For all their enthusiasm for transportation alternatives, liberal bloggers have certainly made commuting by bicycle sound awful. I've never nearly run over a former senator nor knocked out my leg muscles biking to work; maybe it's a DC thi...
Friday, April 25, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Concerned Citizens Against Discarnate Commentary
Housemate Dara would like to endorse pie:As someone whose two main fields of study are performance and civil society, I find the consensus in this country that the only acceptable public action is speech to be incredibly disturbing. Pieing someone in the face doesn’t meaningfully...
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Girl Gone Wilde
I found this quote at the beginning of my research but didn't flag it, so I didn't manage to work it into the final product; I rediscovered it this morning. From the Letters:The name one gives to one's work, poem or picture, is the last survival of the Greek Chor...
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Agrarianism vs. Urbanism (again)
The trade economy of the city, with its merchants and entrepreneurs, its delegations of labour and responsibility, has always been treated by those who dislike cities as an unnatural practice, a perversion of the "natural" life of an agricultural economy. An "ideal city" would...
A quick thought about George Schuyler's Black No More (1931)
Amazon's summary of George Schuyler's Black No More (a satire about the discovery of a medical treatment that can turn black skin white) claims the book is about "revealing the poison behind the notion of wanting to be something you're not." This makes it sound as if Schuyler...
Tweed for Weed?
Let no man say that the Ivy League is unwelcoming to conservatives: high school seniors visiting Yale for Bulldog Days were greeted yesterday by a conservative protest of the drug war, Tweed for Weed. The sign on the left, if you can't read it, says "I couldn't protest the...
Monday, April 21, 2008
More on Paul Gottfried's Conservatism in America
Besides "Fear no continental philosophy," the other take-home lesson of Paul Gottfried's new book on American conservatism is that slinging around the word "relativism" with reckless abandon is, at the end of the day, a self-undermining thing for the Right to do:What had to...
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Friedrich Nietzsche is your new penny-farthing.
Dan McCarthy is skeptical that Nietzsche has any place in the Right's pantheon. The Reactionary Epicurean has stepped up to defend Nietzsche's diagnostic accuracy when it comes to the ills of modernity, but is the best we can say for Nietzsche that he failed to be a modernist?...
The Cosby Doctrine and the Eugene Genovese Effect
Matthew Yglesias suggests (like I been sayin') that if the Right wants to embrace black conservatism's conclusions (self-sufficiency for the black community, benign neglect on the part of whites), it really ought to grant its most important premise, that in spite of all of our...
L'Affaire Shvarts III: Only a promise of unhappiness
On the question of whether this is good art: maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but there's a difference between art intended to shock the viewer in the hopes that they'll get over their shock for everyone's greater social good ("Yes, I'm a black man, and yes, I'm dressed as an...
Retaliatory Quote-mongering
Take that, T.R.E.:True teaching can be a terribly dangerous enterprise. The living Master takes into his hands that inmost of his students, the fragile and incendiary matter of their possibilities. He lays hands on what we conceive of as the soul and roots of being, a seizure...
Thursday, April 17, 2008
L'Affaire Shvarts II
I expressed incredulity that pro-choicers could find a reason to be offended by Shvarts's art project, and the obliging Reactionary Epicurean offers three pro-choice points of view that explain why a person might be outraged at Shvarts's abortions but not by others:It seems...
L'Affaire Shvarts
My opinion on the morality of Aliza Shvarts's senior project is exactly what you think it is, but, while she and I aren't friends or even slight acquaintances, in the fall of our freshman year she spent the train ride back from a Blonde Redhead show explaining textual deconstruction...
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Queer History Goes Medieval . . . and Chaste.
Emily Hale thinks that feminism and conservatism can engage in productive dialogue (h/t Nick), and I hope I'm not the only one who feels the same way about conservatism and queer theory. Even apart from the fact that a family-values trad who doesn't know Stonewall from Stonehenge...
Come to think of it, I've never seen Peter Johnston and Cassandra in a room together...
Peter Johnston warns the Right against hopping on the Left's "autonomy" bandwagon. Fear no verbs:. . . liberalism delegitimizes unchosen obligations, thereby problematizing inherited relationships. It then promises to fix the resulting rootlessness by creating a world better...
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Postmodern Urbanism and Russian roulette
Further proof that lots of ideas can be made better by sticking "postmodern" in front of them: Nan Ellin's Postmodern Urbanism. You can probably expect several posts on it in the next few weeks, but here's one.When I tried to sell the Yale Political Union's most cassava-loving...
Whither paleoconservatism?
This scattered post on the future of paleoconservatism is not necessarily meant to be taken in the context of the "Paleo Epitaph" flurry (on which Robert Stacy McCain has, I think, the best take), although it might make sense to put it there insofar as more than a few of us...
Oscar Wilde, Decadence, Catholicism, Conversion, and me, Elizabeth.
Some people have been asking to see the infamous senior essay, so I've edited out some of the less interesting bits and thrown up a version in an archived post. Also, after weeks of antagonism between the two, I'd like my blog and my senior essay to become friends. "Decadence,...
Monday, April 14, 2008
Why it's bad when "choice" is the Left's only choice left.
While I hate to reinforce the idea that all women's issues are coitus-related, the issues of pornography, abortion, and prostitution keep blurring together in the universe of Yale's political dialogue, and to generally good effect. Here's David of the Flaming Libs in response...
More on the high art/low art distinction
A couple quick hits following up on yesterday's post:1. TKB says:I still disagree with your country music thing. I'm obsessive about my music and always look up the lyrics, interpret them, create elaborate scenarios with them, etc. — the vast, vast majority of people don't (even...
Sunday, April 13, 2008
The Weingarten Subway Gambit
So Gene Weingarten has won a prize for being unhappy that Joshua Bell played the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station and no one paid any attention. I wouldn't have a problem with the piece if it simply criticized indifference to art, but Weingarten seems to want to target indifference...
Julia Kristeva, Catherine of Siena, and other frightening women
Enough meta-talk about gender roles and why you should believe that they matter; here's a few lines from Julia Kristeva in The Feminine and the Sacred on what to do once you decide that you do, in fact, care about them. The magic happens in the last five words:Catherine [of...
Do you think Fredo knows smoking those things'll kill him?
For those who doubt that the way you smoke a cigarette can be a form of communication: this clip from The Godfather Part II is a good example of someone doing just that. Pay special attention to Fredo's hands, and how the way he holds his cigarette affects the way you see his...
Friday, April 11, 2008
Writing about architecture is like dancing to music.
The Rat looks and laughs at this guide to university architecture. For a more serious take on the subject, William J. Mitchell:[MIT's Simmons Hall] is not about the comfortable continuity of tradition (specially for those who have been privileged by it), but about transformation...
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Localism, Technology and Quality Rock 'n' Roll—Pick Two
Several members of the Party of the Right crashed the Liberal Party’s discussion last night (“Will Technology Set Us Free?”), and instead of the Left and Right slugging it out, the paleocons, anarchists, and Marxists had a big neo-Luddite love-in.Highlights include:"The cassava...
An Oakeshott across the bow
A quick response to Will's assertion that "there are compelling, non-braindead arguments for defending tradition qua tradition": Yes, But. Both Will and I seem to be trying to come up with a conservatism that allows us to say "You should do X simply because it is traditional,"...
Remember the Heart-Attack Hoyas
Patrick Ewing has made it into the Hall of Fame. Take a minute to revisit the 1982 NCAA championship game in New Orleans, the one in which a Georgetown-UNC clash of the titans (Ewing and Sleepy Floyd vs. James Worthy and freshman Michael Jordan) came down to Fred Brown passing...
Dude, you just got othered!
Adam has a problem with Ted Everhart's YDN op-ed, and he's not the only one. The basic story is that the International Student Organization is planning a bachelor/ette auction called "Wanna Go on an Exotic Date?", and Everhart took umbrage at the use of the word "exotic." ...
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
TYH says that smoking is cool and blogging is cool? Fantastic!
Nicki already pointed you towards the Yale Herald piece about the Yale blogosphere, but, as a master of virtual self-promotion (apparently), I should throw a link in that direction, too. It seems from the first paragraph that I have been responsible for at least one student...
Comparing a man to a horse isn't always flattering...
Does The House Next Door bother to read articles before linking to them? This one on 'Best kid performances from Abigail Breslin to Jodie Foster' includes such gems as4. Josh Hutcherson in “Little Manhattan.”From the moment he first read for us he completely owned the role....
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Post-Mo'Dernity, Mo' Problems: gender roles & tradition, cont'd
Wednesday, cigarette #1The Reactionary Epicurean tries to break up a blogfight, but if you've never seen a man try to step between a catfight, it's about what you'd expect:In the red corner, we have Karras, leading with the "tradition hurts women but that's okay because it does...
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Dinner with Socrates: Me? No.
Tuesday, cigarette #4If you received a dinner invitation from Socrates, would you accept? Best answer from the 'no' pile:AND FURTHERMORE, should he once again ask the flute-girls to leave before the symposium even starts, I want the old gas-bag to know that I shall leave with...
Gin Island: Nice place to vacation, but you wouldn't want to live there...
Tuesday, cigarette #3A Map on Temperan...
Nick Hornby, your check is in the mail.
Tuesday, cigarette #2The idea that taste in books can be a relationship-killer is uncontroversial, but the comments on the much-blogged-about article are the most interesting thing about it:7. I just realized that I have “Fight Club” and “Atlas Shrugged” prominently displayed...
More on Campus Conservatism as Gnostic Cult
Tuesday, cigarette #1If Penn students had been able to recognize the "organizer" of a fake Obama rally as a pseudonym pulled from Ayn Rand, they could have avoided being dup...
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