October 2011
36 posts
Nabokov, Pnin, and the Preposterous →
A short piece I wrote on Vladimir Nabokov’s use of literary doubles.
Nabokov, Pnin, and the Preposterous →
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An Intuitive Lacking
“Almost everyone living in urbanized centers around the world feels intuitively a lack of something in their lives due directly to the creation of an artificial environment from which nature has been excluded to the greatest possible extent.”
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Man and Nature.
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Spiritual Dimension of the Ecological Crisis
“The veritable spiritual dimension of the ecological crisis has become forgotten, for there is no authentic spirituality without orthodoxy understood in the most universal sense of the term.”
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Man and Nature.
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What Is Time?
Is it the present moving forward and devouring the future? Do we fear its swiftness when we await something difficult? Or are we rebellious towards time’s slowness when awaiting something desired. For some though, time is not simply the present capturing the future but time is conquered and carried of by the past. Given the nastalgic disposition of modernity which can’t stop staring at...
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The Survival of Scientism
“One of the chief causes for this lack of acceptance of the spiritual dimension of the ecological crisis is the survival of a scientism which continues to present modern science not as a particular way of knowing nature, but as a complete and totalitarian philosophy which reduces all reality to the physical domain and does not wish under any condition to accept the possibility of the...
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It Roars
“…in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, ‘regardless whether we want to hear it,’ it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock,...
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A Noise Among Other Noises
Schoenberg was aware that the bacterium existed. As early as 1930 he wrote: “Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless”; it “force-feeds us music … regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it,” with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises.
Milan Kundera from...
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Keeping in Line With Tradition
I wonder if Qaddafi will also have that “Islamic burial” at sea?
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The sound of a happy baby.
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One of Life's Assurances
“All predictions are wrong, that’s one of life’s few certainties granted to mankind.” Milan Kundera, Ignorance.
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American Imam →
American Imam is the title of an article I have written for Inside Islam: Dialogues and Debates, a collaboration between UW-Madison’s nine area and international studies centers, Wisconsin Public…
American Imam →
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American Imam →
American Imam is the title of an article I have written for Inside Islam: Dialogues and Debates, a collaboration between UW-Madison’s nine area and international studies centers, Wisconsin Public Radio, and the public.
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An Honest Money System
“The refusal of King George to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators was probably the prime cause of the Revolution.” - Benjamin Franklin
This is why it’s even more important that the Wall Street Occupiers move beyond feel-good language of equality and compassion and start making real...
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Personal Life
This struck a chord with me: “The more genuine part of my life is unrecognizable, extremely intimate and impossible to define.” From Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector.
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