notes

Dream-blown as the notorious pigeon population, contemplating the sky, they became aware that morning of something else was about to emerge from the sfumato, some visitation . . . something that was to transcend both Chums and Tovarishchi, for all at once there was a great stunning hoarse cry from the invisibility, nearly a material thing, a lethal impedance in the air, as if something malevolent were making every exertion to take form and be released upon the world in long, dry, cracking percussions, as if jarring the fabric of four-space itself.

From Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. British Vintage edition. Page 288.

Every fortnight, a language falls out of use.

According to The New York Times.

“Everybody is going to be with Obama,” [James Carville] added, referring to Clinton staff and supporters. “I have an undated check written out for Obama. I’ll send it when this is over.”

From IHT, quoted on Drudge.

Censors appeared to ease their grip on the Internet, mobile phone text messaging and uploading videos to the Internet, allowing information and even rumors to flow freely. One text message insistently making the rounds forecast a quake for Beijing in the early morning.

“It was really all I could do to convince my friends that this isn’t something that will happen,” said Graham Webster, a journalist and blogger on technology issues in the capital.

From Johnson, Tim. “9,000 still buried in China quake debris; toll at 12,000,” McClatchy Newspapers, May 13, 2008

The political theorist Louis Hartz characterized the American Way of Life as “a nationalist articulation of Locke which usually does not know that Locke himself is involved.” ¹⁶

From Perry, Elizabeth J., “Chinese Conceptions of “Rights”: From Mencius to Mao—and Now,” Perspectives on Politics (2008), 6: 37-50 Cambridge University Press

Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century, p. 183

Again, this ethnographer envy is shared by many critics, especially in cultural studies and new historicism, who assume the role of ethnographer usually in disguised form: the cultural-studies ethnographer dressed down as a fellow fan (for reason of political solidarity, but with great social anxiety); the new-historicist ethnographer dressed up as a master archivist (for reasons of scholarly respectability, but with great professional arrogance).