THOUGHTS
In this section are thoughts on whatever comes to mind, no
limit on topics, written for this web site. When I get the
impulse, I’ll write thoughts and add them to what’s already here (I
don’t plan on ever deleting any thoughts). For each thought,
there will be a title, length, the month and year I wrote it, a blurb
on what it’s about, and a PDF of the thought.
To get a sense of who I am and how I see things and what's
going on with me, you could read these thoughts in order: start with
"On Foucault." The thoughts are self-contained, however, and you
can read them in any order.
-
On Foucault. 19 pp. June, 2007.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a
philosopher who taught at the College de France and other universities,
including in the United States. He authored critical studies of social
institutions, including psychiatry, medicine, and the prison
system. He also wrote about the history of sexuality and the
relationship between power, knowledge, and human discourse. I first
read a biography of Foucault by James Miller, The Passion of Michel
Foucault, in, I believe, 1995, and have revisited it regularly since,
once or twice year, reading a chapter or two or three and browsing
sections here and there before setting it back on my library
shelf. This last time I pulled the book off the shelf—in June of
2007--I noted the phrases and sentences, sometimes a paragraph, I had
underlined, I suppose, ten or twelve years ago. For this thought,
I reproduce the underlines and offer my comments. This thought
provides a sense of the impact this book has had on me, including my
writing, this past decade, and gets across something of what I am like
in 2007. Also, I hope this thought will prompt readers to reflect
on their own lives, as well as look into Foucault and the other
philosophers mentioned in these pages. Read
the full thought here.
-
On Mishima. 8 pp. July, 2007.
Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was a
Japanese author and playwright, who gained international recognition
and acclaim, including being on a short list for the Nobel Prize in
Literature. He is most remembered, however, for his ritual
suicide at 45 by seppuku (disemboweling oneself with a knife and then
being beheaded by a colleague). I’ve read a good bit of Mishima’s
fiction, but I have been most drawn to his outlook as an artist and as
a man and to his personal story. Every couple of years for the
last fifteen, I’ve checked out from the library two biographies on him
and his philosophical essay and memoir Sun & Steel. In this
thought I comment on excerpts from Sun & Steel. I hope I
explain Mishima some here and encourage readers to look into his
writings and personal example, but most of all I use Mishima’s writings
to explain myself. Read the full thought
here.
-
On the New McCarthyism. 18 pp. July, 2007.
The topic here is the current
attacks on racially conscious and active white people by those who
would marginalize, silence, and punish them for their beliefs,
expressions, and actions. I use a memoir on the McCarthy era, as
it was called, in the 1940s and ‘50s, written by Walter Bernstein,
Inside Out: A Memoir of the Black List, and an encounter I had in late
2006 with the Southern Poverty Law Center to frame an analysis of
this phenomenon, drawing parallels between what went on in the McCarthy
years, and at other points in history, and what’s going on now. I
offer some suggestions on how racially committed white people can deal
with attacks against them. Read the
full thought here.
•
On A Very Big Regret.
22pp. July, 2007.
I’d like this thought to speak for itself. The title says as much
as you need to know about it before you read it. Read the full
thought here.
•
On Personal Health. 16
pp. August, 2007.
I’ve never gone after good health for all I was worth at any time in my
life, and that has held me back in significant ways. I’m making
that commitment in this thought, and I’ll describe how I plan to carry
out this commitment over the next few months. I hope this thought
gives guidance and inspiration both to me and to the reader of these
words. Read the full thought here.
• On Three Films That Touched Me.
3 pp. August, 2007.
This past year, I saw three old Japanese films by the same director, Yasujiro Ozu,
that touched me more than any films in my memory. All three
feature the actress Setsuko Hara.
This is my
report on those three films. Read
the full thought here.
•On
Living the Martial Way. 8 pp. August, 2007.
In the same way I did with the Foucault and Mishima thoughts, I record
underlines I made in a book years ago and comment on them, a book I
have gone back to a number of times since that first reading. The
book is Living the Martial Way by Forrest Morgan. My focus
is on the application of what Morgan calls the warrior mind-set to
daily life. Read the full thought here.
•On Big Sur. 2 pp. September, 2007.
Excerpts from
the book Big Sur by Jack Kerouac; although in some cases I may not have
copied them down
exactly as
they were in the
book. Read the full thought here.
•On Chuck Davey 7 pp. October,
2007.
Chuck Davey was a boxer prominent in the
1950s. I went back to a few pages I had written about him back in
2002
and filed
away. This thought is about what came up for me as I
revisited this writing.
Read the full
thought here.
•On Victoria’s Dogs 6pp. November,
2007
Victoria
Stilwell is an animal trainer who straightens out unruly dogs on the
Animal Planet show, "It's Me or the
Dog." I think
I'm learning something from Victoria about straightening out unruly
people. Read the full thought here.
•On John Cheever 3 pp.
November, 2007
Entries from
the journals of novelist John Cheever written in the last months of
his
life. Read the full thought here.
•On Man in the Holocene
2pp. November, 2007
Excerpts
from the novel by Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene. Read the full thought here.
•On Hemingway’s Politics 2pp.
November, 2007
Some passages
from the book By Force of Will by Scott Donaldson about the political
outlook of Ernest
Hemingway. Read the full thought here.
•On
Leonard Schiller 2pp. November, 2007
From the novel by Brian
Morton, Starting Out in the Evening. A young woman has contacted
Leonard Schiller, a
novelist in his seventies,
requesting to meet him as part of writing a masters thesis on his work.
Read the
full thought here.
• On
the Death of Faron Young 2pp. December, 2007
Faron Young was a country
music star from the late 1950s to the 1980s, a honky-tonk singer and
entertainer
in the mold of Hank
Williams. Read the full thought here.
•
On The Beans Story 2 pp. December, 2007
Beans, a Boston terrier (at least
nominally), was the beloved family dog when I was little. Beans
was “put to sleep,”
as they say, when I was about
three—I think he had just gotten old. Beans was often the subject
of discussion
when my much-older brother and
sister and their spouses came to the house for Sunday dinner.
There was one
Beans story, so to speak, that was
repeated time and again. Read the full
thought here.
• On
Falconer 2pp. January, 2008
John Cheever’s novel Falconer ends
with convict Ezekiel Farragut’s escape from prison (New York: Knopf,
1977).
Read the full
thought here.
•
On War 1p. January, 2008.
Read the full
thought here.
•
On Self-Abuse, 4pp., February, 2008.
David Crosby is a
singer/songwriter who was prominent in the 1960s and ‘70s. He
developed a very serious
drug problem in the
years of his prominence,
the subject of this thought. Included are excerpts from two
hospital
in-take reports in
late
1983.
Following the excerpts is my
commentary. Read the full thought here.
•
On Aldous Huxley, 14 pp.,
February, 2008.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
was a British-born novelist and essayist who lived the latter part of
his life in the United
States. He is best
known for
his novel Brave New World, published in 1932. Brave New World is
the ironic
depiction of a “utopia” in
which people are
brainwashed into subordination, accommodation, and a mindless,
shallow, though happy, existence by
the
government
and its agents. Later in life, Huxley became associated with
spiritual and mystical
concerns and
experimentation
with drugs reputed to be mind-expanding, such as mescaline.
This thought contains my
commentaries on excerpts from a
biography of Huxley. Read the full
thought here.
• On Living the Artist’s Way, 10 pp.,
February, 2008.
Robert Henri (1865-1929)
was a
prominent American painter. Not long before his death, the Arts
Council of
New York chose him as one of the
top three living
American artists. Henri was also a popular and influential
teacher of art. Henri’s ideas on
art and life were
collected by a
former student and published as a book in 1923
entitled The Art
Spirit. This thought is made up of
excerpts from that book. Read the full
thought here.
• On Personal Health II: From
Fear to Rage, 9 pp., March, 2008
This thought is an update on “On
Personal Health,” which I wrote back in August of 2007.
Read
the full thought here.
• On
Jack Nicholson, 3 pp., March, 2008.
Things the actor Jack Nicholson
said about himself to journalists over the span of his lengthy career
in films.
In one instance it is something a
friend attributed to him. Read the full
thought here.
• On Woody
Harrelson, 5 pp., March, 2008
Actor Woody
Harrelson first came to prominence as the bartender on the hit
television series “Cheers.” He has gone
on to an active big screen career,
including starring in director Oliver Stone’s film “Natural Born
Killers.” He
continues to act in both lead and
supporting
roles in films, and has become an environmental activist. This
thought
is made up of quotes from
Harrelson. Read the full thought here.
• On
the Death of James Whale, 2 pp., March, 2008
British-born film director James
Whale is best known for directing the sophisticated and morbidly
humorous horror classics “Frankenstein” and
“Bride of Frankenstein” in the 1930s. By the 1950s he was
retired, essentially discarded by
the Hollywood movie studios. Read the full
thought here.
• On
Arthur Bremer, 3 pp., April, 2008.
On May 15, 1972,
twenty-one-old Arthur Bremer shot
presidential candidate George Wallace at a rally
in a Laurel, Maryland
shopping center, paralyzing Wallace for life. Read the full thought here.
•On The Punisher, 1 p, April, 2008.
Comic book superheroes tend to abide by the law and stay away from
killing. One of Marvel
comics' characters,
however, created in the 1970s, The Punisher,
had a very different
outlook. Read the full thought here.
• On
Monsieur Hire, 2 pp., May, 2008.
“Monsieur Hire” is a 1989 French
film directed by Patrice Leconte. This thought is dialogue from
the film:
Read the full thought here.
• On
Dashiell Hammett, 1 p., June, 2008.
Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was an
American author best known for his hardboiled detective fiction.
This
thought is the last words he wrote for
publication. Read the full thought here.
• On Two
Romanian Films, 3pp., June, 2008.
This past week, I saw a couple of films
I found remarkable, compelling, personally transforming.
Read the
complete thought here.
• On Samuel
Beckett, 2pp., July, 2008.
In 1982, at 76 years of age, the Irish
playwright Samuel Beckett (“Waiting for Godot,” “Endgame”) wrote
a play without spoken words for German
television entitled “Nacht und Traüme.” This thought is a
description
of the play. Read
the full thought here.
• On Arthur
Schopenhauer, 1p., August, 2008.
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher.
From the age of 45 until his death 27 years later, Schopenhauer
every day followed the same routine. Read the full thought here.
• On Steve Ditko, 4
pp., August, 2008.
The success of the recent Spider-Man movies
has brought new prominence to the artist who drew Spider-Man,
Steve Ditko. This is my explanation of
what to many is a very enigmatic man. Read
the full thought here.
•On Philippe
Petit, 3pp., August, 2008
Last night, I saw a documentary, “Man on
Wire,” which recounted the planning and execution in 1974 of a high
wire walk by Frenchman Philippe Petit across
the space between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center
in Manhattan. This thought is my
reaction to it. Read the full thought here.
•On Gorgeous
George, 5 pp., September, 2008.
Gorgeous George was the biggest name in
professional wrestling in the 1950s. This is an account of
one of his
matches. Read
the full thought here.
• On the Death of
Eddie Waitkus. 3 pp., September 2008.
In June of 1949, Eddie Waitkus was a
29-year-old veteran of the Pacific war and an all-star caliber first
baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies major
league baseball team. Read the full
thought here.
• On John Lennon,
7 pp., October, 2008.
This thought is essentially a reflection
on the ex-Beatle John Lennon’s relationship near the end of his life
with a woman named May
Pang. Read the full thought here.
• On Hayden
Carruth, 2 pp., October, 2008.
Hayden Carruth was best
known as a major poet, but he was also a critic,
essayist,
novelist, and autobiographer.
He died at 87 on September 29th,
2008. Read the full thought here.
• On the Barber,
5pp., November, 2008.
The barber was born in rural Georgia in
1890. This is his story. Read the
full thought here.
•On Sartre, 3 pp.,
November, 2008.
Philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist
Jean-Paul Sartre has singular eminence in world letters. His
earliest
novel, Nausea, was published in 1938. It is
made up of the diary entries of a French writer Antoine Roquentin
(a stand-in for Sartre himself?) that depict Roquentin’s
struggle to come to grips with the meaning and direction
of his life. This thought is excerpts from this
fictional diary. Read the full thought
here.
• On Richard Yates’
Former Girlfriend, 1p., December, 2008.
Natalie Bowen had been an old girlfriend of writer
Richard Yates (1926-92). Yates is best known for his 1961
novel Revolutionary Road. In 1972,
Bowen
received a phone call from Yates. Read the
full thought here.
• On Sending A Message
With Joan Allen, 1 p., December, 2008.
Producer Jeremy Bolt says casting three-time
Academy Award nominee Joan Allen in his 2008 film “Death Race”
was to send the message that “Death Race” is
an A film and not a low-class genre movie. Read
the full thought here.
• On Don Logan’s Bad
Attitude, 2pp., January, 2009.
Don Logan is a character in the film “Sexy Beast”
(2001). Portrayed by the actor Ben Kingsley, middle-aged, working
class Brit, fierce bird-of-prey persona, small,
compact, muscular, ramrod-straight posture, shaved head, mustache
and
goatee, form-fitting short sleeve dress white
shirt, grey
dress pants, shined shoes. The scene, a commercial airliner
filled with
passengers, ready to take off. Read the full thought here.
• On Ginger’s Dress,
3pp., January, 2009.
Ginger Rogers (1911-1995) was twenty-three years old in
1934 and preparing a duet with the legendary dancer Fred
Astaire
(1899-1987) for the film “Top Hat,” their second film
together. This thought has to do with a conflict that arose over
what
dress Ginger should wear for her dance with Fred. I
think the way Ginger handled this episode illustrates exemplary care
for
one’s work, and great personal integrity and
courage. And I think it also says something about how a parent
can encourage
those qualities. Read the full
thought here.
• On John Updike, 2 pp., January, 2009.
The writer John Updike died of cancer on January 27,
2009. He was 76. The evening I learned of his death, I
retrieved my
copy of his memoirs (entitled Self-Consciousness) from the
bookshelf and paged through it, pausing to read a few pages here
and there. A couple of passages particularly caught
my eye. Read the full thought here.
• On Ted Hughes. 4pp.,
February, 2009.
English poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998) near the end of his
life was designated Poet Laureate of Great Britain. This thought
is made up of excerpts from his letters. Read the full thought here.
• On Philip Roth, 1 p.,
March, 2009.
This thought is an excerpt from Philip Roth’s novel, The
Dying Animal. “The only thing you understand about the old
when you are not old is that . . .” Read the full thought here.
• On the Death of Jean-Paul
Sartre, 5 pp., April, 2009.
Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905-1980, was a French philosopher,
novelist, playwright, and political activist. He was one of the
leading intellectuals of the twentieth century. An
earlier thought on this site deals with his novel Nausea. The
material
in this throught was taken from Adieux: A Farewell to
Sartre, written by Sartre’s lifelong companion, Simone de Beauvoir.
Read the complete thought here.
• On Personal Health
III: George Valliant and Vitamin D, 7 pp., June, 2009.
I recently read a magazine article (“What Makes Us Happy?,”
Atlantic, June 2009) about the Harvard Study of Adult
Development, the most exhaustive investigation of personal
well-being ever conducted, and the chief analyst of its
lessons, psychiatrist George Valliant. Read the full thought here.
• On Being a Modern Day
Spinoza, 7 pp., September, 2009.
Even the quickest perusal of this web site makes it
clear that my outlook doesn't play well at all in the university in
which
I am a professor. From time to time, people
ask me how my university deals with me, as well as how I manage both
personally and professionally in such a
context. This thought discusses what I make of what is going on
with me currently
in this regard. Read
the full thought here.
• On The Captive, 3 pp.,
September, 2009.
An excerpt from the film "La Captive" (2000),
written and directed by Chantal Akerman. Read
the excerpt here.
• On The Last Days of
Elvis, 2pp., October, 2009.
Elvis Presley on
stage in Los Vegas, 1974,
having just finished the song, "You Gave Me a Mountain."
Read the full thought
here.
• On Coetzee, 1 p.,
October, 2009.
A page from J.M. Coetzee's autobiographical novel,
Diary of a Bad Year. Read the page here.
• On Priorities and Next
Steps, 5pp., December, 2009.
You and I will live better to the extent
that we know what we are fundamentally about as individual, mortal
human
beings. Read
the full thought here.
• On Class Even
Without Joan Allen, 2 pp., January, 2010.
In a thought for this site back in December of 2008
entitled "On Sending a Message with Joan Allen," I reported that the
producer of the film "Death Race" had said that he cast
the prestigious actress Joan Allen in his movie in order to send
the
message that his was a high-class film. I
thought about this producer while watching the DVD of season one of
Showtime's
hit series "Dexter." Read the
full thought here.
• On Hyenas, 2 pp,
January, 2010.
In our time, anyone writing from the perspective of
respect and concern for European heritage, white gentiles, as I have,
is going
to come under fire, and I've taken some hits in the media,
on the Internet, and from organizations. Particularly
interesting to
me, much of it has come from other white
gentiles. I've come up with ways to perceive and deal with
these people.
Read the full thought here.
• On Twyla Tharp, 3pp.,
March, 2010.
Twyla Tharp is one of America's greatest dance
choreographers, with a career spanning over forty years. In her
book,
Twyla Tharp: The Creative Habit, she poses and
answers the question, When faced with stupidity, hostility,
intransigence,
laziness, or indifference in others, how do you
respond? Read the full thought here.
• On Cocoons and
Butterflies, 7 pp., March, 2010.
Dear Jack--
Give my regards to Watson. Next time I get to
the Twin Cities it would be great for the three of us to get
together.
I haven't seen him since high school. Read the full e-mail message here.
•On "Unchained
Melody," 4 pp., March, 2010
With my deafness, I can't hear music at all,
except in my dreams, where I hear it perfectly, magnificently, I'm sorry
to wake up. Last night I heard, experienced
fully, gloriously, the popular song "Unchained Melody."
Read the full thought
here.
• On the Death of
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1p., May, 2010.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (May 31, 1945 – June 10,
1982) was a major filmmaker, writer, and actor in post-World War
II
Germany. On June 10th, 1982, Juliane Lorenz, with
whom Fassbinder was living, arrived home at 3:30 a.m. Read the full
thought here.
• On "Cloud 9," 5
pp., May, 2010.
I was captivated by a film on DVD last night.
The film was "Cloud 9," German, 2008, directed by Andreas Dresen.
Read the full thought here.
• On Scaredy
Squirrel, 2 pp, June, 2010.
Scaredy Squirrel never leaves his nut
tree. He'd rather stay in his tree than risk venturing out into
the very scary
world. Read
the full thought here.
• On the
Death of Artie Shaw, 3pp., July, 2010.
In the decade from 1935 to 1945, no musician
was more famous and admired than Artie Shaw.
Shaw--handsome,
brilliant, outspoken--was a clarinetist and
bandleader whose hit recordings sold millions. Shaw lived life to
the hilt:
his swinging personal life and marriages to
several movie stars made headlines. He became an iconic figure of
his time.
But now it is 2004 and Artie Shaw is over 90 years
old. Read the complete thought here.
• On Dick W.
C. Anderson . . . And Me, 15 pp., July, 2010.
A memory came to me in a quiet moment a couple
of weeks ago of a man I encountered just once many, many years
ago by the name of Dick W. C. Anderson.
Anderson wasn't one of the pillars of the community, as they say.
Just the
opposite. He had brutally murdered a
thirty-four-year-old mother of four children ages six to thirteen,
Carol Thompson,
early one morning in her up-scale home in
Saint Paul, Minnesota, where I grew up and around where I was living at
the
time. Read the
complete thought here.
• On Lessons for
Our Daughter, 10 pp., August, 2010.
I have a just-turned-six-year-old daughter.
Among the concerns her mother and I are dealing with currently is what
to do
about lessons for her--dance and music lessons and so
on. Read the full thought here.
• On Lessons for
Our Daughter 2, 5pp., September, 2010.
My six-year-old daughter's mother and I are
communicating from long range--she and my daughter live on the west
coast
and I live in Vermont--about what to do about
lessons for her, in dance, piano, and so on. This thought is a
continuation of
the last thought on this site, "On Lessons for Our
Daughter," and reading that one before reading this one would help put
this
writing in context.
Read the full thought here.
• On Lessons for
Our Daughter 3, 10 pp., October, 2010.
This is the third in a series of thoughts that involve my
correspondence with her mother about lessons and schooling for
our
six-year-old daughter. You could read the two previous
thoughts--On Lessons for Our Daughter 1 and 2--before this one to get
some context, although I don't think you really need
to. This thought, in the form of a hypothetical email message, is
compiled
from parts of five emails I have sent over the past
several days. What I'm trying to get across here is something of
how I see
schooling and the responsibilities of parents in that
regard. Read the full "email" here.
• On Lessons For Our
Daughter 4, 6pp., November, 2010.
This is the fourth in a series of reports of conversations
between my six-year-old daughter's mother and me about lessons
and schooling for her. The first three are the last three
thoughts on this site, and reading them in order will give you
background for this thought as well as provide you with an
overall picture of my perspective on these concerns. My daughter
and her mother live on the West Coast of the U.S. and I live in
Vermont. Last week, I spent the better part of a week with
them. I met my daughter's teacher during that time.
This thought includes excerpts from an email from me following my
return to Vermont. Also here are portions of an email to a
student in an undergraduate university course on sport in society
I am instructing. She had emailed me with her thoughts in
response to concerns I expressed in class that my daughter will
participate in sport activities at the expense of other
involvements and areas of her development. Read
the complete email
excerpts here.
• On David Foster
Wallace, 2 pp., December, 2010.
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was an American
novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, and university
professor.
In May of 2005, he delivered the commencement
address to the graduating class at Kenyon College. With minor editing,
this
thought is a portion of what he said on that
occasion. Read the excerpt here.
• On Evaluating Academic
Scholarship, 3 pp., January, 2011.
There is movement afoot to assess the worth of scholarship in
higher education by objective, quantitative methods--citation
count in publications, Internet traffic, where something was
published, that sort of thing--and thus take human judgment out
of the equation. This thought is a position statement on
this approach I shared with the faculty at the university where I
teach.
Read the full statement here.
• On Saul Bellow, 1 p.,
January, 2011.
Three sentences from a letter the writer Saul Bellow (1915-2005)
wrote in 1975. Read them here.
• On An Evening Meal, 3 pp.,
February, 2011.
After five o'clock, Cheese Outlet--a gourmet market,
so the sign says--sells sandwiches for half price.
Read the full thought
here.
• On Jerry Lewis' Socks,
6 pp., March, 2011.
This thought is to call attention to a possible area
of inquiry: how people who aren't better than other people make
these other people think they are. Read the complete thought here.
• On Trying to Charm the
Uninterested, 3 pp., April, 2011.
In her recent memoir, Tina Fey shared that she spent a lot
of her early years trying to, as she put it, "charm the
uninterested." I can personally relate to
that. Read the complete thought here.
• On the Death of
Lincoln Kirstein, 2pp., June, 2011.
Lincoln Kirstein (born May 4, 1907) was an American
writer, art connoisseur, dance impresario, and cultural figure in
New York City. Kirstein's remarkable commitment,
capability, and energy stimulated creativity and accomplishment in
a number of the fine arts from the 1930s through the
1980s. Now it was the 1990s and he was well into his eighties.
Read the complete thought here.
• On est and the
Human Potential Movement, 19 pp., August, 2011.
A few weeks ago, I watched a DVD from Netflix of a 2007
documentary called "Transformation: The Life and Legacy of
Werner Erhard." Werner Erhard (born Jack Rosenberg)
had his fifteen minutes of fame (and infamy--is this guy a huckster,
a con man?) back in the 1970s as a personal-growth
mogul. Werner Erhard's prominence was linked to a
self-improvement
training program he devised in the early 1970s called est
(lower case). I took the training in 1979. The documentary
prompted
me to think back on a very formative period in my life,
from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, when I was engaged with what
was known in those years as the human potential
movement. The est experience was part of that. This thought
is a recollection
of those years, and it amounts to an intellectual
autobiography. The human potential movement has been forgotten,
and the
major point of this thought is my contention that there is
much to be gained in our time by revisiting it. The list of names
and
writings here should be of help in that regard, and I
stand ready to assist anyone who wishes to explore any or all of
the aspects of the human potential movement. Read the thought here.
• On Brian Daubach, 2
pp., September, 2011.
The past couple of days I read a biography of the labor
leader Joe Hill (William Adler, The Man Who Never Died,
Bloomsbury, 2011). In 1914, Hill was convicted of
murder, and in 1915 he was executed by a Utah firing squad amid
international controversy. Many thought Hill was
framed and put to death because of his radical leanings as a prominent
figure in
the International Workers of the World labor organization,
or Wobblies as they were called. Hill became labor's most
venerated
martyr and was immortalized in the ballad "I Dreamed I Saw
Joe Hill Last Night," a song celebrated by Woody Guthrie and
Bob Dylan and such. Hill's real name was Joel
Hagglund, and I got to thinking about whether he would have gone over
as well,
or at all, if he hadn't changed his name. Read the full thought here.
• On Dog Shows, 4
pp., November, 2011.
I watch dog shows on the USA channel, I guess it is, or
maybe it's Animal Planet, or both. Well, and this past weekend I
saw one on CBS. Read the full
thought here.
• On Bloody Bill
and Bloody Sam. 3 pp., November, 2011.
This past week, I read about a couple of men
associated with savage violence, one of them for committing it and the
other
for portraying it. One of them was William T.
Anderson (1838-1864), a pro-Confederate guerrilla fighter during the
Civil War,
whose untamed brutality toward Union soldiers and
pro-Union partisans prompted the nickname Bloody Bill. The other
was
film director and screenwriter Sam Peckinpah
(1925-1984), whose innovative and explicit depiction of feral violence
evoked
great controversy during the 1960s and
'70s. He was called Bloody Sam. What has come to mind
this past week prompted
by my encounter with Bloody Bill and Bloody Sam is
what this thought is about. Read the
complete thought here.
• On Being a Good Student
in My Course, 3 pp., February, 2012.
At this writing, I am three weeks into the semester as a
professor instructing an undergraduate university course in the
social,
historical, and philosophical foundations of
education. It is a required course for students in the elementary
and secondary
education programs in my college. A student in the
course emailed me asking about writing we do during the three-hour
class
sessions on Wednesday afternoons and wanting to set up a
meeting with me to talk about it. Here is a portion of my
reply.
Reading it over, you'll pick up what I see going on in
teacher education in my college and my attitude toward it, and more
fundamentally, what I think is involved in being a good
student in my course, and a good student generally. Read the reply
portion here.
• On Unimpressives, 6
pp., March, 2012.
In this thought, I set out a construct and work with it
some. It is a category of human being: the Unimpressive. Read the
full thought here.
• On the Death of Telek,
2 pp., April, 2012.
Kay Summersby was a young, vivacious fashion model who became
General Dwight Eisenhower's driver in Britain early in
the U.S.'s involvement in World War II. Summersby's
relationship with Ike, as she called him, grew in intimacy to a
companion
and confidant and woman-at-his-side in public events, and
eventually they began a romantic relationship. Together, Kay and
Ike
bought a little black Scottie puppy that Ike named Telek. Read the full thought here.
• On Being Hearing Impaired, 7
pp., May, 2012.
A student enrolled in two courses in education I teach at the
university was also that semester in a communication disorders
course and was assigned in that course to interview someone with
a communications disorder. She chose me as her interviewee.
I am severely hearing impaired and use a cochlear implant.
She gave me a list of questions and asked me to write out my
answers
to them. This thought is a copy of her questions and my
answers. Read the interview here.
• On Paul Fussell, 3 pp.,
June, 2012.
Paul Fussell died on May 23rd, 2012 in an assisted living
facility in Oregon. He was 88 years old. Fussell was an
American
cultural and literary historian and professor at Connecticut
College, Rutgers University, and the University of Pennsylvania. His
scholarship dealt with a wide range of topics, including
eighteenth-century English literature and the American class
system. He
was best known to the general pubic for his writings on World
Wars I and II, which underscored the gap between the romantic
myths and grand justifications of wars and the terrifying and
horrific realities confronted by the very young men who fight them
and are maimed and slaughtered in them. Reading his
obituary in the New York Times put his name in the back of my mind, and
a couple of days ago as I browsed the biographies section in the
library I noticed a memoir he had written in 1996 entitled Doing
Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (Little, Brown) and checked it
out. Read the full thought here.
• On Michel Houellebecq,
22 pp., June, 2012.
Michel Houellebecq (born 1956) is an award-winning and
controversial French writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His
admirers consider him a literary provocateur in the
tradition of Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire, while his detractors see
him
as a sex-obsessed, racist, misogynist, Islamophobic
peddler of sleeze and shock. An email exchange between
Houellebecq and
the equally controversial intellectual and journalist
Bernard-Henri Levy was published in the 2008 book Public Enemies:
Dueling
Writers Take on Each Other and the World. I'll go
through my copy of Public Enemies and take note of what I either
underlined
or wrote in the margin when I read the book about a year
ago--the Houellebecq half--and offer whatever comments or
thoughts those responses back then prompt in me now.
Read the full thought here.
• On Making Sense of
Michael Haneke’s Films—And Things in General, 6 pp., July, 2012.
The past couple of weeks, I watched films of Austrian
director Michael Haneke. Immediately after watching a film I
compared what film scholars wrote about it with what had
come up for me. Read the complete thought
here.
• On Playing One
Game at a Time and Putting Numbers on the Board, 8 pp., July, 2012.
A good way to study the sport culture, or any
culture, any area of life, is to look at how it uses language. In
this thought,
I list some words and phrases one hears a lot in the
sports world. Read the complete thought
here.
• On Being a
Good Student in My Course (Revised), 5 pp., August, 2012.
As I write this thought, it is four days until
the beginning of the fall semester, 2012 at the university where I am
a professor.
I've decided this semester it would be helpful if
on the first day of classes I were to distribute and discuss with my
students a
statement outlining, as precisely as I can,
how I want them to approach their work in the course and why. I
wrote a three-page
statement with the heading, "Being a Good
Student in This Class." It is an expanded version of the February
2012 thought on
this site with this same title. It's
different enough, I've decided, to warrant it's inclusion here as a
separate thought. Read the
complete statement here.
• On a
Dream, 1 p., September, 2012.
A dream I had a couple of nights ago: I was in
a bathroom. Or was it a bathroom? There were no
walls. There was only a
bathtub overflowing, water rushing out,
gushing; and a washbasin, a foot or two away, the same, water pouring,
falling,
reminiscent of a raging waterfall.
Someone had turned on the faucets full out and left them on. Read the complete dream here.
• On the
Death of Lillian Hellman, 2 pp., November, 2012.
Lillian Hellman, born in 1905, was a
much-honored author of plays, film scripts, and memoirs and an
outspoken advocate for
left-wing causes. For thirty
years, she maintained a high profile relationship with the mystery
writer Dashiell Hammett that
ended in his death in 1961. She
famously declared in a written statement distributed following a 1952
appearance before the
House Un-American Activities Committee,
which at the time was investigating communist influences in the arts,
“I cannot and
will not cut my conscience to fit this
year’s fashions.” She was one of the most prominent and
controversial women of her
era. But now it was
the early 1980s and Lillian Hellman was well into her seventies and her
health was failing drastically.
Read the full
thought here.
•On a
Big Grey Poodle-Looking Dog, 1p., November, 2012.
It was 4:30 in the afternoon on a
crisp, overcast mid-week day in early November in Burlington,
Vermont. I was driving
to my townhouse, which is at the
top of a long hill. A hundred feet or so from my destination, on
my left, I approached five
people clustered talking.
Amid them were three dogs, one of which was a big grey poodle-looking
dog. Read the complete
thought here.
•On
Nietzsche's Maxim, 3 pp., November, 2012.
“That which doesn’t kill me makes me
stronger.” That’s one maxim just about everybody knows and takes
to heart. It's a
hopeful idea, but we need to keep in mind that
everything is what it is and isn’t everything else. In this case,
a maxim is
a maxim and real life is real life. Read the complete thought here.
• On Becoming Who
You Are, 5 pp., December, 2012.
On the home page of this site, I note that my
writing is part of my personal quest to live out philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche’s injunction to become what I am. I
wrote that when I began the site, over five-and-a-half years ago at
this writing,
and considered it to be true of me at that
time. This last year it has come home to me just how true that
statement was, and is
now: it is really true of me. In this thought,
I offer suggestions that may be helpful to others who wish to follow
this path.
Read the full thought
here.
•On the Sparrow,
1p., December, 2012.
A baby sparrow was thrown from its nest high in a tree by
a heavy storm. Read the complete thought
here.
•On “The Woman in
the Fifth,” 5pp., January, 2013.
The most arresting and thought-provoking film I have
seen in recent memory is “The Woman in the Fifth” (the Fifth refers to
a district in Paris) with Ethan Hawke and Kristin
Scott Thomas. It was released in theaters in 2011 and, at this
writing, is
relatively new on DVD, where I saw it a week
ago. Read my thoughts on the film here.
• On Agreements and
Pictures, 4pp., February, 2013.
Ideas from two self-help books I read a few months
ago have proved useful to me as rules to live by, guides to living,
however
best to put it. The books: Don Miguel Ruiz,
The Four Agreements (Amber-Allen Publishing, 1997); and William
Glasser,
Taking Charge of Your Life (iUniverse, 2011). Read the thought here.
• On Obituaries, 4pp,
March, 2013.
My advanced age prompts me to read a lot of
obituaries. I’m struck by how admirable all these people were in
their lives and
how their deaths weren’t all that bad as far as deaths go,
dying peacefully surrounded by their loved ones and so forth. But
people whose lives weren't so rosy and didn’t end so
peacefully die too--what about their obituaries? Read the complete
thought here.
• On Precision, 6pp.,
March, 2013.
In the summer of 2010, LeBron James, the best professional
basketball player in the world, was a free agent, as it is
called.
Up to that point in his career he had played for the
Cleveland Cavaliers franchise in the National Basketball Association,
as
he was forced to do by the way the player allocation
system in the league operates. Now he was able to sign a contract
with
any team in the league. The big sports media story
that summer was should James re-sign with the Cavs or go with another
team. As the decision date got closer, the
scuttlebutt was that James was going to take a multi-year offer from
the Miami Heat. I
decided it was in James’ best interests to stay with the
Cavs. As it turned out, James signed with the Heat, and it is
clear now
that he made the right choice. Where, I ask myself,
did I go wrong in my thinking in 2010? The answer to that
question
intrigues me because while it doesn’t matter a whit
whether I was right or wrong about what sport exhibition company LeBron
James ought to work for, answering it might teach me
something about good decision-making, as well as help me avoid being
wrong about truly important things up the line. Read the complete thought here.
• On Doing My Job, 4 pp.,
April, 2013.
A few months ago, I spent time thinking about what my job
is, or better, what my jobs are, not just in the university where
I teach but in the whole of my life. Read the full thought here.
• On Impeccable Word, 2
pp., April, 2013.
A self-help book I found useful and recommend is The Four
Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
(Amber-Allen, 1997). One of the four agreements is to be
immaculate with words, with language. Ruiz calls it
Impeccable
Word. I can’t remember exactly what Ruiz writes about
Impeccable Word, but the basic concept hit home and got me
thinking
about how people use language to depict and make sense of
reality. Read the complete thought here.
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