Fifty years after the sexual revolution, sex in America is in decline. Americans are having less sex, the share of Americans who say they never once had sex in the past year is rising, and—perhaps most surprising—this revolution in sexual behavior is being led by the young.
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Cultural Clickbait!
Reading about reading
In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks to his treatises.’ Auden’s criticism is like that: a passage of insights instead of a single sustained argument, and the same is true of Samuel Johnson, whose works are a pleasure to read for the feeling of the pressure of a great mind at play. Clive James belongs in this company.
His new book Latest Readings is a kind of reading diary: a collection of short essays, each prompted by one book or a handful he happens to be reading.
Me, too …
… Call me Crazy > New English Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Who cares what Joy Behar thinks about anything? Another piece Dave sent along recently seems relevant to this: Paging Dr. Marx.
Who cares what Joy Behar thinks about anything? Another piece Dave sent along recently seems relevant to this: Paging Dr. Marx.
It is hardly surprising, then, that intellectuals who claim not only to be rationalists but rational are often drawn to gnostic doctrines that claim to reveal the hidden meaning not just of something, but of everything about human existence. Marxism, Freudianism, and, in its most recent form, Darwinism are examples such doctrines. For many, they held, or hold, the key to reality as Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy held the key to the Scriptures.Even I wouldn't insult intellectuals by counting Joy Behar among them, but the editor of Lancet I'm sure is one. Indeed, he sounds like a hopeless case.
Something to think on …
The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain. . . . But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory.
— Alfred North Whitehead, born on this date in 1861
Listen in …
… Episode 255 – Henry Wessells – The Virtual Memories Show.
“This is a project I’ve either been working on for three years, or since I was seven years old.”… Episode 256 — Lauren Weinstein — The Virtual Memories Show.
“Comics are a way to process events in your life. You put it down on the page, and it has its own life, and you’re able to move away from it.”
The virtues of Enlightenment...
...Steven Pinker: ‘The way to deal with pollution is not to rail against consumption’
I would like to hear more of his views on religion.
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Happy Valentine's Day!
I was going to post about the day's history but no one really knows what the history is or who St. Valentine was (there are three contenders) so instead here is the first known Valentine's Day poem, from Charles Duke D' Orleans to his wife Bonne of Armangnac in 1415 (original in the Birtish Museum):
Je suis desja d’amour tanné,
Ma tres doulce Valentinée,
Car pour moi fustes trop tart née,
Et moy pour vous fus trop tost né.
Dieu lui pardoint qui estrené
M’a de vous, pour toute l’année.
Je suis desja d’amour tanné,
Ma tres doulce Valentinée
Bien m’estoye suspeconné,
Qu’auroye telle destinée,
Ains que passast ceste journée,
Combien qu’Amours l’eust ordonné.
Je suis desja d’amour tanné,
Ma tres doulce Valentinée.
Ma tres doulce Valentinée,
Car pour moi fustes trop tart née,
Et moy pour vous fus trop tost né.
Dieu lui pardoint qui estrené
M’a de vous, pour toute l’année.
Je suis desja d’amour tanné,
Ma tres doulce Valentinée
Bien m’estoye suspeconné,
Qu’auroye telle destinée,
Ains que passast ceste journée,
Combien qu’Amours l’eust ordonné.
Je suis desja d’amour tanné,
Ma tres doulce Valentinée.
English Translation:
I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine,
Since for me you were born too soon,
And I for you was born too late.
God forgives him who has estranged
Me from you for the whole year.
I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine.
My very gentle Valentine,
Since for me you were born too soon,
And I for you was born too late.
God forgives him who has estranged
Me from you for the whole year.
I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine.
Well might I have suspected
That such a destiny,
Thus would have happened this day,
How much that Love would have commanded.
I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine
That such a destiny,
Thus would have happened this day,
How much that Love would have commanded.
I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine
Blogging note …
I won't be doing any blogging again until much later today. I have a doctor's appointment this morning, and after that I'm taking the train to Swarthmore to visit a friend.
Together at last …
… Pork Roll, Lent, and Catholic Identity | George Weigel | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.
— P. G. Wodehouse, who died on this date in 1975
Mark thy calendar …
THE GREEN LINE
CAFÉ POETRY SERIES
& POETRY IN COMMON
CELEBRATE THE PUBLICATION
OF THE NEW BOOK, STEP LIGHTLY,
BY DONNA WOLF-PALACIO
WITH A BOOK SIGNING & READING
On TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018, 7 PM
including
An INTRODUCTION & READING
BY LEONARD GONTAREK
THE GREEN LINE CAFE IS LOCATED
AT 45TH & LOCUST STREETS
PHILADELPHIA, PA
(Please note the address, there are
other Green Line Café locations.)
greenlinecafe.com
This Event Is Free
Donna Wolf-Palacio is author of What I Don't Know The Other Side, and Step Lightly, published by Finishing Line Press. She taught a poetry workshop at the University of the Arts and was editor/consultant of the UARTS Poetry Review. She has published her writing in Poetry, The Pennsylvania Gazette, The Musehouse Journal, Intro, The Interpreter, Poems ftom the Heart: Poems about Adoption, and Voices .She has received grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Leeway Foundation, and the Pennsyvania Council for the Arts.
Poems of Donna Wolf-Palacio:
Step Lightly
You never seemed to get it right, the puzzle of your mother.
No god or therapy could free you from those wires she tugged
to keep the medicine flowing. So you read the masters for a sign,
Winnicott, Freud, the family people, stars so far away,
yet windows of hope for a real eternity.
Some days I see your eyes blink with disbelief
at their humane unwavering light.
Yet while you searched, your words and teaching
brought you to the source. Sometimes, you couldn't take it in.
There was so much rage in you. But other times you took it whole,
and what you made was personal, irreplaceable.
Hells and Hierarchies
“All hells and heirarchies are works of the imagination.”
Anthony Madrid
Could it be more true?
The past
a plate
we can't break.
Each piece has
a spot.
And there it is, outlay to the outlay.
Mind around it
in memory. The stone falls.
Maybe a small stone.
Still, a stone.
Reading the Poetry of Du Fu
I like the sound of the words in the old poem, “little farm boat”.
They take me out of this house, this city, this time.
We glide down a river. The town fades behind the blue trees, and the house
is a white dot on the shore. Little farm boat in autumn.
CAFÉ POETRY SERIES
& POETRY IN COMMON
CELEBRATE THE PUBLICATION
OF THE NEW BOOK, STEP LIGHTLY,
BY DONNA WOLF-PALACIO
WITH A BOOK SIGNING & READING
On TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018, 7 PM
including
An INTRODUCTION & READING
BY LEONARD GONTAREK
THE GREEN LINE CAFE IS LOCATED
AT 45TH & LOCUST STREETS
PHILADELPHIA, PA
(Please note the address, there are
other Green Line Café locations.)
greenlinecafe.com
This Event Is Free
Donna Wolf-Palacio is author of What I Don't Know The Other Side, and Step Lightly, published by Finishing Line Press. She taught a poetry workshop at the University of the Arts and was editor/consultant of the UARTS Poetry Review. She has published her writing in Poetry, The Pennsylvania Gazette, The Musehouse Journal, Intro, The Interpreter, Poems ftom the Heart: Poems about Adoption, and Voices .She has received grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Leeway Foundation, and the Pennsyvania Council for the Arts.
Poems of Donna Wolf-Palacio:
Step Lightly
You never seemed to get it right, the puzzle of your mother.
No god or therapy could free you from those wires she tugged
to keep the medicine flowing. So you read the masters for a sign,
Winnicott, Freud, the family people, stars so far away,
yet windows of hope for a real eternity.
Some days I see your eyes blink with disbelief
at their humane unwavering light.
Yet while you searched, your words and teaching
brought you to the source. Sometimes, you couldn't take it in.
There was so much rage in you. But other times you took it whole,
and what you made was personal, irreplaceable.
Hells and Hierarchies
“All hells and heirarchies are works of the imagination.”
Anthony Madrid
Could it be more true?
The past
a plate
we can't break.
Each piece has
a spot.
And there it is, outlay to the outlay.
Mind around it
in memory. The stone falls.
Maybe a small stone.
Still, a stone.
Reading the Poetry of Du Fu
I like the sound of the words in the old poem, “little farm boat”.
They take me out of this house, this city, this time.
We glide down a river. The town fades behind the blue trees, and the house
is a white dot on the shore. Little farm boat in autumn.
Much in what he says …
… Sam Shepard's 'Spy of the First Person' Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I have seen only one Shepard play, True West. I thought it was awful.
I have seen only one Shepard play, True West. I thought it was awful.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Well, it looks like I'll be following the seasons with Karl Ove Knausgaard. This time, it's Winter -- and as with Autumn, I'm a willing participant.
Part of what I've enjoyed about these short essays is their mixture of levity and profundity: right on point, each and every time, Knausgaard delivers an observation, an aphorism, a detail -- all of which transform the commonplace into something more, something endowed with a flicker of meaning.
In my reading, Autumn was more successful, perhaps, than Winter, but I attribute that as much to the season as to any deficiency in Knausgaard's prose. Winter marks the end: of life, of movement, of warmth. The topics that accompany this have the potential to be less engaging -- certainly less hopeful.
And there were indeed sections of Winter which trace a hopelessness: a preoccupation with death, even with the underworld. But there were equally, I felt, chapters which moved in the opposite direction, which asked the reader to see beyond the snow and ice, to identify a beauty in the brown earth just below the frozen surface.
At this point, I guess, I'm in for the rest of the year: Spring and Summer will be on my list. But it's not out of obligation that I'll read them as much as curiosity: as the year progresses and as the earth renews, I'm eager to see how Knausgaard's writing mirrors that change, how it assumes a faint and then sudden sense of life. "Nothing," writes Knausgaard, "ends with what the eyes can see."
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Wonderful …
… Poem | Wintry Gratitude, an Ode | Commonweal Magazine.
#TimothyMurphy is my gay, libertarian, #Beowulf-translating, prairie-loving, formalist friend, a friend with a bad cancer prognosis. Tim pulled through surgery last week and immediately wrote a gorgeous #sonnet. He is intent on making every last moment count, a lesson for us all.]
Too Many Snowflakes in Princeton!
The N-word class (see "Snowflakes in Princeton" here) has been cancelled, according to The Weekly Standard.
Author (podcast) Request
I am working on material about creativity. I have been fascinated by the creative process, and creative people, for a long time; as you may know I do intellectual property (patent, trademark, copyright, etc.) law (as well as civil rights law) and IP law is all about creativity.
I would love any thoughts, insights, etc. etc. our incredible audience might be able to provide, no matter how big or small, and no matter the subject matter, from mechanical inventions to writing to art of all types. The end result will be a series of podcasts as well as some type of hard copy (TBD).
I can be reached at jchovanes@chovanes.com.
Thank you!
I would love any thoughts, insights, etc. etc. our incredible audience might be able to provide, no matter how big or small, and no matter the subject matter, from mechanical inventions to writing to art of all types. The end result will be a series of podcasts as well as some type of hard copy (TBD).
I can be reached at jchovanes@chovanes.com.
Thank you!
What goes around ...
So, on Facebook, there are various ads for programs etc. that do silly stuff, like on the Boardwalk when I was little. ("What will you look like when you're 80?") The other day one came up on my newsfeed that was "What will you look like as the opposite sex?"
Irony is us so I had to do it
Irony is us so I had to do it
Moose, no squirrel
Hanging around the house in Big Sky MT yesterday morning. A little different than what hung around the house in Philadelphia.
Aragorn (the dog on the porch) didn't know what to do. I said "shoo, shoo" and they went away, the mom (a/k/a "cow") pissing on the sidewalk in disdain as she left.
And here's an article on the Moose & Squirrel Phenomenon when making music.
Untitled …
Still in the body, the great gift.
Body Gestalt, Chi exercises, narcissism.
We are headed towards a horizon
where there will be a light,
that is not the light of the sun.
Time will------------
no museum will house the artifacts.
What did they think they were doing
When they played their games of power?
C.2018 Alexander Marshall
Body Gestalt, Chi exercises, narcissism.
We are headed towards a horizon
where there will be a light,
that is not the light of the sun.
Time will------------
no museum will house the artifacts.
What did they think they were doing
When they played their games of power?
C.2018 Alexander Marshall
More than just looking …
… The Habit of Seeing | Commonweal Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In a lecture on “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” O’Connor explored what a Catholic novel and a Catholic novelist might be, with insights that remain valid today. For a novelist, O’Connor asserts, the only access to the supernatural is through the natural. You have to write what you see, not what you want to see or think you ought to see. If you close your own eyes and try to see with the eyes of the church, “the result is another addition to that large body of pious trash for which we have so long been famous.” The solution for a writer, O’Connor proposed, is not to abandon the eyes of the church, but to reach the point at which “the church becomes so much a part of his personality that he can forget about her.” She defined a Catholic novel as “one that represents reality adequately as we see it manifested in this world of things and human relationships.” Only by representing these things and relationships can the fiction writer “approach a contemplative knowledge of the mystery they embody.”
Getting it …
… Debunking the Caricature of Jack Kerouac the Nihilist | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Underlying all of this as Kerouac’s spiritual bedrock was his Catholic upbringing in Lowell, Massachusetts among working-class French Canadian immigrants. Kerouac described himself as a “strange solitary Catholic mystic” whose ecstatic vision of life was the direct result of an eschatology of the end of time. What he longed for was contact with the heavenly eternity overlaying and occasionally penetrating our anodyne perceptions of time. “Life is a dream already over,” he said. It was the furthest thing from an existential claim of the primacy of death and absurdity. It was life reinvigorated by recognition of a transcendent reality.
“I know everything’s alright but I want proof and the Buddhas and the Virgin Marys are there reminding me of the solemn pledge of faith in this harsh and stupid earth where we rage our so-called lives in a sea of worry, meat for Chicagos of Graves—right this minute my very father and my very brother lie side by side in mud in the North and I’m supposed to be smarter than they are—being quick I am dead.”
It's a pretty good poem, too …
… TS Eliot's The Waste Land remains one of the finest reflections on mental illness ever written | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… the crisis at the heart of The Waste Land wasn’t only global, it was also personal. Eliot’s wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, also had poor physical and mental health and he scattered his poem with references to their life together. “I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter,” ends the poem’s first stanza, in one of the most powerful and subtle lines ever written about insomnia, of which he and Vivienne were both sufferers. She asked him to remove some lines due to their being too personal, but many others about a husband and wife living with mental illness were retained. “My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me./ Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.” Theirs was one of the worst romantic mismatches in modern letters.
Something to think on …
Horse sense is the instinct that keeps horses from betting on men.
— Josephine Tey, who died on this date in 1952
Monday, February 12, 2018
RIP …
… Vic Damone, renowned American crooner, dies aged 89 | Music | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Treacherous enemy …
… Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Beat Column: The Vietnam Spy Who Betrayed Us.
… The Journalist-Viet Cong Spy Who Changed the Course Of The Vietnam War.
Time magazine obviously did a great job vetting this guy.
… The Journalist-Viet Cong Spy Who Changed the Course Of The Vietnam War.
Time magazine obviously did a great job vetting this guy.
Hmm …
… The 10 worst colleges for free speech: 2018 - FIRE.
The guy at Drexel certainly had the right to say the things he said. But he was also an embarrassment to the university. Genocide is not a suitable subject for humor. There was also his nausea over hearing that someone had given a soldier a first-class seat on an airplane. The professor is no one I would want to have teaching any of my kids. Which is not to say Drexel couldn’t have handled it better. It is, after all, important to defend speech one doesn’t approve of.
In case you wondered …
… No, Asparagus Won't Give You Cancer | American Council on Science and Health.
What went wrong on, literally, a global scale? Sloppiness combined with a greater desire for eyeballs and ad revenue rather than telling people the truth.
Those dark '50s …
… About Last Night | Just because: Tanaquil Le Clercq and Jacques d’Amboise dance Afternoon of a Faun.
This is the sort of thing we had to put up with when I was in high school.
Light and the Light …
… Mysteries of the Light - The Catholic Thing.
When Michelangelo painted Jesus in the Last Judgment on the model of the Belvedere Apollo, the Greek sun god, he was self-consciously following a venerable tradition, which bridged Christianity to the religious aspirations of humankind.
Something to think on …
Speech is the small change of silence.
— George Meredith, born on this date in 1828
Sunday, February 11, 2018
Anniversary …
… Informal Inquiries (2nd edition): Anniversary — St. Bernadette’s visions of the Virgin Mary.
Here is my review of Franz Werfel's The Song of Bernadette.
Here is my review of Franz Werfel's The Song of Bernadette.
Hmm …
… A Stay Against Confusion: On Why I Started Writing Poetry Again - The Millions. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
Learn everything you possibly can, and you will discover later that none of it was superfluous.
— Hugh of Saint Victor, who died on this date in 1141
Saturday, February 10, 2018
Snowflakes in Princeton!
Professor uses the N-word, students walk out.
The chair of Princeton’s anthropology department, Carolyn Rouse, defended Rosen’s decision to use the racial slur. The purpose of the course, Rouse said, was to give students the ability to clearly state why hate speech should or should not be protected, using an argument other than “because it made me feel bad.”The underprivileged have to learn the language of the oppressor -- I cannot shrivel up in a ball every time someone talks about how trans people are mentally ill or sexual deviants or whatever. It is so hard to take but how am I going to ever win any progress for us if I just collapse? I have to take the hurtful insulting terrible language in order to fight them and claim my, and other trans peoples', rights.
Canadians on Peterson …
… Peter Hitchens seems vexed that not every book ever written was intended for him. Also that he didn’t write it. – 5 Feet of Fury. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… Essays in Idleness: Jordan Peterson. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… Essays in Idleness: Jordan Peterson. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
He is not, and does not claim to be, Christian. His lectures on biblical texts are Jungian blather — the man was after all trained as a shrink — but not maliciously so. He is a diligent independent reader, however, of a shortlist of standard Western classics, who can be no more intimidated by the Lit majors than he is by the campus gestapo, and this is hugely to his credit. He is a man who sincerely seeks truth, wherever he finds it lurking, so I wouldn’t say he won’t end up Catholic; but for the foreseeable future he is a good old-fashioned liberal, fallen upon these evil days.
Something to think on …
The trouble with psychology is that it doesn't take human nature into account.
— Ruth Rendell, born on this date in 1930
Something to think on …
Clap an extinguisher upon your irony if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.
— Charles Lamb, born on this date in 1775
Friday, February 09, 2018
No one went broke underestimating the public ...
I recently came across the phenomenon of YouTubers, who do what I consider stupid and harmful stuff yet apparently make millions ...
Citing his “recent pattern of behavior,” the Google-owned platform announced this morning that it had “temporarily suspended” ads on Paul’s channels — stopping an income stream estimated to be worth more than a million dollars a month ...
According to YouTube, this behavior includes a number of different incidents. Most notably, the YouTuber caused international controversy when he filmed a suicide victim in Japan’s Aokigahara forest at the beginning of the year ... [H]is infractions [also] include trying to monetize a video that violates the company’s advertiser-friendly guidelines, encouraging his followers to do the Tide Pod challenge, and, in one recent video, taking a fish out of his pond to jokingly give it CPRand then tasering a dead rat.
Divide and reject ...
Tucked away in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, somewhere along the winding roads that hug Great Lakes shores, is an idyllic town named Bay View. For more than a century, generations of “Bay Viewers” have congregated here to share in summer activities.
What started out as a modest camping ground for Methodist families 140 years ago has quietly developed into a stunning vacation spot for people who can afford the upkeep of a second home ...
In Bay View, only practicing Christians are allowed to buy houses, or even inherit them.
Something to think on …
Art is like politics. Any theory carried too far ends in sterility, and freshness is only gained by following some other line.
— Amy Lowell, born on this date in 1874
Thursday, February 08, 2018
That interview …
… Why Can't People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Actually Saying? - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Peterson was not evasive or unwilling to be clear about his meaning. And Newman’s exaggerated restatements of his views mostly led viewers astray, not closer to the truth.I agree that the online attacks on Newman are abhorrent, but she does come off in this encounter as a godawful interviewer. Either that, or she has serious comprehension problems.
Minority report …
… Jordan Peterson doesn’t go nearly far enough | The Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I am too keenly aware of the good things which have been utterly lost in recent years to be comforted by what looks like an attempt to reconcile us with the revolutionary order. I find it hard to applaud efforts to help me adapt to a world which I think has gone utterly wrong.I confess I feel much the same way.
Newsweeklies? Going, going, ...
Then on Monday, February 5, I reached my tipping point: The two respected editorial leaders of Newsweek, Editor in Chief Bob Roe and Executive Editor Ken Li, were summarily fired along with a strong reporter who was investigating the various Newsweek scandals. It was too much tsouris for me. I submitted a letter of resignation, probably marking the last time I work for a newsweekly. It’s possible in a few years, no one will.
Blogging note …
My blogging will begin sometime later today. My wife has a bad cold and I must do some shopping and some other tings as well.
Something to think on …
Let thy fortune be what it will, 'tis thy mind alone that makes thee poor or rich, miserable or happy.
— Robert Burton, born on this date in 1577
Wednesday, February 07, 2018
Hmm …
… Corey Van Landingham || Winter 2018 || West Branch Wired | Bucknell University. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I have written my share of negative reviews. But I don’t write negative reviews of poetry. I recently turned down an assignment because, when I read the poems, they just didn’t grab me, and I didn’t feel like spending any time explaining why. I prefer writing about poetry that excites me. I prefer to ignore poetry that doesn’t. Such, as I say, is my preference. It involves no grand critical dictum. At my age, I think I have the right, at least sometimes, to do as I please.
RIP …
… John Perry Barlow, Internet Pioneer, 1947-2018 | Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Choosing your words …
…Puttin’ on the style by Dominic Green | The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Written English is at what the euphemists would call an inflection point. The nineteenth-century ideal of a democratic mass culture is a bizarre historical dream. The twentieth-century empire of “Mid-Cult” is gone. The departments of English got the theoretical barbarians for whom they were waiting. Standards of literacy are declining, even though the tests are getting easier. Knowledge of a foreign language, even Spanish, is rare among those without immigrant parents. Young Americans, like Romans among the British tribes, struggle to understand the language of their servants.
Love, humor and a certain detached irony ...
A close friend (since high school!) sent me this yesterday:
What is brown and sticky?
A stick.
FYI …
 | |
|
Tracking decline…
… NPR Is Seeking a Science Editor. Science Education Not Required. | American Council on Science and Health.
Under the qualifications section, the ad says, "Education: Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience." Amazingly, not only is a background in science unnecessary, college itself is optional. Despite such a low bar, whoever gets hired for the job will be responsible for covering "consumer health trends, medicine, public health, biotech and health policy." Seriously?And I know people whose source of choice for news is — NPR.
In case you wondered …
… Opinion | What Trump’s Speech Says About His Mental Fitness - The New York Times. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… the distinction between public and private speech is key here, so I am unconvinced that his current speech patterns can be analyzed as evidence of dementia. Instead, they’re characteristics of casual speech as it has always existed.It is easy to forget how much casual speech in general differs from writing. We tend to imagine our speech is tidier than it often is. The complete sentences and logical throughlines of writing are a stylization of speech, rather than a mirror image.
Something to think on …
Why should we need extra time in which to enjoy ourselves? If we expect to enjoy our life, we will have to learn to be joyful in all of it, not just at stated intervals when we can get time or when we have nothing else to do.
— Laura Ingalls Wilder, born on this date in 1867
Tuesday, February 06, 2018
This just in …
… from Dan Bloom: EARTHQUAKE in #Taiwan last night 11:50 pm, ten minutes before midnight: big shake, 2 hotels collapsed, one on its side. I thought I was going to die. Photo here: Life is precious https://e3.365dm.com/18/02/
Terrible. Glad Dan’s OK.
Terrible. Glad Dan’s OK.
Plato! thou shouldst be living at this hour …
… Myths, True and Otherwise, Review: '12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos' by Jordan Peterson. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I may have problems with Peterson’s viewpoint, but I certainly don’t think he deserves the treatment described in this piece: The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon.
NOTE: I had left out the word don’t in that last comment. Sorry about that.
Peterson's 1999 first book, Maps of Meaning, is an academic Jungian romp through cultural anthropology and evolutionary psychology. Reflections on the symbolic and evolutionary significance of mythic archetypes for human psychology and health are the heart of Peterson's project …
To explain myth in terms of biological evolution strikes me as a stretch, to put it mildly.
… in a sense the book is Peterson's response to Nietzsche's On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, attempting through existential choice to make the symbolism of our cultural heritage still spiritually significant, narratively true even as it is essentially false, to provide the tools to ward off encroaching nihilism in a world where the state of nature is always crouching at the door. It is a lonely vision for life, making meaning through making yourself, becoming the fittest you can be.
How can something essentially false be narratively true, except in the sense that, if it were true, this is how the narrative would go? But it isn’t true, as far as you're concerned. The basis of your narrative is, in your opinion, counterfactual. How is this supposed to ward off nihilism? Nothing plus nothing remains nothing. But let’s pretend otherwise?
Faith leaves room for doubt. What you assert may be untrue. But you do not know that and assert it anyway.
NOTE: I had left out the word don’t in that last comment. Sorry about that.
Something sacramental …
… The “Cassocked Shadow” of Richard Wilbur – Catholic World Report. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Beginning with his New and Collected Poems, published in 1988, Wilbur’s decision on how to reprint the body of his poetry would only strengthen that gleam. The volume placed the new poems at the start, and then reprinted his previous collections in reverse chronological order. To read them thus entailed reading the older poems through, or in light of, the more recent ones, all the way back to the beginning—and this could have an uncanny effect. The newer work displays a decidedly sacramental or Catholic imagination … and the earlier poems suddenly seem to bear anticipations of it within themselves.
Border wars …
… Informal Inquiries (2nd edition): The General and The Jaguar (2006).
It is hardly surprising that crossing a border and killing the citizens of another country would invite retaliation.
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