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October 09, 2003
Insert Bowie lyric here
So yesterday, instead of even trying to get in a few more pages of Perdido Street Station, I pulled out my old copy of Chomsky for Beginners. Anyone read any of the other books in the Writers and Readers for Beginners series? The Chomsky one is pretty good. And it has pictures and conversations. What good is a book without pictures and conversations?
I'm thinking about getting some of the others, like Buddha for Beginners, if they're of the same quality. There's so much I don't know. . .
Links to kind-a-evil-Amazon because they do have sample pages of the books, so they're not totally evil.
Update: Right, forgot, there's a very good reason I picked that book rather than one of the actual Chomsky-written ones:
He isn't an especially impressive prose stylist. His writing can be as dense, gnarled, and forbidding as a blackberry patch, full of fruit you can see but you just can't get to, though Chomsky can also reach moments of persuasive lucidity unmatched in linguistics.
That's from Randy Allen Harris' The Linguistics Wars, and although he was writing about Chomsky's linguistic writing, the same applies to some of his political stuff.
It's easy to see why he sometimes comes across as a bit tetchy, though. The material on the (then-recent) first Gulf War could just as easily be applied to the current one, and the basic themes he's been repeating since the Viet Nam War. I get tired of repeating myself after about ten minutes.
And I plugged him into Google News, and he spoke at ISU Tuesday:
As war with Iraq loomed, the populations of nearly all other democratic nations opposed the war, [Chomsky] said.An atmosphere of hate was encouraged in the United States, he said. "Administrators blamed 'Old Europe' for getting in the way and ignored that the majority of people in democracies such as France and Germany were practicing their rights."
More frightening, Chomsky said, was that "such a fanatic hatred of democracy passed without comment" from the press or intellectuals.
Instead of worrying about "minor scandals of the day such as the leak" of an undercover CIA officer's name, the U.S. media -- as well as the intellectual community -- should be concerned with "how the U.S. population was driven into a warmongering frenzy," he said.
Yep, same ol' Noamster. Gods bless 'im.
Wish I'd known about the speech in advance, though. Think I could have done a minor road trip Tuesday.
Since, you know, I couldn't see Margaret Cho.
Yes, I compare seeing Noam Chomsky to seeing Margaret Cho. Anybody got a problem with that?
Posted by Aaron at October 9, 2003 02:07 PM
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Comments
Aaron!
I got this off a friend of mine's livejournal. Thought you might find it yummy.
Chocolate cake goodness
For all you vegtarians with ethics and vegans who still like cake:
1 1/2 cups of flour
1 teaspoon of salt
1 tablespoon of baking sode
1 cup of sugar
1/3 cup of baking cocoa
1/3 cup of oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon vineagar
1 cup of water
Mix all dry ingredients together throughly. Pour into cake pan. Make three areas in the mixed dry ingredients, two small one and one large one. In each of the small ones, pour in the vanilla and vinegar, repectively. In the larger one, pour the oil. Mix until kind-of lumpy. (It isn't enough liquid to do a whole lot.) Pour in water and mix throughly.
Bake for 20-30 mins at 350 degrees.
IMPORTANT: You have to mix in the liquids in the pan you intend to bake it in. If you mix this in a bowl and pour it, you'll get nothing but a weird textured baked fudge/cake thing.
In other news, it may soon be legal to have 15 grams or less of marijuana in Canada. This bill is passing through parliment this week.
Posted by: Lisa at October 9, 2003 03:14 PM
i loved the 'nietzsche for beginners' book in that series. 'freud' and 'marx' were also pretty fun. didn't they do one of bakunin? baudrillard? i think they did one of heidegger too. god those philosopher guys are funny.
lisa: can it be mere coincidence, the offering of a chocolate cake recipe followed by a mention of munchie-inducing legislation?
Posted by: r@d@r at October 9, 2003 03:36 PM
Hee hee hee.
Will try the cake recipe.
As for comparing Chomsky and Cho... hey, makes perfect sense to me. Wish you could have gotten to see the Notorious C.H.O., though. She rocks, as does Noam.
Posted by: Natalie "Fair and Balanced" Davis at October 9, 2003 10:50 PM
Oh, by the way, bad news in the Canada situation.
Free Tommy Chong!
Posted by: Natalie "Fair and Balanced" Davis at October 9, 2003 10:52 PM
Buddha is always for beginners...I mean - that's kinda the whole point, isn't it?
Posted by: sean at October 10, 2003 07:45 AM
Sean, take your Buddhist cynicism and bury it!
Heh. I never get tired of that gag. . .
Seriously, perhaps "rank amateur" is better than "beginner" in this context. And you have to begin somewhere. Well, I do, anyway.
Natalie, I will content myself with my Margaret concert cd.
Lisa, oddly enough Heather had that recipe. And I doubted her when she named the ingredients and made it. And ate my words, along with the cake, later. It's Good Stuff.
Posted by: Aaron at October 10, 2003 09:36 AM
They used to drop bales of weed into my backyard when I lived over at Pine Ridge. That never happened when I lived in Canada. Gotta stick to that constitution man, you just gotta.
Posted by: uppity-shinob at October 13, 2003 10:00 AM