WSJ, Eliot and Obama

[redshift1]

Who would have guessed The Wasteland written in mensa-speak and decoded by Obama himself, impressive but I detect a whiff of Cliff Notes paraphrasing.


http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/05/03/president-obama-on-t-s-eliot-the-academics-weigh-in/?mod=google_news_blog

.

[toetoe]

See ya when ya get ba-rack, I guess. :sleeping:

[redshift1]

Barack to barack

[TJDave]

In one letter she told Obama that she was writing a paper in her modern-poetry class at Occidental about T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” His reply wove its way through literature, politics, and personal philosophy:

"I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?"

So, you think he got laid? ;)

We've got a President who opines on Yeats, Pound and Eliot yet can't put people back to work.

Probably because he considers it beneath his pay grade.

[redshift1]

Or," Between the idea And the reality between the motion and the fact falls the shadow".