From It’s Nice That:
Feminist Press is an independent nonprofit publisher based in New York. Founded in 1970, they have a wide variety of material that ranges from fiction to feminist theory. Promoting freedom of expression and social justice, they now own a great collection of books from around the world and from diverse racial and class backgrounds, as well as a section on African Women’s Writing.
Recommended reading, Waiting, a novel by Goretti Kyomuhendo.
From Richard Eskow at 3quarksdaily.com…
Occasionally an idea will come to mind that’s claimed quickly and eloquently by someone else before you have a chance to execute it. When Michael Jackson died I began dabbling with the subject of Jackson as Transhumanist, but my piece was only half-written when RU Sirius pretty much nailed the topic. Nick Gillespie at Reason found the key lines from Sirius: “Michael Jackson is obviously not an example of transhumanism to be followed. But he is a signpost on the road to post-humanity. I believe the future will study him from that perspective, and in some odd way, it will learn from his many mistakes.”
Well said, and lesson learned: When it comes to the world of ideas, if you snooze you lose. (Unless you enhance your work capabilities with Provigil, of course, in which case you won’t do as much snoozing.) But although the Michael Jackson moment has come and gone, a new event was commemorated this week: the 75th birthday of Elvis Presley. Elvis was the primogenitor, the Omo I of rock and roll culture. He didn’t just “ship a lot of units,” as they used to say in the record biz (back when there was a record biz.) He changed everything.
Elvis was certainly considered different. From his early days on he was an agent of radical transformation in sexuality, culture, and appearance. At nineteen, he and his musicians seemed so unusual to the announcer at the Louisiana Hayride that he was asked, on the air, “You all geared up with your band there?”
“I’m all geared up!” Elvis answered.
But suspicious minds require proof for Elvis as transhumanist. Let’s define transhumanism as a rejection of traditional human biology and its limits, an assertion of the right to remake yourself radically (what Max More called “morphological freedom”), and an embrace of technology as the instrument of both self-expression and self-transformation. More…
Orwell's press card portrait, taken in 1933
From D. J. Taylor in The Times Online:
Diaries brings together the eleven individual journals that George Orwell compiled between 1931 and 1949. The final entry, written in September 1949, describes the daily routines of University College Hospital, where he was to die of advanced tuberculosis early in 1950. All were published in the monumental twenty-volume Complete Works (1998), but now appear consecutively for the first time. There is certainly a twelfth diary, and possibly even a thirteenth, among the items taken from a Barcelona hotel room in June 1937 by Soviet agents and now gathering dust somewhere in theFor more…For more… NKVD archive in Moscow. In his introduction, Peter Davison reveals that he once met a man – Miklos Kun, grandson of the Hungarian Communist leader Béla Kun – who had tracked down Orwell’s NKVD file, but was unable to fillet it before the archive shut its doors to the public.
Handsomely produced, illustrated with Orwell’s own pencil sketches and footnoted with Davison’s customary élan, this latest wave in the repackager’s tide invites two questions. Why did Orwell write diaries? And what do they tell us about him? Most writers’ diaries are self-conscious affairs, where the reader ends up with a sneaking feeling that the real audience is only a remote posterity. Orwell’s are notably unvarnished, often no more than a mundane domestic record, and yet this doesn’t make them personally revealing. There is, for example, almost nothing in them about Orwell’s literary techniques. Neither is there very much in the way of confidential remarks. When he notes in 1941, out of nowhere, that he is “thinking always of my island in the Hebrides, which I suppose I shall never possess, nor even see”, there is a sudden glimpse of all kinds of things not often associated with Orwell – frustrated yearnings, sequestered retreats, the deepest of romantic chasms.
From Edmund White in the New York Times:
Aspiring fiction writers have been reading E. M. Forster’s “Aspects of the Novel” since it was first published in 1927. I can remember devouring it in 1960 or soon after; here was one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century, the author of “A Passage to India,” divulging the secrets of the trade — or rather, expressing strong but always courteous opinions about the rival merits and methods of the important novelists of the past.
Here we first learned of “flat” (quickly sketched in) versus “round” (fully developed) characters and how every book needs some of both. Here we were told that Henry James’s decision in “The Ambassadors” to make his two chief male characters reverse positions by the end of the novel was a bad idea, a shoehorning of human vagaries into the rigors of unbending “pattern,” whereas Proust’s far better principle of composition was subject to a more fluid and spontaneous sense of “rhythm.” Forster gives as an example of rhythm Proust’s constant but never systematic or insistent return to the theme of the “little phrase,” a melody that the fictional composer Vinteuil serves up in various forms and that the characters hear at strategic moments. Forster writes of the melody, “There are times when it means nothing and is forgotten, and this seems to me the function of rhythm in fiction; not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope.”
Sir Frank Kermode, who turned 90 last year, has written a subtle and fascinating book of criticism that obeys the delightful vagaries of rhythm more than the inflexibility of pattern. In “Concerning E. M. Forster,” Kermode sinks probes into Forster’s book about fiction (the first chapter is called “Aspects of Aspects”) and manages along the way to explore aesthetic questions, Forster’s life and Forster’s links to other writers, like Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.
Oskari Kuusela, from The Philosopher’s Magazine, on why Wittgenstein rejected theories…
A distinctive feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is his rejection of philosophical theses and theories. Instead he comprehends philosophy as an activity of clarification. How he understands the contrast between this activity and philosophical theorising, however, is not immediately obvious and constitutes a disputed topic among his readers. Apparently symptomatic of this unclarity is that many of Wittgenstein’s interpreters in fact attribute various philosophical theories to him either explicitly or implicitly, against their own self-understanding. Either way, this constitutes a problem. To attribute theories to Wittgenstein is to characterise his work as inconsistent, as containing a contradiction between his methodological statements about philosophy and his actual philosophical practice. Beyond scholarly concerns, to attribute theories to Wittgenstein is to miss out on the possible benefits of rethinking the nature of philosophy with him. More specifically, he claims to have found a strategy for avoiding dogmatism in philosophy, a problem he sees as intimately connected with philosophical theories. The problem of dogmatism thus understood might also be seen as one central reason why philosophy remains enmeshed in dispute, and doubts persist about its value. More…
Congratulations to Jodie Parys, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of new directions in the humanities for her paper Confronting HIV/AIDS through an Erotic Rewriting of the Classic Fairy Tale Rapunzel in Andrea Blanqué’s “Adiós, Ten Ying”
Abstract: Fiction has often served as a space in which to confront, record and archive the AIDS epidemic in diverse manners. Writers frequently use the pages of their texts to challenge societal expectations and perceptions about the disease. Andrea Blanqué’s short story, “Adiós, Ten-Ying” is one such approach. Through a post-modern, feminist reworking of the classic fairytale, Rapunzel, Blanqué subverts reader expectations about AIDS and sexuality by presenting a protagonist who initially evokes the familiar storyline of Rapunzel, but ultimately becomes an icon of sexual liberation in the face of a patriarchal society that would prefer to negate her existence as an AIDS-infected prostitute. Blanqué achieves this subversion and ultimate celebration of sexuality by using a narrative structure that is reminiscent of the well-known tale, but is manipulated at key moments to challenge taboos about sexuality and AIDS. This presentation will examine this reworking to illustrate how Blanqué produces a novel approach to the classic fairy tale and ultimately provides an enlightened perspective on HIV/AIDS vis-a-vis her feminist interpretation of coming of age in the face of HIV/AIDS.
If you have read the paper you may wish to add a review.
From Leland de la Durantaye at Boston Review:
LAST WISHES
In 1965 Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “the bitterness of an interrupted life is nothing compared to the bitterness of an interrupted work: the probability of a continuation of the first beyond the grave seems infinite by comparison with the hopeless incompleteness of the second.” More than any great writer of his century, Nabokov was exacting about the presentation of his words and works, from his painstaking translations to his routine destruction, by fire, of preliminary drafts once his novels were complete. When he died in 1977 Nabokov left behind many things. Among these were a loving family, international fame, and a last request: the destruction, by fire, of the notes for his final work in progress. All expectations to the contrary, these have now been published as The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments.
Less than a year before his death, Nabokov told The New York Times that he was at work on a new novel and that in idle, albeit feverish, moments in the hospital, he read it aloud to “a small dream audience in a walled garden.” “My audience,” he told the Times, “consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long-dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible.” This doctor is finer than anything found in the Novel in Fragments, but that does not mean that there are not fine things therein. More…
From Jessa Crispin, The Smart Set.
You can tell a lot about a person by the relationship she has with time — what she values, how she works, and often where she came from. I have often wondered if my own anxiety about the wide expanse of the day goes back to my rural Kansas upbringing. Barred from watching television and encouraged (pushed) to explore the outdoors, the way I view the hours of the day correlates with the view of the horizon: flat, never ending, bichromal. I wake in the morning to wonder how in the world I will ever find a way to break that expanse into manageable chunks without falling into boredom or uselessness.
Whether it’s the American motto “time is money,” or the Eastern European saying “When man is in a hurry, the devil makes merry,” the primary way in which a culture deals with the passing days marks the people who live in it. Ethnographers and anthropologists have long understood this, and used the way societies react to time — from how they divide their day to how they react to the aging process to the language they use to describe the past, present, and future — to tell the stories of what makes this culture unique.
From Zia Sardar, Naked Punch.
(Direct quotations from Black Skin, White Masks are set in italics)
The opening gambit of Black Skin, White Masks ushers us towards an imminent experience: the explosion will not happen today. But a type of explosion is about to unfold in the text in front of us, in the motivations it seeks, in the different world it envisages and aims to create. We are presented with
a series of statements, maxims if you like, both obvious and not so obvious: I do not come with timeless truths;fervour is the weapon of choice of the impotent; the black man wants to be white, the white man slaves to reach a human level. We are left with little doubt we are confronting a great deal of anger. The resentment takes us to a particular place: a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, where black is not a man, and mankind is digging into its own flesh to find meaning.
“The first function of a literary magazine is to introduce the work of new or little-known writers of talent.” There is an appealing modesty about this brisk declaration, even a kind of impersonality in subordinating editorial ego to the larger good; it seems likely to provoke a murmur of agreement, not least from new or little-known writers. But this is not, of course, the only way in which the function of such publications may be conceived. The editor of one of the many new literary periodicals established in the 1920s announced a no less definite sense of purpose in quite other terms: “I shall make its aim the maintenance of critical standards and the concentration of intelligent critical opinion”. The goals expressed in these two quotations are not necessarily in conflict: editors might, it is true, maintain “critical standards” in a practical way by identifying new literary talent. But the tendency is for the pursuit of these two purposes to result in periodicals of rather different types. One, often thought of as the classic “little magazine”, largely carries new poetry and fiction, mostly by as yet unrecognized writers, often exemplifying a style of writing that is self-consciously, even determinedly, insurgent and unfashionable. The other, committed to upholding the critical or reviewing function, is largely filled with essays and book reviews, taking in the literature of both the past and the present, as well as taking in more than literature; it aspires to shape intelligent opinion and to combat the slackness and puffery of mainstream literary journalism. More…
A piece from TheNational:
For centuries Germans united around the tale of Hermann, a chieftain who rallied his fellow tribesmen to defeat the Roman army. But this founding national myth, cherished by Romantic poets and Nazi ideologues, was banished from memory in the postwar era. As Hermann-mania returns to a wary Germany 2000 years after his victory, Clay Risen considers the search for national identity in a post-national age.
Atop a forested hill a few kilometres outside the sleepy west German town of Detmold stands a 19-metre high statue of Hermann, the Germanic chief whose forces annihilated nearly 20,000 Roman legionnaires at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD. Gazing toward the French border, the copper statue, wearing a jaunty winged helmet, holds an upraised sword, whose blade bears the inscription “German Unity is my strength, and my strength is Germany’s power”. More…
Liesl Schillinger at The New York Times:
In the 1920s, a disaffected Soviet encyclopedia editor named Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky — a man haunted by Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and by Communist realities — began writing a series of philosophical, allegorical, fantastical short stories. Seven of them appear in “Memories of the Future,” a selection of his fiction that takes its title from the book’s longest entry — the tale of a brusque monomaniac who builds a “timecutter” to eject himself from 1920s Moscow. None of these stories were published in Krzhizhanovsky’s lifetime. This was not because the work had been rejected or because it was, well, a little weird. Krzhizhanovsky, it seems, was too proud, too shy or (more likely) too frightened to show them around — given that he was spinning his dystopic fictions at about the same time that Stalin was collectivizing the Soviet countryside. More…
An essay by Damion Searls from The Quarterly Conversation:
Modest in aim, New Aestheticist art does not want to change the world—to bear witness, deconstruct, problematize. It does not batten onto greater social goals, the kind responsibly fundable with tax dollars. It wants merely to be beautiful.
It differs from the old Aestheticism, “art for art’s sake,” in that it no longer believes in Art as a sake either, as a holy cause. New Aestheticism is art for people’s sakes. It is not antisocial; it aims to please. It is elitist but not discriminatory, for it is open to any and all who care to love it.
MFA programs teach the craft of plot or of poetic epiphany, and a pared-down, smooth style that seems embarrassed of beauty. The dictum to show not tell has led downward to darkness, from, say, Madame Bovary and The Sun Also Rises to a prose that is all shown, that walks on ice in socks: all surface and no depth, like TV at its worst. Quote examples here. But I cannot bring myself to write an ode to dejection.
Nor can writers today draw their aesthetic calling from the visual arts, as Barbara Guest did from Matisse, Frank O’Hara from de Kooning, Rilke from Rodin, . . . Museums have turned away from beauty toward a misdirected populism whose logic Proust refuted 90 years ago already (the people, not the elite, he argues, are the only ones intelligent enough to appreciate so-called-elitist high art; in terms of content, it is plumbers who want to read about princesses, just as much as princesses want to read about plumbers). In truth museumgoers go, when they go, for art, not for pandering and exhibits of billionaires’ speedboats. More…
Anand Menon, from OpenDemocracy.net, reflects on the future of the European Parliament…
The campaign for the elections to the European parliament, being held across the European Union’s twenty-seven member-states on 4-7 June 2009, has made one thing clearer than ever. Insofar as people have any intention of voting at all, most will do so on the basis of the performance of national politicians in dealing with national problems within national political systems. More…
The journal Logica Universalis has issued a Call for Papers for a special issue dedicated to the question “Is logic universal?”
Included in the Call is this:
Many questions are connected to this issue: 1. Do all human beings have the same capacity for reasoning? Do people of different gender, ethnic, cultural and linguistics backgrounds reason in the same way? 2. Does reasoning evolve? Did human beings reason in the same way two centuries ago? In the future will human beings reason in the same way? Did computers change our way to reason? Is a mathematical proof independent of time and culture ? 3. Do we reason in different ways depending on the situation? Do we use the same logic for everyday life, physics, economy? 4. Do the different systems of logic reflect the diversity of reasonings? 5. Is there any absolute true ways of reasoning ? Any contribution dedicated to one aspects of the question "Is logic universal?" is welcome. Submit your paper to universal.logic@ufc.br before August 31st 2009
“One idea that elite universities like Yale, sprawling public systems like Wisconsin and smaller private colleges like Lewis and Clark have shared for generations is that a traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation. Rather, the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop have a different purpose: They are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy, regardless of career choice” - Patricia Cohen
Andrew Delbanco, director of American studies at Columbia
To read more of this article please visit the New York Times website here.
19 June-14 August 2009
Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
www.indiana.edu/~iuslavic/swseel/
Complete 1 full academic year of language study in 8 weeks!
An International Conference on Dewey’s Impact on America and the World. Papers should address some aspect of Dewey’s work and its influence.
Invited speakers include: Nadine Strossen, current President of the American Civil Liberties Union; Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University; Larry Hickman, Director of the Center for Dewey Studies; Ron Giere, Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota.
Reading time should be between 20-25 minutes. Please only submit papers for blind review. Papers should be sent via email in .pdf or .doc format. Please submit papers to: jshook@centerforinquiry.net
Submitted papers due: September 1st, 2009.
The above announcement was copied from one of several Internet sources turned up in a Google search. An announcement of the event can be found on the Research page of the Center for Inquiry’s web site. It is likely that additional information will be found there as the conference approaches
Schedule of Events: March 23-24, 2009. ALL ARE WELCOME
2009 is the tercentenary of the birth of Samuel Johnson, one of the great writers of eighteenth-century England. The Bucknell Humanities Institute – supported by the Office of the Provost, and with additional support from the University Lectureship Committee, the Department of English, the Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library, and the Bucknell University Press – commemorates Johnson’s life and work, his contribution to the western literary tradition, to the American tradition of liberal education, and to his continuing place in the curriculum on college campuses such as Bucknell.
EXHIBIT: The Bertrand Library will feature an exhibit of Johnsonian first editions and other rare books, images, and related materials, March 2 - April 30, 2009, in the exhibit space on the lower level of the library. All are welcome to visit the exhibit during library hours.
LECTURES: On March 23, 2009 Bucknell hosts lectures on Johnson by three eminent men of letters: Christopher Ricks, Leo Damrosch, and David Ferry. ALL ARE WELCOME TO ATTEND THE LECTURES AND RECEPTION. The lecturers: Christopher Ricks. Sarah B. Warren Professor of the Humanities and co-director of the Editorial Institute, Boston University, Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and formerly King Edward Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Leo Damrosch. Ernest Birnbaum Professor of English, Harvard University. David Ferry. Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College, Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
SCHEDULE of LECTURES: March 23, 2009, 4.00 - 7.00 pm, BUCKNELL HALL
4.00 pm. Reception begins
4.30 pm. Michael Smyer, Provost of Bucknell University, Welcome
4.35 pm. Greg Clingham, Professor of English, Introductions
4.45 pm. Leo Damrosch, “Doctor Johnson vs Jean Jacques: Two Styles of Thinking and Being”
5.20 pm. Short Break
5.30 pm. David Ferry, Poetry Reading and Remarks on Johnson and Tolstoy
6.05 pm. Christopher Ricks, “Sound and Sense”
7.00 pm. Reception ends
FURTHER EVENTS:
March 24, 2009, 10.00 - 11.00 a.m. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS READING ROOM, ELLEN CLARKE BETRAND LIBRARY
Conversations with Christopher Ricks, Leo Damrosch, Greg Clingham, Philip Smallwood, and Adam Rounce. (Recorded event. Audience welcome.)
March 24, 2009, 12.00 noon - 2.00 pm, WILLARD SMITH LIBRARY
Informal buffet lunch for STUDENTS with Professors Ricks, Damrosch, and Ferry. Students interested in attending this lunch might send their name and e-mail to Professor Clingham at clingham@bucknell.edu
To see the brochure that has been distributed on campus click on the link below: http://www.bucknell.edu/Documents/UniversityPress/Johnson%20Humanities%20Institute%20brochure.pdf
The Humanities Journal
Beijing, China from 2-5 June 2009.
Friendship Hotel Beijing
Friendship Palace
1 Zhongguan Cun South Street
Haidian District
Beijing 100873
China