March 18, 2012
Yup.

Yup.

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March 16, 2012

Also from After the Last Intellectuals

“Unless, of course, that machinery accidentally re-creates some of the constitutive elements of the old cultural order: a body of surplus intellectuals who are not very well integrated into the system. Who have (for example) full access to the range of questions and ideas debated within scholarly networks but cannot find full-time employment in academic institutions—the products, but also the victims, of a system of higher education that is ever more dependent on a parttime labor force.

A group of writers and of thinkers—and even, who knows? of eloquent yellers—who enjoy no economic security and occupy low rungs on the status ladder, without much reason to think this will change. Such people, finding themselves excluded, might in time start wanting to “exclude the excluders.” Then the tenor of intellectual discourse might change, and public life with it; and a space for discussion might appear in which it would be possible to move in more than one dimension.”

I mean, try your local coffee shop for the over educated folks working outside academic institutions. Though I’ll agree that it is a bit tough to keep up with modern scholarship without unfettered access to jstor and the like.

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March 16, 2012

“At this point, one can almost hear a chorus of ten thousand graduate students reciting, “But difficult ideas require complex language! Anything else is mere journalism!” Be that as it may, Jacoby insisted on the vernacular as a necessary corrective to the tendency of intellectual discourse to ossify, thereby excluding readers. The example of scholastic Latin came to mind. The turn to common language “characterizes modern culture since the Renaissance,” wrote Jacoby. “The adoption of the vernacular was not always simple or peaceful, for it meant that groups excluded from religious and scientific controversy could now enter the fray.””

-After the Last Intellectuals by Scott McLemee

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March 16, 2012
Tentative(always with me) reading list for Summer

Heavily dependent on possibility of classes(chemistry! ye gods) and alcohol and running and hiking but the main idea is a book of fiction a weak with supplemental readings in non-fiction and plays/poetry.

Theodor Adorno - Minima Moralia

Lewis Hyde - The Gift

Russell Jacoby - The Last Intellectuals

Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory

Joan Didion - Run River Run

Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach, others

Paul Auster - NY Triology

Larry Levis

Plato’s Republic

Jennifer Egan - Visit from the Goon Squad

William Vollmann - TBA

Some plays TBA (probably Shakespeare, Johnson’s The Alchemist, Ionosco? Albee?)

Some more poetry?

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March 16, 2012
On Plato; the Thomas Jefferson edition

“I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s Republic. I am wrong, however, in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been, that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?”

-A letter from Jefferson to John Adams. Strange aside, they died on the same day, and it was July 4th, 1826.
(obviously the bolding is mine) 

Plato’s possible reply if not just a shrug:

Socrates: Why, Anytos, have you ever been wronged at all by Sophists? What makes you so hard on them?
Anytos: Good God, I have never had anything to do with one, and I would never allow anyone else of my family to have to do with them.
Socrates: Then you are quite without experience of these men?
Anytos: And I hope to remain so.
Socrates: Astonishing! Then how could you know anything about this matter, whether there is anything good or bad in it, if you are quite without experience of it?
Anytos: Easily. At least I know who these are; whether I have experience of them or not.

-from Meno 

Let it be known that I side with T.J. on this one. Basically whole heartedly. 

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(Notes: 1)
  
March 15, 2012

You wanna know what really chaps my ass?

A book of Plato about this high.

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March 6, 2012

What some of us do to study is a bit ridiculous. Like create flow charts of nearly an entire chapter of pathology(I left out information about receptors and stem cells because I never study this long in one go. Frankly, knowing I was going to show people the ridiculousness that has ensued over the last 2.5 hours really kept me going with it. Permformativism, bro).

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(Notes: 1)
  
February 28, 2012
from When Nietzsche Wept. What a strange experience that was. The indeterminate nap in the middle of the movie, which, when it happens when I attempt to read, serves to insinuate me even deeper into the story(though, truly, it gets me lost as well because I find myself flipping through the pages to get back to the last part that I “read” which typically turns out to be a dream fragment and thus total fabrication. I had an entire side plot going through East of Eden as I read 80 percent of the book on a 30 hour train ride to Ohio) can only hope to confuse things. I think the nap removed the aspect of the experience relating to the terrible acting/directing/overall-B-movie feel and I found myself in a bit of a trance. What a strange experience that was.

from When Nietzsche Wept. What a strange experience that was. The indeterminate nap in the middle of the movie, which, when it happens when I attempt to read, serves to insinuate me even deeper into the story(though, truly, it gets me lost as well because I find myself flipping through the pages to get back to the last part that I “read” which typically turns out to be a dream fragment and thus total fabrication. I had an entire side plot going through East of Eden as I read 80 percent of the book on a 30 hour train ride to Ohio) can only hope to confuse things. I think the nap removed the aspect of the experience relating to the terrible acting/directing/overall-B-movie feel and I found myself in a bit of a trance.

What a strange experience that was.

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February 27, 2012
A letter from DFW to Harper’s that is too much. Go here if you need a transcript.

A letter from DFW to Harper’s that is too much. Go here if you need a transcript.

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(Notes: 1)
  
February 24, 2012

“Agents that have multiple effects are called pleiotropic; because of the large diversity of TGF-b effects, it has been said that TGF-b is pleiotropic with a vengeance.” -Robbins and Cotran

Which, of course, is what I have been saying all along the way don’t you know.

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