"…Narratives are better than thumps, is the message; and in the field of human relations this might well be so, but here's the rub. Nature's not a person. Nature's not a mother. We are not fighting it but living it. The industrial landscapes pursued with such terrific thoroughness, the agricultural deserts as well as the suburbs, the minefields as well as the wind farms, the cities themselves, are the outcomes not of rage but of stories, narratives in the dream of the human domination of the world. That's why I hug the boy's head. It's good that he sees himself as a particle of nature, a being rather than a human being, and his life as fundamentally consumptive. He knows if he holds his breath he will die. He knows he must live in the present. So now I must try and teach him this: the bolt-ons and band-aids of the sustainability movement that try to manage our fear of the future are but another chapter in that book of domination. It will not, in the face of the red giant, ultimately sustain. And nature as we know it now, in this snapshot of human time, will not stay as it is, however we try to preserve it."

"Anonymity does not mean without deep contact, it means that the contact has no preempting ceremony. Collaboration, likewise, is the proof of itself. It exists neither before or after the moment it takes place, except in how it inflects your character. Inclusiveness and partiality are symbiotic, too. If partial is a move taken to outflank hegemony, the inclusive works to recombine differences. The paradoxes implicit in such terms are part of what makes them interesting. I'm trying to elucidate a thinking that is not dialectic, no longer dependent on oppositions, not looking for the right way. As one of the directors of Themepark, a London based fashion-architecture-photography-landscape combine said to me: "we are interested in showing content in its pure form." At first I thought it was a joke, more of that London-Thing irony, but then I thought, what else is the material world but content in its pure form? Today's photographers, who mistrust the Magnum generation's point-and-shoot realities, who set up every shot elaborately, who treat landscape, portrait, action and spectacle as the same thing, are not being minimalist. They are positing the velocity of the image."

"It takes, say, thousands of person hours spread over a handful of scholars to create and ‘debug’ a single conceptual trope. When that’s done the trope can show up in casebooks and undergraduate texts. And from there, it goes into the knowledge-hungry minds of our students. And when one of them writes reviews for The New York Times, BINGO! a conceptual trope enters the self-styled paper of record. And, from there, the world."

"That’s how culture works."

'While “self-styled” seems mostly a put-down, it is a notably weak one. The user of this phrase notes that someone claims something, but lacks an official credential, or strong consensus, supporting this claim. But we the reader can also note that this speaker offers no stronger criticism, and is not willing to directly contradict the offending claim. After all, instead of calling someone a “self-styled visionary,” you might say “he calls himself a visionary, but he’s not; he hasn’t has a vision in years.”'

"Contributors are invited to submit papers on aspects of zombies and vampires as they relate to texts and media across cultural boundaries."

"I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out."

"In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized-- connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding. I will try to explain why.
It’s easily the most useful diagram I’ve found for understanding the practice of journalism in the United States, and the hidden politics of that practice. You can draw it by hand right now. Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.”"

"Rich is right that Americans have grown cynical. But the extremists of right and left have exploited that cynicism, have raised big money by distorting the truth, have denigrated the slow, tortuous compromise that is at the heart of progress in any real democracy. Obama's is the least cynical of the seven presidencies I've covered. It is a presidency that took effective action to prevent a depression, that has refused to engage in arrogant jingoism in its dealing with the rest of the world and--most important--spent its political capital on the most important piece of social legislation, health care reform, of the past 45 years."

"What I worry about, however, is that pockets of the open source community continue to largely be defined and driven by complexity, exclusivity, technocracy, and machismo. While I do support independence and freedom of choice in technology — and therefore open source — I prefer to do so inclusively, with an understanding that there are many more people who are not yet well served by technology because appropriate technology has not been made more usable for them. The beautiful, usable technology in the marketplace need not be the exclusive domain of the proprietary — but so far I’ve see little indication that open source developers take seriously the need for simpler, easier, and more intuitive future-forward interfaces. Perhaps I’m wrong or just uninformed, but so long as products like the OpenOfficeMouse continue to characterize the norm in open source design, I’m not likely going to be able to soon recommend open source solutions to anyone but the most advanced and privileged users.

"That said, the internet is pretty vast, and some of its denizens are smarter than others… and I suspect Wragge and Co’s fees for hunting down anonymous commenters will reflect those realities. It also remains to be seen how much they can achieve when working on sites hosted in countries where the jurisdiction isn’t so clear-cut, or sites like Wikileaks which are geared toward protecting their sources. What we can be sure of is that when lawyers can see a paycheck, there’s dirty laundry waiting to be washed… and we can expect the corporate (and political) world to wise up to the web pretty fast now that the full extent of its power is becoming apparent."

via Valdis Krebs

"The fires of the amateur’s enthusiasm are worth stoking; and the heat that they give is not false. Yet they also ought to be more than flashes, and they must absolutely be more than the inverse reflections of the newspaper’s dying embers."

"In fact, their dismissal of history is a direct consequence of their version of Darwinism, which is focused on demonstrating how the actions of literary characters provide illustrative examples of human biological nature. While they give no end of homage to the idea that actual human behavior is subject to environmental influence – as far as I can tell, no one seriously doubts this – they seem to have no interest in investigating how behaviors and environments amplify into history. Literary Darwinism is paradoxically static, the examination of flies caught in amber, and Darwin himself has become a Platonic fetish to ward off the evils of change, of history."

"Wouldn't it be nice, every once in a while, to read some sort of evidence of heart? An occasional 'We kid, the guy's okay??' Unless you really don't, in which case you won't be sorry when that bear shoots me with a rocket launcher. Mark my words: the gossip-monger whose style closest resembles that of Don Rickles' mastery of tension and release will stay successful the longest. Because the salient rules of entertainment will always apply. And Don Rickles should know, because he helped write them."

"These universities, because of their incessant reliance on standardized tests and the demand for perfect grades, fill their classrooms with large numbers of drones. I have taught gifted and engaged students who used these institutions to expand the life of the mind, who asked the big questions and who cherished what these schools had to offer. But they were always a marginalized and dispirited minority. The bulk of their classmates, most of whom headed off to Wall Street or corporate firms when they graduated, starting at $120,000 a year, did prodigious amounts of work and faithfully regurgitated information. They received perfect grades in both tedious, boring classes and stimulating ones, not that they could tell the difference. ..."

"Citing Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Lee Friedlander as an example, "art photography" was a practice valuing the artist's command over the medium, whereas for "conceptual photography" (e.g. Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons...) the emphasis was not on one's mastery over the tool, but rather the tool as a means to express an idea. In applying this contrast to artists working with computers today, Moody astutely observes a similar ethos between conceptual photography and "artist's with computers." In my opinion, one weakness to the post is Moody's stark polarization between his constructed categories, stating, "New media suggests a respect for hardware & software and belief in their newness, something artists with computers don't care about. New media involves a finicky devotion to programming and process, whereas artists with computers are bulls in the Apple Shop.""

"But you, sir, are no painter. And while you hack away at your terminal, or ride your homemade Segway, we painters and musicians are going to be right over here with all the wine, hash, and hot chicks."

"If Web 2.0 is the answer then we are clearly asking the wrong question."

"Criticism understands that "good" and "bad" are just the surface. What's more important is why, and how, and to what end."

"SHOW, DON'T TELL"

"Original sources are jazzy and fun, and everybody should read them!"

"The decline of public intellectuals correlates with the rise of Richard Posner."

"The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery, living mound lumbering against it."

"soulless evil in Heorot". [Funniest thing to me about all this is that I had tea with Cormac several times in Santa Fe, not knowing who he was. But also vice versa, I suppose....]

Damn, I hate that.