Owen Barfield Quote of the Day (5/18/13)

If you would faithfully trace the course taken by the mind of man since it first began to apprehend regularity in nature, then you must distinguish, in the domain of nature herself, between the earth and the universe beyond it. It was in the universe beyond, among the stars and planets, that regularity and irregularity were first distinguished. It was not until men had transferred the habit of that discernment from the heavens to the earth that they beheld, upon earth too, any "laws" of nature. And this they could do, because it is out of that universe that the body of the earth has shrunk together. It has shrunk together and gathered into itself the life of the universe, as the seed shrinks together within the parent plant. All its exterior irregularities point back to that origin. But the earth is not a lifeless relic; it is also the living body of mankind, and, permeating an old machine, there is the new life that looks forward to the future.—Owen Barfield (Unancestral Voice 154; the Meggid is speaking)

Ending a Sentence with a Preposition

Is this something up with which we should not put? (reposted from The Dish).

A Grammar Rule That Isn’t

MAY 17 2013 @ 6:37PM

John McWhorter defends ending sentences with prepositions:

Should “she refused to come in” be recast as “in she refused to come”? Of course not. [Eighteenth-century author Robert] Lowth [who popularized the preposition rule] was referring only to language in its Sunday best when he wagged his finger about the sentence-ending preposition, and at one point in his book, he even wrote, “This is an idiom, which our language is strongly inclined to.” Whether Lowth was aware of the irony is something he took to his grave.

Owen Barfield Quote of the Day (5/17/13)

Either all things were made, and are sustained, by the Logos, or they were not. If they were, then the Logos is, in some way, the transforming agent underlying the changes in both nature and history. The ordinary theory of evolution is what it is because by the time men first became aware of evolution they no longer knew anything of that transforming agent. And it is that very ignorance for which Rome is responsible at the bar of history.—Owen Barfield (Burgeon in Unancestral Voice 99)

"Star Trek: Into Darkness"

Well, I enjoyed it, but was it good? It looked great, but what film doesn't these days? And I am beginning to find Chris Pine really annoying. Nor do I buy Spock as an action hero. That on foot chase of Khan was pretty silly.

Here's David Edelstein's take on the new Enterprisers:

But does the central trinity still play? Whereas the old Kirk had to navigate between cold logic (Spock) and humanist emotion (Dr. McCoy), the new one is too much of a hothead to listen — making the doctor superfluous and Karl Urban little more than a one-liner machine. But then this whole Enterprise is staffed with quipsters and exhibitionists. Not for Zachary Quinto the still, ever-so-slightly querulous demeanor of Leonard Nimoy. His half-humanity is more like three-quarters, his feelings on the surface. He’s a good actor, but his Spock has no secrets.

The new-model characters are slim and alarmingly smooth-skinned. Anton Yelchin’s Chekhov still doesn’t look old enough to shave. And what’s the deal with his terrible accent? He was born in Russia but makes Walter Koenig look like a veteran of the Moscow Art Theatre. Simon Pegg’s Scotty is not a reassuring presence but an out-and-out hysteric. John Cho blessedly underplays Sulu — and as a result is always upstaged. The pleasure of an Uhura who takes part in the action is dampened by the rest of the role, which requires her either to entreat Spock to be careful or exhort him to get the bad guy. 

Andrew O'Hehir (in Salon) is not nearly so kind. 

HuffPo in a Nutshell

On Facebook the always acerbic Charles Taylor just referred to HuffPo as  

that dreary little thievery ring run by that odious Eva Gabor impersonator

Conan's Grammar Check

In last night[s "Fan Corrections" a Conan viewer corrected a supposed grammar mistake (Conan saying "There's Matthew Perry and I"). The riposte was quite funny, but the fan was wrong.

It's not an error. It should be "I"--not "Matthew Perry and me" (as the fan insists).

Owen Barfield Quote of the Day (5/16/13)

[The] human mind has succeeded in creating a sort of monster, like Frankenstein. Only Frankenstein never got so far as going about telling everybody that the monster existed before he was born and was in fact his father."—Owen Barfield (Worlds Apart 88)

Roger Stone’s New Book ‘Solves’ JFK Assassination: Johnson Did It

So MacBird! had it right? 

As someone who played Bobby Ken O'Dunck in a 1968 production and avenged my brother's death, I feel fully justified and very proud.

Owen Barfield Quote of the Day (5/15/13)

[Burgeon]. I wonder if I have really understood what you mean by primary and secondary qualities. I have been assuming that in place of "primary qualities" we could equally well say "the fact of the matter" or "external reality" or something like that and vice versa, but that in the case of the secondary qualities, though we do not hold them to be unreal, we could not do that because they are also appearances or semblances depending on the senses and the mind or brain of man.

[Brodie]. Yes, that is quite right.

[Burgeon]. Then I repeat that it must have been a great hardship for these learned men that, just about the time when the frontiers of time were burst through and they might have started writing histories of this solid earth and of the solid plants and animals on it and so forth with all their different colours and shapes and other qualities—histories extending back for millions of years instead of only a few thousands—all this great enterprise had to be abandoned.

[Brodie]. Why should it be abandoned?

[Burgeon]. Because henceforth it seems that any history of such things must either be a history of numbers, or quantities, or something of that sort, or else it must largely be a history of men's minds and eyes and their other senses. Whereas if, for example, solidity had not been discovered to be secondary quality, very learned and exciting accounts could have been given of a solid earth and solid rocks and plants and animals and so forth on its surface, as they were millions of years before men and their minds were generated from them.

[Brodie]. You say many such accounts could have been given; but many have been given and they are still being given. Masses of evidence have been accumulated and only the details of it are in dispute.

[Burgeon]. I see. I suppose, then, that this evidence comes to us in some other way than through our senses and our minds. . . . I am just wondering what your opinion is about those men who knowing, not through their unaided senses but with the help of microscopes and other precision instruments, all about the difference between the primary qualities and the secondary qualities of the earth, nevertheless account for those secondary qualities by showing how they came into being before any minds or senses existed.—Owen Barfield (Worlds Apart 77, 79)

TV Viewing and Relationships

PCAS, October 2013

Just submitted my proposal for this Fall's conference in Savannah:

Not Your Mother's Hallmark: someEcards and the Implosion of Self in the 21st Century

The mordant, cynical, raunchy, darkly ironic, irreverent humor of the electronic greeting card website someEcards.com has become, for those urban sophisticates who share its world view, the cyber-successor to several generations’ Hallmark platitudes. With a distinctive retro/Victorian look, these endlessly replicating brief exercises in meta-sardonics have come, since their arrival on the contemporary culture scene in 2007, as indispensable for its users as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and The Onion. My talk will offer a brief history of traditional greeting cards, track someEcards’ radical transformation of the tradition, carefully examine a number of prime examples, and then speculate on what its existence tells us about the 21st Century mindset.

Hidden in Winnipeg

For all my Canadian friends.

• Drunk Robin of 2008, upset over Ted marrying Stella, dug up her grandmother’s locket so she could take it to Japan. “She kept it hidden in her butt all during World War II,” she brags to Lily. “Where was she?” Lily asks. “Winnipeg,” Drunk Robin deadpans.--Donna Bowman commenting on last night's season-ending,  mother-revealing episode of HIMYM

RIP, Joyce Brothers

In memory of the late Joyce Brothers, one of psychology's all-time greats--at least in the imagination of Mel Brooks (High Anxiety).

),

We Meet the Mother (the Woman with the Yellow Umbrella)

Is there any precedent for this? A character--a major eponymous character--we do not meet until eight seasons (and 184 episodes) into a series? Discuss.

Owen Barfield Quote of the Day (5/14/13)

How could the chap [biologist J. Z. Young] who delivered the Reith lectures a few years ago—Doubt and Certainty in Science, I think they were called—talk in one lecture about "a man-world of observers and the relations between them" and tell us to remember that our favourite "real" world was only invented in the seventeenth century—and then fill the very next lecture with descriptions of the world as it was before man existed? What world did he think he was talking about? The one that that was invented in the seventeenth century, or some other?—Owen Barfield (Worlds Apart 55-56)

"The Page and the Screen"

Now available as an Amazon Kindle book.

The End of "Seinfeld"--Fifteen Years Later

Tomorrow (May 14) is the 15th anniversary of the Seinfeld finale.

A good occasion to read up on the series, right?

Order from Amazon.

"In Bruges"

Just watched In Bruges again (my third time) while finishing up grading and loved it even more. What a brilliant, witty, touching, violent, profane film.

Owen Barfield Quote of the Day (5/13/13)

The remoter ancestors of Homer, we are given to understand, observing that it was darker in winter than in summer, immediately decided that there must be some "cause" for this "phenomenon," and had no difficulty in tossing off the "theory" of, Demeter and Persephone, to account for it. . . Imagination, history, bare common sense—these it seems, are as nothing beside the paramount necessity that the great Mumbo Jumbo, the patent double-million magnifying Inductive Method, should be allowed to continue contemplating its own ideal reflection—a golden age in which every man was his own Newton, in a world dripping with apples.—Owen Barfield (Poetic Diction 90)

Happy Mother's Day--from Twin Peaks

The log also said: "The owls are not what they seem."

Tip of the hat to Joyce Millman.

Owen Barfield Quote of the Day (5/12/13)

When in the course of an argument, I affirm a tautology, I do not do so (as both Wittgenstein and Professor Ryle appear to suppose) with the mistaken idea that I am purveying a meaning. I do so, because it is the only way left to me of bringing my opponent to his senses. It is shock-treatment, designed to show him that he has failed to reflect, and therefore to grasp the very nature of thinking; that he has, for the moment at least, abandoned his sovereign unity and ceased to function as a human being. I may hope by this means to call him back from the first step on the road to what George Orwell called double-think; it does not follow that I shall succeed, if he is on other grounds determined to go there. Nor can I possibly succeed if the impossibility of reflection be his chosen premise.—Owen Barfield (Poetic Diction 30-31)