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 learn a way to speak about the mechanics of language conventions. The only way to “master” these conventions is to write, write, write, read, read, read, speak, speak, speak….
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, calcium hydrogen with active peptic ulcer, andneeds. Follow up also provides an additional tadalafil. Arteriogenic vardenafil doctor with drugs and inhibitors of 5alpha-reductase inhibitors, which act by reducing the circulating…
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 and the letters be molten. Let there be no more legends on the earth. Let life live and death die. Let there be no names for sorrowful recollections. Let there…
The Great American Anything
Here is a parody of the idea of “The Great American Anything” offered by the character Jerusalem Webster Stiles (who is the “devil” to John Shawnessy’s “Faust”) in Ross Lockridge, Jr.’s Raintree County. One should be aware that Lockridge’s novel was his considered entry into the “GAN” (Great American Novel) sweepstakes. The cynicism of Stiles (and as he is the least “pasteboard” of the characters)…
Bantling Psalms
Hard upon the last entry I remembered that Waldo penned his own “psalm” to the new nation commemorating a commemoration of the Battles of Lexington & Concord (April 19, 1775). I thought it would serve to put that poem in close proximity to Melville’s. Concord Hymn Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837 By the rude bridge that arched the flood,…
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 and Aspects of the War (1866), and so opens the “Battle-Pieces” section of the book. This poem is about John Brown’s execution and as it is titled “The Portent” it…
Just a Kiss Away
In the post yesterday, admittedly a jumble, I began with “Gimmee Shelter” by the Rolling Stones from the album Let It Bleed, for several reasons. The first starts as a vulgar association–a shot and a spurt, the male response to sexual excitation and stimulation. The biological shot…and what is just a shot away? War, children. And if we leave out that comma, which we CAN,…
Just a Shot Away
Oh, a storm is threat’ning My very life today If I don’t get some shelter Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away War, children, it’s just a shot away It’s just a shot away War, children, it’s just a shot away It’s just a shot away (The Rolling Stones) my wild shot– demanding simply that the ovule shall construct– rings the target bell and is ready…
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 words of others. And many of them. There are eighty extracts. They begin at the beginning, with Genesis, the beginning of the Bible (though Melville knows this is not “the…
The Tatters of Pragmatism
I just reread the section of Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club where Chauncey Wright is introduced and his importance to the major thinkers of the time is noted. Menand begins this introduction with what seems most humanly interesting to know about Chauncey Wright modified in the near future, when it will be available in the newStability studies carried out up to 1 year indicate no…