Here are a few pictures I grabbed earlier today.
Prickles, and peril from above
Author: Don
Around town
Joyous multiples
It’s been a while since I last ran a poll. Let’s see if I can remember how to set one up.
(For the significance of “joy multiplier,” see here.)
As silly as reality
Several months’ worth of accumulated nonsense, animal edition.
When girls had noses
The oldest item in Richard’s box of Japanese magazines is a copy of MyAnime. Here are some scans illustrating the state of anime thirty-six years ago. These are large scans; right-click and open in a new window to see them at full resolution.
Hurry up and wait
Moving to a less urban area does have drawbacks. E.g., active railroad crossings. This train blocked my route for a half-hour earlier today. I would guess that it was traveling between five and ten miles per hour, say seven-and-a-half mph, so I watched roughly three and a half miles of train.
Waiting for a duck
Word is that the proprietor of Wonderduck’s Pond is making good progress and hopefully will be back online soon. Until then, here’s a mallard at the botanical garden pond.
Counting game
Here’s a detail from my new yard. How many four-leaf clovers can you find?
Last look at what I’m leaving behind in Wichita:
Elsewhere
I’ve finally escaped from Wichita. I now live in a city an order of magnitude smaller in a neighboring county, where I don’t hear boom cars and shouting strangers all evening. It will no longer be convenient for me to visit the botanical garden in Wichita, but quiet nights are compensation.
Waiting for me in the front yard when I moved in was the puffball above. I’d guess it’s either Calvatia fragilis or Calvatia cyathiformis. It was at its prime yesterday while my camera was packed away, and was starting to deflate this morning when I finally got a picture.
Also waiting for me were a couple of peony plants in their prime.
Thirty-one years ago
Here’s another magazine from Richard’s box, this time from 1990.
Color for a grey day
The weather has been unremittingly gloomy and damp. Fortunately, there is some color to relieve the monotony.
The decline and fall of the English department
A long time ago I decided against a career in academia. It was one of the few major life decisions I got right.
… pluralism in academic settings rarely lasts for long. There has to be a truth at the end of the day, even if it’s the “truth” of an artificial academic consensus. When theory killed literary truth, it doomed the discipline. Into this vacuum, identity professors in English departments poured ersatz truths about race and sex, which have failed to shore it up. At the time I was baffled at this suicidal trend, but in retrospect I can see that it was only natural that identity politics should have ascended so quickly in the nineties. Its urgent claims gave English a moral meaning that theory had undermined. When literature itself no longer sparked the heat of conviction that divided Bloom and Hirsch in the early sixties, the discipline had to find another source of energy. Identity critics had the answer. They weren’t decadent—they were impassioned. By 1992, “post-structuralism” had a stale tang, but gender and queer sounded fresh and potent. A theory panel at the MLA Convention on “Shelley and the Sign” was ho-hum, but “Queer Shakespeare” down the hall was packed.
High seriousness was restored, but literature was the victim. It wasn’t Shakespeare that drew the crowd, but queerness: Lear was a pretext. Literature had become a booster rocket, at best, one that you jettison when you reach the orbit of political relevance. The institutional effects are plain to see at this late date. Fifty years ago, a university couldn’t call itself “Tier One” unless it had a renowned English department. No more: Abysmal enrollment numbers in the humanities at such universities prove the irrelevance of literary study. My colleagues around the country bemoan the decline, but they blame the wrong things. English did not fall because a bunch of conservatives trashed the humanities as a den of political correctness. It didn’t fall because it lost funding or because business leaders promoted STEM fields. It fell because the dominant schools of thought stopped speaking about the truth of literature. Once the professors could no longer insist, “You absolutely must read Dryden, Pope, and Swift—they are the essence of wit and discernment”; when they lost the confidence to say that nothing reveals the social complexity of the colonial situation better than Nostromo; if they couldn’t assure anyone that Hawthorne’s sentences showed the American language in its most exquisite form, they lost the competition for majors. Students stopped caring about literature because the professors stopped believing in its promises of revelation and delight.
Heavy and cute
So, is Odd Taxi really noir? Let’s check with Roger Ebert.
Film noir is . . .
1. A French term meaning “black film,” or film of the night, inspired by the Series Noir, a line of cheap paperbacks that translated hard-boiled American crime authors and found a popular audience in France.
Nearly every scene in Odd Taxi takes place during the evening or night. Check.
Thirty years ago
I recently unearthed Richard’s box of Japanese magazines and scanned a few more. This batch is from the February 1991 Newtype. It provides a snapshot of what anime was during the age of the laser disc. (The magazine pages are a little larger than my scanner can handle and there are missing edges.) These are big scans, so right-click and open in a new window to see every detail.
White, red and fuzzy
The weatherman predicts thunderstorms every day for the next ten days, so I made time today to visit to the botanical garden while the weather was still mild.
There are more pictures here.
Snapshots of wasted time
Screenshots from recent viewing.