There were a number of particularly choice posts on Atlantic blogs yesterday. This is the first of two from Jeffrey Goldberg. A man boards in Philadelphia, and asks a woman across the aisle from me if the seat next to her is free. She responds: “This is the quiet car.” He says, “Yes, I know. […]
Stephen Colbert, Bread, and (Congressional) Circuses
“Not everybody feels that irony and satire has a role in American dialogue. People are entitled to their opinion,” Lofgren told me. But the point isn’t the role of satire in American dialogue — it’s the appropriateness of farce at congressional hearings. via Ruth Marcus – Stephen Colbert becomes another circus of Congress’s making. Of […]
Jazz Is: 12 – Keith Jarrett. Encore.
from “Keith Jarrett: Last Solo”. Tokyo ’84 Encore. —————
Sad Red Reading
Along with the new blog look, you’ll find a revitalized, now to be regularly updated, Sad Red Reading feature over at the right of the page, not that far from the top. There I link to some favored writings reflecting the varied interests of the blog: literary, political, more widely cultural and philosophical. Right now […]
Eating Poetry (XXIII) – The “Ode To Man” from Sophocles’ Antigone
The famous line of Alfred North Whitehead is “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” I am increasingly persuaded that over two thousand years of contemplating and expressing the human condition is a series of footnotes to the Greeks. Here, from The […]