Blog Subjects

Christopher Barnes – See-Saw Then Reel

A fault-line deforms the lark’s sunrise. Frisco unpents itself, shop-soiling a minute. Gloating flames cackle for days. Survivor tents fidget on city-plan lawns. In a leap-the-queue food line Kermit the frog recovered his whereabouts At the brink of intact terrain.

Zev Gottdiener – The Breadman III

Nothing ever works out how you plan. That’s an old trick that ticks and trickles relevance to the point we hate it deep down for proving true. Because that chaos is an integral part of being we also harbor elaborate dreams and plan lofty ends for ourselves, acting them out even while knowing they will […]

Johann Sebastian DOOM: A Brief Note on Hip Hop

Hip hop can deal with emotions sort of but it’s not a strength. Nas’s song about dancing with his dead mother made me cry but that is neither here nor there. Moms make me cry in general. Whatever. It’s an exception. Hip hop is style and virtuosity. Bach’s counterpoint produces linearity by complicating the relations […]

Poetics Ditty, Quickly: Part 2

If poetry is not defined, if there are no sayable parameters for what poetry is or can be or does, then poetry can appear anywhere.

Poetics Ditty: Part 1

(thanks, Josh Keiter) “Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination” is a good post about the difference between expressive and communicative language. It sums up the day’s dominant theory of the place, not just of poetry, but, one might argue, of human understanding in general: “Poetry evokes a special kind of thinking — where we interpret ordinary […]

On MLB and its Long-Term Commitment

by Tyler Collison This is the first post in a series, Reconstructive Manifesto. Though the world of sports is at times both entertaining and fascinating, the fact is that the nation’s major sports organizations (NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL) are businesses, and no business model is flawless. And with that, we begin the inaugural Reconstructive […]

TGIF

In the winter of 1994, the TGIF lineup on ABC was this: 8:00 PM – Family Matters 8:30 PM – Boy Meets World 9:00 PM – Step by Step 9:30 PM – Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper (which changed to Sister Sister by Spring) In the winter of 1994, I was seven and like the rest […]

Culture Shock and the Unlearning of Eating Your Shell

I I’ve always been tickled by the question “what do you do?” How this query usually comes during the small talk phase of interaction, sometime after weather or sports and before becoming lifelong friends, could mean “what do you like to do?” or “what do you do for a living?” Though I often try to […]

Dream Team vs. Dream Team: Debating the Great Debate

by Tyler Collison In the honeymoon period of what was unarguably the greatest single-game performance in Olympics history, the engine driving the debate of who would win a head-to-head matchup between the United States’ two “Dream Teams” — those of 1992 and 2012 — has received an oil change. But before I get too far into things, […]