Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Holiday Blogging Break

mrs-claus.jpg

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and I’ll be traveling to North Carolina and Connecticut over the next several days, so I’ll resume blogging on New Year’s (next week!) — the first day of my “Month of Liberty (i.e., Property).”

I resolve to blog in a civil and open-minded fashion, as if for well-meaning and innocent newcomers. I hope we all learned some things from the sometimes-contentious Month of Feminism, though, including a little something about Mary Marvel’s underwear. Happy 2009.

P.S. My leisure reading during my travels, by the way, will include the nifty volume Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period edited by Margaret Atherton and including excerpts of seven thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia’s correspondence with Descartes. Fascinating stuff.

And had our society not gone through a period such as the Enlightenment, perhaps its women would find themselves having to travel to know freedom, as suggested by this article on Middle Eastern flight attendants pointed out to me by Michel Evanchik. As five-word summaries of human history go, it’d be hard to beat “Life sucked until the Enlightenment,” though that admittedly leaves out some details. Perhaps you can fill them in below while I’m away (but first: tonight I party at an automat in honor of Festivus, which sounds as Enlightenmentish as admiring Crystal Palace blueprints from your panopticon).

3 comments:

Ken Silber said...

So the Month of Feminism was really the Three Weeks of Feminism. Kind of a ripoff, I say.

cb said...

5 word summaries of human history sounds a lot like Harvard’s “Ig Nobel Awards” ceremonies where they have recipients give 7 word summaries of their life’s work. E.g., a thesis of sexual selection in human evolution might be summarized: “Smart was sexy then, why not now?” Just to pick an, ahem, totally random example, utterly independent of this month’s theme…

Brain said...

…speaking of succinct world histories…

My own 7-word life’s summation — “Forget about it, it’s too much work.”