Christmas Reading List...

I have been thinking about what to read over the Christmas break and have come up with a few ideas:
-The Cockroaches of Stay More-Donald Harrington
-Norwood-Charles Portis
-Fight Club- Chuck Palahniuk (I know, shut up)
-After Virtue-Alasdair MacIntyre
-What Computers Still Can't Do-Hubert Dreyfus

While I doubt anyone reads this blog anymore, if you do please give me some suggestions.

The things that keep me going...

I have already noted my misguided love for LoL cats but in this time of great stress I need everything I can to get me through writing my papers. I share with you two things have given me a reason to keep going...

see more Epic Fails

And even better...

Finals and what not...

So I have been attempting to be productive during this holiday/finals season. Mostly this means fretting about my papers without actually getting much done and looking at all of my favorite picture blogs. For some reason cats doing funny things with funny captions makes me weak in the knees with laughter. I cannot explain it. But I do know that I love it. Why is this funny I ask you? I don't know!!! I have also become a fan of Fuck yeah sharks.

Falling down on the job... again...

Well, I really (as I always say after a long hiatus from posting) really need to stay on the ball with this blogging business. It is therapeutic for me in a way and as such I need as much of that as I can get. So where to begin on catching up on what is constituting my life of late. I suppose first thing I need to say is the ever increasing (and always everpresent) angst over what I am going to be when I grow up. I have come back around to philosophy in a pathological way and I am not sure I can shake that off. It is so deep in my veins that I am even considering a return to New York to continue my studies (I am even tempted to try my hand at the NSSR again). It seems that older does mean wiser, or at least more focused and if I am ever going to make money (ie repay loans) with this gig I am going to have to try and go first tier and make my name, whatever the hell that means. I am also considering Vanderbilt and Texas A&M. But we will see whether or not Sophia can be tamed.
So I believe that I now own a cat. Or at least he owns me. This is a step up from our original relationship where by he merely came by once a day to holler until I fed him. He now seems to want in the house. I admit I was much pleased to be having such a casual relationship with him. I imagined that when he was down watching me read he would go back to wherever he sleeps, poor himself a big brandy, put on a fez and smoking jacket and settle down to chuckle while reading Swann's Way. Here is a picture of the magnificent beast (Bear is his name):














Well more to follow. Promise.

Thought:

I sometimes believe that everything I write here is crap.

A brief auto-biographical note concerning something that ruined me.

Sartre once claimed that marxism would constitute the insurmountable horizon of 20th Century thought. Having not been terribly "philosophically" aware up until the beginning of my own century I was not forced to have to deal with any of that. Instead I got something much worse: Heidegger.

I stumbled upon Heidegger as a high school student and even though I would not come to understand it until college (under the tutelage of a Gadamer scholar) I seized upon it and (as he is dead) Heidegger became my great unmoved mover, setting my intellectual career in motion. I studied him and read others against him (esp Derrida and Foucault, with varying degrees of success). My senior yearbook quote was "Questioning builds a way" from "The Question Concerning Technology." My interest in Heidegger subsequently led me to The City to study with those who understood him in even newer and more radical ways than had my previous teachers. It is here that things break down (in a way). My introduction to John Dewey radicalized my conception of not just what a philosophical problem is but what philosophy itself as an enterprise is. The Being of this being that is philosophy came into question if one wanted to guffaw at it. I remember standing drunk on a street corner in the Village trying to explain to a PhD candidate (a much smarter fellow than myself I must admit and the kind of person that only whiskey induced brassiness allows you to talk to) that not only had John Dewey pre-empted Heidegger's thoughts in Sein und Zeit by a decade but that Dewey (to my own surprise on remembering the episode the next day) had rendered Heidegger totally unnecessary. I am still right on the first point and have had to think long and hard about the second in the painfully bright light of day. I rebelled against my own chosen upbringing and (at this point very expensive) path.

It was not until my second year of graduate school that I encountered Richard Rorty in any serious way (via Dick Bernstein's class which pointed me towards Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature). In this book, and others, I came to understand to my consternation and HORROR that what attracted me so much to Dewey were a great many of the same things I found so seductive in Heidegger. This also explained why I had always thought about inviting Wittgenstein to a dinner party if I could live out that fantasy of "if you could have dinner with any 3 dead people who would you chose?" What the hell was I to do? I admit that this constituted one of the dimensions of the "crisis" that caused me to take a break from philosophy, school, New York, etc and move back to my dusty little southern town where people did not worry about such things (and they didn't).

So what has occasioned this reflection now? I suppose it is that I am sitting in the public library working on (another) paper on Heidegger. I could have chosen Husserl or Merleau-Ponty but NOT, I had to come back to The Old Man. I hate the guy and I wanted to write about one of the reasons I hate the guy (his account of death) but then my prof dissuaded me from that and got me on to writing a paper about the (in my opinion) inadequacy of Heidegger's response to the "monster" that is technological thinking. Of course, I have to concede to him that there is a problem and there is. That frustrated me to no end, having to agree with anything he says. But then that brought me around to thinking about the other things that I agree with him about or begrudgingly must concede. This inventory almost drove me to drink bleach. But here I sit, I suppose one could say that I could take my cue from Heidegger. The great criticism and destructuring of his mentor Husserl's work that was Sein und Zeit was dedicated to Husserl. It would be silly to do something similar to this in a graduate level paper but the thought is a happy one.

On the matter of having employment (Or how I learned to stop worrying and whore myself out)

As part of both my new found geography and and my old found profession I have found a job. It is the kind of thing that (probably) seems as alien to you as it does to me. I am a tutor for the Athletics Department. I sit around and do my homework and wait for athletes some of which are deemed "somebodies" in the world of sports. For the most part they do not come. I sit. I read my Heidegger. I glance through Eagleton's After Theory. Essentialy I read things which merely cause the absurdity of my "job" to reverberate through my head louder and more distinct than it would be if I were simply reading the paper.

I am embarressed at how I sneer. It is against my nature to feel this way. These kids (I call anyone who hasn't gone to class all fucking semester a "kid") are treated as work horses first and humans secondly (and only at the demands of the NCAA mind you). Can they really be held at fault when academics are not emphasized but getting by so you can play ball is? I would also assume that they stand before me as the product of at least a decades worth of grooming, training, and other things that should make most parents ashamed of themselves. But this is how you get by. Being from the durty south (where college ball is king and even I understand how deep it goes in the veins of those of us below that M/D line) playing ball was the dream that not only motivated many people who were not destined for the life of the mind but also put them in a much more financially stable position then myself. One of my kids is a basketball player who will probably get picked up first draft round next year. I would imagine his contract will stipulate that he make 100 times more a year than I currently hold in student loan debt.

Am I complicit in this? These tutoring services (which range from teaching tennis athletes english to schooling football player in algebra to myself attempting to explain Socrates to a basketball player) are not open to other students at the university. Should I be offering my services at the "Center for kids who have jobs so they can pay for school"? I would but no such instituion exists. And I doubt that those kids generate enough income for the school to justify the University creating it. I suppose this is what I get for not staying where I was.

I did have one bright moment. The afore mentioned basketball player did seem to care about his studies (unlike my other kids). He wanted to understand the Socrate's Apology. That the way we way die is as (if not more) important as the way we live. We must all come to terms with the great equalizer. I would enjoy watching a conversation between this man and an old professor of mine who specializes in this kind of speculation. But he isn't here now. I suppose that is what I get for not staying where I was.

But now my 7pm appointment is a no show and I can dismiss myself and go on with my life of the mind while my wards go on worrying about their lives of the what the fuck ever they call it.

PS- I should be getting a laptop tomorrow so I will be more assiduous about posting from here on out... Promise.