Culture Clash

Some of the Words Are Theirs

February 22, 2012

. My column from the spring 2012 issue of West:  Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and an exercise in the craft of poetry. The close of The Great Gatsby is probably the most famous and referenced ending of any American novel. Lyricized in a lushly romantic invocation of American promise, somehow gone wrong in the [...]

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CineFile – The City

February 12, 2012

. The remarkable The City, which ran for two years at the 1939 World’s Fair “City of Tomorrow” exhibit, is not so much a documentary in any sense of reportorial filmmaking as much as it is an early film essay on the nature of the modern industrial city and the planned green city. It was directed [...]

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Eating Poetry (XXX) – “Every telling has a tailing”

February 11, 2012

. In 1929, James Joyce recorded this rendition of “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” from Finnegans Wake. It is one of only two recordings of Joyce reading from his work, after a a much more sonically primitive 1924 reading of an excerpt from Ulysses. This wonderful animation by savagecabbage offers subtitles to aide in deciphering Joyce’s luccious vocalization of an [...]

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How We Lived On It (46) – “The Caging Of America”

February 4, 2012

. The temptation is to quote it all. This selection gives you an idea. From Adam Gopnik’s stunning New Yorker article on the sowing and reaping of American criminal justice. For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people [...]

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CineFile: A Serious Man

January 22, 2012

. Before the Law. Waiting for Godot. Meeting Marshak. Anticipating the week ahead… Related articles CineFile – Cheyenne Autumn (sadredearth.com) CineFile – The Last of the Mochicans (sadredearth.com) CineFile: Let There Be Light (sadredearth.com) Running for Office in Movies (sadredearth.com) Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post Email

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CineFile – The Last of the Mochicans

January 15, 2012

. From my recent Geronimo post, we’ve had a brief discussion in the comments section about John Ross, Chief of the Cherokee at the time the Great Removal (in contemporary terminology, “ethnic cleansing), or Trail of Tears, and Andrew Jackson, and who should really be on the $20 bill. One of the actors in the [...]

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Didion Dearest

January 12, 2012

. Sometimes posts pretty much write themselves. In 1975 Caitlin Flanagan’s mother and father, who was then chair of the Berkeley English department, hosted a dinner party for Joan Didion, a Berkeley alum back as a one-month Regents Lecturer. Flanagan, then only 14, was of course expected to attend. She is unforgiving. From “The Autumn [...]

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The World Isn’t What You Think It Is

January 9, 2012

.   It wasn’t ‘t even what you thought it was when you thought it was it. From “Ernest Hemingway: war hero, big-game hunter, ‘gin-soaked abusive monster’,” Time Literary Supplement James Campbell reviewing The Letters Of Ernest Hemingway, Volume One: 1907–1922 and Hemingway’s Boat: Everything he loved in life, and lost, 1934-1961, by Paul Hendrickson [...]

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CineFile – Cheyenne Autumn

January 8, 2012

. Yesterday’s post on Geronimo put me in mind of John Ford‘s Cheyenne Autumn. The excerpt from We Shall Remain noted how within only several years of Geronimo’s capture he had transformed in the American consciousness from demon savage into the iconic fierce warrior. (The U.S. special forces operation that killed Osama bin Laden was code-named “Geronimo.”) John Ford spent much [...]

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Diction and Democracy

December 27, 2011

. The Huffington Post/Chronicle of Higher Education offered a well-written and observed overview late last week of the Vendler-Dove conflict regarding Dove’s Penguin anthology of twentieth century poetry. Author Peter Monaghan kindly cited my own “The Politics in Poetry” a couple of times, but he unfortunately covered only the more easily reviewed cultural politics – [...]

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For Your Transcendental Weekend

December 24, 2011

. Active Child, “You Are All I See.” Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post Email

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The Hitchens Post

December 16, 2011

. In the end, no one will be remembered, a monumental few for a very long time. Others, favored by fortune still, and the riches of their own beings – big, big people – leave a hole when they depart. The air is sucked out of the room, which subsides into a banal kind of [...]

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The Politics in Poetry: Vendler vs. Dove

December 13, 2011

. Poetry is relevant! I kid poetry. Poetry is always relevant. What do you think The Iliad was doing if it wasn’t writing the history of the victors? The inept and cowardly Paris stole Helen from Menelaus – sure. I wonder how the Trojans might have told that story. It has also long been facile [...]

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Art on the Brain

December 7, 2011

. Welcome brainiac, hail mensch. From Alva Noë, “Art and the Limits of Neuroscience“: What we do know is that a healthy brain is necessary for normal mental life, and indeed, for any life at all. But of course much else is necessary for mental life. We need roughly normal bodies and a roughly normal environment. [...]

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Truth, Decorum, and Lyin’ Ass Bitches

November 28, 2011

. The public square teeters on the edge of comedy and farce. No, really, it is over the edge, and who can say when the fall occurred – maybe 450 BCE? Every culture, though, reinvigorating the social struggle anew, relives the fall for itself, and the U.S. has had its own. In classical comedy – [...]

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Eating Poetry (XXIX) – “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World”

November 26, 2011

. The title “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World’ is taken from St. Augustine. “Plato, St. Teresa, and the rest of us in our degree,” says Wilbur, “have known that it is painful to return to the cave, to the earth, to the quotidian; Augustine says it is love that brings us [...]

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A Melancholy Thanksgiving

November 23, 2011

. This is the first Thanksgiving without my brother, who died in May, so it will be a melancholy holiday for my family. It was Jeff’s favorite holiday, as it is mine, and we will try to honor what he loved in it, and why he and Anne hosted our family feasts on the day [...]

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Jazz Is: 34 – ‘Poutin’

November 19, 2011

It was a foggy night. Or a long night, and my heart was foggy. The bright lights glared. The crazy cat stared. All around the city no one waited. From across the bay the foghorn made no call. I walked. Came to a club. Something moaned inside. I went in. There were smoke signals. Whiskey. [...]

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CineFile: Let There Be Light

November 14, 2011

. I wish I’d had this for Veterans Day, but the following day nor any day is too late to view it. Let There Be Light was the last of three films made by John Huston for the Army Signal Corp during and just after World War II. Because of its frank, documentary record of [...]

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How We Lived on It (44) – Unravel

November 12, 2011

. Today is the birthday of my Jewel, from whom, for a while, I was apart. Related articles The Privilege of Being Here (sadredearth.com) Born on This Day (sadredearth.com) Jazz Is: 31 – Freedom Day (sadredearth.com) How We Lived on It (38) – Amen, Brother (sadredearth.com) How We Lived on It (37) – “Knoxville: Summer [...]

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Paterno, Penn State, and Mass Communications

November 10, 2011

. Rob wonders in the comments where to begin in considering the riotous reaction of Penn State students to the firing of football coach Joe Paterno. One can begin by hoping a day will come – tomorrow, forty years from tomorrow – when each student who protested the dismissal will grapple with at least embarrassment, [...]

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