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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's 'Flow'

'Flow' and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1999) discussed by David Farmer.

Flow with Soul (2002): Interview by Elizabeth Debold where Csikzentmihalyi talks about evolution and greater complexity.

My hunch is—and, of course, there is no proof of this—that if an organism, a species, learns to find a positive experience in doing something that stretches its ability; in other words, if you enjoy sticking your neck out and trying to operate at your best or even beyond your best, if you're lucky enough to get that combination, then you're more likely to learn new things, to become better at what you're doing, to invent new things, to discover new things. We seem to be a species that has been blessed by this kind of thirst for pushing the envelope. Most other species seem to be very content when their basic needs are taken care of and their homeostatic level has been restored. They have eaten; they can rest now. That's it. But in our nervous system, maybe by chance or at random, an association has been made between pleasure and challenge, or looking for new challenges.

The Creative Personality: Ten Paradoxical Traits

Reuven Tsur Interview

Interview with Reuven Tsur by Beth Bradburn:

When I was a teenager, at high school, studying Hungarian poetry, I was very much annoyed by the fact that our literary studies concerned mainly the idea contents of poetry. I had very strong intuitions that the most important things in poetry were not conceptual, but something of the kind that, now I know, was 'perceptual'. I spent the ensuing decades in a pursuit of that 'perceptual' something. One of the main problems appeared to be this: language by its very nature is conceptual; but it is an observational fact that poetry sometimes conveys emotional, perceptual, or mystical qualities. At the university, in Israel, I was exposed to 'New Criticism', and was committed to close-reading of poems as the only worthy critical activity. But I always felt that there was that important something which I later called the 'perceived effect' of the poem, and I soon realized that this could not be accounted for merely by appealing to the structure of the text; one had to assume a perceiving consciousness. Wellek and Warren along with Wimsatt and Beardsley provided the theoretical constraints within which I attempted to solve the problem. The latter warned against the 'affective fallacy', while the former conceived of a poem as of 'a stratified system of norms that is a potential source of experience', but categorically rejected all psychologization of the literary endeavour. I thought, therefore, that I must eschew what is individual and idiosyncratic in poetic experience, and pursue the intersubjective foundations of the 'perceived quality'. Eventually I found the redeeming formula in a noncognitive context, in L.C. Knights' Notes on Comedy...

The Dialectic of Narrative: The Pretextual Paradigm of Discourse in the Works of Madonna

[via neatorama] The Postmodernism Generator: Written by Andrew C Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars, and modified very slightly by Josh Larios (this version, anyway. There are others out there).

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity (1996): Alan Sokal's now famous parody essay that was published in Social Text.

More papers on the 'affair' here.

The Abuse of Science: An Interview with Alan Sokal:

'But our dispute is not primarily with philosophers of science. We're more worried about the gross abuses and gross exaggerations of these ideas which originated in philosophy of science but which have trickled down in vulgarised form to anthropology and cultural studies. People just talk about the incommensurability of paradigms as if it were an established fact.'

[wiki] Sokal affair.

Michael Hofmann's Bricks and Blank Spaces

[review] Selected Poems by Michael Hofmann: ...prove[s] that he is a precise poet of desolations and furies, says George Szirtes.

[old interview] Where is our home key, anyway? (1999): Before I discovered blank space, or had any use for it. Other people’s poems were like swans carved out of butter, or something. My things looked dense, uncompromising, undifferentiated. The 'brick' was to suggest utility, interchangeability, compactness, aggressiveness even. I began by despising most poetry for being archaic and mindless and ornamental and unnecessary. Of course, a lot of it still is.

'Body Heat' originally from Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983):

This evening belongs to a warmer day--
separated clouds, birds, bits of green...
We wake late, naked, stuck to each other:
the greenhouse effect of windows and bedclothes.

Fifty years late, you finish Love on the Dole.
--Who knows, perhaps it can really be done?
The Boots hair-setting gel no longer works;
your pecker is down. The underdog's leather jacket

is here to stay, the stubborn lower lip
of the disconsolate punk...The poor hedgehogs,
they must help each other to pull off the leaves
that covered them while they were hibernating.

Douglas Dunn on Creative Writing Programmes

[pdf] Douglas Dunn interview (The Dark Horse, 1999) by Gerry Cambridge:

DD: A lot of reviewing in the literary magazines as opposed to the newspapers, strikes me as being done by post-graduates who are actually printing a chunk of a thesis. By and large I think Universities are a good thing, because I work in one; but their influence on literature is not always good. GC: Why? DD: It academises it. Full stop. Nothing more to say, really. So a writer who works in a university has to protect him or herself. Kathleen Jamie and John Burnside have just been appointed to the School of English in St Andrews, to teach creative writing. I’ll have to look after them. Make sure they don’t get into bad habits. GC: Was St Andrews the first University in Scotland to institute a degree in creative writing? DD: Yes. It’s a one year post-graduate course; it started in 1993. GC: In America creative writing courses are ubiquitous. Some critical opinion over there feels that’s a negative thing. If there were many more creative writing courses in Scottish Universities would it be healthy? DD: Perhaps not. But I don’t think every University needs to have one; there isn’t the market. We get by because we attract quite a lot of Americans who are disenchanted with what’s on offer in the USA. And they want to come and study at St Andrews, in a different culture. And it’s not sitting around talking about your feelings. If they do the poetry course with me then they have to learn versification, as well as study poetry of the past; one of the essays they have to write is on the history of Blank Verse, in Blank Verse. Or they could do a history of the rhyming couplet in rhyming couplets. GC: And how long does this history have to be? DD: At least 150 lines. GC: You mentioned earlier that some of these students can’t study Robert Frost at an American University. That seems an extraordinary situation. DD: Absolutely. If it continues, American culture, never mind American poetry, will go down the drain.

A Removal from Terry Street from Terry Street (1969):

On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,
A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,
Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths
In surplus U.S. Army battle-jackets
Remove their sister’s goods. Her husband
Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son
Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,
And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.
There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms
Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.
That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.

More on Arlindo Correia with Portugese translations (2004).