I am hosting a radio show and podcast on WFHB, community radio, in Bloomington, IN, called The Custom House that will air on Saturdays at 5:30 p.m. through August and continue as a podcast. The first show aired June 1 and can be downloaded here: Babo’s Razor. This show is about our inability to see [...]
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A Lovers’ Quarrel
An audio recording by Doug Storm of “A Lovers’ Quarrel“ by Robert Browning from his volume Men and Women. A Lovers’ Quarrel by Robert Browning (1812-1889) I. Oh, what a dawn of day! How the March sun feels like May! All is blue again After last night’s rain, And the South dries the hawthorn-spray. Only, my [...]
Love Among the Ruins, Robert Browning (audio)
An audio recording of “Love Among the Ruins” by Robert Browning (1812-1889). I. Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles, Miles and miles On the solitary pastures where our sheep Half-asleep Tinkle homeward thro’ the twilight, stray or stop As they crop— Was the site once of a city great and gay, (So they say) Of [...]
Huck Finn On Interpretation: Jim Answers Coleman
Coleman’s Nihilistic Pedagogy Morse Peckham’s non-final Answer The Instability of “Meaning” GOP Rep. Dr. Paul Broun (GA) offers an example asserting a “Young Earth” Answer Jim’s goodness as answer to all of this (Huckleberry Finn) *** When I got to it Jim was setting there with his head down between his knees, asleep, with his [...]
“Clubbed Voices” for the Doubtful
It is often said that Moby Dick is difficult to read. I don’t intend to disagree. It’s the kind of book that really can’t even be classified with clarity these days. It is in no way like a novel that we read now. It is something more akin to an “anatomy” as it seems to encompass [...]
Tit-Bits
At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner. Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice- covered trees all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and [...]
Controlling Signs
Applicable in any century, be it 19th, 20th or 21st (or 21st BCE)–Language controls behavior. *** If Professor Booth goes into his usual coffee shop to get his morning coffee, and says to the waiter, “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” and the waiter brings it to him, what has happened? What is the [...]
Unseconded Coming
Unseconded Coming* Returning I sallied out upon my special errand the sky changed and charged drivingly sleeting stubbornly storming I fought and found and entered a reigning silence of sailors wives and widows congregational against grief stormingly shrieking insularly sitting incommunicably apart seated I pretendingly quoting They steadfastingly eyeing black-bordered masoned marbled tableted sacredly worded [...]
Common Core Is Authority On Steroids
Peg with Pen wrote yesterday about a product offered by the designer of Common Core, David Coleman (more from me on that here, “Occupy Common Core Standards“). I recently had the unfortunate opportunity to examine a SpringBoard assignment, sent to me by a concerned parent with a child in seventh grade. SpringBoard is the latest [...]
Where Be Your Tygers?
Let this serve as a kind of literary addendum to yesterday’s post. And let us first mark out some territory. Perhaps there are two ways that humans MEAN as beings. 1. The animal that may become a god. 2. Animate matter that will decay. That’s broad, sure, and I know there are other ways to [...]
Articles
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The Chaos of Monoculture
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The Custom House: Louis Agassiz with Christoph Irmscher
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The Errant Goes Audible: The Custom House on WFHB
