Why I blog...

One of the great things about having a blog is sharing the good and amusing things one runs across.  At the moment, the blog wife and I are reading 'The Magicians' by Lev Grossman, a novel referencing Narnia and Harry Potter, but written for a more adult audience about students who get into a bespoke university for magic.  The hero (and all the characters) are bright-tending-brilliant students who have a magic sensibility.  Naturally people are somewhat flawed and stressed - the hero gets his head punched by Penny, a punk magician who felt threatened by the hero's easy progress.  One character notes that he had been stewing a long time, with a lot of repressed rage.  "He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog."

Hey, wait a minute...

Painting Fakes

I recently discovered the work of Jon at Painting Fakes through Another Something (see the blog roll).

The blog title is explained in this post (currently linked to from the lead post, but I hope most of my readership are reading from the distant future, ruefully, from which vantage the link may be helpful).

I hope you enjoy it.

A Rest

I will probably not post much in the next little while, as we are in sleep school for babies who like to party too much.

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Community

I really like the show Community - brilliant stuff, and probably the most reflexively self-referential show I've ever seen.  Abed, a slightly autistic cinephile geek is revealed to be taping himself when in his dorm room.  He explains that its not as interesting as you might expect: mostly its video of him watching the dailies (the video collected the day before).

If I had to take a stab at how the self-referentiality fits with the Community, I think it is that Community is an end in itself, but an end to which Community is also the means.  The whole thing is bootstraps all the way down.

In other community news, there has been an exchange of comments on this very blog about Kierkegaard, on the post 'Right and Right' from the end of August, which if you are a Kierkegaard enthusiast with very low expectations, you might like to check out.

Happy Birthday, readership!

The readership is celebrating a birthday today - I hope it's a delightful one.

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Apology to Readership

I've been alerted to the fact that you (all) find my writing to be somewhat, not to state it too baldly, involute or perhaps convolved - concerned to parenthetically run-on thought to thought as if to fully qualify every utterance by including the understanding or sense, or worse, to communicate entirely in coded references to things I happen to have seen or heard. I may not have been the best.... well, the most... well. I am aware of those things.*


*American Dreamer reference.

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Please welcome to the Blog Roll...

Professor Tim Morton, of UCLA Davis, Professor of English (Literature and the Environment).  I highly recommend his course on Romanticism (available in iTunes).  I have already posted a discussion of this course here.

Farewell Tom Scocca, following appointment as managing editor at Deadspin, what I suppose must be or become the sharpest-written sports web-site in the world.

The look

Frances of Bookish asked about the rather lairy site design.  I quite like it, but it is very high-energy.  The main point of reference on this subject for me is public appearances from Jim Hacker from Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.  If you have some very upsetting change to announce, if you want to depart radically from the established way of things, you announce it with a background of many leatherbound books and an atmosphere of rich mahogony*.  If you have no initiatives, solutions or changes to offer, if you want to hide the fact that its more mealy mouthed wittering and more of the same reality by dictat of the civil service, you need a high energy yellow wallpaper, and synthesised intro music.

*little Anchorman there.

mobility

First post using 'Blogger-droid' from my ADP1

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The dignity of the absurdity of this blog

In my traffic sources today, two African-based internet degree factories.  They didn't leave blogspam.  My theories on why not:
1.  Readership too small (no offense, readership);
2.  Blog too obscure to know how to win my trust and my readers trust; or
3.  I write like a spambot and they assumed I was one of their own, with my half formed thoughts and dangling