Spurs party refuses to end. As @Spursonside explained:
One last pic from the Emirates – our fans still inside after the final whistle, pictured from the West Stand!
I’m still buzzing, after all, why shouldn’t half of North London be the same way?
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“This kind of ‘reading’, however, no longer produces interpretations but merely _tests_ them: it’s not the beginning of the critical enterprise, but its appendix. And then, here you don’t really read the _text_ anymore, but rather through the text, looking for your unit of analysis. The task is constrained from the start; it’s a reading without freedom.”
– Franco Moretti talks about returning to the source novels after engaging in some distant reading. From his 2000 article “Conjectures on World Literature.”
Wenger wearing his “Chinese hobo grandma parka” sobs his way off the pitch after Spurs unlesh a psyops masterpiece, scoring three unanswered goals in the second half to take three points at the Emirates for the first time ever, defeating Arsenal twice in a row in the Prem for the first time in forever, and beating Arsenal at home (including Highbury) for the first time since the first season of the Prem. Oh, and Spurs haven’t beaten any of the Big Four away in something like 70 meetings.
Then to get goals from current darlings Gareth Bale and Raphael van der Vaart, as well as having Gallas be a solid central defender in his return to Arsenal… man. The only way it could be better would be to have Wenger walk off, sobbing. Oh, wait…
I still await news of his certain whingefest postmatch.
Continue reading about Wenger wearing his “Chinese hobo grandma parka” sobs his way off…
Outrageous country decadence in this meeting between Bretons and Occitans. Mostly this video is great because of the shots of aligot being prepared on a mass-scale, but note also the “Gâteau à la broche,” or “Šakotis,” as I know it. Now I’m off to Carrefour to buy some potatoes and cantal cheese.
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“[A]mazingly, remarkably, counterintuitively and bizarrely, humanities majors in the United States, as a percentage of all bachelor’s degrees, have held steady since about 1990—since the onset of the culture wars, in fact. Despite all the attacks on our Piss Christ this and our queerying that and our deconstructing the Other; despite all the parents and friends and journalists and random passersby telling students they’ll be consigned to a life of selling apples and flipping burgers if they major in English; despite the skyrocketing of tuition and the rise of the predatory private-student-loan industry; despite all this, humanities enrollments have been at or about the 8 percent mark for about twenty years.”
– Michael Bérubé brings it. He’s right; it’s pretty much entirely unlikely that any “o noez hoomanicheez” article will have begun with a legit premise.
Such optimism!
“If you have no clear idea of what you want to replace the state with, you have no right to subtract/withdraw from the state. Instead of taking a distance from the state, the true task should be to make the state itself work in a non-statal mode. The alternative “either struggle for state power (which makes us the same as the enemy we are fighting) or resist by withdrawing to a position of distance from the state” is false—both its terms share the same premise, that the state-form, in the way we know it today, is here to stay, so that all we can do is either take over the state or take a distance towards it. Here, one should shamelessly repeat the lesson of Lenin’s _State and Revolution_: the goal of revolutionary violence is not to take over state power, but to transform it, radically changing its functioning, its relationship to its base, and so on.”
– No more Žižek, I swear, after this, also from 2009’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. This is a crucial point for my dissertation though (made by a jillion geographers, though, not Žižek; Geographers ♥ Lenin ☭).
“The difference between liberalism and the radical Left is that, although they refer to the same three elements (liberal center, populist Right, radical Left), they locate them in a radically different topology: for the liberal center, the radical Left and the Right are two forms of the same “totalitarian” excess; while for the Left, the only true alternative is the one between itself and the liberal mainstream, the populist “radical” Right being nothing but the *symptom* of liberalism’s inability to deal with the Leftist threat. When today we hear a politician or an ideologist offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, triumphantly asking (purely rhetorical) questions such as “Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? Do you want every critic or mocker of religion to be punishable by death?” what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer—who would have wanted *that*? The problem is that such a simplistic liberal universalism long ago lost its innocence. This is why, for a true Leftist, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a *false* conflict—a vicious cycle in which two opposed poles generate and presuppose each other. Here one should take an Hegelian step backwards, placing in question the very measure from which fundamentalism appears in all its horror. Liberals have long ago lost their right to judge. What Horkheimer once said should also be applied to today’s fundamentalism: those who do not want to talk (critically) about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.”
– That’s right; I’m the loser quoting Žižek.
Happy Smurfy family.