Article of the Day

Paradoxes of Free Will
Author(s): Gunther S. Stent
Source: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 92(6)
2002

in the library today

Arthur O. Lovejoy
Essays in the History of Ideas
B945 L58 E7 (1948)[UBC]

Has an essay on "The Chinese Origin of A Romanticism"
quote on beauty by Sir Christopher Wren (p. 99)

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Max Delbruck
Mind from matter? An essay on evolutionary epistemology
B818 D36 1986 (UBC)

the introduction makes mention of Niels Bohr's lectures "Light and Life" and "Biology and Atomic Physics" - discussions on the impacts of quantum theory on biology

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James Rachels
Created from animals: The moral implications of Darwinism
B818 R323 1990

Had a quote from Charles Darwin:

"Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy
the imterposition of a deity. More humble and I think
truer to consider him created from animals."

Books on Kafka & Conrad

Martin Greenberg. The Terror of Art - Kafka and Modern Literature. Basic Books, New York, 1968.
PT 2621 A3 Z74613 1968 (UBC)

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Angel Flores (ed). The Kafka Problem. Octagon Books, New York, 1963.
PT 2621 A3 Z6 1963 (UBC)

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Patrick Reilly. The Dark Landscape of Modern Fiction. Ashgate Publishing, Burlington, 2003.
PN 3503 R42 2003.
Covers Dostoyevsy, Hardy, Conrad, Wharton, Kafka, West, Camus, Waugh, O'Connor

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Sven Lindqvist. Exterminate All the Brutes. The New Press, New York, 1996.
HT 1521 L4713 1996.

From the Preface:
This is a story, not a contribution to historical research. It is the story of a man traveling by bus through the Saharan desert and, at the same time, traveling by computer through the history of the concept of extermination. In small, sand-ridden desert hotesl, his study closes in on one sentence in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "Exterminate all the brutes."

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Gene M. Moore (ed). Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, A Casebook. Oxford University Press 2004. PR 6005 O4 H476 2004 (UBC)

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October 10, 2008

still reading about conrad & the heart of darkness

more cross references have emerged:

Jonah Raskin
Imperialism: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Journal of Contemporary History
Volume 2, Number 2, April 1967, 118

when looking up this article i came across: Orwell's Patriotism

Stephen Lutman
Orwell's Patriotism
Journal of Contemporary History
Vol. 2, No. 2, Literature and Society (Apr., 1967), pp. 149-158

October 7, 2008

a tale of Henry Morton Stanley and his supposed quest to rescue Emin Pasha

The Last Expedition: Stanley's Fatal Journey Through the Congo
By Daniel Liebowitz, Charlie Pearson
Published by Portrait, 2005
ISBN 0749950862, 9780749950866
368 pages

VPL 916.7 S78L

of things that could go wrong, they certainly did

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have been watching Generation Kill (HBO show) - scary how many lives are lost to those that don't care; where is the humanity? how do people become things?

provides me quotes such as "doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative"

October 6, 2008

doing an article search using keywords: conrad & modernity

came up with:

Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis: Impressionism as Traumatic Afterimage in Conrad and Ford.Preview By: Britzolakis, Christina. Journal of Modern Literature, Fall2005, Vol. 29 Issue 1, p1-20, 20p

October 3, 2008

working my through...

N. Jessica Reifer. Hannah Arendt and Joseph Conrad: Memory, History and the Development of Totalitarian Evil in the Belgian Congo. 2007

which discusses "the role of nineteenth century imperialism on the emergence and development of totalitarian evil"

why you may ask? i think that when one tries to understand the present one needs to have a grasp of what has passed

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Reifer (p. 6)
In Conrad’s novel, we encounter glimpses of the genocides, mass murders, and ethnic conflicts that will become prevalent in the twentieth century -- atrocities committed by “civilized” European adventurers in “backward” countries like the Belgian Congo, colonial domination, native de-humanization, subordination, and extermination -- bringing not only serious abuses of human rights, but simultaneously new possibilities for evil.

we sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf - quotation by George Orwell?

September 28, 2008

Gene M. Moore. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, A Casebook. 2004.

Introduction speaks of Chinua Achebe's essay on Conrad, calling Conrad a "bloody racist."

However, introduction also notes that the words racist and racism did not exist in Conrad's life time - first instances recorded in the OED date from the 1930s and even their predecessor, racialism, was not use until 1907. So Conrad may well have been a racist but not aware of his actions as Achebe's insinuates.

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Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa." In Joseph Conrad: Third World Perspectives, edited by Robert Hamner, 1990.

September 26, 2008

Have been reading a book called Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist - explores genocide and questions if what happened in Germany was a unique case or just another episode along the continuum of European events.

Anyhow, I have a habit of looking at endnotes and came across some other items that may be of interest. Also, cross-referenced databases looking up Conrad & Kafka and came across some other books that piqued my interest.

Gene M. Moore
Heart of Darkness: A Casebook
PR6005 O4 H476 2004

William Randolph Mueller
Celebration of Life
PN3503 M76 1972
- series of essays including one on Conrad & Kafka

Edward Engelberg
The Unknown Distance: From Consciousness to Conscience, Goethe to Camus
PN56 S46 E5 1972

oppenheimer and the bomb

today i read about oppenheimer and the bomb, well at least an article about it

James A. Hijiya
The "Gita" of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 144, No. 2. (Jun., 2000), pp. 123-167.

fizz, pop, bubble

so, i'm in safeway the other night getting a few things and i shop the way i normally do - one aisle at a time, trying to remember what i wasn't supposed to foget to get

then it strikes me - something i've always known but this time it made me sad because it reveals my realistic attitude that we are doomed

it was the aisle - the one in every major supermarket - with pop down one side and chips down the other

i realized how absurd that is - the amount of materials and energy used to produce those products and bring them to the store, along with the gazillions spent on marketing them; yes, marketing empty calories and carcinogens

in western society, where obese people make up a quarter of the population, do we really need a whole aisle to sell coke and doritos?

imagine if just half the resources to produce these products were used to promote healthier options and organic production of food

anyways, the next step for me is to put my money where my mouth is and eventually eliminate my use of these products - much like quiting smoking, this could be a difficult task, especially when there isn't a patch...

as i get older

last thursday (october 4) i went to see a talk/interview with a maasai warrior whom was visiting north america for the first time mostly to raise awareness of the issues that his people were experiencing

one of the main things was their cows were going 'crazy' (BSE?) - cows are the lifeblood of the maasai people; the other issue was the deforestation of their lands as trees were used as fuel and building material

the maasai people had to go outside of their traditional boundaries to seek work and food; there was also a push to educate themselves so that they could learn how to interact with the outside world

learning swahili, a money economy, tree planting and other skills have allowed the maasai people to survive but there is a gradual erosion of their culture that is occurring

the false promise of a better life through technology is creeping into their world and i felt a bad for what is one of the few remaining cultures that exist more in tune with nature then the rest of us

the thing that affects me is the fear of loss and failure to remember; it was a concern of jane jacobs - the problem of forgetting what we have forgotten - an obliteration from our consciousness that something else actually existed

it reminds me of a scene from the movie 'knocked up' where two of the characters were quoting lines from 'back to the future' while the two women at the table had these big looks of 'huh?' on their faces; it made me scared to think that a reference to movies from the 80s are no longer relevant to people in their 20s

it seems that the younger generation spends more time focusing on the present and the gizmos of the present rather than learning about the past or even having a sense of curiosity of the past which constitutes the cultural memory of their parents/aunts/uncles/teachers

it may be the same old complaint but this text messaging/ipod/virtual world generation is losing touch with the real world with it rich texture and timelines

when the spice girls reunion is a big thing i have to wonder....

reading Orhan Pamuk

from his book the Black Book - Celal commenting on secret meanings

"Most people fail to see the inner essence of the things around them, simply because these things are right under their noses, while they pay great attention to the secondary properties of things that seem just beyond themk, simply because they find them in dark corners, on the edge of things, and therefore think them more obscure. This is why I never make open references to my true purpose in my columns. I mention it only in passing - hide it in a corner, as it were. But never in a particularly dark or secret corner; it's a game of hide-and-seek that any child could play. Whatever my readers happen to find in that corner they believe instantly - which is, after all, my ultimate aim. And this is the worst part: They pay no attention to the overt content of the piece, the things that are right under their noses; they ignore even the secret and accidental riddles it would take them only a little patience, an ounce of intellect, to solve - and as for the newspaper itself, it ends up gathering dust in a corner of its own."

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i found the first line interesting how people overlook the obvious and search for the secrets when perhaps the obvious has the power to provide more

by my calculation

if striking workers in vancouver are paid $50 per day they walk the picket line or $250 per week

newspapers indicate 5000 people are on strike

so, if %80 of them walk pickets each week that works out to 4000 people

4000 people x $250 per week x 6 weeks = 6 million dollars in strike pay OR a 1 million dollars a week

my question is how does CUPE accumulate this much money?

what is it about computers...

so, i've got this dell system that has a Pentium Celeron D 2.53 GHz processor with 512 MB RAM running XP Home that runs like a pig in drying mud

i haul out an old Pentium 3 700 MHz with 512 MB RAM running Windows 2000 and it performs better than the above system - less delay opening programs, playing video smoothly; unfortunately it isn't black but a bit of decorative play with colored sharpies should help

i just don't get how a system that is 5 years old runs better

my challenge now is to resist hucking out the new system - perhaps linux will run more smoothly

but it does go back to my feelings that computers shouldn't be discarded so quickly by people - just have to find a purpose for it

what people want

i started reading the audacity of hope by barack obama and in the prologue he talks about hitting the campaign trail for his run at senate and he writes about a common thread that noticed:

No blinding insights emerged from these months of conversation. If anything, what struck me was just how modest people's hopes were, and how much of what they believed seemed to hold constant across race, region, religion, and class. Most of them thought that anybody willing to work should be able to find a job that paid a living wage. They figured that people shouldn't have to file for bankruptcy because they got sick. They believed that every child should have a genuinely good education - that it shouldn't just be a bunch of talk - and that those same children should be able to go to college even if their parents weren't rich. They wanted to be safe, from criminals and from terrorists; they wanted clean air, clean water, and time with their kids. And when they got old, they wanted to be able to retire with some dignity and respect.

now these aren't unreasonable expectations - yet, somehow the richest nation in the world and the world's only superpower focuses on other priorities than keeping its citizens happy

why?

and if their government doesn't provide these things, why do they keep voting for them?

i don't have answers but questions like these make me continue to seek the answer and perhaps one day i'll understand politics and the true motivations of those in power - which undoubtedly involves having power and being able to influence the powerful - but until then, i'll just keep plugging away

misheard lyrics

so my son was listening to the mixed cd i had playing while going home

the song was van halen's why can't this be love

however, he heard it as why can't this be loud...

it puzzled him greatly why something couldn't be loud

methods of distraction

so, i take my son to visit my parents on the weekend so that i can get some time to wallow in misery as i suffer from my fever

my brother gets into a back and forth with my son

it's incredible how little children can bring someone down to their level, rather than adults making an effort to bring the children up to their level

just because children are little does not mean they are incapable of learning - actually, they're probably the best learning machines out there as they try so hard to understand the world around them and integrate themselves into the world of adults

or something like that

first death in war

was reading an article from Harper's and it gave insight into why the Bush administration is refusing to comment on the Pat Tillman death

his was the first death of a prominent figure in Bush's war in terror

this article indicates that the first death in a war is often used to gather support from the people to demonstrate how someone in the public eye would give his/her life to defend their country, the country they loved and for a cause they believed in

well, Tillman was critical of the Bush administration and was killed by friendly fire - not the best example to use as a first death

so, Bush and his cronies continue to tell their lies and Pat Tillman's death becomes a rallying point for those that see through the lies

transit thoughts

have been taking the bus lately and thinking about the approved bus fare hike in the lower mainland

as long as the money is used to improve transit than i accept the fare increase but if skytrains are still packed during rush hour then i'm not sure if it is worth it

this compounded by the total lack of a presence by transit/skytrain staff at skytrain stations and on the skytrain itself

i believe this presence is necessary for several reasons, including: to provide security presence, asking for directions, and as ambassadors for the region to tourists

i've witnessed several times people approaching the ticket machines with no clue on how to operate the machine or figure the whacked zone system

if you want to get more people on transit then it has to be made more friendly

and translink has to force the drivers' union to accept part time drivers

until these things happen, people will still sit in their cars, making traffic worse and harming the precious environmental conditions necessary for maintaining human existence at its current level