Reader Tips

Reader Tips 40 Comments

A lot of online classical poetry readings sound like they’ve been undertaken in the interest of propping up the literary bona fides of some tremulous orator or other who delivers the goods in a dry, excessively reverential, and relentlessly weary tone; others are simply metrically inept, and/or accompanied by inappropriate new-age synth music. Tonight’s selected reading, from New Zealand-born filmmaker Jane Campion’s 2009 film Bright Star, is quite lovely, and well serves the meaning and beauty of the original work: here’s English actor Ben Whishaw reading John Keats’s 1819 poem Ode To A Nightingale.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.

40 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. Flash mob hijinks: John T. Bennett’s “The Racial Violence that Dare Not Speak Its Name.
    Excerpt:
    “The first-hand accounts and surveillance videos of the 2009 attacks (in Denver) are shocking. These weren’t sucker punches or fair fights — the attackers swing madly and rapidly with a viciousness that can only come from blind cruelty. The victims, who can be seen in interviews, were kind-looking, ordinary people. The victims were mostly either gay or straight couples. They didn’t provoke the attacks in any conceivable way. The attackers sometimes fractured skulls, or broke eye sockets, and left one victim in a coma. There were a total of 26 attacks from July 17 to Nov. 17.
    “An incredible 38 people were arrested in connection with this campaign of racist violence. Thirty were ultimately charged, all black. Has this number of arrests been made against any violent white supremacist or right wing organization in the last 50 years?
    “The story first came to light in 2009 when a source inside the Denver police department said that the department was ‘keeping the public in the dark’ about the attacks. Court documents show that the police did indeed have knowledge of a pattern of racial attacks, but remained silent for 27 days…”

  8. Q: What’s a million times a million?
    A: You’re a racist.
    “Dem. Representative Maxine Waters urges Obama to spend ‘a trillion dollars or more’ on new stimulus spending…”

  10. EBD “Q: What’s a million times a million?”
    You gotta put it in units that the peoples can understand … football fields.
    A million times a million football fields is about 55 earths.

  15. Is infinity cubed bigger than infinity squared, or is the question meaningless? And how many football fields are we talking about?

  16. “You gotta put it in units that the peoples can understand…”
    Years ago I saw Dennis Miller was on a chat show where someone brought up a news story about a dog who found his way home from a thousand miles away. In the stated interest of helping people to grasp just how impossibly far a thousand miles is, Miller came up with a helpful analogy:
    “Think of it this way: if the Sahara Desert was one mile across, you’d have to cross it a thousand times.”
    RT: “Academics dub tea partyers (sic) devout, racist,” in the Washington Times:

    “Two years after it burst onto the political scene, the tea party is getting a critical eye from political science academics who say the movement generally is populated by knowledgeable and religiously devout voters, but they are hypocritical and more likely to be motivated by ‘racial resentment.'”

    […]

    “(Emory University professor Alan I. Abramowitz) said tea party supporters were substantially more likely than other voters to question how much effort black Americans are making to advance themselves versus being held back by social factors.”

    Is such a view racist, or just a legitimate, reality-based opinion?

  17. EBD
    It’s intellectual hair splitting and diversion.
    Based on observable behaviour, a substantial case can be made for a lack of personal responsibility amongst a large swath of black Americans.
    Unfortunately, stating the obvious is verbotten as it exposes the failure of decades of social engineering.
    Ergo, anybody who won’t sing with the root cause chorus is a racsist.

  19. “Is infinity cubed bigger than infinity squared, or is the question meaningless?”
    There are an infinite number of infinities. It stands to reason, that there are an infinite number of “things” that can’t be defined by infinity. Hence the squaring – which will cover anything.
    It has been demonstrated (multiple papers … MIT, Harvard, Yale, etc) that cubing infinity is an extremely intellectually lazy way to achieve the same results as squaring.
    “And how many football fields are we talking about?”
    Are there degrees of blond? About the price of a candy bar … a million times a million.

  21. Sue them Mike. See this Vancouver Province article.
    – Canucks GM Mike Gillis considers legal action against Toronto Star, which claimed he called Rick Rypien ‘crazy’-
    Let’s hope the Star is seriously hurt financially by this. I know it won’t change their readership, they are loonies themselves.

  22. “Is infinity cubed bigger than infinity squared, or is the question meaningless”
    Infinity cubed is indeed larger than infinity squared – mathematical proofs will show any cube of a number greater than 1 is larger than its square, by a widening margin as the number approaches infinity.
    Infinity cubed is equivalent to its square, on human terms, if for example plunging into a singularity – the end result is the same.
    It’s largly meaningless because Obama will just print infinity thousand dollar bills for every infinity of tens he spends. It still wont create any jobs.

  24. 23 comments on a poetry reading – there is a hopeful sign, I thought.
    The music is a distraction and so an annoyance. Poetry is music, so adding a second sound track is always a mistake. I agree that the speaker doesn’t miss a metrical beat, but the reading remains lifeless, almost robotical. I enjoy, for example, Frost and Larkin reading their own poems in almost neutral tones. Almost, but in the process with just enough inflection to let the poem, “like a piece of ice on a hot stove… ride on its own melting.”

  25. Of Punch-Drunk Socialist McGuinty.
    Is McGuinty splurging on megalomania or Scotch?
    “In 1999, the two Tory operatives who shadowed his campaign bought him a bottle of Scotch …”.
    …-
    “Tories, New Democrats banned from Liberal events”
    “Breaking with a tradition of professional courtesy on the hustings that stretches back decades, the governing Liberals have banned Progressive Conservative and New Democratic MPPs, candidates and staffers from all electoral events featuring Dalton McGuinty.
    “The Ontario Liberal campaign will strike a very serious tone and we’re only interested in presenting our positive plan to Ontarians,” Chris Morley, McGuinty’s chief of staff, told the Star on Sunday.”
    http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1049271–tories-new-democrats-banned-from-liberal-events

  26. H/T Bullies for Science.
    …-
    “Barack Hussein Einstein at Harvard”
    “By James Lewis
    There’s a funny story about Barack Obama at Harvard Law, both funny-ha-ha and funny-peculiar. It involves one of those cloud-borne Himalayan intellects of liberalism, Professor Larry Tribe, the Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law at one of the most prestigious law schools in the United States. Tribe is the legal giant who is always a bridesmaid but never a bride for the Supremes.
    And yea verily, the Professor met and held converse with The Blessed Lightworker Himself back in the nineties. The story doesn’t say if they were both stoned out of their minds when they got together, but it’s the only explanation I can think of. What happened is so weird and so discreditable to all concerned that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Still, nobody in the liberal media seems to get the joke…which tells you a lot.
    Professor Tribe, it appears, made it really big in academic law by writing trendy postmodern articles like “Toward a Syntax of the Unsaid: Construing the Sounds of Congressional and Constitutional Silence,” “The Constitution in Cyberspace,” “Toward a Metatheory of Free Speech,” “Trial by Mathematics,” and even “Seven Deadly Sins of Straining the Constitution through a Pseudo-Scientific Sieve,” which turned it all into self-parody, because pseudo-science is exactly what made Larry Tribe’s big reputation. This academic disease is commonly described as “physics envy.” It arises out of academic inferiority complexes, with everybody wanting to do fake physics because that is real science.
    If you remember those old po-mo days, that kind of stuff was standard pomotwaddle designed to impress innocent young students and the Board of Trustees. No sane person believed it. Alan Sokal famously hoaxed a po-mo journal into accepting a nonsense physics article, and then revealed their ignorance to the world. Postmodernism never recovered.
    Professor Tribe comes right out of a great comedy tradition of long-winded professors spouting obvious claptrap to fool the suckers. Shakespeare used that gag with Polonius in Hamlet. Groucho Marx used it. Molière became famous for his “scholar” in the suckered Bourgeois Gentleman. Greek and Roman comedy writers used it. Every humorist in history has used that shtick, because it’s funny. But it takes a postmodern professor of law to make it real.
    By the ’90s Larry Tribe had risen to become the Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law, based on the depth and profundity of his cockamamie legal scholarship. I guess. And then, a magical moment in history when great minds meet…it was Michelangelo and Leonardo, Plato and Socrates, Larry, Moe and Curly.
    Barack Hussein Obama Barry Soetoro, Jr. walks into Larry Tribe’s office. ”
    http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/barack_hussein_einstein_at_har.html
    …-
    “On Being Governed By Scientific Frauds
    By James Lewis
    The news leaked out a while ago that Al Gore scored a D in natural science at Harvard. That would be the science introduction for Other Majors, not difficult chemistry or calculus. So Nobel Laureate Al Gore got a D in Science for Dummies.
    But don’t worry. ”
    http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/on_being_governed_by_scientific_frauds.html

  29. Left turns on Obama
    “Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed.
    The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.
    The White House team is flailing — reacting, regrouping, retrenching. It’s repugnant.
    After pushing and shoving and caving to get on TV, the president’s advisers immediately began warning that the long-yearned-for jobs speech wasn’t going to be that awe-inspiring.
    “The issue isn’t the size or the newness of the ideas,” one said. “It’s less the substance than how he says it, whether he seizes the moment.”
    The arc of justice is stuck at the top of a mountain. Maybe Obama was not even the person he was waiting for. ”
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/dowd-one-and-done.html?_r=2

  31. After about 4 pints of Guinness, Keats begins to makes sense even to “hunkies”
    Sorry EBD, its Labour Day afterll, eh!

  32. O’Tar Baby: YK vs 2YKyoto, er Y2KYoto, er KY2Oto …
    “Unfortunately in Ontario, Canada we have a critical election on October 6 which will preoccupy a lot of us since our Green Energy Act is under attack by the “Progressive” Conservative Party (our equivalent of the Tea Party).”
    …-
    “Marie Parham
    Yom Kippur begins the evening of October 7th!!!!!!
    Jared
    What better way to celebrate God’s creation than protecting it from harm?
    Frank
    Nice thought, bad facts. Yom Kippur is a very somber and important holiday, not one you’d spend in this way, even with such an important issue.
    That said, YK starts the evening of the 7th, so those who do celebrate it could certainly do something during the day (but it doesn’t end until sunset on the 8th).
    jerusha
    You could have a fast for sustainable energy starting on Yom Kippur — we could all acknowledge our responsibility to our earth, atmosphere and future generations: and focus on tikkun olan (the healing of the world)– I once joined an anti-war fast on the day after Yom Kippur, and since it was a liquid fast it was very easy to transition from total fast to juice and broth.
    A car-free day would be a cool thing to do on Saturday (or Yom Kippur) since for many it already is a car-free day (Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist sangha also observes what they call “car-free days” and list reversing global warming as one of their priorities.
    In any case, if the call is for something we can do where we already are, it will make it so much easier for more people to participate.
    jerusha
    I plan to be at a Thich Nhat Hanh retreat in upstate New York on Yom Kippur this year….It was a conflict for me in some ways, but I decided to do it. If there’s something announced for the 7th that retreatants could participate in, I would be happy to pass the word.
    http://climateactionnow.ca Patricia Warwick
    Unfortunately in Ontario, Canada we have a critical election on October 6 which will preoccupy a lot of us since our Green Energy Act is under attack by the “Progressive” Conservative Party (our equivalent of the Tea Party).”
    “Next Steps
    In the next 48 hours we will announce the next phase of the Tar Sands Action. Details are being hammered out now, but suffice to say: we have our work cut out for us in the next six weeks or so.
    Start by circling October 7th on your calendar, and then sign up for more details below:”
    http://www.tarsandsaction.org/next-steps/

  36. $10T? $10/T? $10T Party?
    O’s $10T. O’s Grecian Formula: That’s one for the economists to cogitate.
    …-
    “U.S. Debt Held by Public Tops $10T for 1st Time—Up 59 Percent Under Obama”
    “At the close of business on Aug. 31–for the first time in the history of the country–the publicly held debt of the federal government topped $10 trillion, according to data released by the U.S. Treasury Department at 4:00 p.m. yesterday.
    During Obama’s presidency, debt held by the public has now increased by $3.71694 trillion–or almost 59 percent from the $6.3073 trillion in debt held by the public that the government owed to its creditors on Jan. 20, 2009, when Obama was inaugurated.
    Also, according to the most recent reports available from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, approximately $6.1 trillion of that debt—or about 61 percent of it—is owned by foreign interests (led by the Chinese and the Japanese) and by the Federal Reserve.”
    http://cnsnews.com/news/article/us-debt-held-public-tops-10t-1st-time-mo
    …-
    “Debt-choked Greece seeks solar bonanza”
    “ATHENS — Sun-baked and debt-choked Greece presented on Monday a plan to become Europe’s solar energy powerhouse, attracting up to 20 billion euros of investment in the decades to come to lift its economy out of the doldrums.
    The cash-strapped country regards clean energy as one of the few advantages of its uncompetitive economy, which is going through its longest and deepest recession in decades as a result of a debt crisis.
    The ambitious plan, called “Project Helios,” involves multiplying Greek solar power production from 206 megawatts(MW) in 2010 to 2.2 gigawatts (GW) by 2020 and up to 10 GW by 2050, according to an Energy Ministry presentation.
    “Greece enjoys 300 days of sunshine a year, almost 50 percent more sun radiation than Germany, the global leader in solar photovoltaics,” said the presentation held by Energy Minister George Papaconstantinou at an energy conference in Hamburg, Germany.
    Cash-strapped Greece needs foreign investors to finance the plan, which includes leasing state land, free of any administrative or legal burdens, to investors to install solar panels.”
    http://business.financialpost.com/2011/09/05/debt-choked-greece-seeks-solar-bonanza/

  37. And this type of thing is why I no longer will vote for the BC Liberal Party!
    They are FOOLS.
    “By Tom Fletcher – BC Local News
    Published: August 29, 2011 6:00 PM
    Updated: August 30, 2011 9:01 AM
    “I’m not sure where we’ll end up with it, but I think generally what we’ll see is some sort of fund within the Pacific Carbon Trust that’s dedicated to schools, to hospitals, so that money comes back to them to help reduce their carbon footprint,” he said.
    http://www.bclocalnews.com/vancouver_island_north/northislandgazette/news/128643193.html

  38. If this happens in Eire, you can bet that the secular humanist busybodies, want the same law here as well. Its for the childen of course.
    The state should keep its nose out of the Catholic Church’s confession boxes
    Now, as it happens, I am not the confessing type. As a severely lapsed Catholic and now immoveable atheist, I haven’t been inside a confessional since I was 17 years old. And I don’t miss telling some bloke behind a grille about the time I nicked a Kit-Kat or got matey with Onan. But there are millions upon millions of people for whom confession is a central part of their faith, and for whom absolute privacy is a central part of confession. They believe, and should have every right to believe, that the confessional facilitates communication with God, providing a tiny, darkened space, utterly cut off from the world, where they can offload their various horrors and heartbreaks in private.
    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100101799/the-state-should-keep-its-nose-out-of-the-catholic-church%e2%80%99s-confession-boxes/

  39. Interesting article, Revnant. I find it hard to support Brendan O’Neill’s argument because his examples are so carefully selective. Suppose someone confesses to having – for example – planted a giant bomb in the London Tube, and he tells the priest that it will go off in twelve hours: would O’Neill still argue for the *absolute* sanctity of privacy in the confessional, and suggest that it would be a violation of privacy for the priest to alert the police?

  40. “Is infinity cubed bigger than infinity squared, or is the question meaningless?” — Black Mamba
    The question is not meaningless. Infinity squared is an infinite plane. Infinity cubed is an infinite volume, an infinite number of infinitesimally thin infinite planes stacked one on top of the other. Thus, infinity cubed is infinitely greater than infinity squared.

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