I believe I’ve said somewhere else that I really only discovered a “fecundity” of thinking in myself* when I started listening to audiobooks while walking. You know how you need to justify reading to yourself as an activity that isn’t just “wasting time” (stupid American “values”)? Maybe you don’t, but something in me, still, even [...]
Tag Archives: melville
Discipline and Punish
Maybe you’re not 44 and so are not conversant with the movie Reality Bites (its genesis and presentation 20 years past), but I am. The down-and-out 20-something “losers” (heed my punctuation, please) in that film did not exemplify me. I had a job as an English teacher in a parochial high school in St. Louis, [...]
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 [...]
Master-ful-less-ly Supercilious
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, — – and our first thought is rendered back [...]
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 [...]
Judge Not Lest…
From a letter by Morse Peckham in response to a New York Review of Books piece by Christopher Ricks on five of his works, “Out of Order (1971).” Judging Art: (1) Any proposition can be used as a basis for judging art. (2) An indefinably wide range of propositions has so been used, and new ones [...]
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 [...]
Lord of the Level Loadstone
Thou Vain Toy, Part II [ PDF Link ] How can we be done perspectivizing? Yesterday I offered a load of underlinings from an essay by Morse Peckham. As a kind of “proof” text I suggested Ahab’s smashing of his Quadrant as a stance against the “sight” heavenward rather than keeping one’s eyes “level” with the horizon [...]
Thou Vain Toy
For Bobby C., underlinings from an essay by Morse Peckham, “Man’s Use of Nature,” offering powder and ball to my NO! in thunder. And, perhaps as expected, Ahab will have the last word. *** An ideology explains the world, and justifies our behavior in it and towards it, and validates that behavior. An ideology tells [...]
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
