George Carlin (1937 - 2008)
There are various uses for anger, one of them being humor. I found Lenny Bruce via George Carlin, who was criticized for being angry. Anger is one of the major fuels of art, especially the verbal arts of comedy & poetry. Iusually found him mostly sweet-natured & amazed at the absurdity of the world, though. [...]
Adrienne Rich & Graphs of Experience
In her later work, Adrienne Rich has developed a poetic technique that presents the reader with a graph of experience. By experience, I mean the moment by moment tracings of conscious perception. There must of course be a a process of editing during composition, but the poem presents itself as a graph — the poet [...]
Leafing Out
There ought to be a name for the day, in temperate climates, that the trees leaf out. (It would not be the same date each year & it would come earlier the further south one went.) Here in St. Lawrence County, that day was yesterday. The world went from shades of gray & brown to [...]
The Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes
When the last pope first came to this country, I was in graduate school in Iowa. People that I actually knew — people I would never have suspected of such impulses — drove to Chicago to attend a mass presided over by John Paul II. Perhaps it was because John Paul & the poet Czeslaw [...]
What He Said
Increasingly, I feel the same about politics & in particular about one politician as Jonathan Mayhew:
I’ve figured out why I don’t like Hillary. She is a Republican. That Commander-in-chief remark did it for me, because that particular synechdoche is a purely Republican trope.
You see, the constitution makes the president the commander in chief of the [...]
Spam Is Getting Smarter
Some spam bot left the following comment, flagged because I have the software set to send first-time comments to moderation:
i want an original copy of richard cory’s “stopping by woods on a snowy evening..though i qiuet admire you’re comment about this comment..i admit i’ve learned a lot from this poem..God bless!
Either that, or it’s auto-Flarf! [...]
Argument & the Liberal Arts
In looking for something else a few days ago, I came across this discussion by Joseph Kugelmass (at the wittily named Kugelmass Episodes weblog) & thought I’d make note of it here. It’s a response to some passages in Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? that honors Bérubé while disagreeing with him. I [...]
Jr. High Politics
When I was in junior high school in the sixties, you had to be a fan of The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, or The Beach Boys (this was southern California). Call it an early form of identity politics — it was pretty severe. You had to dress like your chosen group, wear your hair like [...]
More on Copyright
A couple of days ago, the Dean of Arts & Sciences at my school forwarded this piece from the Chronicle of Higher Ed to me & several other people with an interest in such matters:
Washington — So a professor wants to show Monty Python and the Holy Grail to her class on British humor, [...]
Credit Where Credit is Due
To be fair, my creative writing students were much better on Wednesday than they were on Monday. I’d still complain that most of them haven’t really tried to apply the principles & ideas & techniques we’ve looked at in example texts & that we’ve discussed in workshop to their own writing. A few have begun [...]
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