From Round to Square (and back)

For The Emperor's Teacher, scroll down (↓) to "Topics." It's the management book that will rock the world (and break the vase, as you will see). Click or paste the following link for a recent profile of the project: http://magazine.beloit.edu/?story_id=240813&issue_id=240610

A new post appears every day at 12:05* (CDT). There's more, though. Take a look at the right-hand side of the page for over four years of material (2,000 posts and growing) from Seinfeld and country music to every single day of the Chinese lunar calendar...translated. Look here ↓ and explore a little. It will take you all the way down the page...from round to square (and back again).
*Occasionally I will leave a long post up for thirty-six hours, and post a shorter entry at noon the next day.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Beginnings (8)—Beginnings Said


Edward Said, Beginnings

He wrote the (a) book on beginnings. I also like the word-play possibilities (“Said Beginnings”).—华
[a] First Lines

I
[b] Said reading (Said)
The problem of beginnings is one of those problems that, if allowed to, will confront one with equal intensity on a practical and on a theoretical level. Every writer knows that the choice of a beginning for what he will write is crucial not only because it determines much of what follows but also because a work’s beginning is, practically speaking, the main entrance to what it offers. Moreover, in retrospect we can regard a beginning as the point at which, in a given work, the writer departs from all other works; a beginning immediately establishes relationships with works already existing, relationships of either continuity or antagonism or some mixture of both. But the moment we start to detail the features of a beginning—a moment likely to occur in examining many sorts of writers—we necessarily make certain special distinctions. Is a beginning the same as an origin? Is the beginning of a given work its real beginning, or is there some other, secret point that more authentically starts the work off? To what extent is a beginning ultimately a physical exigency and nothing more than that? Of what value, for critical or methodological or even historical analysis, is “the beginning”? By what sort of approach, with what kind of language, with what sort of instruments does a beginning offer itself up as a subject for
study?[1]


[1] Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention & Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 3.

Various
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n20/michael-wood/on-edward-said

[c] Edward Said Memorial Lecture, 2011


Images
[a] First Lines (courtesy of Ann Davies, 1999)
[b] Reading
[d] Last Lines
[c] Edward Said Memorial Lecture
[d] Last Lines (courtesy of Ann Davies, 1999)


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