Exile

This magazine just continues to amaze me. When the whole country is buying into James Frey’s laughable white middle class fantasy, the Exile was there to point out how utterly absurd Frey's book is.

This is the first article that I have read that points out this aspect of the Columbine Massacre.

The disappointing thing is that the only place I have come across these ideas is an expat magazine in Russia.

Semiotics

Semiotics Slideshow

Google Print

The other day I realized that Google had finally put up a number of the books it had been scanning from a number of libraries (Harvard, Michigan, NY, Oxford). I know there has been a lot of controversy about this. Publishers contend that if Google has a database of every book it can get its hands on, then somehow people will stop buying books.

After using the service though, I am unequivocally on the side of Google in this. First, I think the chance of true copyright infringement is negligible. If you are only allowed to get excerpts for books that are copyright protected, it is no different than using any other indexing service. It is true that Google stands to make a lot of money from advertising revenue, but to me that seems a small matter when compared to the potential gains.

Those gains seem incredible and revolutionary. Books that are hundreds of years old will suddenly become part of the intellectual world again. For instance, I searched for the Ukrainian poet Taras Schevchenko and I found a magazine article from Macmillan’s written in 1885, twenty four years after Schevchenko’s death. Normally, this article would be lost to time. It would no longer be available to the general public and thus not a part of the overall dialogue. Now it has been revived. I only wish Google would copy faster.

April 12

From NYT
"Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut who was the first man to travel into space, returned to the front pages of nearly every Russian newspaper today in commemoration of the 45th anniversary of his flight, on April 12, 1961."

Student Government and Ideology

I guess it is Student Bar Association election time again because people are handing out candy with their names on it.  I was really surprised to find out that this stuff goes on at this level of educational system, but at the same time I don’t want to be a stick in the mud about it.  I don’t see any posters, so I guess they are not allowed – but if there were posters, I would run under the “one party, one ideology” platform.  I would have large posters proclaiming:

• Free Healthcare for all law students


• Doubling the size of the SBA government, and requiring a course in Hegel for all members.


• The honor board will be dissolved and replaced with the “SBA Honor Board,” which will be an appointed position.

I spoke to a libertarian last semester, and he told me he has plans to run and reduce the SBA government by half and pass on the savings to all students.  We can’t allow this to happen!

Agamemnon (Aeschylus)

CHORUS
“Zeus has led us on to know
The helmsman lays it down as law
That we must suffer, suffer into truth.
We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart
The pain of pain remembered comes again
And we resist, but ripeness comes as well.
From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench
There comes a violent love.”
177-184
-----------------
Let there be less suffering…
Give us the sense to live on what we need.

Bastions of wealth
Are no defense for the man
Who treads the grand altar of justice
Down and out of sight.
381-386
-------------
The reach for power can recoil
The bolt of god can strike you at a glance.
461-462
------------
AGAMEMNON
The beast of Argos, foals of the wild mare,
thousands massed in armor rose on the night
the Pleiades went down, and crashing through
their walls our bloody lion lapped its fill,
gorging on the blood of kings.
810-813
-------------
CASSANDRA
Oh men your destiny.
When all is well a shadow can overturn it.
When trouble comes a stroke of the wet sponge,
and the pictures blotted out. And that,
I think that breaks the heart.
1350-1354
-----------
LEADER
You’re brave, believe me, full of gallant heart.

CASSANDRA
Only the wretched go with praise like that.
1324-1325

The Trial

“But under the beards – and this was K.’s real discovery – badges of various sizes and colors gleamed on their coat collars. They all wore these badges, so far as he could see. They were all colleagues, these ostensible parties of the right and left, and as he turned round suddenly he saw the same badges on the coat collar of the Examining Magistrate.” 59.

K. turned toward the stairs to make his way up to the Court of Inquiry, but then came to a standstill again, for in addition to this staircase he could see in the courtyard three other separate flights of stairs and besides these a little passage at the other end which seemed to lead into a second courtyard. He was annoyed that he had not been given more definite information about the room, these people showed a strange negligence or indifference in their treatment of him. Franz Kafka The Trial 44 (1937)