Category Archives: blogging

I’ve Got Mail!

blogging, education

From a letter sent me on or around August 4th:

The way you parse texts just amazes me. I was hoping you could provide a little advice, what direction I should be going in to hone my interpretive faculties.

Thanks for the praise. I’m very grateful you’re reading. I think the best way to start here is to start with what I get wrong.

I’ll be the first to admit that maybe 75% of the blog needs serious editing. There are plenty of entries which flat out don’t make sense or have reasoning that’s far too clipped for any reader but myself to understand. And as I get older, I forget what I was thinking about at the time.

That having been said, the blog isn’t a final product. It’s really a notebook, a peek into how to go about analyzing things. And ay, there’s the rub yet again. There are plenty of analyses of things that are much clearer than what I’m doing. So what exactly is happening here that might be of use to someone who wants to work through texts for themselves?

I think there’s two things of value: first, dissatisfaction with obvious readings as some kind of gold standard. Strauss is quoted by Benardete somewhere as saying something to the effect of “if your title gives away what you’re talking about, why did you write anything to begin with?” (This is not advice to be taken when writing scholarly papers). I don’t think anything is obvious – what has always taken me aback is how rare this magical thing we call common sense is.

I’m not saying throw out obvious readings. The best approach to them is to summarize them and identify a weakness. This is much harder than it looks, because of the second thing of value: the relevance of someone’s speech is what you’re aiming for, and if someone’s speech is relevant, it speaks to a number of issues, not just one. A good example of this is Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. The nation needs healing; the rhetoric should be simple and to the point. But Lincoln goes and wrestles with divine judgment, knowing that the deeper issue is how democracy itself – our own claim to represent the rights of man – has been and will be judged. You can see how easy it is to get lost in this sort of web of themes.

So some practical advice, which I’m sure you’re already putting to use:

  • Start small. You don’t need to write an interpretation of the whole of the Odyssey. But if you work through a puzzling scene and come to a good question, who cares if you’re exactly right or not? The goal is to do justice to the work.
  • Context & your audience. You can pull stuff out of context, but be really clear. Again, this is not something I practice perfectly – not even close – but you have to be attentive to your audience even when writing privately. You’ve got to ask yourself why you’re writing what you’re writing, why you’ve made the interpretative leap you’ve made. That means establishing for some audience why you’re doing what you’re doing. It means, probably, establishing at least two contexts: that of your inquiry and the one the work is situated in.
  • Bring up the questions that occur in your everyday life without using fancy texts. You don’t need to write about how some piece of legislation you’re for or against is reminiscent of Tocqueville or not. That’s actually something I’ve tried hard to steer away from recently. Yeah, debates and themes recur over and over again. That’s not why they’re relevant. They’re relevant because you’re seeing something that’s important to you.
  • Read everything, though some books are more valuable than others. The books which helped me the most: Aeneid, The Case of Wagner, Plato’s Symposium (Strauss’ lectures highly recommended), Xenophon’s Apology and Symposium, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, Plato’s Minos, Bacon’s New Atlantis. I’m not putting this list down to be like “look at all the learned stuff I read.” Rather, each work listed engages a number of metaphors and themes which show up in nearly everything else. And I mean everything. I actually can’t recommend Xenophon enough for seeing how what is “obvious” fails for those who really want to get the most out of a book.

Changelog 2/27/13 – 3 edited posts, including one on Leo Strauss, another on Lincoln

blogging

Did quite a bit of editing to make good on my last post. I think I’m going to go in chronological order and fix things one at a time. Still, I do want to get some posts cleaned up out of order because they’re rather important.

  • Leo Strauss, “Memorial Remarks for Jason Aronson” – after the primary source, I wrote a rambling commentary about humanity and philosophy. I’ve tried to make it a bit clearer and easier to follow, but I don’t really want to cut into it too much. There’s just a lot here and I’m happy it makes some sense in places. Let me know how’d you streamline it in the comments. I’d rather not mess with this otherwise.
  • The Beginning – the very first post I wrote for this blog in 2006. Editing it I realized I remembered the situation that led me to want my own site exactly. I actually didn’t do a good job then of describing that situation, but now you can tell I was blogging at a community (a place like Livejournal or Diaryland or whatever) and I got tired of it (to be fair, it got tired of me, too). I haven’t changed the post to how I feel now, but rather rewrote it remembering what I felt then. I’m amazed I can be more honest and forthright now – it feels easier to write.
  • On Lincoln’s Second Inaugural – added some more specific commentary on the counterfactuals Lincoln raises about God’s plan toward the end of the speech.

Hope you guys like these posts. There are more changes to come, a lot more.

2/27/13

blogging

As I’m editing this dissertation, I also want to do the same for all the entries on this blog.

Don’t get me wrong: a number of the entries do need editing and clarification. Some need to be deleted outright. Going back and fixing stuff is very, very necessary.

Why now, though? I guess I’m like anyone else in trying to find any way to procrastinate. Though that’s not entirely true – I’ve spent a lot of time away from the computer and away from reading in order to think through problems of structure and overall goals for the dissertation.

I know I want my prose to be that much sharper. That requires being able to see details anew. It isn’t just a matter of going back and cleaning up some grammar. It’s a matter of working through what I wrote, seeing what I wanted to say, emphasizing the correct details, allowing the others to stay as necessary questions. – Yeah, I know why I want to edit. -

The blog is getting considerably more views nowadays. I get a lot of feedback from people reading pretty carefully – I’ve got an audience that’s very attentive and I’m not used to this. You guys are trusting me to frame difficult issues and raise tough questions. It’s a responsibility I’m privileged to have.

Expect “changelog” posts where I call your attention to posts that have been changed. Hopefully one or two will become something really special.

The Inexplicable Popularity of Some Online Personalities: A List

blogging, media

So you’re online and you’re doing your best to keep to yourself or make friends. Typically this means you’re either reserved or polite, which is normal. You’d expect people would get popular by bending but not breaking the rules – they might ask questions that resonate with others but still be polite, to take one example.

What you didn’t expect is that the Internet is one giant suck-pit of stupidity where every personality that could be defined as “pathological” or “repulsive” gets a massive audience instantly. Here’s a few of the many types of idiots that have been irritating me nowadays:

1. Every day is whine day: yes, I know – this post. That argument doesn’t stick; you can read the rest of this blog and see why. All of you know that there are people online who use numerous media streams to complain. Sometimes these aren’t just people who are pissed at coworkers or family or friends. We’re talking about influential and powerful people who supposedly have lives and success who will do nothing but complain – their audience eats it up. I blame the audience. There are people who purposely don’t want to hear anything positive. They want to hear the world sucks.

2. The massive egotist: So there’s this moron who has written what he thinks is a credible expansion of a certain philosopher’s work and proclaims himself a herald of the future because he plays extensive amounts of video games. I am not kidding you. I wish I were. You don’t even want to know how many people are formally allied with his project, let alone the many who are paying for his work. What stuns me is the number of people willing to indulge someone’s brazen insanity, thinking it real courage. We do live in decadent times.

3. Pictures of me, me, me: I don’t mind this once in a while. It is important to project a personality when creating content. But if you’re going to try putting up pictures over and over in the hope one of them will go viral, that’s behavior which the community should shun. We don’t shun it enough – there are rewards for this sort of narcissism. Eventually you do go viral for the exact wrong reason.

4. There’s having a niche, then there’s repeating yourself: This might be my biggest problem with the Web. There’s so much content and most of us take in only a tiniest of a tiny fraction of it. Mark Bauerlein’s point about how the news is all around us yet we still can’t name the Vice-President is exactly what I’m ranting about. I’m obviously trying to expand my vision and see and write about more. I can’t begin to tell you how depressing it is when people get known for something that is literally the same thing, over and over.

There’s more than this, of course – I’m aiming at a few personalities I think are correctable. For example, I think a lot of people complaining or posting pics of themselves don’t realize there are other ways to interact with their audience. They just see it done so much it feels like there’s nothing else online. Right now, that’s exactly the problem.

And yes, I am jealous of those who have bigger audiences than me. I know what I could do with more readers, and I know it’d be special.

Year in Review: February-March 2012

blogging

February 2012

I remember buying an issue of Poetry Magazine where various writers talked about spirituality. “A Prayer” by Robert Creeley had me thinking a long time. I remember loving its minimalism and reading it over and over. Nate Klug’s “Dare” was another poem that got me to sit and stare for a while.

I went to a funeral for someone who did a lot for others. I hope I’ve done the experience some justice and paid some small tribute. It was incredibly moving to see how one person could do so much, be there for so many. It’s a weird feeling when you’re at a funeral and you realize that person, even in death, has something to tell you right then and there.

The haiku poet Issa has a sentiment that I had to help broadcast: Napped half the day; / no one / punished me!

At least twice I wrote down some musings on relationships. There was this on an aphorism of Nietzsche’s about sensuality. A Studio Ghibli movie written by Miyazaki, “Whisper of the Heart,” had an incredible and serious depiction of adolescent love.

March 2012

Wrote a lot of original poetry in March. I think the highlight of everything I wrote, though, was this response to Colin McGinn declaring philosophy as practiced today in the academy a “science.” I say in the post that he may not have been serious. I think now there’s actually a very good chance he was entirely serious. He followed up his original article with far more about his proposal (he wanted to rename philosophy “ontics”).

It was reported Christian Wiman was working with the poetry of Mandelstam. I saw some of what he produced in The American Scholar and was blown away. I stared looking into Mandelstam more myself.

2012 in Review: What I wrote in January

blogging

I write a lot. I know, I need to be editing and making things much clearer when not deleting some entries and pretending they never existed. Still, going over what I wrote this past year, I’m stunned by how much I’ve covered and in what depth. What is below is a sampling from January. It isn’t close to everything covered that month.

If you guys like how this is arranged, let me know. I can’t guarantee a story for every single thing I’ve written, but I’ll try to blurb more.

January 2012

In January of 2012 I was preparing to go to a conference and talk about academic things. I felt like I hadn’t read enough Greek tragedy, so I read Euripides’ “Bacchae” and tried to make sense of it. I think I concluded tentatively that the god of wine has to be seen as the god of drama to make any sense of the play.

I also started looking more closely at haiku, the one form of poetry I feel comfortable writing. I’m very happy with the comment on Basho’s “Winter Solitude.”

The remarks on Plato’s “Minos” turned out really well. I can’t say I understand the dialogue without speculating. Tim probably agrees with me that the original goal – to understand Strauss’ essay on the dialogue better – might take us a bit longer than we hoped. Still, I remember sitting with the tv muttering in the background trying to think how to introduce the dialogue without saying something technical. I wanted to say something about how the problem of justice and law hits us deeply and more often than we think.

I was trying to read – still am trying to read – more Polish poetry in translation. Świetlicki had my attention that month.

At the time, I was trying to write really short blog entries every so often for readers who did not have much time. Yehuda Amichai’s “What I will never see again I must love forever” was something I came across while reading about God and rationality.

Michel Serres: “I quite like my granddaughter’s recent remark: why did that stupid Robinson forget his mobile phone?”

blogging, philosophy

“I’ve known two worlds: that of today in which, near and next to everyone, everyone communicates with everything and everyone, and the other, the preceding one, in which a meticulous cutting up of islets would toss our detached lives about amid a space of scattered tatters. I quite like my granddaughter’s recent remark: why did that stupid Robinson forget his mobile phone?”

- Michel Serres, Biogea 15 (translation Randolph Burks)

I’m not sure what to tell Serres – if there is such a distinction between now and then, it seems very superficial to me. I don’t want to dismiss the possibility that “then” there were strong families and other associations and institutions which may have been closed but helpful in their own way. But Serres doesn’t directly allow for this argument, the argument which might mark a real difference between today and yesterday (i.e. we traded some kind of open-mindedness and choice for a weakening of traditional bonds). He emphasizes a crisis of the past affecting everyone individually: some kind of relentless, surgical flood would throw people hither and thither (“meticulous cutting up of islets would toss our detached lives”). If I want to build a more historical narrative out of this, I have to say people built associations as a response to that more fundamental problem.

That characterization might work, but it involves so much detail that it feels like we’re far away from where we have to be. We have to explicitly talk about the value of communication. The central issue is the quality of communication. To a lesser degree, consistency. Serres’ brief account only seems to focus on consistency, at best. It isn’t clear why or how we communicate with everything and everyone. Before, it seems we were just tossed around and there wasn’t much consistency.

My own thought is we’re closer to the past than the past would like us to think. I can call my parents out on some of their exaggerated hardships – the stories they were telling before have changed slightly nowadays. There’s a lot of talking and messaging online, but I’d be hard pressed to tell you I’ve uncovered a plethora of people other ages couldn’t have possibly known who are now my best friends. Rather, the people who have something to contribute and want to stay in touch make use of the technology. They say hi and we talk about things important to each other. Many other people have figured out that being an island is fun. I think the Internet especially is a haven for the passive-aggressive. Serres, strangely enough, has the right metaphor. It’s just not a narrative for then vs. now.

1500 Posts. Yeah, I’m a hoarder

blogging

1. Because of where I am in life and what I want to do, I can’t help but feel that the fundamental fact of American life is that the university is a predatory lender. I live in a republic that was established by men like Jefferson and Franklin for the advance and free exchange of ideas. That republic now has plenty of people who like to sue each other over nothing (sometimes, “nothing” is called “intellectual property”), put entire generations into debt teaching nothing, and respect nothing but status and money. I can’t even say “power” because power implies consideration of means and ends. When we consider the “power” media companies exert – some trying to rope children into being consumers of their brand for life – it’s not really power being exercised, but a fear of losing out on money.

2. My name’s Ashok. I’m a writer. I choose to publish on a blog because I think it important my thoughts and work are out there sooner rather than later. I choose to be accessible while I’m searching for something interesting.

I choose to give away what I might know for free.

3. I don’t know whether this is radical act or not. It probably isn’t. Lots of us are writing and trying to give away what we know, hoping a seed will be planted that creates some change for a greater good. I suspect one of the deeper failures of American life – that we spend all this money on education, yet few of us even respect learning or bettering oneself – has brought many out who just want to see if can have a more thoughtful world.

What’s hit me like a truck recently is the realization that this fight isn’t about the “world.” All of us who are teaching or creating are really fighting for one or two minds only. We’re competing with each other for their attention, even as some of us are fully aware that we can only convey so much. I count my blessings that in my short life, I’ve got about 10-20 people who care for what I have to offer, and have taken it and made it flower into things I could never have dreamed of.

4. I don’t like talking about authenticity much. It becomes too involved with political views I find shallow. But when all is said and done, what stands strongest about the blog is its directness, frankness, immediacy. It’s important when we try to use our musings on history and philosophy to push an ideology (I am not innocent of this, I admit). It’s important when we can’t just say something is beautiful after we’ve seen it. It’s important when coaches read from prepared statements when their players die.

An Attempt at a Rethink FAQ, 8/16/12

blogging

As always, I welcome additional questions.

1. You don’t have a life, do you?

1. Nope!

2. Who cares about poetry? All that stuff is made up anyway.

2. If you’re not doing the hard sciences, everything is open to the accusation of being “made up.” And even then, lots of people I know who do the hard sciences are prone to conspiracy theory and superstition.

I don’t know what rationality is. I suspect it involves some sort of grip on the fact that we do make things up (convention), that we lie to ourselves, that we believe just as much as we think. All three of those phenomena are distinct and can’t be illuminated by simple appeals to certainty and utility.

Poets write so they can challenge good readers and maybe even make a line or two stay with someone, always. Some poets even know what they’re talking about. I don’t want to miss out on some of the best voices the human race has to offer. Do you?

3. Who cares what you think about Heidegger or Plato? Most of what you write doesn’t make sense anyway.


3. It took me a little while to realize that making notes in class was counterproductive unless I was going to follow-up. That follow-up couldn’t just be rereading, or even additionally reading a few pages of text. You had to get a grip on the work and then get a grip and notes on related works.

In other words, your notes aren’t just notes for a project at hand. They’re always indications of what a larger project might entail, what else might be at stake. I don’t scribble something down about the Crito or Apology and then think “This is done.” The idea about the Minos, that law might always be a composite of different notions of justice, comes from seeing law declare itself universal and comprehensive (last part of the Crito) while seeing lawmakers (at times, jurors) governed by myth. Note that the idea about Minos required me working with Tim Haglund, who read both the commentaries on the Crito and Apology, co-wrote a paper with me, and taught me a lot about what Periclean Athens might have been like.

4. So you have some deep sounding ideas. Big deal. Scholars and journalists report the results of careful, in-depth research. You’ve got a scrapbook. How is this of use to anyone but you?

4. It’s of the utmost importance that I show carefully working through another’s opinion or work is worthwhile. Our age broadcasts. – It surely doesn’t listen. – It wants knowledge to be practical. – It isn’t clear truth is meant for our benefit. -

Rethink is genuinely countercultural. I don’t think that’s the ultimate legacy of this blog, but it is a legacy. Its significance will be known in time. I have no doubt about that. The better entries are being read and reread as we speak.

My own legacy will be something different. I’m just getting started.