Monthly Archives: August 2007

Rant: The Cult of The Expert, Or The Media Is Problematic In Exactly What They Get Right

An enormous amount of learning is repetition and the reciting that goes along with it. In complaining about the media being biased, many of us forget that journalists do go to people considered the expert in their subject and repeat that opinion, complete with the facts supporting that opinion, in their work. They’re learning from …

August 29, 2007 – 12:48 pm | By ashok | Posted in media | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Hopefully, A New Beginning

My Mom and I just dropped off my brother at the airport. He’s going to be attending a Ministry Academy where he will work with people in inner-city St. Louis, helping out in mission activities there. He’ll be gone for a year doing this.He seemed scared when I left him at the airport, worried about …

August 27, 2007 – 6:10 am | By ashok | Posted in personal | Comments (0)

Is Being Serious Something You Work For, Or A Natural Product of Having Fun?

Soul and body have no bounds:To lovers as they lie uponHer tolerant enchanted slopeIn their ordinary swoon,Grave the vision Venus sendsOf supernatural sympathy,Universal love and hope;While abstract insight wakesAmong the glaciers and the rocksThe hermit’s sensual ecstasy.- from W. H. Auden’s “Lullaby”Someone asserted the other day that there were bands trying too hard to be …

August 26, 2007 – 3:22 pm | By ashok | Posted in poetry | Tagged | Comments (0)

Tact

When you deal with people – in fact, especially when you deal with lots of people and are very good at dealing with people – mistakes get made. It is not possible to avoid getting on someone’s nerves for a small thing. What will inevitably happen is that the small thing won’t be let go. …

August 26, 2007 – 10:20 am | By ashok | Posted in personal | Tagged | Comments (0)

Humanity Caught Up: On Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan”

Leda and the Swan William Butler Yeats A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? How …

August 22, 2007 – 8:01 pm | By ashok | Posted in poetry, yeats | Tagged , | Comments (1)

I’ll Believe the Attacks on the Secondary Sources I Use When They’re More Than Character Assassination

The argument in question: pay attention, if you can stomach it, to the passages on Strauss A large portion of the academy is in love with the idea that random bits of information can create shortcuts to accomplishment or make an effective case – to be blunt, they hold that knowledge is power. If knowledge …

August 20, 2007 – 5:14 pm | By ashok | Posted in academia | Tagged | Comments (0)

Freeman Dyson on Global Warming

Required reading for the day, kids One thing about Freeman Dyson is that he is genuinely philosophic. He’ll say things that are certifiably nuts – his old solution to the problem of nuclear war was to have governments agree to use up all the nukes to propel a spacecraft deep into space. And he has …

August 17, 2007 – 4:01 am | By ashok | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (2)

On Love and Death: Regarding Some Lines From Eliot’s Prufrock

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea …

August 17, 2007 – 3:31 am | By ashok | Posted in love, poetry, writing | Comments (0)

Two Articles on the SAT

1. ReadingsCharles Murray’s rant against the SATA much better article than the above focusing on the SAT Verbal section2. CommentI can’t read Murray’s rant. He consistently bores me. Skimming his article, I see passages like this – The cognitive stratification of American society—for that’s what we’re talking about—was not a problem 100 years ago. Many …

August 15, 2007 – 3:56 pm | By ashok | Posted in education | Comments (0)

That Which Forges Art: On Baudelaire’s "La Pipe"

The Pipe Charles Baudelaire (trans. Joshua Rocks and Ashok Karra) I am the pipe of an author; One sees, in contemplating my mien Of Abyssinian or Kaffir, Whether my master is a great smoker. When he is filled with sorrow, I smoke like a cottage Where they prepare supper For the return of the laborer. …

August 15, 2007 – 2:23 pm | By ashok | Posted in baudelaire, poetry | Comments (1)