Displaying comments 1 to 50 of 7501
MeFi post:
RIP Thomas Disch
...his books Camp Concentration, On Wings of Song and 334 remain vivid in my mind thirty years later.About once a week, I think about some aspect of one thing or another from what he wrote--fairies and fairy traps from On The Wings of Song; Birdie Ludd's problems of creativeness in 334, the would be child murderers in Angouleme therefrom or the syphilitic prisoner genii... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 8:36 AM on July 7, 2008
Wolfe is the last one left.
Your canon is missing Jack Vance--who still lives. But then I would put Vance before Lem by an order of magnitude or two any day of the year. As would Gene Wolfe, or so I suspect.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 1:43 PM on July 7, 2008
Lem, Wolfe, Dick, and Disch do indeed go together -- but Vance?
Ahem...
The Dying Earth - Jack Vance
The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Philip K. Dick
Go together ? Utterly dissimilar ?
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 8:02 AM on July 8, 2008
Ah, but one is quite clearly in part an homage to the other and, also, one Gene Wolfe has written an essay entitled The Living Earth.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 9:49 AM on July 8, 2008
I don't think Vance belongs in that list of "trailblazers," is all I am saying...
For you he's not a trailblazer. For me, To Live Forever, The Languages of Pao, Ulward's Retreat and Rumfuddle all come to mind as examples of innovative and ground breaking work of the first rank in concept alone. Emphyrio is nearly universally recognized... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 12:20 PM on July 9, 2008
Well, just for the record:Lawrence Person: Early in your career, critics placed you both inside and outside the New Wave. How heavily did the New Wave influence your own work, and did you feel you were a part of it?
Gene Wolfe: I don't think I was heavily influenced by the New Wave. If I was a part of it, I was only a very remote, peripheral person. I suppose the epicenter of the New Wave was J. G. Ballard, although you might dispute that, and certainly I was at a great... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 1:25 PM on July 15, 2008
On topic: Remembering Thomas M. Disch:Disch was an often brutal satirist who wrote a beloved children's book about sweet-natured household appliances, an ironist who would cheer up a visitor by reading aloud poems ostensibly penned by Paddington the Bear, in Paddington's voice. He reveled in coincidence, in life and art. With Naylor, he wrote a marvelous historical novel, "Neighboring Lives," that explored the web of connections between Victorian thinkers and artists in Pre-Raphaelite... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 2:12 PM on July 15, 2008
MeFi post:
Taking Affirmative Action Against Crime and For Economic Reconstruction
During his interview with Bill Moyers, Douglas Blackmon, said something to the effect that at the end of the Reconstuction, whites north and south came to a consensus about the place of blacks in this country. And it was not talked about thereafter for decades. I was thinking of that when Glenn C. Loury and Ortland Patterson then came on:Bill Moyers: Have we ever had a real conversation in this society about what to do about so large a number of people who have been deliberating assigned to the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 4:09 PM on June 21, 2008
Amazing that Johnson was so dedicated to equality and did so many good things domestically, yet was so flawed in other ways.
Had he not been saddled with Viet Nam, his face would be on a coin or dollar bill of one denomination or another.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 5:18 PM on June 21, 2008
Bill Moyers: What was slope number 12?
Douglas Blackmon: Slope number 12 was a huge mine on the outskirts of Birmingham, part of a maze of mines. Birmingham is the fastest growing city in the country. Huge amounts of wealth and investment are pouring into the place.
But there's this again, this need for forced labor. And the very men, the very entrepreneurs who, just before the Civil War, were experimenting with a kind of industrial slavery,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 7:45 AM on June 22, 2008
note: Help maintain a healthy, respectful discussion by focusing comments on the
issues, topics, and facts at hand—not at other members of the site.
One could insert 'crackpot comments by' before 'other members' as well when the aforesaid comments so beggar the imagination that any response is a default to shooting dead fish mounted in varathane in a barrel. Some comments merit no response no matter how long or how ridiculous they were.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 11:24 AM on June 23, 2008
MeFi post:
Three times as many killed as once thought in 50 years of conflicts, new analysis suggests.
I don't understand this study. The omissions of so many armed conflicts is baffling...
An estimate of all deaths in all wars in the last 50 years it is not. It is a comparison of a new survey method to estimate violent deaths due to armed conflict using thirteen specific examples of armed conflicts where previous estimates had been made.
The point of survey, as I understand it, was not to establish an estimate... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 6:39 AM on June 21, 2008
MeFi post:
That's entertainment
See also The Minstrel Show and, especially, The Minstrel Show 2.0: Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter and The Minstrel Show 2.1 - William Henry Lane & Pattin' Juba as well for ample links to intelligent articles and discussions on the complex matter of blackface minstrelsy.
The Minstrel Cycle from Reading The Committments, from The Minstrel Show 2.0, for example, are most informative, as is Robert Christgau's discussion of the academic literature in In Search... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 6:45 PM on June 4, 2008
See Race/Music: Corrine Corrina, Bo Chatmon, and the Excluded Middle as well. Even if the main link has gone dead, here is a quote therefrom regarding the vocal stylings ofHenry St. Claire Fredericks, also known as Taj Mahal. Mahal, whose father was a jazz arranger and pianist from the West Indies, began to play coffee houses around 1964, while a student in animal husbandry at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His eclectic style was shaped by his interest in the fields of folklore and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 7:10 PM on June 4, 2008
Well, while it is not online anymore, I see it can be found in dead tree form in Music and the Racial Imagination. Now that looks like an interesting collection of essays.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 7:25 PM on June 4, 2008
MeFi post:
This is an Andy Rooney post. That would be an Andy Rooney post worth celebrating.
Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the day we have set aside to honor by remembering all the Americans who have died fighting for the thing we like the most about our America: the freedom we have to live as we please.
...No one would know from Memorial Day that Richie M., who was shot through the forehead coming onto Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, wore different color socks on each foot because he thought it brought him good luck.
No one would remember on... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 11:35 AM on June 3, 2008
They re-ran that segment two weekends ago.
I was flipping channels and came on 60 Minutes just when Morley Safer was making the intro and found myself thinking Jeez, Morley Safer has a head to body ratio not usually seen in humans past the in utero state of development.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 11:49 AM on June 3, 2008
MeFi post:
Phoenix to land on Mars.
On an ancillary note, here, from a Mars Orbiter High Resolution Image Science Experiment shot taken on May 4, 2008, is a close up of the ice polygons characteristic of the landing site terrain.
Now, is that not the geekiest floor pattern of all time or what?
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 8:37 AM on May 27, 2008
Er, just to be clear, that should have read:
Now, is that not the geekiest floor tile pattern of all time or what ?
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 3:26 PM on June 2, 2008
MeFi post:
where's the old lady?
...this is not something people aren't going to see.
Unless they managed to miss the last five minutes of every local tv news broadcast in the country yesterday.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 3:21 PM on May 22, 2008
MeFi post:
Edward Kennedy has malignant brain tumor
I think that Karen Tumulty has just said it best at Swampland:If a lawmaker is to be measured by the sheer volume of his legislative accomplishments, then Senator Kennedy has been, hands down, the most important Senator of the past half-century--a case that Adam Clymer made forcefully in his masterful biography of Kennedy. Paradoxically, his greatest achievements came only after he gave up any ambition to be President, and his impact may have been greater for having been denied that dream.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 12:31 PM on May 20, 2008
MeFi post:
Now, Get Off of My Lawn!
Ignorance is timeless and ageless. I came to find that a friend of mine, in her late 30s, had never heard of the Parthenon. When shown a picture, she maybe kinda recognized it but did not know where it was or why it had any significance.
And the other day, I got an utterly illiterate note of complaint from a forty something tenant in my apartment complex wherein she wrote, among so many other incredibly boneheaded things,
The point... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 12:51 PM on May 15, 2008
MeFi post:
Everybody must get stoned.
So, the two most commonly used so-called cgnitive enhancers reported used are ritalin and adderal. Stimulants. Which aren't exactly hydergine, DMAE or piracetam, podnuh. Those are not your father R. U. Sirus's smart drugs.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 7:55 PM on April 10, 2008
More like R.U. Starbucks.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 7:56 PM on April 10, 2008
MeFi post:
R.I.P. Klaus Dinger, the king of motorik
Hey, I had no idea there was footage of Neu! (such as it is).
Me, neither but now that I think about it, it stands to reason that if there is video footage of someone as obscure as Karen Dalton, there ought to be footage of Neu. I did so like Neu 75 back in the days of vinyl. So, r.i.p. Mr Dinger, indeed.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 3:21 PM on April 2, 2008
MeFi post:
Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison See also Phonoautograph
Here's another version of the Times piece with the actual recording, as well as a more recent recording of the song for comparison.
Oh, thank you so much for that--I missed it
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 8:30 AM on March 27, 2008
About the idea per se of deciphering sounds from history, when I was a boy (734 yrs ago), there was a TV show that featured science questions and enigmas, w/ a futuristic or quasi-fictional aspect to it, w/ the tone of Ripley's Believe It or Not.
That was Science Fiction Theater--July 30, 1955
THE FROZEN SOUND Voices from 2000 years ago and wire taps without wires confront research scientists. and/or Enemy espionage obtains a record... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 10:05 AM on March 27, 2008
History Lesson by Arthur C. Clarke... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 4:49 PM on March 27, 2008
MeFi post:
One for the History Books
When it comes right down to the actual election, America just may find that voting for the 70 year old white guy is exactly the kind of change they're really looking for.
Actually, I think that George W. Bush has torpedoed the whole white man as president concept, at least for this election cycle. We gave the whit eman a break and look where it got us. So, I don't see how getting super sized in the geezer department will be making the whole another... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 10:31 AM on March 19, 2008
Mrs. Clinton is fond of mocking her adversary for offering “just words.” But words can matter, and Mrs. Clinton’s tragedy is that she never realized they could have mattered for her, too. You have to wonder if her Iraq speech would have been greeted with the same shrug if she had tossed away her usual talking points and seized the opportunity to address the war in the same adult way that Mr. Obama addressed race. Mrs. Clinton might have reconnected with the half of her party that has tuned her... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 12:10 PM on March 23, 2008
Clan of the 82nd Couchborne
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 9:34 AM on March 24, 2008
MeFi post:
Scenes From Latcho Drom
...but he isn't from spain
I was guessing--it's been awhile since I have seen the movie. Which is so far unavailable on DVD, or so is my assumption.
I've seen the show last summer, and I have to say that the voice of La Caita has been really damaged (to me at least).
Considering how she sings in the movie, this comes as no surprise. On a sidenote:The singer La Caita performs in... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 10:09 AM on March 20, 2008
MeFi post:
The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar
Of course, during the recountings and recitals of the various minutiae of this whole affair, let it be noted that Ira played the dickens out of The Mystery of the Dunbar's Child by Richard "Rabbit" Brown during the story. And it can be heard, with a point and a click or two, here as well: James Alley Blues – Richard Rabbit Brown.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 8:47 AM on March 19, 2008
MeFi post:
The Geometry of Music
I'm happy to have a go at any questions about this part of DT's work, which I'm reasonably well-acquainted with.
Does he think Deep Purple made great music ?
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 5:50 PM on March 16, 2008
MeFi post:
epilogue
I should think that Columbia should rate yet another mention for how, by releasing five singles from their first album all at the same time, managed to torpedo Moby Grape's future and reputation all at the same time.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 12:36 AM on March 16, 2008
Well, for that matter, the Minnesota Hotel Tapes are not exactly Blonde on Blonde, either.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 1:08 PM on March 16, 2008
MeFi post:
Plagiarize a Presidential Candidate
Why not just bump it back a few years, and ask what she was doing in high school?
Hell, why not junior high ? Everyone should be judged by who they were in seventh and eighth grade. That would be the great leveler.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 11:41 PM on March 15, 2008
MeFi post:
Denny's Saved by Googie
There was a real estate bubble in the 80s, when there was an over abundance of office buildings, but, judging from the thirty odd construction cranes downtown, you woundln't know it now. There is, however, no housing crisis here. And no employment crisis, either. We are sitting very pretty in comparison to the rest of the country, and will be for sometime. Everyone will see this this paradise of unruined beauty and opportunity and make a beeline this way in order to help ruin it and drive up... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl
at 11:33 PM on March 15, 2008
