Casablanca

Just watched Casablanca again. It keeps getting better.

"The work of the world is common as mud."

"To Be Of Use," by Marge Piercy. is a poem about, among other things, the way that a human person is made for work in the same way as any artefact is made in order to fulfill its purpose. Aristotle called this the entelechy. This vital insight led pre-Darwinian thinkers to the argument from design. Now all of us are struggling to integrate Piercy's entelechy with Darwin's universal acid. Thanks to Naomi Schalit for calling "To Be Of Use" to my attention. Thanks to Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona for helping me find the full text of "To Be Of Use" on a page of html to which I might point you in this blog.

Today it is a beautiful day in Scottsdale, Arizona --- except that today is the de facto first day of summer here in the Valley of the Sun; our first day in which the temperature can be measured (in Fahrenheit) in numbers that can be named with decimal numerals in three digits.

I feel drowsy as I am writing this. No one except me seems to be reading this blog anyway, so I'll start getting a little more personal. I feel drowsy.

Do you know that all the beautiful palm trees you see here in the Valley of the Sun are non-native? See, first you rip out the painfully thin topsoil of the Sonoran desert ecosystem. Then you put down layers of gravel. Then every day you waste potable water to make the palm tree live --- oh, yes, of course you must feed it, too.

See the tuna fleets stripping the oceans (and killing off Tursiops truncatus and her kin); see the cyanide (no, it's not Zyklon B) mining the earth mother.

See us doing what we do best, work, to make the world in our image.

But our image is no longer ours; we take it from a video screen.

That's as much as I can conduct right now.

http://www.robertbly.com/

http://www.robertbly.com/ is the website of Robert Bly. Robert is a great American poet.

The Classical Music Pages

SafariU joins the ranks of roll-your-own.

The following is lifted from O'Reilly's website. They are joining the ranks of other academic publishers who assist, rather than resist, roll-your-own textbooks.
The SafariU Revolution: An Interview with Professor Kent Sandoe by -- Professor Kent Sandoe has been teaching in the Information Systems Department of Chico State University’s College of Business for six years. He wanted to produce a textbook on information security in conjunction with his Systems Management course this semester, but at the last minute those plans fell through and he turned to SafariU, O’Reilly’s new web-based platform for creating, publishing, and sharing textbooks. We caught up with him to find out the details.

The evening with Robert Bly was filled with wit, challenge, honesty, compassion, and consummate skill as poet and translator (and practitioner of the lost art of reading aloud).

For your philosophical reference needs, have a look at The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [Disclosure: I am honored to be able to count the founding Editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a friend of mine. I would very much welcome your responses to the Encyclopedia.]

Robert Bly at Changing Hands Bookstore

Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona is one of the nation's leading independent booksellers. [Disclaimer: I have no connection of any kind to Changing Hands Bookstore --- except that I am a loyal customer of CHB.]

Tonight at 7 pm MST, Robert Bly will speak at Changing Hands.

"[W]hich system 'carved nature at the joints'?"

"In Plato's famous image, which system 'carved nature at the joints'?" (Dennett, Daniel C., Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), page 37)

Textbook disclaimer stickers.

http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/textbookdisclaimers/
Some of these disclaimer stickers are quite funny. What's going on in Georgia, Kentucky, and elsewhere in the U.S.A. is not so funny. I recommend Darwin's Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennett of Tufts University.

Charles de Lint

Charles de Lint is among my favorite contemporary fantasists. If you are not above reading a YA, The Blue Girl is a good read. From time to time, I like to read a book marketed as Juvenile (J) or Young Adult (YA). For one thing, there are some very good writers writing for those markets. For another, often their books seem to slip past my defenses and touch me in deep and surprising ways.

The Black Line: Misusing Occam's Razor

The Black Line: Misusing Occam's Razor