Monthly Archives: January 2009

Reasonable Violence: A Reading of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”

The Sec­ond Com­ing William But­ler Yeats Turn­ing and turn­ing in the widen­ing gyre The fal­con can­not hear the fal­coner; Things fall apart; the cen­ter can­not hold; Mere anar­chy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and every­where The cer­e­mony of inno­cence is drowned; The best lack all con­vic­tion, while the worst Are full …

January 31, 2009 – 6:42 pm | By ashok | Posted in poetry, yeats | Comments (8)

Ah, the joys of libel…

…let’s play how many prob­lems can you spot with this: How­ever, a more intri­cate crit­i­cism is offered by the fol­low­ers of Leo Strauss, who also believe in a hermeneu­tics of cul­ture, and often echo many of Adorno’s crit­i­cisms of acces­si­bil­ity and art. Their cri­tique rests on the anti-capitalist nature of Adorno’s ori­en­ta­tion, argu­ing that while …

January 29, 2009 – 11:39 pm | By ashok | Posted in academia, personal | Comments (6)

Politics 101: 5 essentials for changing minds

Alright, I’m writ­ing this, and then I’m off the com­puter for a while. I need to get a lot done. A few of you who are actively involved in pol­i­tics have asked me [Note: I have no idea why. I guess I sound good?] what you can do beyond the usual, i.e. envelope-stuffing, going door-to-door to …

January 27, 2009 – 12:10 pm | By ashok | Posted in politics | Comments (13)

My head is all over the place today…

…so I thought I’d update with what’s going on here. Right now, reread­ing Book 1 of Xenophon’s Mem­o­ra­bilia, which has 4 books total. I am play­ing with the idea that each book cor­re­sponds with a car­di­nal virtue — the order they might be in is mod­er­a­tion, wis­dom, courage, jus­tice. The trick is to get this the­sis …

January 26, 2009 – 4:10 pm | By ashok | Posted in personal | Comments (0)

Sensation (1st draft)

The books lie every­where. Some open, some shut with marks within, and some sim­ply closed, as if human touch were for­got­ten. A mind is sensed. It could be if all pages were read up to the point indi­cated we could recon­struct some­thing. A per­son­al­ity would emerge, one sit­ting atop a moun­tain, wait­ing for the trav­eler …

January 25, 2009 – 11:20 am | By ashok | Posted in poetry | Comments (3)