Robert Charboneau

New Romantic poet from Reno, NV. Interested in philosophy and poetics.

[Robert Charboneau @Rob_Charboneau]

https://t.co/ipLPiOuKJ4

[Robert Charboneau @Rob_Charboneau]

Megalopolis is a better movie than The Brutalist

[robert franco @responsiblerob]

GOD MODE

[Armand D'Angour @ArmandDAngour]

Brilliant scholar A.S. speaking fluent ancient Greek just as an Italian might have done in the 1st century BC.

[Anthony Esolen @AnthonyEsolen]

I take it that behavior problems in public schools are atrocious. Let me suggest some ways to alleviate the problem. Not all of these ways come cheap.

1. It was a tremendous mistake to consolidate schools and districts. Young children should not be warehoused. After a certain point, anonymity MUST prevail at such schools, because it is simply impossible for any one person to know a majority of the other people. The impersonal breeds bad stuff, not least of which is a general sense of unease and oppression. Then too, the troubled kids find each other; less likely to happen when there is not that liminal quantity of them to be the nucleus of a gang.

2. That all schools should be smaller entails also that they should NOT be removed from the areas of town where most people live and work or are out and about. School should never have the character of a factory or a prison. The proximity of OTHER adults is healthy, because it breeds the sense that the school is only a smallish part of a more important social life. Also, those other adults are eyes to notice if things get very bad.

3. That the schools should be smaller and nearer entails that MOST children after a certain age will NOT be riding on the bus. For a small percentage of children, the gregarious, or those whose bodies mature a little earlier, the bus ride can be a romp -- or a place to take out their frustrations against the quieter or smaller kids. We should assume also that bus rides are wearisome, and if the child is not irritable before he gets on the bus to school, he may well be once he gets off. There is nothing healthy about it for body or soul.

4. ALL NOISE is to be kept to a minimum. Noise is not the same as sound. Children singing a song together: that is not noise. The sky above and the trees around and the birds singing, or even the far hum of cars or the chatter of people walking along the street: not noise. Noise can be visual as well as auditory, and the visual can be far worse. All visual distractions should be eliminated. Paintings are not distractions. Decorative moldings are not distractions. But signs are distractions, and so are computer screens.

5. Get rid of the noise of the computer screens. It is jarring, irritating, unsettling, needling. You KNOW that it is. You feel it. Children feel it twenty times worse. You cannot teach in a room full of hornets buzzing about and stinging at will. Each computer screen is a nest of hornets. Even when they are not in operation, their presence has an instigating and distracting effect.

6. Foul language must be forbidden on school grounds. That too is noise. It is also aggressive, obnoxious, distracting. It is a disturbance of the peace.

7. You must have a dress code. Let it be as neat as you can make it. No blue jeans, no short skirts, no T-shirts, no bizarre makeup, nothing distracting. Boys and girls should dress differently. The children should dress almost as if they were going to church in the old days.

8. You must give the children a full hour for recess.

9. ORDER must prevail in the classroom, and that means, most of the time, the teacher is the center of attention, or the book that you are reading together.

10. NO POLITICS anywhere. You have more important things to deal with, and it's not your job, anyway.

[Dr John Vervaeke @DrJohnVervaeke]

We often reduce mental images to visualization—replaying a memory or envisioning an ideal future.

But mental images may not be tied to "seeing" at all—pointing to something more profound…🧵

[Bret van den Brink @BretVDB]

“The human word proceeds from the memory, as the Divine Word proceeds from the Father. Proceeds from it, yet remains one with it. For the world is the thought of God realized through His Word.”

—Owen Barfield, “The Texture of Medieval Thought”

[John McCullough 🏳️‍🌈 @JohnMcCullough_]

Teaching on A. R. Ammons today and his idea that poetry "leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.” The poem below first appeared in Poetry magazine in July 1967.

[James Matthew Wilson @JMWSPT]

I am pleased to announce the founding of a new journal of arts and letters: The Colosseum. We are open for submissions with our first semiannual issue going to press Fall 2025.
https://t.co/gLw0QSLRdu

[Bret van den Brink @BretVDB]

“Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.”

—Lord Alfred Tennyson, “Tithonus”

[Stone Circle Review @stonecirclerev]

“But in a poem I tend to hear whatever can be called its melody long before I have reached an understanding of all that it might mean.”

-- Robert Creeley

[microscopic images. @microscopicture]

microscopic view of serotonin crystals

[lada @ladanuzhna]

Nature just published a piece on why probability doesn't exist.
Lee Cronin said many times chemical reactions are not real.
Your genetics professor probably confessed to you before that there are no genes.
Biologists still disagree on whether cell types are even real.
And we already discussed how there is no such thing as aging.

This summarizes one of my favorite parts of doing science - the longer you stare at your cherished concept, the more it disintegrates and becomes non-existent. Seems to be a universal feeling - struggle to describe reality with words and numbers - experienced by many across fields.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books, had this to say about home libraries:

“It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.

“There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.

“If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice!

“Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

[Poetic Outlaws @OutlawsPoetic]

“Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love.

Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.”

—Chuck Palahniuk

[Edmund @Kulambq]

'From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well.'

Michel de Montaigne

[The Lamp @thelampmagazine]

Issue 26 is live!

[Robert Charboneau @Rob_Charboneau]

"Take the statement by Bateson that language evolves through a series of conflicts between the denotative and the connotative forces in words; between an asceticism tending to kill language by stripping words of all associations and a hedonism tending to kill language by dissipating their sense in a multiplicity of associations. These conflicts are nothing more than changes in the relation between the imagination and reality."

Wallace Stevens, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

[Robert Charboneau @Rob_Charboneau]

Some thoughts on the value of poetry as an artform up on the Stack.

[New Verse Review @newversereview]

It involved some very, very difficult decisions, but the winter issue is now nearly set. Much gratitude to all who submitted. It was an honor to consider your work. The issue will come out in January. Look for some teasers between now and then.

[Robert Charboneau @Rob_Charboneau]

"And if thou canst not come to it by love, thou shalt come to it by fear."

Some words about the books of the Sibyl on the Stack. I'm just posting the links now because either way the algorithm despises anything that's not political or Musk.

https://t.co/OMFLMGNAH4