In lieu of original thought, a few items of possible interest:

+ John Conroy is back! But he’s on WBEZ now instead of writing for the Chicago Reader. (This is not exactly news, but a story today–not up yet on the WBEZ website–reminded me to mention it.)

+ Emily Wilson (the classicist, not the poet) reviews John Tipton’s Ajax: “He succeeds brilliantly at creating a living, contemporary Sophocles. His version is a chilling mirror.” (The original’s in The Nation, but trapped behind a paywall.)

+ Marty Riker interviews the Flood fellows: “Just for the record, I was not, in fact, an angry young man. Confused and obnoxious, but not really angry.”

+ Aufgabe’s editors undo “Numbers Trouble”: “Should we be thankful or irritated that the draft is gendered?”

+ Danielle Allen speaks for herself on the Obama Muslim smear: “Worse than mud.”

+ Kent Johnson is still not sure about “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”: “‘It is a real mystery, that poem.’”

Today’s edition of the New York Times includes a half-page ad by the National Italian American Foundation that’s mostly about A. Kenneth Ciongoli doing his best William Donohoe/Abe Foxman impression. (He’s worried, it seems, that some NBC announcer has slurred Rocco Mediate’s “unsurpassed ethnic heritage” by saying he looks like Tiger Woods’s pool cleaner.) Dumb, but it includes these priceless sentences, retyped here for your electronic viewing pleasure:

[Johnny] Miller seems not to know that in his professional lifetime, the presidents of Georgetown, Harvard, Tufts, and Yale universities as well as sundry other American institutions are cultural and ethnic cousins of men named Rocco. In addition, the recent CEOs of IBM, Intel, McDonald’s, Brooks Brothers, the New York Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ, the New York Mercantile Exchange, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade have been Italian Americans with relatives named Rocco.

From Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in next month’s Atlantic:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet….

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded…. But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one.

No, friend, you’re not, which is why I’m happy to introduce a new feature, previously available only on airplanes and in movie theaters, right here on digital emunction: an emergency exit door. It’s up there on the right at the top of the page, just under the subscribe link. Use it early and often. Who knows? The brain you save could be your own…

If I knew how, I would ask forgiveness, but of whom? Of Aeore? The Sky? Myself?
Who else?
Are you afraid?
Not of death.
Of what?
Of that enormous sky.
You’re going to die.
Well, kill me then, says I.
You’re going to die then.
…
Well I said kill me then or else be quiet.

+++

(This photograph was taken by Gleison Miranda of Brazil’s National Indian Foundation [FUNAI] on a recent flyover of an uncontacted Indian tribe in the Brazilian state of Acre. The quotation is from Peter Matthiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord.)

Deep down I know—I simply know—that the American people love me. After all that I’ve done for them and given to them, how can they help but love me? And I know that it is only a very small percentage that have given up, who have lost faith.

Who said it? (Answer after the jump.)

A) George W. Bush
B) Hillary Clinton
C) Lyndon Johnson
D) Britney Spears

(more…)

I’ve been waiting for someone to write a good long piece about the phenomenon that some have named the New Atheism: i.e. the rash of books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and others whose express intent has been to hasten the disappearance of religion as a cultural force. The article I wanted to read would have less to do with pushing back against the arguments in these books than it would with trying to explain the phenomenon of their collective appearance.

The most obvious question that this imaginary inquiry would tackle would be the question of timing: why did so many of these books appear all at once? (more…)