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 [...]
Wit
I know there is a large literature on wit, but while writing the previous post it struck me that we use the term to name two essential things: 1) Basic smarts, the ability to have your wits about you; 2) the ability to use language against itself in order to stand against conventional wisdom. So [...]
Goodbye to All That
I have been guilty of a certain utopianism when it comes to life on line. For a while I even believed in the idea that we could have “open discussions” about politics on line. IHE’s discussions disabused me of that idea right quick, though I should have seen it years earlier — sometimes I’m witlessly [...]
Not Sentimental?
Here’s another poem — John Crowe Ransom’s “Dead Boy” — I have loved a long time & though I now find Ransom’s celebration of the “dynastic” families of the Agrarian South pretty offensive, the language of this poem is not sentimental. Ransom does not ask the reader to produce an emotional response for which [...]
Hesse as Individualist
Via Wood s Lot, this thought from Hermann Hesse:
My instinct as an individualist and artist has always warned me most urgently against this capacity of men for becoming drunk on collective suffering, collective pride, collective hatred, and collective honour. When this morbid exaltation becomes perceptible in a room, a hall, a village, a city, or [...]
Lenny Bruce’s Birthday
Steve Gimbel reminds us that today is Lenny Bruce’s birthday & links to a great You Tube video / audio clip. Bruce is one of the great poets of the 20th century.
Everybody’s Talkin’ . . .
. . . about Vietnam analogies. I remember hearing back in 2004 that Iraq was different from Vietnam. I was told more than once that because Iraq had sand whereas Vietnam has jungle that we’d be able to “win.” The nasty “moral black hole” [see Rick Perlstein link below] of the word “win” in this [...]
Can Mere Language (Without Pictures) Be Obscene?
An American court will decide. It is apparently an unsettled legal question. In any case, bluenose Pennsylvania prosecutor Mary Beth Buchanan, employing the awesome power of the federal government, has indicted dangerous porno queen Karen Fletcher, “a 56-year-old recluse living on disability payments . . . for writings distributed on the Internet to about [...]
Cornel West on Democracy
Via Wood s Lot, here is a link to an essay, “Democracy Matters,” by Cornel West:
Meanwhile the market-driven media—fueled by our vast [...]
Jonathan Miller’s Alice
Because I am teaching Alice in Wonderland this semester, I ordered Miller’s 1966 production, which includes turns by Peter Sellers, Sir John Gielgud, & Sir Michael Redgrave, though the most valuable minutes on the disk — certainly from a film history perspective — may be Cecil Hepworth’s 1903 silent film of the story. Miller’s [...]
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