Politics
Kevin Hilke
A February issue of The Washington Post carried a piece on the Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s recent decision to ask Disney to train its employees to be more sensitive to patient needs after its recent scandal involving manifestly inadequate care for the wounded soldiers it serves. (That the quality of care for U.S. soldiers on U.S. soil is in question in the first place is a testament to the bureaucratic negligence—the Mickey-Mouseness—of this administration.) The enlistment of Disney is touching but disturbing.
Culture
Lauren Caldwell
As its name implies, the Bank of Common Knowledge aims to be a repository for useful information and how-to—they cite formats ranging from AV tutorials to workshops—all of which information is protected under copyleft. It sounds kind of like a theoretically-glorified version of Instructables, but you won’t see people giving themselves laser-burned tattoos. Because the BCC is interested specifically in knowledge that’s frequently inaccessible to most users.
Culture
Lauren Caldwell
Centering definitions of the literary around both language and the concept of interest gets us somewhere.
Culture
Lauren Caldwell
Poets want things. There is a degree to which this notion runs counter to that of the common reader of poetry (provided such a thing anymore exists: let us say instead dull, or lazy, or naive). Perhaps this is due to precisely the notion that Arensberg (among others) articulates. The poet is a good liar or a master of equivocation and obliquity or he is not a poet, or at least a very poor one. I would challenge you to uncover a poet who is neither a liar nor an obfuscator. One could argue this obliquity a sign of cowardice, but it is more accurate generally to think of it as encrypted utterance accesible only to those with the proper key—and those are they who have what the poet wants.
Culture
Lauren Caldwell
Byron’s virulent hatred of the young “Johnny Keats,” as he derisively styled him, may have been (as some have claimed) inexcusable, but it is certainly understandable. The problem is obviously one of class; but class alone is not enough to account for the phenomenon. Unless the aristocrat felt the upstart poet a threat, his hatred seems misplaced—after all, Keats garnered more than enough negative criticism from his other reviewers. Keeping in mind the uneven ground of class, then, let us consider the poets on their common—and I use the term with deliberation—territory: poetry.
