Archive for January, 2011
Norman Mailer
Posted by Michael Happy on January 31st, 2011
Norman Mailer on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line in 1968. Much of the dialogue sounds like it was written by a precocious grad student suffering from a hangover and the trots.
Today is Norman Mailer‘s birthday (1923-2007).
Frye in a 1968 interview.
Smyth: What about other critics who are less disciplined? I’m thinking of Mailer.
Frye: But Mailer is not a critic. He’s a novelist. He has a creative mind. When he speaks in the role of the critic, he reflects the confusions that a person who is not really a critic gets into. I think that we’ve found over and over again in the history of literature that some of the world’s greatest poets have also been the most confused people in their reaction to the current political scene. The reason is that they are concerned with so fundamentally different a job that they really shouldn’t be asked to pronounce in these areas. (CW 24, 67)
The rest of the Buckley/Mailer interview after the jump.
This Week in Climate Change Denial: Ice Area vs Volume
Posted by Michael Happy on January 30th, 2011
One Hundred Percent Renewable Energy by 2030
Posted by Michael Happy on January 30th, 2011
An excerpt from a speech delivered on January 13th, 2011, by Mark Jacobson
A newly released paper by professors Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucci of Stanford University suggests that we can, using existing technology and resources, convert to one hundred percent renewable energy as early as 2030.
All that is required, of course, is the political will. And with climate change denialism being heavily funded by the likes of ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers — who also have a good portion of Republican members of Congress in pocket — that won’t happen just by wishing for it.
The Koch brothers are also among the founders and funders of the astroturf fraud passing for a populist movement, the Tea Party, which, of course, is wholly on the side of climate change denial. Finding the political will to address climate change in ways that are available to us now will require getting past pretty formidable powers who’ve already demonstrated the damage they can inflict upon the public discourse needed to make it happen.
Frye at the Movies: “Alexander Nevsky”
Posted by Michael Happy on January 29th, 2011
Continuing with our Frye at the movies series, here’s Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky.
