It might have been but a deception of the vapours, but, the longer the stranger was watched, the more singular appeared her manoeuvres. “Benito Cereno” by Herman Melville In a recent scholarly biography of Louis…
Browsing Category Society/Culture
All Over Lost
I am nearly 47. I am very old and extremely ignorant of what has meaning to so many people these days. This piece in The New York Times by Leon Wieseltier (h/t Colin Allen), Among…
UPDATE: About a Boy? Richard Linklater’s Critique of Woman
UPDATE, 1/5/2014: Patricia Arquette as quoted on IMDB concerning her character submitting to drunken abuse by men: “Now, I wouldn’t be like that. I would climb across the table and stab him in the head…
Living in the Futurist Dream (1913)
How does this sound as a description of our world? Aside from #17 below which makes no sense in this list, I’d say this pretty much describes the present. 1. Acceleration of life to today’s…
A Muddle in the Middle: Dominion and Rule
Emerson begins his essay “Experience” (1844)–and here it’s good to remind the modern, the “now” of ourselves, that our thoughts have already walked the earth– Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which…
How Derogation Works
Which do you think is worse thing to hear come out of your child’s mouth? “Bitch” or “Fuck”? There are a lot of really hateful and bigoted things to say out there and most of…
The Impossible Principle
Melville wrote books that could be said to be about: Christian hypocrisy in the Marquesas, authoritarian coercion, military rule, torture, the Leviathan state, labor and brotherhood, wanton slaughter for the benefit of human “profit and…
Part II–Why This American Life On Animal Sacrifice is Great and Good
Perhaps, because you love visiting this vanity project, you recall I praised to the skies this episode of This American Life, #480: Animal Sacrifice, from November 30, 2012. (Part I–This American Life On Animal Sacrifice)…
Part I–This American Life On Animal Sacrifice
I am a casual listener of This American Life. When our family of four drives to and fro to relatives’ homes we will listen to it along with Radiolab. These are “family friendly” podcasts normally…
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…