Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities

A friend of mine at Facebook, noting my affinity for the thinking of philosopher Martha Nussbaum, asked me to recommend a book of hers which he might read to begin getting to know her, too. I recommended Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, which was published in 2010. I attached this review of the book to my message to him: http://harpers.org/archive/2010/06/hbc-90007141. As I reread the review, I recognized its and the book’s value for educators. Voilà, this blog post!

Miriam Dunn’s “What if” and my response “Might then”

A little after noon today, Miriam Dunn, a wonderful poet and friend of mine, posted What if at Google+. Shortly thereafter, I posted a response to her poem in the form of a poem of my own, Might then, which you’ll find below.

miriam dunn  -  What if

What if I disturb you
with a word
that once lay hid
within a shell
and flew off like a bird?

its careless beak
dropping sounds
that once, they met the air,
resembled nonsense syllables
and reconstruct them there.

Skip Zilla  -  Might then

Might then comb the syllabuses
in a library for a syllabary
to syllogize whether the syllables
were silly spatter
or formed symbols
weighted enough to ponder
yet light enough to wave
across a skyful of minds.

When is enough, enough, to act?

I woke up a few hours ago from a dream of being a storyteller of happy-ending life struggles in a world resigned to merely fixing its escapes from despondency. My mind has been working subliminally for some time (years maybe?) in resourcing and restructuring who I’ve been and in heading me toward what to do diligently with the rest of my life, and last night’s dream was clearer than ever a calling to act now without further delay to be much more clever in a disciplined way to create what I can and to join with those who are working at telling stories that heal broken hopes of personality and community. I’ve never been really good at heeding calls to reform myself — I’ve seldom disliked being me — so responding to the call to a more virtuous life in the dream is in jeapardy of self(ish) inertia as a time of amazed enthusiasm for it recedes into the past and out of memory. But it is worth letting others know that I may be quitting an obsessive procrastination cold-turkey.

A pieceful land

[another "nut" -- written around noon on March 6, 2012, a minute ago]

“Move on, words-galore man,”
ordered the one-eyed officer of the piece.
“The land’s capitol grounds now.
Laughing loudly at legislation
is arrestible. Laughter is the only lunacy
not legal here.”

“But officer who stares for light
in the shine of his polished boots,
I can’t help laughing at the spectacle,”
replied the disturber of a pieceful land.
“Move on? But where?”

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What’s luck got to do with it?

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education — sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.
~ E. B. White
[found at http://grammar.about.com/od/yourwriting/a/advice.htm]

Luck is, in my estimation, the most important idea one can understand, not only about using language interestingly, but also about how the cosmos and everything in it happens. There’s a lot of emphasis by scientists of various stripes on “rules” that determine how things happen; but they really know better: that a sense of predictable mechanics misses the deepest uncertainty out of which anything exists–including you and me!

The Way of Bubbles

It used to annoy me that we “greedy bastards” have won throughout history, write our own accounts hiding the perfidy of our ways, and instruct our progeny in the righteousness of moral superiority. Now, I recognize that that’s life for big-brained apes who have had little choice in the matter given our elemental anxieties but to inflate a most delusional projection of ourselves as nature’s conquistadors; I see now, too, that our biological bubble as a species is as prone to bursting as is any bubble of personal fancy.