« August 2005 | Main | November 2005 »
September 12, 2005
N&N
At last, an updated translation, with numberless corrections and infinite additions.
Posted by robin at 05:55 PM
September 09, 2005
"raises an interesting question"
" (er...yeah, I was trying to 'raise issues'....ahem, yeah that's it.)"
and you thought I was exaggerating the gall of this pathetic fool: but no.
Almost impossible to satirise such a thick-skinned numbskull. Still, there's always this. You've been sphoogled!
Posted by robin at 06:17 PM
September 07, 2005
"I'm really not sure that ethics and property rights can meet in this way."
If you must write prose or poems
the words you use should be your own
Don't plagiarise or take on loan
Cos there's always someone somewhere
with a big nose, who knows
who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall
I wonder why Steve 'Krokodile Dundee' Brockbank has removed his blog at the very point when it was attracting some interest? Good job sphaleotas has an archive for us to peruse (of course, you could just read the original here).
This sort of thing provokes some serious thought on the original intent of this blog, which was to publish sections of my research over the next few years. When I told people this (mostly people who'd completed or were in the process of completing a PhD), their response was largely one either of dire warning or incredulous admiration. You're going to give your research away? To anyone? Of course, I enumerated all the points in favour - feedback, intellectual collaboration, escaping from the solipsism of library research. But, added to the fact that I now find I rather enjoy the solipsism of library research, I now find myself questioning whether it's really worth it, whether the distribution-system of blogging is really up to much. Maybe I've been fighting a losing battle all along, and I ought to just concede that the whole arena of textual blogging constitutively tends toward reviews of reviews of reviews, wannabe Guardian columnism or, on a more positive note, fast-breaking indy news (great stuff on Lenin's Tomb lately). I've spent the last month working on some research that I'm writing up now: what benefit would there be in posting this (probably 4-5000 words) here? Twenty people would skim-read it, a couple would probably go out of their way to take issue with it, one might archly connect it to a reference to a reference to a reference of a book they once read, in the interminably tedious way academics do. And then you've got plagiarists who are too stupid even to cover their tracks. It's not that I flatter myself that I've anything particularly worth plagiarising, and I certainly have no regard for the proprieties of academic process and secrecy, but the idea of submissively handing out stuff of value (to me, that is) to an audience partly composed of cynical, joyless fools desperately clicking around for something to rip off, others for something to absorb into their comfortable matrix of references, others to attach as a foil to their hobby-horses, doesn't seem to have much to recommend it. With no apologies, I see my work as something to be lovingly tended, something that in order to be worthwhile ought to communicate some of the energy and joy of discovery and connection; rerouting it through a tangled network of dead ends and culs-de-sac may not be the way to success, it may merely be a waste of energy. I'm not afraid of bits of the research getting diffused and frayed into other people's work – if I didn't have the confidence that I was able to create a unique piece of research out of material that's publicly available, without recourse to fear and secrecy, why would I have committed myself to doing a research degree? – but I don't see the point in positively encouraging it, it just seems to lead to a sort of intellectual heat-death rather than any positive feedback. These things take time – and a certain sort of space that is bound to be disrupted by constant exposure. It may be time to take the slow lane of the information superhighway, and merely keep this channel open for those chance encounters that every so often allow you to meet someone you can actually talk to.
(A lot of this isn't really a reflection of the people who read blogs, but has more to do with the undeniable physical difficulties of this so-called 'virtuality': how easy is it to read any sort of in-depth, technical text from a screen, and to think at the same time? Evidence of this is the constant drift of theory-blogging either into columnist rhetoric or hermetic, uncommunicative pondering. LBTM is entirely different, the necessary outlet for what would otherwise be a dangerous stockpiing of the visual and verbal residues of my unhealthy obsessions.)
ps. see also the pathetic wriggling, drivelling pomo-excusist semi-apology (er...yeah, I was trying to 'raise issues'....ahem, yeah that's it.)
Posted by robin at 10:43 AM
September 05, 2005
sphaleotas back with a vengeance.
Posted by robin at 03:13 PM
September 01, 2005
The Exploding Milk Bottles of Marburg
from a Cassirer family genealogy website:
Perhaps the nicest account [of the character of Ernst Cassirer] is from his daughter who loved him dearly and to whom he was clearly a loving father [...] For all his brilliance, recounted Anna,
"My father thought very straight, but something else was missing. He had to write instructions for himself on how to fill a pen. He couldn't put on a tie. He would put milk bottles on the stove. The milk bottles would explode because the hot milk would expand. The direct experience was always missing. He was purely abstract."
Posted by robin at 09:22 AM