Blogwatch from the stars,

Blogwatch from the stars…

Monster Brains: Images of the Harrowing of Hell. (And isn’t this, also, one?–via Amy Welborn.) I’m blogrolling this guy–Sean Collins turned me on to him, and I know that Sean’s linked him in the past, but apparently I’ve become more monstrous in the past few months. (I certainly haven’t become brainier.)

What do real thugs (TM) think of The Wire? Via Noli Irritare Leones. I haven’t watched The Wire (dude, it’s in my queue, yes I know I’m the only blogger in DC not to have watched it already) and also haven’t read this piece yet, so there may be spoilers–I’m linking to it because I think you guys might want it, and so that I can find it easily once I’ve finally gotten my fangs stuck in to the series.

“Twilight of the Books”: Ratty is right–this is a lot more interesting than the usual oh-tempura-oh-morays death of the books journalism:

It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently; orality, Havelock observed, doesn’t “fossilize” except through its nemesis, writing. But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in
the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.” Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t.

Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to
them than any conceptual category. …

…As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

more

And last: Fin de Siecle Russian Cat. (Via Ratty… of course.)