Epistemographer

Via Dave:

Chris Hyde argues that Kill Bill wouldn’t have been possible without the “influence of the late 20th century’s technologies on the cosmopolitanism of film audiences”:

“The effects of the VCR on post-1980 cinema are many and varied, and it is hardly in Tarantino’s oeuvre alone that the invisible influence of videotape can be seen. But it’s also no surprise to find that the director toiled as a clerk in a video store during some of his formative years, and all of his work contains referential asides that make it patently obvious that his style has been heavily influenced by what he has seen.”

Read the whole article…

Here’s something you don’t expect to see in the local 99-cent store:

Bruno Latour’s talk tonight, sponsored by NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, was an interesting extension of his argument from We Have Never Been Modern. In essence, he was arguing for the same kind of symmetry in approaching religious belief as he has been with regard to scientific knowledge. Rather than claiming that religions are constructed, which has a negative connotation as well as the embedded implication that the speaker is able to judge that some things are constructed while others aren’t (a vestige of the modernist rationality he’s trying to eschew), Latour claimed that we should talk of gods (the subjects of religious belief) simply in terms of how well-constructed they are.

The talk was well-argued, and from a philosophical standpoint made quite a bit of sense. Latour, ever his charming self, did however punt on one question, when he was asked essentially how useful this theoretical shift in how to discuss religion might prove when confronted with fundamentalists who chose not to engage philosophically with it. Not unlike the Science Wars, I wonder if this sort of approach would simply be dismissed as “relativism,” driving those who follow Latour’s argument into a reactionary posture out of sheer defensiveness when under siege by others who choose not to engage on his terms.

Somehow, while I was in Atlanta for the Society for Social Studies of Science and Society for the History of Technology conferences, autumn descended on New York City. This is so my favorite time of year, which makes me even more motivated for the next few months of writing (both dissertation and applications).

I’ll put up a postmortem on the conferences later (in part so I can process the weekend by writing about it)…for the moment, however, I’m off to a lecture by Bruno Latour, titled “If Gods are at War, What are the Peace Conditions?” He gave a good plenary speech down in Atlanta, and I’m curious whether this will be substantively different material.

Heh. Over at Neal Pollack’s blog, guest blogger Christopher Monks is performing a David Blaine-like feat, enduring a full day of Glenn Reynolds’ posts. The really scary thing? This is Instapunditathon II, which means he did this once before…

It happened again. Atrios posted a plea for donations to cover the cost of a new laptop (apparently, something involving a cat and a glass of wine rendered his less than healthy), and within three hours, he not only has enough donations to cover the cost of the coputer, but somebody had also bought him the thing outright off of his Amazon wishlist.

I swear, we’re only just beginning to see the power of individual tipping on a massively distributed scale. Read the comments on Atrios’ posts…they’re really interesting from a sociological standpoint in getting at why people chose to donate.

Yeah, so that’s me today. I swear I’ll have some useful, insightful, interesting things to say tomorrow (or, at the very least, I’ll put up the text of the two papers I’m giving next week at the Society for Social Studies of Science and the Society for the History of Technology meetings in Atlanta).

In the meantime, check out the Virtual Book Tour that Kevin Smokler’s running – it’s an innovative way of using the strengths of the blogosphere to promote worthy books, and I have it on good authority that the current book is pretty great.

Can’t write much now – I’ll hopefully start blogging in earnest again tomorrow, as I ease back into my everyday schedule. In the meantime, check out this interview which I heard in the car tonight – it’s shocking to me to hear O’Reilly’s combative style in the more intimate form of a Fresh Air interview. I’m curious what y’all think…

UPDATE: Paul Fisher (posting at Neal Pollack’s blog while Neal’s out rocking the country) had this to say about the interview…

I’m back on the east coast, though I won’t be back in New York until Wednesday. Jenny’s dad was moved into a private room, out of the cardiac ICU, and seems to be recovering steadily, if slowly.

It’s odd, trying to get back into the rhythms of regular life after a week of completely irregular life. I find myself thinking about the daily schedule of getting up, going to the hospital, visiting hours, getting lunch, visiting hours, passing some time, getting some dinner, visiting hours, then going home and sleeping, and I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that this is still happening, only a few hundred miles away. It feels like a different planet.

It seems to me that the daily routines of the hospital, the visiting hours and the rules and the jockeying for adjacent chairs in the waiting room all help to make a completely terrifying and unsettling experience a little easier to manage – you can step entirely out of your life into the alien world of the hospital, and deal with a medical crisis mainly in that context, rather than immediately having to grapple with the fact that this is real life. It seems hardest to handle things when you’re talking with people from outside this bubble – that makes everything seem more real, and more unbearable.

FYI (and this means you, Hopkins people), media scholar and all-around-kickass-lecturer Mark Crispin Miller has finally gotten around to getting a blog up and running…