Les Français

I don't hate the French. Really, I don't. But I think that certain French persons are obsessed with types of theory which I -- and I think, most Anglophones -- have a lot of trouble wrapping our heads around. It's possible that some of this stuff makes sense in the original French, but in English it's gibberish. At the same time, deconstructionists (and deconstructionism has deep French roots) seemingly are more concerned with perception and description -- what we see, and what we call what we see -- than with the actual reality.

A nerdy digression

I was trying to figure out what "Chaldaic" (Eisenstein, 203-05) meant. From what I can tell, it's another name for Aramaic, or for the Aramaic dialect spoken by Christians and Jews. At any rate, none of the columns in the Polyglot reproduced 204-05 appears to be "Chaldaic". The one on the left is apparently Hebrew -- at any rate, it's in Hebrew letters. The two in the middle are clearly Latin, the one on the right Greek.

This has nothing to do with anything, I was just sharing.

Another problem

Arts school almost shelves yearbook in favor of a CD

I don't see this mentioned anywhere, but how can you sign a CD? I thought that the whole point of a yearbook was getting people to sign it.

Permanent Renaissance

From what I can tell, Eisenstein is arguing in this chapter that renascences were doomed to be transitory until the coming of printing, because scribal culture could not provide the volume of texts needed to keep them going. But the Romans were able to keep their society, which was supposedly being reborn, going using manuscript technology. This argues that it could have worked. It's possible that the Romans had gone as far as anyone could go with a scribal culture.

Yay, cataloging!

(Eisenstein, pp. 70-81.)

Any cataloging system is, of course, arbitrary -- even alphabetical order. Still, I'm struck by the late development of the latter. Anyway, given the small extent of most manuscript collections, and the lack of standardization, it is no wonder that indexing of these collections was haphazard at best. The memory of the "librarian" would be good enough for a small collection, and easier to "interface" with.

Newspapers

Newspapers...and After?

While I feel that reports of the imminent death of the book have been greatly exaggerated, the book's sibling medium, the newspaper, is not at all well. The latest version of this story is in The Nation. (By the way, political magazines can't be too much healthier.)

It seems to me that while computers aren't really a good substitute for books, they are (in conjunction with the web) a much better delivery system for what newspapers do than the traditional system. Newspapers are horribly inefficient. They use a ridiculous amount of paper to print stories and advertisements. Most newspaper readers read only a fraction of these stories. After reading this fraction of stories, the reader throws the newspaper away, or recycles it, or uses it for lining a birdcage, or whatever.

I hardly ever buy a newspaper anymore. I get my news (and other newspaper items like comics) from the web.

First post

Hi, I started the class today. There are a lot of people in there but I talk too much, so I'm pretty sure I'll stand out. At any event, I'm going to find a few stories to talk about later, but for right now I'm just setting up.