Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just :

By perpetuating beauty, institutions of education help incite the will toward creation. ... To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed.

All the (good) news (about the Yankees) that's fit to print

Obviously I'm biased here ... but why is it that the NYT can be the most authoritative, objective paper on any other issue, but when it comes to the Yankees they gush like a fan blog? Even putting aside the almost total lack of Mets coverage (OK, there wasn't much to cover this year, but this is a longstanding issue), the Times' writers are always either praising or defending the Yankees. From extolling Jeter's fielding skills (right), to determining whether A-Rod is clutch, to today's inanity headlined "Don't worry! I'm pretty sure they're not going to blow a 3-1 lead!" they just can't stop wetting themselves over the Yankees' perpetual greatness. Could I maybe just get the box score?

Get ready for a long, cold winter

"It's designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything is new again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains comes, it stops, and leaves you to face the fall alone.” - Bart Giamatti, former president of Yale and MLB commissioner.

Thanks, Red Sox radio announcers, for sending that little extra shiver of despair through my soul when closing out the season today. Remind me again why I decided not to move to L.A.?

What Genre is this Blog?

"Classifications are empirical, not logical. They are historical assumptions constructed by authors, audiences, and critics in order to serve communicative and aesthetic purposes." - Ralph Cohen, "History and Genre"

"Genres fill a need for which no adequate alternative method exists." - Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel

Ralph Nader's take on genre theory.

A Bloody Good Time

Enough has been written about the brilliance of Mad Men that it doesn't really bear repeating here, but I just had to comment on the utterly insane amazingness of this week's "Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency." On other blogs and TV forums there has been some minor complaining about a slow start to the third season. Then last week there was the storyline last week of Sally pushing another classmate, with a glimpse of her smearing blood across her face. All of which led up to this week, when the bloody, mangled bits of new boss Guy's foot are splashed across Paul, Ken and Harry, and Joan spends the rest of the episode walking around in a bloody dress. No other show could make the chain of events (including the fact of the John Deere tractor even being in the office in the first place) so inevitable and realistic. (I could see something like this happening on The Sopranos, but there it would be part of some totally surreal sequence.)

And with all of this building up to JFK's assassination, here's a great analysis of the way the tractor accident mirrors the famous video of Dallas:
http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/mad_men_blogging_the_joke_isnt_funny_anymore/

Blog vs. Blog

On a slightly related note: isn't it funny how certain segments of Internet users have appropriated the word "blog" to mean a post in a comments section? I've been noticing this for a while now, and you generally only see it on the Web sites of papers like the Register, whose readers have learned to leave comments but are generally not very Internet savvy. They know that a "blog" is some kind of online writing, but they probably don't read any blogs and thus don't distinguish between them and reader comments (which, however, can be integral parts of blogs). I've also heard both reporters and sources, many police officers for example, slip into this usage without thinking about it. I wonder whether this will become a widespread use of the word "blog" or fade away as people have more interaction with both blogs and comment sections.