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David Matthews Portable Bohemia

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Nov 15, 2018
3 min

On Reading Poetry with Harold Bloom

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art: I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart. —Walter Savage Landor, "On His Seventy-fifth Birthday" "Poetry is the crown of imaginative literature, in my judgment, because it is a prophetic mode." —Harold Bloom I come to the literary critic and scholar Harold Bloom much as I come to the poets who mean the most to me. At his best, and maybe at my best,

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Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, November 10, 2018

Nov 10, 2018
3 min

Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, November 10, 2018

Rally to protect the Mueller investigation Waterfront Park, Portland, Oregon #nobodyisabovethelaw Is it hyperbole to suggest that we are facing a full-blown constitutional crisis with the forced resignation of Jeff Sessions and the appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general? Each day brings fresh evidence that Whitaker is a political hack who was elevated to this position for reasons we all can guess. What can we do? For a start, we can contact our elected off

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Sep 14, 2018
4 min

The Fall Term 2018

Autumn is in the air, as they say. The week has seen daily showers and temperatures no higher than 70. The change of season stirs that part of me drawn to poetry, art, and intellectual adventure. Maybe it is the gentle melancholy that comes with the onset of Portland drizzle and a softening of light that is not as pronounced as when I lived in the South but present nonetheless. The course of study for the fall term is coming together. This year it is shaped by the political a

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Aug 29, 2018
17 min

The Strange and Curious Case of Jordan Peterson, Part II

This is the conclusion of a two-part essay. Part I was published August 28, 2018. The going gets thorny when Jordan Peterson moves away from self-help guidance into the social, cultural, and political arena with some interesting claims, shall we say, about the nature of human existence and social structures, biologically determined differences between men and women, masculinity under siege, the dire and inevitable consequences of postmodernism and neo-Marxism, and so on. Thes

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Aug 28, 2018
9 min

The Strange and Curious Case of Jordan Peterson, Part I

The strange and curious case of Jordan Peterson could be the scenario for a television minidrama scripted by a disciple of Ayn Rand. An obscure, middle-aged professor finds himself catapulted into the limelight when he launches a series of YouTube videos expressing opposition to a Canadian law that he calls an unprecedented attack on freedom of speech that would "require people under the threat of legal punishment to employ certain words, to speak in a certain way, instead of

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Jul 13, 2018
14 min

Those Zany Surrealists

The Lives of the Surrealists by Desmond Morris Thames & Hudson, 272 pp., 2018 Until recently I knew Desmond Morris only vaguely as a zoologist and author of The Naked Ape. It turns out he was also an accomplished painter who was associated with the London branch of the surrealist movement in the late 1940s. His first major London exhibit was at The London Galleries in 1950 where he was on the bill with Joan Miró, pretty fair company for a young fellow. His new book, The Liv

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Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, June 23, 2018

Jun 24, 2018
4 min

Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, June 23, 2018

In Man's Fate, André Malraux's novel about an episode in the Chinese revolution, Suan, a young terrorist, remarks that the sons of torture-victims make good terrorists. Suan and his comrade Pei are sons of torture-victims. I thought of this when I read that it was only in 1999 that Israel's High Court issued a decision prohibiting torture in investigations of Palestinian detainees suspected of involvement in terrorism. Many thousands of Palestinians were tortured over the two

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May 6, 2018
5 min

Week's End Thoughts & Reflections, May 5, 2018

Yesterday afternoon I finally made it to a Reed College Friday @ 4 recital. The Friday @ 4 series came to my attention about six weeks ago. The recitals are open to the public and free. It would be foolish not to check them out, but as often happens it took a while to get around to it. You know how I am. The chapel on the third floor of Elliot Hall made for a comfortably intimate setting. The architecture of building and chapel are suitably academic in a wonderfully old-fashi

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May 2, 2018
5 min

Incident at Café Insomnia

I came across this story while trying to clean out and impose some semblance of order on the paper files. It was first published on my old blog Memo from the Fringes on July 24, 2005. As those who find their way to this space regularly might expect, minor edits were made to the previously published story. I hope you find it amusing. What follows is a product of the author's twisted imagination. Resemblance to any person or poetry reading, living, dead, or institutionalized, i

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Apr 26, 2018
8 min

A Wacky Saga of Life, Literature, and Intellectuals of a Certain Vintage

The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet tr. by Sam Taylor Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 359 pp., 2017 "Life is not a novel. Or at least you would like to believe so." So opens Laurent Binet's near tour de force The Seventh Function of Language, an erudite and zany parody of the crime novel/thriller genre and an irreverent send-up of certain French intellectuals circa 1980, the era of structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, deconstruction, literary theory, &c.,

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Apr 19, 2018
11 min

Tom Nichols and the death of expertise; or, experts and the rest of us (Part 2 of 2)

Part 1 of this two-part essay and review of The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols was published on April 17, 2018. Tom Nichols tells us in the introductory chapter that his book "is about the relationship between experts and citizens in a democracy, why that relationship is collapsing, and what all of us, citizens and experts, can do about it" (p. 6). His treatment of the first two elements is coherent and well-documented, his points on the whole well-taken. On the third, ho

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Apr 17, 2018
18 min

Tom Nichols and the death of expertise; or, experts and the rest of us (Part 1 of 2)

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Tom Nichols Oxford University Press [2017], 252 pp. I got a little carried away on this one. I hope readers who plow through it find something of interest and merit. Thanks for bearing with me. Our collective inability or unwillingness to distinguish reputable authorities and reliable sources of news and information from knaves, charlatans, and Orwellian propagandists is notorious and b

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Feb 9, 2018
5 min

Tony Judt, Corey Robin, Raymond Aron

Along with the crime novels I can read with half my brain tied behind my back and go through at a rate that gives me pause, I recently finished The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century by Tony Judt and am presently engaged with The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin by Corey Robin and The Elusive Revolution: Anatomy of a Student Revolt, Raymond Aron's response to May 1968. All three books are quite interest

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Dec 15, 2017
4 min

Cultural Appropriation; or, I proceed with trepidation as I venture a few thoughts

Issues of cultural appropriation and identity politics lie in dark waters where intrepid scribes venture at their own peril. Strong feelings abound. I have strong feelings myself about free speech and artistic freedom of expression. Discussion, criticism, and argument presented in good faith are always in order. It is another matter when individuals and groups take it upon themselves to dictate what is permissible for others to think, say, and express with works of art. They

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Dec 8, 2017
3 min

Things People Said

Among the pleasures of reading is the encounter with remarks and observations that are witty, perceptive, intriguing, amusing, or simply relevant to some current affair or interest. I would like to share a few that have struck my fancy of late in the hope that readers will also find them engaging. Aristotle held that there are three qualifications required of those who have to fill the highest political offices: loyalty to the established constitution, the greatest administra

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Sep 21, 2017
8 min

One Month On

So what have I done with the first month of retirement? Much or little? Does that matter? After all, I am supposedly retired. I don't have to do anything. But as I have noted previously, I do not particularly think of myself as retired. I begin with the down side. That is simply my way. Nothing is happening on the intellectual and creative front, not as poet, not as essayist, never mind anything ambitious as a novel. Never before have I thought in terms of writer's block, whi

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Jul 24, 2017
4 min

From Cioran to Eliade

The School of Life's video about Romanian-French philosopher and pessimist Emil Cioran was so intriguing I immediately placed holds on three of his books at Multnomah County Public Library. Anathemas and Admirations was the first to come in, soon followed by The Trouble with Being Born. Each was a let-down. The video, running six minutes and 30 seconds, was like a movie trailer that has all the good scenes and lines from what is otherwise a run of the mill offering. Anathema

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Jul 22, 2017
2 min

What's on my mind today...

Glorious run this morning with temperature in the low 60s and sun all over the place when I set out at 6:15. The route took me from my home in Portland's Sunnyside neighborhood west to Hawthorne Bridge, then south to Tillikum and across the Willamette River, north along the waterfront to the Steel Bridge, back over to the Eastside, down to Hawthorne, and home. Distance was nine miles and change, nudging me over 20 for the week, a modest accomplishment, nonetheless satisfying

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Jun 26, 2017
16 min

Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, Part II

I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg 1955–1997 Edited by Bill Morgan City Lights Books, 284 pp. (2015) It is only in recent years that I have discovered the pleasures of reading literary correspondence, first with the letters of John Keats, then Samuel Beckett, and the Allen Ginsberg-Gary Snyder exchanges. With that pleasure comes a slight twinge of voyeurism. The letters were after all writt

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Jun 18, 2017
8 min

Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, Part I

I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg 1955–1997 Edited by Bill Morgan City Lights Books, 284 pp. (2015) Ah, the joys of a good library. The Ferlinghetti-Ginsberg letters caught my eye as I browsed the poetry stacks at the Central Library in search of nothing in particular, much as at age seventeen at Richland County Public Library in Columbia, SC, with childhood comrade Phil Allen, I hit on a

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