Category: Web

I was quite surprised at the comments in the Guardian over Derrida’s death. A few writers have some interesting things to say about him, but most come off as flip or ignorant. Why bother?
Deconstruction was the part of literary criticism that I least understood in college, and was the one I could never write. It was a sort of quantum physics of literature and meaning, and seemed to require much more background knowledge going in than even New Historicism. Our instructors brought it up, and made us read an essay or two, but didn’t insist too much on it.
One day, Derrida came to speak at UCSB and we all felt the obligation to go hear him, as one would a rock star or a poet. And he certainly did look cool in his suit and his brilliant white hair.
He spoke on the Balkan war, in his heavily accented English. I began to take notes, to try to help me make sense of what I knew would be a dense talk. By minute 15 I was lost. Was he even talking about the Balkans any more? I looked over at my instructor, whose critical faculties I admired, and even he was nodding off. People started to yawn, give up, walk out.
Derrida made no effort to connect to the audience, did not offer up analogies for us to grasp. He just plowed ahead. It was lit theory as performance art, as atonal feedback music. He must have seen these walkouts all the time and knew he was onto something. He couldn’t preach to the choir. There was no choir. And what do we mean when we say “choir”? He was a man unto himself and I suspect most people who admired and followed him only understood 15% of what he was laying down.
I had class and had to leave after 30 long long minutes. And that’s all I remember about Derrida.

Holy moly!

Starbucks must be banking on the theory that the people who buy its coffee don’t just need coffee, they need Starbucks coffee, which packs a higher caffeine punch than many competitors. The Wall Street Journal earlier this year sent samples of coffee from Starbucks, 7-Eleven, and Dunkin’ Donuts to Central Analytical Laboratories. The lab reported that a 16-ounce Starbucks house blend coffee contained 223 milligrams of caffeine, compared with 174 and 141 milligrams in comparable amounts of Dunkin’ Donuts and 7-Eleven coffee, respectively. According to the Journal, the average Starbucks coffee drink contains 320 milligrams of caffeine. (This chart from the Center for Science in the Public Interest shows different measurement levels, including the scary finding that a 16-ounce Starbucks grande has nearly three times as much caffeine as a No-Doz.)

Fundie fun today with a page of photo suggestions of what your house may look like in Heaven. At first I thought this was a parody, but it’s some guy’s half-serious attempt at a thought (he also runs a Rapture-o-meter). Questions: Does God keep up with Western architectural traditions? Shouldn’t your house up in cloudland look more like those in Jesus’ time? Do you have to pay for utilities? Who does the landscaping? Did they have “mansions” back in Judeah?

Photorama
In John 14:2-3 we read, ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.’
The Bible says that each believer will be rewarded according to what good deeds he performed here on earth. I thought I’d speculated on what type of abode many Christians might find when they walk up to their heavenly mansion.

Here’s a posting of scans from OUI magazine from the ’70s, featuring handsomely photographed drug paraphernalia. The bongs look like works of art (well, the Ultraman mask bong looks like folk art), even the roach clips look of the highest quality. This could never be a coffee table book (most of this stuff is probably long gone) but it bloody should be.
By way of Boing Boing

Theo Jansen makes walking machines out of plastic, strange, organic creatures that only need the wind to keep moving. There’s a lot of movies at Jansen’s strandbeest site–check it out.
By way of Metafilter

Why, these wonderful diagrams over at threetwoone.org, silly.

A friend of mine, George Yachtisin, who once wrote for the Independent and now serves as publicist for UCSB’s Arts & Lectures (that’s how I met him), has now started his own blog called I’m Not One to Blog, But…
He claims that “in order to put the spurs to the pony that is my dwindling imagination, it seems necessary to see if I can keep one of these [blogs] going.” He also hopes that the blog will be a daily musing on a random song, “or, I should say, let a song lead my writing.”
The first entry is on Phil Manzanera/Brian Eno’s Big Day, which shows the man has taste.
Welcome aboard, George…

Take your own baffling spam subject line and turn it into a equally baffling tshirt. A bit pricey at about $40, but if you’ve got the dosh…
SPAMSHIRT
By way of Boing Boing

If you don’t live in the New York area but watch Sex and the City and/or The Sopranos, you may notice that characters drink to-go coffee out of a particular blue and white cup. Not being able to see these in a close up, I wondered, is this a brand or just a beloved generic cup? My friend Peter Nacken soon weighed in with the answer. Then follow it up with links to more cups and the t-shirt.