New Critical Reduction

"The New Critics, the best of them skilled technicians in the art of close reading, narrowed their study to individual ­poems, each seen as an airtight mechanism or operating system that, if painstakingly dissected, would yield its hidden meaning, usually reducible to a cluster of ironies and paradoxes."

From this NYT article: Harold Bloom: An Uncommon Reader

The "Mask of Agamemnon"

(we actually don't know who it's a mask of)

Frank Herbert Quote

“A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation”

Speculative Geographies

Looks like a very interesting anthology of quality writing on place.
SPECULATIVE GEOGRAPHIES
My twitter friend @claudiakincaid has a chapter that looks especially fun:

Karen Gregory—Geography of Intimacy
A psychogeographic passage through three New Yorks, and an ethnography of its psychic storefronts

Weber on Providence/Magic

Belief in providence is the consistent rationalization of magical divination, to which it is related, and which for that reason it seeks to devaluate as completely as possible, as a matter of principle. No other view of the religious relationship could possibly be as radically opposed to all magic, both in theory and in practice, as this belief in providence which was dominant in the great theistic religions of Asia Minor and the occident. No other so emphatically affirms the nature of the divine to be an essentially dynamic activity manifested in God's personal, providential rule over the world. Moreover, there is no view of the religious relationship which holds such firm views regarding God's discretionary grace and the human creature's need of it, regarding the tremendous distance between God and all his creatures, and consequently regarding the reprehensibility of any deification of "things of the flesh" as a sacrilege against the sovereign God. For the very reason that this religion provides not rational solution of the problem of theodicy, it conceals the greatest tensions between the world and God, between the actually existent and the ideal.
- Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press), 527
(borrowed from the LJ borbor_chan)

Carolyn Hax (out of context)

"Yes, counseling, ASAP. You seem to think it won't change anything, but I wager it will -- in part because yours is a situation that's very hard to sustain when spoken out loud. The stories you're telling yourself are credible only in your own mind, and trying to articulate them to someone else is often a quick way to expose that."

http://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/advice/article/I-have-a-wonderful-husband-two-fantastic-kids-3728905.php#ixzz22cANhaEX

My buddy Ihsan on Napoleon

I think nowadays the French have a much more sober view, but up until a few decades ago Napoleon was seen as a national hero. Though Napoleon rampaged across much of Europe, it was under the pretense of liberating various peoples and forging a "universal republic"--all of which now sounds rather George Bushian, but unlike Bush Napoleon was a brilliant general (aside from the Russian debacle) who restored national pride, and his belief in the Enlightenment was compromised but genuine (hence enduring achievements like the spread of the Napoleonic code). He was a warlord for the age of romanticism. You also have to remember that American perceptions of Napoleon are colored by the reactions of the British, for whom Napoleon was a pint-size antichrist.