Penny Hero (dot) Net

Part of the first comment at the end of The poet who could smell vowels, which celebrates René de Saussure’s life.

“Thank you so much for your deeply human portrayal of the man Saussure. So often, as you say, we do (or perhaps must) reduce these human idea-factories to a few memorable phrases or greatest-hits concepts. And I think Saussure, because of how widely racinated, how utterly necessary, his ideas have become over so many disciplines, is more vulnerable than most: we think we ‘know’ Foucault, have a grip on who Freud walked around as, don’t feel we need to worry that we might take Marx or Barthes out of context, while the Genevan philologist cited in every liberal arts term paper and dissertation on every continent remains just a surname in a few thousand footnotes. Now at least we can see him in color.”

–Antheia Laplante, Seattle, USA

It’s apparently 150 years since he was born.

Have I mentioned that I miss school? My regrets about not taking more math and science are now in fierce competition with my regrets about not going hard-core into critical theory.

I’ve been getting a lot of unnecessarily nasty comments from a certain reader on a certain post. None of it is getting published of course because I filter all my comments from unknown users.

I’m still having lots of laughs from this guy though. Quote of the day:

Don’t listen to this girlie, she always try to show you, that she are/have great geek woman (but is just another lammer in the fishtank).

How’s that for an insult!? Apparently I live in a fishtank!

Hahaha.

Help! I need a good (NOT CLICHE!) quote to engrave on an …um… ipod. :)

Any ideas?

(suggestions from complete strangers or new readers are welcome!)

Funniest lead I’ve seen in a long time:

SEARCH outfit Google has managed to tell the US government to go forth and multiply over its demands that it hand over details of keywords that its punters choose to search.

Google beats off the government (*snickers again*)

and btw, yes I know that the article is more like funny, and less like news. (”rolled over to have its tummy tickled” ??)

Haha. Writer Nick Farrell just made my morning. Funny thing was that I didn’t get it for almost a minute. took two sips of coffee before I started to laugh. I’m a loser. I’m also a loser for posting about my giggle fit. :) *pfft*

WISH ME LUCK ON FINALS!

From Kenneth Keniston’s Social Change and Youth in America in The Challenge of Youth:

“If Growing up were merely a matter of becoming “socialized,” that is, of learning how to “fit into” society, it is hard to see how anyone could grow up at all in modern America, for the society into which young people will some day “fit” remains to be developed or even imagined (211).”

I’m enjoying this article, even though it’s fricken LONG.

Typo of the Day:

invasion of piracy

:)

For shits and giggles, I just googled “slack-ass” and one of my results was this pdf file of the talks given at the Madison Informal Linguistics Conference in 1998. Here’s a quote from the panel examining “-ass”:

This paper will examine the current trend in American English to use words associated with scatology as an emphasizing particle (e.g. ‘-ass,’ ‘butt-,’ ‘’n’ shit,’ etc.), which I will henceforth refer to as the “anal-retentive hypothesis (ARH)”.

Hey, I thought it was funny. Especially because ARH is both a pirate noise and the noise some people make when they really need to go, and finally do!

P.S. Faris says the guy on page 3 is an idiot because “Rusty” is an appositive. And naturally, I’d tend to agree of course.

The whole thing might even be a big joke. or a pretend conference. or who knows.

“The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it’s like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval.” (91)

but it’s hard to know how seriously to take her, because her prose is so caffeinated that you can’t always separate the sense from the sensibility.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?040628crbo_books1

Quote from Malidoma Patrice Some’s autobiography Of Water and the Spirit:

My visual horizon had grown disproportionately. I was discovering that the eye is a machine that, even at its best, can still be improved, and that there is more to sight than just physical seeing. I began to understand that human sight creates its own obstacles, stops seeing where the general consensus says it should. But since my experience with the tree, I began to perceive that we are often watched at close distance by beings that we ourselves cannot see, and that when we do see these otherworldly beings, it is often only after they have given us permission to see further–and only after they have made some adjustments in themselves to preserve their integrity. And isn’t it also tru that there is something secret about everything and everybody?

From page 225, chapter 18.

It’s incredible because it’s implying that this habit we have of hiding parts of ourselves behind masks, or revealing more or less of ourselves to trusted people is a divine and wholesome practice. That it preserves and protects something inside ourselves. The analogy here is a person’s ability to see things in the non-physical world. If they were literal and visibly present all the time, something of their purpose, their essence, and their power would disintegrate. The non-ness, or the hidden-ness is part of their structure and substance.

Have I mentioned lately that I love this book?