In Salon there is this horrifying little piece (“Let’s Watch a Murder“) regarding the popularity of reality horror-porn. Here’s how it begins: The YouTube video shows Robert, a 28-year-old from Dayton, Ohio, grimace and light…
Posts tagged melville
Okay, I Guess, Whatever
The paradox of the mercantile culture we label “capitalism,” or probably more descriptively and truthfully for most of us, consumerism, is in its “false” interconnectedness. At the level of production, at the level of industrialized…
Indolence! Undercutting the Cult of Mammon
A recent report on Inequality in America from Stanford details the extent of the wealth disparities. Salon has a brief post on it (United States of Inequality) offering this example of the self-perpetuation of winners…
I placed a jarhead in afghanistan
In Stevens’ poem “Anecdote of the Jar” we are given a figuration of the way mind creates order but further of the way mind allows the rules of order to imprison our perception and limit…
As a Flower Succeeds to Foliage
“…as a flower succeeds to foliage.”* (Melville “Lord, when shall we be done changing?” Hawthorne) Meeting Melville I liked him so much I made him an invitation prospective… of bringing out the glory of his…
What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive!
Some poems from Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. The Portent. (1859.) Hanging from the beam, Slowly swaying (such the law), Gaunt the shadow on your green, Shenandoah! The cut is on the…
The Money Virtue As American Rational Religion
The most virtuous and honest character in Dickens’ Hard Times, Stephen Blackpool, often confronts the confusion, ambiguity, paradox, and unfairness of “interests” with an aggrieved and exasperated cry that “it’s all such a muddle.” Even…
Empty Wonder Born On A Beach
I hope you’ll indulge me. Below are three “versions” of Chapter 14 of Moby Dick. The first is “after” Ronald Johnson’s, Paradise Lost (radi os), and so I try to excise the text to “leave”…
Born of Whale Oil and Witches
[T]his remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness, a receptacle for Lions, Wolves, Bears, Foxes, Rockoones, Bags, Bevers, Otters, and all kind of wild creatures, a place never afforded the Natives better than the flesh of…
Sounding Texts: My American Literature
A further edit upon “My Favorite Book.” It grows. A friend asked me recently to name a favorite book. This is nearly impossible to me as I rarely find whole books satisfying throughout and prefer…