More on this soon: I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they…
Date Archives April 2014
Without Reflection
A well-known line from a well-known poem by W. H. Auden is “…poetry makes nothing happen.” It comes in section two of “In Memory of W. B Healthy elderly subjects (65-81 years) showed a statistically…
Clubbing with Consonant Prejudice
Goosey Goosey Gander, whither shall I wander? Upstairs and downstairs and in my Lady’s chamber. There I met an old man who wouldn’t say his prayers, So I took him by his left leg and…
Audio: Walden “Economy” B
I’m not sure how to label these so I’ll just use the alphabet to keep them in order. This recording sounds different than the last (more tinny, big-roomy)–my production values aren’t my highest priority at…
Against the Real Creationists
I just finished reading “The New Synthetic Biology: Who Gains?” by Richard Lewontin in the New York Review of Books. I believe this article makes clear that there are tremendous amounts of insight and ingenuity…
12 Minutes of Walden
To begin reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau. (Apologies for my Latin.) AUDIO FILE: Walden-Economy-A ECONOMY WHEN I WROTE the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a…
Neither Men Nor Toadstools
AUDIO: Neither Men Nor Toadstools I’m inclined to think “teaching” and “instruction” in institutional contexts are only misguided industrial practice. The best that can be done (and one might admit it’s not nothing though suspect) is…
To Act, or Not to Act
The final section (XII) of Harold Goddard’s essay on Coriolanus found in his brilliant book The Meaning of Shakespeare screws a brilliant reading to the sticking place (to steal a line from Lady M.) compressed cellulose,…