Interventions

Welcome to Interventions, an experimental space where authors rehearse new ideas, reframe questions, or play unbridled within Arcade’s field of the humanities in the world. These short posts embrace the incomplete, the imperfect, and the indeterminate, but they may become much more: for example, the record of a thinker’s turn toward a new paradigm or the rough draft of a chapter in a new book. Rapid publication and immediate responses permit Interventions to foster conversation. The tone of the posts may range from personal to political, while maintaining a critical edge. 

Published regularly, Interventions are often freestanding contributions to Arcade, but some may join our feature called Colloquies. Inquiries and submissions are received by the editor of Interventions.

 

What Makes the Obdurate Man Obdurate?
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I've been thinking about Machiavelli's obdurate man, Walter de Brienne, the Duke of Athens who ruled Florence in 1342 and became the proverbial immovable ruler of Renaissance thought.  What made him obdurate?
Update: Total Eclipse
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Who says close reading is only for English professors?  How improbable is it that I would write an update to my slog about “Total Eclipse of the Heart”?  Apparently, not very improbable at all.  Criticism, it seems, can be interesting and useful and not boring.  My friend VW stopped reading Greek long enough  to send me “Total Eclipse Of the Heart” made into a flow chart.
Whipping the Muse
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For the last week, I've been thinking about poetry and politics in mid-nineteenth century Russia.  Writers then faced a situation similar to today in the United States, at least in one respect:  critics kept prodding them to demonstrate their commitment to revolutionary social change.  Good politics did not make a poem good, but it was for many readers a sine qua non.
On Faculty Governance, part 1
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Not too long ago, I received a quotation via email from a colleague at one of the other UC schools that read: “Nothing we have said about the teacher's primary responsibility for defining the intellectual purpose of the university should obscure the fact that American teachers in the recent past have shamelessly abdicated this responsibility.
Annals of Black Sheep: Henry Straith Venn
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The ancestral line of Henry Straith Venn (1869-1908) was a weighty, chronicled one stocked almost entirely on the male side by distinguished, formidable, moralistic churchmen. Henry's great-uncle, John Venn, was the logician who introduced the 'Venn diagram', that pleasingly bulbous, promiscuous mathematical diagram.
Night's Light
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I was writing a different post, but yesterday someone broke into our house and stole assorted things, including my laptop.  Farewell, my Sony Vaio, we had some good times.  After adversity, one seeks distraction.  I went straight to one of the most beautiful poems in the Russian language, Afanasii Fet's "Shëpot, robkoe dykhanie" (1850).  
Reading in Slow Motion, Again
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Raymond Chandler is making me depressed this afternoon.  Not because Chandler has a knack for hitting a nerve (“On the way out I had another look at the face in the mirror.  I looked as if I had made up my mind to drive off a cliff”).  I’m depressed because I am currently rereading The Little Sister in The Library of America edition.

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