Into the Blogosphere is Laura Gurak’s new edited collection on Blogs. The subtitle is Rhetoric, Culture, and the Community of Weblogs. When blogging first started there was little written about it except to point to it as a new phenomenon. Now, there’s volumes. Check out Scholars Who Blog in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Blogs are supposed to provide a space for free speech. The faculty in this article defend issues of personal tone, free range of topic, etc. My own blogging experience as an academic has been dismal, and I don’t know that I will ever feel free to say what I want, althoughRead More →

It is in this juvenile ecstasy of the modern that we must locate the progeny of the future and initially ponder why a man, who just wants to be a boy, is apparently powerless to profess his innocence and relinquish his sexuality, despite assurances everywhere that he can and must.

– Slavoj Zizek in CTHEORY

It is nonetheless easy to understand the intellectual attraction of The Matrix: is it not that The Matrix is one of the films which function as a kind of Rorschach test setting in motion the universalized process of recognition, like the proverbial painting of God which seems always to stare directly at you, from wherever you look at it – practically every orientation seems to recognize itself in it?

– Slavoj Zizek in CTHEORY

Zizek says so much more. It’s all about the “Big Other,” but this quote is my favorite part.

Gareth Kemerling’s Philosophy Page has a link to Donna Haraway. The Philosophy Page is an excellent resource. It is a dictionary of terms and philosophers plus a timeline of the development philosophical ideas. It is rich in both content and links. And it has pictures of a lot of the philosophers. Weird pictures. One of Althusser whose face is sagging like a Dali clock. And B.F. Skinner‘s hair! He looks like he’s on a roller coaster. Friedrich Schleiermacher is the scariest of all! I would not want to meet him in a dark alley. And Arthur Schopenhauer — Mein Gott! Either Kemerling has a bizarreRead More →

What is the difference is between a blog and a journal? Mimi Nguyen’s Slander page has a section of blogs. Surfing from her page onto her friends’ pages shows they also have blogs. It took me a while to figure out what a blog was exactly, probably because I was caffeine deprived. But ‘blog, which is short for weblog, is basically a surfing journal. Blogs have become pretty popular, it seems, especially since there are whole webrings devoted to blogging. Blogs have become an integral part of web culture just like zines. Now, Mimi’s Slander page has an interesting journal entry that talks about whetherRead More →