Morning roundup …

… Courtesy of Dave Lull:



… Help for the philosophically challenged: Edward  : Jerry-built atheism.

The claim that the only respectable options are natural science and conceptual analysis is itself neither a claim that is supported by natural science, nor something revealed by conceptual analysis. (The naturalist might try to bluff his way past this difficulty by asserting that neuroscience or cognitive science supports his case, but if so you should call his bluff. For neuroscience and cognitive science, when they touch on matters of metaphysical import, are rife with tendentious and unexamined metaphysical assumptions. And insofar as such assumptions are naturalist assumptions, the naturalist merely begs the question in appealing to them.)

… Canny craftsman: The sound of sense: Clive James on Robert Frost.

Eventually there will be three volumes, but the first volume [of letters] is already enough to prove, if proof were needed, that Frost was anything but the shit-kicking fireside verse-whittler of legend. When not actually practising his art, he thought about it so long and hard that it was a wonder he had time for anything else. His detractors would like to think that he found plenty of time to suborn editors, sabotage rival poets and practice infinite cruelties on his wife and family, but even his detractors must have noticed that he got quite a lot of meticulously crafted poems written. These letters are proof that his working methods and principles were the product of a mental preoccupation that began very early. Right from the start he had an idea of what a poem should do.

… Good news, I guess: Beyond Foodism.

Foodism is just the latest manifestation of the dietary laws our distant ancestors drew up. The best thought on the subject of food that I know of is this, from Lin Yutang: "If a chicken is killed, and not cooked to perfection, that chicken has died in vain."

… The afterlife of an elegy — Mourning Tongues: How Auden Was Modified in the Guts of the Living by Nina Martyris.

… Auden’s words were quite literally, in Auden’s line from the poem, “modified in the guts of the living,” and how, in a feat that even someone as reputedly self-anointing as Auden could not possibly have foreseen, it went on to link a multicultural pantheon of greats: Yeats, Auden, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney.

… Probably a good idea: Where Only Print Is Permitted.