bigideas

I’ve been listening to a lot of sound poetry lately, and came across Dick Higgins’s short essay A Taxonomy of Sound Poetry on the estimable ubuweb. I was particularly interested in the boundary between this kind of poetry and music, and Higgins makes a useful suggestion that’s at least part of the story.

Aren’t we just loving the story about MPs’ expenses that the Telegraph cheerfully eked out to us over the course of last week? Yes we are! But why?

Charlie Brooker’s take on the BNP’s recent party political broadcast seemed to me to hit one particularly interesting nail on the head. Let’s borrow his hammer and see if we can drive it a bit further in.

The Mail today is reporting excitedly that “House sales hit 18-month high as prices rise for FOURTH month in a row”. And in other news, if temperatures keep going up at this rate we’ll all be dead by December.

It’s Longfellow who’s usually credited with the claim that music is a universal language. He didn’t know much about music but plenty of people who do have expressed the same view, especially musicians themselves.

On the TES forums and The Scotsman we’ve recently seen an outbreak of confusion about division by zero, which actually turns out to be an interesting topic. Here’s our cut-out-and-keep guide to this oft-debated topic.

With newspapers struggling to stay afloat, and people skipping the licence fee and just using iPlayer, has the tradiational media had its day? And if it has, what has replaced it? Or is the old/new media divide a false one?

About this time last year I posted about what Big I webmaster Danny referred to as “the dematerialisation of music”, and suggested I was reconciled to it and everything was OK. Today, on Record Store Day, I’m feeling more ambivalent.

On 28 April 2009, Miran Epstein offers to take us behind the scenes of moral philosophy.

Ought justice be rendered to the victim, or in the name of society? If so, is there a balance to be struck between gaining retribution, deterring criminality and rehabilitating offenders? Are any of these objectives realistic in the first place?