Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The fourth and final class of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research course took place last night. The course was taught by the historian of philosophy Michael Stevenson. I signed up to learn more about Edmund Husserl, but Husserl led me to the much more interesting figure of Merleau-Ponty. What have I learned? Better understanding of Descartes' method of doubt. Franz Brentano's attempt to distinguish between mental and physical phenomena. Husserl's adoption of one of Brentano's criteria, that of intentionality as the distinguishing mark of consciousness. Consciousness is always the consciousness of something. Husserl's foundationalist attempt to build on Descartes' cogito, ergo sum by innovating the phenomenological reduction, i.e., to treat as irrelevant the "reality" of the outside world and as indubitable the "reality" of the intentional act. Merleau-Ponty's re-interpretation of the phenomenological reduction: the chief lesson of ...

TLS January 2, 2009 from Ali Smith's review of Sylvia Townsend Warner's New Collected Poems , and Valentine Ackland's Selected poems : But settling in with Ackland in Dorset in 1930 did bring Warner alive, out of "this death I have say so snugly in for so long", and the couple stayed together, with a couple of rocky periods, in their open relationship for four decades. As Bingham, Ackland's critical guardian angel, writes elsewhere, "the presence of Valentine in her work is one way in which Warner represented the possibility of an alternative society; the revolutionary ideal as she was actually living it". By comparison, though, Warner sublimated her poetry to Ackland in much the same way as she, a woman who loved musix, simply stopped going to concerts because concerts bored her lover. If her lover needed to be The Poet, then she wouldn't challenge her for the role.  *** from Mark Vernon's review of Mark Rowlands's  The Philosopher and t...

from Paula Marantz Cohen's review (TLS Sep 5 2008) of books on Alfred Hitchcock: [Hitchcock] was flamboyantly modest or, perhaps better, a self-deprecating exhibitionist. His understated preening is evident in his famous interview with Truffaut and in the cameo appearances he insisted on making in all his films. * He had an unerring grasp of the cinematic--on the technical level of understanding lenses and camera angles, and on the conceptual level of visual storytelling. He was able to make suspense into a metaphor for life and to use the theme of mistaken identity as a source of rich existential meaning. He understood the popular audience, was a master of studio politics and a genius at publicity, and yet he managed to hold on to his own vision. *** from Richard Marggraf Turley's Commentary piece (TLS Sep 5 2008) on "Barry Cornwall" (the pseudonym of Bryan Waller Procter) and Keats: . . . we reject Cornwall for not offering the layered complexities our long admirati...

After a few kneejerk reactions, this PFFA thread is developing into an interesting discussion about what Keats meant when he said he hated poetry that has a design on the reader, and about the necessity of considering the reader in one's writing. There are also side comments on Damien Hurst, T. S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Hopkins and Yeats.