There are UFOs all over Chelsea; a sea lion attacked and chased a University of Otago rowing crew; Malmesbury wants to be a philosophy destination resort; and Waikato New Zealand now grows oolong tea.

… thriving.

… is only funny if Lynne Rosenthal is an English professor.

Actually, I don’t think it’d be very funny even if she were, since if you read the details it isn’t about being a scathing schoolmarm. It’s about being a gratuitously unpleasant New Yorker.

You’re supposed to laugh at what ridiculous sticklers English professors are about language. Here’s a woman who so insisted on proper usage in ordering at Starbucks that she managed to get herself dragged out of the place by the cops, haha…

First off, I can’t find an English professor named Lynne Rosenthal. Best I can do is a Faculty Trustee at the University of the Virgin Islands.

Second, her behavior seems to have amounted to an extremely rude refusal (“You’re an asshole.”) to answer questions about how she wanted her food prepared. You don’t need a PhD in English – she claims to have one from Columbia – to walk into Starbucks and call people assholes. A degree from any of the Kaplan campuses would do.

Third, her obnoxiousness, coupled with her eagerness to get her picture in the paper (big smile in front of the Starbucks), suggests a cry for help.

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UPDATE: UD thanks a reader for sending her Rosenthal’s academic affiliation. She’s an English professor at Mercy College, in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

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More on Rosenthal.

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UPDATE: The Economist magazine agrees with UD that it’s a cry for help.

I’m sorry, Ms Rosenthal, but linguistically, your position is stupid hovering just above insanity. Most twenty-first century Americans understand that when ordering quick-take food at a counter, you will often be asked if you want various options. This is not limited to Starbucks. The competent thing to do, bringing all your meta-linguistic skills (the study of which is called “pragmatics”) to bear, is say “no, thanks.” Only someone whose pragmatic skills are severely impaired—some people with autism-spectrum disorders like Asperger’s have trouble with this, for example—lose the plot and insist on a pseudo-logical argument that “a bagel” logically excludes “a bagel with butter”, making the question “would you like anything else?” an affront.

It all reminds UD of one of her earliest exposures to pragmatics, via her parents’ 1962 Beyond the Fringe album.

Jonathan Miller plays an Englishman wistfully recalling his days at Trinity College Cambridge:

One of the advantages of living in Great Court, Trinity, I seem to recall, was the fact that one could pop across at any time of the day or night and trap the then young G.E. Moore into a logical falsehood by means of a cunning semantic subterfuge. I recall one occasion with particular vividness. I had popped across and had knocked upon his door. “Come in”, he said. I decided to wait awhile in order to test the validity of his proposition. “Come in”, he said once again. “Very well”, I replied, “if that is in fact truly what you wish”.

I opened the door accordingly and went in, and there was Moore seated by the fire with a basket upon his knees. “Moore”, I said, “do you have any apples in that basket?” “No”, he replied, and smiled seraphically, as was his wont. I decided to try a different logical tack. “Moore”, I said, “do you then have some apples in that basket?” “No”, he replied, leaving me in a logical cleft stick from which I had but one way out. “Moore”, I said, “do you then have apples in that basket?” “Yes”, he replied. And from that day forth, we remained the very closest of friends.’

… seems to UD to combine one of the worst headlines she’s read with one of the worst photos she’s seen.

Bags of Ambition?

And is the foreground of the picture nae but a big plaid butt?

UD‘s been writing about an exhibit, in Austria, of North Korean propaganda paintings.

A New York Times reporter has described the event, and it turns out that UD‘s initial assumption about the art for art’s sake attitude of the organizers (Don’t know, don’t care, about politics; this is about art.) was ill-founded.

[The] catalog essay lament[s] that “our Western ideological lenses cloud, if not entirely distort, the view of other realities” and urg[es] museumgoers to “bid farewell once and for all to Eurocentric and culturally imperialistic attitudes.” The show … “proves that cultural differences can be bridged with mutual respect.”

Listen to this prose. Read it out loud.

It comes from the bellowing mouth of a beribboned teenager at a Pyongyang youth rally. BID FAREWELL ONCE AND FOR ALL TO CULTURALLY IMPERIALIST ATTITUDES.

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UD is about to teach a course called Aesthetics at George Washington University.

She has been collecting a file of current events in America and elsewhere that have a bearing on beauty and art and politics and morality. Stuff like the Italian Vogue oil thing …

Along these lines, the New York Times piece on the North Korean exhibit quotes the German paper, Die Welt, calling the show “obscene.”

[I]n a “terror regime” like North Korea there is “no perceptible visual art according to an acceptable understanding of any sort.”

In a sense, that’s the whole burden of my aesthetics course – maybe of any serious thinking about aesthetics. What sort of acceptable understandings are we talking about? Where does Die Welt get the confidence to call any public exhibit of created images obscene? How is it able both to declare this work not art, and to claim that a terror regime like North Korea’s cannot produce art?

I mean, let’s imagine a Western spectator of these big blow-up cartoon North Korean propaganda images who finds them a pleasing accompaniment to the very similar cartoon images – Asian and otherwise – she spends all of her time looking at, on screens, and in comic books. Her aesthetic life is entirely about moving from one hypertrophic set of cartoon images to another; the North Korean images are more of the same…

Or think of the character Molina in Kiss of the Spiderwoman, adoring the romance of his fascist propaganda tales.

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One thing to say about all of these examples – the Vogue oil images, the Nazi love stories, the North Korean paintings – is that they cast the aura of art over their content. They glamorize – aestheticize – make beautiful – ugly things, thereby both diverting our attention from the ugly things in their political and social actuality, and making the ugly things charismatic, alluring, chic, offbeat.

In the case of the Korean objects, exhibits like the one in Austria help make them sought-after consumer items as well. There’s already a hot market, among sophisticated European collectors, for Korean propaganda art; exhibits like this one, that honor and mainstream the work, strengthen the market for it. Similarly, the Vogue oil images are accompanied by ads for grunge chic, the look that goes with the Roseate Spoonbill corpse you carry with you.

Quite the green thumb.

So says the Bulgarian diaspora minister about a remark he made last week. He was enraged by a group of Bulgarian archaeologists who might have found relics of St John the Baptist in that country, but want to wait for authentication.

The minister’s thing is Why wait? The whole area around the relics can be transformed into pilgrimage tourism. Now.

“Why, damn it, why, where is all this envy coming from?! This is what I cannot find an explanation with this fucking people, with these fucking colleagues.”

He also seems to have insulted the women of Bulgaria. Plus Ancient Thrace.

Anyway, it’s interesting to learn that fuck doesn’t have a pejorative connotation in Bulgarian.

Google Translator gives me дяволите, which does seem innocent enough.

Though when you put дяволите back into Google Translator for the English, it comes out DAMN.

Admit it. Haven’t we all wanted to do just this?

… Beetle.

… Book.

A story out of Wales.

A retired maths teacher was stunned to receive a letter asking for his brain.

Colin Rodgerson was shocked by the letter asking whether he would donate his cranial tissue for medical research in the event of his death.

The 60-year-old received the request from scientists across the UK who are undertaking a project called the TIME study – research which looks into a condition called transient epileptic amnesia (TEA).

Mr Rodgerson, who was diagnosed with TEA five years ago, said he was more than happy to consider the request but was slightly taken aback by it.

“It’s not everyday someone writes to you saying, ‘Can we have your brain?’” he said.

“It was all written in a very sensitive way but it was surprising nonetheless just to be asked.”

Max Brod, you recall, ignored Kafka’s request (in writing) that he destroy all of his manuscripts… Which, you know, I guess was okay since Kafka’s manuscripts were really good.

But then Brod gave all the originals plus lots of other not-yet-released stuff to his girlfriend, who was nuts and hid it away, and then she left it all to her children (now old ladies), also nuts. Nuts and mercenary.

They’ve been selling it off bit by bit (it resides in Israel and Switzerland in bank vaults) for millions. To Germany.

Israel, finding this grody to the Max, and quite certain Brod intended all of it for the state of Israel, has been suing for decades, etc.

Here’s the latest chapter of The Trial:

… Four safety-deposit boxes were opened in Zurich Monday by order of the Israeli court, revealing a wealth of Kafka-related manuscripts that now are being catalogued. In the next few days, five other safe deposit boxes are to be opened in Tel Aviv.

When the very first of the total of 10 boxes was opened last week in Israel, one of the sisters, Eva Hoffe, is reported to have burst into the bank in an effort to prevent the vault from being opened, shouting “It’s mine, it’s mine!”

Though present this week in Switzerland, Ms. Hoffe was barred from the bank vault and from the conference room where the papers were examined.

… The library has produced evidence that Max Brod intended the manuscripts for it and, in three decades of frustrations worthy of Kafka himself, found its deal to receive the papers repeatedly blocked by Ms. Hoffe.

Sure, there’s a limerick or two here. I’ll give it a whirl. Later.

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Okay. So here’s what they find in the vault.

Codicil

Dear Max, here’s my scariest thought:
That this writing, so painfully wrought,
Will fall to some bitches
Who’ll sell it for riches
And, oddly, will never be caught.

UD has already blogged about Moscow’s new suicidal metro stop. Now, riders respond to the station.

Vladimir Supkin, a professor of Russian literature at the International University in Moscow, says he is completely against the murals.

He says the station is not a happy one. He says when he saw it, he was very scared because the station isn’t light, it’s very dark. He says the murals aren’t calming and that they are very strange, and he adds that they put people in very bad moods.

Supkin goes on to say that he doesn’t understand why the author was even chosen to be the face of the new station.

He says that first of all, people don’t read as much as they used to and people know his name, but they don’t read his novels. He says he thinks that Dostoevsky isn’t a very popular author now and that people like to read Tolstoy more.

With Tolstoy you get a choice: Ivan Ilych on his deathbed or Anna Karenina at the train station.

A Folger librarian describes the British dealer in stolen goods who showed up at the Shakespeare library in Washington in 2008 with a First Folio and asked that the staff authenticate it.

The startled staff instead called the FBI and — as Raymond Scott settles in to his prison cell – the rest is silence.

Background here.

A group of 15 monkeys at Kyoto University’s primate research institute in Aichi prefecture escaped from their forest home, which is encased by a five-metre electric fence. The monkeys made their break for freedom by bending and releasing tree branches to fling themselves one by one slingshot-fashion over the high-voltage fence.

… Despite the intelligence demonstrated by their great escape, the primates then appeared unsure what to do with their freedom: They remained by the gates of the centre and were lured back by scientists with peanuts.