair earlier, I was thinking about how another RPG could set itself apart - or try to. The RPG I wanted to make seemed like it could be different enough- turn based and all about fighting styles and combos... Last I heard, currently the battle format of your game is rather standard as is natural when a game just starts out- there will be defaults.

I was wondering if it'd be feasible or even fun if in an RPG, the characters acted somewhat like Advance Wars units in battle. In Advance Wars, as your units get hurt, they are literally weakened. The numbers dwindle and with the loss of units so goes the loss of firepower. I think it'd be interesting if something like that were to happen in an RPG with people. As the fighters get hurt, they lose attack power. Kinna like in real life, as a fight goes on, the blows thrown get weaker, the speed of attacks fall, even taking hits later on hurts more due to the effects of adrenaline wearing off. I realize in many games HP is representative of a unit's stamina, but I was thinking HP could have a direct effect on the Attack stat or there could be a stat like Stamina that would be damaged separate from HP and would affect attack and defense. The effect of course being: when HP/Stamina drops, Attack power and/or defense drops. When HP/Stamina is recovered, Attack power and defense is recovered. There could also be the reverse of this in a Berzerker type character.

In Advance Wars, the way of recovering from losing your attack power is to garrison in a building of some kind. I haven't thought of an equivalent way of recovery that seems reasonable. First thoughts were defending to recover HP or stamina... or... energy drinks or some item like that maybe even passing on a turn. The hero(es) could also potentially gradually heal while walking around outside of battle.

I have neglected to mention that I think such a system should also affect monsters/enemies Maybe not bosses? They gotta be tougher than your average joe, right? Perhaps they'd just have a weaker correlation between their stats or much more HP. Maybe it'd even depend on the types of enemies! Machines and robots are known for not having a weakness known as stamina. They could perhaps have fuel instead- like the mechs in Xenogears.

I'm also curious to know if you guys know if you want to implement random battles or show monsters outside of battle? I'd love learn more about the plans in this project and ask more questions!

I realize that implementing many of my ideas are beyond starter capabilities, but they're just ideas that I had. It could very well be quite un-fun mechanic or a terribly annoying thing to manage. And that really isn't acceptable for a game.

Now to talk about a word I remembered.

On an unrelated note, while stringing a number of words that rhymed, my brain stumbled upon the word "Recalcitrant." When I realized what I had said, I had to look it up to see if it was even a word! I felt that surely this word has something to do with... ionno calcium deposits? Incorrect.

re·cal·ci·trant/riˈkalsətrənt/

Adjective: Having an obstinately uncooperative attitude toward authority.

Noun: A person with such an attitude.

Such a word has been buried in my subconcious for who knows how long and I fear that it currently holds sway within the functions of the rest of the organ that houses it. I am not in a job where such an attitude would benefit the greater whole. I am sure I am currently recalcitrant... but I hope this mindset doesn't stick with me come the time where I should have a job where I am replaceable - or at least fire-able.

Dem Tracks, Man.

When I heard that Classified track "Maybe It's Just Me" and that Kanye track "G.O.O.D. Friday" I had them on repeat for at least the rest of the day that I found them. "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" wasn't a song like I was hoping and I've forgotten every word in it save the title, but it resonated with me greatly while I played Brink (playing on the rebel side). The rest of the tracks I still need to listen to. Also that video encouraging play...I might remember bits of that forever. Those TED talks are awesome~

Another thing I came across- likely through a site about game news was this this videogame movie:

Indie Game: The Movie Official Trailer from IndieGame: The Movie on Vimeo.

This video was of course found at http://www.indiegamethemovie.com/

and just now I found this:

I also watched some developers play and give commentary on their game Magicka here's the first episode:

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;I&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

I am now sick of my going off on several tangents.

Take care friends. It's now 0958 on my watch.

"OMG basedgod, you can fuck my bitch basedgod"

2011-06-21T01:11:00.000-07:00

swag

swag swag

get cooking

swag out the ovaries

I just poisoned you, have a good day.
-Blue Ranger

Reboot

2011-06-20T15:23:00.000-07:00

Here is some notes I transcribed from a text outdated though still relevant. Following it is an essay I wrote with some notes on it. You will find an essay on Melville's Bartleby on my other blog www.heteroglossia.wordpress.com, which should again be updated soon with more poetry, and hopefully after that some more writing. But not neglecting this venue, let me say that it is a project and pride can be put in and had from, for we are centers of attention each of us.

Also, I just finished Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly's All Things Shining: Reading the Classics for Meaning in a Secular World. It is a joy of a popular book of philosophy by a leading philosopher in Existentialism (Dreyfus) and I recommend it to anyone with a yen for David Foster Wallace or Melville's Moby Dick, another book I am 200ish pages deep into.

______________

A Short Guide to Writing About Literature 9th Edition, edited by Sylvan Barnet and William E. Cain. San Francisco, Longman: 2003. Print.

Characteristics of a Good Interpretation

Even the most vigorous advocates of the idea that meaning is indeterminate do not believe that all interpretations are equally significant. Rather, they believe that an interpretive essay is offered against a background of ideas, shared by essayist and reader, as to what constitutes a persuasive argument. An essay (even if it is characterized as “interpretive free play” or “creative engagement”) will have to be coherent, plausible, and rhetorically effective. The presentation as well as the interpretation is significant. This means that you cannot merely set down random expressions of feeling or unsupposed opinions. The essayist must, on the contrary, convincingly argue a thesis—must point to evidence so that the reader will not only know what you believe but will also understand why you believe it.

One important way of helping readers to see things from your point of view is to do your best to face all of the complexities of the work. Some interpretations strike a reader as better than others because they are more inclusive, that is, because they account for more of the details of the work. The less satisfactory interpretations leave a reader pointing to some aspects of the work—to some parts of the whole—and saying, “Yes, but your explanation doesn’t take account of . . . .”

This does not mean that a reader must feel that a persuasive interpretation says the last word about the work. We always realize that the work—if we value it highly—is richer than the discussion, but, again, for us to value an interpretation we must find the interpretation plausible and inclusive.

• Interpretation often depends

• on making connections not only among various elements of the work (for instance, among the characters in a story, or among the images in a poem), and

• between the work and other works by the author, but also on

• making connections between the particular work and a cultural context.

The cultural context usually includes other writers and specific works of literature, because a given literary work participates in a tradition. That is, if a work looks toward life, it also looks toward other works. A sonnet is about human experience, but it is also part of a tradition o sonnet writing. The more works of literature you are familiar with, the better equipped you are to interpret any particular work. Here is the way Robert Frost put it, in the preface to Aforesaid:

A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do. (1954). 86-7

Thinking Critically About Literature

Usually, you will begin with a response to your reading—interest, boredom, bafflement, annoyance, shock, pleasure. Then, if you are going to think critically about the work, you will go on to examine your response in order to understand it, or to deepen it, or to change it.

How can you change a response? Critical thinking involves seeing an issue from all sides, to as great a degree as possible. As you know, in ordinary language to criticize usually means to find fault, but in literary studies it does not have a negative connotation. Rather, it means “to examine carefully.” )The word criticism comes from a Greek verb meaning “to distinguish, to decide, to judge.”) Nevertheless, in one sense the term critical thinking does approach the usual meaning, since critical thinking requires you to take a skeptical view of your response. You will argue with yourself, seeing if you response can stand up to doubts.

Let’s say that you have found a story implausible. Question yourself:

• Exactly what is implausible in it?

• Is implausibility always a fault?

• If so, exactly why?

Your answer may deepen your response. Usually, in fact, you will find supporting evidence for your response, but in your effort to distinguish and to decide and to judge, try also (if only as an exercise) to find counterevidence. See what can be said against your position. (The best lawyers, it is said, prepare two cases—their own and the other side’s.) As you consider the counterevidence, you will sometimes find that it requires you to adjust your thesis. You may even find yourself developing a different response. There is nothing wrong with that—although of course the paper that you ultimately hand in should clearly argue a thesis.

Critical thinking, in short, means examining or exploring one’s own responses, by questioning and testing them. Critical thinking is not so much a skill (though it does involve the ability to understand a text) as it is a habit of mind, or, rather, several habits, including

• openmindedness,

• intellectual curiosity, and

• willingness to work. 89-90

______________________

Love as Ideal Disease

Looking over only the offered poems in our textbook Literature: A Portable Anthology one finds an interesting development of the idea of love. Beginning with Edmund Spencer’s “One day I wrote her name upon the strand” in 1595 love is seen as an ideal to be strived for in life and life-after-death, which faithful love will grant. This spiritual and immortality-granting concept of love is also in other poems of the period until John Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” in 1633. Then beginning with Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” in 1650 love’s idealism became “infected” with mortality and an attention towards the body (versus the spirit) as most formalized in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1917. Then, still keeping with the limited scope of the anthology’s offered poems, love enters a stage of recovery beginning with W. H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening” in 1937 and comes closest to a healthy love in Louise Erdrich’s “A Love Medicine” in 1984. Looking at several poems from each of these three stages we find that love undergoes mutations along two trends, as if a disease: the im/mortality of love and the medium of love (spirit versus body).

In Spencer’s poem the speaker confronts head-on the Reaper disguised as the ocean as he immortalizes by inscribing his and his lover’s love in verse. While “baser things . . . die in dust, [his] shall live by fame” through the speaker’s act of inscribing upon the sand and “the heavens [his lover’s] glorious name” (10, 12). Love in this poem is understood as something that can be immortalized, or survive past “whenas death shall all the world subdue,” through “fame” (13). William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” embodies the same thing: “So long as men can breathe [ . . . ] / So long lives this [‘eternal lines,’ or verse (12)], and this gives life to thee” (13-4). The common point from these is that love can exist entirely in spirit and that it does not shrink at the loss of the body. Yet love is still empowered in Anne Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and Loving Husband” when love is also given the power to sustain the lover’s themselves in its immortality: “Then while we live, in love let’s so persever, / That when we live no more we may live ever” (my italics, 11-2). In the preceding samples it was just love that survived (respectively, the lover’s “glorious name,” and Shakespeare’s “thee”), but now it is “we [the lovers]” themselves that do. As to the aspect of the spirit, nothing so far suggests a necessary bond between body and love. Even in Lady Mary Wroth’s poem the main subject is “My pain” (1), and the main agent is the abstract “love[, which] will not falsify,” or that which will immortalize joy and hope, not the spirit (14). Finally, in Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” both immortality and the spirit are stressed and brought together. Though “immortality” or any of its permutations are not literally written in the poem, one need only infer from the title and the first stanza that it is immortality that is really at stake, since “mourning,” “virtuous men pass mildly away” (1), and “The breath goes now” (4) all suggest literal death, and that the speaker’s prescription will grant immortality not to the body, but to the “souls [ . . . ] which are one” (21).

But then only seventeen years later “To His Coy Mistresses” undermines this classical notion of the immortal and spiritual love. In the very first line love is corrupted: “Had we but world enough, and time,” or had we but health (which essentially is the body as the rest of the poem shows) and immortality. Soon, with “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near [ . . . ] / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity [ . . . ] / Thy beauty shall no more be found” (21-25); time and the body will not last and love becomes lust against “our sun” (45). These general themes are reflected also in other poems of the period, especially in William Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” and the poems of John Keats. One, however, may argue that there remained in this period examples of surviving classical sentiments, such as Robert Brown’s “A Red, Red Rose” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee? Let me count the way.” Yet in Brown’s poem no mention of love or “life after death” is given; the closest is, “And I will come again” in line 15. In fact, death is admitted as inevitable in line 10: “O I will love thee still, my dear, / While the sands o’ life shall run” (14-5); death will overtake, but even more precisely love will exist only “While the sands o’ life shall run,” not beyond (italics mine). Browning’s poem is more nuanced. Though love is great, and I am charmed by it, the speaker is almost suicidal, or at least completely open to the idea of dedicating one’s life to love, which means willing to give it up for love. But the speaker is not serious to begin with, or if she is then she has in mind acts of love “after death” and life, for she is willing to give up life for love; one must be wary with the speaker’s belief in a God without saints. It is, then, a strange and impossible, or unimaginable, love that Browning has in mind, and which, because of its strangeness, cannot be used to refute our main thesis. Love since Marvell is still mortal and bodily. These morbid tendencies in the period is most perverted in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” when the speaker, in order to recapture the old ideal of eternal love, “lie[s] down by the side / Of my darling [ . . . ] / In her tomb by the side of the sea” (38-40). The speaker is either sleeping with the corpse or dying with the corpse; in either case, the old ideals are unattainable.

As extreme as Poe’s poem is, to me T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is this corrupted love’s best expression. The poem basically illustrates the painful self-consciousness of man growing uncomfortably old who is, presumably, in love. It is important to note that the speaker is one who is around people who can afford “restless nights in one-night cheap hotels,” is around women who talk of Michelangelo, and soliloquizes of Hamlet; in other words, he is a well-off man who should be confident and healthy. By creating this awkward and weak character as the speaker of a “love song,” Eliot is obviously mocking the establishment of past, idyllic love poetry. Eliot’s poem is one, rather, of mortality and the body. These obsessions riddle the poem: “etherised upon a table,” “for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse,” “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,” and “I grow old . . . I grow old” (3, 48, 84, 120). The final line encapsulates the obsession of death over love: “and we drown.” Love, according to this love song, is an ironic cause for death. In “Etherised Upon a Table: T. S. Eliot’s Dissertation and Its Metaphorical Operations” Donald J. Childs points to the first three lines in order to make sense of the morbid. He argues that the splitting of the “us” into “you and I” expresses nostalgia for “pre-consciousness” when the self is not yet defined as the subject as something against object, or in fact anything at all, and that “The Love Song” is a poem of “nostalgia for the state theoretically preceding or following the fall into consciousness” (383) According to Eliot’s dissertation he and F. H. Bradley believed in a reflexive, or circular, self: “The self [ . . . ] seems to depend upon a world which in turn depends upon it.” This self furthermore depends as well upon other selves; it is not given as a direct experience, but is an interpretation of experience by interaction with other selves” (146). To become “etherised upon a table” then is to ask for an ignorant experience free of the pain of overbearing consciousness, as if a disease one wants to be rid of, so that when “human voices wake us, and we drown” it is not “you and I” that drown, but rather the desired pre-reflexive and peaceful subconscious “self” (131). In this “love song” the subject is a sickness.

As for the theme of the body, the poem treats it grossly. It opens up with the abstract “you and I” and ends with the concretized drowning of the lovers beside the ominous “sea-girls,” while all throughout the middle attention is diverted from abstractions (e.g., the questions) to the physical aspects of love: “time yet for a hundred indecisions [ . . . ] / Before the taking of the toast and tea” (32-4). The most striking evidence of this is the creepy evolution of the template phrase “And I have known . . .” of lines 49-67 where the first object known is the abstract “them,” which quickly transforms in the next stanza to “the eyes,” then finally the “arms,” which is imagined with so many material accessories. The climax is this object becoming the subject when the speaker writes, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws,” now obsessed with the fingertips. It is this pinpointing of love’s subjectivity that best characterizes “The Love Song,” and in which immortality and the spirit collapses.

It isn’t until twenty years later that a process of recovery begins with “As I Walked Out One Evening.” In it the speaker walks out one evening and overhears a lover sing of love’s wonders, all of which initially are of the classical, timeless, and spiritual type. Yet “all the clocks in the city / Began to whirr and chime” and the lover’s song turns modern, yet of a different and ultimately affirmative type of modern than from the previous era’s sick poems. The lover warns “let not Time deceive you, / You cannot conquer Time” (23-4), and that “Vaguely life leaks away” (31). It is almost all doom, but then there are lines 51-2: “Life remains a blessing / Although you cannot bless.” But what’s my point if it is “life” that remains a blessing and not love, which “shall [be given to] your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart” (55-6)? The answer is in the fact that it is a lover that says all this; it is love reassuring, or giving hope to, itself: despite mortality and crookedness, there is still love to instill hope, and in this gesture the poet sees love as a conceptual vehicle capable of self-rejuvenation. Yet times are different, difficulties remain, and love is already damaged, as Richard Wilbur writes in “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” In a sleepy reverie the speaker’s soul ascends to survey its position: “The morning air is all awash with angels,” but eventually “They [must] swoon down into so rapt a quiet / That nobody seems to be there,” from which then “The soul shrinks / From all that it is about to remember” (5, 13-6). But remember it must and, like the sun, it “acknowledges” and “descends once more in bitter love / To accept the waking body” (italics mine, 21-4). Love here is no longer in perversion, denial, or in spirit; it is in the world with its “ruddy gallows,” “backs of thieves” and nuns “Of dark habits, / keeping their difficult balance” (26-30).

Erdrich’s “A Love Medicine” is an interesting culmination of the trends so far described. Whereas our first poems were explicitly about love, most literally writing “love,” this last poem is exclusively of love, since it does not mention “love” at all, but rather is an act of love from one sister to another. The “love medicine” of the title, I believe, is the poem itself, since in it the speaker’s sister, Theresa, is subjected to abuse in all her nights-out from men whose “boot[s plant their grin] / among the arches of her face” (19-20), all in secret since Theresa is constantly found sleeping outside “in the park” or “in a burnt-over ditch” (27, 29), and of which all is betrayed by the poem’s telling of them; or in other words, poetic justice is a medicinal act of love towards the speaker’s sister Theresa. What is most remarkable, however, is the poem’s innuendos to express the violence done to Theresa: the gross, phallic “trees lean[ing] down aching and empty,” “The river slaps,” a field “that is gagging on rain,” “sheets of rain sweep up down,” and “the river held tight against” (25-32). Besides the boot planting into Theresa’s face, the poem expresses strong implications through the pathetic fallacy, which is “the attribution of human emotion or responses to animals or inanimate things” (Oxford English Dictionary). At then end of the poem the pained speaker, after seeing the horrors of her sister’s situation, identifies with Theresa by sharing subjectivity (“We see” [italics mine, 33]) before intervening mirror-like with “Sister, there is nothing / I would not do” (36-7), giving voice to her “dragonfly” sister with “chains / that flitter at her throat” (4-5). Underlying all this is a recovered concept of love that is mortal and immediate, or modern, while at the same time immortal and spiritual, or classical.

By looking at the many ways poets across the centuries have expressed their own ideas of love I have hopefully shown that as strongly as each has written their verse, the idea of love survives all their efforts as it continually develops in history into something unexpected from preceding ages. First it was a total abstract ideal, then it became something like a physical problem, and then finally beginning in the mid 1900s it was recovered as something healthy and more faceted. In the end, though, I have to say that there is one concept of love better than any other, which is common in all those changing expressions discussed above: love is that which is best felt in the heart that is both soul and body.

Work Cited

Gardner, Janet E., Beverly Lawn, Jack Ridl, and Peter Schakel, eds. Literature: A Portable Anthology 2nd Edition. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. Print.

Childs, Donald J.. “Etherised Upon a Table: T. S. Eliot’s Dissertation and Its Metaphorical Operations.” Journal of Modern Literature 18.4 (1993): 381-395. Web. 1 May 2011.

______________________

Your essay pretty much argues that the idea of love, the way that the poets see love, changes throughout the history of what is given in poetry in your anthology. In other words, according to the poems given in the anthology, the conception of love changes across time. There are three stages: classical, modern, and recuperated/rehabilitated/recovered (these are my terms so they are original, which should give you extra points). In your essay these three stages are expressed through medical metaphors: love is healthy in the classic stage, then it is infected in the modern phase, then it is in recovery in the third stage.

classical stage: the idea of love is spiritual and immortalizing. Read John Donne’s poem again. Notice how the poet proclaims that love is best when wholly of the spirit. Read Edmund Spence’s poem and William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18—notice how and why they both claim that love will live forever.

modern stage: Marvell’s poem is hilarious. It’s a poem in the “carpe diem” mode, which means “seize the day.” Basically, Marvell is trying to get some. He does this by arguing that we all die so let’s get it on while we can. Love to Marvell becomes lust and it is wholly of the body and mortal (death is involved). Read Edgar Allan Poe’s poem. It is the extreme sick poem of love, since in it love conducts lovers to spend eternity together in suicide, attrition, or lethargy, depending on the interpretation of the last stanza.

READ T.S. ELIOT’S “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” One of the most important poems of Modernism. Notice the irreverent tone of it and the novelty of its technique. It is pretty anti-establishment. For the sake of the paper, notice how love is never said, yet it is a “love song.” What is Eliot trying to ironically trying to say? Also, notice how love is not so great and ideal here as compared to how it was with the classical poems.

third stage: read the three poems. This stage of poetry acknowledges fully the damage or sick condition of love, and they all try to rehabilitate it somehow. Auden recognizes that life is a blessing nevertheless; Wilbur sees it as keeping a difficult balance; and Erdrich sees it as a positive instrument of love: she uses poetry as a medicine to cure the vices of the world, as with what happens to her sister.

A manifesto for play

2011-06-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

-Gabe

Sick

2011-05-31T14:22:00.000-07:00

And last night I heard on the Davis radio station 90.3 1-3AM hiphop program a slow slow song I didn't quite feel but it did have the sick line whose gist went something like, "Some people dream of living while I live my dream, something something clip my wings." Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

no words necessary

2011-05-27T13:48:00.000-07:00

A spring forward

2011-05-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd share what I shared with Alex Chuan in the long long time ago. It's an article by the preeminent David Harvey I caught in a great magazine I came across while browsing my favorite book store Green Apples, a man and store I have been enlightened of by one of two young guns I studied under that may yet save our universities. The article is on the capitalist workings of the world, unexpected if one knew that Mr. Harvey is a Marxist scholar and an inspiration similar in kind to Althusser. Consider it a crash course in Contemporary Economics, or just contemporary culture.

"from n+1

NUMBER SEVEN FALL 2008

DAVID HARVEY

Trained as a geographer, David Harvey (born 1935, Gillingham, England) is a leading Marxist thinker and an exponent of what he calls “historical-geographical materialism.” His most important theoretical work, The Limits to Capital (1982), reconciles the account of industrial capitalism offered in Volume One of Marx’s Capital with the somewhat confused and contradictory reflections on financial capitalism in the later, posthumous volumes of Marx. This contribution has gained in importance over recent decades, as financial services have displaced manufacturing as the largest sector of the American economy; as levels of consumer indebtedness have neared or surpassed annual GDP in several wealthy countries, including the US; and as wracking financial crises have migrated from Latin America to Southeast Asia to the heartland of global capitalism.

If Marx in the Communist Manifesto ironically produced an unsurpassed hymn to the bourgeoisie, Harvey’s Limits gives sitting testimony to the wonders of finance: “Credit can be used to accelerate production and consumption simultaneously. flows of fixed and circulating capital can also be coordinated over time via seemingly simple adjustments within the credit system. All links in the realization process of capital bar one can be brought under the control of the credit system. The single exception is of the greatest importance. . . . There is no substitute for the actual transformation of nature through the concrete production of use values.” Credit—including housing finance—is created in vain unless wage laborers continue to convert the natural world into commodities at increasing speed. Otherwise, an economy is literally banking on fantasies.

JULY 14, 2008

NEW YORK CITY

n+1: We’d like to start by asking you to take us through the subprime crisis. Build it from your analytic perspective.

David Harvey: How far back do you want me to go? to its theoretical roots? It might be useful to do that, because part of the problem is that the explanations that are given are very much about, “Oh, it was predatory lending,” or, “Oh, it was excessive optimism on the part of consumers.” Instead of saying there’s a systemic problem here, which periodically erupts in the history of capitalism, we tend to look at this as a peculiar incident of the pr4esent. But property market crises have played a very crucial role historically in triggering major downturns in particular economies, and sometimes the global economy.

For instance, the global downturn of 1973—everybody says, well, it was oil. But actually the recession started about six months before the oil embargo, and it started with a global crash in property markets. If you look at what brought the Japanese economy down at the end of the 1980s, it was speculation in land and property markets. If you look at the recession in this country during the savings and loan crisis—which was huge, something like a thousand banks were on the watch-list—it was a property market thing.

Very frequently when there’s excess capital around, and nobody knows what to do with it, it goes into some sort of asset building. And asset building in property markets is a good place to go. One of the reasons is that when you build something, the rate of return stretches way into the future, so it displaces a current surplus of capital with long-term capital investment. So you only find out what you’ve done—bought too much of it—sometimes four, five, six years later.

Now if you look at property markets in this country, you see that they were taking off in the middle of the 1990s. And by the time you get to the high-tech crash—1999, 2000—you see even more money flowing into property markets. Property markets are debt-financed—you have to borrow in order to build condominiums and to buy. So the debt structure becomes terribly important; there’s a correlation between the buildup of excessive liquidity within the financial system and the tendency of that liquidity to flow into property markets. That’s not the only place liquidity can go. It can go into military expenditures. It can go into raw-material commodity bubbles, too, and we’re seeing a bit of that right now, sort of displacing the property-market bubble. Food prices are shooting up, energy prices are shooting up, so we’ve got a lot of excess liquidity flowing into those sorts of things as well.

This is not unique in the history of capitalism. What is different this time around is the extent of it, and the degree to which the financing changed its manner. For instance, when the property market crashed in 1973, it was mainly local banks that got caught out, because if you had a mortgage, you had it with a local bank, and the developer would also borrow from a local bank, so the mortgage market was localized. During the 1980s the mortgage market became securitized, and they started to put together all these mortgages and push them into organizations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or they would get packaged into collateralized debt obligations and then sliced up and sol to some innocent party in Norway, or a pension fund in Florida, or a bank that had excess liquidity in Germany. So the mortgage market became really global.

That was supposed to spread risk, which to some degree it did. But as it spread risk, it also built more risk. People at the financial institutions, I think, really did start to think that because you’d spread risk, you’d eliminated risk, which of course you hadn’t done. And then you have all of these practices of gulling people into home ownership—those have been around for a long time, but, predictably, they began to crop up more and more frequently, and then people couldn’t pay because of the employment situation and all the rest of it, so suddenly you get the unraveling. Everybody says, “It’s safe as houses,” but it turns out that housing finance is not that safe—it was destined to run into trouble. I was sure it was going to burst about two or three years before it did, and I was going around saying, “This can’t possibly go on.”

n+1: So you stop flipping houses?

DH: Actually I was in a difficult situation. I needed, for all sorts of reasons, to buy into the New York market. And I said, “Delay it, because there’s going to be a crash.” And I kept on delaying and delaying until last summer, which was the peak of the damn thing! So don’t trust me on predictions. Timing is everything. Of course a lot of people who did flip things made a lot of money, and a lot got caught.

n+1: It might be useful to talk about where this over accumulated capital that sought an outlet in real estate came from in the first place.

DH: In a competitive economy, capitalists find themselves forced by competition to devote their gains to further expansion of the system. So the history of capitalism is a history of continuous expansion—unless there’s a crisis, in which case the expansion comes to a stop. So we tend to think that growth is a normal condition of capitalism. You look at the financial press, and if the growth rate is low, everybody starts saying, “This is terrible. The world is awful.”

Capitalist economies are committed to growth, which means there are always surpluses which have to be absorbed. And there the question arises, well, where do you put these surpluses? Can you still make the same commodities you made yesterday, or do you have to make something different? An argument I make is that one of the things you do with yesterday’s surpluses is build cities. The whole history of city building is connected, if you like, to absorbing these surpluses in profitable ways. Rebuilding the property market is one place where you put your surplus capital.

n+1: There’s a distinction to be made between surplus capital and fictitious capital, yes? Because it seems that there’s a certain amount of surplus capital that’s prompted all this speculation, but also an unprecedented amount of fictitious capital.

DH: One of the ways I think you should look at that is to say, you know, all capital is speculative. You make a commodity, and you don’t know if you’re going to sell it. You speculate that there’s going to be a market for clothes or shoes or whatever, and if the bottom drops out of the market, your speculation goes to nothing. So speculation is a normal practice in capitalism, and I think that’s something we have to get into our heads. If we say, “Well, there’s capitalism, and then there’s excessive capitalism, called speculation,” then we could say, “OK, we’ll get rid of the problem by getting rid of the excess.” And I’m saying you can’t do that, because all capital is speculative in some way.

House building, for example, is inevitably a speculative enterprise. A developer will take a huge tract and build a thousand houses and then hoe to sell them. And if you can sell them, then the speculative capital, which is fictitious, becomes real, because you’ve managed to complete the cycle; you’ve sold the product successfully at the end of the day, so your speculation turned out to be successful, and so nobody calls it speculation anymore, they call it normal entrepreneurial practice. The interesting question is, what happens when the property developers who built those thousand houses suddenly find that they can’t sell them? Or can’t sell them at a price which covers their costs? then suddenly everyone’s saying, “Well, that was because they were being speculators.” But actually this is just normal practice. It becomes unhinged when developers can’t find a marketplace for their houses—when there’s nobody to buy them.

n+1: So with what’s happening now—the housing market collapses, and foreclosures start to happen—who gets screwed by this? Who bears the brunt of this devaluation?

DH: Technically, everybody should. But we have a structure of state power which is dedicated to protecting the integrity of the financial system. So in effect what happens is that the state uses its power to bail out the financial institutions. And of course it can’t do it totally, since there are serious losses in the financial institutions, but they can’t possibly let the financial sector crash. The credit system is awash with lubricant, and if you took away the lubricant, the friction in the system would become so tough that capital accumulation would grind to a halt. So you need the credit system, but right now it’s not as fluid as it was. It’s constricted, and a little bit of constriction has catastrophic consequences. As soon as things stop moving, capital stops flowing in this easy way, and you’re in real, real trouble.

There’s an analogy tow hat happened in the wake of 9/11. On 9/11, this city stopped. There were no flows of money, no flows of goods. Everything stopped for about three days. Then all of a sudden Giuliani and Bush and everyone come and say, “For God’s sake, get out your credit cards and start shopping and get the whole thing moving again!” In a way, what happened in the wake of an event like 9/11 is a very good example of what happens in general when the credit system starts to gum up.

n+1: And wasn’t it a basic policy response of the federal government after 9/11 to keep interest rates extremely low?

DH: Oh, absolutely. Pump liquidity into the market. The Federal Reserve immediately said, “We’ve got to pump money in here to keep the credit flowing.” So that’s what’s happening right now. Meanwhile, nothing so far—although legislation’s now finally being passed in Congress, I think, or is about to be passed—nothing is really being done to help those people foreclosed upon. I don’t have sufficient information to say what proportion of the people who got foreclosed upon were themselves flipping or speculating. Some of them were, in some parts of the country—in California, for example, there was quite a bit of that going on.

But in a city like Baltimore, that was not going on. It was largely a low-income, African-American population that had been pulled into the dream of home ownership, and they’ve been wiped out. And in effect if you look at cities like Cleveland or Baltimore the foreclosure wave has been like a series of financial Katrinas. You’ve wiped out low-income neighborhoods, in many instances populated by African-Americans and Hispanics. I’m very familiar with Baltimore, and I have a map of the foreclosures in Baltimore, and it’s clear who’s being affected. A lot of it affects women, particularly single, head-of-household women—they’re just being completely destroyed.

There’s been no attempt until now to prop up the populations being most affected. Notice we’re getting the legislation now—when this problem is beginning to percolate into the middle class. The first tsunami wave, if you like, has hit the very lower classes, and they’ve been wiped out. the million and a half foreclosures so far have really seriously affected them. Now we’re beginning to get legislation because the next two million foreclosures are likely to affect people who are slightly better off.

n+1: You talked earlier about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which seem to have garnered a lot of their political support over the years from the fact that both parties very strongly support homeownership, almost as a sort of right. How do you feel about that?

DH: You might well think a little bit about the whole history of the mythology of homeownership—I’ll call it that, the myth of homeownership—and where it came from, and how it spread, and the role of housing in a capitalist system. There’s always been, obviously, a very important association, which goes back to the seventeenth century if not before, between private property and individual liberty and so on, and the United States has always had that as part of its founding mythology.

But what I think is interesting is that up until the 1930s or so, if you went to large urban areas, most people were renters. And actually, in terms of mobility of workforce and all the rest of it, renting is much more sensible than ownership, so there wasn’t much incentive to move from renter status to homeownership. But a program which launched in the 1930s, which became very strong in the 1940s, was about homeownership for the working class, and all these institutions got set up—financial institutions, the Federal Housing Administration, and all the rest of it, to support homeownership. And one of the arguments made very explicitly back then, and this was also true in Britain in the 1920s, is that debt-encumbered homeowners don’t go on strike—that encouraging homeownership, particularly at a time of great political stress in the 1930s, had a political and ideological objective. And then there was the whole issue of what was going to happen to all of the soldiers coming back from the World War—were they going to face unemployment, what were they going to get into? And so you got a G.I. bill of rights that supported homeownership.

One benefit was that, for state reasons, this creates a little political stability. And secondly, it allowed that segment of the population that became homeowners to build equity, so the house no longer was simply a home, it also became a form of savings. You could save, and eventually when you became a full property owner and you paid off your debt, you had an asset. And so it was a way of saying to the working class, “You can have an asset,” which is a capital asset, sort of, for your old age, and you can pass it on to your kids, and so on. So this builds up in the 1950s and 1960s, until by the time you get to the 19602, the majority of people are homeowners, with all kinds of political consequences.

Now, what are most homeowners interested in? they’re interested in the protection of the value of their property. so what kind of politics come out of that? You keep immigrants out; you keep African-Americans out. Not-in-my-backyard politics, and the homeowners associations become very politically conservative.

Then by the 1980s, the house is no longer seen merely as a long-term asset that you build, but for some people, it starts to be a short-term speculative game. How do you build political solidarity in one of those neighborhoods in Stockton, California, where everybody is only there for a few years to flip houses? there’s no local cohesion; the only local cohesion’s going to be around the defense of private property rights, and maintaining housing value by not allowing someone to put, I don’t know, a drug-treatment facility in your neighborhood. So you move from the idea of a house as a home, which all renters had, to the idea of a house as a vehicle for long-term savings, to the house as a short-tem speculative gain.

Now you think of the political consequences of that—in terms of political attitudes and subjectivities—and you don’t have to be a crass Marxist to see very quickly that, actually, the politics of this is terribly important, and I think that gulling people into homeownership has been part of the political objective from the 1930s onward. It’s important to see this in the long term, about what this does to political attitudes in the country, political allegiances and so on. Now we’ve reached a point where people are indeed desperately concerned to defend the value of their property.

n+1: So maybe we should own the means of production but rent our houses?

DH: Well, you know, that’s the interesting thing about property. Marx is not against property in the sense of the right to appropriate things—he very much encourages that. What he’s against is private property. And in a sense, renting is a form of property you appropriate. And particularly if you have a large segment of social housing, as was the case in Britain, for example, up until Margaret Thatcher, you have proprietary rights; you can’t be kicked out, except for malfeasance or something of that kind. You have right of residency, but you don’t have right of trading. I was thinking about this—some of these people who were flipping properties had kids. I wonder what their kids’ idea of home is.

n+1: You may see a new world of squatting. In Colorado, for instance, there’s been a lot of pre-fab homes built in the suburbs, the economic viability of which seems pretty unclear right now, and you wonder whether, if some of this stuff is sufficiently devalued, you might have some of these suburbs just turn into unclaimed housing.

DH: You may get that. Actually, there’s a very interesting phenomenon right now in some areas of Europe, which is the phenomenon of shrinking cities. In places like Leipzig, what you’ve got is a serious loss of population, and just empty tracts. So the city government takes tracts, buys them out, demolishes them, and builds a park. We may find the phenomenon of shrinking cities—probably not so much in the United States because of immigration. But if they shut of the immigration stream, as some people seem to want to do, you’ll find quite a few places with shrinking cities.

But this is a global process now. As you’ll see from the pictures of the Olympic games in Beijing, property development has not come to a halt globally. Dubai, the Gulf states are building like crazy. There are still booms on in India as well as China. If you’re in Moscow, you’ll see that there’s a building boom there. So the interesting question is, is this just us? There was a huge crash in East and Southeast Asia in ’97-98, which didn’t affect us, and we all kind of looked at it and said, “Well, they’ve got Asian flu, you know; they’ve got crony capitalism; it’s confined to that area of the world.” Actually the United States made a lot of money out of that crisis, buying up properties very cheap. Now the crisis propensities of capitalism have come home to roost here, ad there’s a big, interesting question as to whether this is going to be so big as to pull down, say, the growth rates in China and India. And there are some signs of that. But, at the moment, the building booms are still going on in those places, big time. So global capitalism is kind of saying, “Forget the United States. We could all rush ff to Dubai, or the Emirates, or we can rush off to Shanghai and Beijing.”

It’s a very interesting moment. We are very cognizant of the fact that we are in a crisis. But it’s not yet the case that it has become a total, global crisis. Capitalism has some outlets, and the uneven geographical development of the capitalist system is such that it’s pummeling this part of the world right now, and some parts of Europe—Britain is in trouble, Ireland and Spain are in trouble. And all of them, by the way, are in trouble because of their property markets. My guess is the decline in consumer demand in the United States is likely to have serious implications for the BRIC countries [Brazil, Russia, India, and China]. But it hasn’t gotten there yet, and I think the hope is that somehow or other that is going to help stabilize the situation because, again, look at all that surplus money that is piling up in the Gulf states. What is it being used for? You’ve seen the images of Qatar and Dubai and so on—a huge building boom is going on.

n+1: Islands. They build islands.

DH: Yes! They build whole islands! I mean, it’s an astonishing kind of construction boom! With a lot of American companies heavily involved, a lot of American financial institutions relocating into the Gulf states. And the Gulf states are saying, “This is our moment, this is going to become a financial center, because this is where all the oil money is piling up, and why funnel it through New York when we can funnel it through financial institutions located in Qatar and Dubai?”

n+1: We wanted to ask you about oil. It seems a lot of people from a left perspective are reluctant—though this is changing, obviously—to think too much about resource constraints, or think it smacks of Malthusianism, and I was struck reading The New Imperialism with your description of the Middle East as the spigot of the global economy. And I thought, that’s a descriptive and not an analytic term, and as such slightly unusual in you work, and I wondered if you lend credence to the idea of a peak in global oil production, and if so, what you think this might do to the global economy.

DH: One of the interesting parts of Marx’s Grundrisse is a very serious discussion of the relationship between barriers and limits. Barriers can always be transcended, overcome, got around. Limits are absolute. One of the things he does in the Grundrisse is to point out that capital is always facing what look like limits, and it’s been very adept at turning them into barriers. You can think of a limit on, say, labor supply. Through technological changes and so on, it’s turned what might have been a limit into a barrier and it’s circumvented it. The same thing applies to the whole relationship to the environment. What looks like a limit, capital has a habit of being able to turn into a barrier. And my disagreement with Malthusians, or the Malthusian strain, is the tendency to think in terms of absolute limits, instead of thinking of barriers that need to be circumvented or overcome.

When you think about the ways in which capital can deal with, say, an environmental limit of some kind and turn it into a barrier, then we see some of that going on right now. When T. Boone Pickens says, “We’re going to cover Texas in windfarms,” I mean, how quickly people started to move on this sort of stuff! A lot of these new technologies we’re suddenly hearing about have been in the pipeline for some time. So now all of a sudden people say, “There’s a limit,” and then they say, “No, it’s no limit, it’s a barrier, and here are the ways we can get around it.” There’s a technological fix, there’s a social fix, there’s a political fix. There are some barriers right now in oil production, but a lot of that has to do with the failure to invest in expansion of the oil-producing capacity during the 1990s, and the fact that oil was relatively cheap during those years, it was very cheap. You’ve not got a situation where it’s suddenly becoming very expensive, but oil is not the kind of thing you can go and just open the spigot—it takes a few years. Many people would say, “Well, five years’ time, it will be less of a problem, because investment will have been pushing in with high prices.”

n+1: Toward the end of A Brief History of Neoliberalism, you talk about “the unthinkable but not impossible” chance that the United States could suffer a crisis the way Argentina did a few years ago, and then you give a couple scenarios of how that might play out, in terms of a bout of hyperinflation, or a more prolonged devaluation. To what extent do you think this would be a localized problem, or to what extent would it wipe out a lot of value that belongs to people outside America and Britain, too?

DH: Clearly, the United States has been borrowing at the rate of two billion plus dollars a day for about the last ten years, and its indebtedness to the rest of the world is huge. A lot of that is held by the central banks of Asian countries and Gulf countries, some from Europe. That debt is being wiped out by the devaluation of the dollar. And at some point or another, you have to ask yourself: why would these countries continue to fuel the US debt economy? I think the Chinese central bank, for example, owns a good chunk of Fannie Mae. And the share value of Fannie Mae has collapsed, and a handful in the Chinese government lost a lot of money.

n+1: We have to bail out the Chinese government—the US government has to.

DH: No—in effect, what’s happening is that the US government’s being bailed out on the backs of the Chinese working class, because they’re the ones who are producing the value. And that value is then returning to China in terms of excess funds, the surpluses that the Chinese have, and then the Chinese invest it in consumerism in the United States. Or have been. And of course they’ve been funding the Iraq war, funding the US government debt. About 50 percent of US treasuries are now owned by foreigners. The United States is essentially owned by foreign central banks, and this creates, I think, a real serious problem for the United States in terms of its room for maneuver politically. Obviously, those central banks have no interest in crashing the US economy—they have a lot of interest in keeping the US economy afloat, but at what price?

There’s a lot of chatter about to what degree we’re going to face an inflation crisis in the next few years. My guess is yes, we are. I don’t see any way out of that. People argue no, because wages have not been pushing up very high, there are other forces which are keeping prices down, but I just don’t see it. This kind of very low interest rate regime is, I think, really fueling inflation. And by the way, I think the official inflation figures are phony. When your bagel costs 50 percent more than it did two years ago, this not a 3 or 4 percent rate of inflation! This is big stuff. the real rate of inflation is significantly higher already, and to the degree that people feel that inflation, I think we’re going to see some serious adjustments in the way people spend their money. They have to adjust, because wages are not going up, but costs are going up. It’s not only gas; some other things are going up remarkably.

n+1: If big capital in the United States could get its money out of the country before a major devaluation took place, and then bring it back in, and scoop up things are firesale prices—in some ways this would seem the ideal outcome from that point of view. Do you think there’s a chance of something like that happening?

DH: I’m sure there are elements of big capital that are already doing that. I’m sure there are a lot of elements of big capital that put their money in euros over the last seven or eight years, and that means it’s now gone up twice the value and they can come back in and buy assets relatively cheaply. Strange as it may sound, from the European standpoint, property in Manhattan is relatively cheap. One of the things keeping the property market going here is European money coming in and buying condominiums!

n+1: A Norwegian friend of mine wrote me the other day that everyone in Oslo is saying New York is the new Berlin.

DH: Yes.

n+1: which do you think is more likely—a monetarist response, or a deliberate bout of inflation?

DH: I suspect that the inflation path will be more politically feasible, because you can always say, “It’s the greedy oil states,” or “It’s the speculators,” or “It’s the Chinese” who are pushing raw material prices up. You can always blame somebody else for that, where as if the government undertook really strong fiscal austerity, then people would blame the government, and no government wants to be blamed. So the easiest path out is through inflating away the debt—easier politically, I suspect, than the straight austerity path. And, remember, those places that adopted austerity in the past could always blame outsiders. Mexico could blame the IMF—there’s always someone else to blame. Or they could blame the United States, or they could blame the financial institutions elsewhere. The problem in this country is, who would you blame for fiscal austerity?

n+1: And when this devaluation-by-inflation happens, people’s savings and pensions won’t be worth much.

DH: They’ll be devalued. Actually, already the return on money market funds is barely 2 percent, while the official inflation rate’s now close to 4 percent, so you’re losing 2 percent of the value on any money you have in a money market account. You’ve got to have your money in an account that’s earning more than 4 percent in order to be making anything, and it’s hard to find a rate of return that’s higher than 4 percent, if you’re investing savings right now. So there’s already a devaluation of savings going on, and it’s been going on for a couple of years, and it’s going to accelerate. So one of the best things right now is to be in debt, because then your debts get inflated away.

n+1: So austerity and slow default are the two worst-case scenarios. What’s a best-case scenario?

DH: I don’t think there is a best-case scenario for the state of capitalism right now. I think it is between a rock and a hard place. You can have deflation or you can have inflation. From the standpoint of capital, I guess the best-case scenario would be that the growth processes which have taken off in China and India and all the rest of it will be sufficiently strong, sufficiently powerful, to make the United States and Britain and Spain and the rest a localized problem rather than a global problem—that’s the best-case scenario, I suspect, from the standpoint of capital. From the standpoint of workers, however, and the population in general, I think the best-case scenario is actually starting to think about what kind of alternatives there can be to the capitalist organization of production.

The history of capitalism has always been about growth, and if you look at it since about 1850, you see compound rates of growth around 2 or 3 percent per annum for the whole capitalist system. Now “the whole of the capitalist system” in 1850, that’s about twenty square miles around Manchester. You have a different story when it’s the whole globe. Just imagine what the world’s going to b like, fifty years down the way, at 2 or 3 percent rate of growth—and what the ecological, political, social consequences are likely to be. I think this is the kind of moment when you need to look at the system and say, “Look, this system is unsustainable into the future.” We have to think about a zero-growth economy, and a zero-growth economy is incompatible with capital accumulation in perpetuity.

All societies need a surplus. I mean, very primitive societies that don’t have a bit of surplus—they’re very vulnerable to climatic fluctuations and all the rest of it. The problem right now is that the surplus, insofar as it’s in private hands, has to get reinvested in making more surplus. It’s not a constant thing; it’s continually expanding. Now, the Swedes had a wonderful plan, which was to tax part of the surplus and put it into a worker-controlled fund, which would then invest back in the corporations. After twenty years, the capitalist class would have disappeared, and you would have had a worker-controlled production system. that was what scared the bourgeoisie in Sweden, and that’s when they started giving Nobel prizes to Hayek and Friedman and all these other people, and trying to set up big institutes to back them!

It was a very interesting plan. But if the state controls the surplus, then you’ve got to have democratic control over the state. Otherwise you get the Halliburton phenomenon—you don’t know where the state begins and the corporation ends. so if the state is going to control more of the surplus—and I think that’s inevitably going to be the case, given what’s going on right now—then democratizing the state becomes a terribly important initiative. If you want a peaceful transition as opposed to a total, revolutionary kind—which by the way there are signs of in many parts of India, and we’ve seen it in Nepal—then democratic control over the state apparatus starts to become a crucial objective for any kind of political movement.

We have to think about a revolutionary solution—which is going to deal with questions of social inequality, with questions of environmental degradation, and it’s going to deal with this whole issue of growth in perpetuity, which cannot continue. Otherwise we’re going to get more and more of these fictional, speculative growth spurts, followed by more and more serious collapses. If you go back to 1970, we didn’t have these kind of collapses like Mexico in 1982 and 1995l we didn’t have Indonesia in 1997 and ’98; we didn’t have Argentina in 2001 and the United States in 2007 and 2008; we didn’t have that kind of thing going on. What you see is the system is beginning to get rockier and rockier, and it’s time that people started to say, “Look, this system cannot continue in this kind of way.” So the best-case scenario is the growth of a political movement."

__________

Also, I'll try to scribe a programme of sorts, or some sort of broadside-like pamphlet in furtherance of the vision I have in mind for this here blog-o thing. In the meantime, keep it loose and cool.

My children should usher forth its fruit in a month and a half, at which time the call for pico de gallo will be answered well and fully.

I hope this is a good way to officially begin and formalize my training.

And in the spirit of attention, let us laugh at this patheticism from a recent news article that caught my eye http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110524/wl_nm/us_pakistan_attack: ""Political rhetoric and a Cabinet Defense Committee meeting are not going to solve this one," read an editorial in the English-language daily, The News. "This is an epic failure exposing an existential threat that will need epic leadership to countervail.""

As Uptown Suite exclaims, "Church!" Or if you are inclined towards a cooler and harder way, Ice Cube has this to say: "If you scared then go to church!"

At Your Request

2011-05-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

I often return to this blog at the time I'm about to go to sleep. No sooner.

As such, I don't often reply or post. Even now, the time is 0133 and I have visited and am now posting. I've still been thinking up ideas for games, but I don't post about them anymore out of an unwarranted fear of losing the idea or IP to some other producer. It isn't a mindset I like to nurture, but with this subject - my games- I will do it.

Within the last 2 hours or so I've been to ~3 blogs/sites that consist of stories and ideas of other people who sometimes draw up their ideas, and sometimes don't, but they all express their ideas and tales.

at www.27bslash6.com, the guy mostly tells stories in the form of his back and forths in emails. He's already had a book or two published so he could probably care less about your visiting, but I enjoy his work a great deal. He's probably most widely known for his work with missy the cat.

Reading through that guy's site prompted me to ask about the site www.theoatmeal.com. I thought it was the site that was the source of a comic about "alot" - its misuse and one guy's means of getting past the common misspelling. I was incorrect! that alot comic came from hyperboleandahalf! Theoatmeal is still good though. It has comics about grammar and other silly things- lists, how-to's, as well as simple rants. I didn't check any of those last three links for quality as I should've, but you get the idea. Check out the sites!

I've taken many more trips throughout korea, mostly to the Seoul area. I have become lazy in posting them and even moreso once I noticed I was taking a hundred or two per trip and then it'd be much better if they were labeled or i put some description in them. It's much easier to simply reply with "eff that"

Here's the link to the photobucket with some stuff from ~ 2 or 3 weeks ago:
http://s1129.photobucket.com/home/reginalddlaniger

I should really upload the rest...

I apologize for my infrequency of visits/input. I will attempt to be more active as I can understand how a lack of input can really stagger a creative process.

-NP

P.S. I almost replied to your lengthy post from 16 May- Once again it was late and I ended up closing the window on my reply before it was finished. I really tried putting a lot of thought into that quote about the mean man and all that. I don't like the quote - I want more clarification from the man that spoke it. I'd prefer to discuss an actual (rather than an assumed) meaning.

A favorite quote of mine comes from Benjamin Franklin "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." I've been thinking of it as, "Anyone that sacrifices freedom for security gets none, and deserves neither." Which I think is essentially the same thing. The idea kinna helps fuel my drive out of the military.

Oh the smiley bread thing is likely some poor Korean kid either volunteering or getting paid to be a loaf of bread with wings? At least it looks happy!

Plight

2011-05-23T22:02:00.000-07:00

I've finally transcibed the poems I've written in the past month or so, and so will be posting them up sporadically on my other blog. Here are two poems as preview.

Killing the Corpse

Friendship the sentry, to apologize is to be-
tray my absence as something insincere, in-
valid, the wrath of grapes swished before the pall
of our duty as comrades to serve one a-
nother without breach of the conditionless-
ness of our ideals—scleretic sovereign
of our simpering schedule—the dog
must be put down, Cerberus! Sirs,

do not write like this. It is foul play to re-
move the contact paper from the cupboard.
Condensation will still form, though more drawn,
stains like in a cold frame.
Or a blind before
the zoetrope day that with its own movement
animates the stenciles of each slide
into a whole—the mole into the
sycamore—and retells the whole darn
yarn from its truth: the end to start,
when day is not based on celestrial sun
that when the going is not gone exactly,
but done for the willed, or if blessed, chosen
moment one can originate the project

from behind closed doors, stape of papers,
atop an anvil of books from where your light,
the projector, can cullocate vast reflections
on the organs of attention. Imputate
and serve the scrimptious pomegranate
of our celebratory lives. Delivery just
friendship into the Avantgarde.

________________________

Forgive and Forget

So many names to drop in the field
made of person any time
that and joinings of his life could yield
a satisfactory end, to the beginning of rhyme.
The Musee de Beaux is a sound factory
in which a stroll is gone through without a chortle,
each work entrating each to think a story
a million millenials deep per storage shell
hung flush imperturbably in condignment.
Borges, Deleuze, Bloom, Bolano
men of letters still lipping assignment.
I’d play if it weren’t lain in a bowl,
the last aspirant lympathically doing show
business—last decade heroics on a roll
caught but will not play from a bowl.

______________________________________

Also, could you guys post something? Sometimes the line between genius is a deadline. And at the least, and taking a lead from JR's earlier post, a post can keep one in a habit, which the Spanish for is costumbre, not a costume (don't pose), but a custom. Please, let's do something with this.

Oh and my other blog is: www.heteroglossia.wordpress.com

Hitting the road again...

2011-05-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

So I started writing again. It's strange how encouraging reading other writers' words on the craft of writing is, especially for someone who has always tried to be a world unto himself. But anyways, here's a bit of me showering excerpted from a longer part, which just a part of another part to be endlessly disengorged and toiled

I have also noticed that the drain has been slowing becoming more and more clogged, so I pee while still squatting to feel the temperature of the water before I divert the water up the shower pipe and to stretch the lumbar region of my back by slumping over while gauging and not seeing anything but my own toes, which need to be cut as Mom suggested. What if it gets caught and ripped from its bed because of overgrowth or poor discernment in one’s actions? I know that the water is just right when I cannot keep my hand in it any longer at which point I begin turning the knob to the left until it actually turns and I stand up against the left corner where I can breathe more clearly through the chink in the corner still dry under the showerhead just in case it is still hot so that possibly nothing will get burned in which case. I spent all yesterday after work thumbing through essays online on one of the three works that today’s potential missing tutee is supposed to juxtapose in her final paper and had consumed only one cup of water in the relatively sacred act. After awhile when the water level was covering my tiny toe I forced myself against the wall under the showerhead so that the water massaged my neck and the left hand kneading it there. Then I thought of the growth there, then instead I put myself sidewards and faced the tiled wall and swapped the temperature up on it and pushed myself up while keeping stuck my arm so to stretch apart the sore muscles with the therapeutic water massaging. I keep this for a whole minute, counting with seconds composed of breaths and thinking of the beach and how much greener it looked from the bridge we drove to get somewhere one time before the fun of it was threatened by the reality of the shark and the coldness of the deep turned the saltiness into bile and at my feet was the mix of soap, mucus, shampoo, and piss up to my ankles and covered myself one last time before slamming off the water and the towel to sop myself from head-to-toe. Stepping out over the tub I spread my shirt and my underwear with my feet to step only on them over the green absorbent rug. With my hair I only rub through it above my ears since I do not want any unnecessary losses to accrue on top where it matters, since I’ve been wanting my ears to show more these days. The lotion is against the mirror so I slide it to the corner closer to me and pump almost all the way down blots one each per pair and again for back and front of my body and one last time the same amount to appoportion between the back of my beaten neck and my face, since I haven’t been able to bring myself to bring home face lotion on my way home yet. While drying around my ears and to the back of my head, looking down, I notice my underwear is a browner shade, and without my glasses I fear the worst. But it must just be the one I wore that one windy fine day I thought of in the state just before. After it all I give up my towel to the curtain beam and leave my clothes where they lay for the laundry later once the steam clears up.

And some fruitful quotes from Ezra Pound: "Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing." - "Literature is news that stays news."

And from the inimitable Stephen Colbert: "I'm not a fan of facts. You see, facts can change, but my opinion will never change, no matter what the facts are."

What are you favorite quotes and why??

Oh, and poetry is still to come.

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/3D-Street-Art-Edgar-Mueller/ss/events/wl/0513113dstreetart#photoViewer=/ydownload/20110513/photos_net_web_wl/1305300052

Will post more soon

2011-05-16T18:21:00.000-07:00

The failings of a writer can be summed into one where, in words, it is essentially the failure of thought. He must be able to at once perceive and conceive, to take and to give, before the sands of time cover the thought indefinitely, the thought that is reality remarked. He must be able to tally on both sides of the line the casualties between warring man and nature, whether his nature or what we have come to know as nature, the mountain, the alpenglow, the brook, and the stone. It is here, between life and himself, he must risk his time for a spirit more indifferent to him than anything else. For this is the spirit of hope that could in times of crisis construct from within the hearts of those disoriented a bond to build from as if constructing a bridge from generation to generation, island to island in which looking back from the midst of the past always looks, always until the satisfaction known as an ending, dangerously too close and the future an Eden so far and yet needed, so to finally drop one’s pale, to stammer alas into the ground one’s tired tools and slake the shaking of men’s knees. These are the difficulties of the writer who has no help if his aim is to lift his people by way of showing what each is capable of producing by himself, and that if each one could lift themselves up then the mirror of their magic would instantly lift one another up through inspiration or imitation or even pride as if an invisible hand were throwing a light switch on the stars. He will not have help in picking his subject, his phrasing, timing, or why such a word as “won’t” works. He will not have the help of even himself, or at least not the help popular at banquets, such as in “Please, help yourself!” He is alone, and that is his necessary solitude, the solitude of painful pride. The only help he will have will be of his own invention, the aid of Frankenstein, or the future. If he cannot give the store of his heart through the pen then nobody else will be able to find it. And he will be broke. The floor will be but a subsuming ashtray for his mind where the carcinogens of his addiction tar up and swell him in his writing pension, his fifteen minute break broken into hours a day, day by day. He can call, yes, but what will echo will be the intrusion of marauders in the dead of night. To combat this disease of chaos he must have a patient martial arts.

Oh, and the garage sale went horribly. The day's wind calumned the charm of such a little sale. Sigh.

Also I will be posting a lot of poetry on my other blog soon once I have some time for myself to do so. When the time comes I will report.

And what do you think of this quote? "A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which si the way in which a vulgar man aspires." It's by Henry Ward Beecher, brother of the author who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. I think it's degrading of the aspiring man who ambitions as a realist in plain, honest terms.

And we just missed him.

Exercise balls are horse-proof

2011-05-16T02:09:00.000-07:00

-Hulk Green Ranger

David Doodles...

2011-05-07T23:35:00.000-07:00

How was the garage sale?

-ThongMaster

Please attend: garage sale!

2011-05-06T22:45:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, please support and show up or just spread the word! Only Saturday from 7AM-3PM! Anything will help. Best. -AC

Or: http://sacramento.craigslist.org/gms/2367216755.html

onBreak

2011-05-03T08:48:00.000-07:00

rev run's son is comin up. u know when you get a song with crackhead bruno mars you're poised for the mainstream/radio. the song itself is meh, but youtube diggy anyway he's pretty good for 17

yup

summer jams

haven't been listening to alot of new music lately. heard jin has a freEP if y'all wanna check that out. jay electronica's act II is suppose to drop today (doubt). curren$y did a collab mixtape with the alchemist which I don't have, but I've heard and it's pretty sick...matter of fact

(remember to turn up your bass)

Names Conference

2011-05-03T01:56:00.000-07:00

I declare that we should all have a moniker. It must be approved by every contributor of this here blog.

Here's some ideas I got for everyone. Just drop some so we can narrow down to poll.

Arian- Sunny, sunweezy, Sunny D, SkyLink, Pink Ranger (or Yellow)
Parker- Niggapino, NP, sirHC Valet, Ofcourse of the Black Ranger, Zack
Tim- TimboSlice, ChrisRedfield, UltimateEnd, Tan Ranger
Gabe- Vainglorious, Souperflip, Zero, Shoryuken, Green Ranger
James- PlusOne, Donny, Urien, ThongMaster, ChariotRush, Hulk Green Ranger
John- Jweezy, Apparently known as Matthew, Frog, Citan Proximity Mines, White Ranger
Jayar- Racleo, Rocket, SmashLeo, BlackOp, Lord Zed
Christian- Billy, Dante, PKFire, Blue Ranger

Imagination Land, Draw something bitches!

2011-04-29T00:50:00.000-07:00

Full resolution : http://i.imgur.com/5AzL2.jpg

Consumer Comedy

2011-04-26T22:37:00.000-07:00

These cables are extremely overpriced $2500-$9000 Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable
They probably aren't really in stock either, but many "buyers" decided to review them anyways.

Highlight review:

I knew my day was going to improve when the truck pulled up at my home with this cable deep within. No ordinary truck, this one was Holy White, and the gold Delivery logo sparkled like a thousand suns reflected through shards of the purest ice formed with unadulterated water collected at the beginning of the universe. The driver, clad in a robe colored the softest of white, floated towards me on the cool fog of a hundred fire extinguishers. He smiled benevolently, like a father looking down upon his only child, and handed me a package wrapped in gold beaten thin to the point where you could see through it. I didn't have to sign, because the driver could see within my heart, and knew that I was pure. Upon opening the package, an angelic choir started to sing, and reached a crescendo as I laid this cable on my stereo system. Instantly, my antiquated equipment transformed into components made from the clearest diamond-semiconductor. The cable knew where to go, and hooked itself into the correct ports without help from me - all the while, the choir sang praises to the almighty digital god. With trepidation, I pushed "play," and was instantly enveloped in a sound that echoed the creation of all matter, a sound that vibrated every cell in my body to perfection. I was instantly taken to the next plane, where I saw the all-father. I knew with my entire soul, that all was good in the world.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.

And more golden reviews for a $1600 HDMI cable

-JC

Notes

2011-04-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

On writing and towards a manifesto:

Writing may not need to “do anything,” but life is always leaking what is put into it. Forget physics and cosmology and everything an indeterminably chaotic and open universe has going for itself, life is an ultramarathoner who can’t afford to stop at the restroom. It must run through it. Run too and keep abreast or eat dust.

If you think you can ignore the elderly crossing the street while helping her you won’t be surprised to think twice of your own action. That is a call to action, as is everything you do. Action begets action, but first you must act for it all to become real. Think of Between the Acts, the plenitude of surprise and talk begat by the airplane—and the cows! Do not belittle or submerge the cow, but imagine you are more than cattle!

The canon is not only a body of works widely accepted as central and required reading, it is also the chorus of real people who would take insult the same way your tastes would be dismissed prejudicially on the basis of, let’s say, “otherliness.” The canonical works are fathers to your own work, and the determiners of the canon are step-fathers (if you insist the true fathers are the works themselves) to you. But the author is an inclusive germ and an asexual, so please always remember your mother: yourself, and feel free to call Mr. Bloom Harry.

It is not that the eight-hundred page epic novel is not readable in today’s times, as Cormac McCarthy upholds, but rather those that are written are not good enough to be read. Do not blame the times, live up to it; our past is more empty than our present. Do not lose faith.

If you are discouraged to write then encourage yourself, and regain heart from the view ripped from your chest—see the material that must be grafted if not back to yourself, then to another, thousands others. Nature is a fight against all but nature is what you got, so be economic and order yourself. Be not only a dynamite but also a forcefield.

________________________

Also, here is an introduction to a review I'm writing of Tabucchi's It's Getting Later All the Time. Is anyone interested in reading the work based on what I've reported so far?

“Life goes on,” as it is said, and likewise Antonio Tabucchi’s It’s Getting Later All the Time seems to just go on, but sweetly, in melancholy, and ultimately in cold professionalism. There are three primary images as motifs at play throughout the novel: the hole, the window, and the thread, each symbol expressing two archetypical meanings where each correlates most to either male or female genders. The emotive power and narrative arc, insofar as there is one, derives from the development of these three symbols, not so much the characters, which isn’t to say that there are no characters in the story or that it is absent of any narrative at all. The novel is simply constructed differently from the average novel. For one thing, it is epistolary. Secondly, there are eighteen different letters, each corresponding to a different narrator, and so it is not even a standard epistolary novel, though one could argue that it is identical to them in regards to the closing response “circular letter,” that a correspondence actually is still maintained. But only in that regards. Lastly, it potentially, depending on the reader’s will to see, or even form, patterns, lacks plot linearity, at least until the very last letter imposes itself simultaneously as both a response, or a return, and a termination. The mark of a master that is the ability to ingeniously make form serve content would not be missed in this work if only it were picked up and read through.

Love between two people is often described as rapturous, but it is also rupturing, essentially tearing away the lovers from the context of their old ways of life to install them into a world unto their own. This new world is one highly profused with the imagination and memory, as each lover fantasizes together the optimal way of exercising their joint potentials and turning their promised dreams into reality. Perhaps the most popular condition for a mature and lasting relationship is trust, which in essence is the capacity to honor promises, hopes, and expectations. It is, in other words, a perpetual transaction, a correspondence, and the epistolary correspondence is the most common and concise metaphor for this type of love. There is the purpose of writing the letter and the hope and expectation of it being pitched and returned. But life is not so structured nor facile; it is not a language game. Life, in fact, is a field of chance occurrences “wed to death” that may be cut short at any moment, and under such circumstances, despite the aid of science and statistics, one’s day as a life is always getting later all the time.

Interest will first catch halfway through the first paragraph when, after a casual expositional introducing first sentences, the “rugged and essential” island being written from turns out to be one the unnamed narrator “come[s] to think [it] dpesn’t exist, and [he] found it only because [he] imagined it” (3). The rest of the novel rifts across time, the world, and the human and nonhuman voices that people it, and emotions ranging from disengenuine appraisal to forlorn nostalgia to triumph then back around to bureaucratic indifference in response, tragically always, to dealings of dejected hearts, even in matrimony. It is a work of brilliant jazz.

____________________

and a cool cover of Chris Brown's Look At Me Now:

Personify

2011-04-23T18:12:00.001-07:00

-JC

Tequila Taco Night - Epic Meal Time

2011-04-21T00:03:00.000-07:00

420 means a lot of things, but what does it mean to me? It means I'm hungry. I dunno about you guys, but this is how I felt about yesterday.
-Gabe

Questions and galleries!

2011-04-20T22:01:00.000-07:00

Has anyone seen Black Swan yet? What are your thoughts on it? I was going to attend the previous with a favored snap from the film but google searching it has only given me the jeebies...frightening good stuff.

________________________________

Again, another snippet of my life:

I need to work. She walks away downcast, playfully. The game fills me with joy. I know this, and what to do, and what should have been done. It shouldn’t have been said in the first place. I knew this, but most importantly: she knows this. Yet I fill lungs and bate my breath as I chase her the three bounds to the left that she’s achieved, right over left then left in place before sliding my right leg beside her so that I can lasso her with my arms and hold down on her shoulders. At that moment a group of teenagers let out late at the local school feign interest, “Awww.” The cooing member was the girl alone and ahead of the pack, who kept quiet and made me think of an ambush. But I have to admit, I then saw the best of her in there her eyelashes curled, her opal eyes fountaining resplendent over her cheeky mounds, before she turned it sidewards.

“Hmph.” arms crossed.

“Luuu!” in the highest mock pitch.

“Fine and I dressed up for this.” I knew it.

It usually just takes a few pecks to get her chiseling chimpy cheek back around, just like this time. It’s a wonderful breeze that’s caught up to us this time, like a lot of many other things are. I am thinking of a real modest proposal, the travel paying for itself with each recovered millimeter of smile joining mine in return. It does, it does, it does, I think outside Chin Hua under the awning. I have her back, my baby, that I throw into the air, really breathing now.

“Ok let’s go. You can go to your house to study and I’ll go to mine and lay in my bed and cry because baby isn’t with me because baby doesn’t want to be with baby because he’d rather stu-dy,” moving off the sidewalk. I took the plunge, too, my hand massaging her elbow entirely, behind her. She turns around. “Ok bye.”

“Where is you going?”

“You know where.”

I grab her keys. I open her driver’s door.

“I’ll go around—”

“Please.” I proffer her keys back and with my left arm sweep kindly into imaginary view the door. “I can’t leave my car here there are too many hoodlums coming out from school.”

“Luuuu! Just go home.”

“Okay, let’s go. I’ll follow you.” But before she can retake her natural ground I turn and head to my own door and get in. I buckle down then put the key in the ignition. I look over, and can’t see her face. She’s texting, I know it. I’m going to wait and good thing I just checked out the first volume Norton anthology of English literature. I’ve been studying the French Revolution and the Reformation and Marx, impressed with the Penguin Communist Manifesto’s 200 page introduction, and taking cognition pills to better take in books for potential review such as Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, the contents of which I’m finding to be already occidental, and of which I’m expecting a post-structural twist later in. But what I’m really studying is Marxism to better understand capitalism, to accurately diagnose our times, to have something to write about, anything important. She doesn’t look up once. I press on the honk, and still watching her, I see a wave of response move up her body and out from the top of her head like a bunny turning to prospect any threat to her comfort zone.

I point at what’s behind her, to the road. She doesn’t get it and even tilts her head, like bunnies are wont to. So I give her the thumbs up. She lifts up her phone to view and spins it along its X-axis to identify the proper object of her attentions now. I jut my bottom jaw out, lips pursed, and with eyebrows Stoogely raised with enlarged eyeballs. She just looks down. At these junctures, it’s best to give time.

So I continue down the contents and I see—Samuel Butler! As I’m turning to the appropriate page I notice something outside—she’s walking towards me! I unlock the door manually on her side since I’m not sure if any unlock button will actually unlock the whole car. And of course when she opens the door the alarm takes off and, used to the embarrassment, I calmly try each button on the controller, ‘lock,’ ‘unlock,’ ‘alarm,’ and finding them useless I remove the key from the ignition and then work ‘unlock’ how I know it will now, while taking care not to repeat aloud the page number (2155).

Supporting herself on her angled right leg, which is excruciating to think of, and using the car ceiling as a preventive to a balancing act, she removes everything from shotgun: two beanies, a dvd, her UCSC zip-up, all those tossed kindly to the back, and a clipboard with a single blank piece of paper to the ground, before sitting down. We don’t look at each other for about a long while as we hug.

______________________________________

Also, is this not the dumbest reply you've ever read? Consequently I did not receive any response, to the loss of my wallet and reputation.

"Hi -----,

I actually chose to name my ad's subject "learning aid," and not just "tutor," to not restrict myself to just tutoring for school, since tutoring is usually known as something done "for school" only! With that said, yes I wouldn't mind being a personal tutor for your husband. In fact, I think acting as a conversation partner for language acquisition would be more enjoyable than exclusive school-related essay structuring. Judging by your last name, was I wrong in having already begun brushing up on my Spanish? Do you have any language skills or subjects in mind that I can begin preparing learning material for?

Also, what is your husband's availability? I work part-time at my local library in Fairfield so I'll cross-check his hours against mine. As to the upcoming two weeks, for which I already have my work schedule given by my supervisor, I am completely available Saturday (23rd), Sunday (24th), Monday (25th), and Thursday (28th). I work the mornings of Thursday and Friday, but I'd like some time to prepare so as to deliver an effective tutoring session.

As to the fee per hour, I'm sorry but I would only consider a long-term package type deal if I was local or even lived in Davis. But being from Fairfield, the gas is too much and I honestly need the money. I apologize.

Sincerely,
Arian"

Bastard, and right outside my employee entrance where I take my break . . .

The IRS has finally recognized how many families . . . kidnap children?!

My new office.

Thanks you, James.

Where is everybody?

2011-04-16T23:05:00.000-07:00

Here is a snippet of my taunting life . . .

I cannot open my mouth in objection even with the radio turned down for my response. I was not surprised at my ineffability, nor was I surprised by the way things turned out, or how things are discovered. Or how things are forced into place. We were on our way to a steakhouse in the city over so there was time enough to talk and reevaluate the family’s financial house, which is only possible from a distance. Before any reassessment, and this may be the cause for such a reassessment, there was also the silence not of the road, but of the travel. From an economic point of view there was good foundation, but from the managed’s perspective an iron hand was just shaking the beams to reinforce the contractor’s own good work. It was kind to have given me a shake, but it was pointless; he had already his own judgment, that it was sound.

But my house is a honeymoon suite of myself, sweeter becoming the closer my father gets. Lately he has been kinder to me, and I’ve appreciated the effort, but there was an underlying cause different from what I had hoped, and he had brought it up himself.

“Is it because you want more time to yourself?”

“Yeah. I’m afraid I won’t have time to write.” Kafka would have nodded at my own blunt force. But fathers are rarely Kafka’s.

“If I had known that was why you haven’t been doing anything . . .” In my mind anything I follow this with would have been negatively correct, because my mind was six feet beneath me scuttling for the sea. In the wake of his sentence I reconsidered the proposition, which was: apply for the job, “it was meant for [me],” “that’s a lot of money.” I didn’t even know his SUV had a calculator built-in it—“that’s $160 a day . . . $3200 a month—,” and my mom even joining: “Ooh that’s more than what you made Papa!” I couldn’t thank them enough.

____________________________________________________

Also, does anyone know of any job openings? I need to make money in legitimate daylit ways.

Ad posted

2011-04-15T19:29:00.000-07:00

http://sacramento.craigslist.org/lss/2327982310.html

Does anyone know how to ad pictures in craigslist? I thought it'd be a good idea to have any picture, be it of just piled books, so that those filtering for photos only would still cull my ad.

25 writers on overlooked treasures

2011-04-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

Hmm I just found out about the "Compose" mode of blogging so now my spaces will actually be spaces?

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/12/best-forgotten-reads.html

"What follows are lost treasures from 25 writers, as they looked back in 1999.

André Aciman: "Count d'Orgel's Ball" by Raymond Radiguet

Margaret Atwood: "Doctor Glas" by Hjalmar Söderberg

Anthony Bailey: two by Marc Bloch - "Strange Defeat" and "Souvenirs de Guerre 1914-15"

John Banville: "By Love Possessed" by James Gould Cozzens

Jacques Barzun: "Practical Agitation" by John Jay Chapman

Alain de Botton: "The Unquiet Grave" by Cyril Connolly

Thomas Flanagan: "Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War" by Edmund Wilson

Carlos Fuentes: "Paradiso" by Jose Lezama Lima; "Grande Sertão, Veredas" by João Guimarães Rosa and "The Flowering of New England" by Van Wyck Brooks

Robert Giroux: "The Enormous Room" by E.E. Cummings

Nadine Gordimer: "Turbott Wolfe" by William Plomer

Juan Goytisolo: "Petersburg" by Andrei Bely

Thom Gunn: two by Arnold Bennett - "The Old Wives' Tale" and "Riceyman Steps"

Dave Hickey: "The Man Who Loved Children" by Christina Stead

Pico Iyer: "The Road to Xanadu" by John Livingston Lowes

Milan Kundera: "The Man Without Qualities" by Robert Musil

John Le Carré: "The Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford and "Rogue Male" by Geoffrey Household

Elmore Leonard: two by Richard Bissell - "High Water" and "A Stretch on the River"

John Luckas: two by Jean Dutourd - "The Horrors of Love" and "Best Butter"

Frederic Morton: "Lieutnant Gustl" [also published as "None but the Brave"] by Arthur Schnitzler

Paul Muldoon: "Irish Journal" by Heinrich Boll

Cynthia Ozick: seven by Rudyard Kipling - "The Wish House", "Dayspring Mishandled," "Mary Postgate," "The Gardener," "The Eye of Allah," "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and "Mrs. Bathurst"

Noel Perrin: "Far Rainbow" by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and "The Walls Came Tumbling Down" by Henriette Roosenburg

Gregory Rabassa: "Internal War" by Volodia Teitelboim, "My World Is Not of This Kingdom" by João de Melo and "The Return of the Caravels" by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Susan Sontag: "And Then" by Natsume Soseki, "Jennie Gerhardt" by Theodore Dreiser, "Fateless" by Imre Kertész

Marina Warner: "Anthologie des mythes, legendes, et conles populaires d'Amerique" ("Anthology of Myths, Legends, and Popular Tales of America") by Benjamin Peret

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Rare books from the Huntington Library's collection. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times"

craigstlist ad . . . help please!

2011-04-13T23:12:00.000-07:00

So here is an ad I want to post up on craigslist.org offering my tutoring services in English. It's the first draft and I just completed it. Any suggestions?

ENGLISH TUTOR

To many English is like learning another language, and not just for foreign speakers. Many native English speakers, too, have a difficult time writing, and even reading, English, to the point that the national level of competence of basic English skills expected to be mastered by high school’s, or even college’s, end is often only eulogized in contemporary reports on its status. With many different style formats (MLA, APA, Chicago, AP, etc.) to navigate, each with its own unique grammar and punctuation rules, it is not unexpected that so many students are finding themselves surprisingly frustrated midway through English 1, having thought that they’ve mastered the language after thirteen years of K-12 schooling or preliminary English 350 and 250. And worse, some are even so discouraged to continue past the “drop date,” and it isn’t even entirely their fault!
Four out of five times I tutor I will be working with someone who is willing to make it on time everytime, fully awake and ready to go. Many students do ask for help from their peers and their teachers, but also many times the relationship between them gets in the way. The peer will be too relaxed, or condescending, or is just basically not qualified to guide the troubled student towards the right direction. And the teacher, well he/she is often preoccupied either with other students, her own work, or—let’s be realistic—her own life. There are also environmental concerns, such as distracting noises, absence of references tools, and uncomfortable workspaces. There is also the common plight of uninterestedness . . .
Hi, my name is Arian Cato and I want to help, whether it’s your son or daughter, sibling, friend, or you! I am a graduate of the San Francisco State University Bachelor’s English program as well as an experienced tutor with three semesters’ worth of in-building and private tutoring experience. I have worked with

 English as a Second Language (e.g., a native Spanish speaker from Peru)
 beginning learners in “English Fundamentals”
 beginning students in “Basic Reading and Writing Skills”
 students “majoring” in English taking courses such as
• English: Critical Thinking and Writing About Literature
• English: Critical Thinking and Composition: Language in Context
• English Literature 1 and 2
• American Literature 1 and 2
• Modern Fiction
 a graduate student needing supervision with editing her Master’s Thesis

Of course I am more than eager to expand my horizons and grow intellectually beside you through discussion over whatever piece of literature you have in mind, whether for class or not. I am acquainted with the entire scope of Western literature across all ages and can even discourse over philosophy, criticism, or theory of any sort. I am also knowledgeable about MLA format and advanced grammar and punctuation rules. I am also ready to prepare anybody for the SAT, CBEST, or GRE English or Essay Writing components.

Just $15 per hour. Willing to meet at any house or public service facility, such as a library, within Solano County (Fairfield, Vacaville, Suisun, Vallejo, Cordelia), American Canyon, Napa, Dixon, Davis, or West Sacramento.

Please, if interested, contact me at (707)344-2230 or ariancato@sbcglobal.net

Jacques Barzun

2011-04-13T20:55:00.000-07:00

Here is a great biographical sketch found in The New Yorker I just read of a man, beside D. F. W., it would be an honor for me to actually realize a path somewhat near approaching his own accomplished life.

"Age of Reason
In his hundred years, Jacques Barzun has learned a thing or two.
by Arthur Krystal October 22, 2007

The secret to Barzun’s erudition is a delight in learning.
For the past few years, Jacques Barzun has been dreaming more and more in French. Sometimes two people are speaking—one in English, the other in French—as though nothing could be more natural than the cadences of one language summoning the other. If awakened by the chatter, Barzun isn’t sure whether he has dreamed in French and incorporated a native English speaker, or vice versa. He finds these conversations oddly soothing, but he recognizes that they’re a sign of aging, the tic of a mind seeking a moment when all the world spoke French.
These days, Barzun doesn’t have much occasion to speak the language of Flaubert, whose grammar and syntax, by the way, he considers slovenly. He lives with his wife, Marguerite, in her home town of San Antonio, Texas, where he retired after spending more than seventy years in New York, most of them on the faculty of Columbia University. Barzun is usually out of bed by 6 A.M. He brews coffee, reads the San Antonio Express-News, exercises for forty minutes, and heads down the hall to his study. After lunch, he dips into the manuscripts and books that people send him, answers letters, and takes calls from family members and friends. In the afternoon, he likes to read in the sunroom, whose white brick walls and black-and-white tiled floor accommodate without protest a mélange of armchairs and end tables of no particular style. But then all the furnishings in the house—including the art: Piranesi fortifications, Daumier scenes of Parisian life, Expressionist studies by Cleve Gray, and bright watercolors of flowers and plants by Marguerite—have an aesthetic compatibility that seems to issue more from accident than from design. Cocktails are at six-thirty (Barzun favors Manhattans); a light dinner follows, then a session with the New York Times. Barzun doesn’t watch TV and is usually in bed by nine-thirty. Not long afterward, someone starts speaking in French.
Next month, Barzun, the eminent historian and cultural critic, will turn one hundred. His idea of celebrating his centenary is to put the finishing touches on his thirty-eighth book (not counting translations). Among his areas of expertise are French and German literature, music, education, ghost stories, detective fiction, language, and etymology. Barzun has examined Poe as proofreader, Abraham Lincoln as stylist, Diderot as satirist, and Liszt as reader; he has burnished the reputations of Thomas Beddoes, James Agate, and John Jay Chapman; and he has written so many reviews and essays that his official biographer is loath to put a number on them. There’s nothing hasty or haphazard about these evaluations. Barzun’s breadth of erudition has been a byword among friends and colleagues for six decades. Yet, in spite of his degrees and awards (he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom), Barzun regards himself in many respects as an “amateur” (the Latin root, amator, means “lover”), someone who takes genuine pleasure in what he learns about. More than any other historian of the past four generations, Barzun has stood for the seemingly contradictory ideas of scholarly rigor and unaffected enthusiasm.

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One of those enthusiasms produced what may be his most frequently quoted sentence: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” The line, extracted from his book “God’s Country and Mine,” is inscribed on a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame and routinely trotted out by news anchors and NPR commentators. Sometimes, Barzun worries that after his books go out of print only those fourteen words will be remembered. Or so he said one evening not long ago, when I was visiting him in San Antonio. We had finished dinner and were sitting in the living room. When he saw me looking at a portrait of his mother by Albert Gleizes, Barzun remarked that it was the third Cubist portrait ever done. “Not the third Cubist picture,” he cautioned, “the third Cubist portrait.” He thinks the first may have been Picasso’s “Woman Seated in an Armchair,” and the second Gleizes’s “Portrait of Jacques Nayral.” Barzun’s taste and attitudes were formed at the beginning of the modernist movement—he played in Duchamp’s studio and attended the orchestral opening of Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps”—and he has yet to come around to the cultural aftermath.
Barzun’s declinist views about Western civilization are no secret. One reason that “From Dawn to Decadence,” an eight-hundred-page history of Western civilization from 1500 to the present, which he published at the age of ninety-two, was such an improbable best-seller (“the damnedest story you’ll ever read,” David Gates called it in Newsweek) was its contention that Western civilization is winding down, that “the forms of art as of life seem exhausted.” But, when Barzun insists that he sees “the end of the high creative energies at work since the Renaissance,” his tone is less that of someone appalled by what’s happening than of someone simply recording the ocean currents.
Barzun began to appreciate the transience of civilization almost as soon as he learned what the word meant. Born outside Paris in 1907, he was six years old when the First World War broke out. Early on, he had a sense that, in Paul Valéry’s harsh aperçu, “a civilization has the same fragility as a life.” The war shattered the world that he knew and, as he later wrote, “visibly destroyed that nursery of living culture.” This isn’t entirely a figure of speech. On Saturdays before the war, his parents’ living room had been a raucous salon where many of Europe’s leading avant-garde artists and writers gathered: Varèse played the piano, Ozenfant and Delaunay debated, Cocteau told lies, and Apollinaire declaimed. Brancusi often stopped by, as did Léger, Kandinsky, Jules Romains, Duchamp, and Pound.
In 1914, when the shells began to fall, the visits gradually ceased; soon came the names of the dead. His parents tried to conceal the losses, but the boy became depressed and, as he learned later, began hinting at suicide. At the age of ten, his parents bundled him off to the seashore at Dinard, where he immersed himself in Shakespeare and James Fenimore Cooper.
It’s tempting to relate Barzun’s skepticism about recent cultural developments (he’s inclined to regard the provocations of later artists, from John Cage to Damien Hirst, as leaves from a tree that was planted before the First World War) to the intensity of his childhood milieu and its abrupt disappearance. Barzun readily acknowledges that the accident of birth is “bound to have irreversible consequences,” but he rejects the idea that his character or sense of the world derives from any loss that he might have suffered as a child. In fact, when I broached the possibility that his precise way of formulating ideas and strict attention to empirical evidence are distinctive qualities of the civilization that he saw disintegrate before his eyes, his response was gently quizzical. “Why must you find trauma where there is none?” he asked. “I grew up a child of a bourgeois family, with emancipated parents who surrounded themselves with people who talked about ideas. My views were formed by my parents, by the lycée, and by my reading. How else should I be?”
With the war over, Barzun’s father, the poet and diplomat Henri Martin Barzun, offered his only son a choice of completing his studies in England or in America. Barzun, with visions of Chingachgook dancing in his head, didn’t hesitate, and in 1920 the family settled in New Rochelle. Barzun, with the aid of tutors, entered Columbia at fifteen. His student life presaged his professional one. He majored in history, reviewed theatre for the daily Spectator, edited the monthly literary magazine, became the president of the Philolexian Society, and, together with his friend Wendell Hertig Taylor, kept a running tally of every mystery book that came along. Their brief descriptions, scribbled on three-by-five-inch index cards, eventually coalesced into “A Catalogue of Crime,” one of the foremost reference works in the mystery/suspense genre. He also managed to graduate as valedictorian of his class, a feat he considers less impressive than having written the 1928 Varsity Show, “Zuleika, or the Sultan Insulted.”
Barzun joined the history faculty a year after graduating, at a moment when British and American universities, despite a general dislike of things Teutonic, were in thrall to the ideal of Wissenschaft, or scientific knowledge. Philosophers such as Wilhelm Dilthey had argued that history was a succession of conceptual forms and styles, capable of being classified and studied methodically. (Another German, of course, had maintained that class struggle was actually the transformative force behind historical events.) History was now thought too serious to be left to biographers and storytellers; and even Lord Acton urged his students to “study problems in preference to periods.” Barzun, though hardly a practitioner of the old popes-and-princes school of history (his first books examined ideas about race and freedom), disapproved of attempts to refashion history as a social science. History wasn’t “a piece of crockery dredged up from the Titanic,” he wrote; it was, “first, the shipwreck, then a piece of writing.” He demanded, therefore, that historical narrative include “the range and wildness of individuality, the pivotal force of trifles, the manifestations of greatness, the failures of unquestioned talent.” His models were Burkhardt, Gibbon, Macaulay, and Michelet, authors of imperfect mosaics characterized by a strong narrative line. As for philosopher-historians like Vico, Herder, and Spengler, Barzun held that they did not, despite creating prodigious works of learning, write histories at all: “It is not a paradox to say that in seeking a law of history those passionate minds were giving up their interest in history.”
In Columbia, Barzun found a genial host for his far-flung interests. In addition to the broadly conceived Contemporary Civilization course, Columbia offered a General Honors class—later, the Colloquium on Important Books—that let a select group of upperclassmen read the Western classics with instructors from two fields. When Barzun was assigned to the Colloquium, in 1934, his teaching partner was the English instructor Lionel Trilling. Among the most influential literary critics to emerge from the academy, Trilling admitted late in life that he had once stood “puzzled, abashed, and a little queasy” before the “high artistic culture of the modern age,” a discomfort no doubt torqued by sitting at a table next to a man whose mind had been formed at first hand by that culture. The Colloquium, as the word implies, was a conversation, and in 1934 it became not merely a conversation between instructors and undergraduates but also a dialogue between the two men that lasted until Trilling’s death, in 1975.
Dissimilar in many respects, the urbane, Americanized Frenchman, with his easy manner, and the shy, intense, Jewish writer-aspirant from Queens, who had only recently renounced his Marxist views, soon shared their thoughts, showed each other drafts of their work, and gradually began to carve out a new discipline in American education. They broadened the critical spectrum to include the biographical and social conditions attending the creation of any cultural artifact, and rerouted the notion of individuality or genius toward a busy intersection where various historical forces converged.
Barzun and Trilling, it could be said, also broadened each other. One day in the mid-nineteen-thirties, they began talking about novelists, and Barzun mentioned his admiration for Henry James. Trilling, who had read only a few of James’s stories, replied that he thought him not much more than a “social twitterer.” Barzun pressed upon him “The Pupil” and, as he recalls, “The Spoils of Poynton.” Trilling was duly persuaded, and marched off to convince Phillip Rahv and William Phillips, the editors of Partisan Review, that James was a writer to be taken seriously—and within five or six years he was.
At the Colloquium, books and ideas were thrown open to discussion; almost every approach was tolerated. “Cultural criticism” was Barzun and Trilling’s coinage for their lack of method, and it worked so well that, in the mid-fifties, Fred Friendly, an executive producer at CBS News, tried (and failed) to persuade the two men to offer a version of the Colloquium for television. “It was awe-inspiring,” the historian Fritz Stern, a 1946 alumnus of the Colloquium, recalled recently. “There I was, listening to two men very different, yet brilliantly attuned to each other, spinning and refining their thoughts in front of us. And when they spoke about Wordsworth, or Balzac, or Burke, it was as if they’d known him. I couldn’t imagine a better way to read the great masterpieces of modern European thought.”
The class met on Wednesday evenings, and, as the decades passed and more specialized approaches to literature emerged, Barzun and Trilling remained committed to the essential messiness of culture. Neither the self-isolating pieties of the New Critics, nor the technical proficiency of the Russian Formalists, nor the class-bound shibboleths of Marxist writers held sway in their classroom. As a result, they were condemned, as Barzun recalled, “for overlooking the autonomy of the work of art and its inherent indifference to meaning; for ignoring the dialectic of history,” not to mention “the ‘rigorous’ critical methods recently opened to those who could count metaphors, analyze themes, and trace myths.”
Basically, Barzun and Trilling cast themselves in the Arnoldian mold of relating culture to conduct. Matthew Arnold believed that judging books “as to the influence which they are calculated to have upon the general culture” would help realize man’s better nature and, thus, eventually improve society itself. Trilling and Barzun were less dreamy about the critic’s power, but, like Arnold, they saw no fissure between moral and aesthetic intelligence. They interpreted books liberally and wrote about them with a fluency and a precision befitting R. P. Blackmur’s definition of criticism as “the formal discourse of an amateur.”
For all that, Barzun was never a “New York intellectual.” He occasionally fraternized with the Partisan Review crowd, but he avoided the sectarian wars that seemed to fuel their lives and work; he appears only marginally in most accounts of the literary figures who rotated around the magazine. Yet, when a mid-century issue of Time came out with a lead article entitled “America and the Intellectual,” it wasn’t Edmund Wilson, or Lionel Trilling, or Sidney Hook, or Mark Van Doren whose likeness appeared on the cover (though all were mentioned inside); it was that of a man who hadn’t even been born here.
Around 1941, Barzun took on a larger classroom, becoming the moderator of the CBS radio program “Invitation to Learning,” which aired on Sunday mornings and featured four or five intellectual lights discussing books. From commenting on books, it was, apparently, a short step to selling them. In 1951, Barzun, Trilling, and W. H. Auden started up the Readers’ Subscription Book Club, writing monthly appreciations of books that they thought the public would benefit from reading. The club lasted for eleven years, partly on the strength of the recommended books, which ranged from Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows” to Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition,” and partly on the strength of the editors’ reputations.
Barzun’s public reputation had been made with the appearance of “Romanticism and the Modern Ego” (1943), which defied prevailing opinion by arguing that the difference between the ostensibly unruly Romantic movement and the ostensibly neoclassical Enlightenment was fundamentally social and political, not aesthetic. “The Romanticists’ point was in fact not an emotional point at all,” Barzun claimed, “but an intellectual point about the emotional life of man.” It was a bold statement to make at a time when Eliot’s condescensions to the early-nineteenth-century poets dominated literature departments, and perhaps it took a historian to recognize that Eliot’s distrust of personality and radicalism caused him to misjudge the Romantics’ debt to, among others, Rousseau and Kant. As Barzun laid it out, Romanticism was no aberrant aesthetic movement but reflected an intellectual sensibility perfectly suited to a hectic and idealistic age. In short, he helped make Romanticism respectable.
Although Barzun’s influence on literary studies is difficult to assess, there’s little doubt about his role in the revival of Hector Berlioz. Barzun had heard Berlioz’s “Rakoczy March” at a children’s concert in Paris when he was four or five, and, nearly forty years later, when putting the finishing touches on his biography of the composer, he noticed that the French and German scores of “Roméo et Juliette” contained a small discrepancy. (The placing of mutes on the strings at one point in the Love Scene was different.) He happened to mention this to Toscanini’s assistant, and a few days later he was having tea at Toscanini’s house in Riverdale, discussing music in general and Berlioz’s instrumentation and harmonics in particular.
Toscanini was one of a small number of musicians at mid-century who admired Berlioz. The rest of the music world, along with “conservatives, clerics, liberals and socialists,” Barzun wrote, “all joined in repudiating” the Romantic style. But, where others heard in Berlioz disorder and bombast, Barzun discerned exuberance, vividness, and dramatic flair. When he listened to Berlioz, Barzun heard “Gothic cathedrals, the festivals of the Revolution, the antique grandeur of classic tragedy, the comic force of Molière and Beaumarchais, and the special lyricism of his own Romantic period.” Barzun didn’t just like Berlioz’s music; he liked the mind that made the music, and his two-volume “Berlioz and the Romantic Century” (1950) not only spurred revisionist studies of Berlioz but also brought his music back into a general repertoire. “When I left school, I had to educate myself, and Jacques Barzun was part of my education,” the British conductor Sir Colin Davis told me. Davis had lobbied for Berlioz’s music in England and in 1969 he conducted a magnificent performance of “Les Troyens” in London that eventually led to his recording all Berlioz’s major works.
As much as he wrote about music and literature, Barzun was no unworldly aesthete, and his practical and political side was put to the test in 1958, when he assumed the inaugural post of provost and dean of faculties at Columbia. He remained provost for ten years and is generally credited with extricating the university from its financial and administrative woes. He also replaced the music played at graduation with the march from “Les Troyens.” Barzun returned to teaching the history of Western civilization just as it was coming under attack by various Continental theorists, whose repudiation of hierarchical structures and determinate meaning challenged everything that Barzun believed in. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Barzun became a symbol of the Old Guard, a mandarin scholar futilely defending the works of dead white males. Even as late as 1990, he had a walk-on in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,’s smart, hardboiled spoof of the canon wars, dressed in evening clothes and packing a .38 Beretta, holding forth on standards and errors of usage.
In truth, Barzun looked the part of someone who embodied tradition. He stood a straight-up six feet two inches and wore clothes that, if not expensive, looked expensive on him. His hair was silver, his forehead high and broad, and his nose long and straight, with a slight dip at the end. He looked ambassadorial, and possessed an air of authority that had less to do with giving orders than with the expectation that he would be listened to. Carolyn Heilbrun, one of the first female professors in Columbia’s English and Comparative Literature Department, remembers that she felt patronized by Trilling and other male faculty, but she wrote about Barzun almost reverently:

No picture of him I have seen, whether rendered by a photographer or by an artist, captures either his physical or his inner qualities. Obvious to the mere observer or the frightened student were his aristocratic way of carrying himself, suggesting arrogance, his impeccable clothes, his neat hair, his studious, exact, but never hesitant speech, his formidable intelligence. I have known history students tempted for the first time in their lives to plagiarize a paper because they could not imagine themselves writing anything that would not affront his critical eye, let alone satisfy him.
When I first encountered Jacques Barzun, in January of 1970, he was sixty-two and I was twenty-two. He was the University Professor of History at Columbia; I was a first-year graduate student in the English and Comparative Literature Department. He lived on upper Fifth Avenue; I lived in the Bronx, near Kingsbridge Avenue. He attended the opera; I hung out at revival movie theatres. He wore bespoke suits; I didn’t own a suit. He said “potato”; I said “pot.” Perhaps because we didn’t really know each other (to me, he was just a name following the introduction to my Bantam edition of “Germinal”; to him, I was just another student in a green Army jacket who smoked filterless Camels), Barzun and I hit it off.
After I began to read his books, I noticed that the historian and the critic had distinctive voices. When Barzun is compressing great batches of information, his prose races across spatial and chronological vistas, delivering facts, their causes and implications, in a strictly utilitarian, almost rat-a-tat manner. When he’s addressing an artist’s work, however, the prose becomes redolent, more capacious, its syntactical flourishes a tacit reflection of real appreciation. Very few historians could so confidently gauge a writer’s mind:

Shaw knows at any moment, on any subject, what he thinks, what you will think, what others have thought, what all this thinking entails. . . . Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought—certainly the most conscious since Rousseau; which may be why both of them often create the same impression of insincerity amounting to charlatanism.
Not everything that Barzun wrote struck me with equal force, and some years later, when I edited a compilation of his essays, I made so bold as to tinker with his style. The editorial process led to a spate of letters, highlighting our asynchronous temperaments. During one exchange, I suggested that the importance of what he was saying warranted heightened language. His reply came so fast that I thought he’d bounded across Central Park and put the letter in my mailbox himself. “You are a sky-high highbrow,” he wrote. “Me, I suspect highbrows (and low- and middle-) as I do all specialists, suspect them of making things too easy for themselves; and like women with a good figure who can afford to go braless, I go about brow-less.” Undeterred, I offered to rewrite the passages in question. My changes were acknowledged with fitting tribute. “To put it in a nice, friendly, unprejudiced way,” he responded, “your aim as shown in your rewritings of the ‘objectionable’ sentences strikes me as patronizing, smarmy, emetic!” My heart swells when I contemplate that exclamation point, as he seldom resorts to one.
Barzun doesn’t often emote on paper and is even less inclined to do so in person. When you talk to people who know him, the same adjectives pop up: “composed,” “distant,” “removed,” “reserved.” It’s not that friends find him cold or unhelpful; it’s just that Barzun exudes a formality that inhibits the exchange of intimate confidences. He doesn’t jabber. He won’t gossip about his friends or discuss his marriages (there have been three) or family (he has three children). After all, what does any of this have to do with his work? When I raised the prospect of talking to him about his life, he sighed and said, “It’s not a subject I’m interested in.” Still, I thought, he must confide in some people. So I asked Shirley Hazzard, whose husband, the French scholar Francis Steegmuller, was in the same class as Barzun at Columbia, if Barzun had ever revealed anything about his private life to her. Her reply was almost a reprimand: “If you know Jacques, you know that he doesn’t talk about those things.”
And yet Barzun is not all genteel restraint, something that Sir Colin Davis touched on when we spoke about Barzun’s appreciation of Berlioz: “Such an interesting figure, Berlioz—so intelligent and self-conscious, but also volatile and passionate. I rather think Jacques is like that—his internal life, I mean, not his personal life.” Barzun’s prose may not give off much heat, but over and over one finds paeans to pure feeling, to the sensuous response to experience. Like William James (his favorite philosopher), Barzun believes that feeling is at the root of all philosophy and art. “The greatest artists have never been men of taste,” Barzun wrote, with Berlioz in mind. “By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.” Because Barzun is so coolly analytical in his own work, one might infer that he would be drawn to poets of fine discrimination, to ingenious symbolists like Mallarmé and Valéry, and yet it’s the rude vitality of Molière and Hugo that engages him.
Obvious emotionalism is not the point; it’s the courage to be emotional that matters. Barzun has observed that “the vulgarity of mankind,” in the sense of the common man’s intense awareness of life—life with all its brief pleasures and bruising shocks—“is not only a source of art but the ultimate one.” It’s easy enough to understand why people don’t immediately see this side of Barzun, and pass over, without notice, sentiments such as “And when will art cease to be something so exclusively for nice people?” or “Reading history remakes the mind by feeding primitive pleasure in story.”
Barzun always seemed to know everything you had ever read or thought about reading one day, and he seemed just as comfortable talking about German architecture as about Venetian politics. “He was terrifying,” Steven Marcus, a former dean of Columbia College, recalled about the experience of being his student. “He would disgorge an absolutely enormous amount of information during his lectures, more than anyone could possibly remember, and what you felt was—you felt you couldn’t compete. I mean, you could imagine maybe one day writing something on the order of Trilling—maybe. But how could you ever know as much as Barzun did?” The charge against Barzun, accordingly, was that he spread himself too thin. As Marcus explained, “I think his natural reserve and the variegated subject matter have caused him to be taken less seriously by the intellectual crowd that runs literature departments and literary quarterlies.”
Barzun, though, never intended to write for that crowd. Instead, as he put it in a letter to me, he wanted “to write for a quite different, less homogeneous group: academics in other departments than English, people with a non-professional interest in the arts (doctors who play music, lawyers who read philosophy) and a certain number of men and women in business and philanthropy, in foundations and newspapers or publishing houses.” In writing for a general audience, Barzun was taking sides in an old debate about the relationship between the intellectual writer and the reading public. It was a question not of how much the reading public could bear but of who constituted that public. When Dr. Johnson wrote, “I rejoice to concur with the common reader,” he could count on that reader to actually read or hear about his rejoicing. He was speaking, after all, about a relatively small number of educated Brits who owned businesses or property and could afford to buy books. When Barzun began writing, the size and diversity of the reading public discouraged such assumptions.
Barzun wanted to do on the page what he did in the classroom: help the reader “carry in his head something more than the unexamined history of his own life,” not because knowledge is inherently good or makes one a better person but because it fosters an independence of mind. The more one learns about the course of civilization, he believed, the more one can appreciate its achievements. After a while, if you learn enough, you can argue that, say, Shaw’s mind more closely resembles Rousseau’s than Voltaire’s—and you may actually enjoy doing it. Consequently, there’s nothing Hegelian, Heideggerian, or hermeneutic about his work; no nihilistic or existential angst livens things up. Nor does he proffer any grand theory or unifying design that would explain the past in the categorical manner of Spengler’s organic cycle of regional growth and decay, or Braudel’s emphasis on broad socioeconomic “structures.” For Barzun, these systematic models of cause and effect run counter to the temper of history, which is intuitive, concrete, beholden to time and evidence:

History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything may become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind. And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences: they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the Coliseum. But the special sciences based on sorted facts cannot be mistaken for rivers flowing in time and full of persons and events. They are systems fashioned with concepts, numbers, and abstract relations. For history, the reward of eluding method is to escape abstraction.
Barzun’s approach to history is, in a word, pragmatic. He is temperamentally in tune with William James’s self-assessment: “I am no lover of disorder, but fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it entirely.” Among the things that drew Barzun to James was James’s conviction that every request made in good faith incurs some moral obligation in the claimant. A few weeks shy of his hundredth birthday, Barzun is still pressed to read manuscripts, give talks, and attend affairs in his honor. He tries to accommodate everyone, but there is simply less of him to go around. He’s five inches shorter than he used to be, a decrease due to aging and spinal stenosis, which causes pain and numbness in the legs. He relies on a cane or a walker to get around, and, as one might expect, he is alert to the irony of aging: when time is short, old age takes up a lot of time. There are doctors’ visits, tests to be suffered, results to wait for, ailments and medications to be studied—all distractions from the work. “Old age is like learning a new profession,” he noted drily. “And not one of your own choosing.”
Before I left San Antonio, Barzun called my attention to what he slyly referred to as his “most notable accomplishment.” It was a book lying on a coffee table in the sunroom and titled “Introduction to Naval History: An Outline with Diagrams and Glossary.” I turned it over in my hands and looked inside: it was, as promised, a point-by-point synopsis of seafaring events, designed for the education of naval officers. It turns out that, during the Second World War, the U.S. Navy commissioned Barzun, an associate professor at the time, to write it. And why not? It was always risky to assume that any topic was beyond Barzun’s ken.
Shirley Hazzard learned this one evening, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, when she and Barzun found themselves standing in a storage room on East Seventy-ninth Street, up to their necks in books. They had been asked by the head librarian of the New York Society Library to help him weed out superfluous and out-of-date volumes. “There we were,” Hazzard told me, raising her arm, “books stacked this high, and I thought, We’re really in for it. We’ll never get through these. Then Jacques reached into a pile, glanced at the title—it didn’t matter which book it was—and said, ‘This one’s been superseded by another; this one is still valid; this one can stay until someone or somebody finishes his new study,’ and in a couple of hours we were done. It was a very impressive performance, because, you know, he wasn’t performing at all. It’s just Jacques.”
Sooner or later, all of Barzun’s acquaintances experience their own “just Jacques” moment. Two years ago, while working on a piece for this magazine, I called Barzun to find out whether Lord Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary during the First World War, had said that the lights were going out all over Europe before hostilities had actually begun. Barzun asked if I was referring to him in my article as “Lord Grey.” I said I was, since the attribution was always the same. Barzun cleared his throat. “Well, you know, he wasn’t a lord when he said it. He didn’t become Viscount of Fallodon until 1916.” For the first time in thirty-odd years of conversation, I exclaimed, “Why would you know that?” He replied, mildly, “It’s my business to know such things.” ♦

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_krystal#ixzz1JSxaMUmo"

Question: is this persuasive?

2011-04-13T20:08:00.000-07:00

Comrades, I'm trying to private tutor. I will be posting an ad offering my services at the main and Vacaville Solano campuses. Any suggestions?

English Tutor

o Do you feel that your professor is marking you down unfairly for grammar and punctuation, or even ‘c.s.’ and ‘w.c.’?

o Is formatting your bibliography taking up more time than the actual essay itself?

o Does MLA still sound a bit too conspiratorial?

o Or what again was the significance of the storming of the Bastille and what did it betray? What was the cultural impact in America of the New York Armory Show? What was with fascination with the Greeks around turn-of-the-century Europe? And just what was Eliot trying to say?

Graduate from San Francisco State University with a Bachelor’s in English eager to tutor any English course! Passionate and experienced tutor who has worked with students coming from most, if not all, offered Solano courses over the course of three semesters.

Please contact Arian at (707) 344-2230 ariancato@sbcglobal.net

Some readings

2011-04-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

“Pragmatism. [William] James says that we shall know a truth by relating its consequences to its avowed purpose. Something is true, not because it has been repeated often, not because someone in authority has said it, not because it copies the world outside in every detail, not because it has been deducted from an infallible generality; but because it leads as accurately as possible to the kind of result that we have in mind. Pragmatism, in other words, takes a stand in opposition to the genetic fallacy, which bade us lok at the antecedent of a thing, in institution, or an idea in order to discover its worth. 1941” Jacques Barzun, The Jacques Barzun Reader

The “genetic fallacy” is the fallacy of irrelevance of judging a claim based on a previous similar context that may, or may not be, one in which the same claim’s terms may actually have already been applied. “Genetic” comes from “genus,” a reference to taxonomy where, in the context of logic, the “species” that is the claim is presumed to possess the same characteristics of every other characterstic within the same “genus,” which is the taxonomic tier directly above, or encompassing, the “species,” by virtue of being descended from the same genus. Therefore, the genetic fallacy assumes that the species that is the claim to possess, or to yield the same consequences, as the genus by virtue of it being descended from the genus. In short, a genetic fallacy is committed when a claim is based on its origin. An example is, “To possess the title ‘couple’ is a real shame because it’s just another form of ownership,” or better yet, “Love is conditional when you call each other ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend.’” The cuteness is nauseating in its endlessness. Yet however numerous I’ve committed the genetic fallacy myself, a cousin fallacy is what I am most embarassed of: the etymological fallacy. I have always pondered too late afterwards the validity of “continental philosophy’s” claims, especially those of Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, who once proposed that the German language should be the master language because Germany was in the center of Europe and that it was more original than the other major Western languages because unlike the Romance languages it did not derive from a “mother language,” or so I’ve read in summary. To feel my embarrassment, just open the first page of Being and Time or Of Grammatology . . .

But to turn the page, an excerpt from something so charming I found in “the little book” I am ashamed to have gone on so long into life without:

“Some nouns that appear to be plural are usually construed as singular and given a singular verb.

Politics is an art, not a science.
The Republican Headquarters is on this side of the tracks.

But

The general’s quarters are across the river.

In these cases the writer must simply learn the idioms. The contents of a book is singular. The contents ofa jar may be either singular or plural, depending on what’s in the jar—jam or marbles.” William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style

And I can't get enough of the vindication . . .

One time biking through discomfort.

The saddest photo I've seen in my readings on the recent Japan disaster.

Portal 2 - The Aperture Labs

2011-04-13T18:27:00.000-07:00

Panels + Trust

Turret + Boots

-JC

street fighter x tekken

2011-04-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

coming to a console/pc near you in 2012

Mortal Kombat Legacy

2011-04-12T02:10:00.000-07:00

The high production Internet release of short film Mortal Kombat Rebirth had enormous positive reception by the public and is being further developed as a web series titled Mortal Kombat Legacy. First episode is released today, and new episodes will be released weekly and hosted on Youtube channel Machinima.

Oh yeah, Jax is Black Dynamite and Sonya is Seven of Nine.

-JC

2011-04-11T16:34:00.001-07:00

Adventure Time!

2011-04-10T19:20:00.000-07:00

Stats from two years ago before the Nook came out to take names. However, one does hope that truly portable literature survives in the form of durable paper, and not galvanic polymer.

You can do better jiggaboo.

Bear-girl from a book I glossed while researching the Barnes and Noble store a day before my interview.

Use your own two wheels.

Strength

2011-04-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

Back when I was still attending SFSU I had actually started to write a novel titled Strength. Every now and then I'll contract novelistic tendencies, but recently there is too much of everything happening at once, seemingly anyways. When I think of writing now I think I have a social services impulse, that at heart I am a Realist. But then when I write I become a Naturalist. It is all dreary at times, but only at times of dedicated writing timed out from my usual life of ferrying between Fairfield and Dixon. I still preserve between my ribs the hope to write the greatest work of art, but for now I have to recognize my other duties and joys. But also, I can spring unto you the introduction and bits of the aforementioned Strength, however embarrassing, the only two things allowing myself to alloy our agora being (1) you guys deserve more from me, and (2) an amateur is, after all, a lover, and I'm just sharing some love homies.

The streets, they are there. The rain dropping, their hand across the peak of this cemented hill, sweeping under the skirts of the beach’s violent child, the wind twined with another. There is a lot of green, that is trees, beneath the splotches of aura covering everything. Around the corner there were even new trees planted in brick-marked holes, separating the berths from the encompassing white, white rocks. Priuses, lime and yellow shelled, skitter atop the city’s skin, as if dice, rolling down the chute of Lawton until the arrival of their numbers. This will take awhile, and so until then I look up. There isn’t a sky seen, but it is likely there.
I live in the grid of San Francisco right above the university. In the Fall I had singled myself out of those I had once belonged to, and ended myself here. To leave, you must travel North along 1 and then East, because my apartment is West of where I came from, and I’m assuming those leaving would be those from my childhood, associates from that entire business. From the school you must take the Cow Palace exit, it is a hole of an exit and a tunnel of a turn.
There is no violence in nature today, only a virulent warmth like the ends of brooms in the winter—harsh hours outside, though the innards of the planted homes only better by their walls, a respite between them only temporary for the momentary stays. A television mumbles its signs through the gutters in my roof, which after consideration becomes the bottom of my landlord’s room, and what I take to be the kitchen. Even though piping is normally configured to merge between two stories—the kitchen on the first floor in the same position as the next—a delicious aroma often permeates from my bathroom. Do I shower so good when I don’t every other day? I know why it was named the Sunset District now.
It is barren and safe when the evening couches herself between every curb, congealing herself on panes with ready regards to inclination. When the streets are most quiet you can hear her, hush hush. Before the succession of the sun’s reign a forlorn hope stomps through the yards, construction workings, even, pat their palms of the subterranean earth upon their workpants, most deciding to leave their food-wrappings in their capped ditches. An hour of rush inseminates the city, broiling a soup of mucus-ridden cars in the hoary streets, eggs atop birches taken into even higher structures. An ant is driven over while another is fried, another tormented along its path by the anticipation of its mother’s ways. Before leaving the home of the world, the sun waves goodbye across Ocean View and Embarcadero with a simultaneity the span of a breath, and as the door closes behind mother moon’s entrance a rush of wind threatens the windows one last time. It is standard protocol says the warfare books behind me, making dusty outlines in their shelves, to create subsidiary waypoints, whether in gesture or material, in case resistance should be called in another time. But until then, there is often silence, such is the way my landlord decrees.
A threat, it could’ve been, the incidents today I think could have been threats. No, not to me, but to us, a waylay point for soldiers of curfew to poison our sewers and threaten our dangers, their black-and-white striped cars derailing the 29 but allowing the Metro a passing, nobody objecting though all the red the subject of scrutiny. The Book of Nature is supposed to be inside each of us, our considerations outside of the law self-evidence for the authority of the origin for everything artificial. Across from the campus there walks its student body, two dozen at a time, interfusing and unweaving in their crossing as the stoplights across each of their paths’ count down from a prefigured average. The ants surviving between the rails and the daises between one person and another, their Converse’s and Vans always between synapses.

At the time of a fall, and when in the premises of an other, the effect of intervention is expected. For instance, when the recycled cup of coffee made its usual sound of splashing, upon contact with the floor, its contents splattering the condiments bar and the socks of chairs, I was in the course of calling for caution of the oncoming coffee spoors. Simultaneously, to my right, a gasp was ejected as the woman took notice of the event, this action common as well with the man on my left, we three being on the outermost of the café peering in over glasses and assorted papers. These gasps, mine included, were genuine, and if time had allowed any one of us an increase in reflexes, the cup would never have caused a scene, that is, the scene would not have been necessary. Therein lies the human content, between gasps and notification, or at least warning, but perhaps even as warning. If anybody had been able to call the spill over the calculation of physics required to provide enough of a window to act in catching the falling artifact, then time would have been subjugated to the assurance of man and his society, or his sense of equilibrium, and the spill would not have existed. But yet, it has occurred, and this analysis has assured it so, and we go about our sidewalks and cafés, philosophizing further what it all means, as if chance, that extracted dryad, were as present as the thought of a perfect day, without the spilled coffee, and needed to be excluded. It has occurred, indeed, and this is all I can say, under the gesture of notification, a spilled cup of coffee, and I am on my own perfect little way, not as the message maker, but as the messenger.
To conclude, we will need a return, for I had forgotten a part of the whole story. I had thrown the cup. A stretch was being performed, the ribcage like a stereo projecting my life story in beats and pops. It was in the air as long and silent as I had glided my cotton arm beneath the tables and then straight through the matrix of their interstice, the style of thrust being like a shotput but with a yawning jerk at the wrist. Only the NASA-black security camera knows who had thrown it, and this awareness being only provisional to the extent that somebody may not have been behind its control.
Nobody was there, I knew this. The project was not to harm anybody, only to encourage a scene, to spin one out like a wheelwright.
I had to write, “Therein lies the human content, between gasps and notification, or at least warning, but perhaps even as warning.” But what did I mean? I want to say, perhaps, it is not what the statement can mean or even what I had intended it to mean, but rather what does the act of writing it and then questioning it mean, given the contexts of its explicit, contained claims and the contexts of its previous ground, the paragraph.
And meaning? When a machine says, “I love you,” it will have meant it, but at the same time, not have meant it, for it is a machine, just a machine, and nothing with emotions. I tell you this so I can hear it myself since it will only be you, my opposite, who I can trust with an honest equation. It should not surprise you to hear that I do not trust myself with any sort of high concepts, such as love in general, but this is only because I do not trust myself as an aggregate, or as a collective, or better yet, as a sea anemone with all its surroundings as part of its body, which reality ultimately demands each of her constituents to be. It should not surprise you both that I think my computer mouse tells me, “Hold me,” and that sometimes I do. I say it anyways, aloud, “I do.” I do, I do, I do.

for whatever god was left in the machine, and that had wanted to be known.

Only the trunk was bright with arson, opened and safe from further disaster, the flames engulfing its felt bottom and rusty lock system. It was a trammeled-grass green, the side design’s reliefs espousing lights in shades familiar only to a painter, and multiplied by the dance of heated oxygen in the space behind them, assuming a natural compass packaged with the design. The 29 took it as easy as usual in its rest before the last school corner, the elderly giving only a nod to the fire, a tip of their brims. It was only a bright day, the only casualty being the dry neck of Crayne, the Vietnamese driver. Of interest, however, is the attention paid by those with strong cameras in their phones in their pockets in their hands now. It’s kind of like that, I wanted to alleviate my neighbor’s savagery, but either it was not there, or he was not there, and so I just faced that burning oxygen storm and held unto my pockets, my back straight in its dry shirt.
“Oh my god, that car is on fire.”

These authors died. Every intersection is a book, and when the stars hold the sky there are crosses in some of the bosses, windows clipped in their white rainbows by clipped curtains.

Crazy philosophy

2011-04-10T15:01:00.000-07:00

Crazy philosophy

Three Minute Philosophy: Aristotle

-Gabe

Radioactive Bingo = unimaginable cuteness levels

2011-04-08T04:05:00.000-07:00

note: Not really Bingo. Dachshund from Japan getting checked for radiation levels.

- JC

Advice To Live By

2011-04-07T19:25:00.000-07:00

"Do one thing every day that scares you."
-Gabe

frank ocean

2011-04-07T13:18:00.000-07:00

get this album. its free. no excuses

Street Fighter

2011-04-06T23:21:00.000-07:00

-CC

Pentatonic Scale

2011-04-06T14:29:00.000-07:00

Bobby Mcferrin plays the human.
-Gabe

Achieve The Dream

2011-04-04T02:36:00.000-07:00

&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;s&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;

- JC

CBEST vocabulary input

2011-04-03T14:01:00.000-07:00

I will append the rest of the interesting words of hopeful fruit from the vocab section at the end of my CBEST review book at the end of my study session. But for now enjoy some of the ones I've written example sentences for last night.

Abet – to act as an accomplice; to aid. The BAU was abetted as usual by their technical analyst’s ability to conjure lists of any assortment of information and sift through it and synthesize pertinent data to yield to her team a shortlist of probably suspects, often times however right to the Unsub him/herself.

Abjure – to renounce under oath. To aver that cheating on one’s partner is to abjure one’s tacit fidelity is to seem controlling.

Abnegate – to give up, to deny to oneself. Toben abnegated quality blankets after infecting his whore-turned-wife with gangrene of the mouth.

Abrogate – annul; abolish by authoritative action. Using the new method Dector was able to abrogate all further pataphysics of the Latter-day Sophists.

Abscond – to leave quickly in secret. Absconding into witching hours of lovers is most prevalent amongst teenagers but after twenty-one, at the latest, trysts begin to decrease almost always at the terrifying and nonchalant request for moderation made by the female counterpart, sometimes behind closed doors.

Abstemious – done sparingly; consuming in moderation. Since working at the library my patron check-out record has become an expression completely opposite from abstemious.

Accede – to express approval; to agree to. Accede is something of the negative of concede, which is to agree disapprovingly.

Actuate – to motivate or influence to activity; to put into motion. The closing in of the CBEST actuated me into high-gear constipative cramtime.

-AC

Broly crushing competition with a handicap

2011-04-02T23:45:00.000-07:00

Mike Begum (a.k.a "Broly" or "Legs"). He was born with a condition called arthrogryposis which leaves him with limited use of his hands. He has adapted the use of his mouth to control his character movements. Even with this handicap he has beaten the best in Texas and now is a top-player in Super Smash Brothers Melee, Brawl, and Super Street Fighter 4.

- JC

image by: http://saiyakupo.deviantart.com/art/Metal-Broly-another-end-36515518
news source: http://shoryuken.com/content/interview-w-broly-legs-disabled-ssf4-chun-li-player-4088/

psa

2011-04-01T18:02:00.000-07:00

nice to see this blog taking off. if you have a google account or a blogspot account and you want to contribute just let me know and i'll put u on. also if you have your own blog i'm sure there is a way to link it on the main page...just let me know and STAY ACTIVE

Cowboy Bebop X The Simpsons

just thought that picture was gnarly

&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;ssss&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;

and here are some nujabes samples courtesy of youtube

Question.

2011-03-30T06:56:00.000-07:00

So my friends. What would you do with freedom?

-RDL

De NP

2011-03-29T07:56:00.000-07:00

It is daunting to post here already!

The posts I've seen so far were quite nice! I'm a fan of Childish Gambino now that I've seen those two videos that were posted here. I don't have any ideas for this blog as of yet. Most of my ideas are about game concepts and will probably be centered around games. I will post here again when I get some stuff worth passing along. Also I have a Tumblr with some pics from Korea!

Also, I started a blogger earlier this month with the ideas that I came up with since starting it. I'm trying harder to get at least one pic per post. Sht's rough. I wish i had more time to create a pic, think up a concept, and then post it all. Normally thinking up the concepts take the most time.

I dislike this self promotion that i've been doing lately... but this will be how I get the pictures out. Many of the pics on the Tumblr were from other sites, some of the pics were taken on my phone out here. most pixel-y pics on the blogspot were homemade.

The inspiration to stick with simpler graphics comes from this game which has been in the works by a couple indie devs for... 3 years?

FEZ PAX EAST GAMEPLAY VIDEO from POLYTRON on Vimeo.

So that's my first post. Take care friends!

-Parker

No

2011-03-27T22:36:00.000-07:00

Who posted Childish Gambino? You beat me to it.

http://www.iamdonald.com/

and his blogspot

http://www.childishgambino.blogspot.com/

Adele is cool too.

Back to school, spring break was too short.

working title vol.1

2011-03-27T18:51:00.000-07:00

Childish Gambino aka Donald Glover aka Troy Barnes from Community...dudes pretty raw

Murs teams up with some dude named Terrace Martin on Melrose. It's a pretty upbeat and fun album about girls, shoes, girls, relationships, girls, sex and....girls

Shad paying homage to the Pharcyde...check out his new album TSOL

Odd Future's Tyler, The Creator...kids these days

don't sleep on this. ab-liva kills it while mateo and goapele keep it sexy

blu & dela collab...enough said

mos def produced by ski beatz

thats it for today..check back soon

Where is Arian?

2011-03-26T00:27:00.000-07:00

hella fresh

Thought Moments

Character's Fears in 250-300 Words

2011-03-10T23:36:00.000-08:00

In my first semester at SF State our professor asked us to write the worst situation, getting a feel for the character as you discover new values under intense pressure. The real beauty of the exercise is the tight capacity of 200-300 words; you can squeeze a lot of information in that space.

Character's Fears

The pool split off to the sides behind the stage. The water was fresh and shallow and smelled hot. Steven was waiting and followed the rubber outline back and forth. He heard the general hum of people over the dolphin gates. The metal bleachers were empty and shine in the white sun. Thirty-minutes prior to the performance. On the second row after the yellow marker there was a reservation held for his class. By alphabetical order Marla would sit at the tail of the thing near the stairs. Mr. Gardner emerged onto the center of the stage, changed into shorts and a fisherman’s brim with slippers.

“Excited?”

“I’m all right?” said the boy.

“The gates will open anytime now,” said Mr. Gardner. “Remover your shoes and go in. Get yourself used to the temperature.”

Steven did so, while the man placed the shoes far away from the pool on stage and saying he wouldn’t be needing those. Steven took some steps up to the pool’s mouth only to find the silver rail too cold. Holding onto the rail he stepped in the first slate of water. His ankles were cold and the coldness rose to his kneecaps and finally stopped. He kept walking because he was the center of attention, Mr. Gardner called from afar if Steven was fine. He took the smiling and grimacing for a yes to anything.

“They can survive in fresh water,” said Mr. Gardner.

Fifteen Bull sharks emerged from the tunnel to the center of the pool. Steady and quiet, their shadows were flowing over the white floor. Their eyes were black and glowed as pearls did in the evening. Steven wanted to only follow one shark but there was a brown spread.

“We are to them as humans are to lima beans,” said Mr. Gardner. “Just something to eat when we’re hungry.”

No. Thought Steven. His legs were not wet nor cold. The rough touch must’ve been the nose of a shark. Steven didn’t look down. By now the sharks brought the two into their smoke. Their shadows formed one giant one in the center. The sharks bumped into Mr. Gardner more so.

“What they’re doing now is checking I’m food. As you see I’m not.” Mr. Gardner said. “Aren’t they just so playful?”

The most playful animal Steven knew for now was the camera circling them. He’d set his eyes onto it if he didn’t grow too self-conscious about his appearance. His button nose, the crooked teeth, thin and hairless legs like a girl. That all these were thoughtfully captured on the box on a stick.

After the silence of awe and wonder, the people were talking amongst each other now. His class especially on the third row after the yellow marker. The boys yelled his name, which he didn’t pay attention to because something absurd was sure to be said. Some of the girls tried to encourage him but he doubted them too. Marla was smiling not for him to pet a shark. His safety came before their enjoyment. Her teeth had a certain roundness. Hair gold in the white heat. She leaned forward with her arms behind her, revealing some of her chest in her teal shirt.

“What do you think, Steven?” said Mr. Gardner, who said after a pause. “Can we give an around of an applause for my helper here. Steven!”

Steven’s head shook on his neck, but he didn’t know if it was a yes or no. The crowd grew louder and his class was roaring for him to pet a shark.

“Grab the fin,” said a girl who Steven imagined was Marla. “One hundred points.”

--end. Just thought I'd contribute

The difference between demanding and commanding is commando

2011-03-10T11:15:00.000-08:00

Amigos, en guarde!

Please feel free to post any material you wish you could share with anybody of any type (we won't judge) of any kind of material, be it of a review sort, or just a picture of your pet in repose. But please caption. Or else the Caption Man will get you.

Arian vi Temptation commands you to . . . live!

Seriously.