Free thought now

https://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2018/02/22/steven-pinker-historian/

“To return to the general point, contra Pinker, many Enlightenment figures were not interested in undermining traditional religious ideas – God, the immortal soul, morality, the compatibility of faith and reason – but rather in providing them with a more secure foundation. Few would recognise his tendentious alignment of science with reason, his prioritization of scientific over all other forms of knowledge, and his positing of an opposition between science and religion.”

Swearing for the shy

My own drawing with Pixlr
16114212_850061015133778_357615342907236988_n Lady Chatterley ,yuck!
Post-modernism is quite
Structuralism , my lap!
Looking hell,what a twit!
Foucault again.
Derrida is luck
You are a nasturtium.
Fancy that!
Lacan can.
Oh,Ford!
Goody,hell.
Oh,God.Hell.
Ram it,I made a mistake in my calciferations.
You are so not, I can’t bare it.
Jeepers Creepers ,leopards peepers
Why go to purgatory when you can row to hell free?
What fine wits people have in Oxford.
Russia sends measles to Europe,I’ll be canned!
She had a pierced sailor and ears.
Trump is a bat.
Pakistan ain’t cricket
Israel, a ram’s final destination
Jordan Heaven.
I taught an Eruption.
Sines and murmurs
Oh,God, the home help.Amen
It’s the wrong jar to mess a bounder in
Wood Sight, blue mither schtucker
Pack off the Troubles.
I don’t want your baby. Put it off.

Shall I be mother?

13537619_732004420272772_16690879342427067_n

Do you need help?

As on the sands

After waves rise high they have to fall
Lashed by western winds.Atlantic gales
Fisherwomen in their Arran shawls
Waited while the surf and shingle brawled
Waiting for the boats,did their hearts fail
Until at last they saw the herring fleet?
Did their courage ever sink at all
As on the sands the monstrous seas did beat?
Many drowned and widow women paled
Sad hearts were mauled.

The poetry foundation

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/145775/without-a-compass?utm_source=Poetry+Foundation&utm_campaign=5ac9e76cb7-POFO_Newsletter_FEB_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ff7136981c-5ac9e76cb7-185545637

ESSAY

Without a Compass

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poems explore the mysteries of love.

BY NICK RIPATRAZONE

Photo by Martin Bentsen.

Elizabeth Bishop taught a poetry workshop at the University of Washington in 1966. One of her students was the painter and paleontologist Wesley Wehr, who one day asked his renowned teacher for advice about love. She stared “incredulously” at him, he recalls in an essay written years later, and answered, “You want to ask me a question about what? Did you say it was about love? What would ever possibly give you the idea that I of all people would know anything about a thing like that?” (Bishop’s own love life was often scarred by heartbreak, including the suicide of her longtime partner the following year.)

Later that afternoon, perhaps feeling guilty about her brusqueness, Bishop offered Wehr a new answer: “If any happiness ever comes your way, grab it!”

That’s sound advice, but why do we look to poets for wisdom about love anyway? Perhaps we think art confers upon its practitioners unique insight into the human condition or that poetry, at its most passionate, somehow mimics the experience of love. Maybe the reason is simpler: the mysteriousness of love urges us to seek explanations in the innocent belief that whatever we understand cannot be lost.

Happy Weekend

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Tolstoy’s favourite books

StillLife2 http://www.openculture.com/2018/02/leo-tolstoy-makes-a-list-of-the-50-books-that-influenced-him-most-1891.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Open culture offers a lot of free courses and books.It is well worth visiting it

Lyra’s a Bohemian girl

Lyra's a Bohemian girl
She makes even dead men's hair curl!
She wears vintage skirts
And old blue denim shirts.
She has whopping golden earrings
And black fishnet stockings.
Lyra carries a black velvet tote
Full of the latest poems she wrote.
Lyra's a Bohemian girl.
She makes even her own hair curl.
Lyra's in love with an ancient Emperor,
His unreality does not prevent her.
She believes she is an Egyptian Queen
She sees Mark Antony in her dreams.
As she lies there covered in face cream,
Her unconscious plans more wondrous schemes
Which cause her psychoanalyst to despair.
About a man who isn't actually here.
But the Emperor's mad desire
Has set Lyra's Bohemian mind on fire.
Desperate Freud got a bucket of cold water
And threw it over this delirious daughter.
He was,at the end, unable to maintain
The distance and silence he claimed.
Lyra made even Freud go crazy.
Lyra is one highly desirable Bohemian lady