Interesting Writing

[Bossa Nova]

Here's a clip from The Age Online.


"On Sunday his unusual and exploratory version of I've Got You Under My Skin was pinned to a spare, repeating bass figure from Phil Stack. Another Cole Porter tune (All of You) morphed into a fully fledged salsa, as Murphy stretched syllables across the beat and let them snap back into place before leaping onto another rhythmic riff."

Author: Jessica Nicholas.

[vickihb2]

This one is far more interesting!

'As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined, the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in Manet's work of 'les noms du père', a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus ('Les Non-dupes errent'), a revised Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates (and hence enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of insemination the phenomeno-logically irreducible dyad of the mother and child'

Steven Z Levine in Twelve Views of Manet's Bar (Princeton UP, 1996)

[Bo Gus]

www.privateeye.co.uk


this is a gr8 site for interesting writing

[Teacher]

The amount of grammer and usage error’s today is astounding. Not to mention spelling. If I was a teacher, I’d feel badly that less and less students seem to understand the basic principals of good writing. Neither the oldest high school students nor the youngest kindergartner know proper usage. A student often thinks they can depend on word processing programs to correct they’re errors. Know way!

Watching TV all the time, its easy to see why their having trouble. TV interferes with them studying and it’s strong affect on children has alot to due with their grades. There’s other factors, too, including the indifference of parents like you and I. A Mom or Dad often doesn’t know grammer themselves. We should tell ar
e children to study hard like we did at they’re age and to watch less TV then their classmates.

[bod]

is that like grammar?

[bod]

hey that piece is funny.

[aj]

so which gig was Steven Z Levine reviewing ?

[bud]

His music, some of it for TV and film, is always rich, layered and fascinating


umbria in melb websites description of Grabowsky

[Mark Twain]

KFC Recipe Exposed $19.97
The dishes everyone loves but nobody knows how to make -

from the adverts at the top of this board

[Kenny]

I've never seen that KFC thingo - and I'd be curious. Not that I'm into deep frying or anything.

[baa baa]

something of interest in writing

Most people have no idea that sheep raised for wool are often mutilated and castrated without painkillers, then disposed of by being shipped thousands of miles on open-deck, multitiered ships through all weather extremes, and eventually slaughtered while fully conscious.

Much of the world's wool—from clothing to carpets—comes from sheep raised in Australia or New Zealand, where farmers restrain sheep using metal bars and, without any pain relief, slice away large chunks of flesh from the animals' backsides.
Sheep are gentle individuals who, like all other animals, feel pain, fear, and loneliness. But because of the market for their fleece and skins, they are treated as nothing more than wool-producing machines.

Anyone who buys wool helps foot the bill for a cruel and bloody industry that no amount of fluff can hide. There are plenty of durable, stylish, and warm fabrics available that aren't made from animal skins. Please join the millions of people who know that compassion is the fashion. Save a sheep—don't buy wool.

[PK]

it's a little off the topic of jazz and grammar but i totally agree... more power to PETA, but pity our lame arsed, so called animal rights organisation (RSPCA) hasn't ever done anything about cruelty to sheep. noone would have even heard of these issues had it not been for the american organisation.

[vickihb2]

The sad sheep story reminds me of this man's interesting writings.

Extract from an old interview:


Princeton University's Peter Singer, the bioethicist, is an Australian Jew whose grandparents, were victims of the Holocaust. In person, he's tall, slender, soft-spoken, even affable.

His famous book, Animal Liberation, published in 1975, jump-started the entire animal rights movement, converting many readers to lifelong vegetarianism and inspiring reforms in humane treatment for laboratory animals and livestock. But animal liberation is only one facet of Singer's ethics. Indeed, his goal is to reconfigure our entire moral landscape.

According to Singer, religion's 2000-year domination of morality ended early this decade, specifically in 1993, when British law ruled that a comatose man named Anthony Bland could be killed by his doctors. That decision, he maintains, dealt a "mortal" blow to the unquestioned sanctity of human life.

Singer argues that ethics today should be guided by a particular brand of utilitarianism: he calls himself a "preference utilitarian." In classic utilitarianism, what is good is defined as what brings happiness. But happiness is hard to measure. Singer proposes instead that good be defined by "preference." Under this philosophy, moral decisions are based on the most intense preferences of a given individual or group.

Thus, claims Singer, many times animals will be more deserving of life than certain humans, including disabled babies and adults who are brain-injured or in vegetative comas. Presumably, a healthy chimp's preference for life is more intense than a disabled infant's. This philosophy would rule out most medical experimentation on animals, as well as the breeding of animals to provide organs for human transplants.

Even more radical, Singer suggests that since preference is influenced by self-awareness, babies should not be considered "persons" until they are one month old. Before that time, parents and their doctors should be free to kill a baby if, for instance, it has Down's syndrome and the parents don't wish to raise it.

Though many people will find Singer's proposals deeply troubling, he defends his points with powerful arguments, as PT's Jill Neimark found when she caught up with him recently in his 19th-century row house on the water in Melbourne, Australia.

PT: One of the great ironies connected with your work is that your ideas are continually compared to those of the Nazis, although you yourself are Jewish and your parents escaped from Vienna just before the Holocaust. Do you feel misunderstood?

PS: In those instances, very much. My entire philosophy is shaped by an abhorrence of suffering and cruelty. My grandparents actually went through the concentration camps, and my grandfather died there.

PT: Do you think that your family history influenced your choice to be an ethicist?

PS: It probably did, though I don't know exactly what the link is. I've noticed that quite a lot of people who are prominent in the animal liberation movement are Jews. Maybe we are simply not prepared to see the powerful hurting the weak.

PT: Can you sum up your philosophy?

PS: I want us to have a graduated moral approach to all sentient beings, related to their capacities to feel and suffer. If the being has self-awareness, we ought to give it even more rights. I'm not a biological egalitarian. I do not think that all nonhuman animals have the same claim to protection of their lives as humans do. I don't think it's as bad to kill a simple animal, like a frog or fish, as it is to kill a normal human being.

You have to ask yourself what actually makes it worse to kill one being rather than another, and the best answer I can come up with is one's sense of self, that you are alive and have a past and future. And apart from the great apes, I have made no claim that any other nonhuman animals are definitely capable of the self-awareness that I think gives humans, beyond the newborn stage, a more serious claim to protection of their life than other beings. But I would give animals of some other species the benefit of the doubt where that is possible.

PT: One of the aspects of your philosophy that is most galling to some people is that you don't view human life as sacred. According to you, since a person in a vegetative coma is a being without self-awareness, he or she should be accorded fewer rights than a fully-aware chimpanzee. Needless to say, you've enraged a bunch of religious and disabled folk.

PS: But you really have to question human superiority What justifies the things we do to animals? What justifies keeping a person in a vegetative coma alive? There are two basic views that support cruelty to animals: either you accept the Aristotelian view that the universe has a purpose and the less rational are here to serve the more rational, or you believe the Judeo-Christian view that God has given us dominion over the world. But once you get away from those two worldviews, there just isn't a basis for drawing a sharp moral boundary between us and them.

PT: But you are still drawing a boundary. Why draw one at all? Aren't you still guilty of human arrogance in saying apes deserve human rights, when other animals don't? Who are we to decide?

PS: That's absolutely true, and what we really have is an infinite range of gradations of awareness. But if you are trying to shape policy, you need to draw lines somewhere.

PT: Let's take a specific case. Research on chimpanzees led to the hepatitis B vaccine, which has saved many human lives. Let's pretend it's the moment before that research is to begin. Would you stop it?

PS: I'm not comfortable with any invasive research on chimps. I would ask, Is there no other way? And I think there are other ways. I would say, What about getting the consent of relatives of people in vegetative states?

PT: That would cause a riot!

PS: Well, if you could really confidently determine that this person will never recover consciousness, it's a lot better to use them than a chimp. I agree, it doesn't go over well, and people throw up their hands in shock and horror. But I'd like them to explain why it's better to lock a fully-conscious, self-aware chimp in a seven-foot cage in solitary confinement than to experiment with someone lying unconscious in a hospital ward.

PT: How do your views differ from those of Aristotle, aside from your use of the word "sentient" in place of the word "rational?" It still seems you're placing humans right at the top of the so-called Great Chain of Being, as the most sentient and self-aware creatures.

PS: But there's a huge difference. Aristotle attributed purpose to the universe, and I don't. He was wrong to think that the universe is constructed on some teleological principle.

PT: You deal in great depth with the issue of medical ethics and people in vegetative comas in your book Rethinking Life and Death. You point out that when we call people brain dead, we're arbitrarily marking the moment of death because they're not literally dead.

PS: My point is that we shouldn't pretend breathing human beings are dead when they're not.

PT: We should say they're alive but nonetheless their life is not viable.

PS: Right. They're alive but that life is not worth living.

PT: Do you think we're avoiding a difficult moral dilemma by calling them brain dead, so that we can, for instance, feel it's acceptable to harvest their organs for transplant?

PS: "Yes. We have pushed them out of the category of the living, because the living need to be protected and we can never kill an innocent human being. But if we say they're really dead, we can feel comfortable removing their hearts."

+++++

I do think he has an interesting mind.

[bud]

funny crap from home page of www.jazz.org.au . i luv the way the 1st name mentionde is artistic director. who gives a fuck who the artistsic dirctor is sorry aj. but we wanna know bout musicians not the freakin administartion

For over 30 years the Umbria Jazz Festival has presented the best and most prestigious artists in international jazz each year to audiences from across the world that descend upon the picturesque and historic Umbrian region.Under the Artistic Direction of Carlo Pagnotta, Umbria Jazz - Melbourne 05 is almost upon us, and will present some of the finest names in jazz from Australia and the world, including a special double bill featuring the Wayne Shorter Quartet and the John Scofield Trio on 13th May.

TEXT

then thers a link to there crap website

[John K]

www.weaselwords.com.au/index3.htm