The best way to contact me right now is by email using (despammed in the obvious ways) glaister at yahoodotcom
Some Recent Documents
Mixed Illusions: Mixed Electoral Systems without Illusions (Completed! Ms. available on request.)
Marriage in Law: The Logic and Law of Civil Marriage (Completed! Ms. available on request.)
Making Sense of New Zealand (Nominally completed, but may add another chapter or two. Ms. available on request.)
All the Umbrellas in Cherbourg NYCB prima ballerina, Kyra Nichols, stepping onstage
"It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who
hath duly
considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up
what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and
frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance,
wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a
flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations.
Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs,
transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days'
work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a
match and an easy 'Let there not be' - and the many-coloured creation is
shrivelled up in blackness. Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a
power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may
be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would
make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric
of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon.
And looking at life parcel-wise, in the growth of a single lot, who having
a practised vision may not see that ignorance of the true bond between
events, and false conceit of means whereby sequences may be compelled -
like that falsity of eyesight which overlooks the gradations of distance,
seeing that which is afar off as if it were within a step or a grasp - precipitates the mistaken soul on destruction?" -- George Eliot, Daniel
Deronda Chapter XXI
"In a way he really screwed things up for all tenor players to come after him. It was a bit like Bach in the baroque world. What do you do after that? If you go in the same direction, you're just not going to get as good. It still sounds so much deeper and so much more amazing than anything after." (Ingrid Laubrock, saxophonist, composer, discussing Coltrane)"Do your friends open up books and the words inside
look like strange, wild animals to them?
Well....words can't hurt you if don't you read them.
Don't play their game!" -- Derek Zoolander, Male Supermodel
"No capes!" -- Edna Mode, Designer
