Culture Clash

A Last Thanksgiving Thought

November 26, 2012

All are home now if they traveled far to family. The meals are digested. The work week begins our cycles anew, with all the usual commitments, enthusiasms, and furors. We were in Nebraska, with Julia’s family. From my sister-in-law Anne, I received this by email. It was a sad day for me, thinking about all [...]

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Eating Poetry (XLI) – After Thanksgiving

November 25, 2012

. by Sandra M. Gilbert Related articles Writing Paradise Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post Email

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How We Lived On It (55) – La chanson d’hélène

November 10, 2012

. If you have missed it, my retrospective on the artistry of French filmmaker Claude Sautet appears in the current issue of Senses of Cinema. During Sautet’s 1970s peak, his female muse was Austrian actress Romy Schneider, who appeared memorably in five of his films, winning France’s Cesar Award for best actress for the 1978 [...]

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Jazz Is: 43 – Treme: Funeral Scene & Second Line

October 21, 2012

. The audience and appreciation are starting to build, in its third season, for Treme, just as it did late for the brilliant David Simon‘s earlier The Wire. Whether it is the worlds of the inner city drug trade, policing, municipal government, unions, education, or journalism in Baltimore, or of high end chefs and dining in Treme, [...]

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How We Lived On It (54) – “Scrabble with Matthews”

October 7, 2012

. The kind of poetic conceit etymologicon that delights in the service of deep feeling. Scrabble with Matthews BY DAVID WOJAHN (Poetry magazine October 2002) Jerboa on a triple: I was in for it, my zither on a double looking feeble as a “promising” first book. Oedipal & reckless, my scheme would fail: keep him a couple drinks ahead, [...]

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Purity & Invention: a Claude Sautet Retrospective

September 27, 2012

. From August 1-9 this summer, The Film Society of Lincoln Center hosted a long overdue retrospective of the films of Claude Sautet (1924-2000). Probably best known to younger, more contemporary audiences for his late flowering of 1990s films Un Coeur en Hiver (A Heart in Winter) and Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (Nelly and Mr. Arnaud), Sautet established [...]

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The Poetry of Democracy

August 29, 2012

. In my Poetic License column for the fall issue of West, I return to last year’s New York Review of Books contretemps between Helen Vendler and Rita Dove over the latter’s The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. When I first wrote about the dispute, I considered the the politics in poetry. In “Diction and [...]

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Jazz Is: 42 – “The Cure”

August 24, 2012

. Feeling low, in despair, beset by the boorish and the brutish? There’s a cure for that. Back in May, Julia and I, along with jazz rabbi Charlie K, dropped in on Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, and Jack DeJohnette at the Catlalina Bar & Grill in Los Angeles. The new trio’s tour was billed as a [...]

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The View from Guatemala: the Olympics

August 18, 2012

. Our intrepid corespondent in Guatemala, Dercum Over, wanted for insubordination by the bureaucratic and benighted in more parts than you have, offers this rebalancing of Olympic victory bragging rights. Tucked away out of the swirl of things in our mountainous farming village in Mayan Guatemala, my Japanese friend Yurino and I are suffering this week from [...]

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How We Lived On It (53) – “We are the knife people…”

August 12, 2012

. Maybe none of it, finally, is like bone – not solid and lasting enough – or muscle – not as strong – but cartilage: something in between, partaking of both, lesser, but also greater, because it is all about connections and making them. Some semi-random connections. Robert Hughes died this past week. What we [...]

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Eating Poetry (XL) – As from a Quiver of Arrows

August 4, 2012

. A poem about loss, or the end of things, if there is an end to things, or transformation, or it maybe being the nature in things to be lost, and remembered, so how remembered? Or maybe it is forgetting we want, and where is that, and if we do forget, what was it? To [...]

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Pythonian Philosophy

July 29, 2012

. In the spirit both of the most recent “Drowning Child” post and our current London Olympiad, we persevere in our arguments by exploring the nature of intellectual competition. The first video I actually share with my students in the opening week of my critical thinking class. It’s a hoot and does make a point. [...]

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The Drowning Child: an Experiment in Morality

July 27, 2012

. Over at Philosophy Experiments, a site of The Philosopher’s Magazine, one of the experiments is drawn from Peter Singer‘s “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle.” Here is the basic scenario. Your route to work takes you past a shallow pond. One morning you notice that a small child has fallen in and appears [...]

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Eating Poetry (XXXIX) – “From back when it was Nam time I tell you what”

July 21, 2012

. Here is the vernacular as the purest verbal music, singing the culture from which it is pulled, clots of earth still clinging. You may find it hard to separate the units of meaning on first read. It will be easier on second, and if you listen here to the poet reading it, you will [...]

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Higgs Boson, or What’s the Meta in Metaphor for?

July 18, 2012

. Let’s get God out of the way to start. The Higgs Boson particle/field is not the God particle. (I keep telling everyone – the neutral B-meson is the God particle.) In part because of that name, and, certainly, the momentous confirmation at the largest site of physics experimentation in the world of a near [...]

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CineFile – Drive

July 15, 2012

. with Ryan Gosling, by Nicolas Winding Refn. Primal eruption  and withdrawal. Related articles New Images of Ryan Gosling in Nicolas Winding Refn’s ONLY GOD FORGIVES (collider.com) WTF: Nicolas Winding Refn Directing ‘Barbarella’ TV Series (slashfilm.com) ‘Only God Forgives’ Will Share The ‘Language’ Of ‘Drive’ (moviesblog.mtv.com) Behind the Scenes Photos: Ryan Gosling in ‘Only God Forgives’ [...]

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Eating Poetry (XXXVIII) – To the One Who is Reading Me

July 13, 2012

. To the One Who is Reading Me by JORGE LUIS BORGES Translated from the Spanish by Tony Barnstone You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver (those forces that control your destiny) the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be your irreversible time is that river in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read his brevity? A marble slab is [...]

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Jazz Is: 41 – KLAZZ Brothers and Cuba Percussion

July 13, 2012

. “Summertime” I’m feelin’ it. All hail Kilian Forster, solo bassist with the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra, founder, Klazz Brothers. Related articles Eating Poetry (XXXVII) – The New Physics (sadredearth.com) Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post Email

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Male Genital Enhancement

July 9, 2012

. This essay originally appeared in The Times of Israel, July 3, 2012. Is it too fanciful to imagine that Germany  might wait, say, a thousand years, the length of an eponymously termedTausendjähriges Reich, before any governmental body in that country could feel sufficiently conscientiously liberated as to actually restrict a Jewish religious rite, i.e. [...]

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Eating Poetry (XXXVII) – The New Physics

July 6, 2012

THE NEW PHYSICS Al Zolynas for Fritjof Capra And so, the closer he looks at things, the farther away they seem. At dinner, after a hard day at the universe, he finds himself slipping through his food.  His own hands wave at him from beyond a mountain of peas.  Stars and planets dance with molecules [...]

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The Real “God” Particle

July 5, 2012

. I hate trooping off in a gang. Scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN believe they have confirmed the existence of what others have called the “God particle.” Everyone exclaims “Higgs boson!” But I cry out “neutral B-meson” to that. I understand that for physicists, this discovery completes and substantiates the “Standard Model,” by which they [...]

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