Monday, August 27, 2018

Poet, Biographer, Baseball Bard Tom Clark, RIP

Tom Clark, a prolific and empathetic lyric poet who hitchhiked across England with Allen Ginsberg, wrote a biography of Jack Kerouac, served as the poetry editor of The Paris Review and wrote verse about baseball, died on Aug. 18 in Oakland, Calif. He was 77.

His wife, Angelica, said he died in a hospital a day after he was struck by a car while crossing a street three blocks from their house in Berkeley.

Mr. Clark — whose influences included Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens — gracefully wed lyricism to modernism, added humor, cosmology and a love of the natural world, and demonstrated in his use of language a grounding in the poetry of British masters like John Donne and Andrew Marvell.

“His poetry was music to the ear — poetic, but not obtrusive like Dylan Thomas going ‘clang, clang, clang,’ ” Ron Padgett, a poet and friend of Mr. Clark’s, said in a telephone interview. “It was something subtler. You always came away elevated.”

Friday, August 24, 2018

Go, Noodles!

WeRateDogs™ (@dog_rates)
This is Noodles. He had brain surgery earlier this year, and today, he returned to his favorite park. 14/10 nothing stops Noodles pic.twitter.com/kzqOR2cap8

Monday, August 20, 2018

"Truth isn't truth"-?!

Interesting exchange with my friend Rob Talisse, in wake of Giuliani's "truth isn't truth" Orwellism on Meet the Press. I think Cousin John should get the last word... and Diogenes the Cynic the penultimate:

Difficult days for us old-school Cynics


  Retweeted
"You just said 'truth isn't truth!' That's not acceptable from a president's lawyer. It’s barely acceptable from a sophomore philosophy major who just tried molly for the first time." — on Giuliani

“Truth isn’t truth.” OK philosophers, prepare for at least a week of incompetent amateur epistemology from all sides. Starring roles will be played by use/mention errors, confusions of doxastic and propositional justification, and conflations of truth with proof. Gear up!

KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News