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We Robot 2012 – UAVs and a Pilot-Free World
Day Two at the We Robot 2012 conference at the University of Miami Law School. Amir Rahmani‘s presentation Micro Aerial Vehicles: Opportunity or Liability? prompted a set of thoughts sparked by the...
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Geertz, Trilling and Fussell on the Transformation of the Moral Imagination
In ‘Found in Translation: Social History of Moral Imagination’, (from Local Knowledge: Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, Basic Books, New York, 1983, pp 44-45), Clifford Geertz writes, Whatever use...
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The Pleasures of Etymology Lessons
A persistent reaction of mine while reading is to react with little starts of pleasure when I encounter a little etymology lesson tucked away in the pages of my read. Recently, for instance, I found...
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Nick Drake’s ‘At the Chime of a City Clock’ and Urban Melancholia
I discovered Nick Drake late, very late. Back in 2007, Scott Dexter and I were busy dealing with the release of our book Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software; mainly, this...
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Colm Tóibín on the ‘Real’ and the ‘Imagined’
Colm Tóibín writes of the intimate relationship between facts and fiction (‘What Is Real Is Imagined’, New York Times, July 14 2012), about how the story-teller’s primary responsibility is to the...
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Finding Philosophy in Literature
This semester, I am teaching Philosophical Issues in Literature. PIL is one of Brooklyn College’s so-called upper-tier core courses; all graduating students are required to take a pair of these....
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Shakespeare, Drayton, and Birdsong, Then and Now
In his The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, Peter Levi wrote, [H]istory and family connection do as much to throw light on Shakespeare as a poet as academic criticism has done, and maybe more....
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Coming For You with Chuck D and Public Enemy
In reviewing Jay-Z‘s book Decoded–a collection of lyrics with extensive commentary–(‘Word‘, The New Yorker, December 6 2010) Kelefa Sanneh writes: Too often, hip-hop’s embrace of crime narratives has...
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Aimé Césaire’s Immortal, Eminently Quotable Line
From Notebook of a Return To My Native Land: For it is not true that the work of man is finished, That we have nothing more to do in the world, That we are just parasites in this world, That it is...
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No Matter Where You Go, There’s Home: Robert Viscusi’s Astoria
This morning, while out for a errand-laden walk–visiting the pediatrician’s office, shopping, and getting an influenza vaccine shot–in this bizarrely gorgeous East Coast January weather, I ran into my...
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Mukul Kesavan on Making the Familiar Strange
Mukul Kesavan concludes a wonderful essay on Lucknow, the English language, Indian writing in English, the Indian summer, and ice-cream with: [T]the point of writing isn’t to make things familiar; it...
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Viscusi and Queneau: The Combinatorics of Poetry
Reviewing Daniel Levin Becker‘s Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (‘Anticipatory Plagiarism‘, London Review of Books, 6 December 2012) allows Paul Grimstad to take a tour through...
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Freud, Pointing to Poets
Some distinctive features of Sigmund Freud‘s writings are: a clarity of exposition–at least in works intended for more general audiences–which offset the density and novelty of the subject matter; a...
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Walter Kaiser on Online Instability vs. Printed Stability
In reviewing the fifteen-volume cataloging of the massive Robert Lehman Collection (‘An Astonishing Record of a Vast Collection‘, New York Review of Books, 7 March 2013), Walter Kaiser writes: Like the...
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Reflections on Translations – V: The Special Challenges of Poetry
I have previously confessed, on this blog, to being mystified by the magical processes of translation, especially when I realize important components of my literary and philosophical education...
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Paul Valéry on the Indispensability of Avatars
Paul Valéry is quoted in Stephen Dunn‘s Walking Light (New York, Norton 1993) as saying: I believe in all sincerity that if each man were not able to live a number of lives besides his own, he would...
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Bronowski on the Actively Constructed Good (in the Beautiful)
At the conclusion of The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature and Science, Jacob Bronowski writes: You will have noticed that the aesthetics that I have been developing through these six...
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Kundera on the Novel’s Powers of ‘Incorporation’
In ‘Notes inspired by The Sleepwalkers‘ (by Hermann Broch), Milan Kundera writes: Broch…pursues ‘what the novel alone can discover.’ But he knows that the conventional form (grounded exclusively in a...
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The ‘Anxiety of Influence’ and Scientific Discovery
In his essay on scientific discovery, ‘Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science’, Oliver Sacks writes: Darwin was at pains to say that he had no forerunners, that the idea of evolution was not in the...
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Edward Mendelson on Anthony Hecht and the Palliations of Poetry
In writing on Anthony Hecht‘s poetry in (‘Seeing is Not Believing‘, The New York Review of Books, 20 June 2013), Edward Mendelson remarks: In a familiar paradox of art, Hecht’s poems got their...
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