BillHeise | February 11, 2010
Found an article on the Web today entitled 6 Personality Traits to Admire. If you ask me, I have them all in abundance (especially #6), and if you ask them so does every human being on the planet. Maybe that’s why the author makes herself the judge, because people are not particularly good judges of [...]
BillHeise | May 22, 2009
Larry, my only regular commenter on this blog, wrote the following comment on yesterday’s post: I remember the Secret Sharer in Mrs. Kelly’s class also, though I was not as enamored of her Jungian psycho-philosophy. I would say that I distinctly remember her calling it a “night journey” rather than a “sea journey.” Could be [...]
BillHeise | May 20, 2009
Want to hear a funny story? My Life at 17 I got interested in my education at 17 years old. Before that, I had managed to drift through school without really studying very much. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in my education. I wasn’t interested in my formal education. It was that there are [...]
BillHeise | May 12, 2009
“Rose Marie” Here is Slim Whitman’s version of Rose Marie: And here is Andy Kaufman’s version of the same song. If you find this on YouTube, you’ll find that Andy Kaufman’s version of the song has 175,000 views versus 19,000 views for the Slim Whitman version. What’s the difference? Andy Kaufman’s version is a pitch-perfect [...]
BillHeise | May 12, 2009
[This essay is a continuation of a previous article.] The Legacy of the Sentiment Such an intellectual appreciation of art goes further back even than Duchamp. It has its modern roots in the rejection of science as a guide towards art. René Descartes had managed—for the first time, according to René Descartes—to found our human [...]
BillHeise | April 24, 2009
BillHeise | April 24, 2009
More amazing technology. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping [...]
BillHeise | April 22, 2009
What I Was Watching in 1983 I had dropped out of college in 1981, feeling that if I was not going to get a well-rounded education in college that I would pursue it outside. Two years later, I was still confident that my future would yield answers to questions that had been raised for me [...]
BillHeise | April 16, 2009
Required Reading on My First Trip to College I had been invited to take a class in The Anthropology of Television at Ripon College in 1981, and one of the books we were supposed to read was Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. Now in all honesty, I didn’t get either the class or McLuhan. I thought [...]
BillHeise | March 26, 2009
The Sex Pistols Experiment When I was in graduate school in the English Department, the teachers had introduced punk rock into the curriculum as a way of jolting their complacent students out of their complacent attitudes. They would show a video of the Sex Pistols “God Save the Queen” at the outset of a writing [...]
