Archive for 2007

Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, prescribes for the "ghastly condition ... sellout ... suicide" of Humanities education today.

Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, puts Walt Whitman on the top tier with Shakespeare -- "the two threads in the labyrinth" -- in his grand summing-up.

Poetry critic Helen Vendler shows us how to see the shape so as to hear the sound of a poem. W. B. Yeats' "An Airman Foresees His Death" is a 4 x 4 x 4 "cube," which has everything to do with its meaning.

Historian Philip Gura's "American Transcendentalism" reminds you of -- take your pick -- the pollution or the surging vitality of the old headwaters of American thinking.

Alex Ross's history of the 20th Century according to its music, or: How the home address of musical composition moved from Vienna to the Hollywood.

Middle East Historian Juan Cole recounts the story of Napoleon Bonaparte's 1798 invasion of Egypt, and connects it with the "bookend" fiasco of the Bush war in Iraq today.

In the Americanization process that Ha Jin writes about there is no baseball, no Abraham Lincoln or FDR, no Paul Bunyan or American camp-fire songs, no Grand Canyon, no interest in our local or national politics... and no outward sentiment about a golden path toward the citizenship moment and pledge of allegiance. Is this part of what upsets us about immigration -- that these strangers are so wrapped up in old languages, and their own damned dramas?

The near-tie vote Sunday against the Chavez's idea of constitutional "reform" for Venezula confirms the sense of Chavez as a man on the edge, in a dangerous conflict of self and ideals, a character out a Garcia Marquez novel, in a "headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams." Is this the story? I've asking square-one sorts of questions about Chavismo : about his ideas of "participatory democracy" , about "21st Century Socialism," which may be quite different from the 19th and 20th Century versions, about the populist economic nationalism that Chavez has thrown up against the "neo-liberalism" of the "Washington consensus" on free markets, free trade, and multinational investments. Our guests here are Julia Buxton of the University of Bradford in the UK. She writes extensively (and sympathetically) about Chavez and Chavismo on openDemocracy. Jennifer McCoy of Georgia State Universty and the Carter Center, both in Atlanta. And James Green, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Brown University.

PBS documentarian Ken Burns reflects on his World War 2 epic -- and the possibility that war histories extend the innate human fascination with combat.