University of Chicago / Your Mom

Andrea Walker, "Chicago, Where Fun Comes to Die":

The U. of C. is known for serious thinking combined with a sarcastic, self-deprecating sense of humor that always amused me when displayed on undergraduate T-shirts. These described the school as “The level of hell Dante forgot,” “The place where fun comes to die,” and “The University of Chicago: if it was easy it would be…your mom.” Though my new favorite has to be “The University of Chicago: where the only thing that goes down on you is your GPA.”

(From The Book Bench.)

Adventures in Paleoblogging

Clusterflock's skeleton crew has some nice nineteenth-century stuff this weekend:

• First Barbary War (May 1801-1805)


• First edition of Byron's Don Juan


• Dandyism


• Tabloid write-up of Richard Wagner's affair with Franz Liszt's daughter Cosima


• Blogging about Van Gogh


• Dancing "the German"


• William Carlos Williams's Birth Announcement


• 1883 Dinner Menus from the New American Hotel


• Gayetti's Medicated Paper for the Water-Closet


• My favorite -- pictures of the first postage stamp used for the penny post in the UK


• Victorian Pornography

And many more!

Papa's Got A Brand New Bag

File under: "Why didn't you just Twitter this, again?" I've been shopping for a laptop bag as we speak, so I am 100% primed for this, but I still love Lifehacker's "What's In Our Bags" series. Gina Trapani just posted her bag + contents, shouting-out a bagufacturer I'd never heard of, and an awesome idea I'd never thought of -- headphone splitters so two people can watch a movie on a plane or train!

Me, I keep insane junk in my bag -- whatever the Bookstore was selling the day my old whatever the Bookstore was selling up and quit on me -- for way too long -- receipts and airplane stubs, books and student papers (oops), pens in zippered components that don't even work (the pens, not the zippers). The only constant companion is laptop plus plug. Even then, sometimes I discover (as I did on a trip to central NY for a job talk) that there's a scone from Au Bon Pain where my plug should be.

But I wish, nay long for, a genuine system! And the Lifehacker folks actually seem to have one!

It's also positive proof that the dematerialization thesis (you know, the idea that objects themselves don't matter, everything is up in the cloud, etc.) is bunk at worst, needs to be qualified at best. We just pretend that matter doesn't matter, until you can't get your Prezi on the screen 'cause you forgot your DVI-VGA thingy, if you ever even took it out of the box in the first place.

Here are people living the life digitale to the fullest, and what do they do? Schlep their stuff around in a bag, just like us jerks. And when they have a good idea, do they whip out their magic pen-with-a-microphone for instant digitalization? Only if they're jotting it down on a 99-cent spiral notebook. All this is very reassuring to me.

It Was Citizen Kane

This Kids in the Hall sketch has come up twice in conversation this week. I consider it, like the film that gives it its name, essential viewing. Enjoy.

In This Civil War Reconstruction, The Union Has Dinosaurs

I like this so much. From io9.com:

The attraction, called "Professor Cline's Dinosaur Kingdom," imagines a lost chapter from Civil War history. It supposes that in 1863, a group of paleontologists inadvertently stumbled upon a valley of live dinosaurs. The discovery comes to the attention of the Union Army, who, recognizing the destructive power of the giant lizards, decide to capture them and unleash them on the Confederate Army. Naturally, it results in Jurassic Park-inspired carnage.

H/t to friend (and former student) Drea Nelson.

I Always Wanted To Live In A Knights Templar's Castle

If only I had 6 million EUR lying around:

Château de La Jarthe was once a refuge for the Order of the Knights Templar, the secretive Christian military order that once wreaked havoc in the region.

Located on 120 hectares (297 acres) in the Dordogne near Périgueux, the restored castle offers many of the amenities buyers might expect in a 12th-century castle ruled by the order, including a chapel, massive fireplaces, stained glass windows and a 102-square-meter (1,098-square-foot) gathering hall known as the Knights Room. Many of the original medieval features remain, such as flagstone beamed ceilings, hand-carved wood details and an old granary.

Exactly what havoc did the KTs supposedly wreak in France? In and around Jerusalem, sure -- but in France, they mostly got slapped around by King Philip. Unless I'm mistaken.

Frühling Für Hitler Und Vaterland

A German adaptation of Mel Brooks's The Producers opens in Berlin.

A Fembot Living in A Manbot's Manputer's World

Goodbye, Bea Arthur:

Futurama	Weeknights, 9p/8c
Fembot
comedycentral.com
Joke of the Day Stand-Up Comedy Free Online Games

Golden Girls Lebanese? Lesbian?
Uploaded by AllisonSNLKid

The Simplest Of Weekends

Wyatt Mason on outdoor springtime reading Leaves of Grass (the 1855 edition): "Not least of the pleasures of reading outside is one of the most prosaic: the light's really good."

What's Still In The Inbox

Some people keep tabs open in their browser for days or weeks; I keep them open in my well-loved RSS reader NetNewsWire. (NNW doubles as a browser; I almost certainly do more READING of web content there than in Firefox.)

I like it -- it keeps the old stuff next to the new stuff, and puts little pictures of what I want to read or re-read. I usually use MarsEdit to blog stuff, and MarsEdit is really well integrated with NetNewsWire, so it's a good workflow to keep things open that I want to post to Snarkmarket eventually, or to make some other use of. (MarsEdit doesn't play nice with Movable Type 3.2 [edit - but see below], which is why I occasionally have crazy characters in my posts for smart quotes, apostrophes, em-dashes, usw.)

Anyways, like any other workflow, this one gets backed up; I can't think of exactly what I want to say, or (more often) other stuff gets in the way. But I think it's still good to take some time to register the things I'm thinking about, because you might want to think about them too. Here's what's still in my inbox.

• if:book, "design and dasein: heidegger against the birkerts argument." E-book readers and phenomenology? Content, thy name is Carmody. Disappointingly, author Dan Piepenbring hasn't actually read a lot of Heidegger, so the argument is a little underdeveloped (check my comment down the thread). I really want to blog about this, but I also wanted effectively to remake the whole idea from scratch, and I don't have the time right now to do that.


• CFP for Wordless Modernism at MSA 11. Academic CFP listservs come in RSS form now! This is so, so sweet. So is the CFP here: "If, as W.J.T. Mitchell has argued, the 'linguistic turn' of the early twentieth century took place alongside a concomitant 'pictorial turn,' how does this change the way we approach modernism’s engagement with visual media and theories of sensation?" See also “Film Grammar and Literary Modernism”. If I can't get a paper in Montreal this year, I need to hang it up.


• Two other cool CFPs: Multiple Perspectives on Collecting and the Collection (for a Spanish-English journal -- I may submit something from my chapter on Borges, Melville, and Citizen Kane) and Re-viewing Black Mountain College, for a conference at the BMC museum.


• "Beyond Life Hacks: Reusable Solutions to Common Productivity Problems." Gina Trapani is so, so good. I look at this fight-procrastination guide every day now, trying to read it first thing in the morning.


• "Gabriel García Márquez, literary giant, lays down his pen." In 2005, García Márquez didn't write a line. There probably won't be any new books in his lifetime. (PS: Go read One Hundred Years Of Solitude. Just do it. I won't tell anyone you haven't yet.)


• Clement Greenberg at 100. "I’m so excited. I’m one of the few graduate students who will be presenting at a centennial symposium looking back to the life and work of the legendary Clement Greenberg. (So my name isn’t listed yet on the official publicity, and that’s all right. I haven’t paid enough dues yet to warrant headlining status. Rosalind Krauss and Thierry de Duve, Luke Menand and Serge Guilbaut have)." I wonder how this conference went?


• Diana Kimball drops this perfect quote from Bruno Latour:
  

  In politics as in science, when someone is said to ‘master’ a question or to ‘dominate’ a subject, you should normally look for the flat surface that enables mastery (a map, a list, a file, a census, the wall of a gallery, a card-index, a repertory); and you will find it.



• Wyatt Mason on Proust and Nabokov. I've really been loving Pale Fire lately.


• Jason Kottke, "Gairville." A Brooklyn neighborhood (now Dumbo) once named for the guy (Robert Gair) who invented the modern cardboard box. Jason's interested in the neighborhood; I'm interested in the boxes.


• "Obama Offers Plan to Improve Care for Veterans." Electronic records come to the VA. I want to write a post called "In Praise of Bureaucrats," about how "bureaucracy" has such a mixed meaning as an insult/complaint (meaning both robotic impersonality and feudalist inefficiency) and how much really good information science (and scientists) could improve, um, everything. Not a new liberal art as such, but maybe the new engineering.


• "Substance and Style" (on Wes Anderson). Watched The Royal Tenenbaums the other day, and thought a lot about the subtleties of the writing, especially for Royal.
  

  Royal: Can I see my grandsons?
  Chas: Why?
  Royal: Because I finally want to meet them.

  
  That little inversion -- "finally want to," instead of the expected "want to finally" -- which could (almost) be unintentional -- tells you so much about Royal. Nine out of ten phrases are like that.

Now, to fill up the tabs again.

Thousand-Dollar Steampunk Idea

Teletwitter (or "Twittergraph"): A multiplatform twitter client that pounds out received tweets like an oldtimey telegraph/teletype machine. Morse code optional. Also sheds punctuation formats in telegram style & replaces period with STOP

You Can't Trust A Man What's Made Of Gas

"The Craziest Space Racists Of All Time" at io9.com offers a decent overview of allegories of race and racism in science fiction -- although apparently racism magically enters sci fi only when it's conscious, explicit, and denounced -- but its real value is its citation of the great Mr Show sketch "Racist in the Year 3000":

Paul Krugman Channels Woody Allen

Blogging for the NYT is a little like writing/directing your own movie:

Via Mark Thoma, Anatole Kaletsky writes:

Smith, Ricardo and Keynes produced no mathematical models.

Now, I have Marshall McLuhan John Maynard Keynes right here. Let’s ask him:

Let Z be the aggregate supply price of the output from employing N men, the relationship between Z and N being written Z = φ(N), which can be called the aggregate supply function. Similarly, let D be the proceeds which entrepreneurs expect to receive from the employment of N men, the relationship between D and N being written D = f(N), which can be called the aggregate demand function...

Legit Money, Printing Paper

Idris Elba, best known for playing Stringer Bell in seasons 1-3 of The Wire, is now playing Charles Minor, Michael's new boss on The Office. (Which, when you think of it, if David Simon had ever gotten around to telling the story of put-upon postmillennial office workers in America, is essentially the same story.)

Part of Stringer's conceit on The Wire is that he wants to turn drug dealing into a modern business. He wants even his front businesses to run well. But it's still dissonant, to say the least, to watch this Baltimore man-god walk among the paper salesmen in Scranton. Rex and the commenters at Fimoculous cracked me up.

Rex: Yeah, that totally threw me too: Stringer Bell on The Office last night...

kittyholmes: I guess he's finally using all those business classes.

jed: Well, he did run the copy shop.

Rex: HAHAHAHAH!

True.

Papier Collé

Jonathan Hoefler on the beauty of collage: Vaughan Oliver (designer for The Pixies et al.), Shinro Ohtake, Eduardo Recife, Chip Kidd, and more.

Above: Joseph Cornell, Untitled Collage.

How You Really Cope

A program from Penn's Career Services:

Coping with the Stress of Conducting a Job Search in a Bad Economy While Also Finishing a PhD, an M.A. or a Postdoc

Thursday, Feb. 26, noon-1:30
Houston Hall, Ben Franklin Room

In this workshop Meeta Kumar, Associate Director, Counseling and Psychological Services will discuss dealing with uncertainty and the stress it causes those in advanced degree programs -- particularly those in research-focused programs -- as well as strategies on coping. Julie Vick, Senior Associate Director, Career Services will give some tips on conducting a job search in a challenging economy.

Sign-ups are not required. Feel free to bring your lunch.

Yes! A seminar encouraging stress eating! I can weep, rend my clothing, and munch on off-brand Cheetos at the same time. (These are not name-brand Cheetos times.) Couldn't they at least spring for pizza?

How To Write A Thank You Note

"Get Fuzzy," 2/8/09:

Ars Amatoria

I have a soft spot for Nerve's "Dating Advice From..." column, especially when it's advice from nerds. This week it's "classics majors." Why not "classicists"? Apparently, actual classicists date no one.

Anyways, it's filled with bad Mel Brooks-style jokes -- "Is that a scroll under your toga or are you just happy to see me?" could only be salvaged if it were made extra-nerdy ("Senator, is that a hardwood scroll under your tunica laticlavia, or is this symposium turning into an orgy?").

But some of them are actually pretty good, especially from the people who seem to remember their reading. Bekah, 27, looks to Ovid: "Although some of his moves are a little creepy, at least he has suggestions on what to do while watching gladiators. Hint: pretend her skirt is dirty, bend down to pick it up, then take a peak at her goods. If she doesn't slap you, you're in." And my favorite is Alex, 22:

What has being a Classics major taught you about dating?
Probably that some people are meant to be together. There's a story in the Theogony about it. Pretty touching, romantic stuff. Oh, and that women are evil and to be careful of their tricks.

Yes, I've always felt that The Odyssey was more of a how-to than anything else. That's why whenever I go anywhere where I might be tempted to do something I shouldn't, I bring binding rope, wax for my ears, and a crew of stout sailors to bind me to the mast of our ship. It's cut my nacho consumption by at least one third.

My Boy

September 1986/2008.

A Saltier Metaphor

Thomas Friedman:

Obama can’t wait until Jan. 20 to weigh in on this. If we don’t stimulate the global economy fast enough and big enough, some of Obama’s inaugural balls might be held in soup kitchens.