About "Miriam" (Completely offtopic)

Not about books or anthropology, just about my name.
I long knew its quite complex and various meanings in different cultures, which I'll not detail here now for lack of space and patience and point; but I was surprised to see The Urban Dictionary's explanations of what "a miriam" is.

So, here goes my least scholarly post on this blog (well, maybe if you consider The Urban Dictionary as part of a larger frame of clashing discourses in a funny way exposed by a blurry elite of a postmodern system of meanings... it could pass as appropriate, were there not still the un-randomness of picking precisely the entry on "miriam" out of it all):

Next paragraphs will completely quote The Urban Dictionary mentioned above.

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On the history of modern cemeteries

"I want to reverse the causal arrow: changing burial practices, themselves imbricated in larger cultural developments, produce, or at least invite new meanings of death. "Concepts of death" might be regarded less as the coalescence of attitudes and beliefs and more as practices which take on meaning as strands in a larger web of cultural transformation. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution are not among the causes of cemeteries, if anything the converse is true: cemeteries produce a cultural world fit for the new economic order.
Cemeteries, in this account, are to death what Lombard Street was to Bills of Exchange or the stock market to equities: no mere venue but a sign that the underlying cultural assumptions of capitalism had taken root, that what might have seemed outrageous in an earlier age - the ready circulation of commercial paper or limited liability companies or freehold in grave sites, divorced from the Church - could be taken as part of the landscape of everyday life". (T. W. Laqueur, Cemeteries, Religion and the Culture of Capitalism, in Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in honor of R. M. Hartwell,  edited by John A. James and Mark Thomas, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p 139-140).

On how we consume information (I)

"I would argue that this semi-structured organisation through a network of quests and always available self-selected activities within set boundaries matches the way we read and experience the world today. These days we do things in fragments: we surf, channel flip and multitask. We write and read emails and blog posts rather than novels, we listen to 4-6 minute songs rather than symphonies, and we listen to the news in 30 second sound bites. We devour these fragments, flicking through hundreds each day, and we return to many, spending a few minutes at a time on one topic or blog or news story, maybe, but returning to it again and again. This fragmentation doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re more superficial. We return to things again and again, and the cumulation of fragmentary experience may be as deep or deeper as a single but lengthier exposure to something." (Jill Walker in "Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media", Cambridge, 2007).

We return again and again... to the same net pages, blogs, bits, topics, favorite fragments of this spinning, dizzying, alive multi-verse of a world. Which kind of makes it home. And family. New faces of alienation? Or is it the contrary, a tendency to soothe and tame the cold machine-created virtual wilderness? Aren't we all that insane man talking to a rock and pretending it's a lively pet?

Notes on the youthly rebellion(s)

One of the my most recent enjoyable lectures was The Poetry Lesson by Andrei Codrescu. A writer and a Romanian now living and developing his skills abroad, just like me (but I wouldn't take the comparison further than that), he actually teaches Poetry to university students and he recalls it in a most funny and dreamy fashion in the book. Which of course, makes one think about Dead Poet's Society. :)

I will not speak more on the whole matter here because I will do it elsewhere, but I would like to share a certain remark from the text for purposes to be revealed later:

What statues and culture have in common and abstract economy and politics have not

Marshall Sahlins, in "Culture and Practical Reason", Chicago University Press, 1976.

“Shortly before the events of May 1968, I had the opportunity to witness an informal debate between an American member of the Russell Tribunal – passing through Paris from Copenhagen, where he had learned of the structuralist vogue from French colleagues – and a Parisian anthropologist. After a long period of question and discussion, the American summed up his views in this way: “I have a friend”, he said, “who is doing a sociological study of the equestrian statues in Central Park. It’s a kind of structuralism. He finds a direct relation between the cultural status of the rider and the number of legs the horse has off the ground. One leg poised has a different historical and political connotation from a horse rearing on hind legs or another cast in flying gallop. Of course the size of the statue also makes a difference. The trouble is”, he concluded, “people don’t ride horses anymore. The things in a society that are obsolete, out of contention, those you can structure. But the real economic and political issues are undecided, and the decision will depend on real forces and resources.”
The Parisian anthropologist thought about that a moment. “It is true,” he finally said, “that people don’t ride horses anymore. But they still build statues.”
Something more was implied than that the past was not dead – because, as has been said of the American South, it is not even past. It was also intended that economics and politics have modalities other than the “real” competition for power. [..] The competition does not evolve absolutely, on an eternal and formal rationality of maximization; it develops according to a system of cultural relationships, including complex notions of authority and submission, hierarchy and legitimization. And among other means, it is by a literal concretization of this code into statues that history is made to act within the present, at once directly and through its dialectical reappropriation and revaluation.” (p 19-20)

A wonderful story-style assertion on why anthropology, discourse analysis and cultural theory may exist, must exist and do exist.

Cetatea Neamţului

Nu ştiu dacă v-a plăcut sau nu "Sobieski şi românii" când aţi studiat-o în şcoală, însă în mod cert lui George Coşbuc nu i-a plăcut prea mult. Sau, cel puţin, aşa lasă de înţeles o poezie-parodie pe care a scris-o despre celebra poveste a leşilor şi plăieşilor.
Poezia lui Coşbuc nu face parte, desigur, din categoria umorului care degradează conţinutul originar al întâmplării care parodiază, nu este menit să ofenseze nicio sensibilitate regională sau naţională. Este doar amuzantă (deşi Coşbuc nu şi-a dat mâna la parodii prea des, precum, bunăoară, Topârceanu). Mie îmi plăcea să o citesc când eram mică şi, amintidu-mi recent de ea, am căutat-o de-a lungul şi de-a latul internetului doar pentru a constata că nu se găseşte nicăieri. Ceea ce trebuie, desigur, remediat :).

The Golden Pot (Ulciorul de aur)

I've long looked for an e-book of my favorite fairytale since I was a child. I've talked about it before, here. I found several, but none of the translations was to my liking. The physical format of the book was also long gone from every shop I searched in. Eventually I ordered one from far far away, but in the meanwhile finally found an online English version of The Golden Pot which didn't hack away the story's feeling. I enjoy it quite a bit more than the paperback one I came to own.

To keep this short, here is the link where you can find this good and free rendition of a wonderful story. I recommend it heartily:
http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0355.pdf