A friend (flesh and blood, not Facebook) told me she’d listened to the recent Interchange shows on The Tempest and on Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, really liked them, and wanted recommendations for shows in…
Posts tagged thoreau
Cutting Down the Clouds
This winter they are cutting down our woods more seriously than ever,—Fair Haven Hill, Walden, Linnaea Borealis Wood, etc. etc. Thank God they cannot cut down the clouds! Henry David Thoreau, journal entry, January 21,…
Between Hope and Defeat, History and Heaven
“God himself culminates in the present moment.” (Thoreau) What is “now” for? What if you “know” the future? Fairy tales and wishes of complete knowledge are always disastrous. If you know the hour of your…
Bubbles Like a Burning Glass
It takes little effort to find, all throughout the vastness of the digital nowhere, blog posts reproducing the words of Henry David Thoreau, in any season, on any natural or political phenomena. And here too…
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…
A Commons Or A Prison
I prepared the following for the Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice. From Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling…
Proving the Need to Resist Government by Shadows
Last night on Interchange I talked with Scott Horton of Harper’s Magazine about government secrecy–more specifically the secrecy of “dark budgets” and “dark operations” and “dark lords”–inherent in the National Security State. [A Power Unto…
Pouring Out of Various Devices
After reading pages 40, 43 and 44 of the 9/25/14 New York Review of Books. 1. p 40: a review essay by Robin Lane Fox on several gardening books and an exhibition at the New…
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…
Neither Men Nor Toadstools
AUDIO: Neither Men Nor Toadstools I’m inclined to think “teaching” and “instruction” in institutional contexts are only misguided industrial practice. The best that can be done (and one might admit it’s not nothing though suspect) is…