Eleanor Arnason's blog
Cultural hoo haw: When is borrowing acceptable? And when is it not?
The longer I thought about it, the more I wondered, "How does one distinguish between borrowing/sharing/influencing and appropriation? "Appropriation" means (among other things) taking without permission. But who can give permission for a culture? All at once I think of Disney protecting its copyrights and trademarks.MORE »
Culture and its uses
I thought I had a brilliant insight into cultural appropriation yesterday after Minicon. But Patrick says it is not brilliant and not an insight. Ah well.MORE »
Global warming and the rich: Are they thinking short-term, or not at all?
I have this bad habit of surfing the Internet in the morning, reading news and economics. Today's depressing information is from Scientific American: global warming may have reached the point of being irreversible.MORE »
Thor
Switching to a more useful topic than MFAs in Creative Writing, I want to write about the move Thor. I just saw it for the fifth or sixth time. I really like it. Why? It's just another silly Marvel superhero movie.
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Barbara Jensen, class and language
I read one of Barb Jensen's essays online, after posting at Crooked Timber. Barb is a psychologist who writes about the different ways working class people and professional middle class people use language. This is from her essay, talking about the "condensed" way working people talk:MORE »
Thinking about Occupy
I have been trying to work out my response to Occupy. Of course, I am in favor of it. But what else? What is my analysis?
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Occupy
The police have cleared Zuccotti Park. They have done the same in other American cities. We will see what happens next.
Patrick says this is what the Minneapolis police have done to homeless camps for years. When they find one, they destroy it. Belongings are wrecked or taken away. When people come back to their home, they discover they -- who had so little -- have nothing now.
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OWS - Facebook notes
I went to the Occupy Minnesota demonstration Friday morning. When I was there, it was several hundred nice Minnesota people drinking coffee and chatting. Later on, apparently the group decided to march from the City-County Building to the Federal Bank Building and back. One guy told me he was planning to spend the night.
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Radical history
Note on all that follows: the word "radical" comes from the Latin "radix" or "root." Radical change is change at the root. Radical history is a history of roots: the stuff at the bottom that anchors and feeds everything else.
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Visible poverty, invisible wealth
Somewhere on the Internet I read a description of flying into New York from Europe: how shabby, rundown and beat up Kennedy Airport looks compared to European airports. The same can be said about most -- maybe all -- of our public structures. Compare decaying American bridges to the amazing new bridges in China. Compare Amtrak to the bullet trains in Europe and Asia.MORE »
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