Andrew’s Photos – Blog

This is an unexpected visitor, originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs.

Out of all the photographers and photos that I find on Flickr Trey Ratcliffe’s (aka Stuck in Customs) are by far my favourite. Here’s just one more example of that.

Another interesting quote I found while reading the first chapter of Deleuz and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus”:

Even when linguistics claims to confine itself to what is explicit an to make no presuppositions about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of assemblage and types of social power. (page 7)

I simply found this interesting because I found it to be quite relevant to my feelings toward the teaching and learning of languages like Ancient Greek or Latin. I’ve always been troubled by the way that we do not fully comprehend the structure or construction of these languages, but yet we still make assumptions about language usage and meaning. I believe that we do this by breaking the languages down into a single realm of meaning that may or may not have been applicable or relevant for the general populous of the time.

There’s a fascinating article up on one of The New York Times’ various blogs about the most iconic photographs from President Bush’s tenure in office. Errol Morris sits down with some of the traveling Associated Press photographers and discusses at great length some of their favourite photographs.

Read the article here.

For a class on Contemporary Theory (more properly modern French thought) I am in the midst of reading A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In the translator’s foreword to my edition Brian Massumi writes:

A concept is a brick. It can be sued to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none fo the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power releations encrusted in the laws? All and none fo the above “What interests us are the circumstances” Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture.

Just thought that was interesting and worth sharing. Enjoy.

The Daily Dish has an interesting article up about the future of books and Google’s effort to digitize them. Andrew Sullivan quotes another writer who wrote of the recent settlement allowing Google to digitize thousands of books that:

No one can predict what will happen. We can only read the terms of the settlement and guess about the future. If Google makes available, at a reasonable price, the combined holdings of all the major US libraries, who would not applaud? Would we not prefer a world in which this immense corpus of digitized books is accessible, even at a high price, to one in which it did not exist?

Perhaps, but the settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company.

Here’s the link to the original article that Sullivan pulls from which is also an interesting read although it is quite long.