Sunday, November 8, 2009

“Aggressive philosophy doesn't work out for Lambkins in the end - Coloradoan” plus 4 more

“Aggressive philosophy doesn't work out for Lambkins in the end - Coloradoan” plus 4 more

Aggressive philosophy doesn't work out for Lambkins in the end - Coloradoan

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 04:00 AM PST

Go big or go home was the strategy used by the Fort Collins High School boys team Saturday at the state cross country championships.

After winning both the Front Range League and the Region 4 meets last month, there was no reason to question to the Lambkins' approach Saturday at Fossil Ridge. Unfortunately for the Lambkins, this time their go-for-broke mentality did not yield a big payoff.

Fort Collins finished 13th in the 23-team race, while Rocky Mountain came in 18th.

Regis (116 points) won the team title by 73 points over Cherokee Trail, and Cherry Creek's Walter Schafer won the individual title with a time of 15 minutes, 50.04 seconds.

"We tried to go out hard and stay with it," Fort Collins junior David Garcia said. "We knew that would either give us a great race up top or we'd finish where we wound up. We're disappointed, but we were trying to gamble and go for everything. We were trying to get first."

Sophomore Griffin Hay paced the Lambkins with a 37th-place finish (16:52.64), while Garcia was right behind in 40th place (16:57.29).

Of the Lambkins five scorers, Tait Rutherford (61st), John Patterson (115th), Hay and Garcia all return next year. Only Will Radigan (74th) graduates, leaving one to believe Fort Collins may be a year away from contending for a state title.

"We put a lot more energy into conference and regionals," Fort Collins coach Chris Suppes said. "We came into the state meet not knowing what we would have left. I was hoping we would have more left, but I'm not disappointed. We've got a young team, and we're building toward the future. Let's just say I really think they recognize how good they can be."

Rocky Mountain also tried a different approach that seemed to treat it well Saturday. The Lobos tried to run as a pack throughout the 3.1-mile race.

"We tried something new, and I think we went out well," Rocky Mountain junior Jeff Randall said. "We did pretty good."

Senior Ben Larson came in 42nd (17:00.84) and Randall finished right behind in 44th (17:01.34) to lead the Lobos.

"We've really tried to stick together all season and fight against the pack," Larson said. "We really ran as a team (Saturday). I'm pretty psyched about that."

Rocky Mountain's other scorers were Hayden Brian (109th), Jake Sumerall (123rd) and Andy Jones (129th).

In Class 4A, Wheat Ridge's Scott Fauble ran away with the individual title (15:24.22), while Greeley West beat Cheyenne Mountain by 20 points to win the team championship.

Fossil Ridge competed as a team for the second consecutive year and placed 21st. Sophomore Edward Cleary paced the SaberCats with a 13th-place finish (16:40.72)

"It went good out there," Cleary said. "I was expecting top 15. It was great to run as a team because it definitely helps the vibe."

Fossil Ridge's other scorers were Austin Croft (100th), Clayton Kuchta (101st), Elliott Leonard (123rd) and Wil Gavato (144th).

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Haverhill High grad's artwork shown in Italy - Eagle-Tribune

Posted: 07 Nov 2009 10:09 PM PST

HAVERHILL — When we think about great artists and where they came from, Italy comes to mind.

Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were among the great Italian artists. Indeed, when da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" was exhibited in New York and Washington, D.C., during the winter of 1962 and Michelangelo's "Pieta" was brought to the New York World's Fair in 1964, thousands of Americans flocked to view those great works of art.

But this time it worked out in reverse, with an American painter being invited to display her work in Italy.

Lisa Marie Esposito, a 1976 Haverhill High graduate, was asked to show four of her paintings at a major exhibition that recently took place in Ferrara, Italy. She has a doctorate in philosophy and now heads the department of philosophy and religion at Drury University in Springfield, Mo.

While she always liked to paint and benefited from art classes at Haverhill High, Esposito is largely self-taught. She picked up the brush in earnest a few years ago and has already sold several of her works for hundreds of dollars each, said her father, Francis Esposito of Haverhill.

"We're very proud of her," said the elder Esposito, an engineer who is retired from Raytheon.

His wife, Alba, formerly worked at Haverhill City Hall. They live on Park Street.

Lisa Esposito was invited to show four of her abstract paintings in the Imaginary Journeys International Art Exhibition at the Estense Castle in Ferrara. She did not volunteer her work for the show. Rather, the artistic committee of the exhibition extended the invitation after viewing her work on her Web site — www.lisaesposito.com.

"We've been fascinated by your vibrant and powerful abstract art research where forms and colors create such intense and emotional results," the invitation reads.

"All my work is self-portraits," Esposito explained to The Eagle-Tribune in a telephone interview shortly after she returned from the exhibition, which took place from Oct. 24 to Nov. 1. Her paintings show a variety of emotions, she said.

One of Esposito's paintings displayed at the exhibit is titled "Quiet Desperation," based on great writer Henry David Thoreau's observation in "Walden" that "the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation."

The art work features a swirl of colors, on a red background, that could be seen as a wave, a whirlpool, a distant galaxy viewed through a telescope, or even a tornado.

"I want the viewer to look at the image" and take what he or she can from it, Lisa Esposito said.

Another painting, "Triumphant," shows a flash of yellow, with streaks of green, blue and purple, that seems to emerge from a red sky or sea.

Esposito's parents said she has always been drawn to philosophy. She said philosophy deals with "the fundamental questions of life." Asking such questions as "Why am I here? What is my purpose in life?" is the basis of philosophy, she said.

After graduating from Haverhill High, Esposito attended Wheaton College, where she designed her own major, medieval studies.

She earned her doctorate in medieval philosophy at the University of Toronto.

That led to her teaching philosophy, which she did at the University of Toronto, the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, the University of New Hampshire and Merrimack College, before being hired by Drury.

Given her interest in medieval history and philosophy, she enjoyed the costumes worn by people at the Estense Castle, the troubadours who greeted artists and spectators, and the procession that marked the start of the exhibition.

"It was very exciting," she said.

Asked which Haverhill teachers influenced her the most, Esposito gave high marks to Margaret Masera and Susan Paradis, who taught art at Haverhill High.

She credited English teacher George Manoogian with inspiring her desire to study the medieval period. Manoogian taught Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales," she said.

It was thrilling to have her work displayed with prominent artists from all over the world, Esposito said, because, "I'm such a newcomer."

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The trickle-up philosophy - Star-Tribune

Posted: 07 Nov 2009 10:59 PM PST

Editor:

PBS's "American Experience" has taken up the 1930s, during the Great Depression. It was a time when soup kitchens fed the needy in the cities, and in small towns housewives would feed hungry itinerants who came to the door. (My mother did this, as did my wife Suzanne's mother -- thus Suzanne was called to be the volunteer director of the Laramie Soup Kitchen from its start up until her death from cancer.) A notable segment (on Nov. 2) about the labor-intensive CCC illustrates the vigor of these times and the successes of FDR's New Deal. Fortunately, the much-hated FDR had the support of Congress and such converts as Hopkins, Ickes, Wallace, Tugwell, Farley, Perkins, etc., who fought for and administered the programs.

These various programs embodied the trickle-up philosophy, putting money directly into the hands of the employable, whose purchases then helped fuel the economy. Now, the trickle-down theory has again prevailed, putting monies into the hands of Wall Street, where the stock market plays games with the Dow index, while unemployment grows. Manufacturing plants and businesses shut down, for there is less or no demand for their products in a disrupted consumer economy.

The confrontation continues between the haves and the have-nots, not only in this country, but between what is called Christianity, and Islam, namely the deadly and costly invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Interestingly, while the Christian tradition has embraced the gospel of prosperity (e.g., Matthew 19:29), Islam appeals to those who have nothing. Christianity includes end-timers, whose raptures are of conflagration, and their wafting to heaven. Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" is an eerie reminder of militant mobs and masses, swayed by slogans and propaganda (Part 3).

Thus religious and ideological fervor seems non-ending, as observed in Spengler's "The Decline of the West." "They are converted to it, hang fervently upon the words and preachers thereof, go to martyrdom on barricades and battlefield and gallows; their gaze is set upon a political and social other-world, and dry sober criticism seems base, impious, worthy of death" (II, p. 453).

E.J. HOFFMAN, Laramie

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Ayn Rand: goddess of the market, gateway to the American right - Seattle Times

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 02:37 PM PST

'Ayn Rand and the World She Made'

by Anne C. Heller

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 592 pp., $35

'Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right'

by Jennifer Burns

Oxford University Press, 362 pp., $27.95

Two biographies are being published this fall of Ayn Rand. Both are remarkably evenhanded, given that opinions about the author of "The Fountainhead" (1943) and "Atlas Shrugged" (1957) rarely run lukewarm. Critics hated her rejection of the duty to be one's brother's keeper and the unabashed heroism of her fiction. Legions of readers come away from her books feeling awakened and transformed. Those who knew her said they never met anyone so brilliant, or so intellectually aggressive.

Rand lived a life a biographer should love: a life of opposition and conflict. But in the 27 years since her death, she has been the subject of only one major work, "The Passion of Ayn Rand" (1986). Its author, Barbara Branden, wrote a fascinating account, but she had been a Rand acolyte and her husband was Rand's secret sexual partner. Rand's story needed a more neutral biographer.

Now there are two. Anne Heller is a former fiction editor at Esquire and Redbook who first read Rand in her 40s. Jennifer Burns teaches history at the University of Virginia and first researched Rand for a Ph.D. thesis. Neither accepts Rand's philosophy of radical individualism. Burns was given access to Rand's papers and Heller was not, though Heller had many other sources.

Heller's is the better biography of Rand the writer. It is 45 percent longer. It has more about Rand's life in Russia, where she was born into a Jewish family whose business was seized by the Communists; how she came to America in 1926, and her early struggles as a writer in Hollywood. Heller shows how Rand's early life and work influenced her later books.

Heller focuses also on Rand's powerful sexuality, telling the story of how Rand stalked the man she married, Frank O'Connor, on a Hollywood movie set, and seduced her most prominent follower, Nathaniel Branden, when he was 25 and she 50. About this Heller pulls no punches. Of Branden she writes, "He made an ideal mistress, even as Frank had become an ideal wife."

Burns' biography, subtitled "Ayn Rand and the American Right," is the better book on Rand's influence.

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Burns writes that Rand's philosophy offered readers "the idea that things made sense, that the world was rational, logical and could be understood." In an age of moral relativism, Rand was "an unabashed moralist, an ideologue, and an idealist." In a century when critics expected angst and alienation, she offered heroes. She celebrated the ego and told readers their lives belonged to them — a message that appealed to the young.

Rand's influence was also political. "For over half a century Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right," Burns writes, and it is true, not that conservatives always welcomed her. She was an atheist, and in 1950 she said to William F. Buckley in her Russian accent, "You arrh too eentelligent to bihleef in Gott!" Buckley, a Catholic, went on believing in God and Rand went on believing in herself.

Heller's book is copy-edited better than Burns', which has more than a dozen small errors, such as misstating when Republican leader Wendell Willkie's book was published and misspelling the name of his mistress.

In the end Rand believed too much in herself, which is clear from the last half of both biographies. Believing she had the truth, she broke with almost everyone close to her — Isabel Paterson, her mentor in American political culture; John Hospers, her fan in academia; Bennett Cerf, her publisher; and Nora, her Russian sister who didn't like her books.

Many don't. "Almost everything she wrote was unfashionable," writes Heller, and the statement holds true today. But Americans have bought 13 million of her books and are buying them still. She had a remarkable life, which makes both of these biographies worth reading.

Bruce Ramsey is a Seattle Times editorial writer.

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Neda Agha-Soltan - iranian.com

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 07:34 AM PST

The Queen's College is delighted to announce that, thanks to two generous gifts, it has been able to establish a graduate scholarship in Philosophy in memory of Neda Agha-Soltan, the 27-year-old Iranian philosophy student who was killed in Tehran on 20 June during the protests over the outcome of the 2009 Iranian presidential election.

Commenting on the scholarship, the Provost, Professor Paul Madden, said, 'Oxford is increasingly losing out to its competitors in the race to recruit top graduate students. Donations such as those that have enabled us to create the Neda Agha-Soltan Scholarship are absolutely vital for us to continue to attract and retain the best young minds.'

The scholarship provides the amount of money required to pay the College's graduate fee. All students accepted by the College for the M.St., B.Phil. or D.Phil. in Philosophy are eligible for consideration for the Scholarship, but preference is given to those of Iranian nationality or extraction.

The first holder of the scholarship is Arianne Shahvisi, who has just joined the College and is studying for an M.St. in the Philosophy of Physics. Arianne writes that 'It is a great honour to be the first student to receive the scholarship in the memory of Neda Agha-Soltan, which is particularly meaningful to me, being a young woman of Iranian descent, also studying philosophy. In accepting the scholarship, I extend my sincere condolences to the Agha-Soltan family, and hope that in succeeding in my studies at Oxford, I can do justice to the name of their brave and gifted daughter.' >>>

07-Nov-2009

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