Quentin's Weeknotes 9/8/18-9/14/18
This Week
- I visited the Oneonta Grand and Glorious Garage Sale, and I bought some stuff.
I collect H.P. Lovecraft paperbacks from the 1970s (which often have spectacularly weird art) and I found one in a box of other paperbacks. I also found a two-volume Oxford Compact English Dictionary. It didn’t come with a box or a magnifier, but I’m going to assemble this thing one piece at a time. - I read Owen Hatherley’s fascinating and detailed article “What should a 21st century socialist housing policy look like?”. Hatherley is a british architectural critique and writer of a bunch of great books about 20th century architecture in the U.K., a subject around which people have striking and often conflicting opinions. Hatherley’s argument in this piece is that the new Labour (not New Labour) government’s 2018 manifesto makes some good strides towards dealing with what he calls “the most important of all issues: housing”, but could be strengthened with a focus on de-commodifying and more democratically and communally managing U.K. housing. There’s some interesting insights here that are perhaps specific to the unique history of the built environment in the U.K., but are clearly portable to the US, where gentrification and urban renewal have made major US cities unliveable to anyone but the extremely wealthy.
- We taught our students in “Collectors and Collecting” about wikipedia, with the goal of having them do an assignment where they edit a wikipedia page. We have made great use of the resources provided by the Wikiedu foundation, and the voluminous material on teaching wikipedia in college course.
- I heard Marc Ribot and Tom Waits' version of the Italian anti-fascist song “Bella Ciao.” I’m kind of in awe of it, actually[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50GvkAO0OIg&w=560&h=315]
