But today is worth mentioning. I attended my first class at the Osher Lifetime Learning Institute (OLLI) at the U of Southern Maine in Portland. It’s something unusual for me: I mean a class on American artists, two of whom are short story writers and one a photographer. Plus the fact that these are no ordinary artists, even though they in fact concern themselves with the ordinary. This latter concern explains the title, thought up by the teacher, Janet Gunn.

So who are these people? Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, and Diane Arbus. The first two are the short story writers and they both died young. Diane (pronounced DEEann) Arbus takes pictures of ordinary people in extraordinary contexts.

I’ve read Flannery O’Connor before and even made a post on her and got comments, here. But I had never heard of Raymond Carver until a few weeks ago. They have certain similarities which probably should be discussed in this course. It runs for eight weeks. There were eleven there today taking the course, four men and seven women.

More later.

Fifty votes needed to defeat it, and it got 51. Olmypia Snowe was the only Republican who voted against it. Her Maine colleague, Susan Collins, went along with the rest of the Republicans. Group think is important among Republicans. There are always a few Democrats who stray, in this case three.

Olympia voted against it because, having chosen to retire, she is free, free at last to vote her conscience.

And then there’s that fascistic pig, Rush Limbaugh. He calls a law student a “slut” for wanting contraception available. How 19th century can you get? And have any Republicans repudiated Rush? No. I guess he and Grover Norquist are the voices of the Republican party.

Here’s an excellent NYT editorial on the narrow defeat of the Blunt amendment.

Right on schedule, but still a little late for the celebrators and workers in the snow. JimBob was complaining to me a couple weeks ago that the lack of snow was hurting his business and the businesses of a lot of others too, i.e. the snow plowers, roof cleaners, ski resorters, snow mobiler salespeople, etc. But why not try to make up for it now? There’s still the whole of March, 31 days of it. Of course it could warm up.

At least Olympia Snowe went out like a lamb the day before the big storm. But she is now causing a storm in the GOP which is good thing.

When was the last time March came in like a Lion? Using the almanac weather history finder, and going back year by year for Portland, Maine, for March 1, the first serious precipitation I found was 1.86 inches on March 1, 1999. Pretty wimpy of the first decade of the 21rst century, eh? Except for today!!

The theme of the Wiman interview was his love, faith, and incurable cancer. His two poems, “Five Houses Down” and “Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone”, were written during the infrequent times when he was free from worry and self doubt. Moyers quizzed him in depth about his religious faith and it’s clearly unconventional, although he is a christian.

Moyers showed an interview he had previously conducted with Clive James in which James showed great anger with God. Wiman’s response was that this was merely a human projection of God and that we have to get beyond this humanized notion. He invoked Simone Weil a couple times. At least Wiman is not your conventional christian if he likes Simone Weil who was a christian mystic. But he loses me at this point. However, I’ll hasten to add if there is a God, it would have to be incomprehensible in the sense that Wiman seems to believe, and perhaps even Weil.

Here’s a typical abstract:

“The Apparent Truth of Dualism and the Uncanny Body”

Stephen Burwood
University of Hull

It has been suggested that our experiences of embodiment in general appear to constitute an experiential ground for dualist philosophy and that this is particularly so with experiences of dissociation, in which one feels estranged from one’s body. Thus, Drew Leder argues that these play “a crucial role in encouraging and supporting Cartesian dualism” as they “seem to support the doctrine of an immaterial mind trapped inside an alien body”. In this paper I argue that as dualism does not capture the character of such experiences there is not even an apparent separation of self and body revealed here and that one’s body is experienced as uncanny rather than alien. The general relationship between our philosophical theorizing and the phenomenology of lived experience is also considered.

Neuroscience in general does not concern itself with these philosophical meanderings, but I’m strangely, in fact strongly attracted to them.

Considering my age, why don’t they just give me an honorary Master’s Degree? An Hon. MASM perhaps?

Forget it. MASM is too close to SPASM, and I don’t need any of those.

LOL

Here is a good tract by Sam Harris in which he goes into this. He argues that secularism has no content other than its negativity:

To be secular, one need do nothing more than live in perpetual opposition to the unsubstantiated claims of religious dogmatists.

The “mysticism” he espouses has to do with meditation and the mystery of consciousness. Here is the last sentence of his third note in his article:

Still, consciousness remains a genuine mystery, and anyone who attempts to study it is confronted by serious conceptual and empirical problems

Antonio Damasio, a well known neuroscientist, has a new book out in which he attempts to explain consciousness scientifically. However, John Searle, a well known American philosopher takes issue with Damasio’s claim in his New York Review of Books article, The Mystery of Consciousness Continues.

All very interesting.

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ah, Shelley! Was it true he was want to run naked through drawing rooms? But the poor guy perished at not quite the mere age of thirty in his schooner the Don Juan while attempting to sail to Italy. (Thank you for the factoid, poets.org)

When You are Old
by W. B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Yes, I dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and see too their shadows deep. Did you know the end was near? You so liked “The End” by Mark Strand. Yes, I loved the pilgrim soul in you, but feared the sorrows of your changing face. And now my Love has fled and is hidden somewhere amid a crowd of stars. Can I find you there?