A likely story furth of a domestic setting: Walking down Church Street, I overheard a man urgently inquiring of his phone, "but what is the nature of pleasure? And what is its relation to knowledge?".
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. I know, I like it too.
He was phoning in to Philosophy Talk?
Hey look, it's underwear model Vance Maverick.
Wrong time of day for Philosophy Talk, plus none of the recent topics fits that.
Also, "It's not the kind of fare usually associated with librarians". Hmm -- merely putting urban material down on paper immediately reduces its cool/charge/urbanness to within a percent or two of the out-of-date GRE manuals. Don't flatter yourselves, people -- you're reading books!
Picture me in a thick, scratchy union suit, after a long winter in the mountains.
And you may say to yourself, "This is not my union suit!" And you may ask yourself, "How did I get here?"
Teo!
"Shatlas Rugged" is a great pseud and very appropriate for this thread. New commenter, or brainstorm by existing one?
I forget who s@s.dd is, but he/she is a regular commenter.
Brainstorm, yes. It seems to have one non-Unfogged google hit. The zeitgeist seems to be Ayn-Rand-related right now.
The zeitgeist seems to be Ayn-Rand-related right now.
Must be Greenspan's admission that laissez-faire doesn't actually work.
12: it would look good in caps, on a book cover, over a drawing of a blocky, naked, muscular figure shaking his fist at the sky.
Here's a young woman whose psychosexual development was seriously impaired by Ayn Rand . Yes, it's permanent.
14: lovξ? minξ? What a weird choice of typeface (inkface?).
13: I was wondering when somebody'd get to Greenspan, as I think his admission today is all the counter-argument this: Ayn Rand doesn't have anything particularly psychosexually formative for which to be blamed should ever need.
I got to Greenspan, but commented on the wrong thread by mistake.
16: you understand that I wasn't asserting the proposition you've italicized, and wasn't even really attributing its assertion to Amber, right?
16: Sometimes a clarinet is just a clarinet.
Seriously, I want to read those as "lovx" and "minx". It's like how I always did a double-take at those advertisements for that "Grssk wedding" movie.
Um, aside from the awfulness of the tattoo in general, but hey, if Randroids want to unambiguously mark themselves, all the easier to avoid them!
14's link is freaking me out.
I find the contrast between the sexy young belly and the viscerally ugly message rather disturbing. Does not compute. Even in the reptilian brain.
Is that a picture of Jacqueline Parker Posey Paisley?
23: Has anyone actually seen Greenspan's stomach?
So Greenspan was christened the Maestro by Bob Woodward, right? Has anyone destroyed more heroes than Woodward's hagiography? After his on Deep Throat comes out, I'm sure we'll find out that Deep Throat is really the Green River Killer.
22: Welcome to the new world? Not that Rand is new.
My girlfriend from right after high school had been into Rand for much of her adolescence, and actually had a bit of a rape fantasy because of it. It was... interesting. Not necessarily terrible, but it certainly shows that the stuff can leave a mark.
As I've said before, my mother's first or second cousin was linked to Ayn Rand (nudge-nudge, wink-wink). I've recently found out that the linkage occurred in 1960, when he failed to show up at a family gathering I attended.
Elizabeth Emerson / Hannah Dustin / John Hospers. Good barroom stories, but not much real payoff.
I walked up on a group of my Brit Lit students talking about Rand, and didn't say a word until I realized they were arguing about the various ways Rand destroyed their friends in high school.
Urban as synonym for Black - yes. Over here mostly used to mean hip-hop and r&b and related musical genres.
sexy young belly
An amusing phrase.
re: 31
Complicated in the UK, though, by the fact that a lot of the 'urban' scenes aren't solely black and 'urban' ends up meaning something like 'dance music made by Londoners'. The various grime and garage derived scenes are much more racially mixed than the mainstream US hip-hop scene.
The various grime and garage derived scenes are much more racially mixed than the mainstream US hip-hop scene.
The mainstream US hip-hop scene is much more racially mixed than the mainstream US hip-hop scene.
The Princess Cassimassima is a good urban novel in which the city plays a large role.
The mainstream US hip-hop scene is much more racially mixed than the mainstream US hip-hop scene.
A > A
re: 35
If you are saying what I think you are saying, not compared to the UK scenes it's not. I'm not talking about who likes the music, or who buys it, but who the artists are. The UK scene is still much more 'black' than the UK population as whole, of course.
37: predicate logic is deprecated.
38: I dunno; I think if you go by a straight headcount of artists you're probably right, but if you go by album sales it's a muddier picture. But really, if I wasn't trying to be pithy, I would have said "US hip-hop"; things are more polychromatic out of the mainstream.
41 should have been "I would have excluded 'mainstream'".
re: 41
Yeah, I can see that out of the mainstream, which is why [not being facetious] I explicitly used the word 'mainstream'.
But the situation in the UK is much more like some [counterfactual] scene in which 3 of the Wu-tang clan are white [but the counterfactual RZA remains black].
43: maybe so; I'm probably not a good person to ask, since I don't listen to very much mainstream hip-hop from the US and I don't really have a sense of what counts as "mainstream" (or even "hip-hop") in the UK (Lilly Allen? Burial?). Actually, I suppose I don't have much of a sense of what counts as mainstream hip-hop in the US. Li'l Jon? Um, Outkast?
Christ I'm old and swipple.
re: 44
I'm not just thinking about hip-hop in the UK but more the wider grime and garage scenes. It was notable when groups like So Solid Crew came on the scene a few years back that they were racially pretty mixed. Ditto other loose London collectives/groups like Roll Deep [which spawned Dizzee and Wiley and some of the other big names].
45: yeah; to my imagining there's always been a closer link between the dance scene and the grime scene than there really is between hip hop and anything. That said, talking about club stuff, Diplo is probably the biggest mainstream hip hop DJ in the country, and is a white dude; I think the big charts in the US are just much less connected to any real "scene", and much more manufactured, which might be a piece of it. Commercial radio likes people who can sell ringtones and/or excite the vaguely racist ganster fantasies of white high schoolers in Evanston, so the climb to the top is less organic.
Didn't know Dizzee came from Roll Deep. Damn I love Roll Deep.
The house scene in the US is entirely racially mixed, I should point out.
re: 47
Yeah, different scenes, different demographics, etc.
FWIW, I think in the UK it springs just from the fact that economically depressed urban areas tend to be racially fairly mixed. So the music scenes that spring from specifically those places tend the same way.
FWIW, I think in the UK it springs just from the fact that economically depressed urban areas tend to be racially fairly mixed.
I think that's probably right; hip-hop in the US is very tied to its roots, and its roots were very much a product of black kids in the Bronx who were sort of cut off from the (otherwise pretty pan-racial) disco scene. That gave it kind of a political and explicitly racial aspect that urban dance music doesn't usually have. Or maybe I'm talking about of my ass.
"about of my ass": I wish I'd done that on purpose.
re: 49
Yeah, that all makes sense.
48: surely it's more or a result of the fact that the UK is in aggregate a much less racially mixed country than the US, and therefore there are fewer black people to go round? There are very, very few majority-minority areas in the UK but loads in the US. Economically depressed areas in the UK are racially mixed, but if we had more black people lots of them would be 100% black like they are in the US.
52: hey us armchair sociologists are trying to work, here.
Is the UK still that much more homogeneous than the US? That surprises me, actually.
What about all those banlieues outside Leeds and Birmingham where whites are afraid to show their faces? Surely all those alarmist newspaper reports were not merely alarmist.
54: We still have a lot of public schools, Sifu. And the remnants of our Navy traditions.
52: surely it's more or a result of the fact that the UK is in aggregate a much less racially mixed country than the US, and therefore there are fewer black people to go round?
It may not look this way from your eyrie in the stockbroker belt, dsquared, but London is 35% ethnic minority, and that includes a million black people and another million of Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Sri Lankan descent. There are, indeed, far fewer majority-minority areas in the UK, but I don't think that's because of an absence of minorities - rather it's a historical thing.
54: Is the UK still that much more homogeneous than the US? That surprises me, actually.
Depends what you mean by "homogenous". The answer is either yes (the UK has fewer total members of non-white minorities) or no (the UK's population is less chunky, so there are fewer majority-minority areas, and possibly as a result far more interracial marriage. One-third of British children with one black parent have a white parent).
That's interesting ajay - I hadn't realised London was such a mixture these days either. Just looked up Reading - 13.1% 'ethnic', although my ward is over 21% (because I'm urban ...). These figures seem to be from the 2001 census though, and we've had a huge number of Poles move in since then.
I live in Camden, and am thus not in need of the information (the patronising comes in handy though, so thanks for that). In general, stockbrokers are just people who do stockbroking jobs, so we don't live in "eyries".
The comparative stats for American music industry centres:
New York: 25% black, 55% non-white
Detroit: over 80% black
Los Angeles: 11% black, 55% non-white
Chicago: 37% black, 60% non-white
(I've counted Hispanic as non-white for the purposes above, but to get 35% ethnic minority rather than 30%, I think you're counting "Other White" from the 2001 census).
And your example only works for London - Manchester and Liverpool are equally important music towns in the UK, neither of them with anything like the ethnic minority populations that London has.
55: Such areas do exist (or at least, monoethnic poor areas on the outskirts of Northern towns) but they're really quite small in general.
re: 59
Yeah, and Manchester and Liverpool bands tend not to be as ethnically mixed as the London bands. Which would reflect the relatively high ethnic minority population of London vis a vis 'the North'. Also, the high level of 'swaggering twat' in the Northern music scene.
Where you live totally skews personal perceptions I've find. I've lived in two areas of Glasgow that if they weren't majority Asian they were certainly close to it. I was gobsmacked to find out there are only about 10,000 - 20,000 Pakistani immigrants in the whole of Scotland. It certainly never felt like that living in Glasgow.
"Urban" = black, "metro-" = not-gay rich white person pretending to be gay. Or something.
I surely don't want to say something like this: it's bad because it associates city life with black people.
I'm just worried that people will think that my wife's career is in planning the lives of black folk.
lovĪ¾? minĪ¾? What a weird choice of typeface (inkface?).
When I get a tattoo it's going to be 11pt/14 helvetica light, fl/rr, but I don't know what it's going to say. Lorem ipsum, maybe.
(I've counted Hispanic as non-white for the purposes above, but to get 35% ethnic minority rather than 30%, I think you're counting "Other White" from the 2001 census).
Just in case this is helpful for this (or another) discussion, the accepted term for how you're (implicitly) using "white" in 59 is "Anglo." That may seem odd to a Brit, but it's pretty widely used in places in the US with big Hispanic populations which themselves span pretty much the full spectrum of skin color.
Also, you may know this, but it seemed relevant.
Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland are the centers for white people music, at 70% white.
Yes, Prince is white.
i did not know it's friday until i read the w-g
i'm lazy to check the calendar and see whether it's still thursday
there was frost in the morning on the grass
Urban as synonym for Black - yes. Over here mostly used to mean hip-hop and r&b and related musical genres.
My jaw fell to the floor the first time I encountered a "Black Musik" section in a German record store. This was a good eleven years ago; I think even the Germans have been realizing that this label might be offensive.
but I don't know what it's going to say
"Reserved for apostropher." Now we need to decide where you're going to get it.
I went to a "Black Musik" party in a German club about four years ago. Like Blume, I couldn't quite communicate to German people my shock at the phrase.
So "black metal" is what all those Norwegians of African descent are doing, right?
As to the "urban novels," I've tried a number of times to read them. I've asked librarians to suggest the better of the genre (the ones I asked snorted, "they're all trashy).
So far I haven't been able to get through the ones I've checked out. One of them was a grim morality tale about a materialistic young woman with many lovers; it was so clear that she was on her way to a bad end that I found the details of her downfall just deadly.
One of the ones I didn't check out of the library started with a ten-page graphic description of a one-night stand: the synopsis on the back cover promised a story about a single dad making tough choices! The naughty books I'm used to tend to work up to the doggie-style sex.
I wish I could figure out how to enjoy these soi-disant urban novels because my local branch library is full of them, and not much else.
68, 70: I don't really see this as particularly offensive; would one object to a record shop in Boston having a special section for music popular with and generally performed by people of Irish ancestry and if so, what would they call it?
How about the American Black Music Awards? The British version is called the MOBOs (music of black origin), basically because most of the domestic R&B performers and about half of the rappers are white, as you'd expect.
Actually, thinking about it, the MOBOs were also called the Black Music Awards, until one year when they wanted to give an award to Jamiroquai, IIRC.
"metro-" = not-gay rich white person pretending to be gay. Or something.
As far as I can see in common usage, metro is primarily used to tag young-to-middle age white males, but it doesn't mean rich so much as wears clothes that fit and aren't sports related (by either design or labeling). That seem to be about it, really. There may be a non-obese rule too, I don't know.
"Reserved for apostropher." Now we need to decide where you're going to get it.
How about across my knuckles, smartypants?
where you're going to get it.
How about across my knuckles, smartypants?
I was going to suggest Tijuana, but I see you're taking the question in a different direction altogether.
re: 74
I remember it as having been George Michael, one of us is probably wrong, but the basic narrative is correct, I think.
Nabokov, i'm going to read his Ada next week
now i read Katherine Mansfield's short stories, never read her before, the book is printed in 20ies, the paper in the book is thick and it's kinda boring for now, after The sound and the fury
Ada can warp you just as neatly as The Fountainhead.
Or so I've heard.
79: There are online annotations to Ada by Brian Boyd that you might find useful. (Only the first twenty-five chapters are annotated so far, and in excessive detail, but the book is pretty dense with allusions and multilingual puns, so it's better than nothing.)
Ada can only warp you if you have any idea what's going on. So it had no effect on me.
I was going to suggest Tijuana, but I see you're taking the question in a different direction altogether.
I'm so ashamed of the way I misjudged you, Apo.
thank you, Essear
in English i half-read his Lolita only, so i know his Russian writings only, i'm sure the link will help me a lot
48: surely it's more or a result of the fact that the UK is in aggregate a much less racially mixed country than the US, and therefore there are fewer black people to go round? There are very, very few majority-minority areas in the UK but loads in the US. Economically depressed areas in the UK are racially mixed, but if we had more black people lots of them would be 100% black like they are in the US.
Hey, dsquared channels Peter Blau.
65: I hope "Anglo" hasnt become accepted, seeing as it's only slightly more inclusive than WASP. Most white people in America are not at all "Anglo" in any habits other than speech.
It always struck me as the kind of thing that college students who were trying to avoid the positive/negative white/black implications came up with that doesn't work at all.
"Anglo" makes a lot of sense in New Mexico, and it's less of a mouthful than "non-Hispanic white."
How about Europo? As in, "The po-pos full of Europos?"
"gringo" works there, and is more inclusive.
'Ropo for short, of course. As in "Then this scary bunch of drunk 'Ropos all left the bar and headed down the street. You could tell they were looking for a fight."
It does make sense, but the sense it makes is weird. It acknowledges that Hispanics/Latinos are in the process of "becoming white" a la Noel Ignatiev but then kinda chickens out, as if to say instead of two more-or-less stable categories there's three: black, Latino, Anglo.
I suppose the message is "if you can come up with a catchall term that ridiculously subsumes Quiche Indians and Mexicans of Spanish descent, then we can put Gore Vidal and Woody Allen in the same ethnicity."
I lke "Ropo". It will look nice just before "Swipple" in the Lexicon.
The thing about Anglo and Latino, though, is that "non-Hispanic white" alludes to the "becoming-white" process that deconstructs ethnicity in the united states. The Irish, the Jews, they all became white. But if you divide white into presumed-stable categories of Anglo and Latino, you're not really acknowledging that whiteness is a processed category (like a fine grocery cheese!) -- you're saying, "better to imagine two categories than show that all are bankrupt."
The real story here is that everyone in America who isn't black eventually gets a prize for not being black, which is called being white. It seems plausible that the Anglo/Latino divide is a way of surreptitiously acknowledging that and then drawing the line saying "we ran out of prizes but you can have a little more pie."
Even asian people are white these days.
soi-disant urban novels
Are they really soi-disant urban novels?
That's how they market themselves! "Urban Literature"---right there on the cover.
I actually like Wrongshore's line of argument here, but having lived in Miami, I see it as an exercise in anthropology rather than in getting things said.
For better or worse, we need to be able to talk about groups of people, and people tend to group themselves by things like skin color, language, and national origin. The biggest problem with 'Anglo' is that, ultimately, it's a language distinction, yet it will never admit English-speaking African-Americans. But I'm more comfortable with that short-coming than with some sort of selective admission of Euro-descended Latinos into whiteness.
IOW, using black and white as categories perpetuates the age-old problems. But calling Rocco Baldelli 'Anglo' is absurd on its face, in a way that exposes the falsity of the categories.
WRT Ropo*, it's no more apt than Anglo: the point of Anglo and Latino is that this group of Western Hemispherians speak English and that group speaks Spanish (and/or grew up in Spanish-speaking households). The reason Anglo replaced caucasian is that, esp. in Miami, you get a lot of Spanish-speakers of wholly European extraction, but culturally and politically they don't have much in common with English-speakers of wholly European extraction.
I suspect, but don't know, that a second generation Syrian immigrant would be considered Anglo unless he made a point of identifying otherwise. It's fucked up but, as I said, it tracks IRL groupings. Obviously, ideally we'd all be referred to by our unique snowflake ID #s.
* I know it's tongue-in-cheek
If everybody would just come together and agree on cracker and beaner, we could put this to rest once and for all.
What is the origin of "cracker" as slang for honky? Or "honky" for that matter?
I don't think so -- it's poor white, not slave-owning white. But I don't have a better origin. "Cracker-barrel", like, hanging around the general store and whittling, maybe?
101 - but now you're ignoring the Portuguese empire! Racist!
72: you know, JM, you can just request other books from the public library system and have them delivered to your local branch. It takes away from the whole browsing experience, but wouldn't you rather be reading than browsing anyway?
-
Rand may have much to answer for, but on the other hand I don't think Jean Auel (Clan of the Cave Bear &c) gets nearly enough credit for her service to humanity.
I like browsing. See, it feels a little wrong to REQUEST the library to deliver trashy books to your house. But I like trashy books and am much more likely to want to read one than any of the doorstopping works of serious literature I feel I should read.
i forgot to tell what i thought first, ToS to be blamed
with his nabakov
so skirts, pants distinction, in my language there is a word for female which sounds 'beltless', just phonetically, there is no word 'withbelt' meaning male, though for humour sometimes people use it that way, like, malapropistically
In the Secret History of the Mongols, a man seemed to need a belt, a collar, and a hat to be really a man. My Kyrgyz friend identified ethnicity with the kinds of hats people wore and was puzzled that America didn't have an official hat. I suggested baseball cap for informal wear and cowboy hat for formal wear, and he seemed happy with that.
I can't seem to google up the evidence, but I remember a few years ago when Starbucks opened their first storefront in Harlem, and publicized it as their "first urban location." Because up 'til then they'd mostly been, you know, out on the bayou.
When Starbucks opened their first branch in Mongolia, they branded it "Our First Location on The Steppes!" despite the fact that they'd opened a branch on the forehead of one of The Capitol Steps just a year before that.
Fuck, I'm bored.
hats and belts, right, if one is to show respect one usually wears his hat, it's opposite to the european custom
but collars are not, coz collars were almost the same on all clothes irregardless whether it's feminine or what, the only different one was the lam zakh (collar), for the monks' robes
a proverb 'khun axtai, deel zakhtai' which means 'a man has a brother, a deel (traditional robe) has a collar' meaning one needs some kind of authority to revere
I thought you were a drug user, Sifu. The Man didn't show up this week?
Read, the idea I got from the Secret History is that a man without a collar would be a crazy man or a slave or comething like that. Not a man/woman thing, more a real person / defective person thing. It's toward the beginning in Bodanchar's story.
ah, right, without a collar were, yeah, maybe something like convicts, they tore off collars to make it clear, a very convenient way to recognize
the difference between the Chinese female formal light dress and ours is the belt, Chinese can be without it, ours not, it's always belted despite the beltless word
the newly designed ones, without belts are not genuine Mongol
the other day i watched a movie "Far north', couldn't finish it coz it was disgusting, a lot of killings, though i'm still like curious how it ended
109: I think the only answer is to rid yourself of that troubling qualm about requesting trash. My friend's requested something like a half dozen romance novels delivered to her branch weekly for *years*.
This thread lost its way after leaving behind discussions of twenty-something women with Ayn Rand quotes tattooed on their abs and Rand-inspired sexual fantasies.
