Category: Uncategorized

fragment of a manifesto for a radical pedagogy

Gary has started to keep an experiential diary on his blog and I mean to hold him to it, as the project interests me. Perhaps I should do the same, even though the entries might be too similar.

Well, anyway…

Viewed:

Preston Sturges’ “Easy Living”:

“Milk”

To be female still means being trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s turned back on her. Because emotion’s just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.

(photo from Time magazine)

I’m feeling somehow like I need these.

Limerence

an article by my father, Glenn Gordon

A careless green woodpecker is trying to get off the subway, but some befuddled yokels are blocking the door, trying to figure out if this is their stop, stumbling upon a pile of dry cognate stones.

A spoiled or foppish townsman also meanders through the underground maze while chewing his innate bacon, his thick, succulent stems entirely abandoned as useless and misleading in the process or circumstances of being born.

A broadly “misshapen egg” joyously peals the plan for wandering in a unique way, like a “chawbacon” or “hayseed”: casually, and without urgent destination: rambling trepidly into a cock’s egg.

In spite of all this, a clumsy, heavy-footed, xeric shark , naïve and gullible in her 12-foot deep, 120,000 gallon tank, follows a winding or intricate (and citified) course into her nascent renaissance.

She roamed over the hills for hours.

Friend Lina Kogan sends this apt quotation:

Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.

Karl Marx, 1867

Three quotations from feminist, poeticist, journalist, and (until he turned tail and became a McCarthyite) socialist Max Eastman:

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

Google has thoughtfully digitized his wonderful 1921 book, Enjoyment of Poetry. It’s definitely worth a perusal.