Signifying nothing

I was listening to Jackson Browne's "Your Bright Baby Blues" and  I swear I heard one of the lines in the first verse was "Run as fast as you can rhyme."  I played it back immediately because couplings of words like that don't come along that often.  The line turns out to be more in line with the story the song is telling of the isolated observer watching people self-assuredly going places while the lonely singer-songwriter is pining either lost love, lost direction, or both: Everybody's going somewhere Riding just as fast as they can ride I guess they've got a lot to do Before they can rest assured Their lives are justified Pray to God for me baby He can let me slide  As it is, the song is an interesting enough exploration of purpose and direction in one's life, but I am still intrigued by the misheard lyric: running as fast as you can rhyme.  It is the sense/nonsense notion that appeals to me in the line.   The juxtaposition of two dispe...

I was thinking, just now as I was noticing that all the snow has disappeared from the yard, why twitter has become so appealing not just to me, but to the masses. I believe with twitter there is a strong correlation to the solitary spoken utterance. Tweeting is much like making any statement in normal conversation. You say something, usually less than the 140 character limit of twitter, but sometimes up to the limit, but rarely over it and then you may or may not wait for a suitable response from your interlocutor. The difference, of course, is that it is not a normal conversation. There is no interlocutor built in. You are making proclamations in twitter--choosing willy nilly who you want to respond to or not. Ultimately you are saying "I am here. This is what I say. Screw you." Now with twitter, of course, as with normal conversations, sometimes your statements go unnoticed, so you either repeat them or move on with the flow. Sometimes you completely ignore any ...

I recieved the following email this morning from friend Fallinahole (or J.T. as he sometimes wont to comment here) about the recent Stanley Fish review of the upcoming book French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States: I guess all I can do is sit back and entertain myself with ceaseless mockery of everything, especially myself (whatever that is). JT to which I responded I don't think Fish is saying that is all that Deconstruction does: he is saying that part of the problem is that Deconstructionists ended their analysis and took up positions that could easily be deconstructed themselves. Ultimately I think, as he says, D is a farce in its very approach, or a war-like drama. Now, of course, he doesn't offer anything in its stead in this article, but he has elsewhere. He always has been a firebrand, and that seems to be an end unto itself for him. I think it is more interesting to look at the response that ...

This week's This American Life podcast featured an excerpt from Radio Lab a cool show out of WNYC. Radio Lab has some very unique production methods such as narration that talks over interviews. The production tends to make the show engaging, but the content is the thing, of course, that makes at least the current episode stellar. The current episode is on morality, and how a moral sense is most likely ingrained in our our brain structures as well as in the brains of some other animals. As a research scientist Dr. Joshua Greene states of a genetic disposition to morality: "We think of basic human morality as being handed down from on high, and it is probably better to say that it was handed up from below--that our most basic, core, moral values are not the things that we humans have invented, but the things that we've actually inherited from other people. The stuff that we humans have invented are the things that seem more peripheral and variable" ( Radi...

A quotation for you: We choose..."a life of action over a life of comnsumption...engendering a life style which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a life style which only allows us to make and unmake, produce and consume." (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society , 52 as quoted in The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice , Geller et al , 71) Discuss.