January 2011
30 posts
Every Single Song On Boys For Pele Covered By... →
OMG. This is every interest I have rolled into one: bedrooms, networks, technology, identity, affect, and 1996.
On this day fifteen years ago, Tori Amos released Boys For Pele, a harpsichord-driven ride through a world where everything is severely off-kilter and people express emotion by saying things like “tuna rubber, a little blubber in my igloo.” It’s a love/hate sort of album. As a...
Last night, N and I met my school friend Allie for Sherry Turkle’s talk at Town Hall. I love Town Hall, especially in the winter. I love its grand draftiness and never quite right temperatures. I love the aging regulars who are interested to hear talks about interesting topics (this is such the opposite of academe), and I love hearing a well-executed public speech.
Sherry Turkle is, well...
I will tell you, my distant and imagined, though not terribly powerful writing beef is with Chuck Klosterman’s books. Not the man, who is seemingly kind and reasonable, but the place his books hold. And that there is not a girl Klosterman, culturally. And so many girls are reading the and Cocoa Puffs book at bus stops. And that he is the pentultimate in contemporary music writing and...
things to do when you don't know what to do with...
go on a hike
get drunk
post a lot to serious ladies
clean the house
watch basketball
go back to work on your dissertation
“You may recall that for instance the natural language recognition started out as...”
– Interview with Sandy Stone
"Why would a library discard books?" →
After consulting with the SBCC faculty who teach in the various disciplines, librarians look carefully at the collection, sometimes as books come to our attention, or by looking at sections of the library on certain topics. They look for certain criteria, such as how often a book is checked out, or does a book have an index, or are there other copies of the same book already on the...
“Alcohol, however, is the drug of choice for the indie community. But why Red...”
– Ask the indie professor: Why do so many bands drink Red Stripe?
Brand identities and race and class, duh. Why are Brits able to talk about this with some degree of self-awareness?
“…the regularly hidden-in-plain-sight politically engaged work - perhaps most...”
– Gregory J. Seigworth & Melissa Gregg (2010). “An Inventory of Shimmers” in The Affect Theory Reader, M. Gregg & G.J. Seigworth (eds.). Durham: Duke University Press. (via fugitivesound)
angry paragraph deleted from dissertation
“Although Two kinds of Power gives us some solid arguments for why indexing is an important object of study and a complex process to be examined, its snide tone and general certainty about ways of knowing make one wonder if Wilson was one of the densest to emerge from Berkley in 1968. Although Wilson was touted as a philosopher and intellectual, his work was unremarked on outside of the...
So I was in this weird little bookstore that I patronize somewhat regularly in order to buy film books and British Tabloids. It’s run by this kooky old woman who has a bunch of photos of herself 20-30 years ago in the company of Elizabeth Taylor, Larry Hagman, and the like tacked on the wall. I don’t know her story but feel like I’ll hear it sooner or later.
Anyways, I went in...
Can someone tell me if there is a theoretical term for wanting or longing for (however briefly) things you see in photos or films, and specifically, wanting to go and buy them in that specific setting? I have a rather chronic condition.
I have a copy of “Stores of the Year, 1979” which kind of aggravated my condition. In it, racks and racks of Orange Desco cookware, Snoopy branded...
I just got grumpy thinking about how they reconfigured the network files on my school/work computer, which now makes it impossible to listen to my iTunes while I have Freedom on. Sighing, realizing I have to now charge my phone before going to the office (on a Sunday). Then I remembered the days before internet radio, before any of that, when I used to bring my walkman to the school computer lab...
“This feels arbitrary, like taking a piece of wood and wrapping it in paper.”
– Silly NYT article about novelty bookbindings.
a pretty awesome library director's obit
“He brought together obscure legal, historical, political and cultural sources that enabled researchers to have the most cross-disciplinary, in-depth framework within which to study legal issues,” said Eric M. Freedman, a professor of constitutional law at Hofstra University.
“To do a legal article, you can’t confine yourself to court decisions,” Professor Freedman continued. “Like...
