Monday, February 28, 2011
By Edgar Mason.
PRETENDING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF geographical ties for poets – as Rodger Martin and Sid Hall’s Hobblebush Books has done in its Granite State Poetry Series – is a fine and time-honored ambition. As a rule, however, these collections don’t really tell us much about a region other than that there are poets living in it.
This is made clear by the first two books in the Hobblebush series: Earth Listening, by Becky Dennison Sakellariou, and From the Box Marked Some Are Missing, by Charles Pratt. Ms. Sakellariou and Mr. Pratt are different not only in details of biography – while Ms. Sakellariou, a New Hampshire native, was living and writing in Greece, Mr. Pratt was tending apples in his Brentwood orchard and reflecting on it in verse – but also in their technique and subject matter. Ms. Sakellariou’s poetry is fresh, unpredictable, and, not surprisingly, somewhat Mediterranean in its worldview. Her poetry can be exciting, even when she sometimes displays a propensity for light, short-cut phrases – see “this love business” in “Questions About Love,” for example.
Continue reading “Poetry from a rock-hard place.” »
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Abdul Karim: 'A real comfort'.
By BEN LEACH [The Telegraph] – ‘I am so very fond of him. He is so good and gentle and understanding… and is a real comfort to me.”
These were the words of Queen Victoria speaking to her daughter-in-law, Louise, Duchess of Connaught, on November 3, 1888, at Balmoral. Perhaps surprising, though, is who she was talking about – not her beloved husband, Albert, who had died in 1861. Nor John Brown, her loyal Scottish ghillie, who in many ways filled the void left by Albert, since Brown had died in 1883.
Instead, Queen Victoria was referring to Abdul Karim, her 24-year-old Indian servant.
Her relationship with Karim was one that sent shockwaves through the royal court – and ended up being one of the most scandalous periods of her 64-year reign.
Continue reading “· Abdul Karim, serving at Her Majesty’s pleasure.” »
Sunday, February 27, 2011
By TONER QUINN [The Journal of Music] – The arts are a breeding-ground for entrepreneurs. It is second-nature to the scene because it is full of creative, passionate people, consumed by a need to create. Many of the great arts enterprises that we have today are the result of a small group of people with a lot of passion and very little money. For funding in the past, they made do with volunteerism, private support from business and the good will of the public. With an increase in state funding for the arts however, many arts initiatives of the last decade and more have grown up entirely under the wing of an arts funding body, and are heavily reliant upon it, seemingly interminably. The result is that, for all their positive aspects, arts funding bodies today are actually blunting the entrepreneurial skills of creative people.
Continue reading “· The art of entitlement.” »
Friday, February 25, 2011
The last two lectures in the 2010-2011 London Lecture Series take place this evening and next Friday evening in the J Z Young Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building, Gower Street, London. The lectures begin at 17.45 last an hour, followed by half an hour of questions. The Institute’s lectures are free and open to the public. Please arrive early to be sure of a seat.
Continue reading “· Events: Last of the 2010-2011 London Lecture Series.” »
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Iris Murdoch.
By JONATHAN DERBYSHIRE [New Statesman] – A hundred and fifty years ago, thinkers and intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill and Leslie Stephen wrote on philosophical topics not for learned journals, but for general periodicals such as the Fortnightly Review and the Edinburgh Review. They were not academics writing for fellow professionals, but “public moralists”, to use the historian Stefan Collini’s phrase, addressing their fellow citizens.
Continue reading “· The unedifying irritations of incomprehensible philosophy.” »
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
By A WITNESS in Tripoli [Pulse] – At 2am I hear gunfire and screaming coming from far. Hours later, I heard that a woman was randomly shot by ‘security forces’ while she was standing by her window in an area called Zawiyat Adahmani, which is near the area of Ben Ashour, where I live.
Last night there were big celebrations around the streets and mainly in Green Square by the thug’s supporters (when 2 days ago almost 1000 martyrs were brutally killed). Following his threatening speech, anyone who walks in the streets of Tripoli by night will be cleared (killed) right away – exactly as he said. Right after the celebrations, non-Libyan mercenaries and some black Libyans (from the south) belonging to ‘kitaib khamis‘ (the Khamis Qaddafi Brigade) were spread all around Tripoli (there is a video taken proves mercenaries driving around the area of Fashloom – at least 8 open cars).
Continue reading “· Tripoli: ‘Gunfire and screaming’ in the dark.” »
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
By DAVID ORR [Poetry] – The anthology on my desk is titled Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present, edited by David Kader (a law professor at Arizona State) and Michael Stanford (a pubic defender in Phoenix). I’m both a lawyer and a poetry critic, so asking me to discuss this book would seem to present an especially harmonious pairing of subject and analyst—like handing an animal cracker recipe to a zoologist-pastry chef. And indeed, flipping through, I find plenty of work that appeals to me as a reader of poems who is also, when necessary, a filer of briefs. Continue reading “· Filers of briefs, writers of haiku, and those felonious anthropomorphizers.” »
Monday, February 21, 2011
By ALAN BRINKLEY [Democracy] – Obama’s ideas and convictions do not themselves explain his performance as president. It is Obama’s political skills, not his ideas, that seem to be his problem.
One of [James] Kloppenberg’s most important claims [in Reading Obama] is that Obama embodies the spirit of pragmatism–not the colloquial pragmatism that is more or less the same thing as practicality, but the philosophical pragmatism that emerged largely from William James and John Dewey and continued to flourish through the work of Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and others. Kloppenberg provides an excellent summary of the pragmatic tradition–a tradition rooted in the belief that there are no eternal truths, that all ideas and convictions must meet the test of usefulness. (Or, as James put it, ideas have to “work.”) Josiah Royce, James’s Harvard colleague and friend, argued that behind all moral claims there must be some “absolute truth” or “absolute knowledge.” Without such absolutes, he (and many others) believed, individuals would have nothing on which to build a moral life. But the pragmatists insisted that every idea has to confront the test of relevance to its time and circumstances. There could be no easy recourse to an absolute truth, either from religion or ancient texts or even from contemporary philosophy. People and nations must live with the knowledge that even their deepest beliefs can be challenged and, if necessary, rejected.
Continue reading “· How pragmatic is Barack Obama’s belief in compromise?” »
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Looking down.
By G.W. BOWERSOCK [New York Review of Books] – It’s not easy to make sense of the remarkable Lod Mosaic, a large, ancient floor newly discovered in Israel and now on display in the United States for the first time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the very difficulty of interpretation, together with the excellent state of preservation, is what makes it so fascinating. We simply don’t know whether it was part of a residence or an official building, and we can’t even say whether the owner or owners were Jewish, Christian, or pagan. The date is not secure either, although the excavator proposes about AD 300 because late third-and-fourth-century coins and ceramic scraps were found immediately above it. Miraculously, what is on display at the Met survived intact apart from one large gash near the bottom that the excavator considers ancient damage, although not everyone agrees.
Continue reading “Experts stare at the floor and try to make sense of it all.” »
Saturday, February 19, 2011
By JEREMY DAUBER [More Intelligent Life] – For me there’s nothing that doesn’t love a list. Not of chores, mind you, but of books, films, records and so on. Show me a set of titles branded as “The Top Fifty Novels of the Nineteenth Century” or “The 42 Greatest Singles of the Motown Era” and my fingers practically reach of their own accord towards my Amazon account or Rhapsody playlist. I suspect I’m not alone, given the way such lists choke the web like kudzu. Nor am I the only one who has stashed away files of these lists, ambitiously started, rarely completed. But based on the attestations of my wife, my friends and everyone else I know, I may be more assiduous about list-following than most.
Continue reading “The 1001 buckets you must kick.” »
Friday, February 18, 2011
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS [The Atlantic] – Sean McMeekin is a professional historian with a deft popular touch, based at a modern Turkish university, and he is careful to salt his engrossing and enlightening narrative with frequent allusions to this famous thriller, which after all contains the most that many people know about the First World War’s forgotten front. He gently corrects Sir Walter [Bullivant]’s deranged diagnosis of Enver Pasha and the “Young Turk” revolution he led in 1908, while pointing out that it was in fact the actual view of the British Foreign Office. According to the two most senior of His Majesty’s diplomats in Constantinople, Gerard Lowther and Gerald Fitzmaurice, Enver and his associates were rooted in crypto-Jewish Freemasonry, with its adeptness at “manipulating occult forces,” and modeled themselves on “the French Revolution and its godless and levelling methods.”
Continue reading “Germany’s Orientalism express and the dream of global jihad.” »
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
By JUDD MORRISSEY et al. [Goat Island Performance Group] –
In our long, slow process of
disappearing, we had forgotten that the surface of the performance space was
not worn wood like a table i
n
n
eed of refinishing but a scuffed
black page with cobblers, saints, and carpenters, projected out into its flickering
Continue reading “The Last Performance. Plus: How to see yellows, and other lessons from Goat Island.” »
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
By NATE ANDERSON [Ars Technica} – How did [Aaron] Barr, a man with long experience in security and intelligence, come to spend his days as a CEO e-stalking clients and their wives on Facebook? Why did he start performing “reconnaissance” on the largest nuclear power company in the US? Why did he suggest pressuring corporate critics to shut up, even as he privately insisted that corporations “suck the lifeblood out of humanity”? And why did he launch his ill-fated investigation into Anonymous, one which may well have destroyed his company and damaged his career?
Thanks to his leaked e-mails, the downward spiral is easy enough to retrace. Barr was under tremendous pressure to bring in cash, pressure which began on November 23, 2009.
That’s when Barr started the CEO job at HBGary Federal. Continue reading “The not-very-smart insecurity of security and intelligence experts.” »
Monday, February 14, 2011
'Tracking Shot' (detail). Click to enlarge.
By PETER MILTON [from his website] – Tracking Shot, named after the filming technique of tracking alongside the subject of a scene while it is being filmed, is the first of three prints in a new series of 23″ x 36” etchings, to be part of a set I am calling Sight Lines.
With Tracking Shot I have entered the digital world. The making of my collage/etching/engraving pieces has become so complex that I have often found myself hostage to the actual process of execution. Since my greatest motivation for a new piece tends to be solving the unresolved aspects of the previous piece, I find I can’t simplify without destroying my whole modus operandi. I have to defer to the reality that elaboration is what I do best, what I want to do and where I still find the most profound satisfaction.
Continue reading “Peter Milton: the satisfaction of elaboration in a digital world.” »
Sunday, February 13, 2011
By WONDER-TONIC [from On the Bro’d: Every sentence of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, retold for bros] – My first impression of Dean was of a young The Situation—ripped, funny as shit, with spiked hair—a Natty Light-slugging hero of the Southwest. In fact he’d just been in the hospital for alcohol poisoning before hooking up with Marylou and coming to OSU. Marylou was a nine-out-of-ten with a Mystic Tan and a crazy rack; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her iPhone in her hands and her oversized Dolce and Gabana sunglasses on, waiting like a less-hot Megan Fox in that first Transformers movie. But, outside of being pretty hot, she was a total bitch and capable of being a defcon-one psycho hose-beast. Continue reading “Meet Dean Moriarty, the ‘Natty Light-slugging hero of the Southwest’.” »
