Start Your School Year Right, Read Some Marx.

Nate and some other fellars are reading themselves some Marx – I would certainly like to pitch in, but I’m a bit slow on the technological side of the matter and I’m not sure who and how will follow all the posts on all the blogs, if someone can give me a hand, I’d be [...]

Read Full Post »

Preposterous!

It has been suggested to me that I am in fact this guy (picture below) – impossible! I would never, I tell you, never!

Read Full Post »

Aesthetics Research Group

An interesting resource: The Aesthetics Research Group at the University of Kent is pleased to make public its archive of recorded lectures in aesthetics: http://www.kent.ac.uk/arts/hpa/aestheticsresearchgroup/materialsarchive.html The archive includes audio and video recordings of research talks given by Noël Carroll, Howard Caygill, Gregory Currie, David Davies, Susan Dwyer, Jonathan Friday, Andrew Kania, Jerrold Levinson, Patrick Maynard, [...]

Read Full Post »

Liquid Books: The Post-Corporate University

As I noted here, an interesting online experiment is currently taking place. Entitled The Post-Corporate University (Edited and curated by Davin Heckman), it is the second volume in Culture Machine’s Liquid Books series. The volume is available now online and is open for discussion, contributions and open collaboration. The first chapter, “Neo-liberal Arts and the [...]

Read Full Post »

BBC Proms: More Shostakovich

Having done 11th with Bychkov the other day, BBC Proms gives us 8th symphony (it’ll be available for 7 days to listen online here), conducted by Valery Gergiev – this symphony was written in 1943 – again, you might skip the pre-symphony chatter (annoying Russian lady that ends every sentence with “ya?” and all, but [...]

Read Full Post »

BBC Proms: Bychkov Conducts Shostakovich’s Eleventh

If you skip all that chatter (symphony begins around minute 13) in the beginning (all that bullshit about how Shostakovich was really a secret anti-Soviet rebel, sneakily writing music about 1905 but in fact criticizing Soviet system without, however, really leaving any evidence of that), this is a great version of Shostakovich’s 11th symphony.

Read Full Post »

Hyperbole, Zizek and Israeli Politics

UPDATE: As Hjalmar notes below, this is from the Guardian website referring to the original op-ed: This article was amended on 20 August 2009. The online version originally referred to “Palestinian-frei”, while the print version had been edited to say “Palestinian-free”. This editing change should have been applied to the online version.  [As I've been [...]

Read Full Post »

This Class Is Brought To You By Matress King.

This was bound to happen – when a smart administrator is looking for extra-cash, they’re bound to find it. Let’s face it, we already have a name plaque on everything that can be sold anyway.  So if you are teaching a class with a donor’s name on the door, why not have a donor for [...]

Read Full Post »

I Like My Physics Like I Like My Opera.

Weird, that is. I saw this in SEED: Since writing a bestselling book on her fascinating and complex extra-dimensional theory of the universe, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall has been busy re-imagining it as an appropriately cerebral art form—opera. After three years of development, Hypermusic Prologue: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes premiered at Paris’s prestigious [...]

Read Full Post »

Another Boring Post: New Book of Interest, Law in Crisis

Description: Taking natural disaster as the political and legal norm is uncommon. Taking a person who has become unstable and irrational during a disaster as the starting point for legal analysis is equally uncommon. Nonetheless, in Law in Crisis Ruth Miller makes the unsettling case that the law demands an ecstatic subject and that natural [...]

Read Full Post »