Twas the night before Christmas...

And I dont give enough of a shit to come up with a rhyme about how i am getting drunk at the moment. Well here we are at the eve of Christmas and the dawning of a New Year. Well "Fuck all" says I. 2009 blew goats for the most part and I am glad to be done with it. So here, enjoy this...

or this...

Other than that at the moment i have little to say. Look forward to more and my Top Ten list before the new year....

Well, I needed another break to electronically vomit...

So where was I? Oh yes! I have been up for almost 40 hours now and for some reason feel no need to sleep. Maybe I am finally evolving beyond such silliness? I doubt it...
I have finished a paper today on the legacy of philosophical skepticism. I believe that for the most part it was satisfactory rubbish except the section on Wittgenstein's On Certainty and the section on my general response to the problem where I used some good old fashioned Pierce. Basically I find the whole mess incoherent and untenable. If someone wishes to run the most failed thought experiment of all time to question one of the silliest perennial nuisances of philosophy they can be my guest. For my part I am quite content in going on like a dumb ass acting as if "This is a hand and this is hand." Sleep probably would not be a terrible idea at this juncture though... So now I am up to my ears in Foucault... again... I was originally excited about the idea but unfortunately I am not now except the parts where I do some serious Kant quoting which sounds ridiculous except that it isn't.
Back to work. Enjoy some cheese with this whine.

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.

I told a friend today I was going to quit blogging...

But I didn't realize I was going to end up at the public library sans the cash necessary to copy out my readings for wednesday. Thus, the heat outside keeps me looking for things to do inside and this will suffice until the back of my neck dries...

I have have mentioned before how uncanny it is to now live in a college town in the mountains. Everything breathes and sighs and moans the University. I enjoy watching it. Sorority girls (shit tons of them, their fathers should be ashamed, and I am not even kidding), a decent college radio station (though the NPR stations play news for 2 hrs in the morning and 2 in the evening), and a main drag of bars that provide for some of the most provocative people watching I have ever experienced. It is a spectacle. I have been trying to wrap my mind around "Game Days" when the town will swell to cheer on the football team. These have always been alien things to me. The town my college was in was a desert and we occupied a terrarium inside of a bell jar inside of it. The City did not seem to care to much what you were studying and prefered it if you got out of it's damn way. It is just so jarring. This is not to say that I don't like. Anything but to be honest. Everythings is within walking distance. The elevation means it is 10degrees cooler here than anywhere else in the state. It is full of life in a way that only a town full of young people can generate. My public library card bears the quote, "In our youth our hears were touched with fire." That is Oliver Wendall Holmes Jr. (This card is red, the blue was a much nicer color but had a T.S. Eliot quote, which I can do without) I suppose this to be the case.
(Rambles somemore)
First class of the day, of the semester, of the school year, of my career at this institution. Since so few of my NSU credits transerred I am, in essence, starting my MA over again. I decided against taking Symbolic Logic (since I know NOTHING about logic and this course would be easy I was told if I was any good at college level math and since I chose philosophy I think we know how that went). So what was my first class? "20th Century Continental Philosophy." I must be quick not to judge or despair. I sat through the entire class maybe taking 3 lines worth of notes, maybe. The topic for today? What is 20th Century Continental Philosophy? I must be quick not to judge or despair. I suppose I decided to play to my strengths. I had no idea that I was truly going to be starting over. I have read everything on the syllabus except the Husserl (which I am only nominally excited about being exposed to). It will be review. Relearning how to read for both myself and others. This summer has been about me. I have torn through many books. I have been working on all the back issues of The New Yorker that have escaped my reading since the spring (even the Fiction). So the idea of having to read for anything other than enjoyment is, well, hrmm, not too exciting. It feels intrusive to me now. Especially since I have formed my own opinions (some more learned than others) about what I have to write about again. This sounds arrogant or repugnant I am sure but its how I feel.
Oh well, cheers.

A new chapter in my life...

Well for the first time ever I am living by myself and living in a true college town. It is a whole other beast. I have always lived in towns that had schools. Little Rock had a few. Conway had 3. New York, well, it had a lot. It is a whole different vibe up here. It's in the mountains. It's fill of hippies, dirt punks, and of course frat boys (which is good because that means I can get rid of the truck to some chump who voted for McCain and wears "deck shoes").
I have signed up for my classes and I am super psyched. Symoblic Logic, Skepticism, and Explanation. So as such, I feel some momentum for the first time in a while. In some senses I feel as though I had to leave LR but it sorta provided the impetus to keep moving. So we will see. Enough of my drivel. Back the job search.

...

I love ellipsis...
They seem to indicate without doing so. I stupid thing to say out loud but a lot of time it truly is what is unsaid that means more. I look, a gesture: a smile, a hug, etc...
I have had a lot of these of late. Things unsaid and such that I worry about it.
Oh well,
...

Wow, another chance for post-debauchery introspection...

So I went to a wedding in Fayetteville and it was great. Except I have been hungover for 2 days now. I always find that the 2.5 hr drive home from the great North Western frontier provides a chance for some deep thinking (while listening to Ryan Adam's Love is Hell, as is my custom). I realize that in a week I embark upon a new chapter of my life and a chance to try what I failed to do in The City: grow-the-fuck-up. Now some of you might say (from experiencce) that such a mission is doomed to failure in that deranged and depraved town but I can promise you it is a far less dangerous of a beast than Gotham. So I began to think about life, liberty, and the recent free time I came into (not that I am too pleased by this) and decided to make up a list of things to accomplish while living in Fayett-Nam. This are derived from a few premises which I will outline first.
1. I am fat. There is no bones about it. I am sure you can read back through the enthralling archives of this blog and find me mentioning it many times over and how I planned to do something about it. Well, I didn't. As per the last time I see myself mentioning my grand designs to get that svelt thing around my lower abdomen/upper groin that Brad Pitt has (damn his eyes/*see picture below) I have put on about 8 pounds. Way to fucking go dude. I admit even though I was concerned about this issue it was not until last weekend that I had the kind of epiphany necessary for true life changes. But it is too embaressing to discuss here.
2. I have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. This is also simply a fact and it negatively effects many aspects of my life (not least of which is my girlish figure).
3. I don't write enough. And under no circumstances do I count this tripe I am working on at this moment as "writing" (though I do need to do more off this. It is healthy in a wierd way). I mean concerted, structure, intentional writing. While I shall not perish I do need to publish.
4. I am a quitter with poor follow through skills (see 1-3). Though I feel that grappling with #1 will lead to an improvement on this front.

Roommate just walked in. Time to prepare myself a feast of sticks and twigs so that I can garner that sweet bod like Brad's. More to follow.



















* That thing up there!

Summer...

So summer finally arrived here in the durty south and that means many things...
First off, as many of you know I have an odd masochistic streak in me that demands that I spend time during the summer outside with children. I usually hurt myself in this fashion by working at the local Boy Scout Camp for 6 weeks: bossing around idiot underlings, reading philosophy, writing letters, catching up on the New Yorker and all in all enjoying the sights and smells that awaken those old memories which lie in my genes. To catch the smell of sweet grass or the distant stench of decay. To notice the smell of wild roses or that smell that comes from cold droplets of rain frying on the scorched earth. These reach back into what we can claim to be our primal "essences." Stamped in proteins and passed down before the dawn of the language and concepts we use to describe them. But I puff up and digress.... This is an experience I cherish more than almost any other and it has stood as such a formative one that I cannot imagine my life without it in my passt. Needless to say this year "real life" intruded upon my Rousseau-esque idealizations in the form of that need for health insurance. My employer could not spare me for 5 weeks and quitting is not an option at this point. So I figured out a way to tag along as a volunteer with a group of 14 urban youth who had been collated so as to keep them off "the streets." It should be a requirement for everyone to spend a week in close quarters with a group of people whose background is so different from your own (riding the subway does not count here). It was great times and I will have to elaborate more at a later date. I am getting lost in my own silliness....
Summer also means reading and writing and watching movies that are totally sweet. I have already finished 2 Faulkner novels, Sedaris' most recent (which if you listen to This American Life or read The New Yorker) there is absolutely no reason to buy, and am well in to re-reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in preparation for the upcoming movie. I saw Star Trek twice (tottally fucking sweet), Terminator: Salvation (which was so terrible I loved it), and this past weekend I saw Transformers 2 (also twice, and if anyone can explain where the Air & Space Museum actually is I would appreciate it. It clearly is not where I thought it was).
More to follow....

Too Long...

So I have been absent again from my blogging duties. I am not sure if duty is the right word but I blame that on being forced to read Kant as a small child.
1) A thought on the nomination of Sotomayor. There Republicans have made a huge stink over whether or not personal experience feeds (or should feed) into how one views the law and how one behaves as a jurist. I find this question laughable. The question is moot and reflect an old ideology and a lack of grasp on the reality of legal decision making. Fact: Personal experience DOES have an impact on how you make legal decisions whether you realize it or not. Tell me this to not be case with Scalia or (gasp) Roberts! This does raise other questions which is worth discussing: What kind of experiences do we want feeding into the decision making process? What kind of variety of life experiences do we want on the court? The first question is about individuals. The second is about the make up of the court as a whole. Jeffrey Toobin wrote a great bit in the New Yorker about how the court has always been decided to reflect some kind of electorate balance. In the beginning we had regional seats. Then we had a catholic seat. Then we had a jewish seat. These were facts of the process of nominations and confirmations. It seems ridiculous now to ignore this and cloak prejudice and partisan hackery in terms of "originalism" or accusing people of "reverse racism" (a phrase I am still not sure I understand). The fact that we try and give seats on the high court to women, african-americans, hispanics and hopefully one day a gay jurist is simply an attempt to get brilliant minds together first and second make sure those minds are a reflection of the America in which we live in and (more importantly I hope) a reflection fo the America we hope to someday find ourselves in. As usual though we are missing a chance to have an honest and open discussion about the American legal system in favour of name calling and buffonery. It will only get worse I promise
2)I am thinking about buying a gun...
3)So I dream about The City. The people are all there as I knew them and this is the best aspect of dreaming in New York. Many of you who waste your time reading this are recurring characters. But the city itself is different. It looks different. It smells different. It even tastes different. Yet, it is still New York. The New York of my dreams looks a lot like london. The streets are narrower the buildings squeezed even closer together and the clastrophobic aesthetic gets into your marrow. Below Canal the city is a lagoon. It looks like Lake Ponchatrain. There is green everywhere, of slime, moss, algae and plants attempting to wiggle out of the ooze. There are above ground subway lines that go no where. There piles covered in the slick green of decay. There are ruined boats and the skeletons of destroyed docks. That New York is one that exists only between the hours of 2-4pm but it is mine and that is where I get to meet you all. At least the Red Head is still there but the beer is free and the lights are even dimmer.

Supreme Court Nomination: Day 1!!!

So I am totally giddy about this upcoming confirmation hearings. I will make two predictions: First she will confirmed. Second, the Republican's will make total ass-holes of themselves in the process. We shall see...

A great day...

That cusp of summer is a great thing. Warm but not too warm so that when it rains it is so pleasant that you just want to sit outside and be rained on. I would do this more often but unfortunately most of my books are not water retardant.
I am falling in love with books again. A while without HAVING to read coupled with a job that allows me sometime to read can sure turn your mood around about reading. I wish I was a better reader though. Not that I don't read a lot but I mean I wish I was better at the task itself, at the quality. Not that I don't read quality stuff (and yes I include most of my comic book readingin the "quality stuff" category) but I mean I was better at reading. T.S. Eliot and Derrida were good readers in the sense that I am meaning here. The ability to think beyond what you are reading. I suppose practive makes perfect though...
Now I will go read!

And it pours...

So by my own account I have written more philosophy for myself then I think i did as a graduate student thus far. I admit it is far easier to do it in the comfort of your own home, beer and smoke at hand, without worrying about what some professor will say about your thesis or atrocious grammar. This is good. It also gives you a chance to spin freely in that viscous mess of your own thoughts. Philosophy of mind: lets talk about it. Political philosophy? In the words of the Fonz, "Sit on it!"
I have a love hate relationship with azaleas. For my norther brethren I am not sure if you know what these are. They are a flowering bush and they are southern as magnolias, bbq, and de facto racism and open homophobia. They are beautiful. They are a sure fire sign of spring (along with the birds) and they let you know that rain and sunshine in equal meausre are in the future but in a good way. They flower in shades that range from bright pink to fucia. They have a subtle smell that fills the air. My back yard is full of them (and two dog woods) and I like to sit there when no one else is around and read or sit there with others and try to play dominoes (my new love. fuck video games or metaphysics!). But the problem is that they die. And yes, everything dies but these do it slowly and painfully. They almost rust and turn brown and then your yard is full of brown dead flowers, each a monument to a failed dream or possibility. But I poetically digress and badly at that.
My job goes on. This is how things go over a beer:
Me: "How you doing? "
Them: "Dude. Bitching day. Lots of paper work to do. Boss sucks."
Me: "That sucks."
Them: "How was your day?"
Me: "A mentally retarded kid ripped my shirt of while trying to beat the shit out of me. And I got spit on.:
Them: "Oh."
Me: "Yeah, all and all not a bad day."
It takes a certain kind of hate/love to with stand that. Luckily I am going back to school in the fall.
Ok, that is as much of a facile update as I feel inclined to share in my current state.

Charles Portis...

“A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity”
- The Dog of the South

At the end of the day...

...mental health facilities break down into two categories. Those which are locked from the inside and those that are not. There are many different types but this is one of those dichotomies that pretty much gets it. Those facilities that are not locked from the inside cover a myriad of services and practices while those which are define a pretty specialized sort of facility.
For this week I am working at one of those facilities: a residential facility for children. Their maladies cover the entire spectrum of disorders and symptoms. To find oneself coated in the smell of industrial cleaner seems to add clarity and paradoxically obfuscation to the matter. What do we do with the mentally ill? This is a question that has plagued society since before we had a name for the term (besides being possessed). This remains an important question for society at large and the answer seems to be the same as many other inconveniences: containment. Unfortunately the kritik of this method is the same as that of many kritiks of other solutions for social problems. One simply creates or reinforces those behaviors which you seek to get rid of. The more I work in this field the more I convinced of its shortfalls. I hope something can be done. Write your congressman. Write anyone.


It is not a pleasant place to work.