Post-...um...brevity

Just in case you were looking for a one-sentence description of post-structuralism (and I know you were), Adam Shatz provides one in an LRB review (which is also otherwise worth reading) of a new biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss:

Inverting Lévi-Strauss’s favoured terms, Derrida and his allies celebrated diachrony over synchrony, events over structure, the exception over the rule, the periphery over the centre, the variable over the invariant. 

I hope to have cleared a few things up.

What a long, strange trip it was

Owsley Stanley -- LSD pioneer and Grateful Dead sound technician -- died a few days ago.

Being a long-time fan of...well...let's just say the Grateful Dead, I found this sort of sad.

But I noted an interesting fact of Mr. Stanley's biography, via the obituary in the New York Times:

Mr. Stanley was previously a ballet dancer and a member of the United States Air Force.

Yeah, I suppose that's the kind of thing that leads to a life as the king of hallucinogens.

RIP Owsley.