This site has been making the blog-rounds of late, but it’s still worth playing with, for the odd poetry (and even odder critical commentary) that it’s capable of producing.  Input a line of English text, and Lost in Translation will use Babelfish to translate it into French, and then translate that result back into English, and on from there into German, English, Italian, English, Portuguese, English, Spanish, and finally English once more.  As jill/txt points out, “I love you,” run through this mill, becomes “Master to him.” My own personal favorite thus far, however, is “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” which morphs into “The dream of loaded white man.”

Now that’s deep.

With two p’s.*

*(Incidentally, does anybody remember what that’s a quote from?  Is it L.A. Story?  The straight-line is something like “Hi, I’m Sandee, with two e’s.”)**

**Yes, this diversion into Hollywood-based lightheartedness is an attempt to deny the fact that I’m living in a state presumably led by the Governator.  Or the Gropenator.  Depending upon which pundit you favor.

Late this evening comes news of the death of Neil Postman, University Professor of Culture and Communication at NYU, and author of Amusing Ourselves to Death.  I never studied with Postman while I was at NYU, and, frankly, much of my recently-completed manuscript on the relationship between contemporary literary culture and television argues explicitly against the Postman line.  Nonetheless, he has been for years a leading figure in media ecology circles, and will be much missed.

[UPDATE, 10.08.03:  At last, confirmation.  Interesting that this comes from Toronto; there’s still nothing in the NY Times...]

[UPDATE2, 10.09.03:  The NY Times obituary has at last appeared.]

Part of my recent failure to be especially entertaining or enlightening here in the land of Obsolescence has to do with a smallish project that has absorbed increasing amounts of my already skimpy non-teaching, non-committee, non-fretting-about-the-state-of-the-world time:  I’m co-coordinating a colloquium that will take place here at Pomona College October 31-November 2.  This colloquium, entitled “What Is Media Studies?”, is designed not as a conventional academic conference, but rather as an operational think-tank.  The principal speakers will deliver extended addresses, each followed by lengthy open discussions that will include not only the speakers but also other media professionals, artists, teachers, and scholars from the L.A. area and further afield.  We hope that our audience will represent the full spectrum of contemporary media practice, pedagogy, and scholarship, such a conversation might take place the multiple constituencies that comprise media studies, constituencies that revolve in such separate circles that we almost never meet.  What we hope to consider in the course of the colloquium is less what the field of media studies as it currently exists looks like from varying professional perspectives, than how those particular professional perspectives might be applied in defining the discipline, its objects of study, and its pedagogical practices into the future.

Our speakers include:

Richard Burrows, Director of Arts Education, Los Angeles Unified School District;

James der Derian, Professor of International Relations, Brown University; principal investigator, InfoTechWarPeace; author of Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network;

Meaghan Morris, Professor and Chair of the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong;

Peter Rawley, producer, CEO of EKR Strategies, and former Executive Vice President and Head of International Department, International Creative Management (ICM);

Tim Rutten, columnist, “Regarding Media,” and former city bureau chief, metro reporter, editorial writer, assistant national editor, Opinion editor and assistant editor for the Editorial Page, Los Angeles Times;

Viola Shafik,* professor, American University of Cairo; author of Arab Cinema:  History and Cultural Identity;

Jesus Salvador Trevino, Chicano civil rights activist, writer, producer, and director.

If any of you out there will be in the L.A. area that weekend, I hope you’ll consider joining us.  E-mail me for more info.

*Given the increasing instability in the region, Prof. Shafik may be joining us via video, rather than in person.

The Swedish Academy has this morning announced that this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to South African novelist J. M. Coetzee.  From the New York Times:

I am working with a student this semester who is writing his senior thesis in part on Coetzee, and so have been trying to catch up in my reading of his work.  It’s a nice confluence, and this citation reveals one of those moments at which the Nobel’s evident political underpinnings are put to admirable use.

Aren’t we supposed to ease into the semester?

Or, if the semester begins in complete insanity, aren’t we supposed to reach a point at which it levels off?

How can one begin with madness, and then proceed to grow even more insane?

(Yes, no content here.  Sorry.  I hope to have the time and space to put a thought together tomorrow, though I promise nothing for its coherence.)