Rufus F.

Playwriting Contest

by Rufus F. on January 30, 2012

Hey folks! I’m getting back to play writing with a screwball comedy. It’s about a corrupt big city mayor who takes on some grand and insincere endeavor to improve his image. It has to be something fairly ridiculous. If you come up with a good enough idea to construct a flimsy plot around and hang jokes off it, I’ll list you as “scenarist”. Whaddya say?

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Note on Zola and heredity

by Rufus F. on January 26, 2012

How should we read Zola today?

Reading his Nana, I was struck by a scene in which the corrupt journalist Fauchery writes an article attacking the well-connected courtesan at the center of the novel, and the Second Empire culture by association:

“Entitled The Golden Fly, it was the story of a girl descended from four or five generations of drunkards, her blood tainted by an accumulated inheritance of poverty and drink, which in her case had taken the form of a nervous derangement of the sexual instinct. She had grown up in the slums, in the gutters of Paris; and now… she was avenging the paupers and the outcasts of whom she was the product. With her, the rottenness that was allowed to ferment among the lower classes was rising to the surface and rotting the aristocracy.”

It’s a sticky passage, brushing up uncomfortably against Zola’s own interest in heredity. Nana’s story lies in the twenty novel Rougon-Macquart cycle; her parents drank themselves to death in l’Assommoir, and heredity plays a role in the characters’ lives- not as inescapable fate, but certainly something. The Rougons have inherited- let’s say a tendency- which Zola describes elsewhere as, “their ravenous appetite… that rushes upon enjoyment”, caused by, “the slow succession of accidents pertaining to the nerves or the blood (either-or?) which befall a race after the first organic lesion, and according to environment, determine in each individual member of the line those feelings, desires, and passions”.

At first read, this is uncomfortable-making, dredging up images of sterilization and slanders against “Mongoloids” and Kallikaks. And yet, Zola’s fascination with heredity comes from a common nineteenth century liberal sympathy for those paupers and outcasts. Each member of the line has been dealt a rotten hand they’re struggling to escape. If Alexander Berdiaev is right that “man is the being who surmounts and transcends himself”, the Rougons are still struggling to become men. Zola seemingly wants us just to witness their uphill struggle and grow colder towards a society that isolates the poor in hovels than towards the poor themselves.  [click to continue…]

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In his voyage account from the 13th century, Marco Polo tells of “the old man of the mountain” (Book I: Ch. 21), or Ala’u-‘d-Din Muhammad, one of the last rulers of the Nizari Ismailis, a heretical offshoot of Shiite Islam in lands stretching from modern Afghanistan to Syria:

“In a beautiful valley, enclosed between two lofty mountains, he had formed a luxurious garden, stored with every delicious fruit and every fragrant shrub that could be procured. Palaces of various sizes and forms were erected in different parts of the grounds, ornamented with works in gold, with paintings, and with furniture of rich silks. By means of small conduits, streams of wine, milk, honey, and some of pure water, were seen to flow in every direction. The inhabitants of these palaces were elegant and beautiful damsels, accomplished in the arts of singing, playing upon all sorts of musical instruments, dancing, and especially those of dalliance and amorous allurement.”

In Polo’s highly dubious account, Ala’u-‘d-Din created this artificial wonderland to have power over the young male initiates to his military order. Claiming to be a prophet equal to Mahomet, and able to determine who would enter paradise, Ala’u-‘d-Din would have daring youths brought to his meagre castle, given opium, and transported by means of tunnels to his sound-stage seventh heaven, there to be given a supposed glimpse of paradise. Having thus been promised every form of delight in exchange for their obedience, the young men were enlisted into Ala’u-‘d-Din’s order of political killers, feared throughout the region. One version of the story holds the youth were regularly drugged with hashish and were originally known as “Hashshashin”, or “hashish users” giving the order its proper name Assassins. [click to continue…]

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Note on “The Day After”

by Rufus F. on January 9, 2012

In November, 1983, the ABC network aired the television movie The Day After, depicting the effects of a nuclear war on the Midwestern United States. Viewed by an estimated 100 million people, the film was considered deeply affecting, not to mention horrifying, and may have inspired President Reagan to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in Reykjavik three years later. Prior to the broadcast, ABC distributed half a million viewer’s guides and classrooms around the country worked to help traumatized children deal with their feelings of terror afterwards. (Here is the attack sequence.)

I was a nine-year-old boy, however. So my views on nuclear war were probably not as somber as they should have been. Me and my friends had been raised on a steady diet of post-apocalyptic action movies in the Mad Max mold, and our understanding of the Russians was that, after they bombed and invaded the country, we would be forced to fight them to the death using our cunning, preadolescent physical prowess, and lawn darts. Like all little boys, we believed in the Peter Pan myth: being removed from civilization would set the stage for untold adventures. The nuclear bomb would be the world’s loudest school bell.

Looking back, I’m not remotely ashamed that we manipulated other people’s apocalyptic nightmares. There’s something egotistical about all apocalypse scenarios, appealing as they do to our resentment towards the existing reality and our deeply subconscious feeling that it’s a bit unfair and unimaginable that the world should outlast us, carrying on after our death. The existentialists understood the truth- every death is the end of a created world. The apocalypse is a fantasy that our death will be epic and transfiguring and deeply meaningful; all of us will die alone and the apocalypse is a fantasy of dying together. Nine-year-old boys have no interest in such things, busy as they are with being alive.

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Surge was a citrus-flavored soda pop launched in the US by the Coca Cola Company in 1996 as an American variant of the Norwegian Urge. It had an advantage over 7-Up and Mountain Dew in lacking a syrupy aftertaste, although, like them, it essentially tasted like what a kiwi fruit might urinate, if it could do so. What really killed Surge, though, was an insipid ad campaign, intended to evoke “extreme” sports, but instead bringing to mind rioting and a failed educational system. If you want to drink Surge today, you have to know a Norwegian. (Perhaps an extreme Norwegian)

But, in 1996, free bottles of Surge were offered up at many outdoor festivals and rock shows, and I was the right age to attend them. Coincidentally, that summer, I was wrapped up in the first great love relationship of my life with a tempestuous, beautiful, charmingly amoral, keenly sensual, intellectually exuberant, and deeply challenging young woman- a relationship that would burn high, flame out viciously and forever alter my views about love and the opposite sex; it undoubtedly prepared me in some sense to be with my wife, who is all of the above but more so. Surge barely outlived that young relationship.

Surge would be my equivalent of the madeleine in Proust, were it not discontinued. For me, the memories bring back the taste, instead of vice-versa. It’s strange, but years later, I can still remember that taste, along with the sense of being alive in my body, in love with someone who loved me, and for the first time feeling that I belonged in exactly the time and place I was. You’ll therefore forgive me if, perhaps, I remember the girl, the drink, and the relationship as all tasting a bit sweeter than they really did.

 

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Note on Zola

by Rufus F. on January 5, 2012

In his 1877 preface to, and defence of, his novel L’Assommoir, Émile Zola writes:

“I wanted to depict the inexorable downfall of a working class family in the poisonous atmosphere of our industrial suburbs. Intoxication and idleness lead to a weakening of family ties, to the filth of promiscuity, to the progressive neglect of decent feelings, and ultimately to degradation and death. It is simply morality in action.”

Zola’s two great themes are poverty and vice. With a near-clinical precision, he shows them struggling against, while anchoring and giving rise to one another, fixed like the two headed serpent in Egyptian mythology. L’Assommoir, the story of a destitute family whose patriarch drinks away the earnings, triggering the vices of wife and daughter, caught hell from French conservatives for its adultery, promiscuity, and immorality; and from the socialists for its all-too-reproachable poor. Then, as now, poverty and vice are delicate subjects, particularly in combination. Suggesting they fuel one another is a provocation to both conservatives and socialists who bemoan vice and poverty respectively, while ignoring the effects of poverty and vice respectively.

Does Zola’s liberalism hold up? In 2012, his fascination with the “filth of promiscuity” likely seems old fashioned and “sex negative”, and his characters’ alcoholism seems positively antiquated in an era in which the situation of the poor has improved to the point that they have meth. But his paramount theme, beyond vice and poverty, is oblivion- the oblivion that men create for themselves and one another, but which seems to be the inheritance of a particular class. His great skill is in depicting his characters in a way that is at once pitiless and sympathetic. The milieu, those Second Empire industrial suburbs, is changed, along with some of the particulars, but the theme might be eternal in human life. Reaching ever upwards, we slide ever downwards.

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"Usherette"- Reginald Marsh

Over at the League sub-blog “Forbes”, E.D. shares Roger Ebert’s suggestions as to why movie theatregoing is declining. As avid cinephiles, one might expect me and the missus to go to the movies more frequently, and yet our attempts to do so this holiday season reminded us once again that, for adults, moviegoing is not all beer and skittles.

Here follows a chronicle of our holiday moviegoing crusades: the first was a children’s movie we saw with our friend and her kids. Unfortunately, the multiplex went suddenly and unexpectedly “offline” that evening, forcing us to pay cash; also, me to frantically scour the neighboring mall for an ATM machine and dash back to the ticket line, which snaked around the block as the pitiable teen cashier had to write out “tickets” for everyone paying. Luckily, your heroic narrator arrived ridiculously early and saved the day for the others, allowing us to make our way to the theatre for a pleasant evening of children crying and kicking our seats like they were filled with candy and needed only to be cracked open to spill their delicious sweets.

Undaunted, our hero returned a week later for a friend’s birthday outing. We were all fairly sauced after a brewery tour, which made the blaring children comfortably tolerable as we waited for the theatre staff to figure out how to get the movie to project- a puzzler that lasted until well over an hour after the movie was scheduled to begin. In apology, the theatre manager gave everyone free passes to a multiplex film of their choice. And lo, the second crusade ended in a draw.

The next week, the knight and his lady returned for a third time to cash in that free pass. Alas, we were thwarted by an officious 16 year old martinet who insisted we return to the meandering box office line to verify that my free movie pass was authentic. The line delayed us further and when we got to the front we opted against attending the movie (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) for which we were now thirty minutes late or any of the other films at the multiplex, all of which were made for and aimed at teenage boys and their girlfriends, perhaps explaining the self-importance of the teen usher. A bit sauced this night as well (she drove) I blared to the manager, “That kid should be fired!”, which my wife has laughed about for days since because I am usually a mild milquetoast. The third crusade ending in failure, thus ends the chronicles of pain and struggle. [click to continue…]

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Hobbes: Notes on Leviathan

by Rufus F. on December 15, 2011

Karl Marx once said that he wouldn’t consider himself to be a “Marxist” and reading Leviathan I don’t find that Hobbes was quite as “Hobbesian” as he’s made out to be either. Often, he’s described as a po-faced authoritarian, pessimistic about human nature and the outcome of unrestricted freedom; this is contrasted with Locke, who is depicted as a proto-liberal founding his hypothetical society on innate rights and property. There’s certainly some truth to it, but the two aren’t as far apart as the neat argument places them.* [click to continue…]

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The League in 2010- Round Two

by Rufus F. on December 1, 2011

After the first batch of 2010 league posts was whittled down, there are 40 posts left. Any suggestions? [click to continue…]

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There is a superb scene in the third chapter of Alexander Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin in which Tatiana, the landowner’s daughter character that Dostoevsky deemed a model of Russian womanhood, is sitting up all night at her desk, writing out her heart to Eugene Onegin, an aristocratic intellectual who has traded the grand monde of St. Petersburg for the petit monde of the countryside, and unwittingly won her girlish affections. She sits writing until, in Stanley Mitchell’s translation, dawn, “Streams silver and a shepherd’s horn wakes villagers to rise and rally. It’s morn all bustle here and there, but my Tatiana does not care.” For the young, love is music that drowns out all the noise of the world. She is pure in her single mindedness.

She’s also a much more likable character than Eugene Onegin. He is not detestable, because he would have to have more substance to be detested; but he embodies, for as much as he rejects it, all of the charming superficiality of high culture, the sharp witted words and supple ballerina’s feet that Pushkin tells us lie and cheat. Pushkin’s contempt shines through for the frivolous western styles that dominated enlightened Russian culture as he evokes the traditions, institutions, and values that once held sway, and which he implies provided the average Russian with a mooring since lost and leaving them adrift. Earth was traded for air.

There is a persistent sense of barrenness in the text, of empty fields under snowcover and hearts emptied out of all substance. [click to continue…]

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The League in 2010

by Rufus F. November 17, 2011

If we’re going to pick our favorite posts from the last three years for this League Journal, we’re going to have to remember what was posted in that time. I’ve been making my way through 2010 and I can say that these were some of my favorite posts of 2010. Now, via the comments, we [...]

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Ibsen’s “Ghosts” of long dead values

by Rufus F. November 8, 2011

Currently, the Soul Pepper Theatre in Toronto’s distillery district is staging Ibsen’s Ghosts; thus one can safely dissect the hypocrisies of the 19th century Norwegian bourgeoisie in the happy company of the 21st century Canadian equivalent. Since the characters in the play are moral hypocrites, it is safe to say that no one in the [...]

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The Journal of Ordinary Gentlemen

by Rufus F. November 6, 2011

[bumped to the top and the front page for more visibility - Erik] Two recent stories got me thinking about a pet project/experiment that’s been percolating in my brain for a bit now: this one discusses the importance of the feminist blogosphere for a community of young women; this one explains the financial difficulties involved [...]

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Voltaire: Candide (nor Optimism)

by Rufus F. November 4, 2011

As a stand up comedian, Steve Martin had a bit in which he would muse about what a great prank it would be to raise a child and teach them to “talk wrong”, with the hilarious result being that the child would arrive for the first day of school speaking gibberish. The joke is funny [...]

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Culture and Order

by Rufus F. October 11, 2011

For some reason, the following exchange of viewpoints, across a span of about a century, came to mind when reading the threads on the Wall Street protests. Arnold was writing about the protests in London of the (18)60s. Williams was commenting on Arnold’s essays in the (19)60s.

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Robinson Crusoe, Enlightenment Man

by Rufus F. October 3, 2011

Robinson Crusoe was an immediate success when first published in April, 1719. By the end of the year, it had been put through four editions in English, appeared in Dutch, French and German, was already being pirated (appropriately enough), and Defoe had completed a sequel, the Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and another story, The [...]

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Doctor Sardonicus in the Urinal

by Rufus F. September 16, 2011

With the annual onset of seasonal depression my curmudgeon persona returns and promptly begins griping about every stupid fishing thing around me. Some of you might wonder how much that persona, who we can call “Doctor Sardonicus”, differs from my regularly mordant personality. Well, let’s recall it was last winter that I gibed the local [...]

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Plotinus and Evil

by Rufus F. August 30, 2011

How does evil get into the world? Where does it come from? Why is it here? For religions that attribute a fallen nature to man, this isn’t such a problem; after all, it was you and me. For Socrates and his epigones, it’s a considerably trickier problem. If all of material reality is defined by [...]

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Friday Jukebox Blues

by Rufus F. August 26, 2011

Okay I did one a few weeks ago. If nobody objects though here’s a really cool blues song. The original, by Geeshie Wiley is one of the most haunting songs you’ll ever hear. Those of you that play guitar can probably tell just how difficult, and actually kind of weird, the playing is here. This [...]

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Record Store Day

by Rufus F. August 23, 2011

As someone who spends, and has always spent, a great deal of time in record stores, I have not been able to avoid hearing about the fast approaching “death of the record store” after a long and heroic battle with the Internet. There are now documentaries on the subject and an international Record Store Day [...]

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West Memphis Freed

by Rufus F. August 19, 2011

Wow! The scuttlebutt has it that the West Memphis Three are about to be released from prison via a (somewhat bizarre) plea deal. No word yet as to what Eddie Vedder will due with all the additional free time if this is true. Update: CNN is now reporting that they’re going home.

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Question on Empiricism

by Rufus F. August 8, 2011

I know what you’re going to say: I’m getting you to do my homework for me! But I’m working on designing my Enlightenment course today and I’m trying to select a single text for the English Empiricism week. Some of you might have an opinion about this. Here are my choices:

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Friday Jukebox

by Rufus F. August 5, 2011

I haven’t done one of these in a while and this one is certainly not a new recording by any means (Domino Records, 1960 and available on the “Domino Records Story” CD). I’m a record-collecting nut and also listen to a lot of blues and early rock’n’roll; so I’ve heard many takes on Got my [...]

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“Fiscal Indulgences”

by Rufus F. July 28, 2011

Via the Economist, a poli-sci professor comes up with a clever way to describe tax credits.

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Plotinus: Enneads 1:1 Does the Soul Sense?

by Rufus F. July 27, 2011

“Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat?” In other words, are they rooted in the Soul, the Body, or some combination of the two? This is a common question in early philosophy. The answer often removes the Soul from these experiences- attributing them instead to [...]

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Gangs

by Rufus F. July 22, 2011

They have their calling cards, don’t they?

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Euripides: Rhesus and overenthusaistic coyotes

by Rufus F. July 22, 2011

Rhesus is a play about connections missed and badly met that has seldom quite connected with audiences, which is probably why a few nineteenth century critics attempted to disconnect it from Euripides’s body of work. My own enjoyment of the play is probably somewhat disconnected from the plot. Based on Book 10 of the Iliad, the play shows [...]

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How the World Works?

by Rufus F. June 14, 2011

Like that post on Haiti, I often put things in Off the Cuff just to ask, “Hey, what do y’all make of this?” So, in that vein, what do y’all make of this Vancouver Sun article about the Justice Department going after a former Cisco Systems employee who happens to be bringing an antitrust suit [...]

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How the World Works

by Rufus F. June 9, 2011

In other news, the Obama administration seems to have pressured the Haitian government at the behest of contractors for American companies Levi Strauss and Haines to abandon a law they’d passed in 2009 to raise their minimum wage law from 24 to 61 cents an hour.  Thanks to American intervention, it was raised instead to 31 cents.

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Admittedly, every time I’ve eaten at TGIFridays, I’ve thought of jihad…

by Rufus F. June 1, 2011

An American Muslim-convert South Park hater was recently arrested in Morocco. My sister actually saw him last week, in Morocco, eating in a local TGIFridays. There are many possible punchlines here.

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Friday Jukebox

by Rufus F. May 20, 2011

Of course. I’ve always wondered, incidentally, if Barry McGuire was ever tempted to pen a follow-up song for Eve of Destruction. Maybe, “(Okay, we’re not quite on the) Eve of Destruction”.

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Euripides: Hippolytos, lust and helplessness

by Rufus F. May 19, 2011

Have we found a cure for lovesickness yet? Judging by our dramatic works, one might guess we had. Fictional characters seem to suffer all sorts of exaggerated ‘conflicts’- from owing the mob money they can’t pay to inventing weapons the C.I.A. would just love to get their hands on- but the deranging, crippling, and devastating [...]

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Osama is gone, Bouazizi lives on

by Rufus F. May 11, 2011

The Economist surveys the Arab press on the death of Osama bin Laden and finds one pan-Arab newspaper reporting the encouraging hearsay that he was already yesterday’s news in much of the Arab world: “But others just don’t care because, for them, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are old news—remnants of a more troubled and [...]

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Les Machines de l’île

by Rufus F. May 10, 2011

After the jump a few of the Vernesque machines from the workshops of Les Machines de l’île Nantes:

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Euripides: “Daughters of Troy”, the Spoilers of War

by Rufus F. May 10, 2011

After few wars have the victors entirely resisted the urge to be as vengeful in peacemaking as they were in war-making. There’s more often the desire to settle all accounts and ‘teach them a lesson they’ll never forget’ (or forgive), with the justificatory ‘hope’ that ‘they’ll never try anything like that again’; the irony being [...]

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Sales and Sex Ability

by Rufus F. May 7, 2011

A recent Washington Monthly profile of Dan Savage draws this interesting* parallel between modern sexual norms and consumption patterns: “Classical liberalism, however, may prove just as inadequate in the bedroom as it has in the global economy, and for many of the same reasons.

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Epictetus, Freedom, and Autonomia

by Rufus F. April 7, 2011

  I have a very distinct memory from last summer, sitting in a chair on our back porch and taking a break from my reading. I was looking at out lilac bush, just sitting there enjoying it and doing nothing really, and there was one lilac bloom in the bunch that stood out: it was [...]

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What do you mean ‘we’, Paleface?

by Rufus F. March 29, 2011

An old joke: Tonto and the Lone Ranger are surrounded by hostile Indians. The Lone Ranger: It’s looks like we’re in a lot of trouble, old friend! Tonto: What do you mean “we”, Paleface? I think of that joke whenever I read articles like this one about how “we” live, think, and experience things these [...]

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A few Questions on Local Currencies

by Rufus F. March 28, 2011

I posted something recently about the Baltimore B-Note, a local currency being unveiled next month for use in local businesses in “the city that reads”. After getting some questions here and elsewhere and having a few of my own, I boiled them down to three brief questions, which Jeff Dicken, Executive Director of the Baltimore [...]

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Localists Take (B)Note

by Rufus F. March 18, 2011

Coming next month to a store near you, but only if you happen to live in Baltimore, a new local currency the BNote will be available on April 16th and 17th. More on local currencies here. If you’ve got thoughts or info on the topic, please share in the comments.

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Euripides: “Hecuba”- Nobility Outs Itself

by Rufus F. March 18, 2011

{Note: Just remembered I’ve previously discussed the idea of a moral order reasserting itself in Hecuba here last year.} I’m not sure if Oscar Wilde’s line about losing one parent being a misfortune but losing both looking like carelessness applies to losing children as well; by this standard, Hecuba would look like a complete dope: [...]

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“Flight of the Stone Heads”

by Rufus F. March 18, 2011

Here’s something different- one of my paintings. It’s the second painting I’ve ever done, so be kind; it was inspired by a dream I had about floating stone heads.

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“Love and Death”

by Rufus F. March 17, 2011

After the jump, a somewhat disturbing pencil and white gouache drawing by Hans Bellmer, which appeared recently at the Thomas Dane gallery in London as a part of their “Contingency” show:

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“Brain Storm”

by Rufus F. March 11, 2011
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Fleshing out the University (Pt .4)

by Rufus F. March 10, 2011

(Update: One line changed to directly quote Megan McArdle instead of inaccurately summarizing her position.) I think we’ve nearly sucked all the marrow from the bone of ‘liberal academia’ (in pts. 1, 2, 3). Discussing the topic is always exhausting because half the people you discuss it with want to hear that there is a smaller [...]

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