Thursday, November 18, 2010

A Post of Links

You might remember my reservations regarding the string of videos making fun of undergraduates who wanted to go on to secondary school. Well, Karl Steel shares this wonderful video of a professor and student seriously discussing graduate school. My only reservation is the idea of the life of the mind. Whatever else graduate school and being a professor is, it isn't the life of the mind. But nothing is, and I think that's okay. Click the link, watch the video.

Jason Read has a smart review of Simon Choat's Marx Through Post-Structuralism. This review came at a time I was having a series of discussions about the relationship of Marxism and poststructuralism with my colleagues in the communication studies department here. Now my only annoyance is the absurd prices that Continuum wants for this (and so many other) books.

Speaking of my colleagues here in the communication studies department, I have been wondering what would happen if I ended up in a tenure track job in a department of communication or rhetoric or something of the sort. I have sort had a lot psychologically built into this label of philosopher. Which is odd, because I freely admit that some of the best philosophy I read is from people not working in philosophy departments. Or, I should say that I read good philosophy both in and outside of philosophy programs. I say this, because whenever I see Brian Leiter get up on his tautological horse about how only people in philo departments are doing philosophy, I feel a lot better about being associated with any department that is doing interesting work. So, go here and go see comments on Leiter's ranking of Continental programs, and also read the comments to this post, where Leiter engages in his usual tautological comments. (h/t Tom Sparrow).

I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise, but it seems that South Carolina will soon be running the largest dairy farm in the state, by using prisoners. (h/t vegan.com).

[update] I forgot this link. Here is an interview with Catalin Avramescu about his book, The Intellectual History of Cannibalism. The interview was fairly interesting, and now I have to pick up the book.



Now, I know this song has been out for a while, but I have only recently been made aware of this wonderful performance by The Heavy on the Late Show, particularly the encore is just pure, unadulterated fun. (it seems the embedding isn't working right, but I don't know why. Anyway, if you can't see the video, click here).