Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 151
May 1, 2015
Unfolded Dept.
No, I haven't forgotten aboutWelcome to the Fold — and neither should you, for that matter, because the wheels have begun turning on that project again!An editor (that is, a copy editor) has the book in hand and will be giving me some detailed edits. After that comes the real fun: thehunt for a publisher or an agent.
April 28, 2015
The Moral Obligation To Be Creative Dept.
The title is a riff on Lionel Trilling's book of nearly the same name (still sitting, I confess, in my "to be read one of these weeks when I'm not dodging quite so many bullets" pile). The upshot of the idea came in the form of a question I popped to a friend during a discussion of how mainstream media struggles to be inclusive:Do people who complain that there's no media for them have a moral obligation to create it?
April 23, 2015
I, Groucho Marxist Dept.
I'm not sure who came up with that term first, Bob Black (ofThe Abolition of Work) or the anonymous graffitist who wrote "Je suis marxiste, tendance Groucho" on a wall in Paris sometime in1968. But it's a sentiment that's strong in me: I wouldn't belong to any club that would have me as a member.
April 17, 2015
Pick A Side, Any Side Dept.
Not much time to blog lately — impending family stuff, work, re-jiggering some project priorities, etc. The one big thing I keep meaning to bring up is the debacle of the Hugos, but Tim Hall has beaten me to it and done a far better job of running down just what has been so repulsive about this whole mess.What bugs me most about all this is how the hijackers (on both sides, mind you) can claim victory of a kind no matter what happens.
I hate quietism as a political stance, but I know full wel...
April 12, 2015
Gonehattan Dept.
I just discovered theVanishing New Yorkblog, easily the best and most comprehensive documentation of the way the New York City I remembered and lived in is now being chewed to pieces.
It's an absorbing and depressing read in about equal measure.Bookstores, Judaica, shoe-repair shops, diners, bagel places, papaya-and-hot-dog spots, dive bars and not-so-dive bars — all of them are being squeezed out by stupefying jumps in rent and the maddening urge to knock down a block of five-story buildings...
April 8, 2015
Power Show Dept.
Froma ways back:Oliver Kamm: Not the whole story
The social theorist Daniel Bell, whose seminal writings might profitably be consulted by those who imagine Noam Chomsky to be a leading public intellectual in the field, is in no identifiable sense a neoconservative. Bell broke politically with his friend Irving Kristol, the founding father of neoconservatism, in 1972, when Kristol backed Richard Nixon for president while Bell supported George McGovern. To my knowledge, Bell has never amended...
April 5, 2015
Diss Belief Dept.
What with two major religious holidays in this country falling on top of each other this weekend, I hearkened back to something from a couple of years back (2007) about one avowed atheist's position:
Oliver Kamm: Religious tests and public office
I was mildly interested that the new Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, professed his own unbelief this week in answer to a direct question. But I was incredulous that he appended it with the pragmatic observation that he had "enormous respect for...
April 4, 2015
Forwards Ever, Backwards Never Dept.
An Exchange between Howard Zinn and Sidney Hook on Democracy
...the United States is more democratic today than it was a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, twenty years ago, five years ago with respect to every one of the criteria he has listed. To recognize this is not an invitation to complacency. On the contrary, it indicates the possibility of broadening, deepening, and using the democratic political process to improve the quality of human life, to modify and redirect social institution...
April 2, 2015
Left, Right, Left Dept.
Last couple of days were rather crazy, culminating in a black eye that I still have covered with a steak, but I'm doing my best to keep the swelling down. Anyway, here's a topic I don't touch on much: politics.
Privatization Memories - NYTimes.com
... what you learned early on in the Social Security debate was that centrists desperately want to believe that there is symmetry between the left and the right, that Democrats and Republicans are equally extreme in their own way. And this means th...
March 28, 2015
To Leap Over The Wall Dept.
From the comments section ofAll Content Creators Should Watch Porn - The Illusion of More(don't worry, the article itself is SFW):
... a glut of supply in a time of reduced demand drives prices down – or, in other words, that all producers are worse off in this situation.
It gets even better (worse): the big guys are actually at an advantage here. The sheer amount of music being put out there means that potential customers (fans) have no way of sorting through it all and making an informed d...
