Category Archives: Uncategorized

Vietnamese fish

This evening we took pictures of the process of making a favorite dish, hands down one of the most delicious ways to eat haddock (and not half bad with salmon, either). The procedure can be seen here, but the taste and smell just don’t digitize well. It’s an adaptation of a dish I first encountered in California about 25 years ago, but I’ve been making it so long that it’s pretty well assimilated, and the ‘Vietnamese’ part is the fish sauce –an acquired taste/smell, but once acquired, nothing else will do.

from Language Log

In a guest rant on the every-day-more-essential Language Log, Paul Kay contributes this lovely bit of skewering:

In “deconstructing” all historical texts and arguing that they merely express the power of the interests their authors represent, postmodernists apotheosize the obstacles to objectivity rather than combating them. [Michiko Kakutani] cites in this connection an elegant line of Stanley Fish’s: “the death of objectivity ‘relieves me of the obligation to be right’; … it ‘demands only that I be interesting.'”

Giving some thought to music

I replied to my son John’s question about what I was up to with music these days, and it seems like something blogworthy, so snip:

I haven’t had my mind very firmly on music in the last few months. I was playing a lot while we were staying at Scott & Judy’s in VA (after the house was sold), and I’ve now got a good array of instruments where I can reach them, but other things have intruded, like the Nova Scotia Faces –which if I do say so myself, is getting to be a pretty remarkable document. If you haven’t looked lately, nsfaces.schtuff.com is the main entry, and I’m now getting to more interstitial writing …but still scanning a lot every day.
So I’ve done nothing systematic about music in the last 4 months; a lot has been leaking in via mp3 but that tends to be bits of preposterosity, not coherent bodies of stuff that one might study. I have some thoughts about doing that sort of systematic stuff, but the question is one of medium: the problem of managing the digital rights, and not stepping beyond Fair Use if I’m making something for distribution. I’m not sure that the world really wants the didactic, which is the default mode for the retired prof. There are so many really wonderful web-accessible radio stations that I’m not sure there’s an open niche for what I might do with my collections –but that’s really a matter of my having not yet realized what the empty niches are. So still thinking about it…
To some degree that’s part of the reequilibration consequent upon not being in the ed biz anymore. For so many years I passed much creativity through the filter of teach-a-course, and was basically dealing with captive audiences and institutional trammelments. Free of those silly bonds now, I’m having to reinvent what it is to Learn, and I love it. I don’t know that there’s any reason for me to relearn or reinvent what it is to Teach …certainly not in any sort of institutional context anyhow. I’m so done with that.

/snip

Mr. Pooter

Why has it taken me this long to encounter The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith? I stumbled on it via a posting to Crooked Timber by Chris Bertram, in which he quotes this wonderful example of dudgeon gone awry:

I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.

Seems to me that Mr. Pooter (who is, we see, in the public domain) ought to have the Pepys treatment, and so come to life again in the blogosphere, where he can do the most good.
…and a few minutes later, thanks to Google, I find that, sure enough, somebody has already done it! Bless whoever it is, thrice over.

So magnificently preposterous that it has to be redistributed

This from WFMU FM’s Beware of the Blog:

…After freemasons and lumberjacks, the only logical next topic is Wittgenstein, like Mozart an Austrian native. During the first world war he wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in which he claimed to have solved all problems of philosophy. Here is the famous second paragraph of the introduction in English translation:

The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language. Its whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

That last half sentence just asks to be set to music, and it is strange that it took a whole 46 years until Finnish troubadour M. A. Numminen did just that, accompanied by the Sohon Torwet brass band. You can hear the tune with the original German lyrics “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen” here (MP3).