Glenn Kubish

My first thought was not that someone had deliberately sown tacks on the bike lane. It was a Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago. The air was pleasant. We were pedalling down 102 Ave to meet friends from Holland for brunch. A metallic sound, a kind of clank, from the back of Shelagh's bike made her pull over for a quick inspection of her machine.  Not looking for tacks, we didn't at first find two of them embedded in her back tire. The spokes were good, the chain guard was good, maybe a rock had kicked up into the fender? We rode the last block to Blue Plate, locked up and forgot about the mystery sound. While we talked and laughed and reminisced across a table inside, the back tire breathed its last on the sidewalk outside. "Something's not right," Shelagh said a block into the ride home. Flat tire. Or, if optional spelling is allowed, a pfffffflatt tire. The p and the extra f's somehow do a better job of capturing the sense of immediate ...

I was in deep trouble as a political philosophy undergrad when Book VII of The Republic hit me, and that was all she wrote. The allegory of the cave happens in Book VII. That's Socrates's treatment of the eternal human condition. It's a sad story. Only the elite whose souls somehow emerge into the light of reality see things as they are. The rest of us are kept below in the theatre, our necks chained, a fire burning behind, our vision trained ahead to a wall on which dances shadow puppets we mistake for real objects.  Some in our Thursday night Plato seminar used the allegory to free themselves and climb into careers as political science professors. Me, I loved the sentences. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is from a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners there is...

Ong's thoughts on orality take mine in a lot of directions, including to Las Vegas. In Orality and Literacy , Ong shares many examples of the persistence of the oral state of mind and its practices, habit, instincts. Witnesses were prima facie  more credible than texts because they could be challenged and made to defend their statements, whereas texts could not (this, it will be recalled, was exactly one of Plato's objections to writing. ... Written documents themselves were often authenticated not in writing buy by symbolic objects (such as a knife, attached to the document by a parchment thong...) (p. 95) Somehow,  this account of medieval society transported my thoughts to the Palazzo in Vegas and into the Jersey Boys theatre. In the play that tells the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons there is a scene that depicts the heart of the group. It is an oral agreement, sealed by a gesture, a handshake, between Valli and musical partner Bob Gaudio. And the con...

Lippmann's Public Opinion begins with a dedication to Faye Lippmann, Wading River, Long Island, 1921, which, in what follows, is a quotation from Book 7 of Plato's Republic where we are asked to contemplate the allegory of the cave. Very romantic. Of course, it does force us to keep the teaching in mind while reading the book and be aware of Lippmann's use of the word allegory. I may not have my word count right, but the first time I came across "allegory" in the book is in the third paragraph of chapter eleven, where the author writes: "The bewildering variety of our impressions, even after they have been censored in all kinds of ways, tends to force us to adopt the greater economy of the allegory. So great is the multitude of things that we cannot keep them vividly in mind. Usually, then, we name them, and let the name stand for the whole impression. But a name is porous. Old meanings slip out and new ones slip in, and the attempt to retain the full...