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: moby dick
“Clubbed Voices” for the Doubtful
It is often said that Moby Dick is difficult to read. I don’t intend to disagree. It’s the kind of book that really can’t even be classified with clarity these days. It is in no way like a novel that we read now. It is something more akin to an “anatomy” as it seems to encompass [...]
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, [...]
What is a Metaphysic?
Evolution may be considered as a fairly straightforward metaphysical theory with a long history which was not so much confirmed by the theory of natural selection as embarrassed by it. The difference between the two is indicated by the fact that Darwin himself did not use the word until the fifth edition of the Origin [...]
Raising Workers for Poverty’s Sake!
Why do “philanthropists” want to “deliver on the American promise of equal opportunity by working to attack the achievement gap that takes root early in life and puts children in poverty at great disadvantage?” (Educare website) Every word a philanthropist organization utters must be understood as a kind of duplicity. Listen. That (reducing “achievement gaps”) [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
