Monday, August 31, 2015
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Alexander (Hammid) Hackenschmied Maya Deren c.1930 “In an anagram all the elements exist in a simultaneous relationship. Consequently, within it, nothing is first and nothing is last; nothing is future and nothing is past; nothing is old and nothing is new… Each element of an anagram is so related to the whole that no one of them may be changed without affecting its series and so affecting the whole. And conversely the whole is so related to every part that whether one reads horizontally, vertically, diagonally or even in reverse, the logic of the whole is not disrupted, but remains intact.” Maya Deren, “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film” 1946
Uncredited Photographer Oliver Sacks, Doctor of Neurology and Writer, Greenwich Village 1961 Oliver Sacks 1933-2015 Ave atque Vale “Every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.” Oliver Sacks, “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain” 2007
Friday, August 28, 2015
crashinglybeautiful: “When the Lakota leader Sitting Bull was asked by a white reporter why his people loved and respected him, Sitting Bull replied by asking if it was not true that among white people a man is respected because he has many horses, many houses? When the reporter replied that was indeed true, Sitting Bull then said that his people respected him because he kept nothing for himself.” –Joseph Bruchac: “Sacred Giving; Sacred Receiving,” PARABOLA, Summer 2011.
the problem of anxiety-John Ashbery
Fifty years have passed
since I started living in those dark towns
I was telling you about.
Well, not much has changed. I still can’t figure out
how to get from the post office to the swings in the park.
Apple trees blossom in the cold, not from conviction,
and my hair is the color of dandelion fuzz.
Suppose this poem were about you–would you
put in the things I’ve carefully left out:
descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily
people behave toward each other? Naw, that’s
all in some book it seems. For you
I’ve saved the descriptions of finger sandwiches,
and the glass eye that stares at me in amazement
from the bronze mantel, and will never be appeased.
Thursday, August 27, 2015
welovepaintings: Abbott Handerson Thayer My Children (Mary, Gerald, and Gladys Thayer) 1897 Oil on canvas 86 1/4 x 61 1/8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum ___ Abbott Handerson Thayer, known for his paintings of angels, often used his children as models. Referring to My Children, Thayer wrote of his aim to show “three blissfully exalted children” in a way that “puts beauty to the eye first, and the idea last.”
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Paradoxes of War - Princeton University | Coursera Miguel A. Centeno Musgrave Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and International Affairs Princeton University
About this Course
The Paradoxes of War teaches us to understand that war is not only a normal part of human existence, but is arguably one of the most important factors in making us who we are. Through this course, I hope that you will come to appreciate that war is both a natural expression of common human emotions and interactions and a constitutive part of how we cohere as groups. That is, war is paradoxically an expression of our basest animal nature and the exemplar of our most vaunted and valued civilized virtues. You will learn some basic military history and sociology in this course as a lens for the more important purpose of seeing the broader social themes and issues related to war. I want you to both learn about war, but more importantly, use it as way of understanding your everyday social world. So, for example, the discussion of war and gender will serve to start you thinking about how expectations of masculinity are created and our discussion of nationalism will make clear how easy “us-them” dichotomies can be established and (ab)used. I will suggest some readings for you to complement the class and assign some activities through which you will be able to apply the theoretical insights from the course to your observations of everyday life. At the end of the course, you will start to see war everywhere and come to appreciate how much it defines our life.
Professor Centeno is the Musgrave Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the WWS. He was the founding Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (2003-2007) and Master of Wilson College (1997-2004). In 2000, he founded the Princeton University Preparatory Program. He is interested in political sociology and social change. He is the author of Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation State in Latin America, and Global Capitalism among other works. He is also the editor of Discrimination in an Unequal World, Towards a New Cuba and The Politics of Expertise in Latin America, The Other Mirror: Comparative Theory Through A Latin American Lens (ed. with F. Lopez-Alves); and Mapping the Global Web (ed. with E. Hargittai). Forthcoming books include War and Society, 2014 and Building States in the Developing World (w. A. Kohli and D. Yashar). New projects include an analysis of “emergent risk” in global flows and a history of the concept of discipline
The Paradoxes of War teaches us to understand that war is not only a normal part of human existence, but is arguably one of the most important factors in making us who we are. Through this course, I hope that you will come to appreciate that war is both a natural expression of common human emotions and interactions and a constitutive part of how we cohere as groups. That is, war is paradoxically an expression of our basest animal nature and the exemplar of our most vaunted and valued civilized virtues. You will learn some basic military history and sociology in this course as a lens for the more important purpose of seeing the broader social themes and issues related to war. I want you to both learn about war, but more importantly, use it as way of understanding your everyday social world. So, for example, the discussion of war and gender will serve to start you thinking about how expectations of masculinity are created and our discussion of nationalism will make clear how easy “us-them” dichotomies can be established and (ab)used. I will suggest some readings for you to complement the class and assign some activities through which you will be able to apply the theoretical insights from the course to your observations of everyday life. At the end of the course, you will start to see war everywhere and come to appreciate how much it defines our life.
Professor Centeno is the Musgrave Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the WWS. He was the founding Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (2003-2007) and Master of Wilson College (1997-2004). In 2000, he founded the Princeton University Preparatory Program. He is interested in political sociology and social change. He is the author of Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation State in Latin America, and Global Capitalism among other works. He is also the editor of Discrimination in an Unequal World, Towards a New Cuba and The Politics of Expertise in Latin America, The Other Mirror: Comparative Theory Through A Latin American Lens (ed. with F. Lopez-Alves); and Mapping the Global Web (ed. with E. Hargittai). Forthcoming books include War and Society, 2014 and Building States in the Developing World (w. A. Kohli and D. Yashar). New projects include an analysis of “emergent risk” in global flows and a history of the concept of discipline
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Hydria with scene from a story of Dionysus (Bacchus). While travelling to Greece by sea, pirates overtook Dionysus’ ship. They repeatedly tied him up but the ropes wouldn’t fasten. Dionysus then began to cover the ship with vines. In their desperation to escape the pirates leaped into the sea, turning into dolphins as they did so. On this hydria, Dionysus is represented by the vines on the left of the scene.
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