contradiction in terms.

I will refrain from any snickering comments. I will refrain from any snickering comments. I will refrain from any snickering comments and embrace the fact that there may be people out there who have sought such inspiration for a long time.

Roam Confidently With the Cultured Class. From the book description: "Millions of Americans keep bedside books of prayer and meditative reflection collections of daily passages to stimulate spiritual thought and advancement. The Intellectual Devotional is a secular version of the same collection of 365 short lessons that will inspire and invigorate the reader every day of the year. Each daily digest of wisdom is drawn from one of seven fields of knowledge: history, literature, philosophy, mathematics and science, religion, fine arts, and music. Impress your friends by explaining Plato's Cave Allegory, pepper your cocktail party conversation with opera terms, and unlock the mystery of how batteries work. Daily readings range from important passages in literature to basic principles of physics, from pivotal events in history to images of famous paintings with accompanying analysis. The books goal is to refresh knowledge we've forgotten, make new discoveries, and exercise modes of thinking that are ordinarily neglected once our school days are behind us. Offering an escape from the daily grind to contemplate higher things, The Intellectual Devotional is a great way to awaken in the morning or to revitalize one's mind before retiring in the evening."

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nomads in da house.

The cultural self-imagination of the US and A in the 1970s and early 1980s was frequently spelled out through the figure of the foreigner, whose grotesque attempts to adjust and assimilate to American social habits and their attendant vicissitudes would mark the outlines of its ideal instantiation. We chuckled at “two wild and crazy guys,” Mork and Mindy, "the Coneheads," or Balki Bartokomous. How utterly appropriate then that this mode of representation should return with a retro-character straight out of a Paleolithic state of mind: Borat Sagdiyev, the intrepid Kazakh reporter. The latest rumors indicate that 20^th Century Fox is scaling down the film’s US release to 800 theaters, because test audiences apparently declared themselves offended. Predictably, since Europeans assume that “political correctness” is official American policy, advance screenings of the film have garnered rave reviews in Europe. A German newspaper has gone so far as to declare the Borat the "funniest man in the world" and his film "sphincter-threateningly hilarious." It is true that the film frequently crosses the pain threshold. While its sophomoric nude wrestling sequence has already been hailed as a masterpiece in film history, I was mostly disturbed by the scenes in a religious revival tent because they actually reveal the limits of Borat’s satirical powers. In the meantime the newly independent, glorious nation of Kazakhstan is currently invested in its own retro-moves. With the help of Miramax, they have indulged in Nomad, a cinematic fantasy of narrative destiny with a purported budget of 40 million – American greenbacks, that is, not tenge, which apparently still exhibits an appropriately symptomatic tendency to suffer from linguistic confusion.

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boundaries redeployed.

In the open space that defines the so-called marketplace of ideas let us take note that in the name of freedom, the US government "has recently denied, delayed, or revoked visas to a group of seventy-five South Korean farmers and trade unionists opposed to a free-trade agreement; a Marxist Greek academic; a Sri-Lankan hip-hop singer, whose lyrics were deemed sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers and The Palestine Liberation Organization; a Bolivian professor of Latin-American history who had been offered a position at the University of Nebraska; a Basque historian; a former Sandinista minister of health; and nine thousand five hundred Burmese refugees." At the same time, the news agency Reuters has now established a Bureau Chief in the virtual world of Second life, who reports on the work of an Indiana University professor working to recreate a virtual world of Shakespeare.

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this is our anthem.

This is our country, according to the new Chevrolet Silverado commercial entitled "Anthem," which you can see here in its full-length but slightly infringed version:



Nothing like Rosa Parks and Hurricane Katrina to sell a pick-up truck with 15 miles to the gallon. An American revolution indeed.

Naturally, an edited response has already been posted here.

UPDATE: It figures. The previous link has been removed. Here's a new one.

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narrative template.

One of the few eggheads with his own fan site notes in his review of Pascale Casanova the following characteristics for a global literature prototype: it features "a trauma-and-recovery story, with magic-realist elements, involving abuse and family dysfunction, that arrives at resolution by the invocation of spiritual or holistic verities."

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