Technological Reflection

Just downloaded about half a gig of texts. I transfered them to my stick drive, something that one of my friends has labeled, “The briefcase of the 21st century.” 
I plan to read some of these on the bus trip this weekend to Ithaca on my microtop, a computer that is about 8 inches in size.
These texts are mostly Buddhist commentaries, and I always think of Jack Kerouac when I’m reading this stuff.  When he got into it, he wrote Allen Ginsberg many letters about it, including one that was a bibliography.  At the end of this nice bibliography (he annotated it as well) he remarks to Ginsberg – hey, dont’ go looking for these books in the New York Public Library because I stole them from there.  
Ironic, but close to what I’m doing, except the theft is a bit more ephemeral. I wonder what he would have thought about BitTorrent and all the freely accessible texts on the internet? I do know he probably would have loved the word processor – no more taping together typing pages to write novels.

Charts and Essentialism

I have a lot of work to do, but I justify not doing it based on my debate work. I don’t know if this is a good thing or not, but sometimes I just have to decompress a bit.
So I’ve been catching up on podcasts – mostly I listen to experimental music, classical music and buddhism podcasts.
I’ve also been watching some documentaries. I’m very interested in Tibet lately so I’ve been watching films about that. I just saw one that could have been really good – 10 Questions to the Dalai Lama, but the filmmaker was one of these oversimplistic neo-liberal types who asked loaded questions.  It was somewhat silly.
I also post to my blog.
I’ve been teaching a small seminar on Feminist Rhetorical Theory. I think it’s going well. One of the things that I did was make a chart to explain some of the differences between thinkers. The chart is problematic because it is essentialist. But it’s essentialist character, I think, makes it a good condensation point for teaching.
However the problem of how to point to the chart’s essentialist character hangs. If you do this, you might ruin the pedagogical value of the chart.
I think it is like identifying clash points in a debate – you start there and the debate goes and gets good. But if you finish with only that, you are actually more confused, and you wish the debate never happened.
Unsure where to go from here.

Should Elections be publicly funded?


Here’s a debate from last Friday’s scrimmage between The King’s College, Manhattan and St. John’s University, Queens.  The motion is This House would publicly fund all election campaigns.

This is a great event and I hope we can do it at least once a month, if not more. The next one appears to be scheduled the weekend after the Cornell tournament, unless I’m out of town that weekend. I’d better check on that sometime today . . .
Still figuring out the camera. This video is not in HD but was shot in HD – Google video does not yet support HD, and vimeo’s support even with subscription is only 1 GB files. This debate is around 2.5GB of data. I’m reducing it in various ways to preserve the HD quality and allow it to be posted on vimeo. Once it is, I’ll replace this lower quality Google video link.