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Illicit love

What marks Tristan as a work of its time is the crime that the lovers commit; the intensity of illicit love is intense because illicit - it is not "normal" to feel so much. Hans Sachs - perhaps Wagner's only truly sympathetic character, and just a man - will mock boundless love in Die Meistersinger. But in Tristan, Wagner sought to express Eros without restraint in an era when people believed in moral discipline. No transforming love without transgression, then: this was the conundrum written out in the pages of Anna Karenina, sounded out in this amazing opera.Add a note!


Jazz Gallery

John Coltrane tried to apply Einstein's theory of relativity to his music. Both men were searching for the same thing, what Coltrane called the "essence", the ultimate vibration. I hope you feel that energy, that vision when you gaze at my drawing of him.Add a note!


A WIRELESS, SOULLESS FUTURE? 

Mobile communications technology was supposed to be the great liberator. Freed from the artificial boundaries of the office, workers could do their job anytime, anywhere without having to suffer the tyranny of nosy supervisors or the limitations of the structured corporate workday. The reality, however, could not be further from the truth. A new study finds that "untethered" workers tend to labor longer hours and under more intense pressure than their traditional office-bound counterparts. For many, mobile communications technology has done nothing more than extend the rat race to new and more stressful levels.Add a note!Read more...


(...) there isn't much uniquely human genetic material to build the prefrontal brain structures underlying human mental life. Instead, I think that an important clue to the human mystery lies in the fact that virtually all prefrontal capacities -- working memory, theorizing about other people's minds, our sense of self -- unfold gradually over the first two decades of life. So too, the human prefrontal cortex is distinctive in how long it takes to develop, continuing well into adolescence. I suspect that the key to building a human lies in letting the world help build the prefrontal cortex as it experiences the world. If this is so, then the interaction between brain and world is a far richer one than ever imagined, and crucial to understanding who we are.Add a note!Read more...


For I am nothing if not critical

Even the best-intentioned academics are strained and hampered in the relations with Shakespeare. Certain issues, especially political issues, and certain plays, especially the history plays, remain radioactive; Shakespeare's challenges to contemporary ideas of liberalism, democracy, and equality are more profound than these critics are willing to acknowledge. Past critics, less anxiously involved with their political principles, were more supple in their approach to these problems; and perhaps only an unsponsored imaginative writer, like Keats or Hazlitt, can truly do justice to Shakespeare, or understand him on his own terms.Add a note!Read more...


When the student is first acquainted with the myriad ideas of medieval thought, they may appear to him widely elusive, hopelessly incoherent, and even self-contradictory. It is the taunting, tantalizing challenge of the history of philosophy to discover the overall pattern of interrelated meaning. With this insight one can savor the distinctive contribution of each man or movement.

In understanding the meaning of philosophical ideas, one has not only factual information but an appreciation of what philosophizing meant for Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham. What better way is there to learn to philosophize than to observe the great philosophers of the past? This history of philosophy is intended as an introduction to the process of philosophizing itself. With adequate knowledge of the history of philosophy, one can share in the collective enterprise of philosophizing which has occupied the mind of Western man for twenty-five centuries.

To disclose effectively the pattern of meaning in the history of medieval philosophy, the historian of philosophy must keep in mind two aims. First, he must discover the spirit of an age by fathoming the full depth of its men and movements. To do so within a reasonable compass, he must be highly selective, concentrating on the preeminent philosophers and chief tendencies of the medieval Western period. With this purpose in mind, near Eastern Islamic and Jewish thought will be introduced to the extent that it influenced Christian thinkers in the West.

This, in turn, contributes to the accomplishment of the second purpose; to identify as clearly as possible the main currents in the continuing flow of philosophic thought. The author has written this history particularly for students "who are looking for the main thrust of the development of thought among philosophers in the Middle Ages.Add a note!


Strictly speaking, then, the history of haiku begins only in the last years of the 19th century. The famous verses of such Edo-period (1600-1868) masters as Basho, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa are properly referred to as hokku and must be placed in the perspective of the history of haikai even though they are now generally read as independent haiku.Add a note!Read more...


The difficulty with Hegel

Kierkegaard saw something essential about Hegel when he noted that he and his philosophy “constitute an essay in the comical.” Hegel, Kierkegaard said, was like a man who had built a palace but lived in the guard house. His elaborate “System” of philosophy promised to chart the necessary development not only of consciousness but also of world history and even of nature— indeed, for Hegel, there were no hard and fast distinctions to be drawn among these realms.Add a note!Read more...


Art Form for the Digital Age

Games do matter, because they spark the imaginations of our children, taking them on epic quests to strange new worlds. Games matter because our children no longer have access to real-world play spaces at a time when we’ve paved over the vacant lots to make room for more condos and the streets make parents nervous. If children are going to have opportunities for exploratory play, play that encourages cognitive development and fosters problem-solving skills, they will do so in the virtual environments of games. Multi-player games create opportunities for leadership, competition, teamwork and collaboration—for nerdy kids, not just for high-school football players. Games matter because they form the digital equivalent of the Head Start program, getting kids excited about what computers can do.Add a note!Read more...


The encounter of a typically German idea such as that of Bildung, with the rebirth of the Ciceronian idea of cultura animi and of the Greek Paideia gives us the possibility of explaining the richness and novelty of German culture at the end of 18th century.Add a note!Read more...


Not facing facts

"God Almighty, Franny," he said. "If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you'd like him to have been. You don't face any facts. This same damned attitude of not facing facts is what got you into this messy state of mind in the first place, and it can't possibly get you out of it." ...Add a note!Read more...


The Sound of Philosophy

Philosophy is not science, and we do not evaluate philosophers simply in terms of the truth of their views. (Doing so would reduce the philosophical canon by a worrying degree.) Instead, we value philosophers because they are interesting thinkers: because they develop compelling visions of the world, or of humanity’s place in it, and because their arguments, though sometimes wrong, are tempting, or instructive, or otherwise rewarding to think about. (Occasionally, of course, we like them because they are right. But even here they tend to be more right about why their predecessors were wrong than about how things actually are.) Babbitt and Cage fit neatly into this tradition of compelling speculations: each propounded radical, extreme theories about the world and music’s place within it, and each managed to live those ideas, changing the musical world in the process. Furthermore, Babbitt’s and Cage’s views push us to think very deeply about music (or more generally, art) and its place in our society. Indeed, I would venture to guess that most contemporary composers have thought seriously about Babbitt or Cage, and that many of these have had their views about music changed in the process.Add a note!


The Environment: A Global Challenge

The web's most comprehensive site on the environment.  With 400 articles and 811 pages, the site covers every aspect of the environment and provides many interactive features.Add a note!Read more...


Add a note!


Letter from Yale

In a class on The Canterbury Tales, the secondary literature dwarfs the Tales. We are asked to review books on Chaucer, and even review reviews of books on Chaucer. I see an infinite sequence of mirrors into which Chaucer has disappeared.Add a note!Read more...


The Archaic Torso of Apollo

Unlighted, only stunted marble stands-
A headless block; a dead and rock-cold star.
Instead, a gleaming panther pelt expands
To hold that bursting form.  Each star's a knife
That points at you alone, no matter where you are,
And tells you now that you must change your life.Add a note!Read more...


The unreliable guru

Russell’s ethical writings are best understood as representing an attempt to adapt 19th-century radical liberalism to the modern world. He held a rather pessimistic view of human nature and so never subscribed to utopian socialism. The challenge before modern society, he believed, was finding ways of deflecting innately aggressive and competitive instincts.Add a note!


Turmoil in Palestine: The Basic Context

What will come of this latest violence is unclear. Certainly the dire poverty in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the repression by Arafat's police, and the hopelessness of the Oslo process are factors which make another intifada possible. And Barak has made clear how he would answer any such uprising: the Israeli military would use "all means at their disposal" and they would do so "[e]ven if it is against the whole world." (Karin Laub, Laura King, both AP, 7 Oct. 2000) And indeed Israel is unlikely to concern itself with international pressure as long as the United States continues to flak for Israeli barbarism. U.S. officials may work to quiet outbursts of violence, but they still fail to insist that Israel offer justice to the Palestinians. Peace and justice in the Middle East will never occur until Washington stops giving Israel a blank check. And that will require decisive action by the American people.Add a note!Read more...


Common sense

There are certain things you can get out of a device by having speech recognition and all that. But, if somebody is saying, okay, now it's time we can just skip this whole literacy thing, I really disagree with that. The fundamental benefits of having a tool like this, 99 percent of the benefits come when you've provided reasonable health and literacy to the person who is going to sit down and use it. (...) These 'get it' things are really quite faddish, I've never been a 'get it' kind of guy. I apologize, if that's the political test, then what I get is that there are things those people need at that level other than technology.Add a note!


Look Homeward, Angel

was rejected by three publishers and finally turned up at Scribner's where it aroused interest and dismay over length and "other problems." The dismay, already mentioned, the editing, extensive, took on a life of its own, and the book brought Maxwell Perkins into the light with the result that more has been written about his struggle and friendship with Wolfe than about his professional work with Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The reviews of the book were favorable, but they do not bring to memory the affection remembered by those who first came upon it in their youth.Add a note!

See also: Dixieland, Thomas Wolfe's Old Kentucky Home


The Coming Revolution

The World Wide Web will destroy the filters that have traditionally separated publishable work from the surrounding chaos. But the profound human instinct by which people have always created order, distinguished value, and sustained markets amid multitudinous babble will create new filters. Distinguished and useful websites will prevail over inferior competitors and readers will find their way to desirable goods as they have always done. New technologies alter the forms of production but they do not annihilate human nature.Add a note!


In a meander from Athens to Delphi, visiting temples, tombs and tumbled forts, it's easy to believe legend is history

Tiryns, the "birthplace" of Hercules, was a few miles up the road, and just beyond that, "Golden Mycenae," home to Agamemnon, who survived the siege of Troy only to be murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra. Immersed in a world 3,500 years old, we arrived at Tiryns in the gray morning light; we were the only ones there. It was easy to believe that the Cyclops built this citadel; only giants could move those stones. (The largest block weighs more than 15 tons.).Add a note!

See also: Travels without My Herodotus


A new Guggenheim

Hallmarks of Frank Gehry's work include a particular concern that people exist comfortably within the spaces he creates, and an insistence that his buildings address the context and culture of their sites. This aspect of Gehry's work makes him a particularly appropriate choice for a large-scale structure located on the waterfront in Lower Manhattan, where the context of the surrounding skyscrapers, the constraints of the river site, and the needs of the community create a unique and challenging environment.Add a note!Read more...


Francis Poulenc (1899 -1963) A Comparative Discography

Poulenc's music has an immediate impact on the listener, but goes beyond a mere surface charm as almost all of his vocal music testifies, whether the Apollinaire or Eluard song cycles, or Aragon's "C", or the composer's only full-length opera, Dialogue des Carmélites. As Poulenc matured, he developed a religious streak that gave rise to a number of sacred choral works that are often performed, only the late Sept Réponses de Ténèbre not yet in favor, perhaps because the solos devolving to a boy soprano are not nearly so juicy as those of the Stabat Mater or the Gloria. This is a work that merits more than the two recordings it has had to date.Add a note!Read more...


An Interview With Nikolaus Harnoncourt

It was Karajan who, in 1952, picked him from 40 aspirants to play in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. At the audition, with Alice at the piano, he played the first movement of the Dvorak concerto. "I heard later that Karajan said immediately, 'That one - I like the way he sits down. I'll take him.' " They remained on friendly terms until Karajan took command of Berlin, Salzburg and the Vienna State Opera.

nikoluas harnoncurt

"I still don't understand why our relations went bad," he says. "Perhaps it was due to his advisers. Karajan loved to perform Bach, but every time he produced a choral recording it would be compared to mine, not always favourably. I wrote to him once, and got a very nice reply, but it remained impossible for me to work in Salzburg.".Add a note!Read more...


Stravinsky: Pastorale

Click to download now:
Windows Media - 64K MP3 - 128K MP3

Performers:

Wilson, Julia (Oboe)
Harris, Kathryn (Cor Anglais)
Simon, Andrew (Clarinet)
Shui, Kam (Bassoon)
Preucil, William (Violin)
Atherton, David (Conductor).Add a note!


The Computer Delusion

I see a parallel between the goals of "Sesame Street" and those of children's computing. Both are pervasive, expensive and encourage children to sit still. Both display animated cartoons, gaudy numbers and weird, random noises.... Both give the sensation that by merely watching a screen, you can acquire information without work and without discipline.Add a note!Read more...


Kermode and Almereyda on Hamlet

Shakespeare's Hamlet escapes the prison of language in the end -- just as he escapes what he calls the "prison" of Denmark -- somehow learning, between Acts 4 and 5, to make peace with multiplicity and uncertainty. For Hamlet (and, it would seem, for Shakespeare), the Word cannot be trusted -- it can be two or more things at once -- and yet somehow this master of words and wordplay finds it within himself to look into language's abyss, the abyss of ambiguity, and to utter a simple, mysterious, and finally inexplicable "Let be." This is perhaps the play's finest and most ironic bit of wordplay, Hamlet's most outrageous and profound turn of wit: a seemingly alchemical transformation of "to be or not to be," a resolution of the unanswerable, into the simplicity of an almost beatified statement of oneness.Add a note!Read more...


Martin Scorsese on MaxiVision

We have rules (frequently ignored) about how quickly any given lens can be panned, or how quickly an object can be allowed to travel from one side of the frame to the other in order to prevent these motion distortions. We are forced to "pan moving objects (which keeps them stationary in the frame) in order to prevent this strobing, or accept these distortions and hope that sound effects will carry the viewer's suspension of disbelief past these visual anomalies. Sometimes these motion distortions are desirable, as in many moments in the opening of Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," when they were actually exaggerated for specific aesthetic reasons. But new aesthetic possibilities would emerge if we could do the reverse of that and capture near perfect, lifelike motion and more of the inner life of actor's performances. We could still introduce motion distortions anytime we thought it would add to our creative interpretation, but with MaxiVision48, we would have that choice and new, visually compelling opportunities.Add a note!Read more...


Enquivering

If you are a believer, then Martin Heidegger was an unparalleled modern thinker, whose profound diagnosis of the condition of mankind in the twentieth century rightly dominated large tracts of culture, and directed the finest subsequent work in the humanities. If you are not, then he is a dismal windbag, whose influence has been completely disastrous, and whose affinity with the Nazis merely indicates the vacuum where, in most other philosophers, there would have been a combination of common sense and common decency.Add a note!

 

 

The Culture of Liberty

By M.V. Llosa

In reality, globalization does not suffocate local cultures but rather liberates them from the ideological conformity of nationalism.Add a note!Read more...


The Anxiety of Prosperity

Conservatives are comfortable when the maladies they identify can be attributed to the overreach of government. But when problems originate from outside the political sphere, they tend to follow impassioned denunciations with an odd silence. This has been particularly true of conservative critics of capitalism. Daniel Bell ended Cultural Contradictions by calling for the development of a new public philosophy, one which would seem to involve a greater role for the state, but he strenuously avoided mentioning the state or specifying its role. Elsewhere he and others, including Novak and Kristol, have made hopeful predictions of a new Great Awakening, which is usually vague in its theological content but consistent in its rejection of excessive materialism. D’Souza echoes this hope with talk of an imminent "spiritual renewal." He is more optimistic than most, believing that this renewal will be engendered by prosperity itself, which has made possible the luxury of reflecting on its inadequacies. But this talk is ultimately only speculative. All conservative social critics run up against a fundamental barrier: that the principal instrument at our disposal for achieving social change is the state. And the state, for a variously weighted combination of its inefficacy and its coercive tendencies, is more horrible to conservatives than the cultural deficiencies they lament. This dilemma has not disappeared with the new affluence, nor is it likely to be resolved any time soon.Add a note!Read more...


W. V. Quine, Philosopher Who Analyzed Language and Reality, Dies at 92

Roger F. Gibson Jr. wrote that if Mr. Quine's project could be summed up in a single sentence, that sentence would read, "Quine's philosophy is a systematic attempt to answer, from a uniquely empiricistic point of view, what he takes to be the central question of epistemology, namely, `How do we acquire our theory of the world?' "

Mr. Quine's answer, in a nutshell, began by rephrasing the question to read, "How do we acquire our talk about the world?" In his radically empiricist view, nothing that humans know about the world lies outside the realm of language, and so he insisted that any theory of knowledge depended on a theory of language, which he duly set about developing and which became the framework of his philosophy.Add a note!Read more...


Violent Entertainment

(...) But as the politicians castigate TV, music, movies, and video games for causing all sorts of social problems, citizens would do well to question both the supposed link between fictional and real-word violence and the implications of government regulation of the entertainment industry.

While there's no question that popular culture has been getting increasingly violent and lurid every year, it's absolutely unclear what the actual effects are on society as a whole, or on kids in particular. The relationship between such fare and the real world is far from obvious.

Consider this: According to the most recent National Crime Victimization Survey, violent crime is at its lowest point since the federal government started tracking crime trends in 1973. When it specifically comes to kids, the same government data show sharp and steady declines in serious violent crime committed by or against kids since 1993; crime at schools has dropped by more than 1/3 over the same time.

Would that be happening if Eminem is really Public Enemy Number 1 ?Add a note!Read more...


A faster Net will save old media

(...) Zap! Encryption exists to be defeated. Movies, television, recorded music, and the texts of books will be essentially free. But here is the crucial point: They will be free in their digital forms. This will inspire a wholesale move by the entertainment industry back into analog and physical media, and into live performance.

You can't digitize a live concert. You can download all the words in a book, but you can't digitize the feeling of holding one in your hands. You can trade MP3 files, but vinyl record stores get top prices for classic LPs, and buffs claim that vinyl sounds better than CDs. You can see a movie on a big video screen, but you can't digitize the smell of popcorn and the roar of the audience. (...)Add a note!Read more...


The point about pornography


There's a conservative tradition which I think I'm part of which is hostile to fantasy as such -- fantasy as a flight from reality, "fancy" in Coleridge's term as opposed to imagination. It's the difference between the escape from things into a world where you control everything -- which is essentially what pornography is, even if it's only with a switch -- and the imaginative re-creation of things, which enables you to confront again the real human being. The point about pornography is that it depersonalizes the human being and therefore impoverishes one's ability to confront human beings as they are.

From Roger Scruton's Salon Interview.

 

 

 

One Criterion

The extent of my daring is to suggest one criterion, by which it may be rationally conjectured before-hand, whether or no a reader would lose his time, and perhaps his temper, in the perusal of this, or any other treatise constructed on similar principles. But it would be cruelly misinterpreted, as implying the least disrespect either for the moral or intellectual qualities of the individuals thereby precluded. The criterion is this: if a man receives as fundamental facts, and therefore of course indemonstrable and incapable of further analysis, the general notions of matter, spirit, soul, body, action, passiveness, time, space, cause, and effect, consciousness, perception, memory, and habit; if he feels in his mind completely at rest concerning all these, and is satisfied, if only he can analyse all other notions into some one or more of these supposed elements with plausible subordination and apt arrangement: to such a mind I would as courteously as possible convey the hint, that for him the chapter was not written.

From: S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria.





The Peasant Marey


SUDDENLY, amid the deep silence, I clearly and distinctly heard a shout: "There's a wolf!" I screamed, and, beside myself with terror, crying at the top of my voice, I ran out into the field, straight at the plowing peasant. It was our peasant Marey. I don't know if there is such a name, but everyone called him Marey. He was a man of about fifty, heavy- set, rather tall, with heavy streaks of grey in his bushy, dark-brown beard. I knew him but had scarcely ever had occasion to speak to him before. He even stopped his little filly when he heard my cry, and when I rushed up to him and seized his plow with one hand and his sleeve with the other, he saw how terrified I was. "It's a wolf!"

I cried, completely out of breath. Instinctively he jerked his head to look around, for an instant almost believing me. "Where's the wolf?" "I heard a shout.... Someone just shouted, 'Wolf'" . . I babbled. "What do you mean, lad? There's no wolf; you're just hearing", reassuring me. But I was all a-tremble and clung to his coat sleeve, more tightly; I suppose I was very pale as well. He looked at me with an uneasy smile, evidently concerned and alarmed for me. "Why you took a real fright, you did!" he said, wagging his head. "Never mind, now, my dear. What a fine lad you are!" He stretched out his hand and suddenly stroked my cheek. "Never mind, now, there's nothing to be afraid of. Christ be with you. Cross yourself, lad."

But I couldn't cross myself; the corners of my mouth were trembling, and I think this particularly struck him. He quietly stretched out a thick, earth-soiled finger with a black nail and gently touched it to my trembling lips. "Now, now," he smiled at me with a broad, almost maternal smile. "Lord, what a dreadful fuss. Dear, dear, dear!" At last I realised that there was no wolf and that I must have imagined hearing the cry of "Wolf." Still, it had been such a clear and distinct shout; two or three times before, however, I had imag- ined such cries (not only about wolves), and I was aware of that. (Later, when childhood passed, these hallucinations did as well.) "Well, I'll be off now," I said, making it seem like a question and looking at him shyly. "Off with you, then, and I'll keep an eye on you as you go. Can't let the wolf get you!" he added, still giving me a maternal smile. "Well, Christ be with you, off you go." He made the sign of the cross over me, and crossed himself I set off, looking over my shoulder almost every ten steps.

Marey continued to stand with his little filly, looking after me and nodding every time I looked around. I confess I felt a little ashamed at taking such a fright. But I went on, still with a good deal of fear of the wolf, until I had gone up the slope of the gully to the first threshing barn; and here the fear vanished entirely, and suddenly our dog Volchok came dashing out to meet me. With Volchok I felt totally reassured and I turned toward Marey for the last time; I could no longer make out his face clearly, but I felt that he was still smiling kindly at me and nodding. I waved to him, and he returned my wave and urged on his little filly. "Gee-up," came his distant shout once more, and his little filly once more started drawing the wooden plow. This memory came to me all at once - I don't know why - but with amazing clarity of detail. Suddenly I roused myself and sat on the bunk; I recall that a quiet smile of reminiscence still played on my face. I kept on recollecting for yet another minute. I remembered that when I had come home from Marey I told no one about my "adventure." And what kind of adventure was it anyway?

I forgot about Marey very quickly as well. On the rare occasions when I met him later, I never struck up a conversation with him, either about the wolf or anything else, and now, suddenly, twenty years later, in Siberia, I remembered that encounter so vividly, right down to the last detail. That means it had settled unnoticed in my heart, all by itself with no will of mine, and had suddenly come back to me at a time when it was needed; I recalled the tender, maternal smile of a poor serf, the way he crossed me and shook his head: "Well you did take a fright now, didn't you, lad!" And I especially remember his thick finger, soiled with dirt, that he touched quietly and with shy tenderness to my trembling lips.

Of course, anyone would try to reassure a child, but here in this solitary encounter something quite different had happened, and had I been his very own son he could not have looked at me with a glance that radiated more pure love, and who had prompted him to do that? He was our own serf, and I was his master's little boy; no one would learn of his kindness to me and reward him for it. Was he, maybe, especially fond of small children? There are such people. Our encounter was solitary, in an open field, and only God, perhaps, looking down saw what deep and enlightened human feeling and what delicate, almost feminine tenderness could fill the heart of a coarse, bestially ignorant Russian serf who at the time did not expect or even dream of his freedom. Now tell me, is this not what Konstantin Aksakov had in mind when he spoke of the advanced level of development of our Russian People? And so when I climbed down from my bunk and looked around, I remember I suddenly felt I could regard these unfortunates in an entirely different way and that suddenly, through some sort of miracle, the former hatred and anger in my heart had vanished. I went off, peering intently into the faces of those I met.

From: Dostoyefsky's, Diary of a Writer, Feb 1876.



Escaping the transcendental


CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, which explicitly references Dostoevsky throughout, is the story of Judah Rosenthal, who commits a murder, after which he is haunted by sparks of his long-suppressed religious upbringing, and stands on the verge of confessing his crime. But if Dostoevsky's novel argues that, in God's absence, man's conscience will assume the vacancy (that the novel is marred by an embarrassing, tacked-on Christian ending is another story), Allen's protagonist stifles his guilt, and gets off scot-free. Except, according to the unstated tenets of tragedy, which moves from the specific to the universal and dictates that the choices a protagonist makes affect not only himself, but the very nature of the universe, Judah's world is forever altered. "All his worst fears about the world are realized," Allen's character says at one point, and the tragic irony of the film is that unbeknownst to himself, Judah has transformed his world into one no one in their right mind would want to inhabit. "The universe is a cold place," says one of Allen's characters -- a philosophy professor who plays the same dramatic role assigned Lear's fool, and disappears midway through the action by jumping out a window. "And it is we, with our capacity to love, that infuse it with meaning." Through the choices he makes, Judah infuses the world with the most terrible of meanings. "Oedipus," Allen has a buffoonish producer say at one point, "Now Oedipus is funny! Who did this terrible thing to the city? Oh, it was me!" Stripped of the tragic dimension, the film ends, like all archetypal comedies, at a wedding.

"Comedy," according to Ionesco, "is a feeling of absurdity, and seems more hopeless than tragedy; comedy allows no way out of a given situation." But are we really doomed to live in a world where, no longer weighed down by the burden of God's presence, tragedy must float on the shallows of a grotesquely comic despair? "Various kinds of impersonal and hostile mechanisms have taken the place of God, Nature and History, found in the old tragedy," writes critic Jan Kott. "The notion of absurd mechanism is probably the last metaphysical concept remaining in modern grotesque. But this absurd mechanism is not transcendental any more in relation to man, or at any rate to mankind. It is a trap set by man himself into which he has fallen." Judging by the condition of our literature, man hasn't failed to drag art along for the fall. More and more, it seems, our best fiction, having inherited the burden of grappling with the absolute, seems set on escaping the transcendental, and yet, no matter how hard we pull, we seem to get no further away.

From: Alex Abramovich, On Tragedy.

 


Class distinctions

Modern and cultured persons, I believe, object to their children seeing kitchen company or being taught by a woman like Peggotty. But surely it is more important to be educated in a sense of human dignity and equality than in anything else in the world. And a child who has once had to respect a kind and capable woman of the lower classes will respect the lower classes for ever. The true way to overcome the evil in class distinctions is not to denounce them as revolutionists denounce them, but to ignore them as children ignore them.

From: "Charles Dickens", at Chesterton Day by Day: March.



Liberty in education

[...] what exactly does it mean to have "liberty" in education? Does it mean that all the manuscripts that reach me should be published, funded, the authors given professorships, etc.? It's a finite world; we can't avoid choices. Slogans are easy, choices harder.

From: Noam Chomsky, Forum Answers from Noam (link broken).


 

Part-time readers

To learn by heart, to transcribe faithfully, to read fully is to be silent and within silence. This order of silence is, at this point in western society, tending to become a luxury. It will require future historians of consciousness (historians des mentalites) to gauge the abridgements in our attention span, the dilutions of concentration, brought on by the simple fact that we may be interrupted by the ring of the telephone, by the ancillary fact that most of us will, except under constraints of stoic resolve, answer the telephone, whatever else we may be doing. We need a history of noise-levels, of the diminution in those natural masses of silence, not only nocturnal, which still enfolded the daily lives of Chardin and his reader. Recent studies suggest that some seventy-five per cent of adolescents in the United States read against a background of sound (a radio, a record-player, a television set at one's back or in the next room). More and more young people and adults confess to being unable to read a serious text without a background of organized sound. We know too little about the ways in which the brain processes and integrates competing simultaneous stimuli to be able to say just what this electronic input does to the centres of attention and conceptualization involved in reading. But it is, at the least, plausible to suppose that the capacities for exact comprehension, for retention and for energetic response which knit our being to that of the book are drastically eroded. We tend to be, as Chardin's philosophe lisant was not, part-time readers, readers by half.

From: George Steiner, No Passion Spent.


Wilde at heart

If Wilde had been more truly radical, he might have abandoned his Christian piety entirely, for better and for worse, as Nietzsche did. At moments, especially in his essay, Wilde does seem like a dandified Nietzsche, proclaiming the relativity of all moral judgments and the total indifference of art to ethics. But Wilde was never able to move completely beyond good and evil. In De Profundis, he wrote: "I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art." He thought it was a new discovery, a rejection of his whole literary ideal. In fact, it was merely a return to the Christian insight of The Happy Prince.Add a note!Read more...

 

Essays on the Philosophy of Technology

An excellent resource.Add a note!Read more...


The Symphony

The Symphony - An Interactive Guide

An educational website dedicated to the orchestral symphony.Add a note!Read more...


See especially the encyclopedia.Add a note!Read more...


Clone

The recent cloning developments have created a large scale debate on the morality and ethics of duplicating humans and other creatures. Enter the reactions section to learn about common cloning misconceptions, views from both sides of the cloning debate, and what the government is doing to prevent human cloning research.Add a note!Read more...


SYMBOLS.com contains more than 2,500 Western signs, arranged into 54 groups according to their graphic characteristics. In 1,600 articles their histories, uses, and meanings are thoroughly discussed. The signs range from ideograms carved in mammoth teeth by Cro-Magnon men, to hobo signs and subway graffiti.Add a note!Read more...


MyEurope

The myEUROPE Schools Network is a group of more than 300 schools. They form a unique community of teachers who work for the development and the enhancement of our common European identity.Add a note!Read more...


THE HUSSERL Page.
FICHTE: The Vocation of Man.


THE CANONICAL Tradition of the Orthodox Church.
THE GREGORIAN Chant Home Page.
Registry Editor Plus: at Windows Hardcore Freeware.

MONASTIC Orders and Monasteries.
WEB SITES Related to the Study of the Eastern Churches.
THE CHRISTIAN Activist.

PETER BROWN: A New Augustine .

DISCOVERING BYZANTIUM: Eastern Orthodoxy is no longer a 'stealth' religion .
A CULTURAL Chronology of Early Beat Generation Literature.
LIFT UP Your Hearts: Sites Devoted to Christian Spirituality .

R. WOODS: For the 3rd Sunday of Lent.

JOHN MILTON: Areopagitica.
Dominican Spirituality.
DAVID HOROWITZ on Political Correctness.
THEOLOGY Library.

SPIRITUALITY Internet Resources.
ORANGATOR Sound Generator.

THE LADDER of Divine Ascent.

PAUL MEYENDORFF, The Liturgical Path of Orthodoxy in America.

 

GERMAN Dictionary And Translation Bookmarks.

THE BACH Cantatas (Complete and searchable text in German, English and French).
MEYERS Lexikon.

 


LES FOUS dans la litterature: Anatol France on David Copperfield.
A SYLLABUS on Medieval History.

THE HERESY of Self-Love.
MEMES as Cultural Viruses.
On Melito’s Peri Pascha.

CONSTANTINE And Christianity: The Formation Of The Christian State Church.

LINKS to Wilhelm Furtwangler.
FRANCISCAN Bibliographies.
ORTHODOX Resources.
BOOKS On-line, Institutes and Fora.





THE FRIARS Preachers.

A DICKENS Bibliography.

MICHAEL PSELLUS: Chronographia.
ESSAY INDEX: Medieval Europe.

MICROMEGAS: Philosophy, Mythology & Religion.
BOOKSELLERS





IRIS MURDOCH Resources on the Web.
SMARTERKIDS.com.
BRYN MAWR Medieval Review.
ELECTRONIC Text Collections in Western European Literature.
MAJOR International Newspapers.

PAUL TREANOR Texts
AN URBAN Ethic of Europe.
BOOK Related Sources.
THE WWW Watermark Archive Initiative.
ST. MARK of Ephesus and the False Union of Florence
GREEK Tragedy: Early History.



PHILOSOPHY Collections.
YOUTH and Children Links.

THE PAINTINGS of Marsden Hartley.
EUROPE? Which Europe?.
UNION of International Associations.
DOMINICAN Web Library.
THE CITY Review.
ON HANNAH Arendt.






KEITH JARRETT.
MAGRITTE in Brussels.
DAS AUGE E-Zine.
SUBJEKT und Selbstmodell.
ESOTERICA Journal.
WWW SPACE for Cultural Pages.

GOETHE kontra Newton.
THE WEST and Islam:
An interview with Benazir Bhutto.

GAMEstart.
BOOKLINKS.

KING LEAR Home Page.
BERLINERZIMMER Magazine.
KANT'S AESTHETICS in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.
RESCOGITANS Library.

COMICS als Kunst.
JOURNALS and Newspapers.
UPDATED Notebook Freeware: ShellGEM.
UNIVERSITÄT GRAZ (Österreich): Katholisch - Theologische Fakultät .

GEDICHTE von Rainer Maria Rilke.
PRELIMINARY Bibliography of English Translations from Medieval Sources (1968-1991).
ANSCHRIFTEN deutschsprachiger Mediävisten.
SCHOLARLY Publications.

BOOKMARKLETS: Free Tools for Power Surfing.
EINE AUSEINANDERSETZUNG mit Rilkes Gottesbegriff.
WINDOWS Hardware Reviews.
BRACTON: De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae.

THE FLYING Inkpot! A Classical Music Page.
A HYBRID of Painting and Photography.
BURKE: In a Sentimental Context.
J. S. BACH Home Page.
AFRICA: The Art of a Continent.
FEDERALISM REFORM: Seven Options for Congress.
UPDATED Notebook Freeware: Split Files, Folder Size, Paquet Builder.
FOCALPOINT F/8: Photographic Journalism.




PRAISE of Folly.
EFOLLETT Textbook Search.
BUCHANTIQUARIAT Siegfried Unverzagt.
ON-LINE Medieval and Classical Library.
ARTICULATIONS of Daily Life in Paris in Some Thirteenth-Century Old French Dits.
REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE publiée par Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal.

ROMANOV Russia.
BODILY Fluids.
FINNEGANS Web.
CHRONOLOGY: Medieval Europe.
BRITISH HISTORY 1700-1900: Child Labour.
A BRIEF COLLECTION of Middle High German Poetry.
GERMAN LANGUAGE & Literature Sources.
HUMAN RIGHTS & International Relations: Ideas and Links.

JOHN UPDIKE: One Cheer for Literary Biography.
ICON Town.
CLASSICAL Net.
THE RISE of a Children's Literature.
DESIGNING the Web of the Future.
CONSTANTINE and Christianity: The Formation of the Christian State Church.
HISTORY AND MEANING of Orthodox Christian Ikons.

SEVEN KEY DAYS in the making of Europe.
G. SOROS: The Capitalist Threat.
EUROPE: Still in Search of a Definition.
THE NEW PURITANISM: Who's afraid of Lolita? (We are).
CHILDREN'S Crusade.
SAVING OUR CHILDREN from Poverty: What the United States can Learn from France.
VAN GOGH at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
LUC BESSON'S The Fifth Element

'SUSTAINABILITY AND MODERNITY in the European Union: A Frame Theory Approach to Policy-Making' .
NEW GREEK Nationalism.
THE JORGE LUIS BORGES Center for Studies & Documentation.
NATIONAL IDENTITY in the Democratic Multi-Cultural State.
IS THERE a European Society?.
RECONSTRUCTING THE BALKANS: A Geography of the New Southeast Europe.

BIBLIOFIND.
ADVANCED Book Exchange.
THE TRUTH About the Marquis de Sade.
SOME BRITISH contributions to the development of a common European civilisation.

PEACE SYMBOLS: The Truth About Those Strange Designs.
THE CLASSICS at the Wake - Some Aspects of Classical Influence in Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
Rare & Collectible Books


Why, why, does everyone go on so about the brain?

I'm old enough not to be surprised when people are interested in things that seem to me not to be interesting: Golf, the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber and the adulteries of politicians are three examples in a plethora. Since, in most such cases, we're not competing for resources, I don't mind at all. But science is different. Science is expensive, and it's largely publicly funded, and there's never enough money to do all the research that might be worth doing. In particular, brain imaging is expensive compared to other ways of trying to find out about the mind. If you put your money (which is to say: our money) into the elaborate technology required to establish neural localisations of mental functions by imaging techniques, you almost certainly take it out of other kinds of psychological research.Add a note!Read more...


Nietzsche's Styles

Every writer, finally, even when he or she is no stylist in Nietzsche's league, is caught in the web of style's paradoxes. To write is to insist, to crave agreement—whether in commentary, or commentary on commentary, or review of commentary on commentary. Nietzsche's continuing relevance in some ways has little to do with anything he said about life, strength, morality, or the future. It has far more to do with the fact that he said it the way he did, that he said anything at all, that he made its saying his deepest and most ineluctable philosophical subject—and in so doing made it ours.Add a note!


The Biographer's Art

And yet, after being in Coleridge's presence for several weeks and some 800 pages, I feel I know him more deeply than I know my friends or even my husband. It is ironic that a rich, detailed biography brings me closer to a person's inwardness than I can hope to achieve in living relationships. The artful biographer gives me the satisfying illusion that Coleridge is thinking out loud in my presence. "Subjects sprout up with the tropical speed and variety of jungle plants: 'Why is True Love like a Tree?'; 'Essay in Defence of Punning'; 'What was the origin of philosophy?'; 'When did Time begin?'; . . . 'Property clearly natural to man . . . manifest in animals-the Swans on Hawkshead Lake'; 'Absolute Truth is always a mystery.'" He is a wonder-full man.Add a note!


Rimbaud and Orwell

So Rimbaud gave up poetry when it failed to change the world. Orwell at the end must have had his doubts about language, too, or he wouldn't have dreamed up Newspeak. Neither is remembered for his hard work at identity-making. Instead, the poet's name is worn by freaks, geeks and videodrones as if it were a logo on a T-shirt or a jet-propelled sneaker, and the novelist is propped up on a horse like the dead El Cid to frighten the Moorish hordes. They have both been turned into the standard-issue celebrity flacks of this empty, buzzing time, selling something other than themselves, unattached to honor, glory, kingship, sainthood or genius. They join a talk-show parade of the power-mad, the filthy rich and the serial killers, the softboiled fifteen-minute Warhol eggs, the rock musicians addled on cobra venom, the war criminals whose mothers never loved them and the starlets babbling on about their substance abuse, their child molestations, their anorexia and their liposuction. "I have never belonged to this race," said Rimbaud.Add a note!


Letter from Europe: Crossing many bridges...

The third time I went across the bridge was to see the Peter Greenaway exhibition, 'Flying over Water,' at Malmø Konsthall. The exhibition questions the story of Icarus in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Icarus was the son of Daedalus who built the Labyrinth in Crete for King Minos, where they were later held prisoner. To escape from the Labyrinth, Daedalus constructed wings of feathers that he glued together with wax. In his joy, Icarus flew too close to the sun...the wax melted and he lost his wings and fell into the sea. In the exhibition, Greenaway asks questions like: What kind of birds, and how many died for Icarus' wings? How long would it have taken him to reach another shore? How did the sea receive him? Greenaway invites us to follow our own path in interpreting the myth...Did Icarus really drown or is he still flying over the water preparing for a perfect landing in the new Millennium???Add a note!


Belief without belonging

Brown, who is Reader in History at the University of Strathclyde, argues that Britain's core religious culture has been destroyed. But he challenges the view that secularisation has been a long and gradual process, proposing there has been a catastrophic and abrupt cultural revolution. Personal Christian identity broke down suddenly in the "swinging Sixties" when new media, new gender roles and the moral revolution dramatically ended people's conception that they lived Christian lives. He predicts the same fate faces the whole of western Christianity.Add a note!Read more...

 

 

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