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…
Posts tagged melville
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…
The Binary Whole?
The militarization of life requires a binary mind, one prepared by ignorance for fascism. Black and white. Good and Evil. Us and Them. Terrorism and Patriotism Mine (Not Yours). This is the mind grown thoughtless…
Where Be Your Tygers?
Let this serve as a kind of literary addendum to yesterday’s post. And let us first mark out some territory. Perhaps there are two ways that humans MEAN as beings. 1. The animal that may…
The Monkey Rope, Or Our Common Umbilical
We live in a kind of false paradigm of “self-reliance.” I don’t need to blame Waldo for this but perhaps he does bear a good bit of the burden for at the very least his…
Power Agent in Repose
The previous post offers a kind of temperamental and philosophical comparison between two our most fecund writers and thinkers. The section out of Emerson is representative of both his power and his risible ambivalence. This…
The Dart’s the Thing: Melville on Emerson
“All men live enveloped in whale line.” Self-Reliance (Waldo) 1841 Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to…
A Reasoned Resistance
Below we find (in bold) the reason why, as I put forth in “The Plunder Years,” it is necessary to stand against systems serving utilitarian and martial purposes; we find these to be argued in…
Anonymous Labor
To be read as postscript to “The Factory Store.” The Future (and Past) is Yours, Young Women! Brought to you by the Cook Group, owners of Bloomington, Indiana, and Ivy Tech, Cook’s publicly subsidized employee…
The Jesus-Prop–The State at War and the Lie of Humanitarianism
You’ve read rant upon rant about the topics in the title of this post if you’ve stopped here for any length of time or visited now and then over the months. One runs down. But…