“I began with a desire to speak with the dead,” wrote Stephen Greenblatt at the beginning of his 1988 book Shakespearean Negotiations.

I was awake this morning at 6:30. Crack of dawn on a Saturday. I have a lot to do today.

I dreamed of the dead last night and woke up blogging. My uncle Carl died of cancer about six years ago. Last night he was so glad to see me, and we talked about buying a van.

So much to say, today.

This past summer, in a Guardian Review article by Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, I was struck by this memorable quote:

The terrible reductive conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like America, the West, or Islam, and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, must be opposed … We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that are the legacy of humanist education. Rather than the manufactured clash of civilisations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other and live together, but for that kind of wider perception, we need time and a patient and sceptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation, that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.

The quote is from Edward Said, in the 2003 preface to his Orientalism.

[Danielle Sered has created a useful, brief webpage at Emory University on Said and orientalism.]

“We will never forget,” reads the bumper sticker. The problem is not forgetting; it’s alchemy, the mysterious practice by which being sick and tired of violence and death gets transformed through a shady practice into a desire for more violence and death.

Let’s try something else. Read. Learn. Talk. Take a look at the NY Times special section on 9/11, the report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, and the September 11 Digital Archive..

[CC-licensed Flickr photo by Geoff Gallice]

So, documents were made public that seem to indicate some nefarious goings on with regard to Bush’s time in the National Guard. Then people began to question the authenticity of these documents. You know, you think they’d ask those of us who do work in the history of writing, reading, and publishing to help out with these issues, but no…

• From Little Green Footballs: “Bush Guard Documents: Forged“:

I opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Microsoftís Times New Roman, tabbed over to the default tab stop to enter the date ì18 August 1973,î then typed the rest of the document purportedly from the personal records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian.

And my Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as ìauthentic.î

• From the Daily Kos: “ TANG Typewriter Follies; Wingnuts Wrong“:
  

  You see, a “typeface” doesn’t just consist of the shape of the letters. It also is a set of rules about the size of the letters in different point sizes, the width of those letters, and the spacing between them. These are all designed in as part of the font, by the designer. Since Microsoft Word was designed to include popular and very-long-used typefaces, it is hardly a surprise that those typefaces, in Microsoft Word, would look similar to, er, themselves, on a typewriter or other publishing device. That’s the point of typefaces; to have a uniform look across all publishing devices. To look the same. You could use the same typeface in, for example, OpenOffice, and if it’s the same font, surprise-surprise, it will look the same.

  So kudos on discovering fonts, freeper guy.

I guess Plato was onto something when he had Socrates say this:

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

Reporting the facts…: “The politically useless he-said, she-said stenography that passes for so much political reporting is only possible when the press misunderstands objectivity. Objectivity is not a stance; it’s a process.”

Read the … how you say? ah, yes … whole thing.