Resources for September 27, 2014

"The Purpose And The Pretence - Bombing Isis." Media Lens (September 24, 2014)

Saunders, Kevin and Stephen Torrence. "The Right to [Redacted]." Bad Philosophy #155 (September 5, 2014) ["Do we have a fundamental right to be forgotten on the Internet? Would the exercise of that right constitute censorship? How do these considerations intersect with our notions of privacy and security?"]


"Following the views of Paul Ricoeur and David Carr, I argue that our life is best understood as the product of our own narration: we account for the meaning of our lives in the terms of a story about what we have done and who we plan to be, selectively emphasizing and interpreting life's events into a unified whole, like the plot of a novel. If this view is correct, and I believe there is good reason to think it is, then the creation of a meaningful life and the imposition of meaning on the world around us is a creative process that is not dissimilar to the creation of a film. Films are realistic, I contend, not because they reflect the world the way it really is, but because they reflect the world the way we experience it - as a process of choosing among narratives we inherit from our cultural traditions and finding, or creating, our own reading of events. In short, films are realistic portrayals of how we encounter life in the one aspect that is crucial for this book: the way in which we establish meaning (5)." -- Pamerleau, William C. Existentialist Cinema. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.


Ginsburg, Sarah. "Anatomy of the Filmmaker: Varda, the Maysles, Blank and Timoner." Keyframe (September 25, 2014) ["An infographical take on the philosophies, approaches and technological habits of a few key documentary heroes."]

Drucker, Johanna. "Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing." LA Review of Books (January 16, 2014)





Bordwell, David. "How to tell a movie story: Mr. Stahr will see you now." Observations on Film Art (January 5, 2014)





Tracz, Tamara. Beau Travail Senses of Cinema (February 2007)


Merriam-Webster Word-of-the-Day:

fainéant \fay-nay-AHN\

adjective: idle and ineffectual : indolent
EXAMPLES

Deanna's parents warned her not to become fainéant during the summer; even if she didn't want to work, she should travel or volunteer somewhere.

"We go on, Beckett-like, enacting the rituals that define existence, trapped in an existential spiral, too fainéant to change, ... doomed to repeat the same mistakes and fall into the same situations." — David Krasner, A History of Modern Drama, 2011

You've probably guessed that fainéant was borrowed from French; it derives from fait-nient, which literally means "does nothing," and ultimately traces back to the verb faindre, or feindre, meaning "to feign." (The English word feign is also descended from this verb, as are faint and feint.) Fainéant first appeared in print in the early 17th century as a noun meaning "an irresponsible idler," and by 1854 it was also being used as an adjective. As its foreignness suggests, fainéant tends to be used when the context calls for a fancier or more elegant word than inactive or sluggish.