From Lecture #6 from John Searle’s 1984 Reith Lectures, “Minds, Brains and Science.” If libertarianism, that is the thesis of free will, were true, it appears we would have to make some really radical changes…
Browsing Category Literature/Arts
To Fart and Think of Dante
It’s hard not to love this paragraph from an essay on the poet Walter Lowenfels by Jim Burns. Lowenfels was clearly at home in this kind of atmosphere. With a friend, Michael Fraenkel, he started…
Tied to Your Shared Fate
[In which we conclude that Stubb’s version of the monkey-rope is evil.] What is Equality? The state of being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities. What is Equity? The quality of being fair or…
Let No One Be Called (Updated: Audio)
Let No One Be Called (3:11) Perhaps it is better to have no legends. Let there be no letters composed into rigid words. Let no words be graven onto replicating presses. Let the forms be broken…
Law On Her Brow
One would guess that “The Portent” is far and away Herman Melville’s most well-known poem (perhaps the only poem of his remembered or read by anyone other than an academic). It opens his book Battle-Pieces…
The Ungraspable (Extractable) Phantom
“But the list is artful…” (Harold Beaver) Melville opens Moby Dick, often considered the greatest book written by an American, with a list of extracts. That is, our greatest author offers as opening gambit the…
In Silent Misconstrual Walks the Con
Coda to “Briggflatts” (1966) by Basil Bunting. A strong song tows us, long earsick. Blind, we follow rain slant, spray flick to fields we do not know. Night, float us. Offshore wind, shout, ask the…
The Errant Goes Audible: The Custom House on WFHB
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…
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…
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,…