Mutability and Mortality
Perhaps my favorite in this set of personal homages is “Ode to the Arts and Humanities Staff” which sings the praises of the otherwise unseen and unsung heroes, the clerical and support staffs that keep universities and academic departments running.
Translating the Chinese Diaspora
For many of the characters in Yan’s stories, particularly those who find themselves alone in a foreign land, the feeling of always wishing to be elsewhere captures a state of longing that appears to be the most permanent fixture of their interrupted lives.
Dave Hickey Now
Oppenheimer’s introduction tells the story of Hickey’s unrealized book project Pagan America—a country of a “large, secular, commercial democracy,” united by shared icons across cultural strata.
Recent String Quartets
The stillness of Shulamit Ran’s high harmonics, and fragments and sequences of unrelated materials, seem to represent the disjointed, depleted nature of mind when confronted with the destruction of the bodily self.
Religious Heresy, Liberalism, and Political Philosophy
By not knowing, the recent positions taken by political philosophers over the nature of justice repeat, but superficially so, those much earlier theological arguments over sin and free will.
How To Think Outside, Around, In Between, and Beyond the Box
From metaphor to material, humankind has used containers of some sort for the past 200,000-400,000 years.
Better Lives Through Reading
Reading opens us up to a topsy-turvy, funhouse-mirror, Alice in Wonderland universe where we follow in wonder every hint of the hero, intermittently puzzling over what our author is doing.
Love, Envy, and Revenge
Titian invites us to empathize with antiquity and to humanize it.
Like Magic
A book arrives to readers already finished. If we allow ourselves to be mystified as we age, we might wonder at the object in our hands.
Aeneid Wars
French departments do not stop teaching French literature after Moliere and Racine, Italian departments do not stop teaching Italian literature after Dante and Petrarch, so why do almost all classics departments feel they have no duty to study and teach Latin literature after Juvenal, Martial and Seneca?
Dual Nature, Singular Poulenc
Poulenc’s style, and the French aesthetic that he inherited from Satie, Fauré, and Debussy, are defined by their elegance, lightness of touch, and humor, but with the ability to move one deeply.
Will Laughing at and with One Another Save Us?
Israel seems quite correct in his claim that if Melville’s Ahab, with his bitter rage at what is morally offensive and cosmically disordered, may be seen as a representative figure revealing the haunted soul of American white Protestants, for the Jews the complementary imaginative construction is the Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman.
The Cost of Discipleship
Reitter and Wellmon do propose Weberian vocation as a universal possibility which, if we all acted on it, would grant us more meaningful lives. But an equally plausible conclusion is that there is something wrong with Weber’s ideal of vocation.
Coins, Trinkets, Bits and Bobs
Lake takes her readers through a history of artifacts that people dug up or collected in England during the eighteenth century, focusing on coins, manuscripts, weapons, and grave goods as specific case studies.
In Praise of Ozsváth and Turner’s Poetry of Translation
Ozsváth and Turner, amazingly, have achieved the impossible: the syllabic count, the metrics, the rhyme scheme, and the even the number and line placement of the feminine endings matches Goethe’s German perfectly.
Opening Our Eyes to See
Greene offers a gentle, albeit powerful call-to-action: “The world is chockablock with untold wonders, there for the taking, ready to be uncovered at any moment, if only we keep our eyes open.”
A Way of Knowing
Kindness, amity, and benevolence are the motivating factors. These aspirations are embedded in the central artwork linguistically with the prominently utilized kanji seals for “heart” and “friend.”
