So I decided, encouraged by a certain girl in glasses from whose hand a cigarette was never absent, to publish the story which I returned to read over and over again. My readers will see that I nourished no pretensions to style while revising the book into contemporary Turkish: after reading a couple of sentences from the manuscript I kept on one table, I'd go to another table in the other room where I kept my papers and try to narrate in today's idiom the sense of what remained in my mind. It was not I who chose the title of the book but the publishing house that agreed to print it. Readers seeing the dedication at the beginning may ask if it has a personal significance. I suppose that to see everything as connected with everything else is the addiction of our time. It is because I too have succumbed to this disease that I publish this tale.
Long Sunday, the group theory blog that holds symposia, complete with assigned texts, calls for submissions, and post-presentation sessions of find Pico in the Pizza ("that cheese reminds me of Althusser's favourite sweater", "this mushroom strikes me as a composite of Tacitus and Bachelard"), hosts a spat about this project and its suspicious efforts to regulate or attain distinction via escape from the freedom® of the blogsphere to the value and hierarchy production rituals and customs of a virtual ivory tower.
Apparently poking fun at such things is a right one must earn the hard way, with hard work, like the virtuous brokers at Smith Barney.
Complicating matters, a pretty large chunk of American academic product, what Henry Farrell has called 'The Bernard Lewis school of analysis', was criminalised in France this week. You could get thrown in jail now in France for teaching or publishing what in the academy in the United States is considered not only a legitimate but prestigious 'version' of 20th century history. There may eventually be a real practical need for subdivision of the list into Law Abiding and Criminal Academic Blogs.
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