RJC

July 2, 2009

Despite the affirmative, vital presence of imagination, that playground area is situated at a great distance from experience. It is distinctly externalized. Distance is as much the distinctive feature of the poems as play; distance, which might be seen as antithetical to that other enterprise of poetry—strong feeling.

Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment, by Tony Hoagland.

Hoagland doesn’t come back to distance as an important feature of contemporary poetry, but it seems like an important shared feature of both dissociative and narrative poetry. Distance can be as useful as elusiveness in avoiding “the potential embarrassment of sincerity.”

And yet many dissociative poems make bold assertions about the world, sometimes assertions that seem simplistic and cliched — say, about consumerism or Republicans. Is skepticism about sincerity really a motivating force for skittery poems? Maybe in part, or maybe it’s just a constraint of the form — dissociative poems might make it more difficult to think about a topic in movements of thought longer than a single declarative sentence.

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I keep wondering if we can find a broader cultural explanation for the contemporary attraction to dissociation. Perhaps one reason is in our current, deeply ambivalent relation to knowledge itself.

More. Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment, by Tony Hoagland

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There may be yet another more hidden and less conscious anxiety behind the contemporary mistrust of narrative: a claustrophobic fear of submersion or enclosure. Narrative, after all, and other poetries of sustained development, seduce and contain; its feature is the loss of self-consciousness; in the sequential “grip” of narrative, the reader is “swept away,” and loses not consciousness, perhaps, but self-consciousness. The speedy conceptuality which characterizes much contemporary poetry prefers the dance of multiple perspectives to sustained participation. It hesitates to enter a point of view that cannot easily be altered or quickly escaped from. It would prefer to remain skeptical, and in that sense, too, one might say that it prefers knowing to feeling.

Tony Hoagland breaks down contemporary poetry’s mistrust of narrative and meaning. Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment, by Tony Hoagland

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June 29, 2009

The only problem, with all respect to Gardner: There probably is just a single intelligence or capacity to learn, not multiple ones devoted to independent tasks. To varying degrees, some individuals have this capacity, and others do not. To be sure, there is much debate about Gardner’s theory in the literature, with contenders for and against. Nonetheless, empirical evidence has not been robust. While the theory sounds nice (perhaps because it sounds nice), it is more intuitive than empirical. In other words, the eight intelligences are based more on philosophy than on data.

Lynn Waterhouse says that the theory of multiple intelligences is dumb. Is it? Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius.

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Dropbox

Dropbox is a backup system I use. Posted here for reference and sharing.

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June 28, 2009

Maira Kalman on Thomas Jefferson. Time Wastes Too Fast.

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June 26, 2009

LEONARD COHEN [ TOUR ]

Leonard Cohen is a) alive and b) on tour. In Europe. Wow.

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At age 5, Michael J. was a healthy, normal child with a talent for music. Today, twenty years later, he lives in what observers describe as a “fantasy world,” isolated physically behind tall gates and mentally in a Disney landscape, which he thinks is real. His favorite toy is an electric car modeled after Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland. “He has had no adult life,” writes one journalist who has studied his case. His closest friends are animals (“I think they’re sweet,” he explains), including a pet boa constrictor (“Snakes are very misunderstood”), and several life-size mannequins. (“I surround myself with people I want to be my friends. And I can do that with mannequins. I’ll talk to them.”)

Michael Kinsley on Michael Jackson, from the April 16th, 1984 issue of The New Republic — The Prisoner Of Commerce (via Rod Dreher)

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That’s one of Dreher’s big problems, fitting every moral issue into a framework dating back to the Low Middle Ages.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has the best commenters. This is smart thinking about Thomas Aquinas, the New Testament, sex, and American conservatism. Acting Like It Can’t Happen - Ta-Nehisi Coates

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June 25, 2009

Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.

Wow. Lera Boroditsky, How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?

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