This is a forewarning for subscribers of a series of posts that has already begun. Apologies if this is of no interest to you, but it will be over in a fortnight or so. I am attempting to compile a comprehensive list of the Ancient Greek terms in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory . I am creating one post per entry and giving as much background information on the term as is viable.

"The portion of it that is θέσει grew to such an extent that all efforts to secret away the process of production in the work could not but fail" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2004.

"His work is the extrapolation of a negative καιρος" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2004. p. 33.) -- in reference to Beckett With thanks to Yorgos Maragos.

A quick note as I had to look it up and might save somebody else some time. First occurring on p. 7 of the Hullot-Kentor translation of Aesthetic Theory , χωρισμός or chorismos, can most accurately be translated as "separation". The context, for search engine purposes is "by abstract negation posits the χωρισμός of art as absolute". (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann.

"Thus what was planned as a bridge between theoretical and practical pure reason is vis-à-vis both an άλλο γένος" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2004.

Pynchon biography sleuth, Albert Rolls, sent me information today of the only known inscribed Pynchon book complete with a presentation letter.

I thought it would be a good idea (New Year's resolutions and all that) to make sure I was on top of my finances this coming year. For that purpose, I began to investigate options to aggregate my accounts in one place. There were several online options, but I really disliked the idea of giving an online service my banking credentials.

A quick, perhaps egotistic, documentary post to note that the Guardian have published their top 10 posts of 2011 and the piece I wrote with Jennifer M. Jones made the cut. Indeed, 6 months after it was written, "Angry Young Academics" has returned to being the most read item on the site with 366 Facebook "likes" and 77 unique mentions on Twitter.

A guest piece over at the Guardian Higher Education section: Secondary schools are not adequately preparing students for higher education Featured image by ChrisM70 under a CC-BY-NC-ND license. P.S. I've just noticed that the version on the Guardian is far more businesslike and brusque in tone.

An update on my earlier posts about meXmlGalley, the OJS plugin that allows you to publish PDFs from XML source documents, to say that I began some further work today to begin integrating image support. Thus far, it's working very well in PDF form!

This is a brief, and perhaps pedantic, post to bring attention to an essay of extreme prominence in Pynchon studies, Anne Mangel, "Maxwell's Demon, Entropy, Information: The Crying of Lot 49", Triquarterly 20 (1971): 194-208. (Future reference will be to the reprinted version Mangel, Anne.