is this STILL happening??

warning: incoherent rage
I can hardly believe denial is still taking place — against all reason & evidence. I thought today about the degree to which Japan’s government is succeeding in their erasure of the past — what is it like for people within Japan without immediate access to external sources? is there not sufficient memory [...]

Read Full Post »

links for 2007-03-31

A guide for those who don’t read, but wish they did – International Herald Tribune
how to talk about books you haven’t read. philistines! (via liminaldreams)
(tags: funny books)

Odorless durian raises a stink
scientific progress comes in many forms. “You can take the sugar out of soft drinks and the fat from junk food. But eliminate the pungent [...]

Read Full Post »

links for 2007-03-30

textetc.com: poetry craft and theory: creation, analysis and improvement
oh, beautiful. so much to learn here.
(tags: poetry learning resource explorethislater)

Heaven and Hell, According to Various Religions
does this testify to an irreconcilable plurality of religions, or a singular idea manifested variously? beautiful pictures anyway. (via clioweb)
(tags: religion history images afterlife)

Scribd – They didn’t study
if you don’t study, [...]

Read Full Post »

thesisthesisthesis

writing the thesis presents issues of organization — do I approach it thematically, sandwiched between an introductory narrative & conclusion? or do I write chronologically & demonstrate my brilliance by weaving the themes into the narrative? the former is uninteresting; the latter runs the risk of incoherence or unnecessary reiteration.
whatever the case, I am [...]

Read Full Post »

women, spread your….wing

found a wonderful expression to describe my distrust of consciously women-based history: purdah of scholarship, a woman’s wing of history writing to and for itself — where ideas of women scarcely cause ripples outside the tokenism of a highly specialized gender studies, a kind of ‘women’s quarters’ of the royal academic palace. Feminist scholarship can [...]

Read Full Post »

bookporn #4: charing cross road, london

charing cross road is full of splendid bookstores. (ps: remember you can subscribe to the bookporn feed)
shipley bookstore

henry pordes bookstore

francis edwards antiquarian books

excuse me, I think I have to take a cold shower. no thanks to holly stick, who kindly (cruelly) left a link to a glorious page of EVEN MORE erotic bookporn. my new [...]

Read Full Post »

is there a word for “a supremely splendid word”?

[crossposted out of sheer coolness]
I am fond of words. an article I read yesterday incorporated the word “foofaraw” into its otherwise perfectly ordinary news prose, causing me endless delight. and occasionally I try to come up with some of my own, when english proves deficient (and it often does). but recently I’ve discovered some seriously [...]

Read Full Post »

seedling thoughts on causality

I am skeptical of the notion of modernity because it immediately implies a teleology (the term “modern” is unavoidably deictic, from whence comes torturous configurations like postmodern, post-postmodern, hypermodern, neomodern, late-modern).
Society today is not a necessary outcome or a logical conclusion of the past.
Is democracy a “discourse”? Why do I take for granted that a [...]

Read Full Post »

in honour of women’s history month

march is women’s history month. I periodically pick up random goodies in the archive, without any particular reason other than that it interests me. and serendipitiously, this month is a good time to share one of them: two women’s day memorial songs, bellowed in jubilant unison by legions of Chinese women on International Women’s Day [...]

Read Full Post »

world history is the forest

I am firmly convinced of the value of context. The study of history, and increasingly at graduate level, is necessarily vertical, constrained by national, regional, periodical, linguistic, ideational, individual boundaries. You always study the history of something (and you have to). Sometimes, though, study becomes so vertical that you lose sight of the forest. I [...]

Read Full Post »