Rethink.

Alright. A few of you want to know how to keep up with the blog, so I don’t have to go shouting all over the Internet about it all the time. Here are some options:

• Subscribe by e-mail. This is probably your best option: let my blog spam you. It can be annoying, but if you want copies of what I write without going to the site, this works well. Do note that you have to verify the subscription. You should be sent an e-mail if you click that link and follow the instructions asking you to verify. A lot of people have tried to “subscribe” and not verified their subscription.
• Feed reader. So here’s the feedburner feed preview, if you’re interested. There’s also the simpler http://ashokkarra.com/feed. Feed readers may be subversive. Ryan Holiday points out that RSS – really simple syndication – puts your content in focus and brings back a “subscription” model of media, as opposed to the “clickbait” model we have now. With the bells and whistles and hype stripped away, feed readers create a more level playing field for quality content. Feedly makes my site look good, and also shows how pathetic the subscription count is (39 as of 3/30/2014).
• I don’t post automatically to the Facebook page, but I might start doing that, especially as I’ve had to shut down comments due to spam.

As always, thanks for your patience and readership. Let me know what else I can do.

I have a bunch of Dickinson poems I could write on. I don’t feel like writing – I feel like wrapping up this month of blogging and working on something else today and tomorrow.

What you may have missed:

• Everything I learned in life I learned from Lana Del Rey’s Twitter
• Completely fulfilling human interaction is impossible. (from a post on George Szirtes’ “Tritina”)
• “The bravest thing you will do / will happen one day, and then that day will end” – Hannah Stephenson, “How to Put This, Exactly”
• “Just make sure you know when you’ve won.” – Michael Donaghy, “The Whip”
• To be free is to be mirrored by nothing less than time, which stands outside you. (from a post on Kay Ryan’s “Chop”)
• To be too literal is to intentionally blind oneself. (from A Preliminary Response to Catherine Zuckert’s Analysis of “Political Philosophy and History”)
• The specific importance of history is to more fully see the implications of the ideas one works with. Only a special imagination could adequately account for reality in speculation; I don’t even know we’d call that imagination “best” as the best ones reintroduce us to wonder and remake the world in fantastic ways. So it does seem history is a very necessary task, especially as we’ve been given a past to make sense of. Ignoring it makes us prey to some terrible demagoguery. (from More about whether Political Philosophy depends on History)
• You don’t become a god by forcibly taking over a temple. Nor do you become a hero by stealing Batman’s costume. And, most of all, you don’t become beloved by forcing your attentions on someone. (from a reflection on Sappho’s “I confess / I love that which caresses me”)
• The inscription only calls Theseus kalos, though: noble or beautiful, not a gentleman (also known as kalos kai agathos, noble and good). (from On a Bell Krater and Oinochoe from the Spina Necropolis, Seen at the Dallas Museum of Art)
• To be an immortal beaten by a mortal is to know death. Acheloos has our pain in some sense. In another sense, he doesn’t, because we don’t understand our own pain. (from On the Etruscan Pair of Shields with Head of Acheloos)
• So I was at two biker bars recently, and I felt out of place. I might have gotten a conversation about tattoos and graphic novels going, but the bartender had to go back to work. (from 5 Random Facts About Me, Because Tumblr)
• “We starved on the back of the earth,
  But when we’d stuffed ourselves,
  We tumbled to these delves,
  Numbskulls, fed up with dearth.”

  (A.E. Stallings, “The Companions of Odysseus in Hades”)

• Fashionable is all we are. (“Sneering at Tourists at the Vatican”)
• The best art comes from the heart. (from the post Coco Rico, “Te Cantare Mis Recuerdos”)
• The girl would have been better off with a coloring book in the parking lot as opposed to being forcefed culture by someone who barely had any. (from a post on George Romney’s “Young Man with a Flute”)
• Some days are not even close to the best. Thing is, a lot of us are striving for consistency, for security. And to strive for consistency and security is just that. There’s a lot of turbulence by definition. Some of it we’re trying to escape, some of it is self-caused. (from a post on Sappho’s “At noontime / When the earth is bright with flaming heat”)
• “One who can honestly acquire the most and use the most to noble ends, him I count most happy” – Cyrus, in Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus
• Sharing one’s dreams is very risky.  It could be interpreted as an act of incredible shamelessness or bravery. (from a post on Maiko Shioda’s “let me dream”)

With thanks to moogernaut & phroggee for tagging me

1. I really, really hate horror movies. If you’re planning on making me faint, just hint we’re watching one. It isn’t even the movie itself. I’m nervous no matter what, so I just start imagining everything under the sun and then some.
2. Niagara Falls is incredible. I am still blown away by how much a ton of falling water can impress.
3. Bars are still weird for me. So I was at two biker bars recently, and I felt out of place. I might have gotten a conversation about tattoos and graphic novels going, but the bartender had to go back to work. At another bar which journalists frequent, my friend hurriedly got me out of there because he could see the contempt I had for every idiot with a Tag Heuer watch.
4. Other than news and sports, I don’t think I’ve watched any TV in months. This is not snobbery on my part, not at all. I just feel I need to be reading or writing, and I’m pushing myself to do that maybe a bit too much.
5. I still need to finish “The Fault in Our Stars.”

I’ve stopped keeping track of traffic. Aside from promoting to people who pretty much know me, I’m trying to let my work speak for itself:

• What’s funny is the hubris of our standard-setting. We see ourselves as humble throughout the process. (from the post Emily Dickinson, “We never know how high we are”)
• Sleep is what breaks time into sentences – Hannah Stephenson, “The Aloe Vera Grows Ragged”
• Yes, it is a love poem – one about how crazy love is. (from the post Emily Dickinson, “I have no Life but this”)
• I think the “god” question, in light of the respect for the “being” question, sets up the problem of Socrates. Socrates is an extremely unique individual, even as he is self-sufficient, seeking the nature of things, unconstrained by convention. He is a natural human being, perhaps the natural human being. “Rational animal” applies to him too well. (from a post on Seth Benardete’s “Memorial Speech for Leo Strauss”)
• That doesn’t mean every writer is a glory hog. Some of us just want to do this well. We’d like to know what we can do. But honestly, the glory stuff catches up with you in weird ways. (from a post on Sappho’s “We shall enjoy it”)
• A lover is a strange sort of being. Not all lovers are creeps, but this poem presents a creepy “love” which may be more present than we like to think. (from a comment on Hannah Stephenson’s “A Light Hand”)
• What is fear, asked Child Helga. A blank wall in the sky with only one door, said her father. - George Szirtes, “Child Helga on the Big Questions of Life”
• What I’ve been trying to do here is dedicate myself to the spirit of the liberal arts. That spirit isn’t about right answers. It’s about raising questions and working through them carefully, understanding the value of wrong answers and misleading insights. (“Blogging is dying. I need to blog more.”)
• Is this how love burns,
  shimmering in its feathers,
  looking to touch down? 

  - George Szirtes, “Courtship”

• I traced tales of cloud shapes until you believed in sleep. – Katherine Soniat, “Morning Child”
• The eros of writing, if I stretch this idea, is the revelation of self. But right now I’m thinking I probably would have had a few fancy things to say to a date yesterday. (from a post on Sappho’s “Standing by my bed”)
• The grass lifts lightly in the heat like the ancient wing of a bird. – Robert Bly, “A Late Spring Day in my Life”
• I like to say that I dislike travel but love being in new cities. The getting there part is not always fun. – Emory Rowland
• “An Imperial Affliction was my book, in the way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts.” – Hazel, in John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars”
• I kept going back to poetry from then on to see experience encapsulated. People took the time to record their experiences and thoughts in verse. (“Why Read Poetry? – 2/20/14″)
• If you perform miracles, who are you? And what is the price of performing one miracle? (“King and Country: On Lawrence of Arabia”)
• The “safe” world is that of design and marketing. The pen reminds of what truly lasts. (Gerald Murphy, “Razor”)
• I did point at another work entitled “Chair” and said it was a file cabinet that had a hatchet taken to it, that the artist was like “woah man, I can rip the lid off a file cabinet and get a chair out of it.” (On Museum Jokes)
• Sing the way the artist does / since you will never hold / completely the thing you are sure / you almost see  – Hannah Stephenson, “Painting”
• The older me knew that more would burn than the goat if I pursued too fully, too soon. (on Sappho’s “And I said / I shall burn…”)

The surest sign blogging is dying isn’t twitter or youtube or instagram. The surest sign is the inability to hear anything about what you write for months. Blogging always was like putting messages in a bottle and hoping for a response. Now it feels that much worse. The commentariat is on social media 24/7 and won’t look past their navel.

And yet, something is at stake. “Blogger” has been made a derogatory term because of the connotations of “amateur,” “wannabe,” “gossip.” I certainly have been all three and far worse. But when you’ve been working to be better, and keeping a log of how you’ve improved and evolved – well, that’s gotta mean more, right?

It’s gotta mean more when you’re trying to start an involved, in-depth conversation about what’s important to you. Right?

A blog is a log, a diary. If you’ve done something with yourself, a blog can track that. And as much as I bemoan my older entries and their bad writing and incoherence, they stand for something important. I’ve read a lot over the years and done quite a bit to respond to it, to work through its relevance. The payoff until recently has been scattered. I think a few of you are seeing that something over the last few months has been taking on a new relevance. Only I’m in a position to judge where I am, and I can safely tell you that I’m a bit scared. There are smart blogs by intellectuals and academics. There’s new agey stuff that has my rhetoric and moralizing. And there are close readers who analyze in order to appreciate.

I think it’s fair to say that what I’m trying to do online is pretty exceptional. I don’t know. I’ve run into smarter people, better writers, more relevant and far better researched blogs. Yet what I’m bringing to the conversation is unlike anything else. It isn’t just my voice. It’s a number of voices, a diversity of media: I work to introduce everything from webcomics to video games to contemporary art to snippets of philosophy to rants on politics and, yes, poems. Where I fail is in getting my audience to contribute, in making sure they’re appropriately valued and rewarded. But that’s not quite fair to myself. I consistently aim for short poems, short texts so people have something to carry with them through their day. I’m not (always) shooting for every word of mine to be savored; I’m really looking to get a poem or quote or image in someone’s hands so they have something different.

What I’ve been trying to do here is dedicate myself to the spirit of the liberal arts. That spirit isn’t about right answers. It’s about raising questions and working through them carefully, understanding the value of wrong answers and misleading insights. Understanding, in the end, what’s involved in raising a serious question and coming up with a credible, personal answer. Sometimes, because of my failures as a writer, I feel like my audience has to be ashamed they read me, and that’s got to be the height of ridiculousness. You haven’t been reading for this long because something important wasn’t going on. You believed that like any serious discussion of a serious opinion, this was important, the heart of reflecting on human being. Not hidden away on dusty shelves but brought forth for all of us who have to work and fight and study on a daily basis. I’ve worked hard at my job, even if I’m ultimately a failure. I’m saying all this because I’m not sure what’s next. I’m gonna keep blogging for a while longer, but what that means is anyone’s guess.

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.

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.