Heading Out

Tomorrow I’ll be leaving idyllic South Colton for the even more idyllic Blue Mountain Center, a place where artists and writers spend a month working free from the distractions of . . . What? Exactly? Well, anyway, we call it work so our spouses will let us go. What was that old New Yorker cartoon? [...]

Corrupter of Youth

I’m still in a May Day mood & so thought I’d pass this link along, about Allen Ginsberg in Prague, May 1st 1965. That’s when he was crowned King of the May & the authorities decided that the poet was corrupting the fine socialist youth of the city. [Via the New Poetry email list.]

“For a Coming Extinction” (W.S. Merwin)

For a Coming Extinction
Gray whale
Now that we are sinding you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were [...]

Animal Cruelty

In a comment to the previous post, Chris Robinson makes reference to a poem from my book Magical Thinking. We bear a special responsibility, greater perhaps than the responsibility we bear toward each other, to care for animals. Whichever philosopher said that we reveal our character through our treatment of those weaker than ourselves was [...]

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 [...]

Potsdam (NY) to Portland (ME) in 20 Hours

What was supposed to be a six hour trip down to Boston & up to Portland for the SLSA conference turned into a 20 hour marathon yesterday when my Delta commuter plane from Ogdensberg had to go back to the hanger for repairs. I didn’t get out of Ogdensberg until late in the afternoon and [...]

Baseball’s Christianist Assholes; Or: Go Boston!

I was getting ready to root for the Rockies in the World Series, partly because I love a newcomer / underdog & partly because I think more than one championship a century would be bad for Boston’s soul. And then Michael O’Hare at the RBC blog had to ruin my (admittedly superficial) fan-affiliation by linking [...]

Reading for Pleasure

Note: I began this post back in May, but just looked at it again in the context of the paper I’m writing on teaching Intro to Lit. I’ve added the second paragraph, which is mostly John Dewey, to the first, written earlier.
Timothy Burke taught a course called The History of Reading last semester & has [...]

Against Stoicism

Steve Gimbel at Philosopher’s Playground, has a recent post about the Stoic Epictetus. Reading that in combination with this piece in The Smart Set about “longevity hot spots” got me thinking about my own approach to ordinary pleasures, especially eating & drinking. When you hit your fifties you start thinking about how long you’ll live. [...]