In order to know, we must be capable of forgetting, abandoning, abjuring.
One way to look at a “renaissance man” is to say “He’s interested in so many things!” Another way is to say: “He’s already passed over and lost interest in so much!”
One way to look at a socialite is to say “He knows so many people!” Another is to say “He snubs and is snubbed by an incredibly large crowd!”
via nick currie
Adam K. writes,
Nothing points to the cultural impoverishment and flat-footed literalism of the modern era more than the decline in spurious attribution. In past eras, spurious attributions flourished, ranging from the high-flown speculations of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite to the improbable claims underwritten by the Donation of Constantine. Indeed, one must go back even further: the Bible itself, the foundation of religious, cultural, and intellectual life for centuries, is mostly a work of spurious attribution.
Our forebears were aware of the power of a well-placed name for settling disputes and advancing important causes; their imaginative, and therefore also argumentative, resources far outstripped our own. Today, true spurious attribution lives on only in the hollowed-out form of celebrity ghost-writing, reducing a long and glorious cultural institution to simply one commercial transaction among others.
Worse than that, we have now completely reversed the process. Our characteristic practice is plagiarism — we steal someone else’s words and attach them to our name, hoping the quality of the content will gain us personal advantages. The contrast between plagiarism and spurious attribution is the measure of our decadence.
Nice argument. To which two readers respond,
I will attribute my Lacan translation to you. My belief is that Lacan would be easier to read and explain if “jouissance” were translated “fun”. Some doubt this theory.
And
This, like everything else, is the fault of the romantics.
Ok, probably not very funny if you haven’t sat through any university level humanity courses lately, but I nearly fell out of my chair laughing.
Seriously though, I think that everyone should, at sometime in their life, be forced to sit down and read some Lacan and some major works of the Romantics . In this hypothetical situation, one would then be asked about what they thought about their readings. There would only be two choices – I loved it or I hated it.
Reading European philosophy is a lot like going to the circus – it elicits strong emotions of either love or hate.
i’ve completely changed my blogging software to WordPress. Movable Type and DavidComeaux.com had a 4-year relationship. It was very productive. We grew and changed together. In the end, if it weren’t for the issue of comments, we’d still be together. But, alas and alack. We had to split up. I wanted the comments to be accepted graciously and free of error, MT did not.
What does this mean for you, the reader? Hopefully, nothing. Nothing more than perfect functionality, that is: the comments are working again. What does this mean for us, your humble narrators? Freedom. Love. Mutual Understanding. Forgiveness.
i was able to test out WordPress on Digivation.net, thanks to Matt Smith and his technological heart. the crossgrade went smoothly, and even when i hit some snags, i was able to overcome them with little difficulty. WordPress is a little clunky on the outside, some quirks here and there. For example, the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t really jive with Safari, which is maybe more of a Safari problem. But on the operations side, it runs very smoothly.
I’ll be working to achieve similar functionality on Desiree’s site and JohnComeaux.com shortly.
trying to fix the mysterious comment problems, i severely broke my website yesterday (on the administrative end), and i just had the best time trying to put it back together. and the comments are still not fixed.
Once again, we still get the comments you send, even though it throws up an error message. sorry in the meantime.
and if you notice anything else going bonkers around here, let me know.
it may have been a coincidence that jon and i were talking about the different blogging softwares around these days, and up until just now, i’ve been more than happy with movable type. but i’m seriously considering giving up on MT after this.
Now available on DavidComeaux.com are the honeymoon photos! The set is meant to be shown as a slide-show, so put on some Bob Marley background music, click the first photo, and read all the captions for the whole (short) story.With all the photo-related posts these days, you’re sure to waste an hour or two at work between my photos, jessie’s photostream, dad’s endless photographic chronicles, and coming soon, a thousand more photos from the wedding.I’m trying to come up with a good format for my photo pages, so it’s slightly different than what you’re used to. The minimum recommended viewing resolution is no less than 1024×768, so you might have a little trouble if you’re on anything smaller. If you have any comments about the new photo style, please post em here.
I’m off to Denver today to attend a conference with the family unit (minus one), so posting may be light next week.
I plan to take lots of pictures, see lots of interesting things, and generally enjoy being so far away from sea level.
While I am busily trying to motivate myself to write, here are some excellent articles that have been sitting in my newsreader for weeks just waiting to be shared.
A great article on the economics of productivity, academia, and how it relates to Mozart and Baumol’s Disease here from the New Yorker.
Forgive American consumers if they feel a bit perplexed. Policymakers and pundits have been warning them about the prospect of deflation (a prolonged and widespread decline in prices) but there’s no sign of any decline in many of th prices that people pay every day. Car-insurance premiums jumped more than nine per cent las year. Health-insurance costs are soaring, to say nothing of the cost of a haircut. Cable-TV prices have risen sixteen per cent since 2000. And then there’s college: tuitions at private colleges have jumped 5.6 per cent annually over the past three years, according to the College Board, and public colleges are even worse. In times like these, it’ hard to get worked up about deflation
Why the divergence? It may have something to do with Mozart.
Pardise Lost: Leo Hickman on the unsustainability of global travel.
The travel industry tells us that tourism makes poor countries richer and the whole world happier and more peaceful. Even the most beautiful places can retain their charm. But the truth is very different.
What the World Eats : a pictorial slide show of food and the people that eat it from around the world.
And finally, an article about lapdances that manages to be both insightful and entertaining.
Readers: you may have tried to post a comment recently, and it may have given you a 500 Server Error after a minute or two. However, rest assured that in most every case, your comment was recieved and sent to the “waiting to be approved” bin. Management is working on this. For now, think of the 500 Server Error as more of a We [Heart] Comments page.
One thing that I don’t like about trying to maintain a weblog is the feeling that I get when I haven’t posted anything in a while – long absences make me feel like I need to write a large post to bring my online self up to speed with my offline self. Silly, I know, but its a complex I have. So, what has been happening in the month of February that I haven’t written about?
School has been going well. I’m enjoying my class. Work has been okay, however, I’m at the point where I’d like to resign from my job as web designer – people keep asking for revisions! When the site is finally finished (assuming the folks in charge can settle on one design and stick with it), I’ll be sure to post a link here.
Speaking of the web, I’ve revived my livejournal. Check there for more personal entries or some one off things that I haven’t posted here. I probably won’t be updating it often, but I’d expect something every now and then.
I finally took my graduate examination last Saturday. I scored well enough to feel like I won’t need to take it again, but crummy enough to know better than to brag about my “numbers”. No doubt I could have done better, but that would have involved studying for the test itself, something I happily refrained from doing. One only has so much time in life, and I just couldn’t bring myself to spend that time studying for yet another standardized test.
Mardi Gras was good. Nothing to say about it that hasn’t already been said already.
I’m thinking of planning a hiking trip for a couple of days during spring break. Nothing too long or too rigorous, maybe something like a three day hike, with a day or two added for driving to and from the trail.
If I don’t make a trip over the break, I’d like to do a big hike some time this summer – a section of the AT over the course of a month would be ideal, but I’m not sure if I can get my resources together in time.
I just uploaded some more photos!
long overdue is Jon’s shots from hiking the Appalachian Trail this past summer, *just after* going to the florida keys with me and bennett. He had hundreds of photos, all very beautiful, and i tried to trim down to only the best, and i still ended up with 50 photos, half of them from a beautiful sunrise that they saw. If you have a favorite, you can email me or jon with a column + row identification (i.e. page 1 col 3 row 5) and we could send you a high-resolution version for your desktop.
Also uploaded is some shots that jon took from the Calendar Recording Session, called “calendar jam” in the photos navigation, which took place at his house in lafayette over the christmas holiday. There are only a handful of those, but i think they really good and significant.
I’m not sure how many locally famous people have wikipedia entries that were created by ardent followers/haters, but you can count LSU professor Joe Bockrath as one of them. Seriously. This kind of “tribute” is pure lawyer-student genius. Be sure to check out the “gear” link at the bottom of the page.
If you had a wikipedia page: 1) what would you want to see on there and 2) would you shamelessly edit it yourself?
I just put up the keys photos! yay everyone!
Since everyone and their mom’s gardenia plant left Baton Rouge for fall break, i’ve had like 4 hours to work on the photos page. Updating photos used to be a big pain, because a system that works for like 3 sets of photos dosen’t work so well for… say… 11 sets of photos. Now, i made it much more streamlined for me, and still tolerable for you. I kind of subtlely rearranged some linkage in the photos… it’s not perfect, but i think it’s fine. The point of me telling you this is, if you ever find any incongruency whilst navigating photos, please let me know.
Read the rest of this entry »
Just in case you wanted to check it out, my sister is back on the web. You might remember her rather well-written live-journal. Although I’m a bit biased, it really was quite excellent. Well, the new re-incarnation is even better. Naturally, I don’t have permission to go broadcasting this link to everyone who reads this site, but I couldn’t resist. Some things are too good not to share.
It appears that I will be hitting the road again from August 20 to the 25 to spend some time working in Barbuda and Antigua. You read that correctly – I will be on duty, not on vacation. However, I’m not going to complain because getting ANY flight overseas these days is a major achievement for me, especially when the University is going to foot the bill.
I think the place we will be staying at will have some limited access to the internet so I’ll probaly be able to check e-mail and answer any urgent problems (like I ever have any). Pictures from my previous summer adventures are coming soon.
In other news, I had a fantastic weekend hanging out with my wedding buddies: a few groomsmen, a maid of honor, the bride and groom, and myself, the best man. It was digitally documented and some snaps will probably appear on that little website that most college students are members of.
Just from my subjective standpoint, it seems the overall happiness level of everyone involved in David and Desiree’s life has risen exponentially since the engagement announcement. I’ve never seen so many smiles in one place on the faces of my friends. And Dave and Des – well they are just exuding the love vibes. Like we’re talking Tsunami-style love vibes. It’s been a lot of fun to see them together and to feel the whole room just fill up with unadulterated happiness. Like whoa.
I also saw the new Will Ferrell movie – which I give 4 flaming stockcars out of five. A must-see for fans of his previous work. My new roomie accompanied me to the film and he was a swell time as always. A preview of harmonious times to come.
Are you sick of reading this entry yet because I sound punch-drunk on happiness, joy, and general well-being?
Read the rest of this entry »
