Audio: Just a Spoonful of America The title of our show, “Just a Spoonful of America – Prescribing American Studies to Fight Fascism,” might be more than a little ironic given that fascism currently stands…
Posts tagged moby dick
Pea Soup and Poetry
A poem, for me, is often very clearly a response to what I am reading and the way it fits into my material existence. The poem in other words is both a reflection on literature…
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…
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…
Swerve Me Ye Cannot!
From Lecture #6 from John Searle’s 1984 Reith Lectures, “Minds, Brains and Science.” If libertarianism, that is the thesis of free will, were true, it appears we would have to make some really radical changes…
Tied to Your Shared Fate
[In which we conclude that Stubb’s version of the monkey-rope is evil.] What is Equality? The state of being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities 10Erectile dysfunction may occur regardless of the post- tadalafil…
The Impossible Principle
Melville wrote books that could be said to be about: Christian hypocrisy in the Marquesas, authoritarian coercion, military rule, torture, the Leviathan state, labor and brotherhood, wanton slaughter for the benefit of human “profit and…
The Ungraspable (Extractable) Phantom
“But the list is artful…” (Harold Beaver) Melville opens Moby Dick, often considered the greatest book written by an American, with a list of extracts. That is, our greatest author offers as opening gambit the…
The Poet Attempts To Explain His Poem
Common Errant: What goes into the making of your poems? Nemesis-Poet: Who knows? CE: One presumes you know. Or perhaps that you know something of this. NP: Well, I can only offer an interpretation and…
Listening to Literature, or Hearing Hard Words
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…