Keywords Cannery Row, John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday, Ed Ricketts, Literary Tour, Audio Tour “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” John …
Keywords Paul Valery, Poetry and Abstract Thought, Poetry, Philosophy “Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of …
Paul Valery on the Common Material of Poets and Philosophers Read More »
Keywords Joseph Campbell, A Hero’s Journey, Reading, Independent Scholarship “A hero is someone who has given their life to something bigger than oneself.” Joseph Campbell Joseph Campbell was born on March 26, 1904 in White Plains, New York and passed …
Independent Scholarship: Joseph Campbell on Reading Nine Hours a Day Read More »
Keywords Clive Thompson, Coders, Creative Imagination “Code giveth, and code can taketh away.” Clive Thompson Clive Thompson, author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, explores the calling of the hidden architects in …
Clive Thompson on the Creative Imagination of Coders Read More »
Keywords Susanne Langer, Creative Philosophy, Philosophy in a New Key “The secret of fusion is the fact that the artist’s eye sees in nature… an inexhaustible wealth of tension, rhythms, continuities, and contrasts which can be rendered in line and …
Susanne Langer on Creative Philosophy in a New Key Read More »
Keywords Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology “A May wind, swelling up like a piece of fruit, with a rough outer skin, slimy flesh, dozens of seeds. The flesh split open in midair, spraying seeds like …
The Invisible in Haruki Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Read More »
Keywords Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller, Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light, Mimesis, Diegesis, Aura “For Benjamin, the activity of reading is charged with an explosive power that in no way preserves, but rather, in the interruption of its movement, tears the …
Walter Benjamin on Explosive Reading and the Storyteller Read More »
Keywords Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, Lewis Hyde, Seeing, Artistic Observation, Gift, William Blake “The past is preserved only in darkness, the future is not raised to the level of an image, as something which can be anticipated. It …
“Pay attention to the patter by means of which we convince someone of a truth of a mathematical proposition. It tells us something about the function of this conviction. I mean the patter by which intuition is awakened.” Ludwig Wittgenstein …
Four women will invent time travel. Three will make their mark on history. Two will do anything to be remembered. One will not survive. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIME TRAVEL Summer is here and we are cracking open a new book …
Kate Mascarenhas’s The Psychology of Time Travel Read More »
“The wave is one. There’s a reason we’re drawn to it, whether viewing or watching entranced as one wave after another breaks on shore: a wave is a clear instance of energy charging static matter until that energy is spent …
Narrative Architecture in Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode Read More »
“The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.” Anthony Trollope For most teachers and professors wondering how to read more books, establishing new routines, resolutions, and goal-setting …
“The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close …
How Time and Space Converge to Evoke Walter Benjamin’s Aura Read More »
“Until writing was invented, men lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.” – Marshall McLuhan When …
Walter Ong’s Psychodynamics of Orality and the Reader Read More »
“The book industry is focusing more on diverse voices and stories: a reflection of the real demographic of the United States, allowing all to find their stories reflected in books. Children’s publishers across the industry have put an emphasis on finding diverse …