Monthly Archives: April 2008

Distracted

Power over words should mean the abil­ity to per­suade, and per­sua­sion should mean that at some point I can get what I want in some small degree. Instead, what words used rightly do is make peo­ple think; “per­sua­sion” occurs, but wow can it be lim­ited. I prob­a­bly have to con­fess I suck at this advice/persuasion …

April 30, 2008 – 10:55 pm | By ashok | Posted in personal | Comments (0)

Eros and Violence: On Auden’s “Jumbled in the common box…”

“Jum­bled in the com­mon box…“ W.H. Auden Jum­bled in the com­mon box Of their dark stu­pid­ity, Orchid, swan, and Cae­sar lie; Time that tires of every­one Has cor­roded all the locks, Thrown away the key for fun. In its cleft the tor­rent mocks Prophets who in days gone by Made a profit on each cry, Per­sona …

April 30, 2008 – 1:18 am | By ashok | Posted in auden, poetry | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Writing

Ugh. Sit­ting in front of the com­puter for hours on end yes­ter­day did yield some pages of progress, but boy did my eyes start hurt­ing well before I quit. Today I have pens and note­book paper. Any­time dis­ser­tat­ing gets too much, sit and write notes away from the com­puter. Lots to do, lots to do — …

April 30, 2008 – 12:18 am | By ashok | Posted in personal | Comments (0)

Links, 4/28

Arts and Let­ters Daily has had a few good things recently — this arti­cle on how Islamic ter­ror­ists are com­pet­ing with each other to be leader of the whole move­ment wasn’t too bad. They also linked to this review of Richard Dawkins’ first book, The Self­ish Gene — it reads quickly and I learned some­thing from it. …

April 28, 2008 – 8:30 pm | By ashok | Posted in links | Comments (0)

Go Read Josh’s “A Fallen Generation”

I merely want to com­mend Josh’s arti­cle to all of you because of its hon­esty. I would be inter­ested in read­ing responses that fol­low up and expand on it. Josh puts the prob­lem fac­ing all of us rather bluntly in his post “A Fallen Gen­er­a­tion” — the best and bright­est of our gen­er­a­tion seem to be …

April 25, 2008 – 4:26 pm | By ashok | Posted in politics | Comments (0)