May 14, 2014

Unopening

Passageway, May, 2014

May 07, 2014

A note on the gate

I've been thinking about boundaries and gates. This video cleverly investigates the bewildering complexity of international boundaries as they are drawn in the real world. The narrator himself speaks an English at the far reach of what most English manages to sound like these days. Perhaps there was a time when we all had to speak like that to be speaking English at all, but pronunciation, globally, has moved on from that kind of talk. He has not left English, he is still operating within it. But it is not call-center English. It is an enclave of the tongue.

A Churl Replies


Condoleeza Rice is a non-metaphorical warmonger. She hawked the own-goal invasion of Iraq concocted by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. She was part of the full-court PR for US invasion, the tragic world-historical blunder that unleashed the current generations-worth of warfare in the Middle East. She is odious in that respect.

Why should any university grant the platform of a commencement address, its one last gesture of guidance to its assembled graduating class, whatever that might be worth, to a person who, when it came to the crucial self-defining passage of her life, did the wrong thing, the utterly, reprehensibly wrong thing?