Wednesday, October 17, 2001 Link
Feeding the inner geek:
On the site of Robert Harris, which offers both A Glossary of Literary Terms and A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices, I clicked the link for The Scout Report, a professionally compiled annotated bibliography of new (or newly noted) Internet resources that is updated every Friday.
From the Scout, I might have chosen, for instance, to travel to the Eukaryotic Promoter Database, but being of the opinion that none of my eukaryotes deserved promotion, I jumped instead from the Scout to the pages of A.I.R., the Annals of Improbable Research, to chuckle at the IgNobel prizes awarded this month by the editors of Hot A.I.R.
2:00 PM CDT (GMT -5)
Tuesday, October 9, 2001 Link
Over the past month I've been reading short books, books short enough to read in a night or two, short enough that I might quickly reread them after acknowleding that I was too distracted on the first pass to really understand them. Among the best of them (and one I reread yesterday) has been Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a writing that blurs the imagined line between fiction and memoir so thoroughly that a librarian might have to rely on its subtitle (A Work of Fiction) to understand how to catalog it.
As America's Thucydides of Vietnam, O'Brien might be regarded as no longer au courant, especially in light of Sunday's counterattack and the ground struggles that must follow it. Here's why that view is incorrect:
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
(from the chapter/story "How to Tell a True War Story")
8:00 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Monday, October 8, 2001 Link
Amen.
8:15 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Tuesday, October 2, 2001 Link
The local Birkenstocks-with-socks folks have finally thrown up a web page. Drawing from both mainstream and alternative media sources, the current MAPJ (pronounced 'map-jay) page provides an extensive set of links to news and opinion about the 9/11 attack. Some of those linked sources (such as alternet.org, for instance) in turn provide extensive links, thereby widening the gyre.
4:00 PM CDT (GMT -5)
