this journal blug

i'm trying to get a handle on some history over at this journal... not sure where it's going... not sure what it matters

just getting a jump on it... tomorrow's the day... Happy Barfday, Mr. Joyce!!

1882... same year as V. Woolf... just a year younger than Felix... great souls all...

Would You Have Been Drafted to Fight in Vietnam?:

If your number is lower than 196, you would have been drafted.

mine was 116...

reading the title essay of wendell berry's 1969 the long-legged house

Although I have become, among other things, a teacher, I am skeptical of education. It seems to me a most doubtful process, and I think the good of it is taken too much for granted. It is a matter that is overtheorized and overvalued and always approached with too much confidence. It is, as we skeptics are always discovering to our delight, no substitute for experience or life or virtue or devotion. As it is handed out by the schools, it is only theoretically useful, like a randomly mixed handful of seeds caried in one's pocket. When one caries them back to one's own place in the world and plants them, some will prove unfit for the climate or the ground, some are sterile, some are not seeds at all but little clods and bits of gravel. Surprisingly few of them come to anything. There is an incredible waste and clumsiness in most efforts to prepare the young. For me, as a student and as a teacher, there has always been a pressing anxiety between the classroom and the world: how can you get from one to the other except by a blind jump? School is not so pleasant or valuable an experience as it is made out to be in the theorizing and reminiscing of elders. In a sense, it is not an experience at all, but a hiatus in experience.

Lorianne Schaub - Introduction to Zen Meditation

In Zen meditation, there are three main things to pay attention to: body, breath, and mind. (via The Coffee Sutras)

UK Pop Hits

The UK's 950 Number One Hits since 1952, reviewed, in order, irregularly, for as long as I can bear to keep doing it. A history of pop in the shape of a chart. (via Mosses from an Old Manse)

o the presentations are going well... very thought-filled... good connections to woolf's apparent purposes... some very creative graphics and activities... teacher breathes a sigh of relief... here on student appreciation day...

a careful observer will note that i've been doing a lot of random surfing today... yes... i have... the classes are running themselves today putting finishing touches on the projects... so i got some post counting done... and a bit of reading... and some... surfing... here

i think these reptile shots are by my brother... but he never said anything about them being here... we don't talk as much as we might... i need a dinner invitation

Edward Gorey: Those Covers! Paperback Covers

In April 1953, Anchor opened up a new market for paperbacks: the 'serious' or academic book. They were the brainchild of twenty-five year old Jason Epstein who convinced Doubleday of the market need for such books in paper editions particularly suited for college use. Epstein's research so impressed the Doubleday executives that they created such a line and made him editor. The format was the same as the taller mass market size (Signet, Ballantine, etc.), but higher in price: 65? to $1.45. Anchor was well received from the start, reaching a mass audience through trade book outlets, campus bookstores and some drugstores. And they had Edward Gorey in charge of the covers.

o... the other night i got to see on THE SUNDANCE CHANNEL a film by Sherman Alexie called The Business of Fancydancing... and it's a good one... for all the usual reasons that just about anything by mr. alexie is good pretty good excellent or great... i hope you get to see it sometime... (i was reminded of this by laurable's mention of an alexie interview)

and also from plep The Snakes of India... snakes are cool... i remember the snake cameo in Pather Panchali... do you?

i seem to like The Editorial Cartoons of Clay Bennett (via plep)

this appears to be the complete text of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children... i stumbled onto it by googling "parahamsa gander"... boy... i bet this is some kind of illegal... those crafty russians

Heraclitus [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

A Greek philosopher of the late 6th century BCE, Heraclitus criticizes his predecessors and contemporaries for their failure to see the unity in experience. He claims to announce an everlasting Word (Logos) according to which all things are one, in some sense. Opposites are necessary for life, but they are unified in a system of balanced exchanges. The world itself consists of a law-like interchange of elements, symbolized by fire. Thus the world is not to be identified with any particular substance, but rather with an ongoing process governed by a law of change. The underlying law of nature also manifests itself as a moral law for human beings. Heraclitus is the first Western philosopher to go beyond physical theory in search of metaphysical foundations and moral applications.

if i were streaming broadband right here you'd see the seniors talking, clipping, laughing, planning for this project due friday... some have colored markers out... some have the book in their hands

think about suzanne's momentary meta-blog... or is it meta-meta-blog (?)

do bridge builders blog
shop-talkative

from Jacket 24 - Nada Gordon, in conversation with Tom Beckett

Writing begins with the desire to be hypnotized.
And the desire to hypnotize.
Writing begins with nagging refrains.
It doesn,Äôt begin with boredom, exactly.
Writing begins with excitation and banality.
Writing begins with the fury, with kicking.
Writing begins with languor, then with a stretching up in which the heart beats slightly faster.
Writing begins with the lower lip and jaw jutting out.
Writing begins with a need for a fort, hiding place, cave or burrow.
It begins tentatively and finishes as sweeping gesture.
Writing begins with total befuddlement.
Writing begins with terror, and also a struggle against apathy.
Writing begins with mockery.
Writing begins as revelation.
A slightly naughty smile.
Writing begins with a ,ÄòW,Äô (*no* political entendre).

check out the whole interview...

S D P G

Information traveled up out of the podium and through the microphone out the speakers and into/through Silvers's gestural signings / contortions, then I guess through the sensory pathways of a packed audience and out somewhere into the darkening night sky.

BREWER: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

Fadge (1 syl.). To suit or fit together, as, It won't fadge; we cannot fadge together; he does not fadge with me. (Anglo-Saxon, faegen, to fit together; Welsh, ffag, what tends to unite.)

'How will this fadge?'
Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, ii. 2.

still snowing... the apes are working on virginia woolf/jacob's room projects... what... me worry? i asked them to work from the following prompt: what can you do to show your understanding of what virginia woolf is doing in jacob's room? have i set them/us up for... something less than excellent?

Dr. Gerald Lucas

Foreword: the book design blog

Gyorgy Ligeti

One of the world,Äôs best known living composers, Gyrgy Ligeti is widely acknowledged as a musical pioneer of the late twentieth century. In response to a general stylistic crisis in the mid-century avant-garde, Ligeti forged his own musical alternative, based on texture and sound density, that has become one of the major influences on contemporary music. His varied output, which he began in pre-communist Hungary and continued in western Europe after the Hungarian communist revolution, is searingly intense at times and full of vivacity, humor and irony at others.

snowing this morning... but with that lackluster in-betweeny persistence that adds up to NO SNOW DAY... which would have been nice... but...

and that's ligeti... with one eastern european t...

o... so this is ligetti... a thousand needles

GOLD STAR FOR ROBOT BOY: notes on Guided By Voices' work from 1992 to 1997, by Jordan Davis

Who are Guided By Voices, why do I have at least fifteen recordings by them, and how can it be that those cds constitute less than half of their recorded output?