December 2009
54 posts
[Eye blog] The form of the book: Fifteenth-century...
“In [Gunther] Zainer’s edition, some rubrics have been deemed unnecessary, and others have already been replaced by a new use of white space. As we can see in the manuscript here, for instance, chapter headings often simply continue at the end of the previous chapter’s last sentence, and are marked by salient rubrics. In the edition, on the other hand, new chapters always begin on a new...
1 tag
A Moment in Time: Dodgy Archaeology and the MMA
via Archaeological Institute of America’s Archaeology magazine, “Tracking the Etruscan Warriors”:
“Put on display in 1933, the statues included an “old” or “life-size” warrior, a “colossal” head of a warrior, and a “big” or “heroic-size” warrior. In his foreword to An Inquiry into the Forgery of the Etruscan...
Eileen Joy, 'After the End of Everything, Then...
“[W]e are back to the idea, sketched out by Bill Readings in his book [The University in Ruins], and taken up by many (including Derrida, Foucault, and Edward Said), that the humanities enact an important philosophical/critical function with respect to larger, more super-structural institutional discourses and maybe also with respect to the formation of new disciplines and modes of thought...
“University of Scranton psychology professor Carole Slotterback analyzed about...”
– How Kids Talk to Santa - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com (via literarypiano)
John Mark Ockerbloom: Understanding...
“Diane Hillmann’s review of the recent Library of Congress-commissioned Study of the North American MARC Records Marketplace… laments that the study tries to propose economic tweaks to the current system of MARC bibliographic record distribution, but doesn’t consider the more basic questions of whether this sort of distribution is what cataloging should be focusing on in the first...
“I am going to be a storm- a flame-
I need to fight whole armies alone;
I have...”
– Cyrano de Bergerac
John Turnpenny: Will we ever manage to deal with...
“When our grandchildren and great-grandchildren excoriate those of us still alive in the 2060s for our failure to do enough to stop climate change, more thoughtful political scientist-types… might cite Creating a Climate for Change and Facing Climate Change Together as evidence that some in our generation knew what the problems were, lamented the lack of action, and tried their hardest...
“Keeping climate change at the forefront of governmental decision agendas will be...”
– Pralle, Sarah B. (2009) ‘Agenda-setting and climate change’, Environmental Politics, 18: 5, 781 — 799, quote from p. 783. Read it via Informaworld (need subscription though)
A Comparative Review of Research Assessment...
“In Australia there is some underlying tension between the research assessment principle and academic freedoms, often because the assessment process can lead to a need to increase productivity (and therefore workload) but also because it emphasises research over teaching which will disadvantage some institutions. This tension is offset somewhat by a desire among researchers to work together...
Thomas Mann: What is Distinctive about the Library...
“Who in 1959 would have thought that in 2009 General Motors would seek bankruptcy protection—and then, further, require a huge government bail-out to protect [itself from] market forces? The lesson here is that the long-term existence of either Google or Amazon is itself by no means guaranteed—but LC’s existence is guaranteed. Even that, however, is now questionable when Library Services...
John Banville: Criminal Odes
“The deepest satisfaction we derive from crime fiction, whether we know it or not, is the sense of completion it affords us. Life is a mess—we do not remember being born, and death, as Ludwig Wittgenstein wisely observed, is not an experience in life, so all we have is this chaotic middle bit, bristling with loose ends, in which nothing is ever properly over and done with. It could be said,...
The Economist: I am become Death, destroyer of... →
This story, though, raises the question of why there is but a single ejecta layer of iridium and shocked quartz in late Cretaceous rocks around the world. One answer might be that the two impacts were, in effect, simultaneous—that the objects which created Shiva and Chicxulub were the daughters of a comet that had broken up in space and hit the Earth a few hours apart, as the pieces of comet...
Steve Muhlberger: Syme's Roman Revolution →
Marissa Brostoff: History and Memory (Yosef...
“[I]t was [Yeurshalmi’s] 1982 book, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, that put him on the map for scholars in other fields as well, cementing his reputation as an unusually erudite and wide-ranging thinker who made the concerns of Jewish history universally interesting…”
David Kamp: Norman Rockwell’s American Dream →
‘Rockwell was no more a man of simple vision than he was the house artist of the right wing. While his approach was calculatedly upbeat, it was never shallow or jingoistic, and his work, taken as a whole, is a remarkably thoughtful and multifaceted engagement with the question “What does it mean to be an American?”’
Dwight Garner: 'Communism’s Path' →
Crossing the Bar (Alfred, Lord Tennyson; 1889)
Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea, But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home. Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark; For though from out our...
Nauplion →
