Noam Chomsky stormed campus yesterday with a lecture double-header. Bwog commences its in-depth coverage with the linguist's more academic engagement. Below, Linguistics major Sara Maria Hasbun reports on deep thoughts.

Noam Chomsky isn't exactly known for his engaging lectures, but even so, he packed the theatre of the Casa Italiana by 2:45 for a 4:00 booking yesterday. His lecture was titled, "The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden?"; the most entertaining line was the first sentence: "For those of you anxious to hear the punchline, if you have something else to get to, the answer is, 'Everything.'"

The event, sponsored by the Heyman Center for the Humanities, was hyped as a linguistics lecture, though it turned out to be something more closely approximating a history and theory of the academy. Chomsky delivered his remarks straight from a pre-written paper, complete with awkward gaze-shifting from paper to audience. But of course, this was Chomsky. So we made do.

While his political views and loud criticism of the American government have made Chomsky a household name, the Pennsylvania-born academic became famous for developing an entire field of linguistics called "generative grammar", a theory that claims that language is an innate, and uniquely human, ability, as well as claiming that all the languages of the world are inherently based on the same innate syntactic structure.

Chomsky's second speech, a discussion of Harold Pinter's censorious Nobel Prize acceptance speech, failed to impress contributor Armin Rosen. He sends this evaluation of the MIT linguist's decidedly uncritical reception.

I remember reading somewhere that Noam Chomsky was a controversial figure, but if I had to depend on my own sense perceptions for evidence, I'd have serious trouble believing it. Yes, a few people stood outside of Miller Theatre alleging that Chomsky was in fact a "radical adviser to U.S. imperialism." But, the fact that these people were Sparticists, and the fact that they provided what was virtually the evening's only counterpoint to Chomsky's polarizing views on American foreign policy, is evidence either that the entire educated world is in accord with Mr. Chomsky's somewhat divisive political views, or that students at this University are, simply put, intellectually impotent.

And then there's a horrifying third possibility, which is that some intellectually impotent faculty organizer went ahead and assumed that the entire educated world is in accord with said linguist-cum-ultraleft polemicist, and deliberately engineered this event as a means of reinforcing Chomsky's abominable political views. A cursory glance at the program description led me to logically eliminate this possibility: the concept of the event, which was to juxtapose playwright Harold Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech with Chomsky's own views on American foreign policy, implied the kind of differentiation of opinion that makes for intriguing, provocative intellectual discussion. After all—if Pinter and Chomsky were in complete agreement then screening the speech in front of a sold-out Miller Theatre would be the most ludicrous possible act of redundancy.

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1) If you've been ignoring your inbox lately, you probably haven't heard that Columbia will be graced with the presence of the MIT linguistics expert, sometimes-anarchist, and general wise old man, Noam Chomsky. First, Chomsky will speak about Renaissance man Harold Pinter (weird, no?) for five dollars at Miller Theatre. But if you'd rather hear him talk about the topic that made him famous, he'll be at the Italian House on the night of February 5th. Get tickets for the Miller event here.

2) The website of New York Magazine recently launched an interactive version of its approval matrix online. Now web-crawlers can vote on what's high-brow, low-brow, despicable and brilliant, rather than being indoctrinated by the editors of the magazine. Example: Marcel's performance in last night's Top Chef = low-brow + despicable.

3) El Presidente Bush. In an interview with USA Today's David Jackson, 43 responds to Columbia historian Eric Foner's accusation that he's the worst President ever. When he is asked to share the lessons he learned from LBJ's war in Vietnam, Bush replies: "Win."

- JDC