June 12, 2012
Reason Not the Need
I do not need religion. I can plug that hole with anything: family, literature, music, medicine. I can distract myself and go along and never look up and die quite […]
June 8, 2012
Poetry and Entropy
It’s not often that the nuclear radiologist in me shows up on this blog, but Dr. Majmudar—reader of medical images created by measuring positron annihilations and differential tissue attenuation—would like […]
April 2, 2012
The Enduring Appeal of Jules Verne
If all Verne had done was predict the future, he would excite my admiration, not my love. How perspicacious the man was! Really ahead of his time! And that’s where […]
March 18, 2012
The Unwritten Late-Life Poetry of John Keats as Adumbrated in a Posthumous Epistle
T. S. Eliot says somewhere Keats’s poetry hadn’t yet evolved to the point where it could express the philosophical mind we find in the Letters. Keats, at the time of […]
March 7, 2012
Notes on Capital-T Tragedy
1. Why it started with the Greeks and showed up again with the Elizabethans. What makes a tragedy tragic—as opposed to a story with a sad ending—is that the sufferer […]