From the comment box: Reen suggests that without the appeal to intention, the Constitution (or, I guess, any other document) is just “accordionlike.” I’ll admit I actually like–or at least don’t mind–the image of the Constitution as accordion, each article and amendment opening out in possibly infinite ways. But that’s me being a naughty lit-crit type. I’m still a little…
I’m sorry, too, that I didn’t get a chance to meet the man I’ll now fondly think of as The More Emphatic Wallace Stevens.
Whoops. In all the, um, excitement I missed this blog’s birthday: tympan went online just over a year ago, on March 23, 2003, with–what else–some musings on blogging. So make a wish, everybody. The war still isn’t over.
POEM PRESENT at the University of Chicago is pleased to announce a reading and lecture this week by: *************** ROBERT CREELEY *************** Thursday, April 1, 5:30 p.m. (Social Sciences 122): Poetry reading Friday, April 2, 1:00 p.m. (Classics 10): An open conversation A reception will follow the reading on Thursday. ******************** Since 1962, when he published For Love: Poems 1950-1960,…
Yesterday I asked whether the appeal to intention in reading is always conservative. I didn’t note that there’s obviously a difference between a reading based on intention and a “literal” reading. In the case of the Chinese government’s reading of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the appeal to intention is designed to “look beyond” the literal. In the case of “strict…
Bill Allegrezza bought one of the five sold-out copies of Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole at AWP. And he liked it.
Robin looked out the window this afternoon and saw our neighbor’s dog lying on the front walk with two women bent over her. It appeared that the dog had fallen out of an open third-story window–it was extraordinarily warm today, in the mid-70s; we could see that the screen had broken and the dog must have fallen through it, and…
Is the turn toward “intention” in reading always a conservative one? I read an article this morning on Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the mini-constitution put into place with the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997. The Basic Law was designed to preserve some semblance of democracy (or, rather, to create it, since Hong Kong was never self-governing…
I’m sure I’ll regret it, but I’ve added commenting. Fire away.
I seem to have become the kind of person who writes letters to the editor. Or maybe the Trib just makes me do it. There was an article yesterday about the Supreme Court challenge to the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. It included a quote from a lawyer named Steven Aden, who claimed that the decision amounted…