C___ has offered numerous complaints that the Hindi taught by the institute isn't 'real Hindi,' i.e the Hindi of everyday life. "I embarrassed myself by using the word bhaviśya; no-one even uses that word! Everyone made fun of me! But the teacher said it was proper ( Read more... )

SPEAKER: Welcome to the first of seventeen bialogues we'll be having this week. I would like to thank the Greater New York Council of the Performing Arts for lending us this wonderful space, and the audience for showing up in such large numbers! I've never seen any of you before, but we here at Bialogue are committed to speaking with gays, ( Read more... )

Maybe it's just hanging out with the Foucault-loving C___ so much, maybe because I live in Brahmin-town (Brahmins may just as well be floating brains, apparently), or maybe it's just Marx continually reminding me to work to reunite mental and physical labor as 'sensuous activity,' but I feel like everybody's beating up on Descartes ( Read more... )

I googled the following phrase this morning, and what I can tell you, mis amigos, is that there has been great longing and nostalgia for the woman singer-songwriter of the 90s for quite some time.

Even USA TODAY in 2006 bemoaned the loss of authentic women writing and giving vent to their feelings on the national airwaves ( Read more... )

Do you remember Marx at 26, when Marx was young and hopeful? The Marx who liked to party? Marx at his most Weberian? Maybe I should refresh your memory...Thus political economy - despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance - is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human ( Read more... )

I googled Peter Hessler after reading about his new book about the Chinese highway system. The third hit led me to this blogpost, "How Peter Hessler Ruined My China Life" which pretty much, for me, captures what Princeton is all about ( Read more... )

Finished Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) yesterday, primarily to find the context for the Mansfield Park quote from the back of the Indian edition I wrote about earlier (turns out that the quote is from another Trilling essay twenty years older), but also because these terms are honest ciphers for the bloggy among us ( Read more... )

I recently sent baolangsen a link to an Onion AVClub biographical essay on his "ironic appreciation" of Saved by the Bell to cheer him up. O'Neal writes:We've had a lot of talk around the office this week about the experience of "growing out of" ironic appreciation: that moment when you suddenly realize that life is too short to waste on having insincere ( Read more... )

Just finished reading Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program for the first time. It's pretty trippy, and allows you to experience what it might be like to have Marx as a copy-editor or professor ( Read more... )

Most of the week I worked slowly through Tucker's Marx-Engels Reader, trying to fill in gaps between the Marx I read in 2002 (Economic/Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Critiques, On the Jewish Question, Manifesto, etc.), Marx I read in 2006 (German Ideology, Theses on Feuerbach), and the Marx I read in 2008 (Capital, v. 1). I read the 18th ( Read more... )