Arts & Letters Daily

VERITAS ODIT MORAS a service of the chronicle of higher education -- a refrence site and a must on everyone's link list

Boycott RIAA

visit this site and help boycott the music industry. this is their mission.
"Boycott-RIAA was founded because we love music. We cannot stand by silently while the recording industry continues its decades-long effort to lock up our culture and heritage by misrepresenting the facts to the public, to artists, the fans and to our government. Our mission is to represent the position of the consumers and of the independent music artists against this nearly completely foreign-owned cartel which exhibits behaviors indicative of deliberate and outright contempt for the law, and of those whose job is to enforce it. (Simultaneously, they implore the government to persecute grandmothers and children on their behalf!!!)"
This is a useful site, RIAARADAR.COM , this helps you find out if the music you are trying to buy is published by one of the RIAA members.

the darkcoding network

have you ever been asked for a credit card number on the net by someone (or site) you don't want to give your real name to? worry no more, visit darkencoding for that credit card number. also visit the DNS stuff link --very useful.
Also visit the Michael Jackson link which I think is one of the funniest things on the web. Many Thanks to Graham King

Coming soon: Notes from Underground

"Notes from Underground (also translated in English as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld) (1864) is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is considered the world's first existentialist work. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg." "Like many of Dostoevsky's novels, Notes from Underground was unpopular with Soviet literary critics due to its explicit rejection of socialist utopianism and its portrait of humans as irrational, uncontrollable, and uncooperative. Many existentialist critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre, considered the novel to be a forerunner of existentialist thought and an inspiration to their own philosophies."

Notes from underground has been described by Walter Kaufmann as "the best overture for existentialism ever written". Today the notes remain as valid as ever -- who cannot see in the main character the defeated ideals of a whole generation of Iranians. Anyway, I am going to put up the whole work in book blog format. Here are some excerpts:


I AM A SICK MAN.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well -- let it get worse!

Now I am forty. I used to be in the government service, but am no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least.........................When petitioners used to come for information to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and felt intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making anybody unhappy. I almost did succeed. For the most part they were all timid people -- of course, they were petitioners.

I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty?.....................
I am a collegiate assessor. I was in the service that I might have something to eat (and solely for that reason), and when last year a distant relation left me six thousand roubles in his will I immediately retired from the service and settled down in my corner. I used to live in this corner before, but now I have settled down in it. My room is a wretched, horrid one in the outskirts of the town. My servant is an old country-woman, ill-natured from stupidity, and, moreover, there is always a nasty smell about her...............................The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was "sublime and beautiful," the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether. But the chief point was that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me, but as though it were bound to be so. It was as though it were my most normal condition, and not in the least disease or depravity, so that at last all desire in me to struggle against this depravity passed.

the street, no sound was to be heard. The street lamps gave a disconsolate and useless glimmer. I ran two hundred paces to the cross-roads and stopped short.
Where had she gone? And why was I running after her?.................................
And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better -- cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?


keep posted for the notes

2006 weblog awards -- the bloggies

Millions of blogs.Thousands of nominees.151 finalists.Thirty winners. visit this site and cast your vote for the best blog in 2006. Deadline is January 10, 2006. Don't forget if you don't email tis post to at least 10 people you know (no spammers) within 45 minutes of first seeing it -- you will never be able to have sex again, all your friends will die, your breasts will turn into oversized raisins , and everyoyher freakish doomsday phobia that might work for you. stand up and count (as many times as you want ;) )

anais nin's diary volume 2

When the movie Henry and June came out in 1990 I had already read couple of books from Henry Miller and didn’t like them. So, I went to see the movie reluctantly – and the movie turned out to fall somewhat short of my expectations. What the movie did was to cause me to pick – up the diaries—and never put them down. Today Anais Nin's diaries seem more relevant the ever before – as you will see they have a bloggish quality about them.


I have made a couple of posts on Mark America, Grammatron, and Becoming Research on my hamid & company blog before – check them out for Mark is doing truly wonderful work to develop the web as an artistic medium. Here is Mark's descriptionof the diaries: "True blog is not true at all. It is pseudo.For example, the novels of Henry Miller could be considered bloggish, but then again so would the so-called "diaries" of Anais Nin, not because they are diaries per se, but because they subvert the diary form into what reads like an associative, pseudo-autobiographical novel. It's her socio-linguistic poetics coupled with an energetic linking process that makes it feel so bloggered. Her enigmatic jazz momentum totally eroticized by a very stylized use of language as aphrodiasical elixir. This, I believe, is the key to blogging less it become nothing but narcissistic foreplay, and mediocre narcissistic foreplay at that. " I have started A blog of the second volume--here Nin is more measured compared to the sexual overtones of the first volume. The site itself has some issues to work out--but I have deceided to go ahead. Enjoy.

C a p o t e

Capote is a 2005 biopic that follows Truman Capote on a writing assignment for the New Yorker in a small Kansas town where he investigates the gruesome murders of a local family. The film follows the events in Capote's life during the writing of his non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood. The movie was filmed in Winnipeg, Manitoba in the summer of 2004.Here is a review:" This moving film lives and breathes on the powerful shoulders of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's stunning performance in the title role. Hoffman captures all of the unique physical characteristics that made Capote such a familiar public figure in his lifetime and invests them with a humanity that is almost unbearably poignant. The film focuses on Capote's research on the book "In Cold Blood" and the personal journey that his relationship and identification with killer Perry Smith became (Capote says at one point that it was like they grew up in the same house, and he went out the front door while Perry went out the back), a compelling and complicated relationship that this uncompromising film presents in moving detail. But what truly makes it a unique work of art is the brilliant work of Hoffman - always an interesting actor - whose performance as Truman Capote should elevate him to the pantheon of film giants. "