Today I went to a Tulip Festival for the first, perhaps the last time. It's late in the season, so most of the fields had been chopped. We did find one garden and wandered through it. No one ever told me that tulip names were so bad-ass. Here's some of the gems:
Dreaming Maid
Scarlet Pimpernel
Graffiti
Oriental Splendor
Moneymaker
Dutch Master
Flaming Parrot
Queen of the Night
Temple of Beauty
Ninja
Aladdin
Way more exciting than the Calvinist tulips.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
friends of the library
Here are the books I bought at the sale. $11.
McTeague - Frank Norris
Scarlet and Black - Stendhal
Love - Stendhal
Therese Raquin - Emile Zola
Mardi - Herman Melville
Spring Torrents - Turgenev
The Long Valley - John Steinbeck
Never Let Me Go - Ishiguro
Letters from My Windmill - Daudet
Pictures from Italy - Dickens
The Storm - Defoe
I'm very curious about how my standards for buying books changes. Generally, I only buy books in good condition (not too ripped, little or no underlining, not too dusty). Lately I've been more interested in older copies of books, curious about them not only to read but as artifacts. Also, my interest in books often goes in waves of publishers. Recently its been Penguin. Eight of those eleven books I bought were published by Penguin.
Also, pretty much any Stephen Gould book can be bought for $3 at a used bookstore. This will be useful to me whenever I decide I want to read more of him. Good, readable essays on natural history.
McTeague - Frank Norris
Scarlet and Black - Stendhal
Love - Stendhal
Therese Raquin - Emile Zola
Mardi - Herman Melville
Spring Torrents - Turgenev
The Long Valley - John Steinbeck
Never Let Me Go - Ishiguro
Letters from My Windmill - Daudet
Pictures from Italy - Dickens
The Storm - Defoe
I'm very curious about how my standards for buying books changes. Generally, I only buy books in good condition (not too ripped, little or no underlining, not too dusty). Lately I've been more interested in older copies of books, curious about them not only to read but as artifacts. Also, my interest in books often goes in waves of publishers. Recently its been Penguin. Eight of those eleven books I bought were published by Penguin.
Also, pretty much any Stephen Gould book can be bought for $3 at a used bookstore. This will be useful to me whenever I decide I want to read more of him. Good, readable essays on natural history.
Monday, April 5, 2010
The Naive Realist Manifesto
Principle First: the principles of naive realism do not need to be explained, because they are self-evident.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
children
A few thoughts.
1. Pedophilia functions as a fantasy of absolute good and evil. What I mean is that when it's discussed, its discussed as an example of something that everyone can believe is absolutely and self-evidently evil. In this sense children function as the object of fantasy for both pedophile and anti-pedophile.
2. The concentration on pedophilia and child molestation disguises the way in which children are more comprehensively exploited. This is not just in a general or ideal sense but in a very physical sense. The infant body is used to sell a variety of products, some of them having nothing to do with children. But of course in these cases what is noticed is how cute the babies are, and somehow that's separated from how the children are simultaneously being used/sold/exploited. Children similarly function as a fetish in pedophilia and advertisements.
3. There is a paradoxical discourse about sex and the body, first that the exploitation is traumatic and real because it involves sexuality, second that the exploitation is bad because it involves sexuality. More specifically, the horror is when children's bodies are the product, but there is no horror when children's bodies are used to sell the product.
4. In a more general sense I've been intrigued for a long time about how quick people are to talk about prostitution as exploitation (because it involves the body) but ignore the ways in which all jobs of any kind involve selling the self and permitting control over one's own body by the employer (if not always the customer). Another irony is how the alienation of the laborer from the product is condemned, but prostitution breaks down that alienation (then again, I'm not convinced that the product sold in prostitution is the prostitute's body.
1. Pedophilia functions as a fantasy of absolute good and evil. What I mean is that when it's discussed, its discussed as an example of something that everyone can believe is absolutely and self-evidently evil. In this sense children function as the object of fantasy for both pedophile and anti-pedophile.
2. The concentration on pedophilia and child molestation disguises the way in which children are more comprehensively exploited. This is not just in a general or ideal sense but in a very physical sense. The infant body is used to sell a variety of products, some of them having nothing to do with children. But of course in these cases what is noticed is how cute the babies are, and somehow that's separated from how the children are simultaneously being used/sold/exploited. Children similarly function as a fetish in pedophilia and advertisements.
3. There is a paradoxical discourse about sex and the body, first that the exploitation is traumatic and real because it involves sexuality, second that the exploitation is bad because it involves sexuality. More specifically, the horror is when children's bodies are the product, but there is no horror when children's bodies are used to sell the product.
4. In a more general sense I've been intrigued for a long time about how quick people are to talk about prostitution as exploitation (because it involves the body) but ignore the ways in which all jobs of any kind involve selling the self and permitting control over one's own body by the employer (if not always the customer). Another irony is how the alienation of the laborer from the product is condemned, but prostitution breaks down that alienation (then again, I'm not convinced that the product sold in prostitution is the prostitute's body.
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