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"INTELLECTUAL," said Terry Eagleton, "does not mean frightfully clever." He added, "There are dim intellectuals as there are bright truck drivers. It is more of a job description than a personal commendation." You should look him up on the Internet perchance to learn something, not so much about Terry Eagleton himself, but about the things that are of interest to him. One of these would be Homer, not the Homer Simpson variety but the original Greek poet.

If nothing else, Homer, in the Iliad, describes the origins of the barbeque, that is, the pagan idea of the burning flesh offered in appeasement to the gods so that the next morning, they will aid them by sending down flesh piercing arrows of doom upon the enemy.

I chanced upon a lecture that Terry Eagleton was giving at Berkeley on youtube. There is web site where one can convert the youtube video into an mp3 file. I have a device for listening to mp3 files in my car via a USB socket. The title of the lecture was 'Death of Criticism'. I hollered 'hurray!' to that particular announcement. Stop! before even more damage is done to the sensitive souls who hate criticism, especially academics.

Being pedantic has not ever helped the cause nor the arts. Why were music recordings ever made if not for the pleasure of loving the music for all the lifetime? Using the same service of converting to mp3 files whatever is on youtube, one has immediate access to some pretty cool cultural material. I have rediscovered the thing which, in current parlance, is called 'Prog Rock'. I knew Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer were the premiere exponents of this style from my youth. Now they keep me awake as I commute some distance to work. In my time it was called 'Classical Rock'. The albums had titles like 'Tales from Topographic Oceans' and 'Brain Salad Surgery'. Now they might sound somewhat pretentious but the intentions in those days were to do with making art profound - a purpose which we would do well to recover.