“Who through millennia of self-torture acquired such a feeling of power and self-confidence that he endeavored to build a new heaven—the uncanny symbol of the most ancient and most recent experience of philosophers on earth: whoever has at some built a “new heaven” has found the power to do so only in his own hell” [...]
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I wonder if Eliot had read this piece [JSTOR] by M. R. James in the Classical Review? He notes that the sibyl had dried up like a grasshopper and wouldn’t be in an “ampulla” otherwise, a detail I’ve always found myself dwelling on when I’ve taught the poem.
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I would like to write a history of apriorism in science and also among the coalition of insurance mid-execs and Carl Hiassen characters seeking the election of Bush tertius (known, colloquially, as the “Jebusits”); but none of this is as likely as it may now seem. Observe Agoraphobe Harold on Twin Peaks mentions the orchid’s [...]
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I can no longer remember whether or not I dreamed about Charles Whitman last night, or, once I heard about the horrible shootings at Virginia Tech, I somehow mixed that association with my increasingly vague memory of the dream during the day. The impression I have of the dream is that I thought it was [...]
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Atlanta is a beltway town—it is defined by the interstate, known as the Perimeter, that encircles it. It has a notoriously paltry system of public transportation. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, or MARTA, operates two rail lines, which form a cross whose ends extend, at most, a few stops past the Perimeter. Most communities [...]
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I have three back-to-back classes this semester. Yesterday, I taught Endgame, “To Room Nineteen,” and an exercise about mapping social space (pp. 195-200 of Fieldworking, to be exact.) There was nothing particularly depressing about the last one, of course, but I think most will agree that the first two aren’t pick-me-ups. So I was thinking [...]
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I’ve been cursed. I cannot exorcise Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On.” I found it on youtube, this video from a more innocent era where it was modish to wear white sneakers with jeans and a sports coat, and played it for Clancy, who loved it. Now, as I’ve been composing a paper all day [...]
After reading this review-essay by Richard Hibbitt in the Cambridge Quarterly on recent translations of Rimbaud, I’m quite eager to read Clive Scott’s Translating Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Look, for example, at this visual effort.
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