First, to all reflexive types: This post is not about Sarah Palin. It is about public speaking, something I have done quite a lot of in my life - rather successfully, if I do say so myself. Giving a speech or a lecture is not the same as reading one. I usually have a complete text in front of me, but it has highlighted phrases that I take as my cues (I have also given more than a passing glance to Rhetorica ad Herennium, and I studied rhetoric and public speaking in college, thanks to which I had one of my great undergraduate successes). I have also given talks just from notes. Those notes can be written anywhere. I usually use a little scrap of paper. But you can also write them on your shirt cuffs - though there goes that shirt. Or your hand. Anyway, if you've never stood before an audience and tried to be coherent about something for maybe 45 minutes, don't be too hasty - like this dimwit press secretary, who is himself rarely coherent - with your sneers.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Event cancelled ...
The reading at the Moonstone Arts Center, 110A S. 13th Street, in Center City Philadelphia, scheduled for tomorrow night (Feb. 10) at 7 PM, has been postponed because of weather (or, rather, because of fear of weather). It will be rescheduled in April.
Judging by the forecast the fear of weather is fully justified.
Fascinating ...
... Shylock, My Students, and Me. (Hat tip, Scott Stein.)
I would note that when Portia says, "...consider this, / That, in the course of justice, none of us / Should see salvation,” she is theologically correct: God's mercy always trumps his justice.The initial notion that my job had become easy, since I no longer had to defend Shylock, began to change as I realized that the all-encompassing, reflexive sympathy my students felt for him was perhaps even more insidiously wrong than the earlier prejudice toward him. In an odd reversal, I, the Jewish teacher, now became the only person in the classroom to argue that Shylock was still a villain, despite the abuse he had suffered, and that his stubborn call for a pound of flesh was the emblem of his villainy.
The accused ...
... An interview with Geert Wilders. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Pat Condell has some comments on the case:
Pat Condell has some comments on the case:
Well, I am linking to it ...
... Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Well, maybe ...
... In Defense of a Common Culture.
But a liberal education was originally meant to be an education befitting a free man.
School choice by its very nature militates against one of his major recommendations: the adoption of a common curriculum that all students must learn. Libertarianism, his analysis reminds us, is not the same as conservatism. Unquestioning reliance on the free market puts the individual and his or her immediate desires at the center of the moral universe, not unlike the cultural and moral liberationism celebrated during the 1960s. If the New Left was particularistic rather than universalistic, so are advocates of school choice. By contrast, Hirsch argues that we need more common space and not the invasion of the schools by consumer culture.
But a liberal education was originally meant to be an education befitting a free man.
Pet implausibilities ...
... Casting Widely, Lots of Keepers. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
... the vice president is revealed as a gifted mimic of Washington figures (impressions that are quickly put off the record), a wry witness to the trappings of high office (divers are on hand for the excursion, he explains, "in case I fall out of the boat"), and an appealing companion. Mr. Labash ends up thoroughly liking the warmonger: "Don't get me wrong," he writes. "I feel sick about it."
Thought for the day ...
For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.- Amy Lowell, born on this date in 1874
Which makes this age ...
... like most others before it: Once a profession, writing is becoming a social activity. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The 18th-century may have created Grub Street, but it also gave us Walpole's and Lord Chesterfield's letters.
The 18th-century may have created Grub Street, but it also gave us Walpole's and Lord Chesterfield's letters.
A new form ...
... Scholar and Blogger. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
... one reason why it is wonderful to have a selection from A Don’s Life in book form: we aging Luddites like to reread things we enjoyed, and blogs can be hard to track back (especially if you’re reading in bed). Another is the perspective that the book form gives. Blogs strew the electronic landscape like autumn leaves in Vallombrosa. But A Don’s Life has special qualities that set it—and other blogs like it—apart from the mass, and this anthology helps to make them visible in a new way.
A good chat ...
... Jeff Bridges opens up his Crazy Heart.
Crazy Heart is a good movie, but it is outshone by the performers. Bridges is simply great. Come to think of it, so are Colin Farrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Once expects Robert Duvall to be great, and he is.
Crazy Heart is a good movie, but it is outshone by the performers. Bridges is simply great. Come to think of it, so are Colin Farrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Once expects Robert Duvall to be great, and he is.
Monday, February 08, 2010
Reign in the ideas ...
... Nassim Taleb...continued from ai5000 Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Ortega y Gasset says somewhere - I think it's in On Love - that a mere theorizer entertains any number of theories, but that a genuine theorist only has one.
Heresy alert ...
... Fodor's fight against fitness. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The big winner is evolution itself. It'd become a subject that never ends, like history. They'll always be variations in the way the past can be reconstructed, always new details to add, always unseen factors at play. In her review, Midgley says Darwin would have welcomed that. Whatever the story of terrestrial evolution turns out to be, the story of evolutionary science now looks radically incomplete.
Middlebrow days ...
... A Tour of 'Hell' in Evening Dress. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
By the way, I remember seeing that reading of the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego on the the Sullivan show. Of course, we all know - thanks to Newton Minow - that TV was just a vast wasteland in those days. Not like today.
Network TV was like that in the era of what came to be known as "middlebrow" culture. Back then and for long afterward, you could switch on your set and see a new play by Horton Foote or a lecture by Leonard Bernstein about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in between sitcoms, just as you could read all about the wide world of art each week in Time and Life. In those days it was taken for granted that the upward mobility of middle-class Americans extended to cultural matters, and that anyone, educated or not, could appreciate highbrow art so long as it was presented in an accessible and engaging way.
By the way, I remember seeing that reading of the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego on the the Sullivan show. Of course, we all know - thanks to Newton Minow - that TV was just a vast wasteland in those days. Not like today.
Up from theory ...
... Confessions of an Accidental Literary Scholar. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The nail in the coffin of my brief career as a linguist was probably a seminar I took that winter about the philosophy of language. The aim of this seminar was to formulate a theory that would explain to a Martian "what it is that we know when we know a language." I could not imagine a more objectless, melancholy project. The solution turned out to consist of a series of propositions having the form "'Snow is white' is true if snow is white." The professor, a gaunt logician with a wild mane of red hair, wrote this sentence on the board during nearly every class, and we would discuss why it wasn't trivial. Outside the window, snow piled deeper and deeper.
Thought for the day ...
A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for.- Martin Buber, born on this date in 1878
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Who knew?
... Obama vs. Einstein.
I think Axelrod vastly overstated the President's role in this paper, as Glenn Reynolds notes here.
The key thesis of the Obama-Tribe paper is contained in the opening sentences of its abstract: “Twentieth-century physics revolutionized our understanding of the physical world. Relativity theory replaced a view of the universe as made up of isolated objects acting upon one another at a distance with a model in which space itself was curved and changed by the presence and movement of objects. Quantum physics undermined the confidence of scientists in their ability to observe and understand a phenomenon without fundamentally altering it in the process.”
All of these sentences are completely wrong.
I think Axelrod vastly overstated the President's role in this paper, as Glenn Reynolds notes here.
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