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POPSMetaphors We Live By A short step whence to seeing all language as metaphor and metaphor as the meeting of the body and consciousness. Hard to stomach for right-angled rationalists, those who carry tablets of stone truths, number crunchers and those who live in a bricked-up mind. Spot the metaphors.
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POPSSex and Gender
In fact, behind your question is the fundamental problem of the degree to which behaviour is innate and to which it is acquired – an essential question that philosophers and scientists have been debating for centuries. This remains an ideologically-charged subject, which the media adore. Absolutely. The media often echo works that argue that cerebral specialisation differs between male and female. They say, for example, that language functions are undertaken by both hemispheres only in women’s brains. What do you say? The theories on the hemispheric differences between the sexes in language appeared over thirty years ago. They have not been confirmed by recent brain imaging studies which allow us to see the living brain at work. These theories are often based on observations carried out on very small samples – often a dozen people. People continue to quote these studies whereas contemporary scientific reality is very different. Meta-analyses, which draw conclusions from all the exp
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POPSWriting with the Body <<<Perl wants us to recognize that it is literally in our bodies where we experience that we are trying to say more than we currently have words for or that we know something we can't yet articulate>>>(from review). Sonrda Perl, 'Writing with the Body', Heinemann, 2004
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POPSIsraeli "Internet Warfare" Team: chat and twitter Not peculiar to Israel, of course. One wonders whether it is worth it since the sort of chattering 'politico' twits who bounce soundbites off each other seven days a week are fortunately hermetically sealed in their own collective fantasies.
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POPSThe Case for God: Karen Armstrong (review) <<<Armstrong's new book is shaped as a response to these two distortions. She wishes to remind us of the mystery of God. Her sympathy is with the great Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians who have denied that any human attempt to put the divine into words will be accurate. We are simply too limited to be able to know God; our apprehension must hence be suffused with an awareness of our provisional and potentially faulty natures. She writes: "He is not good, divine, powerful or intelligent in any way that we can understand. We could not even say that God 'exists', because our concept of existence is too limited.">>>
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POPSthe Aesthetic act a la J.L.Borges the first lines are quoted from: "the wall and the books". in different translations it may be referred as: the esthetic act the esthetic fact the aesthetic event the aesthetic phenomenon ...
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POPSA Cultural Law of Gravity "Human culture seems to have gone way beyond what such a law of gravity might allow" a fascinating post, worthwhile your time of reading
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POPSMechthild of Magdeburg - German Mystic, Poet, Beguine The Flowing Light of the Godhead. (Transl. by Frank Tobin) Even in her lifetime, Mechthild of Magdeburg gained some renown for her extraordinary book of mystical revelations, "The Flowing Light of the Godhead", the first such work in the German vernacular. Yet her writings dropped into obscurity after her death, many assume because of her gender. In "Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book", Sara S. Poor seeks to explain this fate by considering Mechthild's own view of female authorship, the significance of her choice to write in the vernacular, and the continued, if submerged, presence of her writings in a variety of contexts from the thirteenth through the nineteenth century. "Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book" offers new insights into medieval vernacular mysticism, late medieval women's roles in the production of culture, and the construction of modern literary traditions. amazon.de
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POPSThe Meaningless of Meaning <<<To Nabokov, skimming the Present without sinking into the Past is a miracle that befits only the most experienced: "Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish" (if I may add) under the weight of past associations.>>> Thus do we think we have thought and felt and experience the One, the Abyss, the Edge, the Love.... yet the graceful lightness of being is elusive and we are weighed down always, especially 'Now' (oh, its 'Power'!) by the depreciating luggage of our conceptual memories and ossified identities.
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POPSThe Language of God Among Collins’s most controversial beliefs is that of “theistic evolution”, which claims natural selection is the tool that God chose to create man. In his version of the theory, he argues that man will not evolve further. “Scientifically, the forces of evolution by natural selection have been profoundly affected for humankind by the changes in culture and environment and the expansion of the human species to 6 billion members. So what you see is pretty much what you get.” “If one is willing to accept the existence of God or some supernatural force outside nature then it is not a logical problem to admit that, occasionally, a supernatural force might stage an invasion,” he says.
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POPSUK educator decries domination of education by management-oriented language An Oxford professor examines the gradual takeover of all policy writing on education by the language of business management: "efficiency," "providers," "audits," "performance indicators," etc. This kind of thinking, he says, has gradually obscured any legitimate answer to the question of what education is really supposed to accomplish.
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POPSMusical Thought Thomas Carlyle described poetry, too, as ;musical thought'. Perhaps music, poetry, discursive thinking, art, concepts and ideas are all from the same 'place'?
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