I wasn’t surprised to find among the list of “local weirdos” featured in the article “How To Be A Local Character: Five Basic Examples” Memphis’ own Prince Mongo (pictured left). Prince Mongo– né Robert Hodges, changed his name to King Mongo, then Saint Mongo– has been a fixture in Midtown Memphis for as long as…
Read MoreJames Baldwin, a 20th C. African-American novelist and parrhesiastes, wrote a letter to his nephew in 1963– on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation— that was later published under the title My Dungeon Shook. In that letter, Baldwin tried to persuade his young nephew not to fall prey to the more insidious temptations of assimilation,…
Read MoreI recently discovered wordle.net, which generates “word clouds” from text that you enter. The program gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently, thus producing a kind of shorthand-image of what is emphasized in the original text. I know that readers of this blog probably don’t need yet another Internet distraction, but this one…
Read MoreOver on KHG’s blog, there’s a really interesting post (Titillating Food) about her experiment with trying to make “caramel sea salt.” Reading it, and amazing at all of the care and thought that went into such a project, got me thinking about that odd-variety of human being that we call the foodie. The foodie differs…
Read MoreA couple of interesting stories that caught my attention this week… and also made me throw up a little in my mouth: First, a book review of Raymond Tallis’ The Kingdom of Infinite Space: An Encounter With Your Head. Tallis– a poet, philosopher and professor of geriatric medicine– considers the relationship between the various operations…
Read MoreWith only 8 more days to go before the Inauguration, Slate magazine (in collaboration with MixedInk) has invited us, the people, to help write Obama’s inaugural address. The way it works is as follows: when you click on this link, you will be taken to a site where you can begin writing your own speech….
Read MoreThe painting to the left is Akt Elke 2 (Nude Elke 2) by the German artist Georg Baselitz, who is famous for painting figures upside-down. When Baselitz was asked by a reporter recently whether or not he felt any guilt about the “astronomical prices” his works were fetching at auctions, Baselitz took a long drag…
Read MoreI’ve mentioned my fascination with medical mysteries before on this blog (see: my post on Apotemnophilia). I suppose that part of that fascination is simply grounded in the strangeness of some of the conditions, but I am also particularly interested in the way that medical knowledge is stymied. A couple of years ago, I read…
Read MoreThis semster I’m teaching a “Philosophy of Race” course that meets on Tuesdays/Thursdays from 12:30-1:45 in the afternoon… which means we will be meeting in the middle of the Obama inauguration next week! I’m debating whether or not to cancel class, or at least to forego my syllabus schedule (would’ve been Bernier and Kant) in…
Read MoreAnyone remember the “culture wars”? Now that we’ve got all this change we can believe in, people don’t talk about them very much anymore, but the battle is far from over. One of the leading soldiers on the conservative side for years has been David Horowitz, who has a blog here and a “Freedom Center”…
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