I have been slow to blog about the death of Jacques Derrida. He wasn’t as formative an influence on me as he was on others, but his essay "Freud and the Scene of Writing," together with the text it comments on, Freud’s "A Note on the Mystic Writing Pad," helped shape key parts of my […]
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Amanda
Because sometimes you need some eye/ear/tastebud candy… For the eyes: Zoom Quilt (how did they do that? — via things magazine); Balnea, a virtual museum of sea-bathing (via Ramage, which I can’t believe I didn’t discover earlier) For the ears: the jazzy Brazilian French Japanese Italian noirish lounge stylings of Pink Martini. Their cover of […]
Via Professor Dyke: Post three of your… Pet Peeves: 1) Double doors with one door locked for no apparent reason. (Why? Why? Why?) 2) The mixture of fear and disdain with which some people regard public transportation. 3) Microsoft frelling Word. AAAAARGH. (Insert stream of curses here.) Favorite Sounds: 1) An orchestra tuning up before […]
Here follows an announcement from Anya Kamenetz, author of the Village Voice article “Wanted: Really Smart Suckers,” about which I blogged some time back. She’s looking for graduate students to interview for an upcoming book. I’m posting the announcement she sent me in case any of you who come here for the postacademic commentary are […]
JibJab.com has reduced me to helpless laughter. See especially "Good to be in D.C." I especially liked the parody of the vice-presidential debate. (Linked to by a variety of people, but I somehow managed not to go there and watch the movies until now. Bwah!)
Dear women’s shoe industry as an aggregate, Perhaps you can explain something to me. When I look for new shoes, I nearly always come away empty-handed. My standard shoe-shopping experience goes something like this once I’ve located a pair of shoes and tried them on: – 85% of the time, they don’t fit my feet. […]
Today I helped someone track down information about a University of Virginia alumnus who came here in the 1850s and who was known by his middle name, which, of course, wasn’t listed in full in the University catalogues. But after much searching I found him nonetheless. By the time I was done answering that question, […]
The Science of Music: an exhibit from the Exploratorium. Covering such eternal questions as why everyone sings better in the shower, why your voice sounds freakishly weird on tape, and what makes a song become an earworm. Also, I spent an inordinate amount of time playing with the Dot Mixer. (Via the Scout Report.) The […]
Am not going to post at length on the first presidential debate. It’s past my bedtime already. Must catch up on sleep. However, I have to say that my good mood from watching Kerry mop the floor with Bush was perfectly capped off by watching the commentators on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart fling […]
Via Arts & Letters Daily, a long essay in praise of the essay form in its circuitous truth-seeking glory, from which this struck me: The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn’t do this out of frivolity. The path it has […]