robertogreco + via:robinsonmeyer   20

General Vagaries. • winchysteria: ossacordis: crockpotcauldron: ...
"there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of course there was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”



"The Milton scholars screamed and argued about how the serpent was supposed to move before it crawled on its belly. Dr. Matthews, enraged that Dr. Goldstein could believe the serpent bounced around on the coiled end of its tail, flipped over the conference table. "Satan is not a fucking pogo stick!" he howled."]


I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy.


have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:

my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?

wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.

background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.

so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—

then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”

some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.

so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.

much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.

so my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. then out of the dead silence, the panel moderator stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:

conferences  via:robinsonmeyer  2018  academia  arguments  debate  humor  orangutans  racism  disagreement  rules  taxonomy  johnmilton  edgarallanpoe  serpents  highered  highereducation  education 
february 2018 by robertogreco
Why the Economic Fates of America’s Cities Diverged - The Atlantic


"Another explanation for the increase in regional inequality is that it reflects the growing demand for “innovation.” A prominent example of this line of thinking comes from the Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, whose 2012 book, The New Geography of Jobs, explains the increase in regional inequality as the result of two new supposed mega-trends: markets offering far higher rewards to “innovation,” and innovative people increasingly needing and preferring each other’s company."


Starting with the country’s founding, government policy worked to ensure that specific towns, cities, and regions would not gain an unwarranted competitive advantage. The very structure of the U.S. Senate reflects a compromise among the Founders meant to balance the power of densely and sparsely populated states. Similarly, the Founders, understanding that private enterprise would not by itself provide broadly distributed postal service (because of the high cost of delivering mail to smaller towns and far-flung cities), wrote into the Constitution that a government monopoly would take on the challenge of providing the necessary cross-subsidization.



"By the 1960s, antitrust enforcement grew to proportions never seen before, while at the same time the broad middle class grew and prospered, overall levels of inequality fell dramatically, and midsize metro areas across the South, the Midwest, and the West Coast achieved a standard of living that converged with that of America’s historically richest cites in the East. Of course, antitrust was not the only cause of the increase in regional equality, but it played a much larger role than most people realize today.







In other realms, too, federal policy during the New Deal and for several decades afterward pushed strongly to spread regional equality. For example, New Deal programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Bonneville Power Administration, and the Rural Electrification Administration dramatically improved the infrastructure of the South and West. During and after World War II, federal spending on the military and the space program also tilted heavily in the Sunbelt’s favor.




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march 2016 by robertogreco
Just Asking - The Atlantic
"Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea1 one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?2 In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?


Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?

In the absence of such a conversation, can we trust our elected leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, PATRIOT Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

1. Given the strict Gramm-Rudmanesque space limit here, let's just please all agree that we generally know what this term connotes—an open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, Federalist 10, pluralism, due process, transparency ... the whole democratic roil.

2. (This phrase is Lincoln's, more or less)"
freedom  culture  terrorism  davidfosterwallace  2007  democracy  sacrifice  safety  mobility  autonomy  comfort  personalsafety  via:robinsonmeyer  johnziegler  risk 
january 2015 by robertogreco
S’More Inequality

[via: ]
executivefunction  via:robinsonmeyer  cognitivescience  psychology  cognitivepsychology  willpower  self-control  marshmallowtest  delayedgratification  control  neoliberalism  bathanymoreton  2014  children  schools  schooling  edreform  policy  education  preschool  privatization  ideology  popscience  capitalism  latecapitalism  labor  behavior 
october 2014 by robertogreco
Why Do Music Students Have Higher SAT Scores?
“A more candid appraisal of the current body of research literature might suggest that music is somehow attractive [to those] who are already more likely to perform well academically, and as such, may serve as an important artistic outlet with positive developmental benefits for those students who choose to study it.”
music  education  correlation  sat  testtaking  via:robinsonmeyer  2013  research 
may 2013 by robertogreco
The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture » Overview
"Introducing Scalar. Born-digital, open source, media-rich scholarly publishing that’s as easy as blogging.

Specializing in richness, depth, experimentation, and understanding.


More fundamentally, Scalar is a semantic web authoring tool that brings a considered balance between standardization and structural flexibility to all kinds of material. It includes a built-in reading interface as well as an API that enables Scalar content to be used to drive custom-designed applications. If you’re dealing with small to moderate amounts of structured content and need a lightweight platform that encourages improvisation with your data model, Scalar may be the right solution for you.

Scalar also gives authors tools to structure essay- and book-length works in ways that take advantage of the unique capabilities of digital writing, including nested, recursive, and non-linear formats. The platform also supports collaborative authoring and reader commentary. The ANVC’s partner presses and archives are now beginning to implement Scalar into their research and publishing workflows, and several projects leveraging the platform have been published already.

Scalar is a project of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (ANVC) in association with Vectors, IML, and CTS and with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities."
blogging  digitalhumanities  publishing  tools  onlinetoolkit  via:robinsonmeyer  scalar  annotating  trythis  semanticweb 
may 2013 by robertogreco
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's surprising baseball card collection - ESPN
"Anyway, as Burdick was moving into middle age, he began thinking about where he wanted his collection to end up. Baseball cards weren't yet hot collectibles, so the idea that his cards might have commercial value never occurred to him. Instead, he proposed giving his collection to the Metropolitan Museum, which basically told him, "Sure, we'll take it -- as long as you catalog it and organize it first." So Burdick spent years making daily trips to the Met, where he painstakingly put all his cards into albums. He gave each series of cards its own alpha-numeric code -- sort of his own Dewey Decimal System -- that's still used by baseball card collectors today. That includes the code that has become the most famous shorthand in the card-collecting world: T206."
via:robinsonmeyer  cataloging  baseball  baseballcards  collection  folksonomy  themet  jeffersonburdick  organization  archives  cardcollecting  cards 
may 2013 by robertogreco
Feuilleton - Wikipedia
"Feuilleton (French pronunciation: ​[fœjtɔ̃]; a diminutive of French: feuillet, the leaf of a book) was originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers, consisting chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the latest fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles. The feuilleton may be described as a "talk of the town",[1] and a contemporary English-language example of the form is the "Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker.[2]

In English newspapers, the term "feuilleton" instead came to refer to an installment of a serial story printed in one part of a newspaper. The genre of the feuilleton in its French sense was eventually included in English newspapers, but was not referred to as a feuilleton.

In contemporary French, feuilleton takes on the definition of "soap opera," specifically ones aired for television.

German and Polish newspapers still use the term for their literary and arts sections.
The term feuilleton was invented by Julien Louis Geoffroy and Bertin the Elder, editors of the French Journal des Débats in 1800."
via:robinsonmeyer  feuilleton  words  french  soapopera  talkofthetown  newspapers  gossip  news 
march 2013 by robertogreco
Early American Handwriting
"Handwritten colonial documents provide a wealth of information. For colonists, the way a person wrote conveyed not only social status, but also revealed one's gender and occupation.

The goal of this game is to decode the explicit messages of handwritten documents. Through the game you will learn to recognize some commonly confused letters. When you are done with this game return to the general Handwriting menu, and you can practice reading longer passages from colonial manuscripts and learn more about the implicit messages colonists were sending.

To practice identifying individual letters, begin the game and then drag the manuscript letters* on top of the print letters to which you believe they correspond. To see the answer for a single letter, hover your mouse over the letter and press SHIFT on your keyboard. To see the answers for all the letters click on SHOW ANSWERS at the top right of the screen. Click on the link below to begin!"
via:robinsonmeyer  handwriting  games  history  colonists  english  communication  writing 
january 2013 by robertogreco
acts of Frankenstein | the m john harrison blog
"Brutalise all plans & conceptions. Lose patience with last 10 years of ideas, now seen as prison. Bolt wrong components to wrong components! Sustained acts of Frankenstein & self-piracy! Address current emotional issues not 5 year old ones! New observations/notes; new philosophical/political insight; new structural problems/solutions. New imagery. Sense of adventure. Sense of risk in the material. Explore & affront your hopes for yourself. Glee at breaking own definitions & taboos. Carnage in the files. Parameters missing at the outset may be the things that writing will show you. In the end you have to get frightened enough to push down the pillars of your own establishment."
examinedlife  progressivism  progressive  deschooling  unschooling  perspective  self-examination  criticalthinking  mindchanging  mindchanges  notetaking  observations  observation  frankenstein  rebirth  establishment  disestablishment  fear  writing  radicalism  taboos  challenge  change  freedom  self-piracy  exploration  risk  2012  via:robinsonmeyer  yearoff  cv  shaking  canon  mjohnharrison  from delicious
december 2012 by robertogreco
Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention (Full text)
us  obama  simplicity  complexity  climatechange  moonlanding  skyscrapers  internet  michelleobama  2012  future  investment  sacrifice  improvement  infrastructure  legacy  via:robinsonmeyer 
november 2012 by robertogreco
Junot Diaz - Bookworm on KCRW
"Junot Diaz Drown (Riverhead) Diaz' stories render the young-immigrant experience in harsh, unforgettable rhythms. Here Diaz discusses the art of telling the truth."
bookworm  storytelling  truthtelling  truth  junotdíaz  interviews  tolisten  via:robinsonmeyer  1996  from delicious
october 2012 by robertogreco
Junot Diaz - Bookworm on KCRW
"This wide-ranging yet intimate conversation explores many difficult subjects: sex addiction, cultural difference, the Dominican diaspora, dictatorship, new ways of thinking about the function of literature, and the necessity that we leave the isolation of our self-made cocoons."
tolisten  thebriedwondrouslifeofoscarwao  oscarwao  interviews  books  michaelsilverblatt  2007  culturaldifference  culture  communities  community  literature  self-madecocoons  bookworm  junotdíaz  via:robinsonmeyer  reading  from delicious
october 2012 by robertogreco
Junot Diaz: This Is How You Lose Her - Bookworm on KCRW
"Our master of seductive street-slang discusses seduction and its relation to fiction. Can a writer seduce you?  Does Junot Díaz feel guilt about his persuasive and tempting approach? Find out, as he describes what he calls "the shock of representation.""
tolisten  via:robinsonmeyer  thisishowyouloseher  representation  literature  fiction  2012  interviews  bookworm  junotdíaz  michaelsilverblatt  from delicious
october 2012 by robertogreco
september 2012 by robertogreco
Notes of a Novice Student of India - Justin Erik Halldór Smith
"As time goes on I'm finding myself more and more hung up on questions of methodology and, one might say, of metaphilosophy, wondering how to put two belief systems into comparison without simply resorting to impressionistic observations of the sort, 'This sounds like that', and without favoring one of the systems over the other in the comparison. Lloyd focuses on medicine, which perhaps lends itself more easily to comparison than philosophy as a whole, a field so nebulous, with a denotation so unstable, that one must always wonder whether one is talking about the same thing from one century to the next, let alone from one civilization to the next."

"I'm more convinced than ever that to the extent that academic philosophers stay in the village of European ideas, they are really only, to paraphrase Nietzsche, offering up a catalog of their own prejudices in the guise of philosophical arguments."
wadepage  history  indo-europeanhistory  philosophy  crossdisciplinary  interdisciplinary  interdisciplinarity  curiosity  specialization  asianstudies  indology  via:robinsonmeyer  2012  ignorance  notknowing  knowing  knowledge  research  southasia  eurocentrism  justinehsmith  india  specialists  generalists  bias  academia  from delicious
august 2012 by robertogreco
Amazon Kindle: A Highlight and Note from Howards End
"It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it. When their poets over here try to celebrate bigness they are dead at once, and naturally."
via:robinsonmeyer  influence  local  size  howardsend  scale  slow  big  small  emforster  from delicious
may 2012 by robertogreco
A Sontag Sampler -
["Art is Boring"]

"Maybe art has to be boring, now… We should not expect art to entertain or divert anymore. At least, not high art. Boredom is a function of attention. We are learning new modes of attention — say, favoring the ear more than the eye — but so long as we work within the old attention-frame we find X boring ... e.g. listening for sense rather than sound…

If we become bored, we should ask if we are operating in the right frame of attention."

["On Intelligence"]


["Why I Write"]

"There is no one right way to experience what I’ve written.


attention  glvo  opinions  understanding  wisdom  life  sharing  conversation  humanism  intelligence  thinking  writing  obsession  love  art  boredom  susansontag  via:robinsonmeyer  from delicious
april 2012 by robertogreco

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