Department of spell-checking

The word 'alterity' isn't recognized by Microsoft Word's spell check.  A quick gander at the OED entry tells me that the word became more widely used in 20th century critical and cultural theory (not something that the writers of whatever dictionary Microsoft uses are too familiar with, I guess), but at any rate, the earliest quotation is from 1425:

Speculum Sacerdotale 234   Sche [sc. woman] made an alterite and an oþerhede in that tyme, that sche made alienacion and partynge bitwene God and man.

 I also found an awesome (now obsolete) synonym in differency.  I think I'm going to incorporate that into my vocabulary after this.  Or not.

Random titbit of the day

One of this week's non-related* reading was Linda Henderson's The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art.  It's a fine book, with a relatively straight-forward argument, that four-dimensionality was important spatially before it became important temporally.  Even before Einstein's relativity, artists were finding great inspiration in the idea of a fourth dimension, and Einstein's work represents the beginning of an end for these kinds of ways of thinking about the world, and not simply the beginning of some movement.  Or, at least that's what I think is going on.  At any rate, I think that the best part of my reading notes (and the most important thing I learned while reading) was this:  

"Dali came up with the visual idea for the watched in The Persistence of Memory while looking at a plate of camembert cheese, and in his The Conquest of the Irrational, he described the melted watches as “the extravagant and solitary Camembert of time and space.”  What the hell was this man smoking"

That, I'd say, sums up the level of critical analysis for my reading of the work.

*that it, non-related to anything I am remotely thinking about working on, but which I still read because I thought it was fun, or I thought it was useful, or I had to read it.

New addition to my carrel

My carrel is not a terribly friendly place.  It is in the bowels of our main library, in a small room with a few other desks designated for students who study ridiculous things, like I do.  Besides being absolutely devoid of natural light, there is an incessant hum and rattle from the air vent above my head (and it is LOUD!), it's always freezing in here, no matter what the season, and I sometimes feel like the room hasn't really been cleaned since 1972, to give a conservative estimate.  However, I recently acquired something that is going to make my stays here much, much more pleasant.

I now have a mini coffee maker to go along with my books. All I need is a sleeping bag, and I'll never have to leave the library.  Ever.

Just another pointless blog

run by yet another grad student with too much to do, and too large of an inclination to waste time. 

I imagine this place as my sandbox, tucked away in some anonymous corner of the internet, where I'll write ridiculous and no doubt pointless things about things that come across my path. 

So, like I said-- just another pointless blog.