September 2010

Seeing the World (We Want to See)

September 29, 2010

One can analyze at length how one, seeing the world, transforms into the other, seeing the world we want to see. There are varied predictors and indicators of the phenomenon. One is the the commitment to a closed, systematic ideology, especially reinforced either by supernatural belief or a fixed animus. We see this in the [...]

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“The Poverty of Experience”

September 29, 2010

Another one of those particularly good posts at the Atlantic yesterday, this one from James Fallows, or more precisely, mostly from one of his readers. This has been my experience, too, in travel, that every place I visit is transformed from more than just another place in the world into a part of my life, [...]

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Abbott and Costello in the New York-DC Corridor

September 29, 2010

There were a number of particularly choice posts on Atlantic blogs yesterday. This is the first of two from Jeffrey Goldberg. A man boards in Philadelphia, and asks a woman across the aisle from me if the seat next to her is free. She responds: “This is the quiet car.” He says, “Yes, I know. [...]

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Stephen Colbert, Bread, and (Congressional) Circuses

September 29, 2010

“Not everybody feels that irony and satire has a role in American dialogue. People are entitled to their opinion,” Lofgren told me. But the point isn’t the role of satire in American dialogue — it’s the appropriateness of farce at congressional hearings. via Ruth Marcus – Stephen Colbert becomes another circus of Congress’s making. Of [...]

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Jazz Is: 12 – Keith Jarrett. Encore.

September 29, 2010

from “Keith Jarrett: Last Solo”. Tokyo ’84 Encore. ————— Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post Email

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March to Keep Fear Alive

September 28, 2010

America, the Greatest Country God ever gave Man, was built on three bedrock principles: Freedom. Liberty. And Fear — that someone might take our Freedom and Liberty. But now, there are dark, optimistic forces trying to take away our Fear — forces with salt and pepper hair and way more Emmys than they need. They [...]

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Rally to Restore Sanity

September 28, 2010

We’re looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it’s appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie [...]

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Forbes and D’Souza’s Basement Journalism

September 28, 2010

The Newt Gingrich comments about President Obama to National Review online, about which I’ve been blogging the past week, and based on the Forbes article by Dinesh D’Souza,  have drawn renewed attention to the empty intellectual shell of contemporary American conservatism. Beyond the obvious media hacks and charlatans like Limbaugh and Beck, and their political [...]

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Incoherence on Race and Culture

September 27, 2010

Christelle Nadia at The Republic of Dissent begs to differ (dissent, as it were) with my post The Churchill Doctrine. Before I differ with her differing, let’s examine, first, how she does her differing. She begins by characterizing the post – or what she quotes of it; this point is unclear – as “self-indulgent fluff.” [...]

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Sunday Matinee – What We Were Thinking Of (4)

September 26, 2010

What We Were Thinking Of A Play in Two Acts by A. Jay Adler ————— —————— Part Four The Story So Far David Rich, professor of literature, minor cultural celebrity, receives a mysterious letter from his childhood friend Bud Powell, who was alienated from his father, Charles, a CIA officer, over the politics of the [...]

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Sad Red Reading

September 25, 2010

Along with the new blog look, you’ll find a revitalized, now to be regularly updated, Sad Red Reading feature over at the right of the page, not that far from the top. There I link to some favored writings reflecting the varied interests of the blog: literary, political, more widely cultural and philosophical. Right now [...]

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Eating Poetry (XXIII) – The “Ode To Man” from Sophocles’ Antigone

September 25, 2010

The famous line of Alfred North Whitehead is “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” I am increasingly persuaded that over two thousand years of contemplating and expressing the human condition is a series of footnotes to the Greeks. Here, from The [...]

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Walt Whitman Reads “Space and Time”

September 24, 2010

Here’s a virtual movie of the great Walt Whitman reading his poem Space and Time”” From Leaves of Grass Published in 1900. This edited segment of Section 33 and 46 of “Leaves of Grass””Song of myself” is read by Orson Welles in a recording he originaly made for BBC Radio in 1953. All rights are [...]

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Founding Fathers Not Partiers’ Cup of Tea Only

September 24, 2010

Among the many mistaken and, frankly, repellent notions of today’s Right is its nearly constant invocation of the nation’s origins and its founders as somehow ideologically ancestral only to them. Here is a very fine reminder that the truth is very different, from Ron Chernow’s op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times. Op-Ed Contributor – The [...]

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The Selling of American Democracy

September 24, 2010

Free speech in an America of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy. Under a Tax-Exempt Cloak, Dollars Flow to Political Causes With every election cycle comes a shadow army of benignly titled nonprofit groups like Americans for Job Security, devoted to politically charged “issue advocacy,” much of it negative. But they are [...]

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the sad red earth, Leading the Fight against Neo-Creationist Astrophysics

September 24, 2010

What he said ——>Link. ————- Related articles by Zemanta “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Tells UN General Assembly 9/11 Was An Inside Job” and related posts (mediaite.com) Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post Email

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The Churchill Doctrine

September 23, 2010

No, it’s not his but you never heard of it. It’s mine. I’m naming it for him. I think he’d be pleased. If not, I’m sure he’ll let me know. Thinking back to Newt Gingrich’s recent plunge through the previously known floor of debased political rhetoric (he’s an explorer, that one, of perpetually undiscovered depths [...]

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2010 Berenice Abbott Prize Winner – Christopher Capozziello

September 22, 2010

The Berenice Abbott Prize for an Emerging Photographer is an international competition administered by The Julia Dean Photo Workshops in honor of Julia Dean’s mentor, famed photographer Berenice Abbott.  Each year, one person is selected for this prize and is given a one-person, all expenses paid, exhibition at an LA gallery, an exhibition book, a [...]

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Conservative Anti-Humanism

September 22, 2010

Increasingly, American conservatism is an anti-humanism, dogmatically opposed to nature in its physical reality – the natural occurrence in the animal world, including the human, of homosexuality – and assertive of supernatural religious claims and imperatives in the face of reason and science. In opposing the ignorance and intolerance of Islamic fundamentalism, American conservatism purports [...]

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Jazz Is: 11 – Last Tango in Paris

September 22, 2010

If you were a cineaste living in New York City in 1972, in the fall of that year what you spoke about was the New York Film Festival, Last Tango in Paris, and Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review of the film. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris was presented for the first time on the [...]

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Ship of Fools II

September 20, 2010

Updated: GOP Candidate Sharron Angle Speaks at John Birch Society Event. See below. That what is referred to as the Tea Party movement – a phenomenon, in fact, more multifaceted than the mass popular movement that name is meant to suggest – has a base in the passionate discontent of a segment of the populace [...]

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