escapegrace

Geometric Relationships More Realistic Than the Love Triangle
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A right-wing group has offered UCLA students $100 to spy on faculty.

The group's website, uclaprofs.com, lists 31 professors whose classes it considers worthy of scrutiny. The professors teach classes in history, African-American studies, politics, and Chicano studies. Their supposed radicalism is indicated on the site by a rating system of black fists. The organisation denies on the website that it is conducting a vendetta against those with differing political views. "We are concerned solely with indoctrination, one-sided presentation of ideological controversies and unprofessional classroom behaviour, no matter where it falls on the ideological spectrum."

The U.S. government is trying to force Google to turn over information about on-line searches.

"The bad news is that Google probably has more information in its data banks than any other search engine. Google may have to give in, but at least they are showing some backbone."

Google stores user information in a single tracking "cookie" that could hold a rich load of data about anything from email, online purchases, addresses, names, searched words, or other terms typed in, Givens said.

Dixon said Google would not be able to filter out personal information from the data demanded by the government.

"That is what is really at stake here, anything you type into that box," Dixon said, referring to the window used by computer users in their searches.

"This will pull down everyone's information, even if they had nothing to do with pornography."

As someone who does frequent searches on cults, this is not a comforting time to be completing a dissertation.
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I'm of a certain age where Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett meant something to my teenage fantasies. Whereas Mr. Cassidy is now producing popular TV dramas, poor Leif is having some serious trouble kicking the junk. While no stranger to run-ins with the law, the most recent fracas involves the former star getting busted for narcotics last night after failing to produce a subway ticket at the Pershing Square station. I have a feeling it's all Nicollette Sheridan's fault.

In other really bizarre celebrity rap sheet news, KCRW DJ and former host of Morning Becomes Eclectic Chris Douridas has been arrested for drugging and attempting to kidnap a 14-year-old girl. I predict there's a lot more to this story.
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First, Kansas approves the Intelligent Design curriculum and then Boog Highberger, mayor of Lawrence, declares a month dedicated to International Dadaism.

As part of the proclamation, Highberger will utter the “zimzim” phrase, from a poem by Dada founder Hugo Ball, the late German author and poet. The words have no meaning, which Highberger said is the point.

“I just think it is good to acknowledge that there is a place for chance and nonsense in every healthy lifestyle,” Highberger said.

Maybe there's some kind of balance there.
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The Lit Blog Co-Op has chosen their first pick of the new year: Kirstin Allio's Garner.

In Garner, Allio pulled me into a small farming town in 1925 New Hampshire and didn’t let me go until she had finished telling me everything I needed to know about it. Her writing not only described the time period and area to the point where I could see it in my mind, but also captured the cadence and pace of said period and area. Her writing voice is amazingly consistent, especially when one considers the structure she utilizes to propel the story forward, switching narrators from section to section. This structure, while having a very modern feel to it, blends in seamlessly with the story Allio is telling.
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Now would be a good time to read some Martin Luther King.

From the speech delivered the day before his assassination - "I've Been to the Mountaintop":

Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy." Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a away that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — "We want to be free."

And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we're going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demand didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.
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More fun from the unmasking of JT Leroy...and Meghan O'Rourke on lying writers and the readers who love them.
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If you ever come upon me, hairbrush in hand, singing at the top of my lungs in the privacy of my apartment, chances are pretty good that I'm in the midst of a rendition of Jessi Colter's version of "Tell Me Baby Why You Been Gone So Long?" When a friend first turned me on to this song, I couldn't believe I hadn't heard more from the woman who's been called "the queen of '70s outlaw country." Following the death of her husband Waylon Jennings in 2002, she began the album that will be released next month: Out of the Ashes. Tony Joe White, her son Shooter Jennings, and even Waylon himself through old masters will all make an appearance.
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I've mentioned 3 Quarks Daily here before, but they've recently posted their Best Original Essays of 2005. It's as fine a time as any to check out this smart, smart site.
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Before I started writing on LA literature & alternative religion, I was obsessed with literature written about war (and obstacles to bearing witness in narratives of atrocity, to be specific - it's all here). One of the more fascinating anecdotes I heard about World War I was the 1914 Christmas truce. The image of the soldiers putting down their arms and picking up footballs is so perfect it doesn't matter if it's true. Now I can see how someone else pictured it in the Christian Carion film Joyeux Noel! (Merry Christmas).
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The current issue of LA Weekly is devoted to lists. The Feuilletons section includes 10 Reasons to Switch to Scientology, John Hodgman's 9 Presidents Who Had Hooks for Hands, and The Year in Useless Products. The Politics and Culture sections include such varied collections as 8 New Alternative Energy Ideas, A Dozen Weird Weather Moments, Fatwas of 2005, 10 Albums That Stank Up the Room, 10 Signs of the Yindie Apocalypse, and the 10 Best Dishes of 2005. And there's more...Just look around.
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I've gotten really into the Oscars for the past couple of years - Adrien Brody's stolen kiss and Chris Rock's opening monologue featuring the Gap vs. Banana Republic War being some of the highlights - so I was pretty excited to hear Jon Stewart will be hosting this year. Defamer writes:

Stewart’s selection was reportedly arrived at following a marathon sit-down between high-level Gay and Jewish Mafias officials in a secure basement conference room at David Geffen’s Malibu compound; the fabulous faction stubbornly threw its support behind movie star/respected song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman for the gig, but after a personal audition by Jackman featuring a musical Brokeback Mountain parody fell flat, the Velvets finally acquiesced and gave their approval to the safer choice of the universally loved Stewart.

Kittenpants provides a preview of what we can expect from Stewart's stewardship.
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Despite his questionable thoughts on Hitler, one of the most underrated writers, in my opinion, is Norwegian realist Knut Hamsun. He won the Nobel Prize in 1920, but after I read his bleak, fascinating 1890 novel Hunger years ago, I would usually bring him up in conversation and be met with blank stares. So it's interesting to see the Hamsun bandwagon seems to be hitting the road. The New Yorker has a look at the author's "return":

When “Hunger” came out, in 1890, Hamsun informed reviewers that he was trying something different; he was not, he insisted, interested in marriages and balls—the book was not really a novel at all. Rather, as he told a friend, “What interests me are my little soul’s endless emotions, the special, strange life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a hungry body.”

Hamsun’s narrator, a writer, is a careful cataloguer of his own psychological states—no victim but, like Hamsun himself, a subversive, generational voice. Not a great deal happens, and yet from the first line—“It was in that time when I walked around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one can leave without being marked by it”—the novel’s oddly joyful desperation never flags.

The latest issue of Boldtype (The Obsession Issue) also features a review of Hunger. You can read the whole novel on-line here.

Robert Frost once wrote, "The best way out is always through." Having a birthday that directly follows on the new year means this a ripe time for renewal for your lowly correspondent. It's been quite some time since there was a mix post entry (September, in fact), so I thought the coming of the new year was a perfect occasion to give tribute to the power of music that spurs us on.