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11-23-2004 Links Liberal Education: Dead or Alive? Articles of Interest "You can breathe a sigh of relief: the Universe will last for at least the next 24 billion years, according to astrophysicists who have modelled the mysterious force of dark energy to work out the fate of the cosmos." link "Greenblatt's book is skillfully written, with spirit and verve. It gives a vivid picture of the Elizabethan world, and it has fine and illuminating things to say about particular aspects of Shakespeare--about the blend of disclosure and concealment in the sonnets, about the development in the playwright's use of soliloquy and his deepening ability to represent inwardness, about the ambivalence in his portrait of Shylock. Yet much of the book is silly. It shows small understanding of how to weigh historical evidence; and its notion of the creative process, and of the relation between a writer's work and a writer's life, is naïve." link "Jon Eddy always had been a religious skeptic and critic. So when it came time to choose a required religion class at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., the psychology major thought he'd take the easy way out. " The senior signed up for 'Religions of Star Trek' last semester and thought, 'Here's my out. I'm going to destroy this class," says Mr. Eddy, joking that he would ace it.'" link "For me, Raphael’s version of the beautiful is the sublime of the pretty: sheer comeliness, to the nth power. His paintings lack the element of reverent awe that informs beauty. They are about liking, albeit intense liking, rather than love. In this, Raphael was less a creator of the Italian Renaissance than its definitive human creation, a demigod whose capacities rivalled those of the divine." link "Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?" link "The greatest wonder of the ancient world is how recent it all is. No city or monument is much more than 5,000 years old. Only about seventy lifetimes, of seventy years, have been lived end to end since civilization began. Its entire run occupies a mere 0.002 per cent of the nearly 3 million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone. The progress of 'man the hunter' during the Old Stone Age, or Palaeolithic – his perfection of weapons and techniques – led directly to the end of hunting as a way of life. The big game was all but exterminated, except in a few places where conditions favoured the prey. Next came the discovery of farming – most likely by women – during the New Stone Age, or Neolithic, in several parts of the world. And from that grew the experiment of worldwide civilization, which began as many independent enterprises but over the last few centuries has coalesced, mainly by hostile takeover, into one big system that covers and consumes the Earth." link "'Some areas of academic life are indeed pointless and out of touch, precisely because of their embrace of sloppy, fashion-following, jargon-ridden, introverted, authority-besotted nonsense,' Grayling nods. 'Very little harm would be done if literary critics and postmodernist anthropologists, lawyers and the like were told to go and get real jobs.'" link "Don Quixote deserves its reputation as one of the greatest things ever written and it also belongs to that late-Renaissance moment when the imagination of Europe was fascinated by art and illusion, by madness and civilisation rubbing up against one another as a form of mystery and revelation. Don Quixote belongs to the same moment as Hamlet, say, or Calderon's Life is a Dream." link "When you look at the big international hits of the year, it is easy to understand why the world views America with a certain disgust. Shrek may be a lovable (and Scottish) ogre, but nearly every other global hero in American movies is bellicose, intellectually limited, stuck in ancient times or locked in a sci-fi fantasy. American films used to be an advertisement for life in the states -- there was sophistication, depth, the allure of a cool, complex manner. Now most big studio films aren't interested in America, preferring to depict an invented, imagined world, or one filled with easily recognizable plot devices. "Our movies no longer reflect our culture," said a top studio executive who did not wish to be identified. "They have become gross, distorted exaggerations. And I think America is growing into those exaggerated images." link "...I have nothing but veneration for those who have mediated, say, the Romantic movement to me, made me actually feel the incredible ferment produced from and involving but probably not restricted to items from the following list: youth, love, friendship, generation conflict, sibling relationships, world- and self-intoxication (to coin a couple of rather Germanic-sounding notions), a revitalised appreciation of the classics, idealist philosophy, revolution, spirituality and the death of religion, a volatile interest in the inner and outer world (all sorts of fads and 'isms'), a proclivity for associations, amalgamations, movements, new magazines, publishing ventures and experiments in social living. As my texts I would take a couple of biographies, Richard Holmes's Shelley: The Pursuit, Joachim Maass's Kleist, Penelope Fitzgerald's Novalis novel The Blue Flower, and a Georg Büchner's prose fragment called Lenz. I would urge anyone to read these things." link "Sting turned his fans on to Nabokov and the Special AKA alerted a generation to apartheid. Dave Eggers on how music makes you smart." link "That extraordinary writer of stories about the 'Christ-haunted' American South, Flannery O’Connor, was frequently asked why her people and plots were so often outlandish, even grotesque. She answered, 'To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you have to draw large and startling figures.' I expect Søren Kierkegaard, had he lived a century later, would have taken to Flannery O’Connor and would have relished her affirmation of the necessarily outlandish." link "Charles Moore had supposed that scientists would revere facts, but that supposition is a myth: scientists actually treat facts the way barristers treat hostile witnesses — with suspicion." link "You'd be hard pressed to find a campus that evokes the liberal-arts tradition more than that of bucolic Dartmouth College, with its main quadrangle surrounded by cupola-topped buildings and, in the distance, the surrounding hills. But faculty members here are worried. Earlier this month, they gathered academic luminaries like Anthony Grafton, Steven Pinker, Louis Menand, Elaine Scarry, Nicholas Negroponte, and others for an intense, two-day discussion under the stark heading 'The Liberal Education: Dead or Alive?'" link "Astronomers now believe that all large galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their centre, but it was believed that these black holes formed after the galaxy. The evidence is starting to point the other way, that these black holes formed soon after the Big Bang, and then the galaxies built up around them." link "That Faulkner has been so much studied, so much analyzed, so deeply and thoroughly taught is not anything he would himself have predicted as he sat, bored out of his mind, in the classroom at Ole Miss in the months and weeks before he dropped out, for good. Then, too, as a young writer, he could never have guessed the degree to which the academic establishment would provide a perennial, and grateful, audience for his fiction." link "Why is Elgar's music for Land of Hope and Glory so quintessentially English, while Debussy sounds so French? It is all because the music mimics the composer's native language, say scientists." link
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