Obama, Lakoff, and Conceptual Metaphor

Follow commentary on the 2008 US elections via George Lakoff's commentary and conceptual metaphor discussions. Other interests:

• TalkLeft: What Lakoff and Obama Do Not Understand (Jul 2006)


• AlterNet: The Secret of Obama's Success, He Listens to Lakoff (Feb 2008)


• Lakoff's Buzzflash Interview (Apr 2008)


• Obama in a Bind (Jul 2008): Christopher Lyndon talks to Lakoff

Neuro-Liberalism is William Saletan's NYT review (Jun 2008) of Lakoff's The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain:

Lakoff is a puzzle. No one has more brilliantly dissected conservative spin. "My goal as a scientist and a citizen is to make the cognitive unconscious as conscious as possible," he writes. But each time Lakoff the scientist exposes a right-wing frame, Lakoff the citizen substitutes a left-wing frame. First he shreds Bush's depiction of Iraq as a "war" that can end in "victory" over a united "enemy". Then he repeats each of Bush’s fallacies, oversimplifying the conflict as an "occupation" in which the United States is "losing" to a united "resistance". It's as though Lakoff were lobotomized.

Charles Bernstein's 'Poetry Bailout' Statement

[via Grand Text Auto] Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers by Charles Bernstein: From a statement read at an event marking the release of Best American Poetry 2008...

Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance. Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.

Michael Symmons Roberts on Science and Poetry

Michael Symmons Roberts talks to New Scientist (2007) on science and poetry.

'The Box' (poem read in the above video) from Corpus (2004):

In case of catastrophe,
winter can be recreated
from this skeleton of leaf.

All the bitter subtleties
of crab apple are tangled
here, as is the DNA

of dew-point calibration
of the second when a tree
lets go, the recipe for clouds

on the horizon like a new
born mountain range,
like north itself.

And with the leaf,
this relic box contains
a hair curl from a child

to reconstruct humanity,
though all the lights and currents
of his soul are lost to us.

Spores, antennae, claws,
the box will hold all evolution.
It will be full and empty.

More of his poems from The Poetry Archive.