Yet Another Update of Telegraphic Nature

Yesterday went well enough. A friend left to do her practicum for her B.Ed in Alaska, I got more essays checked. This time, they're going quite well--the essays are generally of quite a high quality. Later in the evening, I began to watch Reservoir Dogs, but then I stopped--the ear-cutting scene was a bit much. Shortly thereafter, I went down to the Grad Club on main campus to meet up with some friends from the English grad program. Mayor McCA put on a rather impressive show--his tap-dancing skills alone were worth the price of admission. Subsequent to these, a few games of foozeball.

Fascism versus Communism

Last night, before one of Mayor McCA's tapdancing session, we four English grad students got to talking about The Lord of the Rings, in particular, the political orientation of its writer (possibly fascist, probably not compatible with a liberal democracy associated with urban-industrial civilization).

This discussion later segued into a discussion of how, of the two great totalitarian ideologies of the mid-20th century, communism could trace its origins fairly directly to Marx's texts of the mid- to late-19th century, later funnelled through German and Russian Marxist thought. Fascism, in contrast, couldn't claim a comparable monogenetic origin, simply because of its multiple origins (in different national cultures, for different reasons). Or, at least, I think that's the case.

Back to checking papers. This batch really is superb.

Weather on PEI

I didn't know that things were this bad.

Everyone all right?

Ottawa

I've booked the tickets. I'll leave Kingston at 10 o'clock on Saturday and get to Ottawa at noon; Sunday morning, I'll leave at 8:40 and get back to Kingston at a bit after 10:30.

This should be fun.

Roundup

• Over at Abiola Lapite's blog Foreign Dispatches, an excellent series of posts (1, 2, 3) on South Africa's tortuous 20th century history. It'd be nice if the white supremacists stopped popping up in the comments, though.


• At the rewarding Far Outliers blog, fascinating excerpts on China's historic ethnic diversity and, over at Language Hat, a related discussion of Chinese multilingualism.


• Is there hope for the revival of Angel? One can hope.
  
• There's an excellent post by Maria Farrell over at Crooked Timber on the inevitability of outsourcing of technically skilled jobs in the current biased world economy. Great stuff.


• Over at A Fistful of Euros, a fascinating discussion on the so-called Anglosphere. While I'm skeptical of the applicability of the theory (at least as Bennett wants to deploy it)
  
• An interesting article, from the French-language Cursus long-distance education site, on the impact of la francophonie on non-French languages. Interesting statistic: "[On] voit de plus en plus en Afrique, et surtout dans les mégapoles, les langues locales au profit du seul français. Au Cameroun, par exemple, le français est devenue la langue maternelle de près de 25% de jeunes urbains qui ne connaissent plus un traître mot de la langue des villageois."


• Making Jews Modern is a fascinating book on Yiddish and Ladino print culture in the former Russian and Ottoman empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I have to write on it, one of these days.


• Via Charlie Stross, The Grey Album. This album, remixing the Beatles White Album with Jay-Z's The Black Album to great critical acclaim, is being banned for copyright violations. You can download copies starting from here.


• While looking at my livejournal friends' friends, I was surprised to find the livejournal of a male escort. Just goes to show everyone has a blog these days. Remarkably literate guy, too. Really.

That's the most notable things I can think of.