6. Sideshow Bob raises a fundamental question: what is the role of the cultural elitist in a mass democracy?
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 26, 2014
More discussion here.
Sideshow Bob Raises a Fundamental Question…
August 27, 2014 by at 7:30 pm
Practice What You Preach Department
August 11, 2014 by at 7:36 am
We shall still more thoroughly ground the young man, if, on introducing him to poetry, we explain to him that it is an imitative art and agent, analogous to painting. Not only must he be made acquainted with the common saying that poetry is vocal painting, and painting, silent poetry, but he must also teach him that when we see a painting of a lizard, an ape, or the face of Thersites, our pleasure and surprise are occasioned, not by the beauty of the object, but by the likeness of the painting to it. For it is naturally impossible for the ugly to be beautiful, but it is the imitation which is praised, if it reproduce to the life either an ugly or beautiful object. On the contrary, if an ugly object is represented as beautiful, we deny the truthfulness or the consistency of the picture.
– How to Study Poetry by Plutarch.
Heermeneutic of Suspicion
June 28, 2014 by at 5:35 pm
I honestly think both Hitchens & Dawkins were secret Vatican agents recruited to discredit atheism.
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) June 28, 2014
Richard Dawkins as the Vatican’s Manchurian Candidate. There is a movie in that.
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) June 28, 2014
Tweet-er Jeet Heer, incidentally, though not himself a Catholic (see the last paragraph of his article on Hugh Kenner), wrote an interesting examination — and appreciation — of the centrality of Catholicism to Marshall McLuhan’s work for the July/August 2011 issue of The Walrus magazine.
The many selves of Krista – or, things to discuss with ourselves over drinks as we watch a sunset/sunrise on Guemes Island
June 5, 2014 by at 7:49 am
I thought this an interesting read, worth some discussion, especially since Walker Percy haunts the margins of the piece but never quite makes an appearance:
Thought Experiment
July 10, 2013 by at 5:23 pm
Imagine Walker Percy in place of Norman Mailer here.
That’s sort of what my Still Lost in the Cosmos paper (co-authored with Read Schuchardt) will aim to do.
Rumor has it, McLuhan’s library (now in his son’s possession) contains several heavily annotated Percy titles.
See you in New Orleans.
What Came in the Mail
June 12, 2013 by at 12:18 pm
It’s been awhile since I’ve held a paperback that exudes this particular mid-1960s bouquet. The last one I can recall that gave off this distinctive compact pulpish effervescence was my first copy of The Last Gentleman, published in 1966 and purchased by me in a used bookstore in Walla Walla, WA in 1986. There was a near-pornographic image of a woman doing some sort of postmodern dance of the seven veils on the cover and in the air the smell of acidic pages destined to crumble as the 20th Century unwound. Now I turn to McLuhan for help in healing that wound Percy put his finger on, or at least in furthering the diagnosis.
Quin Finnegan on Rediscovering Pokémon
Yikes! It’s tough reading all that Heidegger when nefarious creatures like this show up in your living room …
But having ably disposed of “Gastly”, he’s now taking the offensive—hunting for more of these hobgoblins born of technology and our ever-shrinking minds.
And taking in an architecture lesson or two along the way.
