Steven Parmenius

“You need to play American music” said the lady in the video I just watched. Some Puerto Ricans were playing Puerto Rican music which is, I suppose, as American as any other music made in the United States. This lady objected though, opposing it to something called ‘American music’ which I assume is what ‘real’ Americans listen to. This is something I can say a bit about having had a campus radio show where I played a great deal of ‘Americana’ and got to be a bit of an expert. When I think of what music is ‘American’ it is true that, like Music Karen, I do not really think about the Hispanic tradition. Lovely Cumbias or lush, melodic Tropicalia are sounds and styles I associate with Columbia and Brazil not the U.S. This, though, is a quirk of mine and a limit of my musical education for, of course, Mexican, Cuban and Puerto Rican sounds are absolutely part of the great river of song that is America. For me American music is Blues, except that it is also Jazz, Bluegrass, Country and A

"All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well” are the words of Julian of Norwich made famous by T.S. Eliot in his poem "Little Gidding". They do not represent any facile optimism but a commitment to the goodness of the world and the beauty of creation based on the presence of God within it. This involves no arbitrary and ungrounded belief in human perfectibility, only that nature, even human nature, cannot be wholly debased by sin. In fact, there is a striking backdrop to this claim: the claim, traceable to Plotinus, that the soul is unfallen. This takes some unpacking, especially for those who associate Christianity with notions of ‘radical evil’ or ‘total depravity’. We might state the point this way: the basic intentionality of the will is towards the good just as the basic intentionality of the intellect is towards truth. The basic intentionality of the soul is towards God structurally and inalterably . This makes the state of separation from God, sin

                 Few philosophers are credited with such a fundamental assumed error as 17 th Century ‘immaterialist’ Bishop George Berkeley. To be is to be perceived, said Berkeley infamously. Without a perceiver to perceive no object of perception can exist: there is no mind independent world of which true or false assertions can be made. In his later writings this ‘to be is to be perceived’ becomes something more Platonic. Berkeley does not explicitly renounce his older formulation (as far as I can discover) but I think that in later works such as Siris ‘to be is to be perceived ‘takes on the more Platonic/Parmenidean form of ‘to be is to be thought’. The thinker is an essential moment of the thing thought. This is a solution which has presented itself to certain problems in Quantum Dynamics. What Berkeley insisted again and again and what his critics have never quite grasped is that his position is easy, intuitive, and restores to us the common world of sensation AGAINST the a

                Ares, I was once told by classics professor, represented raw, animalistic aggression while Athena, goddess of war, represented the disciplined courage of, say, a Greek hoplite army. Of course, it is the discipline and applied energy of ‘civilized’ warfare that has proved so utterly destructive compared to the limited exchanges of spears and arrows more typical among hunter gatherers. It is among the Mesopotamians that we find the first clear examples of it. We can find represented in their art the basic unit of ancient warfare; the close ranked infantry phalanx equipped with shield and spear. We find as well the mobile ‘shock’ arm of chariot riders in bulky looking wagons drawn by onagers, an extinct type of donkey. This is the basic form of the civilized army even today where we have rifle armed footmen who hold and take ground and roving armored forces which flank the enemy or pour rapidly through gaps in the opposing side. I have often wondered what genius it was

I was the proverbial boy who, if not given a plastic gun to play with, would pick any random stick and start shooting at Germans, Huns, Vikings, stone-age barbarians or any other villains my fertile imagination could concoct. As I was bookish, this passion for shooting things up in the imaginary sphere soon turned into reading military history on more and more immersive levels down to things like logistics and the design and procurement of crucial weapons systems. Whatever the malign fascination of humanity’s basest activity (and I can write about that some time- it is not down to simple repressed blood lust for instance) I concluded two things from all this reading. The first was that the more I learned, in detail, about how people acted and how people died in wars the less inclined I was to participate in one. Further, as I am more than a bit of a Kantian, I concluded that I could not rationally wish anyone else to participate in one either. This means rejecting the classical conce