Monthly Archives: May 2008

A Speech For all Graduates, Past and Present: Is Education a Good?

for Nancy, Joe, David, Zach, every Sarah I know, Con­stance and a mil­lion oth­ers who I wanted to con­grat­u­late but didn’t have the right words at the time. This is only a speech: the thoughts in here are sub­ject to being revised, and like some of my rhetoric, cer­tain prob­lems are pur­posely not being addressed

Brief Incomplete Comment on Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (Oedipus Rex)

Adapted from an e-mail I sent recently; I am aware this doesn’t address Benardete’s “trap­doors,” it’s not meant to. What is below is mostly from the essay “On Oedi­pus Tyran­nus,” by Seth Benardete, in the book Ancients and Mod­erns: Essays in Honor of Leo Strauss. You can deduce how this read­ing came about by think­ing

On Grace: Dickinson’s Poem #904 (“Had I not This, or This, I said…”), Revisited

I don’t want to take back what was said in the ear­lier dis­cus­sion, but I woke up in the mid­dle of the night think­ing about this poem and need to clar­ify some­thing. Here’s the poem again: Had I not This, or This, I said, Appeal­ing to Myself, In moment of pros­per­ity — Inad­e­quate — were Life —

Links, 5/20

An excel­lent arti­cle that sug­gests our very notion of love has been mar­keted to us. Exactly why does an 8 year old need to know about rela­tion­ships and break-ups? And what does it say about us that unchecked cliches make money over and over? OMG u kan n0t b srs! (I think that’s mis­spelled even in

Going. Back?

Every time I leave cam­pus it feels like noth­ing will be the same again. — I don’t mean that for the peo­ple I know here per­son­ally: they know me and I know them, and it will always be the same in a good way. But we’ll always be in touch whether “here” exists or not — But