December 2009
6 posts
2 tags
Towes on Contemporary (Pomo) Historical...
“Ultimately, it is the genealogy of identity-construction as a narrative without closure that constitutes the irreducible heterogeneity of the dead as historical agents who resist all of our attempts to construct their existence as a function of our own and to manipulate the traces of their acts as objects in the construction of our own meanings. But acceptance of the ultimate otherness and...
I’m listening to an audiobook presentation of The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen. It was written in the midst of WWII and the diarist’s voice that it contains is filled with disgust and rage at the United States, at Capitalism, and at humanity. It is compelling. It is the voice of someone who has fixated on the horror of what was happening in the war and as someone...
“I have to be honest, as the world watches us … I think our ability to take...”
– Obama in Copenhagen: ‘Time for Talk Is Over’ — Daily Intel (via peterwknox) (via apsies)
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A nice quote from a book by Alice Kessler-Harris described the power of ideas or rather “worldviews” to shape history:
This book is not so much about women as it is about the power of gendered worldviews…to construct the circumstances of history by shaping the parameters with which people see. (Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity).
Obviously, this is not a unique insight these...
“If you think you are sick of Joe Lieberman now…just wait until you get sick.”
— Jim Shea, a columnist in The Hartford Courant, quoted in http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/health/policy/15lieberman.html?hp
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“The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our [Constitutional] convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and...