Kalliyam

It’s not very adult of me to continue to be inspired by the original National Lampoon movie   Animal House .     Sorry.     ‘Can’t help it.     Plus, Belushi.     So there’s that.     I   need   to laugh at the tragic absurdity, the painful truth, the helplessly hoping that wonders if her harlequin still hovers. I am offended by almost everything but what's about that is new?  It's not like being "offended" is anything but smīva.   Smīva is the Sanskrit phrase used in the Gita for when Krsna "as if smiles" when Arjuna finally breaks down and asks for help.   It's what my mother used to call "that look on your face."  Well, that might be all I got: that look on my face. I refuse to make others bend to my tender feelings problems, so I'm not inclined to bend to theirs.  If you’re easily offended by this or that word or gesture or idea I might only appear to be nice about indulging that and your pronouns. Appearances really do matter when real

   I’m feeling helpless and I’d bet a lot of others feel the same way.  But in my case that helplessness, at least as far as this pandemic is concerned, doesn’t feel so bad. We’re going on two years of a deadly, sometimes debilitating disease.  I feel for those who have suffered, whether that be from the disease or its consequences.  If your livelihood has depended on being in the world and the world you need has “gone away,” I am genuinely sorry. Those who think that being a college professor is about engaging young people and talking in public usually don’t realize that getting this job involves a solitary, deeply private obsession and a lifestyle that is, at least quantitatively, more isolating than social.  At least this is the way it is in the humanities.  Ironic, no? The humanist writes his books and papers usually without collaboration, with little need or recourse to socializing events.  There are conferences, sure.  But the honest ones will tell you that at the actual delivery

The evidence is in.  The facts seem incontrovertible.  I mean, we have the evidence and let us for a moment suspend if we might the legalities, fraud, evasion, and bullshit.  Can we?  Not rhetorical.  'Cause if we can't, we're in trouble.  Are we in trouble?  You betcha.  Can we agree on what the evidence before us is telling us?  To be able to read the evidence is to able to make an argument.  Most people are not very skilled at this process.  Who are we kidding?   It's about to get worse.  You see, whe n people tell you who they are and then they  do what they say they are going to do , what more does it take to believe what we need to do?  Is it not plain to the meanest mind?  Not always.  People say all sorts of stuff that they mean but don't do and stuff that they do but don't mean.  People are nothing like perfectly predictable but nothing else is either.  Those imperfect people like the imperfect unpredictability must not stop us from trying to make sense

      It’s almost two years since the Covid pandemic shut down life as we’d known it and changed lives in ways we weren’t predicting and surely didn’t anticipate.  There's really no end in sight.  We know that because a significant portion of our population refuses to do what's right.   Kant thought that when we understood rationally what the right thing to do is, we'd do it and that we have a moral obligation to do it.  In other words, Kant thought that there was an imperative to good when reason presents a case with which we must concur.  Bless his Vulcan heart but that bird don't fly.   People don't do what's right because it's right anymore than they will change their minds because the argument is sound.  Nah.  They will do whatever they want so far as they can.  I don't oppose rewarding or incentivizing those who can't be reasoned with and I don't care if they change their minds or come to the right conclusion: I only care that they no longe

Babe, I'm gonna leave you Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you Oh I can hear it callin 'me I said don't you hear it callin' me the way it used to do? The traditions that sanction disaffection as a prerequisite for changing our ways agree that we are all complicit in the malaise and culpable for our shared circumstances.  No one gets a pass, not even those who would like to think they tried, they  really   tried, they  told you so , and for chrissakes it’s not  our  fault.  If you’re part of the world, you're part of the problem.  If you’re lucky enough to be alive, you made the cut and for that you should be grateful.  That’s the paradox we’re going to need to embrace here.   The world is shameful mess of our own making but life, life is a gift to be cherished because there is, if we are privileged enough and lucky too, a chance for beauty, maybe creativity, certainly ink and paper.  I mean to think in analogue, if you will.   When the situation seem