Last night on WFHB’s Interchange I hosted a discussion about Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. You can download the podcast here: Interchange – The Prick of Noon: Romeo & Juliet. I believe that, after Hamlet, it is the most performed of Shakespeare’s plays. I also understand that some folks think it is too juvenile and too sappy. Most of us probably remember the first balcony scene, or…
Serving the Word
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 Agassiz, Christoph Irmscher, in a chapter on Agassiz’s notorious “race science,” notes that Agassiz is in no way the lone institutional (or canonical) proponent of the racist views many Northern…
A Sane Impulse and a Clear Lesson: Charter Schools
Let’s dare to be honest about charter schools. There is no “testable” benefit. Which is to say that testing tells us the same thing about any school environment. Kids, as humans, grow and develop variably, that poverty deadens living and this includes “intelligence” as part of overall health. What is a charter for? To create an environment you want your child to grow up in….
The Privilege of the Engaged
In a recent “rant” about Indiana’s “testing regime” and its instrument of student “achievement” measurement, the I-STEP, posted on the blog page of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education, the Chair of the Monroe County and Southern Indiana chapter, Cathy Fuentes-Rohwer , wrote something that struck me as extremely instructive and worth discussing. First though, it’s a good rant and I’d recommend you read it….
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 the Disrupted, pretty much expresses much of what I feel regarding the way the speed of “cultural transmission” allows for transmitting nothing but memes empty of reflection. Here’s a sample:…
To Catch a Noddy
The tops were large, and were railed about with what had once been octagonal net-work, all now in sad disrepair. These tops hung overhead like three ruinous aviaries, in one of which was seen, perched, on a ratlin, a white noddy, a strange fowl, so called from its lethargic, somnambulistic character, being frequently caught by hand at sea. ******** When at ease with respect to…
Everything Reminds Me of Moby Dick: Maxine Kumin
It came to my attention while skimming the Women’s Review of Books that poet Maxine Kumin had died (nearly a year ago). I know nothing of Kumin’s work but this memorial piece by Robin Becker reminded me of something: The humor here belies the relationship Kumin negotiated with her own impulse toward reverence. The paradise of animals, family, farm, friends, and garden suffices, though the…
The Work of Language
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Immeasurably the Most Important Book of Poetry
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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 with a fork.” My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a…