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 [...]
On Being an Academic Generalist
As academics go, I am about as much a generalist as it is possible to be. First, I am in the Humanities, which unlike science are generalist by tradition; second I am a poet. Both these identifications mean that I can legitimately be interested in anything. I might be able to claim a specialist’s competence [...]
Contingency
The previous post may have been somewhat elliptical. I was trying to dra a distinction between systems of certainty & systems of contingency. Science & the arts are systems of contingency (though they have deep epistemological differences, whereas fundamentalist religions & conspiracy theories are systems of certainty. Systems of certainty are, by both definition & [...]
Fundamentalism & Science
It always struck me as weird that the Grace Brethren fundamentalists among whom I grew up tried so hard to make science serve religion. Even as as sixteen-year-old, it seemed to me that the preacher & the Sunday School teacher were covertly admitting defeat when they tried to square various scientific discoveries with a “literal” [...]
Gibbersih
This isn’t really the sort of blog where one would go to find commentary on the news, though I certainly air my political opinions in this space. I have tried, in fact, over the last few months to come at political questions through the lens of language. But I wanted to note my reaction to [...]
Standing Armies
Like the Founders, I am opposed to standing armies. In Federalist 26, Hamilton lays out the history & the political theory. Standing armies are threats to democracy & morality. The modern American volunteer army is the contemporary version of a standing army. And the political right — a category that includes a large number of [...]
Poetry’s Obligation
Poetry has an obligation to oppose clichés. Clichés are the viral carriers of lies. Poetry can do this by rejecting cliché or by analyzing or exploding cliché in its own use of language. The poet — who certainly does not need to be a maker of verses — uses one kind of language against another, [...]
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