I thouroughly enjoyed pretty much every aspect of this video: the totally awesome 80s lead, the meta-concept, and of course, the great remix by Justice of Let Love Rule by Lenny Kravitz.
Nov 222009
Jul 222009
In 2004, a review of David Foster Wallace’s story collection Oblivion appeared in the academic journal Modernism/Modernity. It was titled “An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent” and written by Jay Murray Siskind.
Who is a character out of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise.
Yes, the review was a fake, albeit a playful fake, and it’s taken five years for anyone to notice. Gawker, where I saw the story, treat the story pretty cheekily:
Well, a couple people noticed. Anyone who actually read the review should’ve noticed, because if you’re reading Modernism/Modernity you really ought to recognize the visiting lecturer on Living Icons from White Noise. Especially once the review stopped addressing the Wallace book and detoured into DeLillo pastiche.
“It is at this point that I must confess to missing something in Wallace, namely the presence of women nearer the center of the narration (setting aside Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, Jr., the protagonist in Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System). I admit that I’ve always been partial to them, i.e. women. I fall apart at the sight of long legs, striding, briskly, as a breeze carries up from the river, on a weekday, in the play of morning light. And what fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing nylon stockings as she crosses her legs. Wallace, I suspect, shares these predilections and could write wonderfully complicated women.”
Some students have even unwittingly used the review as research for their papers, which is ironic on several levels. Mark Sample had one of those students. After noticing the review, and then promptly forgetting about it, he did a little digging and found that it has even been used as research for a theses, which Sample says shows the state of academia today:
The troubling blindness to contextuality and intertextuality (how could any 20th century Americanist, whether modernist or postmodernist, fail to see the references to perhaps one of the most important novels of the past fifty years) — this troubling blindness on both students and their advisors’ part turns a fun fake review into something much more telling about the state of academia.
While talking to Grant, he argued that maybe the article had points worthy enough to be included as research in an academic paper. Or perhaps we’re not giving the students enough credit. Maybe their use of the review is just an extension of the joke.
Either way, the editors of Modernism/Modernity wrote to Sample to clarify the review. It is fairly long, so I’ll only link to it (link!), but it is obvious that the review was only ever meant to be fun, and that the editors of the journal are still having fun with it. (A word to the wise: if you haven’t read White Noise, you really won’t get the jokes in the response).
Apr 092009
This is solid stuff, a symbol of enduring quality.
Some of my real-life friends may know of my orange socks. I got them from the Draplin Design Co., a design outfit that also runs a pretty great blog — one that I’ve linked to permanently to the right, there. I’ve found loads of stuff there in the past, and a couple of times, I’ve shared it here, as well.
I always find at least one great link in Aaron Draplin’s daily posts. Today, I got to contribute.
Doing my regular rounds of the blogosphere, I happened back across Winnipeg Love & Hate, a photoblog dedicated to “the most beautiful, most repulsive city in the world.” I’d been there before, of course — I’ve even linked to it before. But the top post today was a striking photo that focused on some neon typography. Great typography, by the way, is one of thing that you can always count on Draplin to ferret out.
Well, I browsed for a shameful amount of time, and figured I should probably drop a link in the Draplin direction. It was also way past time I thanked him for the greatest pair of socks I’ve ever owned.
So I fired off an email — a bit of a gushy one, re-reading it now — and got a response back lickety-split.
Before the day was out, that link had been featured on the DDC. He had some kind words for this blog, too.
So if you don’t regularly check out my blogroll over there, do yourselves a favour and at least click on the Draplin link. The guy’s a genius at using Futura and he’s got a full set of sweet merchandise (including socks and the only work calendar I need). Tell ‘im Grant sent ya.
Apr 062009
If you happened to log on to this blog last night (Sunday) at about 9pm, the above page is what you would have been greeted with. Yup, we got “hacked.”
(click on the image to see a full-on screen shot sent to me by a concerned friend — thanks Stacey! bookmarks, etc, have been blurred for (some) privacy)
I say that we got “hacked” in quotes because it’s not like there was a movie-style security breach. It was only the front page — direct permalinks to individual posts worked fine, as did all the administrative stuff, like logging on. It happened in about a 20-minute window of me driving from one house to another, and it took me another 20 minutes or so to get that page down and replaced with something less, well, embarassing.
At first, I was even glad to just get a “this page is parked” by my webserver.
Now, as far as I can tell, this wasn’t a hugely malicious hack — just a drive-by job. And since I’m kind of anal about security updates, I think it’s because I got cheap hosting — and cheap hosting means shared hosting. So someone else I’m sharing a server with may have left a back door open.
I’ve taken the opportunity, in cleaning out the hijacked page, to update the blog a little bit more. You’ll notice first off that there are now threaded comments. You can now “reply” to people. I didn’t go crazy with it, but it’ll go three levels deep (to start — I’ll adjust if it seems necessary).
There should be some improvements to image galleries as well, plus a new “mobile” edition of the site coming soon.
Apr 022009
Listen folks, we’re still waiting for some submissions on a possible logo. Very few takers so far. You don’t want to see what I’ll cook up.
But that’s just the glitz and glitter — you’re here for the content, right? And the behind-the-scenes boring stuff? Of course you are. Here’s some more:
1. In the two weeks since I posted that, for the first time, spam comments outnumbered legitimate comments, the level of spam has skyrocketed. Spam now outranks legitimate comments by 50% (there’s 951 spam to 628 legitimate). Sure, you could comment more, but I’ve taken steps to slow that down:
a) I’ve turned off comments to posts older that three weeks. Because I have a nice little “two weeks ago” feature at the right hand side, there, I thought it would be nice to keep comments open for a few days if you see something that you like there. But after three weeks, bam!, I’m shutting the door.
b) I’ve also installed a spam filter called Askimet, which should cut down on spam by detecting it automatically. To be honest, the spam that we deal with here is pretty obviously spam. Lots of links that blare pornography and pills. Strange, but the mortgage come-ons have declined a lot, recently.
c) Why do you care? I know, you’ve never seen spam on this blog ever! That’s because every comment is held for moderation until you’ve “proven yourself” with one legitimate comment. So we kill all the spam before it gets to you. But that’s almost a thousand times we’ve had to glance over and delete spam. This filter should allow us more time to do what you love — bloggin!
2. On that note, we’re now joining the digital revolution that is Twitter. Yes, you can follow this blog at:
We’ve got it set up so that each blog post goes out as a separate tweet, and we promise not to do silly things like tell you what we’re having for breakfast, or how sad we feel, LOL. Each post will also come with a short-form link to the actual blog, through the cli.gs service. It’s like tinyurl in that it takes something lengthy, like “http://www.absurdintellectual.com/2009/04/02/slight-improvements-to-the-blog/” and turns it into something short, like “http://cli.gs/45A7bp“. It’s perfectly legit, and you can click on it. It also helps keep things within the 140 character Twitter limit.
As always, we exist because we hope that people find interesting the same things that we find interesting. Comments or suggestions? Comment away below!
Mar 192009
For one of these logos, the designer was paid $35. For another one, the company paid $10-15, but the designer maybe got $6.
Absurd Intellectual needs a logo, and we’re willing to pay, too. Um, let’s say $20. If that gets us something between the transience of Twitter and the elegance and longevity of the Swoosh, then we’ll be happy.
So far, we’ve only had one entrant respond to our plea. It was pretty good: raw, unfinished, but with some definite possibility. I’d like to see more. Twenty bucks, people!
Mar 192009
Ever since I started this here blog thing, I’ve been really anal about keeping track of the “stats.” Apparently I’m not the only one, because there are literally zillions of ways that you can analyze your web traffic.
I’m making this post to share some of that behind-the-scenes knowledge with you, the readers, but also to honour a very special milestone.
Last weekend, for the first time ever, spam comments outnumbered legitimate comments.
That’s right, as of me writing this, we have a total of 1,033 comments — and 526 of them are spam. That leaves only 507 true comments. The spam is never seen because I force everyone to give a name and an email address when they comment (it can be fake!) and the first comment you make under that alias has to be approved before it’s posted.
There were a couple of comments on my dual-flush, dual-collector toilet post which verged on spam but which I let through anyway — they were more like shills — and a few random posts on hot-button topics attract one-off comments from people who have an agenda to push and a website to link to.
I try to be lenient, though, and so long as they sound like real people, I let them have their say.
Other interesting stats and facts:
We get between 50 and 100 visits on a regular day, but sometimes we can get up to 150 with a good conversation going, and the highest ever was 232 (the day that Amy, Keith and I all posted links to this blog on our facebook statuses — the day we went public, you might say).
Most of our traffic comes from people who link to us from other blogs — primarily Curtis at Endless Spin, but also some from H. Bergeron at R.U.Sirius and some from the Ripping Arseholes. (Gonna have to update my blogroll.)
We also get a fair bit of Google traffic — we’re the number one result for “absurd intellectual” and we must be near the top of the list for “naked men in gym change rooms” because that comes up in the referral logs all the freaking time. (UPDATE: We’re fourth from the top. Geez.)
In case you’re interested, I aim for three to five posts a day. Crunching the numbers, with 149 posts in January, we averaged 4.8 a day. Not too shabby. We slowed down a bit in February, with 123 posts, or an average of 4.4. Still pretty good! So far in March, we’ve got 91 posts with 18 days in the grave, so that’s an average of 5.05 — we’re back on track!
Keith and Amy and I are hoping to do more “special posts” like our French Onion Martini — but it does take time to pull those off. In the meantime, I’m hoping to start a semi-regular series of vintage book reviews. And cross your fingers, for “Cheese of the Week” started on Tuesday, and it will continue for the forseeable future (I love cheese).
I love that lots of my friends have started emailing me suggestions of things to blog about, and I feel bad that I haven’t gotten around to posting some of them yet. I do have over a dozen drafts in various stages of completion, and when somebody sends me a link, I like to give it its proper due.
Any other comments or questions, I’d be happy to answer, so leave ‘em in below. Let me know what you like or dislike, or would like to see more or less of, too.
Be anonymous, if you like! As always — thanks for reading!
Leave comments, suggestions
Mar 082009
This turned out to be a LENGTHY post. To save scrolling from people who want to get on with the next post, I’ve put it all “after the jump.” Also, it’s a real first draft, that just came pouring out, not a carefully considered post, so take that into consideration when posting comments!
Jan 062009
Long video, but with some insight into this thing I’ve taken up. Comes with a lengthy and thoughtful essay, too!
No columnist or reporter or novelist will have his minute shifts or constant small contradictions exposed as mercilessly as a blogger’s are. A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
Thankfully, Atlantic writer Andrw Sullivan says that the “unfinished” nature of blogging is actually one of its strengths. Whew.
Oh, and just for fun, to explain the allusion in my title:
(I note, that’s two “Airplane” references in as many days. I had no idea that the movie was such an influence on me. Next up: do I speak jive?)
Jan 012009
I don’t know who this guy is, but I love him!
Especially this:
The Absurd Intellectual: Emotional rather than rational. Having or showing ignoramus, often of a high order. A dunce who engages in critical evaluation of ideas and issues. You are better off not knowing the results or conclusions of their ludicrous mental labour. Our suffering is indeed great for having to live in a country full of absurd intellectuals!
(link)
Now, all we have to do is knock him off his high perch in Google results.
Dec 312008
It wasn’t exactly a resolution to start a blog, but the idea did a slow burn in my mind until it was impossible to resist (similar to what happened when I tried to give up beer — not drinking, mind you, just beer).
Eventually, the desire was insurmountable, and I bit the bullet, and I mixed some metaphors, and I started this blog. And now I feel just like everyone else. Just under the wire in 2008.
But the damn thing about it is, there’s no real content. And until I have the design and layout kind of finalized, I’m not going to be all that motivated to write — I need to look GOOD dammit!
But I also want to say I started it last year.
So here goes. Gulp. A first post. Real content.
Welcome to Absurd Intellectual. Proudly established on the flimsiest of foundations in ‘aught-eight.
Dec 302008
yes, i can!
Dec 302008
This is a placeholder post to get things kicked off. Whoo!
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