News blurb: "Wall Street is pricing in a Clinton presidency and a split Congress, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats the Senate, Merrill Lynch said." This has been becoming a general line for a little while now. Big Money just makes it sound more authoritative. It's early, though. I cannot help thinking that the first debate ( Read more... )

"I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world."

-- Jackie RobinsonIt is a statement that is harder for being expressed in his mature years, rather that an utterance of youthful passion. It was sometime ago, too, perhaps 50 years ago. As one of the best baseball players of today, he ( Read more... )

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Byron was not born into his title, but inherited it. It seems a fortuitous thing that this should have happened in time for his university education, but in this poem, we get this sense of regret for his younger, simpler days.

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"We think in generalities, we live in details."

-- Alfred North Whitehead

Hobbes’s “Behemoth” is his account of the English civil wars of the 17th century. It takes the dialogue form, and this excerpt goes over some of the religious background of the era. “A” is a person who lived through the wars and is a witness thereof. “B” is a student seeking to understand the history.

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I just finished watching the movie “5 to 7” (2014) about a budding writer who stumbles into a relationship with a woman in an open marriage. He can only see her between, yes, 5 and 7, which is great at first, but this is real love, and he wants it all. She loves him, but she feels committed to her husband and children. His pain becomes fuel for ( Read more... )

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It is intriguing to consider how many of Frost’s best poems reflect on the act of creation, the process of breaking down the forms of reality given by the world and remaking them, restoring them to freshness. Frost’s aesthetics was largely derived from the Romantics, especially Coleridge, who argued in the Biographia Literaria ( Read more... )

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Plato is discussing the different types of divine madness or possession or inspiration. This one by the Muses is a keeper for me.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<“The third type of possession and madness is possession by the Muses. When this seizes upon a gentle and virgin soul it rouses it to inspired expression in lyric and other sorts of poetry, and ( Read more... )