The Fine Balance of Political Inaction
Tom Matrullo writes:
It teeters on antinomy: The people who can speak something like the truth lack power to do what the truth requires; the people in power can’t bring themselves to speak anything like the truth.
Tom is responding to Al Gore’s having said:
At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA’s domestic surveillance. [...]
(Still) Cold
It was twenty-seven below zero here by the river at 7:30 this morning. The sun is shining, though, & it’s now up to four degrees above. This is one of the longer cold snaps I can recall. It regularly gets this cold in January, but we don’t often go for several days without a spike [...]
“Musicianship” by Barbara Guest
From Barbara Guest’s 2002 book, Miniatures:
Musicianship
How far are you going in the culture program? Lizt draws nearer. Wagner overwhelmed us in that last demonic song.
Where the snowline fell on its supple track, people lost their maps in advance culture. And the faces, on the back row singing: rare tonalism, lying on its sides like a [...]
Cold (Still) & Interpreting Poetry
It’s minus twenty-one (F) as I write this at 7:30. Carole has already headed off to the barn where she boards her horse to muck out stalls, which she does to help pay her horse’s board. (The call it “board” even though I’m pretty sure the horses don’t eat from a table.) She wouldn’t have [...]
“My Problem” by Rae Armantrout
I’ve been meaning to post this poem for a long time. As my students might say, I can identify with it.
My Problem
It is my problem
to squeeze
the present from the past
by demanding particulars.
When the dog is used
to represent the inner
man, I need to ask,
“What kind of dog is it?”
If a parasitic
metaphor grows all
throughout – good!
Why stop [...]
Cold
There’s a poem in my book Customs that begins, “The oldest words are those invented for weather.” I had a note from a friend on the west coast yesterday who is selling his house. When he was building it twenty years ago, we put that line into the concrete forms when a retaining wall was [...]
Blog Talk: Hum-SS Coloquium
Note: This post was slightly edited after my presentation this afternoon. I’ll also be adding an afterword.
I’m giving a talk tomorrow afternoon to colleagues & interested parties at the university in blogging. When I first conceived this talk last semester, I was going to talk about academics blogging their research, careers, political opinions, etc. [...]
From a Summer Notebook
I was reading Nadler’s masterful biography of Spinoza last summer & jotted the following in my notebook:
Unlike Spinoza, I don’t believe there is any point of view outside the world, but, damn, his refutation of teleology is powerful!
Flipping through that notebook earlier this morning looking for a note about something else, I was stuck again [...]
Obama Lays it Down
Despite the fact that I have been skeptical of Barack Obama’s politics (too centrist for me), I have a small bet with Shelley Powers that he will be the next president. But even if I lose my bet, it does my heart good to see the senator taking on the liars at Fox News. The [...]
Nodding in Jonathan Mayhew’s Direction
Jonathan, as usual, right about this:
… “prosody… ‘the science of versification; that part of the study of language which deals with the forms of metrical composition,’ to cite the OED’s definition–has largely disappeared from English-language poetry.”
Wouldn’t that be like saying that herpetology has disappeared from snakes? I speak a language, but I am not [...]
