{"id":6931,"date":"2008-06-22T07:41:56","date_gmt":"2008-06-22T07:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mrsokana.wordpress.com\/?p=184"},"modified":"2008-06-22T07:41:56","modified_gmt":"2008-06-22T07:41:56","slug":"round-table-discussions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/2008\/06\/22\/round-table-discussions\/","title":{"rendered":"Round Table discussions"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first came across these round-table discussions because one of them concerned the weather. I became distracted en route to clicking on that one and listened to the one\u00a0about Susan Sontag, which is compelling listening, but rather a public dissection on her personality that, at times, seemed to these neophyte ears, a bit unforgiving.\u00a0Given that this discussion took place after\u00a0extracts from her journal <\/a>had been published which surely gave some context on the complexities of her personality…<\/p>\n

Perhaps I am too squeamish, but I kept thinking yes, she was a public intellectual, perhaps she could be vicious and critical, but she was\u00a0also someone’s mother and it cannot be easy to have your mother turned over and pulled apart like a piece of toast. You can see why it was so necessary for her son to write his recent book, which though remarkably restrained, created a profound portrait of grief and its inherent complexities. It’s effect\u00a0for the reader was what John McGahern would have described as the particular being the way to the general, which is perhaps when and how the particular can serve a purpose.<\/p>\n

This roundtable discussion relied too much on the particular only as a means to the particular and sometimes felt like crows pecking the same patch of land to turn up the same version of\u00a0the repeatedly pecked and bloodied\u00a0worm.<\/p>\n

Why are these dichotomies in her personality so surprising? Why the gasp and gush over her insecurity? I’m confused as to why this is so foreign. Are not most humans similarly flawed?<\/p>\n

Nabakov’s position of “I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal.” made certain sense as an aspiration\u00a0in the aftermath of listening to it.<\/p>\n

The roundtable discussions are here: http:\/\/philoctetes.org\/past_programs\/<\/a>\u00a0They are varied and some are about the brain, and the weather, areas of particular interest to me. I also like that these discussions are hours long.\u00a0We live in times of conversational brevity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I first came across these round-table discussions because one of them concerned the weather. I became distracted en route to clicking on that one and listened to the one\u00a0about Susan Sontag, which is compelling listening, but rather a public dissection on her personality that, at times, seemed to these neophyte ears, a bit unforgiving.\u00a0Given that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1101],"class_list":["post-6931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","tag-susan-sontag"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}