Oct

31

Rethink in Review: October 2009

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My apologies that I didn’t blog more on political philosophy this month – I didn’t really read that much offline, just Plato’s Charmides (and a dense commentary on that by Benardete) and a reread of Xenophon’s On Tyranny (finishing up the commentary by Strauss right now). I also think I completed a reread of the Oeconomicus and Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, but yeah – I’m not real happy with the amount of reading I did this month (I think the quality and the note-taking was fine). I am happy with some of the dissertation edits.

Anyway, I did read a lot of poetry this month, and brought four poems in particular up on the blog:

I also reviewed some of Thomas Jefferson’s writings, and put forth some speculation:

And there was much written in a more practical vein about politics:

I don’t think this was the greatest month in terms of my personal reading, but I can’t say I’m displeased with the writing. The future only promises to be that much brighter.

Oct

30

“Ivywall of Sparrows,” Amy King

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Ivywall of Sparrows (from MiPOesias)
Amy King

for Rob Davis

I missed you at the coffee shop
before sunrise, so I went along
with a to-go in hand all the way
to Clinton and Jerolemon,
where the subway juts up
from the earth’s eye socket,
& from the corner of my own,
I twisted toward the sparrows
upon sparrows covering
a 30-foot stucco wall cracked
with song, without syllables,
“Here Comes the Sun” in case
I lost track of the time.
Tell the people you pass
and inhabit later on:
Take your marketable skills
and raise them to this wall;
hold your brush up wet with
rushes and slows and find
your daytime position sings here.

Comment:

“I missed you” at a place we would awaken; there is little if any light out. Therefore, “I went along with a to-go in hand:” not seeing entirely yet, and with an object not made for any particular place.

“Clinton and Jerolemon” is almost an intersection in Brooklyn, and “where the subway juts up from the earth’s eye socket” may or may not be near there – I’m imagining the Borough Hall Metro stop to be like one resembling an eye. This landscape probably isn’t real: this could be anywhere: the poem ends with an exhortation to the entire world. “[F]rom the earth’s eye socket, / & from the corner of my own” – not that we see, but how we see. We are mimicking something we perceive to be natural, something that is an aspect of the whole (the earth). Therefore, “I twisted toward the sparrows / upon sparrows covering:” darkness upon darkness is being dispelled, but we only see that by forcing ourselves to pay attention to the sunrise, seeing a sparrow’s dullness emerge.

There is no light imagery except for a song title, and that is the revelation of cracks in a wall. That revelation signals the onset of the work day: the thing about the wall of sparrows is that for a moment, it doesn’t matter if they’re real or painted. The sun and the wall itself do not care, and yet are present; something in our speaker has broken through (“juts”/”cracked”), and darkness has come to life. So from silence, to a song playing in one’s head, there now emerges “tell.” This telling is universal, but we do not naturally associate with everyone – universality is achieved, and ends up being something different from what was first assumed.

For now, the achievement depends on taking what in us makes the work day and sacrificing it to the wall: “raise” has every religious connotation possible, and this is an awakening of light, not coffee. This doesn’t mean we abandon our work, though. Our work makes us a brush loaded with paint, capable of different sort of brushstrokes: “rushes and slows.” Working conceived as painting finds the individual daytime position singing. There never was anything universal other than the crudity of stumbling in darkness and standing in light; all people experience time. The true discovery of the “universal” is the individual.

Oct

29

A Sample of What American Political Life Needs Far More of

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NRO’s Jim Geraghty reports that the two major candidates for governor in Virginia, McDonnell (R) and Deeds (D), were asked the following by a magazine [original]: Can you name one good reason that someone should vote for your opponent? I’ve put their responses in the blockquote below:

DEEDS: [Long pause] You know, I can name you a thousand good reasons why they should vote for me. I’m the best-prepared person to be the next governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. … Bob is a guy that I’ve always gotten along with, but I get along with most people. I work hard to get along with people. I don’t agree with Bob on a great deal.

McDONNELL: He’s a good family man. He’s worked hard to represent his district well for 18 years. To me, he’s a good story of somebody living and accessing the American dream. You know, he tells the story about … first guy in his family to go to college with four $20 [bills] in his pocket and now he’s competing for the job held by Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. To me, that’s a great story. I think there’s a hundred reasons why I’d be a better governor than him, but for the way, and this is his own personal life story, the way he has told it — it obviously happened because of tremendous hard work, tremendous perseverance to be able to get to the level that he is at, and I think that’s very admirable.

I’m not going to knock Deeds: a staple of American political life for over 8 years now has been believing the other party is worse than Hitler, especially if that other party had President Bush in it. The Obama administration is setting a new record in terms of utter classlessness that is absolutely impacting political discourse: the Secretary of State went to Pakistan and promptly bashed President Bush for applause (hmm. Pakistan seems to have a mind of its own when considering where its problems lie), the administration has lied about the effort put forth by the previous administration on Afghanistan, and it has gotten to the point where the only thing that the current administration can be counted on to reliably do is blame everyone else for everything. Those links are partisan, but notice the case I’m making here is about partisanship – either we’re working together here while disagreeing with each other on some points, or we’re going to spend the rest of our lives ranting about enemies who actually are our fellow citizens. We need far more people to speak like Bob McDonnell just did of his political opponent.

One more link that I suspect some of you will find to be indirectly related to all of this: Josh Gerstein, “What if Bush had done that?” – double standards do not help when getting people to realize we’re all supposed to be working together. If you go through previous posts categorized “links,” you can find plenty of examples of right-wing classlessness and double standards (update: actually, I just stumbled on a really good example of how low some on the Right will go to slander the President - NRO is completely out of line giving this utter garbage any credence – the only reason why they’re running it is to attack the President).

Oct

28

Links, 10/28/09

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First two links are from aldaily.com.

  • Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt – The older view, fta: Based on chronicles that he considers to be broadly accurate, Clifford J. Rogers, a professor of history at the United States Military Academy at West Point, argues that Henry was in fact vastly outnumbered. For the English, there were about 1,000 so-called men-at-arms in heavy steel armor from head to toe and 5,000 lightly armored men with longbows. The French assembled roughly 10,000 men-at-arms, each with an attendant called a gros valet who could also fight, and around 4,000 men with crossbows and other fighters. Although Mr. Rogers writes in a recent paper that the French crossbowmen were “completely outclassed” by the English archers, who could send deadly volleys farther and more frequently, the grand totals would result in a ratio of four to one, close to the traditional figures. Mr. Rogers said in an interview that he regarded the archival records as too incomplete to substantially change those estimates.
  • Who’s afraid of the avant-garde? – And yet how can Structures I [a work of atonal classical music] lack structure? It is, after all, one of the most “structured” pieces of music ever written. It was composed using “integral serialism,” a method related to the 12-tone or “serial” method introduced in the 1920s by Schoenberg. The serial method ensures that no note is used more often than any other within a piece of music, so that the piece cannot become anchored to any particular musical key, as it always was (to a greater or lesser degree) in the tonal tradition to that date. By the 1950s, serialism had become, in many schools of classical composition, the only respectable way to compose; anything hinting at tonality was considered passé and bourgeois. Yet Schoenberg not only failed to justify his horror of tonality but never came to terms with what its abandonment implied for composer and listener. Since atonality has no tonal “home,” there was nowhere to depart from or return to, so that beginnings, endings and structure became problematic.
  • Some links on newspapers and journalism that might be of interest: Megan McArdle on “horrifying” circulation figures; Kristine Lowe, “How blogs transformed and challenged mainstream media coverage of the credit crisis;” Jeff Jarvis on the worldview killing old media. Putting these links your way because I was thinking of writing something about what a new model for media might look like, but I think I want to stay quiet about that.
  • Jon Corzine’s formula for winning an election has nothing to do with his actual job performance. More at the link that makes me shake my head. fta – Corzine, a former Wall Street executive, has spent $23.6 million on the general election, compared to Republican Chris Christie’s $8.8 million and independent Chris Daggett’s $1.2 million, according to the state Election Law Enforcement Commission.

Oct

28

Soaked

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It’s soaked outside: it rained on and off all day yesterday, and that is continuing today. I love the color of the sky, but it is a blank with no sense of texture, nothing for the eye to wander to.

However: looking at the soggy ground and the soggy objects all around makes things seem gloomier than they are. I headed out for an errand or two yesterday, one of which included a trip across the river into Pennsylvania and several train rides. I don’t have pictures: it was getting dark while I was going; I spent time on the train and in the station both people-watching and getting a surprising amount of reading done. There were a lot of nice older buildings I passed, busy streets with much to offer. It felt nice moving about; the water was probably more of a concern for cars, given the deep potholes in abundance in these parts.

I might go wander a bit today. I want to be productive, I want to learn. Both goals will be achieved by editing, but there is something to be said for actual motion.

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