Leigh M. Johnson

Because They’re There

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 7 Comments

I want to present an award. I’m calling it The Most Ridiculous (Yet Still Frightening) Article of the Week. And the winner is…. drumroll…. The Next Five States by Thomas Barnett (in Esquire magazine) The author begins his essay by bemoaning the fact that he will be the first Barnett in several generations to be…

Sad Songs Say So Much

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 17 Comments

My friend Kyle and I used to make up these games, in which we would try to list the top ten songs/artists in an invented category, mostly to keep us occupied in the culturally-vacant wasteland that was State College, PA. Often, determining the category was as fun as filling it out, and Kyle was particularly…

“Answer” Songs

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 1 Comment

This past Sunday, on my radio show “Americana the Beautiful” (which you can listen to Sundays from 7-8 Central Time on Rhodes Radio), I did a themed show featuring “answer” songs. Answer songs are, as the name suggests, songs written in response to a previously recorded song by another artist. They were popular in blues…

I’m Singin’ To You

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 6 Comments

Apparently, the recent entry Sad Songs Say So Much struck a chord with many of you. So, I thought I would continue the theme for a bit more… One of the many, many reasons that I think sad songs say so much is that they don’t actually “say”… they sing. There are a whole mess…

A Noun, A Verb, and 9/11

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 2 Comments

Last week, Senator Joe Biden remarked of fellow Presidential candidate Rudy Giuiliani: “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11” Echoing Biden’s sentiments, The Daily Show anchor Jon Stewart suggested that Giuliani has a condition called “9/11 Tourettes.” Similarly, Sen. Chris Dodd lambasted Giuliani for accepting donations of…

American Beauty, Reconsidered

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 3 Comments

I run the “Philosophy Film Series” (and the corresponding “Pub Talks”) at my college, a task I enjoy so much that it doesn’t even seem like work. I’m always pleasantly surprised to find that our students are very sophisticated film viewers, and my job as the facilitator of our discussions is often impeded by my…

The Train: American Art’s Lost Muse

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 4 Comments

There was a film review of the new Wes Anderson flick The Darjeeling Limited last week in The New Yorker in which the reviewer asks: Can you have a thriving movie culture in a country without enough trains? It’s a great question– for those of us interested in all genres of American art. I, too,…

Why the ocean is sublime (and why it isn’t)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 6 Comments

I went to a roundtable the other night on “The Aesthetic” hosted by our English department. As you might expect, much of the discussion was guided by Kant’s Critique of Judgment, supplemented with the requisite considerations of Baumgarten and Burke. At one point, the discussion turned to the “sublime” and, of course, to the ready-to-hand…

Studenting Redux

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 9 Comments

I was very pleased to see all of the interest in the To Student, or not to student post! The discussion, much of which was sparked by an initial distinction between a student-who-learns and a student-who-students (a la Sartre’s garçon de café) seemed to concentrate on the “inauthenticity” of the latter. I thought it might…

To student, or not to student.

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 8 Comments

A colleague of mine recently alerted me to an interesting passage in Garry D. Fenstermacher’s essay, “Rediscovering the Student in Democracy and Education,” in John Dewey and Our Educational Prospects: A Critical Engagement with Dewey’s Democracy and Education. Fenstermacher suggests imagining that the word “student” might function as a verb or a noun. He writes,…

Because They’re There

Sad Songs Say So Much

“Answer” Songs

I’m Singin’ To You

A Noun, A Verb, and 9/11

American Beauty, Reconsidered

The Train: American Art’s Lost Muse

Why the ocean is sublime (and why it isn’t)

Studenting Redux

To student, or not to student.

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