I was flipping through Deleuze’s books on cinema this morning, with cinema, not literature, on my mind. But this just leapt out at me. We know that there’s a connecting line between Thomas Pynchon and Gilles Deleuze. And Against The Day, like his previous novels, is at times incredibly cinematic (in a sort of impossible way). So check these passages…
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Finally, a table of contents to all four blogs
Hey folks, I finally have a table of contents to all four of my blogs: Social software; Cultural Commentaries; Film; and Music. If you’re like me, you probably don’t navigate blogs by archive postings; so here’s to one of the most basic navigation inventions ever, the TOC.
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Webocracy, Mass media, mini media, MySpace, YouTube
An article in today’s SF Gate caught my eye. It’s title included the word “Webocracy,” so I knew right away that it must have to do with web 2.0, Silicon Valley, and the like. Like the term “folksonomy,” “webocracy” captures the new in something old. In this case, democracy done online, retooled and perhaps even improved. Folksonomy, similarly, refers to…
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Pay Attention to YouTube!
I don’t normally post the same thing to two of my blogs, but this one’s an exception. This one also differs in one respect. It’s got an extra period in it. See if you can find it. Just kidding. It’s the same. I’m on a bit of a Marshall McLuhan kick this week, with YouTube’s acquisition to Google still in…
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North Korea: Sticks and Stones may brreak…
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me… So it’s happened. The event our administration has hoped to head off, to discourage and deter, happened anyways. Asian security policy ought now be chronicled with “before test” and “after test.” For how can Japan and Australia now maintain non-nuclear military postures? What do the South Koreans…
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Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Accept Kim Jong Il
If it is indeed true that N Korea conducted a nuclear test today, US foreign policy will truly be turned on its head. For everything about North Korea that is true will be like a mirror image of all in Iraq that was false. Washington will wish they only had to deal with the publication of Woodward’s State of Denial.…
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My problem with the Law…
People who know me know that I live by my own principles. I have a constitutional (!) allergy to rules, as well as a generalized condition of avoidance (if not out-right hostility) to dogmatic principles. The law falls under this rubric. But so too do many things opposed to law. Dogmatic violence (“insurgents” in Iraq), dogmatic freedom (US occupation of…
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Media circus finds no pictures allowed in Amish country
I only just heard on the news this morning that the Amish don’t keep photos. There are no pictures of the girls who were killed. (Let’s assume everyone’s telling the truth; tho if I were an Amish parent I dont think I’d want my daughter’s pic pushed onto the internet by bloodthirsty journalists, would you?) That’s fascinating. And only moreso…
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Rajeev Samant at Stanford
My friend and old dorm-mate Rajeev Samant has been flown in, business class and not the class that sits on top of the airplane, to speak to the incoming freshman at Stanford this year. That’s 1700 kids at Stanford’s MemAud. I remember that morning back in 1984, President Donald Kennedy advising us to Question Authority. Raj was one of the…
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Difference and repetition
In lieu of an actual post (I have things cooking but they’re not yet ready), I’m just going to post one of my favorite passages from Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: “But perhaps the majority of philosophers had subordinated difference to identity or to the Same, to the Similar, to the Opposed or to the Analogous: they had introduced difference…