Life, if we choose to live it fully, is an open university. To study, which means to acquire life’s gifts, we must reduce the clamor. Just as we would not expect to hear someone in another room while the water is running, so we would not expect to learn in a din. And yet we [...]
Read More...When you search the web for Sinbad you’re likely to find David Adkins, the comedian, before you find that wealthy young sailor of Basra whose adventures are immortalized in The Thousand and One Nights. When you search on Odysseus you find Homer’s mythological sailor immediately. We are, after all, Eurocentric, and worldwide accessibility to the [...]
Read More...There are certain days when things don’t hold their shape. This is not just a middle-age weight problem or distortion through a tear drop. It can happen in bright sunlight. People go convex and concave. Buildings seem to play with hula hoops. Sentences play hooky on their periods. Things are not exactly where they ought [...]
Read More...The New Yorker magazine’s incendiary new cover caricatures Barack Obama in Osama bin Laden head dress. Michelle Obama is seen sporting an afro and an AK47, and they’re fist-dapping in the Oval Office. The cover article is favorable to the couple, the cartoon’s defenders say, being intended as satire. It’s meant to drum up attention, [...]
Read More...The CNN crawl this morning declared the Flip-Flop Wars. Barack Obama had changed course about campaign finance, deciding not to limit himself to a federal contribution, and John McCain had decided offshore drilling is okay after all. The more important issue is the press’ mindless acceptance of the received boobism that changing one’s mind, one’s [...]
Read More...In an article entitled The Modernists of Al Andalus (May issue of Istanbul Literary Review) I suggest that modernist English language poetry owes a significant debt to the medieval Arab and Jewish poets of Al Andalus, Arab Spain.—DM
Read More...The surpassing silliness of arguing about which politician has flip-flopped on an issue reminds me of my own flip-flopping around Oscar Wilde’s (inset) famous observation that we pretty much have the faces we deserve by the time we’re forty. I’ve always loved his remark so much that I’ve neglected to notice that it flies in [...]
Read More...America is haunted by The Other, by otherness. The fastest approach to an understanding of this is to consider the photographs of the people we send to Washington. They don’t look like our demographics. They look northern European. We look for The Other to determine who we don’t want in our churches, our neighborhoods, our [...]
Read More...In my lifetime we have whisked through an age of psychiatry into an age of triviality. Perhaps our journey through the age of psychiatry scared us into the age of triviality. Our numerous trivial excursions, our addiction to games, celebrities and consuming suggests a flight from the world whose doors were pried open by Sigmund [...]
Read More...How is it that the nation that rescued the world from fascist thugs and kept the red wolf at bay is now regarded in Europe as a rogue nation, the most dangerous and reckless nation in the world? How is it that while we demonize North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, the Europeans tell pollsters we [...]
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