psychology dector

Watching the Egyptians take to the streets of Alexandria and Cairo this week, I am contemplating what people will do to change their lives. And, I wonder if Americans have the strength to change theirs. Do we have what it takes against bullets, tanks, and tear gas? Or maybe it is just as simple as making a commitment to live differently. Egypt has had years of Hosni Mubarak’s leadership, or lack thereof. Unemployment is very high, and most of the middle class and poor must make do on a few dollars per day. The country is bereft of new ideas, new thinking, of open doors of opportunity. The rest of the world awakens to the burning façade of Egypt’s stability and a populace clamoring for fresh ideas, a new start, and a reformed government. Doesn’t sound familiar? The American government is involved in an extended game of tit for tat, Republicans and Democrats. We have our own extremists fringe group, only they’re called the Tea Party . They are obsessed with returning America to the myt

I found myself struggling to stay focused last night during President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address . Lots of words, some tepid applause, and not a lot of inspiration. He said some things about jobs and spending and education, but I felt as if I had heard it all before, and some of it he did not fulfill the first time he promised to change things. Clearly, President Obama feels corporate, big business, and banking industry pain. He is also sympathetic to Wall Street. He did address middle class suffering, and vaguely alluded to the poor. Jobs came up a number of times. But the line that hit me in the first part of the speech was this one: “Corporate profits are up.” Yes, they are, even as they laid off employees, slashed benefits, and shipped jobs overseas. In theory, a corporation does not elect a president. I know that a corporation does donate a lot of money to a candidate’s coffers. Still, I would like to hear that the average middle class American’s profits are up. I w

History On Film Film On History: History, Concepts, Theories and Practice By Robert A. Rosenstone Pearson Longman $39.20 paper ISBN: 978-0-582-50584-4 October: Ten Days That Shook The World Dir. Sergei Eisenstein Sovinko; $24.99, DVD Sergei Eisenstein, according to Robert Rosenstone in his book, History On Film Film On History , was one of the first to use film to convey history and foundation myths. His work in the film, October: Ten Days That Shook The World , demonstrates his ground-breaking artistry utilizing “a kind of montage that helped him to construct epic works which promoted the twin-edged theme of the masses entering history and history entering the masses.” He also uses camera angles to indicate the power of a character or the chaos of a street riot. His film is a recreation of the Bolshevik Revolution , completed ten years after the historic event. To audiences, the film could be labeled propaganda , but Eisenstein is brilliant in the way he uses his camera to tell a ric

There is the story that to improve or reform education in this country, we must track standardized test scores, fire teachers, spend more money, spend less money, end the layers of bureaucracy, add more administrators, abolish credentials and licenses or make them more difficult to get, issue vouchers and privatize public schools or turn every school into a charter school. There are the hair-brained schemes of idiots and the solid ideas from veteran teachers and people with common sense who know and understand that improving education means challenging students and holding them accountable while teaching like the fate of the world depends on it, because it does. Ethics, morals, values, history, languages, cultures, sciences, mathematics, physical fitness, music, art, acting, theatre arts, writing, poetry, imagination, religion, philosophy, political science, geography, spelling, grammar, literature, ideas—teach it all, teach it all, teach it all . Teach our children well and let God ta

The Wasteland: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism By T.S. Eliot ; Edited by Michael North Norton Critical Editions , $13.75 paper ISBN: 978-0-393-97499-7 The pleasure of reading T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is the horror of the epiphany. If this sounds paradoxical, it is. How can a poem written and published 89 years ago say something about the way we live now? And what is the pleasure of reading something that should scare us? If pleasure means instigating an emotional response, a catharsis , then Eliot’s poem offers pleasure even in the face of its horror. The poem is frightening, sprawling, prophetic, historical, confusing, elliptical, dangerous, even sexual, but also, as Conrad Aiken points out, incoherent. F.R. Leavis counters Aiken by saying Eliot’s “touch with which he manages his difficult transitions, his delicate collocations, is exquisitely sure. His tone…exhibits a perfect control.” For the record, I agree with I.A. Richards who finds the poem “a music of ideas.” Or

The Pleasure of the Text By Roland Barthes; Trans. by Richard Miller Hill and Wang , $12.00 paper ISBN: 978-0-374-52160-8 In this slim volume, the late Roland Barthes discusses the pleasure of reading. He is one of the foremost literary critics of the twentieth century, a writer mentioned alongside other noted intellectuals like Jacques Derrida , Philippe Sollars , psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan , and in America, Susan Sontag . No problem there, but difficulties do arise when we discuss his language. Bathes writes in French, delineating the kinds of pleasure inspired by reading. Mainly, he categorizes reading that gives pleasure and reading that creates bliss. The reader demands pleasure from the reading, but these demands rooted in popular culture are limiting. “We cannot get beyond an abridged, two-tense dialectics,” he writes, “the tense of doxa , opinion, and the tense of paradoxa , dispute.” To move beyond these two tenses is nearly impossible. Texts of pleasure never quite come to

What does it mean to live a spiritual life? Last week, I attended a lecture presented by Helen and Alexander Astin , co-authors of a recent book called Cultivating The Spirit: How College Can Enhance Students’ Lives . The thrust of the presentation was that according to the authors’ reams of research, today’s college students crave the spiritual in their lives. This cuts across organized religion, lifestyles, and ethnicities. That’s right: even Atheists and Agnostics desire a connection to the spiritual. I had occasion to reflect on this research this weekend with the events in Arizona , where a young, vibrant, intelligent congresswoman nearly lost her life, and a host of others did lose theirs, in a shooting rampage by a mentally deranged man. The youngest victim was just nine years old. With all the challenges we face, maybe people are starting to return to a search for the deeper meanings of existence. When human life can be extinguished in an instant, we must come to an understand

Last Sunday’s The New York Times Book Review deftly deconstructed the state of modern literary criticism . Just who is it that book reviewers write for these days? The collection of essays on the subject from a diverse group of intellectual writers takes inspiration from Alfred Kazin’s “The Function of Criticism Today,” published in the journal, Commentary , in 1960. In this space, I have reviewed a fair number of books. I love to read, and consider myself more reader than writer. It began as an escape, a way of avoiding the rage and oppression I felt at home as a child. In books, I was not me, probably the biggest attraction. I could live other lives and experience other ways of existing, and that got me to the library every two weeks for my parcel of books which I then poured through neglecting my homework and other obligations, much to the chagrin of my parents. They were powerless to stop me. When I started this blog years ago, I wanted to write about two things: my reading life

It has been a cold and rainy New Year’s here in Los Angeles, a lot colder than normal. Today and overnight, we will see snow in places where it hasn’t snowed in twenty years . This is a perfect way to start 2011: cold, wet and blustery out while we are safe, warm and contemplative inside our homes. I am probably a lot more prone to sit in the dark and think than most people. Periodically in history, the American people have had to stop and rethink their lives. The Great Depression was one such point. Post-Second World War was another, as was the era when the Cold War ended . The last one, when the Berlin Wall finally fell, I think we turned inward as a nation. There were no exterior threats, so Americans began to think about what they could do to make their lives better than ever. Unfortunately, many of us focused on materialistic pursuits featuring greed and ostentatious excess. I don’t mean this to sound like a lecture, and that is not my purpose for writing. There was lots of mis