OOO for dummies (like me)
Research Blog | March 2, 2011
I’ve been scampering and doing a troll-like stumble, following along with Tim Morton‘s logorrheic flights for some time now, and gotten twinks of excitement about things like Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology (OOO). Of course I have no thorough (or even scanty) background in this stuff or its antecedents, but it gets me tweaked,…
“Imagine what we know.”
Research Blog | February 23, 2011
The subject line is Percy Shelley’s. This part of an essay by Tim Morton, “Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There!” included in the exhibit/site RETHINK — Contemporary Art & Climate Change (2009). Among other provocative chunks and challenges: Along with figuring out what implications science has for society and so on, humanists should be asking…
Book Review – The Turquoise Ledge – By Leslie Marmon Silko – NYTimes.com
Research Blog | November 27, 2010
…in the Tucson Mountains, pack rats make a home in the copy machine, a rattlesnake hides under the chaise longue, spiders are welcome and the appearance of a grasshopper is seen as a sign from Lord Chapulin, the Grasshopper Being. Silko’s menagerie includes mastiffs, parrots, macaws, bees, hummingbirds and various other creatures. None of them…
The Author of the Acacia Seeds, Ursula K. Le Guin
Research Blog | November 17, 2010
Link to the short story, The Author of the Acacia Seeds, Ursula K. Le Guin. This was warmly transcribed and posted by a Matt Webb in 2008 who stated: My favourite short story is The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics by Ursula K. Le…
The Contemporary Condition: Fragile
Research Blog | September 17, 2010
“I don’t for a second buy into the story, promoted both by deep greens and by the right, that Mother Earth will just brush us off and recover. Faith in an all-powerful deity is precisely a way to ignore hyperobjects. Some people commented on my previous post on hyperobjects, wondering whether God could be considered…
Love
Research Blog | May 11, 2010
My cousin Pejk Malinowski sent me this poem last night by Robert Creeley. I am smitten. Love The thing comes of itself (Look up to see the cat & the squirrel, the one torn, a red thing, & the other somehow immaculate) – Robert Creeley
#39 The Riddle of The World
Research Blog | March 30, 2010
(Poem #39) The Riddle of the World Know then thyself, presume not God to scan The proper study of Mankind is Man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A Being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride, He hangs…
fucked up awesome books
Research Blog | March 18, 2010
Yes – say it like it is. Sorry to be such a child, but I have no better language to describe how provocative, dark, pure (following the heart, following internal logic, following a line of inquiry), genre-bending, and ideologically challenging these works of fiction are. 1. Bear, Marian Engel 2. An Episode in the Life…
Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World
Research Blog | August 11, 2009
From today’s NY Times: Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World, an article on what the decline of taxonomy means for us as narrative beings. The past few decades have seen a stream of studies that show that sorting and naming the natural world is a universal, deep-seated and fundamental human activity, one we…
A grey defends his rights in britain
Research Blog | June 14, 2009
There aren’t many sites in defense of the grey squirrel. Here’s one written in the first person, with some good arguments on defining “nativeness:” http://www.grey-squirrel.org.uk/ “NATIVE BY BIRTH – CONDEMNED BY ORIGIN” Key points at a glance 1. “Nativeness” is based on political boundaries rather than sensible concepts of the range of a species, or…
Your mouth is a coral reef
Research Blog | June 12, 2009
Talking to Grant Burgess at the DOVE Marine Lab today about the defensive slime that bacteria produce, in order to keep from being decimated (by enemies, by antibiotics) reminded me of Alfonso Lingis’ description of the body as bodies, systems inside of systems, from his book “Dangerous Emotions”:
Philip Henry Gosse, Hyena
Research Blog | April 21, 2009
Apropos nothing except looking in depth at Victorian naturalists, I found this passage by Gosse from a digitized Google Book copy of “The Romance of Natural History” (1863) Gosse’s use of the “you” seems more choose-your-own-adventure than Victorian nature narratives. He declares in the preface that he’s taken an aesthetic approach, and while he denies…
Charismatic megafauna: you can’t live without ’em.
Research Blog | April 12, 2009
“Giant pandas are ‘charismatic megafauna,’ a category that includes whales and other sea mammals, salmon and other inspirational fish, eagles and other flashy raptors. In each instance, the creatures help spotlight the hundreds of humbler but equally endangered species: the black-spored quillwort, the longhorn fairy shrimp.” —”Birth and Rebirth,” USA Today, August 23, 1999 Usually…
Conrad Gesner’s Historiae Animalium
Research Blog | April 10, 2009
Also at the National Science Library, this book of Conrad Gesner’s beautiful 16th century animal woodcuts, real and imagined (so much was hearsay anyway).
Paré’s Monsters
Research Blog | April 10, 2009
There’s a magnifabulous online book of the 1585 edition of Oeuvresby Ambroise Paré, 16th century surgeon, considered the first humane surgeon to come out of the barber-surgeon tradition. He was also very interested in ‘monstrous’ forms. The book’s at the National Library of Medicine
Reading: Animal, Erica Fudge
Research Blog | April 6, 2009
(Corey Wolfe, Michael Pollan, Erica Fudge, read like cornball-edly obvious fictional names, but their books are great) At ITP I’m teaching a class called “Animals, People and Those in Between.” This book, in addition to The Animals Reader, was super-useful, covering a lot of ground both on the history of people’s attitudes towards animals (from…
Reading: Zoontologies, Carey Wolfe, ed.
Research Blog | April 6, 2009
Zoontologies, the Question of the Animal is a collection of essays about “those nonhuman beings called animals (who) pose philosophical and ethical questions that go to the root not just of what we think but of who we are. Their presence asks: what happens when the Other can no longer safely be assumed to be…