March 2015
-
On the mall, smoking, wheels (i.e. bicycles and skateboards), and pets are prohibited. Between forty and fifty signs and icons state the case very clearly. Nevertheless, the rules are often flouted. Smokers are furtive: they can't help themselves even though they show, by their demeanor, that they are well aware that they're doing wrong. The…
-
For the first twenty minutes or half-hour of Things We Lost in the Fire I thought that Susanne Bier, my current favorite director, had succeeded in transferring her wondrous Danish idiom into a big-name Hollywood production. I loved the unusual but profound relationships, especially between Brian Burke, the real-estate developer, and his childhood friend and…
-
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the renowned philosopher whose strict stringent strictures about language inadvertently destroyed my youthful interest in philosophy, wrote in one of his less rigorous moments that "a man's own name [should be] sacred to him. Surely it is both the most important instrument given to him and also something like a piece of jewelry…
-
A close relative has accused me of lacking spontaneity. Specifically, "I doubt he ever did a spontaneous thing in his entire life." I've been mulling over this attack and I can think of at least three spontaneous actions that I have performed. A) Frequently, in the middle of the afternoon, without forethought or planning, I…
-
If a person could rescue one of the many lost books of the Greeks and Romans, which would it be? I think most ordinary walking-around-Americans would nominate the lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, about which Umberto Eco made such a fuss, and which is presumed to be a philosophical analysis of the genre of comedy.…