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…
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreMy 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…
Read MoreSeveral years ago, when I used to manage an independent bookstore/cafe in Midtown Memphis, I had the pleasure of reading the book to your left, How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction. (Hey, what can I say? A woman cannot survive on Derrida alone!) The book doesn’t include a single hint of irony in all…
Read MoreAnyone who’s ever read Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, one of the greatest books ever on secrecy, has certainly had to grapple with the aporia of the secret. Of course, the “secret” of that text (such that there is one) is that there is no Secret. This is partly true because, structurally speaking, someone…
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreThere 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,…
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreA 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,…
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