Though we may never see precisely how the protean dancing stuff of everything endlessly becomes itself, we have no choice, being human and full of desire, but to go on perpetually seeking clarity of vision. The ultimate form within forms, the final shape of change may elude us. The pursuit of the idea of form—even the form of force, of endlessly interacting process—is man’s inevitable, crucial need.John Unterecker
In one ballad, Bosnia was a name of a weeping shepherdess in an orchard whose sheep had scattered and where hay had burst to flames by a sudden thunder. The poetic tragedy is matched by an equally haunting fact that Bosnia & Herzegovina, with her war-stricken population of 4 million, is overcoming its internal warzones and facing the future with an uneasy burden of 60% of its young being unemployed. Perhaps even more striking and tragic is the truth that 200,000 of her people remain illiterate. The levels of corruption remain staggeringly high. And the universal capitalist corollary is truer now in Bosnia than ever: the rich are getting richer. The poor are digging beyond rock-bottom. One woman has recently done an incredibly sobering act of delivering an uncompromising lesson to the Bosnian parliament. In this instalment of The Heroes Series, we celebrate her courage.
Setting [the] goals [of this book] will sound to you grand and immodest. I can certainly tell you that pursuing them nearly killed me.Gennaro Chierchia (Logic in Grammar, p. 9)
So this is when I actually take up what I’ve been wanting to do for over a year now. I came across some bloody impressive folks in the last couple of years, even months, who need mentioning and celebrating. They all share a capacity to inspire while retaining a huge chunk of humility and humanity. It’s this group of people that deserve to be listed and this is what The Heroes Series is about, celebrating a collection of brave people that have restored and reinforced (my own) hope for the future. Our first entry is a political one, in light of the July 13th parliamentary elections in Slovenia.
I met up with Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT and political activist, to discuss the socio-economic instability of Europe. The interview in Slovenian translation was originally published in Mladina. I’m publishing here the original transcript to make Chomsky’s critical thoughts available to an English speaking audience.
Timing synchs by definition. An aspiring jazz sommelier and dear friend of mine has reviewed some of the major and funkiest vocal jazz works but has been dreading to hit the nail on the head and write about the original form, the one where there’s no verbal language. I too have been wanting to get back on track with keeping up a blog (was I ever on the track? Anyway.). The idea my friend and I had, propelled by the same thirst for a writers’ nudge, was this: let’s both of us come up with an album for each other to write about. He managed to write a wonderful piece on one of my favourite albums, Davis’s In a Silent Way.
I’ve recently stumbled upon Dave Clarke‘s guide to ‘Surviving your PhD Write-up’. Here’s what he advises what you should do before you start writing:
Check out his original post to learn what to do while and after writing, which sort of made me look forward to that time!
Constance Iloh, a grad student at USC, has recently blogged about an embarrassingly true typology of PhD students. I found out about this via Times Higher Education’s tweet.
Iloh recognised an initial class of five types:
She’s got a very exhaustive post, which is both entertaining and embarrassing, as you just may find out who you really are. Find the original post here.
The link to the original post has been broken and I can’t retrieve the original page. My thanks to Rashmica Gupta for noticing the hyperlinkcrack.