El Aleph

Michelet on the French Revolution:

"That day...everything was possible...Future became present...that is, no more time, a glimpse of eternity."

http://www.phinnweb.org/links/literature/borges/aleph.html

_________ Handbook Table of Contents

Area codes / Atlantis / Barcode / Binary / Box stores / Cell phone towers / Cryptozoology / Cul de sacs / Dewey decimal system / El Dorado / Frontier / Flags / Franchises / Geodesic dome / the Law of Superlatives / Monorail / Miniature Golf / Municipalities / Power Lines / Pizza Hut / Pay Phones / Pneumatic Tubes / Reservoirs / Shopping Malls / Suburbs / Satellites / Street Lights / Street Names / Semaphore / Trap Streets / Trolleys / Weather / Zip Codes

Forthcoming here.

Royal Flush -- "Worldwide"

i always thought "don't provoke and getcha team smoke for broke and no joke" was "don't provoke and get ya teeth smoked..."

B C -- "What They Want"

Fail Log

I recently tried to do some more creative writing. I would start with a specific memory, and engage in stream-of-consciousness writing while continuing to picture that memory or detail. It often helped to to put that memory in motion, just as it's easier to picture someone moving than simply trying to picture their face. I hit off about fourteen pages of decent stuff, but then lost interest; then, the writing was forced and the voice inauthentic, the flow no longer captivating. It is also painful to travel back to old memories.

Opening Day for Durham Skate Park

http://durhamskatepark.com/

learning to fly

B C

Detection & Rhetorics of Evidence

Instructor: Barry F. Saunders

Detection engages the problem of the hidden—criminal disguises, buried treasure, coded meaning, invisible particles—and thus involves modes of conjectural, hypothetical knowing, and histories of curiosity. It also involves rhetorics of evidence and practices of proof. These problems and practices are as ancient as reading—e.g. of animal tracks, and signs of divine intentions.

Detective stories as such arose in the nineteenth century, in metropolitan settings that connected police work (and its limitations) with new popular enthusiasms for comparative anatomy, Egyptology, cryptography, and other projects of reconstructive knowing. These developments were contemporaneous with the consolidation of important new modes of medical diagnosis. This course develops these historical contexts along with some critical dimensions of detective literature and films—and of medical/scientific modes of finding, knowing, and showing. Half the course hours will be shared with 8 second-year UNC medical students.

Course texts may include selections from: stories by Poe, Doyle, Dennis Potter; Benedict, Curiosity; Detienne & Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society; Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method; Gall, On the Functions of the Brain…; Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, & The Order of Things; Benjamin and others on the flâneur; Bennett, The Birth of the Museum; Sekula, “The Body and the Archive”; Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination; Muller & Richardson, The Purloined Poe; Taylor, Hiding; Peirce on abduction; Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Zizek, Looking Awry; Montgomery, How Doctors Think; Burney, Bodies of Evidence. (List is partial & provisional…)

Posthumanism

ENGL 785.1 Proseminar in Lit. after 1870: “Posthumanism”
Prof. Matthew Taylor
TTh 12:30-1:45

Course Description
Although the posthuman frequently is associated with current or near-future
developments in cybernetics and immersive virtual realities, the idea that
we might benefit from expanding the boundaries of our bodies (and thus our
selves) is both centuries-old and inclusive of a range of traditionally
technophobic discourses, from aesthetic romanticism and transcendentalist
metaphysics to the deep ecology movement and critical animal studies. With
this broad definition in mind, our course will survey major statements in
“posthumanist” literature, painting, film, web media, and philosophy from
the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries; address the differences
and similarities between popular and critical posthumanisms; reflect upon
posthumanism’s political and ethical implications; and ask what futures, if
any, the posthuman might have.

We will consider the following: short fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and Franz
Kafka; H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau; William Gibson’s seminal
cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer; Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, a meditation on
the metaphysics of artificial intelligence; STELARC’s transhumanist
website; Peter Høeg’s recent The Woman and the Ape; select paintings by
Francis Bacon; Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg’s A.I.; and Werner
Herzog’s Grizzly Man. Likely theorists/philosophers to be included: Donna
Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, Cary Wolfe, and N. Katherine Hayles.

“Histories and Theories of Sexuality”
Comm 849: Seminar in Cultural Identity, Spring 2010
Weds 5-8pm, Hamilton 150
Rich Cante

Focus: major redirections of “post-identitarian” anglophone political thought since queer theory and, in particular, during the past few years.

Readings (NOT in this order):
Bataille, Erotism
Berlant, Intimacy (selections)
Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies
Braidotti, Transpositions (excerpts)
Butler, Bodies that Matter (excerpts) & Precarious Life (excerpts) & Undoing Gender (excerpt)
Chauncey, Gay New York (excerpt)
Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida
D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity”
Dean, Unlimited Intimacy
Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life
Derrida, “Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas” & “ A Word of Welcome”
Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I am
Derrida, “Circumfession”
Derrida, HC for Life , That is to Say…
Duttmann, At Odds with AIDS (excerpt)
Edelman, No Future
Ferguson, Aberrations in Black (excerpt)
(viewing) Fellini, Roma
(viewing) Fellini, Satyricon
Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I & Volume II & Volume III
Fuss, Identification Papers (excerpt)
Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want?
Kunzel, ed., Queer Futures (issue of Radical History Review, selections)
Lacan, Seminar on Transference
Love, Feeling Backward (excerpt)
Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes & Place for Us
Parker and Halley, eds., Writing Since Queer Theory (issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, selections)
“Plato,” Symposium
Puar, Terrorist Assemblages
Scott, “The Evidence of Experience”
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (excerpts) & Tendencies
Warhol, Philosophy of Andy Warhol (excerpt)