Nostalgia for Neo-Liberal Technocracy
I pulled Pierre Bourdieu’s slim book of essays, Acts of Resistance, off the shelf in my office the other day to check a quotation I thought I might use. Actually, I had the wrong book, but I left Acts sitting on my desk until yesterday when I picked it up to put it back on [...]
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” [...]
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, [...]
Perfect Day
Dog walk at 7:30 this morning under a clear, cool sky. Did some chores around the house. Watched the final round of the British Open, which ended dramatically in a playoff. Read some of my Patrick O’Brian novel, then tried to take a nap but couldn’t because the dogs kept barking at this & that. [...]
One-Dimensional Man
Via Wood s Lot, I came across this cogent essay in CTheory by Carol Vanderveer Hamilton in which that flickering sensation you get when watching George W. Bush on television is explained. The most effective critical writing reveals the known as newly informed insight. Hamilton’s dispassionate prose is devastating in its directness:
Kosinski’s Chance is unable [...]
Indentured Workers in the Mariana Islands
From Dover Bitch, writing at Hullabaloo:
Why is this hearing important? After all, it’s not on the evening news. It’s not even scheduled to be broadcast live on C-SPAN. The truth is, this hearing is only important to people who believe that America shouldn’t be a place like this:
Using its immigration authority, the Commonwealth has created [...]
Remarkable Bonsai / Richard Rorty
I just ran across these amazing photos of bonsai by Walter Pall, who has developed what bonsai purists call a “naturalistic” style, though the viewer unfamiliar with the formal styles of traditional bonsai might not choose the adjective “natural” to describe these tress. All that apparently lifeless wood, by the way, called jin, is part [...]
Evil
Executing an innocent person — even a merely potentially innocent person — is surely the the depth of evil. This execution, going forward tomorrow, combines so many kinds of moral failure it staggers the imagination. (See Mark Keliman’s commentary here.) My stomach turns at the knowledge that the United States has an “Anti-terrorism and Effective [...]
The Primal Horde
Reading this account of Williams syndrome (a genetic disability) in the NY Times & the light it sheds on the details of primate social evolution, especially language, I was struck by the fact that it does not differ all that much from Freud’s account of the dynamics of the “primal horde” at the beginning of [...]
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