Paideia

millinerd.com: Metaphysical Summer

Matt Millinerd writes an informative post.

Attempts to overcome metaphysics having been shown to be themselves irrepressibly metaphysical, metaphysics is again in the air.  Consider Dan Siedell's compelling review of Gabriel Bunge's The Rublev Trinity. Siedell quotes philosopher Jean-Luc Marion's Crossing the Visible, where he suggests that Nicaea II, the council that vindicated icons, "formulates above all and—perhaps the only—alternative to the contemporary disaster of the image." Siedell then takes the philosopher's insight into firm art historical terrain:  "The icon is the theological foundation of all painting, secular and religious."  We can hope any who missed this crucial insight from Sidell's God in the Gallery will get it this time around.

The fiercely brilliant (and if you doubt that adjectival combination, read the last paragraph of this review) art critic Maureen Mullarkey provides a remarkable testimony to just such an insight.  After years of hesitation, and despite extensive experience in New York both reviewing and creating contemporary art, Mullarkey has come around to seeing the wisdom of the Byzantine aesthetic.  Spend a considerable amount of time not just reading Patristics, but marinating in the Orthodox liturgy, and you'll likely agree.

What does this have to do with metaphysics?  Everything.  Interest in the icon is not just for those who like painting.  The wisdom of Byzantine art was not in its style but in the iconic, symbolic horizon to which that style successfully testified.  Fruitful as the icon may be for painters and art historians, it would be a mistake, one almost laughable in its small-mindedness, to limit the Byzantine iconic perspective to the realm of "art". Consider a not so familiar passage of John of Damascus:

We see images in creation which faintly reveal to us the reflections of God, as when, for instance we speak of the Holy and eternal Trinity imaged by the sun, or light, or a ray, or by a spurting fountain, or a gushing stream, or a river, or by the mind, or speech, or the spirit within us, or by a rose bush, or a flower, or a sweet fragrance (De imaginibus oratio I).

No narrow "art theory" there.  Icons are merely the fish that swim in that ocean.  (An ocean, incidentally, in which the Protestant Jonathan Edwards swims just as happily.)  The word for that ocean, following Aristotle, is "metaphysics." Like all words that have been around for a while, it's been abused and misused, but it's eminently recoverable.  Abusus non tollit usum.

The thing that Siedell is after, that Mullarkey intuitively grasps, and that Damascus and Edwards effortlessly understood, is a thick metaphysical horizon.  Make no mistake, the word is getting out on this.  In the latest Mars Hill Audio journal, Ken Meyers interviewed Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson and Thomas Hibbs to discuss the kind of realism that can sustain such metaphysical grit.  I highly recommend shelling out the few bucks to listen in, but the same idea is on offer, at considerable length, in one of Wilson's essays, entitled Saint Augustine and the Meaning of Art.  Even if symbolism and meaning have been systematically eviscerated thanks to a fashionable academic cyclone that has long since passed, there is nothing about such a turn of events that prevents the immediate recovery of the previous symbolic arrangement.  In Wilson's memorable words:

The meaning of the world that we usually describe as constituting culture, or a culture... does not depend primarily upon our social conventions. Rather, the signs of a culture are founded on natural signs, and, indeed, are themselves natural signs in whose fashioning our intellects cooperate, and for whose knowledge and joy they exist. Given how destructive the wars and social changes of the last century have been—above all the change in thought that has tried to reduce even the human person to a fungible fact for exploitation—we should take great comfort in that fact. The meaning of things, which our cultures may embrace and develop, nonetheless does not depend on us for their existence. And so, when we see a painting or some other work of art—the remnants, say, of some half-ruined memorial statue, in some empty square, at the edge of a red-light district in Brussels—we are seeing not the illegible signs of a lost culture. We are seeing a sign whose meaning has, for the moment, been lost to us, and whose intelligibility only awaits someone with reason, sense, and patience enough to uncover it.

Call them Neo-Byzantine, Edwardsian or Maritanian, there seem to be an increasing number of such someones.  But - and this is Wilson's point - it wouldn't even matter if there were not.

via www.millinerd.com

Christian Ethics in a Technological Age | Mere Orthodoxy

Chris Benson over @ Mere Orthodoxy has announced a book I have already ILL'ed. This looks interesting!

"I recently broadcast new and upcoming titles of interest, but a clear stand-out emerges. Here’s the career of an inquiry.

First, there was Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934).

Then there was Martin Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” (1953).

Then, Jacques Ellul’s Technology and Society (1954).

Next, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).

After that Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992).

And now, almost two decades after the last book, Brian Brock’s Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (2010) promises to change everything . . . .

Christian Smith (University of Notre Dame): Christians are often so naive about the power of technological culture in our lives. Brian Brock isn’t. With sobering realism and Trinitarian clarity of vision, Brock shuts down happy optimism and focuses hope only in cross and resurrection, as worked out in the nitty-gritty particularities of our lives. The voices of Bonhoeffer, Barth, and Augustine, which Brock here brings to bear on the overwhelming domination of technology, are a gift to any seeking an alternative vision.

Stanley Hauerwas (Duke Divinity School): This is as good a treatment of Heidegger’s account of technology as any that we have, and a more appropriate theological response. Brian Brock is going to be one of the most important theologians of the future.

Michael Banner (Trinity College, University of Cambridge): A considered and mature statement of a serious position on a highly pertinent topic . . . . An extremely valuable contribution.

Bernd Wannenwetch (University of Oxford): Remarkable . . . . It is easy to criticize the technocratic spirit, but  much harder to point out an alternative. The books does.

John Webster (University of Oxford): A fine treatment, both in its scope and its perceptive analysis. . . . Brian Brock articulates judgments with force and clarity.

Hans Ulrich (University of Erlangen): Brock’s Christian Ethics in a Technological Age is not just one more contribution to the ethical and moral discourse on technology assessment. It pushes that discussion to a whole new level by meeting the need for a fundamental reflection on the ethical challenges presented by modern technology."

via mereorthodoxy.com

"You'll Never Be Alone" by Christopher Clausen, City Journal Spring 2010

As anyone knows who spends time in the sunshine latitudes of contemporary America, gated “55-plus communities” have been spreading faster than kudzu ever since the oldest cohort of baby boomers felt the first twinges of arthritis. The oddly age-specific phrase signifies that the developments in question are designed for the needs of the (relatively affluent) retired. Typically, at least one resident of each unit must be at least 55 years old, and no permanent resident can be a minor. Why 55 became the canonical age rather than 50 or 60 is hard to say, but the figure is now so deeply ingrained that the vast Del Webb chain uses the variation “55 or better” in all its advertising.

Now that I’m a whole decade better than 55, my wife and I recently drove more than 2,000 miles touring such properties in the Southeast. Our original goal was simply to visit friends from Indiana who had decided to spend the rest of their days in The Villages, a retirement empire that stretches halfway across the flatlands of north central Florida. That particular realm of gold, feelingly described by Andrew Blechman in Leisureville, seemed too unreal to appeal to us—an endless sprawl of “town centers,” complete with ethnic themes and fake histories, around which you can observe hundreds of senior citizens tooling along on golf carts, day and night.

Florida sunshine, however, promised such a sublime change from the gray Northeast that it inspired an inspection tour of other, less grandiose, communities. Over the course of a few months, we visited half a dozen such places on the outskirts of Florida cities, beside Georgia lakes, or in verdant mountains. One hugged the bank of a South Carolina river and had just built an enormous shed for its residents’ boats. All had lavish recreational facilities and activities directors who offered daily classes in how to use them. As these places repeatedly emphasize, they are for “active adults” and carefully avoid any resemblance to nursing homes. The whole experience boiled down to one basic appeal, summarized by the horrifying promise we encountered again and again: “You’ll never be alone.” Or, as one resident enthused, “It’s like being back in high school!”

A succession of charismatic women in their twenties named Cyndi, Brandy, Misty, and Tara—I am not making the names up—led us through the neighborhoods, stopping every few minutes to talk animatedly with some resident who had succumbed to the same treatment six months or a year ago. Each a native of her territory, they were all the sort of fiddle-dee-dee sex bombs who transition effortlessly from high school cheerleading to selling middle managers from Milwaukee on top-of-the-line retirement homes while still keeping the wives charmed. Following them around was such a mindless pleasure that it was surprising to discover now and then that their grasp of figures was everything a sales manager could wish.

My wife, with the inbred politeness of a native Virginian, drove herself crazy trying to keep up with Brandy or Misty’s relentless extroversion and invariably conveyed the misleading impression that she loved everything she saw, whether it was a three-room condo or a replica of Mount Vernon in modern materials. Meanwhile, the job of asking about construction, bylaws, monthly fees, and whether two people who never played golf would still be paying for the upkeep on a championship course fell to me. Only once did I come up with a question that had apparently never been asked. Most of the residences, no matter how small, had rooms with glass doors referred to as libraries. When I asked Cyndi or Tara whether built-in bookshelves were available as an option, she seemed utterly baffled. “Why,” she wondered aloud, “would you want bookshelves in the library?”

With or without shelves, the outcome was always the same. Once we were back in the privacy of our accommodations, my wife fumed that she would rather die of rabies than live in something made out of Hardy Board, and it would be my duty to tell Misty or Cyndi that if it were up to me, we’d move here tomorrow, but unfortunately these houses reminded my wife of orange crates, or slightly more tactful words to that effect.

So in the end, little came of our 55-or-better tour, apart from the memory of following Quebec license plates up and down Interstate 95. Part of the reason was that these communities are designed for exceptionally outgoing people who love group activities, set a low value on privacy, and don’t mind living in a mass-produced structure that is rarely built to outlast its owners by much. Another source of our paralysis is still more difficult to overcome because it seems to involve an abiding law of human nature, which is that as many men grow older, they become less tolerant of cold weather, while many women become less tolerant of heat. No retirement community I know of, from Maine to Miami, has found a way to deal with that dirty trick evolution can play on even the most gregarious couples.

Christopher Clausen is the author of Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of Post-Cultural America.

via www.city-journal.org

The Connection Between Food and Fairies | Front Porch Republic

“[Family life must have been different] in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense real (not metaphorical) connections between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air and later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardized international diet…are artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien, from an unpublished letter to Arthur Greeves, June 22, 1930

via www.frontporchrepublic.com

Whither Walker Percy? | First Things

Today is the twentieth anniversary of Walker Percy’s death. He died at home in Covington, Louisiana on May 10, 1990 following a two-year bout with prostate cancer. He left us six novels and two works of nonfiction, as well as numerous essays, some of which were later collected in the posthumous Signposts in a Strange Land.

Along with Flannery O’Connor, he is often considered one of the leading Catholic writers of the South in the twentieth century. His work—from the National Book Award winning The Moviegoer to the fast-paced The Thanatos Syndrome—captures the malaise and potential absurdity and horror of a post-Christian America with compassionate aplomb. Yet, while interest in O’Connor continues to grow, interest in Percy has plateaued somewhat. There is, of course, the new Walker Percy Center at Loyola University in New Orleans, and, hopefully, the soon to be completed film by Win Riley, but according to these and other measures—works of criticism, biographies, and collected works—the day clearly belongs to O’Connor.

But why?

Percy brooded over the labels “Catholic” and “Southern,” aware of the fact that both, particularly the former, could be used to dismiss his work as another manifestation of what he pejoratively called the “triumphant Christendom of the Sunbelt.” Terrence Rafferty did write a somewhat overheated, though not entirely wrong-headed, review of The Thanatos Syndrome, which he tagged “[e]schatology made simple,” but this rarely happened. While his Roman Catholicism is perhaps more essential to his work than it is to O’Connor’s, it seems unlikely that interest in Percy is less than interest in O’Connor because of this.

Overall, Percy’s Southernness was also an advantage to him—as he himself recognized. The northern writer, Percy once observed, no longer has anything to write about. Having dismissed Christianity and sharing no common culture with his readership, he finds himself writing “dirty,” “not by design, but by default.” The Southern writer, by contrast, still has the remnant of a tradition (or, at least, he did during Percy’s time). He details “the crumbling porticos, the gentry gone to seed, like Faulkner’s Compsons” or is nourished by “the extravagant backwoods Protestant fundamentalism of Georgia.”

No, it seems to me—and it pains me to say this because I am an ardent Percy fan—that interest in O’Connor outstrips interest in Percy because she is simply the better fiction writer. She is a purist and he is a hodgepodge of novelist, essayist, philosopher, and man of science. Or, to put it another way, he is the Samuel Taylor Coleridge to her William Wordsworth. The fact is, when it comes to plot and character—the touchstones of fiction writing—O’Connor excels where Percy sometimes struggles.

While it is easier to structure a short story than a novel, O’Connor’s stories are nevertheless carefully wound for effect and efficiency of movement, even if they are somewhat limited as far as subject matter is concerned. Percy’s plots, however, can sometimes stall and are occasionally tarnished by errors of chronology and coherence, particularly in Thanatos, which is far from his strongest work.

But the biggest difference between the two authors is their characterization. O’Connor’s range and nuance surpasses even that of Faulkner. From the childlike and, at the same time, grotesque brutality of Hulga’s secular atheism in “Good Country People” to the tragic innocence of Bevel in “The River” and the simplistic morality of the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor’s characters shimmer with vitality and complexity.

In his novels, Percy focuses primarily on the protagonist, who often tends to be a version of Percy at the time of the novel’s composition. In The Moviegoer it is the adrift thirty-something, Binx Billing, and in Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome< it is the middle-aged, then older, Tom More. Minor characters are rarely developed, some dropped unexpectedly.

Yet, O’Connor cannot match Percy’s philosophical engagement and his scathing critique of a reductive scientism. It is significant in this respect that one of Percy’s best works after The Moviegoer, at least in my opinion, is Lost in the Cosmos—a hybrid of fictional and nonfictional satire that cuts to the core of American, if not Western, dissatisfaction. Indeed, Percy is at his best when he speaks directly to the reader. In Lost in the Cosmos, for example, Percy proposes to explain: “Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos—novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes—you are beyond doubt the strangest.” Or:

How it is possible for the man who designed Voyager 19, which arrived at Titania, a satellite of Uranus, three seconds off schedule and a hundred yards off course after a flight of six years, to be one of the most screwed-up creatures in California—or the Cosmos.

His response, of course, is that we do not know who we are because we have rejected our sole point of reference: God.

It is clear from Percy’s gently prodding wit and humor that he had fun writing this book and that the genre suits him. It highlights his great strengths as a writer—his humor, philosophical insights, and prophetic voice. If O'Connor has excelled in the stuff of fiction writing, Percy has done so in the stuff of nonfiction, even if the material is sometimes presented through the medium of fiction.

We will read Percy for many years to come, and rightly so. I, for one, recommend him to anyone I can. Unlike the intellectual impotence found in so many contemporary novelists, Percy takes risks in his work. He asks and answers important questions, which, despite its other flaws, gives his work a sharpness and vigor.

However, like Coleridge with respect to poetry, I think Percy will ultimately be remembered for his ideas rather than for the execution of those ideas in his novels. He will not be remembered for the plots or the characters he gave us, but for his diagnosis of “the modern malaise,” presented in those plots and those characters, and expounded in his works of nonfiction. If O’Connor is the better fiction writer, he is the great thinker, satirist, and apologist, and it is for his unflinching assessment of the essential emptiness of modern secular life that he deserves to be read.

Micah Mattix is an assistant professor of English at Louisiana College and author of the forthcoming book, Frank O'Hara and the Poetics of Saying 'I' (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press).

via www.firstthings.com

The Sun Magazine | Digging In (with Wendell Berry

 

For more than forty years, Wendell Berry has worked his family farm in Kentucky the old-fashioned way, using horses as much as possible and producing much of his own food. And he has published more than forty books, writing by hand in the daylight to reduce his reliance on electricity derived from strip-mined coal. Berry has been called a “prophet” by the New York Times, and his Jeffersonian values are so old they can appear startlingly new. His strong pro-environment position has made him something of a cult hero on the Left, as have his antiwar sentiments, which have grown sharper over the years. His 1987 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” published in Harper’s, led some to accuse him of being antitechnology, a Luddite. For his part, Berry has criticized environmentalists for not working to protect farms as well as wilderness. His stout self-reliance and unabashed use of moral and religious language in his writing have endeared him to a number of conservatives, even as his stance against corporate globalization has drawn criticism from others. But these apparent contradictions don’t seem to bother Berry one whit...

Fearnside: Stopping by a local eatery on the way here, I asked people what they might want to ask you. Henry County is small, they noted, and farming isn’t very profitable anymore. So, why did you stay when you could have left for, as one waitress put it, “glitz and glamour” elsewhere?

Berry: I just happen to have no appetite for glitz and glamour. I like it here. This place has furnished its quota of people who’ve helped each other, cared for each other, and tried to be fair. I have known some of them, living and dead, whom I’ve loved deeply, and being here reminds me of them. This has given my days a quality that they wouldn’t have had if I’d moved away.

There have been some good farmers here. The way of farming that I grew up with was conservative in the best sense. I learned a lot from people in Henry County. Probably all my most influential teachers lived here, when you get right down to it. I owe big debts to teachers in universities, to literary influences, and so on. But it’s the people you listened to as a child whose influence is immeasurable — especially your grandparents, your parents, your older friends. I’ve paid a lot of attention to older people. Of course, not a lot of people here are older than I am anymore, but some are, and I still love to listen to them, to my immense improvement and pleasure.

Fearnside: What are some of the things that they say?

Berry: They tell stories. They talk about relationships. They talk about events that have stuck in their minds. The most important thing is not what they say, but the way they talk. We had a local pattern of speech at one time. Now we’re running out of people who speak it. But there were once people here whose speech was uninfluenced by the media, and it had an immediacy, a loveliness when it was intelligently used, and a great capacity for humor.

Fearnside: A good friend of mine told me that she knows people from Kentucky who have trained themselves not to speak like Kentuckians.

Berry: That was the main goal of the school system: to stop you from talking like a “hick” and get you to speak standard American.

Fearnside: When you speak of what the elders here in Henry County discuss, it reminds me of a line from Barry Lopez’s short-story collection Winter Count: “That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

Berry: I don’t think we’re just stories — we’re living souls, too — but we’d be nothing without stories. Of course, stories that belong to a landscape are different from stories that don’t. In Arctic Dreams Lopez talks about how the Eskimos, the native Alaskan people, have a cultural landscape — the landscape as they know it — that is always a little different from the actual landscape, which nobody ever will fully know.

In a functioning culture the landscape is full of stories. Stories adhere to it. And they’re most interesting when they’re told within the landscape. If, say, an oral-history project records somebody’s story and puts it in the university archives, then it’s a different story. It’s become isolated, misplaced, displaced.

Fearnside: You’re a well-known advocate for local economies, yet you write for a much-wider-than-local audience, which means you must rely on the machinery of the corporate world to get your message out. Is there a contradiction in this, or is it simply an inescapable paradox that you must be pragmatic about?

Berry: There are contradictions in it, no doubt about that. There’s an absolutely lethal contradiction in my driving and flying around to talk about conservation and local economies. But you have to live in the world the way it is. You can’t declare yourself too good for it and move away. You have to carry the effort wherever you can take it. You’ve got to have allies. The thought of the Committees of Correspondence in the American Revolution is never very far from my mind. People have to stay in touch somehow. They have to meet and talk. They have to support each other. But that’s a network, not a community.

Fearnside: I was fortunate once to participate in a barn raising in Idaho. It was an incredible experience of community. With the help of friends and neighbors, using mostly hand-held tools, a couple raised a barn in a day and a half.

Berry: The Amish do it in a day. They belong to a traditional culture that, for a long time, has steadfastly put the community first.

Fearnside: I’ve noticed that the Amish seem less self-conscious than most Americans. Why do you think this is so?

Berry: I’d say that in their community, honesty is the norm. One of the most striking things about the Amish is that their countenances are open. We pity Muslim women for wearing veils, yet almost every face in this country is veiled by suspicion and fear. You can’t walk down a city street and get anybody to look at you. People’s countenances are undercover operations here.

Fearnside: While traveling in the Xinjiang Province of China — which is predominantly Uyghur, a traditional Muslim culture — I was struck by the people’s openness. In particular, the children radiated gaiety and health, just as Amish children do.

Berry: The Amish children are raised at home by two parents. They’re given little jobs to do from the time they’re able to walk, and they’re important to the family economy. They have rules. They’re secure. There are things that they’re not allowed to do. There’s something pitiful about American children who are left to invent a childhood on their own with one parent or none, no community, no relatives, and nothing useful to do. They don’t even go into the woods and hunt.

Fearnside: I fear that my generation may be the last to grow up outdoors. I used to roam for hours, hiking through the fields and woods or bicycling down country roads, completely unsupervised, which is unheard of today. Nowadays a kid is going to grow up sitting in front of a computer screen or listening to an iPod, not climbing trees or even playing ball in the street.

Berry: Young people around here don’t come to the river to swim or fish anymore. Of course, an alarming percentage of Kentucky streams aren’t fit for swimming or fishing.

Fearnside: It seems that we’ve been separated from our local communities by radio, television, and now the Internet. Because these forces come from outside the communities, they often don’t reflect the communities’ values. How can we stay plugged in to information and yet preserve our local connections?

Berry: I don’t know. There’s not much you can do, unless you want to disconnect yourself from those electronic gadgets. I pretty much do. Tanya and I haven’t had a television for a long time; people used to give tv sets to our children, because they felt sorry for us. I think we were given three over the years. I listen to the radio some. I don’t have a computer, and I almost never see a movie. To me this isolation is necessary. It keeps my language available to me in a way that I don’t think it would be if I were full of that public information all the time.

Fearnside: My wife and I enjoy watching movies on dvd, but we find that most mass-media offerings aren’t worth our time.

Berry: To make yourself a passive receptacle for information, or whatever anybody wants to pour into you, is a bad idea. To be informed used to be a meaningful experience; it meant “to be formed from within.” But information now is just a bunch of disconnected data or entertainment and, as such, may be worthless, perhaps harmful. As T.S. Eliot wrote a long time ago, information is different from knowledge, and it has nothing at all to do with wisdom.

(hit link to read more)

via www.thesunmagazine.org

Thomas Hardy as Poet

The major goal this summer for me is to imbibe deeply in poetry. I thought I would share someone I did not recognize as a major poet until recently and is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. I stumbled across Thomas Hardy as a poet while reading the excellent (if sometimes dry) biography of Robert Penn Warren by Joseph Blotner. Apparently "Red" Warren encountered this poem and loved it. 

I also ran across a great story in Blotner's biography that exhibits not only the death of a era but also the wisdom of "Red" Warren. While Warren was teaching at Yale at the end of his career the literary world was controlled by the ideology of class, race, marxism, etc. Student strikes and other issues controlled literary exploration and the actual contents of literature were left to the side.

During this time it is said Warren went into the first day of class on poetry and asked what seemed to him a simple request. "Can anyone here recite a poem?" The class looked blankly at him. No one spoke and all stirred uncomfortably in their seats. He than asked, "Can anyone tell me the outline of a short story?" Again uneasy silence. He went around the room asking people individually, hoping someone just didn't have the gumption to step into the spotlight. No one could do it. Warren got up and left the class. It was the last class he was to teach. For someone who could recite the Wasteland by Eliot and The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge by heart (among hundreds of other poems) this would just not do.

With sadness I must confess I would have also been the cause of Warren's disappearance. Hopefully this summer will remedy this.

Wessex Heights

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend -
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to
mend:
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,
But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky.

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways -
Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things -
Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the
moon,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now
passed
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the
night,
There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a
shroud of white,
There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.

5 Ways The Google Book Settlement Will Change The Future of Reading - Futurism - io9

If you care about the future of books, you need to understand the Google Book Settlement. It's a complicated legal document, but we've talked to some of its architects, detractors, and defenders - and break it all down for you.

via io9.com

A Sighting of Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney- lecturing this Thursday evening at Indiana University. Greatly anticipating this!!!

Wendell Berry on Surfing

From a friend of a friend, this excerpt from the Plowboy interview with Wendell Berry, from Mother Earth News magazine, sometime back in the late '70s.

PLOWBOY: It's true most educators are jumping on the "relevance" bandwagon. And yet a less didactic approach is certainly appealing to the young person who wants to try new directions in learning.

BERRY: What I'm saying is that the young have had lots of praisers and lots of detractors but few critics which is really a way of saying they've had few friends. A curious phenomenon of the youth culture thing — and it's full of curious phenomena — is these old sycophants who hang about its skirts and try to touch and kiss the hem of its garment. We see white-haired old men stand up at the university and abdicate their responsibility to the young on the grounds that they (the teachers) have not received the word of God.

Charles Reich is one of the best examples I know of a teacher who's copped out completely by becoming a sycophant of his students. I mean I'm completely against this idiocy of his that says surfboarding is an acceptable way of life. That's utterly absurd. The Greening of America is full of false apologies and excuses for people's failure to be responsible. Surfboarding is not a way of life. People are free to think it is because the care and responsibility for society has been broken up and parceled out to the experts. People who make a life of surfboarding are living off other people. They're leeches of the affluent society. They're parasites of a parasite. As long as we have people making some kind of amusement a way of life, you'll find they're getting their support from something destructive, like strip-mining or needless "development" or war-making.