Cost-per-action in San Marino

SCEPSI - European School of Social Imagination
Conference 20-22 May 2011, Republic of San Marino

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM:
PRACTICAL INFORMATION:

Reinventing the autonomy of knowledge is the task of our time. It’s not only a political task. The epistemic foundation of research and learning as autonomous activities is at stake, when dogmas of profit, growth, competition take the lead in the old institutions of production and transmission of knowledge. This is why we are calling students and researchers, artists and scientists and social activists to gather in the first conference of SCEPSI that will take place in San Marino, on 20-22 May 2011.

Protests against the financial aggression and the destruction of the
public school in the European continent are spreading, but we have to
create new institutions, aimed to self organization of cognitive workers
and to the reactivation of social sensibility and imagination. The
conference will be the first act of the activity of the European School of
Social Imagination, that in the next year will organize seminars in San
Marino, and in European cities like Helsinki, London, and Oslo.

The activity of the School starts from four question[s]: 1. How can we think
the consequences to every day life in the face of a possible economic
failure of the European Union? 2. How can art and poetry arouse new
energies and revitalize the social field weakened by precarization and the
alienation of (digital) labour? 3.How can emergent scientific imagination
reconstitute the social body? 4. How can we open up spaces for the
autonomy of knowledge within the process of the marketisation and
capitalisation of the education system?

These questions will be foundational for the emergent curriculum of the first year of seminars and engagements of the European School of Social Imagination. The following is the program of the conference, that may change slightly during the next weeks.

One apparently must go to San Marino to find people talking about something worthwhile. Of course we USians gave up the autonomy of knowledge early on - was it at the time we decided that all speech should be impregnated by advertising? Or was it endemic to our method of escaping history -- making all speech, all public records, merely somebody else's marketing, to which we triumphantly suggest our counter-marketing?

If Europe is concerned for the destruction of the public school, it is now in need of referring to our history.

Ovid in America

From my good friend Peter D'Epiro, author of The Book of Firsts: 150 World-Changing People and Events from Caesar Augustus to the Internet, comes this fascinating "first":

The first literary work composed in English in what became the US was a translation of the Metamorphoses by George Sandys (1578-1644): Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures. He was treasurer of the Virginia Company for its settlement at Jamestown from 1621 to 1624.

Cover of George Sandys's 1632 edition of Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished

Ezra Pound on the Tea Party

Guide to Kulchur, (page unavailable) cited in The Celestial Tradition by Demetres Tryphonopoulos.

A Blight from JSTOR

Here's a book about Ezra Pound, pounder of the flesh of Usura, that you can purchase as a paperback for $17.86 on Amazon:

Here's an academic note on Surette's book that's little more than one page long. You can purchase it from JSTOR for $34:

Hey JSTOR: "It gnaweth the thread and the loom" -

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