A Random Assortment

~ Sweden's official twitter is democratic--control of the twitter account changes from person to person each week (this of course runs into a lot of trouble, given people's complete lack of tact and eagerness to bring up controversial subjects).

~ Salvador Dali's illustrations of the Divine Comedy (also above).

~ Okay, so, as a conservative, I'm a hundred percent sure that I shouldn't be saying this, but: "Machine translation software may become so advanced as to render second-language learning useless." That day can't come quickly enough for me. Of course, I don't really believe that will happen, either.

~ Homesteading is still alive and well in Nebraska (via Mr. Sayers). Well, alive, not well. I'm thinking about doing it:

"'Everything is right here that we need,' said Ms. Warner, listing the town's amenities including a water park, a skate park and a speedway that offers deep-fried gizzards and a popular annual 'Eve of Destruction,' with demolition-derby-style races." 

~ House Hunters is this planned. Still looking forward to seeing Diana and Fred on TV, though!

~ From W.H. Auden's "The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict":

I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin. From the point of view of ethics, desires and acts are good or bad, and I must choose the good and reject the bad, but the I which makes this choice is ethically neutral; it only becomes good or bad in its choice. To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however “good” I may become, remains unchanged. As St. Paul says: “Except I had known the law, I had not known sin.”

...
The magic formula is an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt; then a suspicion of being the guilty one; and finally a real innocence from which the guilty other has been expelled, a cure effected, not by me or my neighbors, but by the miraculous intervention of a genius from outside who removes guilt by giving knowledge of guilt. (The detective story subscribes, in fact, to the Socratic daydream: “Sin is ignorance.”)

If one thinks of a work of art which deals with murder, Crime and Punishment for example, its effect on the reader is to compel an identification with the murderer which he would prefer not to recognize. The identification of phantasy is always an attempt to avoid one’s own suffering: the identification of art is a compelled sharing in the suffering of another.

Kafka’s The Trial is another instructive example of the difference between a work of art and the detective story. In the latter it is certain that a crime has been committed and, temporarily, uncertain to whom the guilt should be attached; as soon as this is known, the innocence of everyone else is certain. (Should it turn out that after all no crime has been committed, then all would be innocent.) In The Trial, on the other hand, it is the guilt that is certain and the crime that is uncertain; the aim of the hero’s investigation is, not to prove his innocence (which would be impossible for he knows he is guilty), but to discover what, if anything, he has done to make himself guilty. K, the hero, is, in fact, a portrait of the kind of person who reads detective stories for escape.

The phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law. The driving force behind this daydream is the feeling of guilt, the cause of which is unknown to the dreamer. The phantasy of escape is the same, whether one explains the guilt in Christian, Freudian, or any other terms. One’s way of trying to face the reality, on the other hand, will, of course, depend very much on one’s creed.