Posts by Jake Pollock
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While we're all being pendantic about science and logic and stuff, I feel compelled out that in that PhD. comic that Lucy posted, Galileo appears on the Medieval News Network, when in fact he lived in the early-modern era, or, for the Italians, during the late-Renaissance.
I'm glad I got that off my chest.
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And that, to coin a phrase, is a loaded Canon.
But loaded in favour of what? I think you'll find that the Top 10 contains not only four books by Rand, but three by L. Ron Hubbard. Which suggests that this Reader's List was somehow fixed by Objectivists, Libertarians, and Scientologists. It's true that Rand is extremely popular in the US (I was taken aback when I first when into a bookstore in Pittsburgh and found her works in the Philosophy section), but L. Ron Hubbard's are surely only read by his cultists.
The literary fix was in, and if you take out those seven books your two points of comparison align a little more neatly.
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I have reread Catch-22 at least a dozen times, though not for a few years now. And Pratchett's Small Gods.
I'm only just turning back to reading fiction, for pleasure, now that I've gotten past the read-three-academic-books-a-week-for-thirty-weeks-a-year ordeal that is the first three years in an American grad school. So this year I have read Wuthering Heights, Borges' Fictions, and the first 200 pages of _2666_ before I packed it in a box and began a transnational itinerary which mitigated against carrying such a tome.
Right now, I'm reading _The Kindly Ones__ by Jonathan Littell. It's an excellent example of how historical fiction can be used to expose the internal, human workings of atrocity, and reach it away from the abstractions of historians and the pomp of the History Channel. I think I'm going to assign parts of it for my students when I teach them about National Socialism next year.
Not really a beach read, though.
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One scene near the end appears to have been mistakenly filed under "you were really there and it happened" ...
I felt the same way about Battle for Milkquarious.
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There are, apparently, two interpretations of the badly-worded legislation. One says that the legislation is a return to the pre-lapsarian days of the 1867 Reform Act that McCarten talks about. The other says that land-owners are able to choose one ward or borough or whatever it is in which they own property, and vote in that. So, one vote, but it can be in the electorate of your choosing. Which makes a bit more sense, but is probably a pretty bad idea as well.
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Sam, I don't know how to break it to you so I'll just come right out and say it. There are five seasons of The Wire.
Oh, and I probably saw seven or eight movies this year. I'm so average.
edit: Actually that's not right. I saw a few at the Film Festival, including the Jim Jarmusch soundtrack debacle. I forgot about that.
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(All except Catcher in the Rye, which I still loathe in an unadulterated fashion.)
In that case, you should read King Dork, which is, in part, about how much the main character hates The Catcher in the Rye. It's a very well observed take on the role of that book in high school English classes/
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As much as indicating ones use of irony with punctuation makes one seem much wittier⸮, I can't see it taking off.
Still, that particular symbol might solve the long-standing problem of the raised-eyebrow emoticon ⸮:-|
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when speaking in person I am approximately as daunting and/or elegant as a half-set blancmange.
You see, this is where my fear of all forms of Continental pudding kicks in.