My friend Anna Sew Hoy and I are working on a new artists book — contribute to the project if you can.

Nancy Lupo for works sited

August 30 - September 30, 2010

“Imagine that you are on a train car sitting next to a Russian gentleman with whom you wish to speak. You have brought with you a key to Esperanto in Russian. On the back of the key is written (in Russian), “Everything written in Esperanto can be translated by the help of this vocabulary.” You give the gentleman a sentence written in Esperanto, and he will be able to make out your sentence in a very short time by using the key. As an example Dr. Zamenhof gives the following sentence: Mi ne sci’as kie mi las’is la baston’o'n: Cxu vi gxi’n ne vid’is?”

“My original motivation had to do with epistemic relativism,” explains Sokal, “and what I saw as a rise in sloppily thought-out relativism, being the kind of unexamined zeitgeist of large areas of the American humanities and some parts of the social sciences. In particular I had political motivations because I was worried about the extent to which that relativism was identified with certain parts of the academic left and I also consider myself on the left and consider that to be a suicidal attitude for the American left.”

Sokal’s intention was to write a parody of this kind of relativism and to see if an academic journal would publish it. The end result was “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, which was published in the journal Social Text in 1996. With extensive quotations from the thinkers Sokal was targeting, such as Lacan, Irigaray and Baudrillard, the article pulls off the powerful trick of constructing the parody almost entirely out of the parodied (something which, ironically, some of the post-modernists Sokal attacks would surely appreciate).

W/———
SUMMER SCREENINGS
AT B.EAST
withnyc.org

via

Courtesy musician Nick Pittsinger, who used the free program Paulstretch, this is “U Smile” made slower. Like, a lot slower—eight times slower, to be exact. Thanks Fernando, via Gawker.

Randy Miller, President of Original New York Seltzer and sponsor of Alphy’s Soda Pop Club.

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