William Heise | July 11, 2010
Okay, let’s review. Here’s how I look at art. The viewer starts out with a Status Quo (that’s ‘the way things are now,’ for the less Latin inclined). But the clever artist has identified a conflict in the Status Quo. The introduction of conflict into the previously untroubled world of the Status Quo means that [...]
William Heise | July 5, 2010
Okay so I tried to fulfill promises I made during the second week of June, and I failed. So I decided that I would get the last two promises I made to my readers fulfilled in the month of June. And once again, I failed. So the lesson for me is not to promise anything [...]
William Heise | June 11, 2010
Okay, I missed a day. Sorry readers. But I have yesterday’s post today. I’ve been reading Brad Gooch’s City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. Frank was a member of the New York School of poetry. After serving in WWII (the Big One), he availed himself of veteran’s assistance and went to Harvard. [...]
William Heise | June 8, 2010
With the fragmentation of news sources, the Enlightenment ideal has come under pressure. We are living in a world where people feel the need to only read something when they know in advance that they are going to agree with what they’re going to hear. This means that no one actually reads works of other [...]
William Heise | May 13, 2010
Here’s one reason why I get in so much trouble with, not only academic liberals, but with conservatives. Even my closest friends don’t have infinite patience for my philosophical antics. My dear friend, who lists his political affiliation on his Facebook information page as ‘Crazy-Eyed Liberal,’ posted a facetious article on Facebook with the title [...]
William Heise | May 8, 2010
Most Americans believe that equal distribution of resources is the natural state of affairs. When resources are placed in the hands of the few, then we want to redistribute them in a more equitable manner. In this case, nature and human nature have a common source. Nature distributes resources equally and man, though his corrupt [...]
William Heise | April 14, 2010
A couple weeks ago, I was talking about the difference between Neil Postman’s certain vision of the past and his uncertain vision of the future. I had noted that he was worth listening to when he was talking about the past, but when it came to his vision of the future he was worse than [...]
William Heise | March 23, 2010
I could have been happy being an academic, but it was not to be. Initially my academic aspirations were stymied by my feeling that I had bitten off more than I could chew in my dissertation. (I have a scanned copy of my dissertation, which I will eventually put on the Internet so that everyone [...]
William Heise | March 20, 2010
So what will the Republicans do after they lose the health care vote this weekend, as it now seems inevitable they will? It seems one option is to vent their anger by going after whoever offered a job to Joe Sestak in order to get him to drop his challenge to Arlen Specter. The American [...]
William Heise | March 19, 2010
I suppose I ought to be more careful when I write, because, although I started writing this blog for the purpose of rehabilitating my stroke-ridden mind (and for no other purpose, really), people actually read things on the web. Yesterday, I posted an article on Alan Reynolds‘s column in IBD, and (to my great surprise) [...]
