Friday, February 12, 2010
Snow scenes ...
The General in the snow.
An igloo built by our neighbor Nichole and her little son Simon.
Celestial hierarchies ...
... certain gods.
Judging by this, and by the response my column last week received, Dawkins et al. might want to pay more attention to the gods.
Judging by this, and by the response my column last week received, Dawkins et al. might want to pay more attention to the gods.
Thought for the day ...
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in this our life!- George Meredith, born on this date in 1828
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Source book ...
... Faulkner Link to Plantation Diary Discovered. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Scholars found Faulkner’s decision to give his white characters the names of slaves particularly arresting. Professor Wolff-King said she believes he was “trying to recreate the slaves lives and give them a voice.”
Not so easy ...
... Audiobook confidential: the art of reading aloud. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.)
The history of audio books begins in 1952, when Dylan Thomas was first persuaded – in the bar of the Chelsea Hotel – to record his poems.
He began the session with 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’. But instead of a thin, quavery voice, Thomas gave of his deep, Welsh best. The microphone levels were duly adjusted.
Thomas continued to read, until the production team realised that the poems were only long enough for one side of an LP. To fill the other side, Thomas recorded a new work – A Child’s Christmas in Wales. The recording remains his everlasting testament.
This week's batch ...
...of TLS Letters: Alyosha Karamazov, 'The Arabs', 'The Pregnant Widow', and more!
Kundera
I've just finished another of Milan Kundera's novels - this time, The Farewell Waltz. As always when it comes Kundera, I was impressed. And this again got me thinking: why not Kundera for the Nobel Prize? Along with Roth he seems a deserving candidate. I mean, if Jelinek can get the nod, why not the author of - in my estimation, at least - two, even three, of the best books written in the past forty years? (In this list I include: The Joke, Unbearable Lightness, and Laughter and Forgetting.) Kundera remains a master.
And in Philadelphia ...
... of all places: The sensual literary salon. (Hat tip, Dave Lull. Thanks to the snowstorm, we didn't get a paper yesterday.)
Critic and scholar ...
... An Interview with Sir Christopher Ricks – Part I. (Hat tip, Dave Lull - for both.)
... An Interview with Sir Christopher Ricks – Part II.
‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is superb and – this is something I’ve said before – as the first poem in someone’s first published book of poems, it is an astonishment. I’ve asked people to suggest candidates for a better first poem in a first book of poems and nobody can ever think of any. So that would be the poem I suppose I would start with if I wished to persuade people much younger than I am to love Eliot. Read that poem, and particularly read it aloud. It has so much which is the best of Victorian verse in it.
... An Interview with Sir Christopher Ricks – Part II.
Keats speaks as if revision is an admission of weakness, but that’s not actually how he proceeded. There is that great letter in which he asks why should he afterwards sit down coldly and consider that which, at the time, came out with fierce vivid critical attention. That is the combination of criticism and creation. But of course we know he did revise. We have evidence that he did. Poetry should come as naturally as ‘leaves to a tree’, and yet you have to prune trees.
Look and listen ...
... The Hunter – A conversation with author Donald E. Westlake. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Thought for the day ...
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.- Sylvia Plath, who died on this date in 1963
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
"Experts" ...
... and The Limits of Bioethics.
[Arthur} Caplan is a bioethicist; his titles imply an expertise in ethics. [Douglas] Hanto served as the chair of the Ethics Committee at the American Society of Transplant Surgeons. Yet what are we to make of their willingness to issue life-and-death pronouncements involving other people? Well, we know a few things about them. First, that they share an absolutist approach to egalitarianism: If all cannot benefit, then none should benefit. Second, as ethicists they presume to know how despairing patients should conduct their private affairs. And third, they appear to have few qualms about conveying to desperately ill people a message of hopelessness: Be passive, dying patients — wait your turn and take no initiative to save your own life.Does being a bioethicist entitle one to any such moral authority, edifying the rest of us about right and wrong? Is this what society should expect of its “ethics experts”?
Good questions.
I wonder...
... is this what Rupert Sheldrake has been driving at? Physicists Prove Teleportation of Energy Is Possible.
Just asking. I have no idea myself.
Just asking. I have no idea myself.
Sounds confused ...
... but no less interesting for that: "SEARCHING FOR GOD IN THE SIXTIES": A Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
... the edges of the guide come unstuck and begin to peel off. What is under it is Nothing. The most terrifying emptiness of nonexistence.
This has never bothered me, and wouldn't even if I thought it were true. As it happens I have never felt it to be so, though I have tried to. And please, spare me the bullshit about "the conformity and false security of the Eisenhower years." I've never been remotely conformist and it was great to be young and alive then.
Well, sure ...
... Happiness as a By-Product: An Interview with Jessa Crispin, Founder of Bookslut.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I don't know if it's a by-product exactly, but it best arrived by indirection.
I don't know if it's a by-product exactly, but it best arrived by indirection.
Ouch ...
... The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'. (hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Graduate school may be about the "disinterested pursuit of learning" for some privileged people. But for most of us, graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life. That dream is long gone in academe for almost everyone entering it now.
Sounds right to me ...
... If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
So, if you are publishing research articles that use computer programs, if you want to claim that you are engaging in science, the programs are in your possession and you will not release them then I would not regard you as a scientist; I would also regard any papers based on the software as null and void.
Pace Michael Hofmann ...
... Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig.
I just read Zweig's little biography of Verlaine. I thought it a gem, wonderfully concise and compassionate and insightful.
I just read Zweig's little biography of Verlaine. I thought it a gem, wonderfully concise and compassionate and insightful.
Thought for the day ...
Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.- Charles Lamb, born on this date in 1775
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
This must be addressed ...
... Tin Ear.
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.
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.
Destination is clear ...
... but the path needs to be cleared: From Hope to Reality in Personalized Medicine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Today's Inquirer reviews ...
... include mine of Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves: Leda and the swan rigmarole.
Also:
... Presidents wielding power.
... Bird flu out of mind but still a threat.
... Glimpses of urban violence, through the eyes of victims.
Also:
... Presidents wielding power.
... Bird flu out of mind but still a threat.
... Glimpses of urban violence, through the eyes of victims.
Thought for the day ...
By confronting us with irreducible mysteries that stretch our daily vision to include infinity, nature opens an inviting and guiding path toward a spiritual life.
- Sir Thomas More, born on this date in 1477
Saturday, February 06, 2010
I love it ...
... Hitchens attacks Gore Vidal for being a 'crackpot'.
I with Hitchens on this. I have always thought Vidal was loathsome.
I with Hitchens on this. I have always thought Vidal was loathsome.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)