Summary: Charlie D. Hankin’s Break and Flow examines the language, culture, history, and politics of hip hop in Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti. Organizing his chapters around a series of themes––yearning, raplove, uprooting, scale, writing, and violence––Hankin invites the reader to consider the many ways that hip hop culture and rap music have influenced (and been influenced by) […]
Summary: Katherine D. Kinzler’s How You Say It is a book about how our ways of speaking influence our internal, social, and political experiences. Kinzler argues that all people have “language identities” that typically go unacknowledged, and seeks to highlight the importance of such identities in determining various life outcomes. Some sections of the book focus on […]
Language is a brushing broom, Sweeps intent and dusts desire, When it first reaches us, so far away, Yet within, the only force we know, Rushing forth from cradle’s cover. Language is a learning lamp, Gathers fuel and sets ablaze, Dark discoveries of limit and loss, Every chance of loyalty and love, Empty echoes on […]
Consolations are words, strung together utterances, that explore experience but allow the essential mystery of existence to remain hidden. They come to us, through air, through ink, offering an embrace just comforting enough to help us bear the painful and frightful realization that we are alone, so starkly alone, that the words dancing through our […]
I’ve had Marshall B. Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication recommended to me more than a few times, both by friends and strangers on the Internet. It never really appealed to me, but now that I’m gearing up to enter a caring profession I decided to give it a whirl. My experience was a mixed bag; some of Rosenberg’s ideas […]
Several chapters from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue were instrumental in my undergraduate thesis, but I never got around to reading the whole book until now. This is a grand and fascinating journey through the history of ethics, fueled by MacIntyre’s argument for a modern renaissance of Aristotelian thought. He begins with this assertion: The language […]
“Although I too enjoyed reading, I never loved the sport of language the way Owen did. This was because to me, language had no native intelligence of its own––it was created by man and was given meaning by man, and therefore clever writing often seemed to me little more than a Chinese puzzle box of […]
“Everything speaks in its own way.” ––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 123 “A few years ago I began thinking that the bookish people of the world were becoming a little bit like medieval monks, living austere but intellectually complex lives in voluntary seclusion from a gaudy and action-packed secular world. I’ve written a novel, […]
“She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’ That seemed to satisfy her.” […]