New Blog Address


The Public Life of Symbols has moved to my website.    The new address is:

www.sherrysalman.com

Thank you

Sherry Salman

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Staying Sane in an Insane World

Image
Set design for Scheherazade, (Ballet Russes), Leon Bakst, 1910 How do we stay sane and humane in what feels like an insane world? Finding the deeper stories running underneath the runaway stories on the nightly news, well, for me it makes the difference between sanity and madness. It helps to parse the  divine from  the demonic, and most important, both of those from the human.   I look for those stories by rooting around in the rubble of history, getting messy in the dustbin of mythology, and in the flights of imagination that lift off, like a flying carpet, from both.     There may or may not be a 'deep state' but there are deep stories. They allow us to share emotional essentials within ourselves and with each other. And there we touch down on common ground. In One Thousand and One Arabian Nights  (originating in a three volume Syrian manuscript from 14th-15thC.) ,  the narrator Scheherazade tells stories that literally save her own life...
Read more

Facebook, Frankenstein, and the Problem with Giants

Image
Cover illustration, "A Modern Monster" by Craig & Karl, 2018,   Science , Vol. 359, Issue 6372   It’s been 200 years since Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein was written, and the monster lives on in the form of Frankenbook. The mess we are in with Facebook right now is not unlike the mess we are in with so many things too big to fail: a hyper-speed confrontation between the forces of creation and destruction, and the misshapen Giants born from that union.   Both Frankenstein and Facebook had a youthful aura of “protest” attending their birth, protest against perceived dehumanization, and protest against power structures through which information was available. Both were  adolescent hedges against the abyss of non-being -- Frankenstein with his scavenged body parts, dead and yet vitalized for eternity, and Facebook with its one-eyed romantic notion   of democratization of information and manifesto of open and limitless benign growth and  conne...
Read more