One of the problems we have today is that people aren't writing enough sonnets. A long-overlooked art form, the sonnet is comprised of an 8-line octave followed by a 6-line sestet. OK, end of vocabulary lesson. Let's look at one by the modern poet John Tranter:

Sweat is a style of the body
trying to tell us something. Listen!
Tic Tic how I get envious
of those cool ladies on the TV ads
lolling on the jungle veranda with a drink
and a sticky lipstick while insects
bother the tropic night I sweat a lot
and in a desperate bid to externalise

a talent for journalese I wring out
my neck and get clobbered. Bid! Bid!
And yet the real storm relents,
and hangs about, a style of cloud sweating
against the windscreen of our means, our
deep trivialities.

Feelin' Groovy

"Slow down," say Simon and that other guy, and so did a bunch of other artists this weekend at Pomona College in a colloquium on the effects of the Information Age on human concentration.

This is light artist James Turrell, who likes to make light "inhabit a space so fully that it changes our perception of our surroundings." According to the story, it can take hours to fully appreciate one of his installations. Another artist at the shindig, composer Pauline Oliveros, is a proponent of "deep listening," where she asks the audience to "get inside a sound and let it resonate through their bodies until they can no longer separate themselves from the surroundings." She plays slow, hypnotic trance-accordian music that can take a half-hour to get through one song. Does anyone have enough time for this kind of thing?

If you're like me, the idea of pausing in the mad rush of life to take in an experience at extreme leisure seems almost blasphemous, and strongly tempting.

Downgraded

That's what happened to nouvelle cuisine pioneer Bernard Loiseau.

He was intensely worried about having his Cote d'Or restaurant bumped from 19 to 17 in the 20-point rating system of the GaultMillau. "He said, 'If I lose a star, I'll kill myself."' They downgraded him. He killed himself.

Loiseau, 52, was found dead in the bedroom of his home in Saulieu, near his three-star "Cote d'Or" restaurant in the Burgundy region southeast of Paris. A rifle was at his side.

Axed

That would be Phil Donahue, who was fired by MSNBC today due to poor ratings.

I'll spare you the gory details, because you basically know them already. At least, I'll bet you weren't watching his show every week—I sure wasn't. And that's the problem confronting the whole idea of a liberal counter to the O'Reilly Factor: Liberals aren't entertaining. They're preachy, strident, and they make you feel bad.

And that's what I'd like to talk about, if you have a second. I notice there's a lot of stongly left-wing blogs around, with writers who seem to think that they've got a God-given mission to reform the world, to vent their anger, and tell us how screwed up everything is.

Note to bloggers: We already know.

Bear in mind that there isn't anything wrong with having a strong political focus to your blog, and there's nothing wrong with sticking an educational message in there somewhere, but consider the words of the ancient critic Horace, who said that if you've got a moral message in your writing, "keep it brief."

You want to be entertaining, because when you package the message with interest, laughter, and keen attention, you can slip those important ideas in the way you feed a pill to a hungry chihuaha. But if you're gonna come on all waving the red shirt and ringing your bell early in the morning, all over this-a land, you're gonna be talking to nobody but yourself.

And for those times that I bore you, accept my apologies in advance. I'll try harder next time.

6:40:22 PM       

The big story this morning is President Bush asking the UN Security Council to approve a direct engagement with Iraq, now, because the Iraqis failed to take the "final opportunity" to avert war. Condoleezza Rice, meanwhile, is squaring off against France, declaring their admission that even though Saddam is foot-dragging he should still be given more time as being "the worst of both worlds."

This got me thinking about the two worlds, too. On the one hand, we have the world of pure reason—hard science, empirical fact, verifiable and falsifiable in terms that always come out the same way. On the other side we've got the "softies," those pesky humanities types who like to interpret the meaning of data and boink around with the abstract. These two worlds collided back on February 12, when Colin Powell's address to the Security Council presented a case for war expressed in the mathematical calculus of conflict, whereas de Villepin of France held aloft the standard of morality and argued from the bulwark of emotional passion.

Now maybe you noticed in school that some people have a head for science and others have the knack of writing essays, and maybe you observed that these are really two separate orientations toward reality. But the story didn't end when half the student body went off to become engineers and the other half set up freelance graphic design studios. No, what's at work in the world around us is a continuing war between these two factions. We get caught in the crossfire every day.

The Guy with the White Flag

Occasionally someone will come along and try to reconcile our combatants. Stephen Jay Gould took a shot at it, and you might consider the ideas of John Brockman, another one of those deep-thinker types who has an essay at the Edge titled, "The New Humanists." Brockman pinpoints the two factions and makes an eloquent case for their respective contributions toward our understanding of reality. The part I wanted to bring to your attention concerns his appraisal of each side's future prospects. "Science is still near the beginning," Brockman says, because each new discovery we make about our natural world "allows us to see life playing an ever greater role in the future of the universe."

He doesn't see as bright a future for the traditional intellectuals, however, in that the literature of the humanities is becoming increasingly "self-referential and most often concerned with the exegesis of earlier thinkers." That is, we aren't breaking new ground in philosophy as much as we're engaging in petty disputes regarding the meaning of meaning. Science, then, is spiraling outward with unlimited prospects and art is crashing inward toward the black hole of irrelevancy.

Here's where Brockman tries to play truce-maker: There's a solution and it involves rediscovering our potential to become Renaissance thinkers—new humanists in Brockman's terminology. Remember that during the Renaissance you couldn't just be an artist, you also had to be an engineer, a scientist, and maybe a chemist, too, in order to make your paints and design tools to accomplish your objectives. A mathematician studied music, astronomy, printing, and philosophy in order to place his work into the context of the great discussion. We're at a point again where it is imperative to cease dividing ourselves so cleanly along the artistic/empirical spectrum and reverse our tendency toward specialization in favor of expanding the range of our perception.

These ideas may not seem radical to you, but they do have larger repercussions and if you have an extra fifteen minutes or so, take a look at the commentary following Brockman's article. Some heavy hitters in the arts and sciences respond to his essay with some extremely profound insights.

Notes from the Ivory Tower

Every now and then a professor says something exceptionally witty. Profquotes.com is collecting these little bon mots as recorded by students and offers them for your amusement and edification.

The difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals wake up in the morning and say, "How can I save the world today," while conservatives wake up and say "Thank God a burglar didn't slit my throat during the night."

The New Intellectual

Ayn Rand coined that term to describe a person unafraid to operate from an ethic of rational self-interest. Today we call these people, "SUV drivers." But if I had to put my finger on the outstanding New Intellectual of our time, I'd have to go with John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States.

It's hard to know where to begin. The man has a preternatural ability to focus on the sharpest and most critical threats facing our well-being. With uncanny insight and an almost extrasensory accuracy he zeroes in the perils of the modern age and fearlessly employs the machinery of state to protect us from harm and redefine our future as a safer and brighter place in which to reach our collective potential.

Why, just last night I was watching CSPAN and beheld Ashcroft's press conference in which he announced a nationwide crackdown on the distributors of drug paraphernalia. This makes perfect sense since, as DEA chief John Brown puts it:

"People selling drug paraphernalia are in essence no different than drug dealers. They are as much a part of drug trafficking as silencers are a part of criminal homicide."

Remember yesterday we were talking about Pennsylvania's crackdown on porn sites? Ashcroft is definitely paying attention, since he took this opportunity to go after online dealers of pernicious merchandise like marijuana pipes and shut their Websites down. Click here to see an example of federal interdiction in action. I tell ya, these guys are good.

Officials said two investigations had put 11 illicit dotcom companies out of business. John Brown, acting chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said, "There are 11 dotcoms that are dot-gone."

Ashcroft went out of this way to praise the DEA, which was criticized earlier this year in a White House budget office assessment of government performance as being "unable to demonstrate its progress" in the war on illegal drugs.

10:14:58 AM