Remembering

Given that it's the day that it is, I wanted to mention two veterans that we've talked about here previously:

My (maternal) grandfather John W. Dennis:



My grandfather (by marriage) Johann Lamm:

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.

It's not so much a policy, it's more like free verse

Prospective Republican candidate for president Herman Cain (who is apparently leading the party's polls), responding to a question at last night's debate about how he would respond in the face of a possible European financial meltdown:

"Just like a dollar must be a dollar when we wake up in the morning, just like 60 minutes is in an hour, a dollar must be a dollar."

That's very reassuring.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung helpfully informs us today that a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination embarrassed himself in last night's debate.

I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been the Governor of Texas; however, it seems to have been some other chap.

This race is even more crowded than I thought it was! I should start paying more attention.

And so, it seems should the FAZ.