Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
It’s been only 10 years since the first browsers (Mozilla & then Netscape) were widely distributed, making the internet readily accessible to average computer users. Immediately, early adoptees, futurists, & pundits announced wild possibilities for a radical social realignment. They declared that, like Rocky Balboa, the little guy had a shot at the title…
On Sunday, we went to West Hill United Church which holds itself out as a “progressive community of faith.”
The Interpretation of Cultures, by Clifford Geertz (New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, 1973) is a collection of anthropological essays which combines a theoretical examination (how we should think about thinking about cultures) with field work (thinking about cultures). First collected in 1973, the volume has been reissued because its ideas simply will not go away. His writings may have wider application and a more urgent relevance than is apparent at first glance.
My sister-in-law called with a grammatical question. A family argument had arisen. They wanted to know the correct use of the comparative. Here are the options: 1. He is bigger than me. 2. He is bigger than I.
Three posts ago, I concluded by pointing out the usefulness of hypertext. It is a tool which enables us in certain directions. Afterward, in a more reflective mood, it occurred to me that hypertext is both analogical, and a facilitator of analogical thinking.
Summer reading, nothing freshly published, just books that have sat unread on my shelves, books I’ve been meaning to read but have brushed aside in favour of more immediate demands.
Looking back on some of my earliest rants, I see that I was personal, and reading them now makes me wince (a little like watching an interview of Anne Heche shortly after she had broken up with Ellen Degeneres).
A Le Carré spy novel is more than just another cheap paperback thriller. That is what we learn from the dust jacket of The Little Drummer Girl. According to the L.A. Times: “Le Carré’s ability to create character, dialogue and event approaches the amazing … THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL confirms without qualification his status as a writer of elegance and importance.”
I must be maturing; I think I’m developing a deeper appreciation for Virginia Woolf. My first encounter with this author came when I was 18 and had to read Edward Albee‘s play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in high school. I had no idea what Virginia Woolf had to do with the play, and so, because I didn’t know any better, I decided to read something by Virginia Woolf.
For my wife’s birthday, I bought her tickets to Wicked, which we saw on Saturday. It uses the Wizard of Oz as its point of departure and tells the story of life before Dorothy — the relationship of Glinda the Good Witch and Elphaba (who became the Wicked Witch of the West) — and also the story of how the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion came to be.
A while ago, at an art auction, I purchased a single Dali wood cutting from a series of 100 prints to commemorate the 700th birthday of Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, in 1965.
Some things never change. The April/05 issue of the United Church Observer [named changed to Broadview in 2019] features an extended letters–to–the–editor section because of the huge response to an article from the February/05 issue — “Believing Outside the Box” by Jennifer McPhee. The article is about a minister, Rev. Gretta Vosper, who decided to come clean with her congregation about her struggles with the orthodoxy of the United Church.
George Bernard Shaw advocated the use of a phonetic alphabet and even made provision for it in his last will and testament. What a sad little man.
This is a follow–up to my entry on BitTorrent. I have another theory about why BitTorrent doesn’t work. According to Wired, BitTorrent’s creator, Bram Cohen, has Asperger’s syndrome.
Today, in the west, we scrutinize everything with a presumption of incoherence. We use post-modern theoretical models to call into question even the possibility of coherence, suggesting that the world we inhabit is fundamentally fractured.