February 28 08
Good Satire, which is difficult to achieve, is biting, directed, and clear. Poor Satire merely offends all parties.Case in Point: The Torontoist’s published article on renaming streets for dead soldiers, by Christopher Bird. Join in the discussion on whether making fun of dead people is in poor taste or not. Some [...]
January 23 08
Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (1945).
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with [...]
January 15 08
Dana Gioia, “California Hills in August” (1982).
I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.
An Easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral — a landscape
August has already [...]
August 28 07
Presented today, as a brief lesson in elementary Saussurian structuralism, and post-structuralism, is an excerpt from Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel, Il Nome Della Rosa (tr: The Name of The Rose, 1983). Any semiotician or Eco-fan will be familiar with the text, and with the excerpt, as it is one of any number of pages from [...]
August 25 07
As if we needed another link to justify oour use of the internet, what with the incredible amount of internet banking, monster.com job-hunting, google calendaring and flickr photosharing we do, I present today a small but wondrous hip-hop-ified rendition of William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud“.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXbrSALG684]
Re-interpreted as a short rap as part of [...]
August 17 07
This is an addendum to a post I began last week on the enthusiasm inherent in postmodernism, as explicated by Linda Hutcheon in her Poetics of Postmodernism (1988). In this, another long excerpt, Hutcheon explains what “meaning” in a postmodern world (that is, in our systems, our philosophies, our politics, our art forms, etc) [...]
August 11 07
There is a lesson at hand today, on the nature of post-modernism and its place in society today. It is not so much a lecture as it is a reminder of some important words written by Linda Hutcheon in 1988. [Recent talk on pomo has kick-started my summer studies into high gear, it [...]
June 4 07
W.G. Sebald is known for his unique narrative style, and his untimely death. The German emigré to the UK died in a car accident in December, 2001, not long after the publication of his last novel, Austerlitz. The academic-turned-writer wrote in his original German tongue, but found fame in several languages, largely on the [...]
November 5 06
Adaptation
1. The action or process of adapting, fitting, or suiting one thing to another.
1610 HEALEY St. Aug., City of God 743 They..made a very ingenious adaptation of the one to the other. 1646 SIR T. BROWNE Pseud. Ep. III. xi. 130 A commixtion of both in the whole rather than an adaptation or cement of [...]
February 26 04
I found this file on my desktop the other day. It was the beginning of an entry I had started a long time ago, I think in November, but dropped, as it was time to head home and prepare some dinner. It is nonetheless an interesting little note about a book I will [...]