Og prisen for ukens mest arbitrære litterære allusjon går til...

Tom Egil Hverven, for sitt bidrag til gårsdagens bokmagasin i Klasekampen:

Marsdal retter heller blikket mot andre forklaringer: Hemmeligheten er, som helvete i Jean-Paul Sartres teaterstykke "For lukkete dører", de andre.
(Klassekampen s. 35, uthv i original)

Zeno of Elea, MA

I find that trying to finish an MA thesis is like living on the inside of Zeno's paradoxes, which go like this: if person M, let's say a student of comparative literature, is trying to get from point X to point Y, let's say X is being unemployable and Y is the finish point of an MA thesis, he'll have to write the appropriate number of pages to get from his starting position to point Y.

Easy as π. Except first he writes half his thesis, no problem. Next, he writes half of what is left, leaving a quarter of the way to go. Then, he writes half of that, and he now has an eighth to go. But since this guy is pretty dumb, and probably watching House M.D. obsessively instead of working, he keeps just going half of the remaining distance. And as you know, Xenophon, since all numbers are infinitely recursive, he has to keep covering half the distance. Forever. He'll never get to that magic last page. On the other hand, the same thought holds for dying, so he'll never die or run out of House M.D. episodes to watch, either. Sweet.

Susanne Christensen har tekstuelle relasjoner til Jon Refsdal Moe her.

"By the late 1970's, Vonnegut was rich and irrelevant".
-- Fox News obituary.

Ting-a-ling, you son of a bitch

Kurt Vonnegut died last night. So it goes.

Being a humanist means that you try to behave as decently, as honourably, as you can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. When we had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, I spoke at it and said at one point, 'Isaac is up in heaven now'. It was the funniest thing I could think of to say to an audience of humanists. Believe me, it worked - I rolled them in the aisles. If I should ever die, god forbid, I hope people will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now'. That's my favourite joke.
Kurt Vonnegut: Timequake

Monocle interviews HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway.

forresten så er denne bloggtørken jo en slags agurktid. kos dykk med denne pausefisken.

Leave of absence

As you might have noticed, I'm not really around here much these days. I'm going to be in seclusion finishing my MA thesis, and probably won't have much time for blogging. I do still occasionally post pictures on Flickr (link in sidebar), because it takes less time (and also, I don't want to use up my writing mojo on blogging). See you all after May 15th.

This is not an april fool's joke.