Monthly Archives: April 2009

reading list

An unpleasant truth that many bloggers must face down is that they seldom have anything of value to contribute to the internet. This hardly stops anyone (including myself), but since I’m aware of the problem it hardly seems proper for me to perpetuate it. This is not to say that I’m about to twist some [...]
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music: larytta

Larytta is two swiss guys on a bunch of synthesizers with outsize ideas about modern art and how fun it can be. 3/14. about the ranking system: A NEW NADIR refuses to be bound by arbitrary norms created by the hegemonic discourse of base-10 counting. All media given a qualitative rating will be judged on a [...]
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marked ‘discard’

To situate ourselves, The Eleatic stranger is the dialogue’s main interlocutor. Before saying exactly what statesmanship consists in, he recounts the myth of the time of Kronos, when “the god himself assists the universe on its way and helps it in its rotation.” (269d) In this prelapsarian world, the god ruled humans and there was no [...]
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sunday slough

A review of Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language by John T. Hamilton How to manage your unwitting internet reputation. How Obama, whether he wants to or not, is reshaping American capitalism. Bret Easton Ellis is on Twitter, and the joke is that he’s not doing anything. One assumes, however, that the dearth of updates means the [...]
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on my bookshelf: A Universal History of Iniquity

As a new project, I’m going to be going from left to right, top to bottom (as does the autodidact in Sartre’s Nausea) through the books in my bookshelf and giving a short little review of them. A Universal History of Iniquity is a collection of short clippings describing various crimes committed in and around the [...]
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Review: Savage Detectives

Science fiction it keeps cropping up in my dilletantish adventures in reading. What do you make of realism in novels when the best examples seem to flout the carefully-established norms? The novels whose margins I write in most, the ones with the coffee stains from all that reading during breakfast—are the novels most likely to [...]
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saturday links

I was going to take a picture of the breakfast sausage I cooked in order to make today’s headline a sort of joke, but I ate them before I could take a picture. So here’s a picture of a burger I made at the end of last summer: Anyway, on to the links (don’t worry, I’m [...]
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evening digest.

New iPhone app allows user to shake a baby until it dies. Awesome. The Last Modernist: Chris Petit’s retrospective on J.G. Ballard in Granta Why we should ditch all the crap about wind and solar and go straight for nuclear. Bill Nye the Science Guy pissed off a bunch of people in 2006 by saying that the Moon [...]
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since you won’t print it…

I wrote the following letter to my college’s newspaper after the brouhaha surrounding this cancelled course: What a freshman year this is turning out to be for Daniel Abramson. He comes to college after a year of toil—preparing for SAT’s, writing essays, beefing up the ol’ resume—and he gets a bunch of mud in his face [...]
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new circuits: David Maisel, Gavin Bryars, The Awl, After Habermas, Crash

New circuits a semi-regular set of posts about general trends in the internet’s culture-production organs. The internet is a system, and most of its unintelligibility is due to the sheer speed with which a new idea is released, digested and discarded by the collective wit. In the end this will prove a strength, not a [...]
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