May 2011
9 posts
11 tags
The Monopoly of Ideas
Ayn Rand indoctrination in Universities:
http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/151066/ayn_rand_u_rich_conservatives_—_not_just_the_kochs_—_buying_up_professors_and_influence_on_campus
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What if I taught Atlas Shrugged by guiding students through a semester-long process of ripping apart every single page, while delivering a well-versed political critique of the...
18 tags
Preliminary thoughts on Żuławski's "Trzecia część...
[I haven’t done even half of what I would like to with looking at this film: it is as brilliant as it is cryptic. I thought I would post the base I am going to work from for a more complete view firstly to get feedback, and secondly that there would be something on the internet that doesn’t leave their critique at “it is about loss” or “it is about heart-ache”,...
The internet: a tool of....?
Anything we do in life we can do or see other people do on the internet: sex, eating, shopping, loving, talking, fighting, rape, violence, murder, suicide. If you are reading this, the internet is an inescapable part of your life. My comrade has written eloquently about the dangers of channeling our subjectivities into and making connections through a medium so pervasively mediated by...
8 tags
My translation of Lermontov's The Angel (Ангел)
[This was a difficult one to do, but I think it worked out better, and more closely to the original than my Tyutchev translation for instance. Still a couple slightly awkward moments, but better then most of the versions I see in english ( I did borrow lines 7 and 8 from Nabokov’s translation). I even managed to keep the AABB scheme, but lost a lot of the internal rhyming and grace, which I...
10 tags
Project Nightmare
[A review I wrote for submission to the Film Criticism zine Samurai Dreams.]
“You see, we both really enjoy machinery.” Project Nightmare is about a government computer test that renders ones inner thoughts in physical manifestations, not unlike Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The confusing and barren landscape of the film would probably be boring for people used to modern pacing, but...
10 tags
Three pieces on Vladimir Nabokov 3/3: Pale Fire
[This piece has not been edited, it was the final paper I wrote for a class I audited on Nabokov at the art school I work at. The teacher really liked me, despite that I sort of invaded the class without going through the official auditing channels, and confronted all of his bourgeois students with a healthy dose of Marxism. He even offered to write me a recommendation if I ever decided to go to...
18 tags
Existentialism, Objectivism, and their...
[Rough draft, I am sorry I used two men to critique two women, it was an accident. Need to flesh out relationship between existentialism and objectivism more specifically.]
One specifically infamous concept that comes from misreading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is that it concludes with the end of all history, where the dialectic consciousness’ movement through time halts in the positive...
argonautica asked: Is Russian your first language or did you learn it? Anyway you're lucky to be able to read Russian poetry in its pure form. I can appreciate that. Great job of the translations. All very impressive. I really love Pushkin
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