There is no limit to how high John Jack can count.Speaking of intra-Yalien affairs, Rob, like Bluto, has alcohol-related advice for the undergraduat...
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Fun with nuns
From Postmodern Heretics, which one kind soul sent me for my very merry un-birthday, a description of an interview Bill Moyers did with Sister Wendy:. . . Moyers presses on, asking whether she was offended by "Piss Christ," a work which, he claims, "denigrates the central figure...
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
"The Pentecostal Home for Flying Children"
I'm preoccupied with longer pieces for today, so why don't you compensate for my blog neglect by picking up the latest Oxford American? To hook you, the first three paragraphs of "The Pentecostal Home for Flying Children":In 1984, Shreveport was experiencing turbulent race...
Monday, July 28, 2008
Tobacco: More powerful than capitalism?
Matt Yglesias thinks he has landed a blow against McCain over his newfound opposition to higher sin taxes on cigarettes:. . . has McCain flip-flopped on any issues? Yes:McCain now opposes sin taxes on cigarettes. He said he worries that Congress would put the additional money...
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Is there already a Bloggers Anonymous? I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
Mona over at Art of the Possible thinks that Alcoholics Anonymous's "higher power" rhetoric makes it illegitimate for courts to require that alcoholics attend AA meetings:If you or a loved one had a problem with: alcohol, narcotics, gambling, overeating, spending or any of the...
Themed blogwatch: Pop music and localism
Three men. Three links. Three arguments brought to bear on the idea that rock music should be tied more closely to place.Nick throws out this Pitchfork interview with the co-foundeds of Sub Pop:Coming out to Olympia and plugging into KAOS was a huge shift for me, because...
Friday, July 25, 2008
If blogwatching is wrong, I don't want to be right.
A few quick hits:1. REACTIONARIES AND FORMALISTS, TOGETHER AT LAST!: This column on the vinyl LP is worth reading all the way through, but you gotta let these two sentences into your life:Maybe it’s because current methods of listening aren’t cutting it that I’ve started buying...
"Base slave, did I ask you that?"
An interesting take on Coriolanus from Eurozine (almost as interesting as Dara's "McCain of Corioles" and Nicki's wonderfully sprawling riff on Greek maxims from "You shall not sin against philosophy twice" to "When life gives you hemlock, make hemlockade"):To Virgilia, her...
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Get down off that pillar! I want to photograph your outfit.
The China Beat links to a street-fashion blog called Stylites in Beijing. I thought for a brief, shining moment that they were talking about this kind of styli...
Return of the Son Daughter of Gender Theory
Martha weighs in on the comments thread that wouldn't die:Just stumbled upon this - fascinating. If you don't mind, Helen, I'd like clarification on just a couple points. 1) Enforcing femininity. I think anonymous has a point here. If it is, as you say, ambiguous ("flexible...
Oscar Wilde hits the Balkans
Apparently:As a fuller picture emerged of his life as a fugitive, one person who was more shocked than most was the Belgrade writer Mirjana Djurdjevic, who found life imitating her fiction.In her novel The First, Second and Third Man Djurdjevic put one of the most wanted men...
If there's a Constitution on the wall in the first act...
Something I mentioned in a previous post but never quite backed up: Americans don't really care about the letter of the law. Ta-Nehisi Coates pillories Larry Craig but gives John Edwards a pass because Craig was arrested on a misdemeanor? Visceral hostility towards the large...
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Our love is God, let's go get a Slushie.
Turns out I'm not the only one chomping at the bit for any excuse to talk about Heathers: the powers that be have jumped the gun on its anniversary to release a twentieth-but-if-you-actually-count-it-only-nineteenth anniversary DVD edition. It's two decades later and the romantic...
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
What does he care if the world's got troubles? What does he care if the land ain't free?
The intersection of music and localism is a horse I ride pretty frequently, so it's nice to see someone else do it from time to time. In this case, it's the boys from M for Musicology:The most surprising of the lot for me is by David Z. Kushner, about debates and policies in...
Friday, July 18, 2008
The authenticity-watchman state
I promised myself no more posting about gender until I finished my homework, but maybe just this one:The idea of the ‘bad girl’ has long been linked to deviance, particularly criminal and ‘unacceptable’ sexual behaviour. Embedded in a diversity of discourses, popular culture,...
You can't out-Left the Left
It's always news when someone talks sense about the higher education culture wars, but there are two especially noteworthy things about this post from Duke music professor Robert Zimmerman. (I would make a joke, but I bet he gets them all the time.)The first is the phrase "academic...
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Quote of the week
This story reminds me of a party I went to back in my high school days. I was bored to tears, but embarrassed to leave early. “If only I were a solipsist,” I remember thinking, “I could just leave.” After thinking about that for a minute, I had a second thought: “I can still...
"Our kitchen is narrow, like our views on gender."
The mind behind Books Do Furnish A Room has taken a sledgehammer to my gender theory and I am eager to refute him, but it's going to take a day or two. Until then, I can only offer him a tip of the hat as I link to the Sugarbutch Chronicles.It may be surprising to hear an arch-conservative...
How to have an intellectual street-fight in good faith
There's been a lot of discussion about good-faith arguments over here lately, most recently in an anonymous comment here suggesting that I can't complain about a lack of good-faith discussion between liberals and conservatives and defend a clerk who made up a fake law in order...
Monday, July 14, 2008
I haven't been this offended since Torture Chic!
Philip Giraldi on the AmCon blog, quoted in full, emphasis mine:My daughter had an unfortunate experience this weekend near Winchester in Virginia. She and a group of friends were tubing on the Shenandoah River. Nearby a large group of Hispanics were at a public park picnicking,...
A few quick hits
1. What is and isn't wrong with left-wing bias in academia.Nick responds to my cavalcade of embarrassing quotes from liberal professors ("Unlike conservatives, we believe in working for the public good and social justice," etc.) by saying, "[M]y response is: go forth and do...
Shame culture: "Yes, but will it work?"
Kate has some very sage thoughts [UPDATE: So does Dara] on my article in praise of shame culture:Letting aside the obvious protests about the tyranny of the majority, this doesn’t involve the girl in question [a fifteen-year-old who was given a hard time by a convenience store...
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Don Giovanni: Third-wave feminist?
Don Giovanni as a political figure: In 1787 the Don represented a triumphant sound of liberty. In the great closing chorus of act 1, in which a dance of deception is performed, the aria is "Viva la liberta!" which is in fact an exploitation of peasant innocence by a dissolute...
How to write a letter to a Maoist director, if you must
To what do we owe this new flare-up of interest in Jean-Luc Godard? Surely the publication of Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by the New Yorker's Richard Brody, and surely we should thank him for the opportunity to revisit the differences between leftist...
Bookbag
. . . a word does not remain its speaker's possession; he to whom it is addressed, he who hears it, or acquires it by chance--they all get a share of it; the word's fate, while in their possession, is more fate-ful than what its original speaker experienced when first uttering...
Respect: The hottest girl-on-girl action of all
They tell you not to blog angry, so I left this NYT book review alone for a few hours, had lunch, went to the movies, drank some bourbon, had dinner, played a few records, and then came back to it. It was still awful:Save the Males is one of two new books, each of them arresting,...
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Elseblogging
[TakiMag]: I'm in your online magazine, posting about my obsessions.Noah K.'s invisible hat tip is in the ma...
STEP ONE: Spit on hands. STEP TWO: Hoist black flag. STEP THREE: ...
KC Johnson's old article on left-wing bias in higher education is getting some replay in the wake of a scandal over the apparently misquoted statement of a Duke department head. (What he didn't say: “No. We don’t hire Republicans because they are stupid and we are not. Why...
It wasn't the German gin. It was the pack of Marlboros!
From the comments on a story about tobacco on film:Has anyone ever left a movie theater saying, "Gee, there should have been more smoking in that?" Of course not.Not so fast.I think the anti-smoking people don't get that Hollywood could be a valuable ally. If they wanted to...
Friday, July 11, 2008
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Of all the Eve Tushnets known to me, Gnomic Eve is certainly a favorite. I know I'm outside the concensus on this one--"All life is a choice of genre? Woman, we have told you before what happens when you smoke the crack rock..."--but lay this one on your turntable:TRADITIONALISM...
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Schwenkwatch
All the cool kids, they write for Doublethink:What is perhaps strangest of all, though, is Taibbi’s understanding of the role that the mass media have played in the rise of this (exaggerated, as we have seen) cultural chaos. He writes of the unwillingness of newscasters and...
In-credibility!
Ta-Nehisi Coates:I think Barack gets leeway to speak the way he does about race because, to put it bluntly, he knows what he's talking about. I mean this in a very specific personal way. For instance, you can talk about Lil Wayne, when you have Jay-Z on your Ipod, when Nas has...
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
What color is your journalism?
"Oh, I know all about reporters. A lot of daffy buttinskis running around without a nickel in their pockets, and for what? So a million hired girls and motormen's wives'll know what's going on?"Objective journalism has been under attack on both sides of the pond this week, by...
Competing narratives of the conservative movement's succes.
I'm over at the Flaming Libs blog defending the conservative movement against the accusation that, if conservatives hadn't engaged in things like race-baiting, they'd have about as much political muscle as Trotskyism do...
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled...
. . . was convincing the world he was a Southerner. Ryan Avent should remember that there are advantages to having people assume you're an idi...
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
"I don't care if you burn."
Via ELT, Japanese tobacco etiquette, ranging from the surreal......to the equally surreal.This is my favorite: Gotta catch 'em a...
Yanqui stay home!
Somewhere in Helen & [REDACTED]'s whirlwind tour of the DC blogosphere's best liquor cabinets (I'd like to thank all our sponsors), I managed to slip off to yesterday's Grand New Party publicity event at AEI.* I walked away with several questions, the most pressing of which...
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Výborně, Švejk!
Nicola on undergraduates in right-wing drag:There are two ways to wear a bow-tie or a tweed jacket: as if it is the most natural thing in the world, or as a deliberate and self-conscious bit of drag. The problem is that there are very few people today for whom bow-ties and tweed...
Who would make a better sheriff: Joan Crawford, George Bush, or Aaron Sorkin?
If making a genre film means hewing to stylistic and thematic conventions, then the western is the genre man's genre. Its conventions are more restrictive than those of, say, noir, which means that riffing on them is harder and therefore more likely to be awesome, in a low...
Thursday, July 3, 2008
You take the high road and I'll take the low road
I neglected to link to my Takimag piece on local solutions to illegal immigration. The bottom line of it is, if we take it as a given that a national solution to immigration is at least a few years off, we have four options: let sanctuary cities extend certain privileges of...
High Fidelity meme: Three "top fives"
Noah has tagged everybody with the High Fidelity meme, but I know better than to try and pick my top five rock songs of all time. In the spirit of Rob Gordon, let's narrow it down.TOP FIVE SONGS ABOUT THE MAN OR WOMAN YOU LOVE MARRYING SOMEONE ELSE1.) "Invitation to Cry," the...
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