The political scientist Benedict Anderson has argued that newspapers and novels created the “imagined community” that nationalism requires in order to flourish. What might be termed “imagined empathy” serves as the foundation of human rights rather than of nationalism. It is imagined, not in the sense of made up, but in the sense that empathy requires a leap of faith, of imagining that someone else is like you. Accounts of torture produced this imagined empathy through new views of pain. Novels generated it by inducing new sensations about the inner self. Each in their way reinforced the notion of a community based on autonomous, empathetic individuals who could relate beyond their immediate families, religious affiliations, or even nations to greater universal values.”

If you’d like to learn a little about me, read my About page.

For a links to publications, read my Writing page.

And to give you a sense of my interests and whimsy, here’s a consideration of Denise Levertov’s poems about St. Thomas the Doubter, and here’s an improvisation I wrote blaming the last recession squarely on poets. (I like poets and poetry. Some of my best friends are poets, and I read and write about poetry a lot. This is simply a humorous sketch.)

Oh, and here’s a collection of recipes from Julia Child’s cookbook from her days in the OSS.

Comments? Drop me a line.

Late spring to summer and now into late summer. How quickly it goes. Plunging again and again into weeks. The shoreline changes. Clouds arrive. The temperature drops. The beach tapers to a cliff.