The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by jrochest:

Coming to this very late: what is it about book and word people that makes us all collectors? I move once a year, and at my last move, 8 months ago, I looked at the contents of my storage room, items I had moved three times, once across the country and twice within the city, and *still* never used. I swore mightily that I was not moving them again, and dumped the lot on the local thrift store -- along with 3 pieces of furniture, three 2x2 foot moving boxes of kitchen stuff and 5 plastic garbage bags of clothes.

And now, 8 months later, I sit in a room wooged to overflowing: stacks of books and papers on the floor, the bed, the windowsills, autonomous piles of tottering clothing filling up laundry baskets, and clutter and tat on every flat or slightly slanted surface.

I have bought five pieces of clothing, six books and food since moving here. Where did all this stuff come from? Does it breed?

oh, and Kes #143: run. Hoarders (my dad is one) burn out the people who love them, and they will never change. You can't love someone who cares more about a stack of old newspapers than you.

For short hops, trains make vast amounts of sense: there should be high speed service between New York and Washington, between Chicago-Toronto-Montreal, between Seattle-San Fran-LA. There's something so handy about going downtown, lining up for a half an hour, sitting comfortably in for 4 hours and arriving downtown.

And at least in Canada, airlines now fly you in short hops: to go Toronto-Vancouver on Westjet, you often need to go Toronto-Winnipeg, Winnipeg-Regina, Regina-Calgary, Calgary-Vancouver, with significant wait times between flights. A 4 hour direct flight is often expanded to a full day.

Two snippets from Auden's long poem on Yeats' death:

...poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

[. . .]

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

[. . .]

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

*******

Are there plans afoot for a volume of Ford's poetry? It strikes me that that might be an appropriate tribute, oh mighty ones of Tor.

Okay, the Tempest quote makes me think -- has grumpyguts considered the Elizabethan tradition of pageants and parades?

I mean, if Elizabeth the 1st could be welcomed into the City of London by Fame , Time and his Daughter Truth, and serenaded by an 18 foot long mermaid at Kenilworth Castle, then 21st century Londoners should be allowed a moving Elephant.

Bonniers -- that paper seems to imply that the goal is to build an army that will be able to simultaneously:

1) defend the continental USA,
2) fight and 'decisively win' simultaneous 'multiple major theatre wars',
3) police the remaining crumbling rubble -- er -- 'shape the security environment in critical regions'
4) weaponize space and build the Ronnie missile shield,

Oh, and rearm all three branches with wizzie new high-tech weaponry and increase the total number of soldiers from 1.4 million to 1.6 million, all without increasing government spending by more than .5%.

After which, I assume, they're going to invent cold fusion and develop a warp drive. Oh, and time travel.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

-Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)

Thank you. I'm going to print that out and stick it on my office door.

Sad, though, isn't it -- my initial reaction to a little bit of brilliance is 'Gee, that would make a great Bumper Sticker'.

There are few better ways of causing needless casualties than dropping large bombs indescriminately on populated areas.

Do you remember how the 'smart bombs' were going to ensure that no civilians died?

And yes, I'm sure, absolutely sure, that the figures are being fudged and the American people are being lied to.

oh no, gramps would be nice and dessicated by now.
I doubt that he'd have much to say, though.

I'm shuddering at the thought of agressive Mormon missionaries doing MLM of ANY product but the image of a LDS wife with a broad cheery smile and a messenger bag full of oddly shaped devices is deeply disturbing.

However, even if they are selling 'slumberwear' I'm sure that the point is to avoid the awful sin of moving into the public sphere. Rather like Tupperware ladies. Even if you are working 8 hours a day, you're still not leaving home to do it.


Oh, and P.Z. Myers has a couple of killer posts on the "Painter of Light", himself.

Since the Roomba needs to go under furniture (if it doesn't, it comes to believe that it is failing in its task and becomes despondent) either you would need very high furniture or a very short Dalek suit.

I'd put up with un-vacuumed-under furniture.

Either that, or I'd put the sofa on blocks...

And I thought I'd add these guys to the pie, so to speak:
Breatharianism

The leader claims to have lived for 20 years on Prana, light and air alone. Unless she's green and leafy, I somehow doubt this.

Way, waaayy up the thread, someone said:

(I assume the real answer has something to do with that "a dog wouldn't eat it, therefore it's no longer food" rule.)

Having known a beagle that ate feces, plastic CDs, garden hoses, cardboard boxes, an entire garbage can, light bulbs, and big blobs of road tar -- with predictable effects on the fecal products the next morning -- this gives me real pause.

I second the call for a Dalek costume. If one existed I'd probably even buy a Roomba, simply for the nerd fun value.

I therefore deny your canon sight unseen, or anyone's, and further deny anyone's right to enforce a canon on me, whether by duct tape or by required study credits; and that is the nub of this argument.

And you may read whatever books you like in the privacy of your own home. But if you take a course designed to give you an overview of an area, you're going to have to read the assigned reading, should you want to pass.

And you may revise, deny, reject or otherwise refute the concept of the canon and the mystique of canon-formation. But you've got to know the stuff to reject it, otherwise you're ignorant, not revisionary.

What is your religion so fearful of that they will not let you look at it? Seems to me you're talking about a cult whose practices can't stand impartial examination; if you choose to castrate your brain and follow them, why should you get the right to call yourself educated?

I think Mr. Manheim is at an Orthodox school.

I was curious about what kind of college would be as restrictive as the one he describes, so I did a little googling and poking about for small sectarian universities in New York State. I found a blog by a David Manheim, a student at Lander College for Men, which is a very conservative Orthodox school. May not be the same guy, but I'm betting.

So no, Mr. Manheim isn't a wingnut of the type we're all envisioning, and his frustration at being restricted to a sectarian school makes a little more sense. He can't leave the context he's in without becoming, at least in his eyes and from his practice, less Jewish. And he wouldn't be there at all if faith and identity weren't central to his sense of who he is. So he's stuck.

I have a good deal more respect for someone in this situation than for a classic fundie wingnut, not the least because of a deep respect for the traditions of Jewish education. It's hard to find a religious tradition more intellectually rigorous -- maybe the Jesuits, but only just.

Still, I've gotta say that only a Orthodox boy would seriously think that 'sexual or otherwise offensive content' could be simply exised from a general undergrad education.

I am proposing that I should not be forced to read them, which implies that nobody should be forced to read texts which they find offensive on similar conscientious grounds.

Of course you should not be forced to read texts you find offensive, and should you be attacked by a gang of English professors who break into your house, duct-tape you to a chair and read _Tess_ aloud to you, I will be the first to rise to your defense.

Should you sign up for a course in the Victorian Novel, however, you take your chances. There will be things on the course that you do not love: there will be things on the course that you find dull. But you will emerge knowing something about the period and genre, which is the purpose of taking an English course.

And yes, they made me take things I hated too. Some of them I even hated when the course was over.

Oh, and in case no-one believes the above post, I have had several students complain about the sexual content in my lectures -- and you don't even want to talk about the boy actor.

Just because it's old doesn't mean it's not obscene. In the best possible way, of course.

I'm late to this party -- but to answer the very, very first commentator, who said:

That said, there is an argument to be made that at least one section of a required class have a "non-controversial" syllabus. If sex and swearing bother you, there are large pastures of literature in English that you may study.

I teach in one of those large pastures -- the Renaissance - and just for fun I thought I'd list off all the potentially offensive material in the generally accepted canon of English and European Lit, pre-1650.

Here's what I came up with, with apologies for length:

The Iliad (war, violence, paganism, starts with a rape)
The Odyssey (violence, paganism, drugs and witchcraft)
The Aeneid (sex, violence, suicide, paganism, necromancy and visits to the underworld, Imperialist)
Ovid's Metamorphoses (sex, violence, paganism, witchcraft, sex with trees, gods, showers of gold, you name it)
Ovid's Art of Love, The (don't even need to explain this one)
The entire extant canon of Classical Greek drama, tragic and comic (rape, incest, murder, cannibalism, fratricide, matricide, infanticide, buggery, prostitutes, phalloi and profanity)
The Sapphic Fragments (don't need to explain)
The Odes of Horace (sex, wine, beautiful boys, carpe diem)
All of Roman Comedy (sex, swindling and theft, buggery, prostitution)
All of Roman Tragedy (violence, murder, incest, necromancy)
The Confessions of Augustine (sex)
Beowulf (violence, dismemberment)
Mort D'Arthur (adultery, violence, torture, witchcraft)
The Divine Comedy (violence, torture, blatantly sectarian placing of people in Hell and Heaven)
The Decameron (sex, violence)
Roman de la Rose (extended sexual allegory)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (adultery, sexually suggestive scenes, violence, paganism)
The Canterbury Tales (sex, violence, anti-religious commentary)
Troilus and Criseyde (war, violence, pimping, nonmarital sex)
Confessio Amatis (lust, violence, transformation, based on Metamorphoses)
The York and Wakefield Cycle plays (violence, sex, domestic violence, infanticide)
Mankind (violence, irreligious commentary, scatological imagery)
Pantagruel and Gargantua (sex, lechery, gluttony, sloth, scatology)
The Prince(political machination, targeted violence and terrorism, murder as an art)
The Faerie Queene(sex, violence, rape, cross-dressed women, anti-catholic satire, imperialist, anti-Irish, advocates genocide)
The Arcadia (sex, violence, rape, cross-dressed men)
Hero and Leander (explicitly sexual material)
Venus and Adonis (explicitly sexual material)
Most Sonnet Sequences (sexually explicit language, sexist, homosexual imagery)
The extant corpus of English Renaissance Drama, comic, tragic and tragicomic (war, imperialism, anti-democratic politics; violence, mutilation, dismemberment, torture, suicide and murder (mass, sexual, fratricide, matricide, patricide, regicide, infanticide, petty treason, human sacrifice, genocide); sex, adultery, prostitution, rape, gang rape, necrophilia, pedophilia, homosexuality, lesbianism, buggery, incest, cross-dressing; obscenity, anti-Purtain satire, anti-Catholic satire; witchcraft, white and black magic, devil-worship, open atheism; theft, swindling, glorification of anti-social behavior)
Donne's Songs and Sonnets (sexual imagery)
The poetry of Campion, Herrick, Carew, Lovelace, Suckling, Marvell {sexually explicit material)
Hobbes' Leviathan (politically offensive; anti-democratic)

I think John Heywood's A Mery Play Betwene Johan Johan, the Husbande, Tyb, his Wyf, and Syr Jhan, the Preest would be better.

Hey! John John is much more respectable than Atlanta Nights! It has a better plot than the average Adam Sandler movie, and it's actually funny -- assuming you like cuckold jokes.

You don't like it, you try writing something that survives for 450 years.

And I apologize for the pedantic post: I just figured that since no-one had put up the numbers I would, for the benefit of our Neighbours to the South.

a vote of no confidence can be called as soon as a majority of Canadians are fed up

Well, it'll be as soon as a couple of the other parties sense that it's a good time to win an election. But it will need to be the Liberals and the Bloc -- so if Harper chops the country into isolated little feifdoms, which he'd very much like to do, he's not going to have any trouble.

There are 308 seats. You need 154 seats for a majority, which allows you to pass a bill with no help from another party. The Conservatives have 124 seats; the Liberals 103; the Bloc 51 and the NDP 29. There's one independent.

Conservatives + NDP = 153 seats
Conservatives + NDP + indie = 154 (just!)
Conservatives + Bloc = 175 (easy)
Liberals + Bloc = 154 (just!)

What this means, I'm assuming, is that Duceppe is the kingmaker: this is probably good for social policy -- since the Bloc is left of centre - but bad for national unity, since both the Bloc and the neo-cons are regionally based...

And to explain why that's a bad thing I'd have to explain the CONSTITUTION, the night of the long knives and Meech Lake. Which I'm not going to do since I'd bore everyone. The link is pretty good, though.

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