I like articles where politics or news is parsed through a literary criticism focus. Thus, I liked this story on Mitt Romney and "America the Beautiful." It's about how Mitt Romney uses the patriotic hymn "America the Beautiful" to talk about his idea of the opportunity society, but only cursorily reads the song. I think what's spot-on about the ( Read more... )

Something odd happened last week. Greenfield held a town election on Tuesday and all the people I voted for won. Well, except for the flyer write-ins. Dan, if they call you saying that you've been elected a trustee to some esoteric local fund, I must have pushed you over the top.

Anyway, Mark Wisnewski won an at-large town council seat, by a ( Read more... )

I finished Bart Ehrmann's The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot. I have to admit, I wasn't really interested that much in the Gnostic mythology: the aeons dropping from the pleroma, the realm of Barbelo, the demiurge. But I thought that the alternate reading of the story of Jesus's betrayal was interesting. And I was really interested in something that ( Read more... )

Overall, I was disappointed with Errol Morris's five-part NYT series of columns, "The Ashtray." It started off interesting enough. But in the end, it was more of a diatribe against his old teacher, Thomas Kuhn, than it was about an idea about language or philosophic relativism. Morris came down pretty strongly against the relativism he saw in Kuhn ( Read more... )

I was driving home last night, flipping through the radio stations, and landed on on Springfield's Rock 102. It had been a warm springy day and a little bit of Classic Rock was reminding me of high school. Now, don't get me wrong, when I was in high school, this was still called "Classic Rock" -- even then, my generation was under the sway of the ( Read more... )

Interesting article in NYTimes, "Grifters' Tale," comparing John Edwards and Sarah Palin as populist opportunists.

So, the next U.S. Senator from Massachusetts will be a Republican. And he will be the 41st vote against health care. I was not impressed with Martha Coakley as a candidate. I voted for Mike Capuano in the primary, but I voted for Coakley today, even though we felt harassed by all the robo-calls we got from her campaign ( Read more... )

There's a ZBA meeting tonight in Greenfield about a proposed Biomass plant that a developer would like to build in the industrial park. Here's a blog post by Myriam Erlich Williamson at The Back Forty that contemplates the issue. I found it interesting that environmentalist heavyweight Bill McKibben posted favorably about the biomass projects in ( Read more... )

(Note 5/4: I'm making this post public.)

So says WRSI The River morning host Monte Belmonte. I heard him and fellow local radio personality Chris Collins on the Bill Dwight show Tuesday, while driving to Springfield. Monte and Chris, apparently, had aimed to start a half-hour radio show on Greenfield politics to be broadcast from the People's Pint ( Read more... )

Searching the Poetry Foundation's website this morning, I found this missive by Stephen Burt on Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's mis-use of Tennyson. "How could a resignation sound so defiant? How could Blagojevich’s speechwriter get this famous poem so wrong?" Burts writes.