sikandro

One Last Thing...

2012-01-07T15:05:00.000-08:00

...on the books I read last year. Most represented publisher was Penguin with 12 books, then 4 for Oxford University Press.

The List

2012-01-02T18:45:00.000-08:00

In 2011, I read 39 books. 2 were by women. 11 were written in the 21st century, 11 in the 20th, 14 in the 19th, and 3 before that. Original languages are English, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Danish, Japanese, and Arabic. 21 were fiction. Goodreads calculates the total as 17,941 pages. I'll write more on this later but, for now, here's the list:

The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon
The Decameron - Giovanni Boccacio
Capital vol. 1 -Karl Marx
The Hours - Michael Cunningham
Human, All Too Human - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen J. Gould
Off the Books - Sudhir Venkatesh
Inez - Carlos Fuentes
The Challenge of Jesus - N.T. Wright
Confessions of an English Opium Eater - Thomas de Quincey
Redburn - Herman Melville
The Seven Pillars of Creation - William P Brown
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
Sons of the Profits - William Speidel
Scarlet and Black - Stendhal
Reaper's Gale - Steven Erikson
Orient Express - Graham Greene
The Sublime Object of Ideology - Slavoj Zizek
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
An Outcast of the Islands - Joseph Conrad
In the Lake of the Woods - Tim O'Brien
The Eustace Diamonds - Anthony Trollope
An Education - Lynn Barber
Nobody Move - Denis Johnson
A Feast for Crows - George Martin
Anti-Oedipus - Deleuze & Guattari
An Autobiography - Anthony Trollope
Repetition / Philosophical Crumbs - Soren Kierkegaard
The Malay Archipelago - Alfred Russel Wallace
A Dance with Dragons - George Martin
Jonathan Wild - Henry Fielding
The Birth of the Clinic - Michel Foucault
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Gay Science - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Oregon Trail - Francis Parkman
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
Reflections - Walter Benjamin
Arabian Nights vol. 1

Sleuthing

2011-12-18T21:44:00.001-08:00

Several months ago I was on a northbound bus when a man and his son boarded. One stop later, the son disembarked and began walking south.

I've thought about this off and on, and here's the best conclusion I've reached: the son was there to buy a cheap ticket that he could pass off to a third party that was waiting for him.

method

2011-11-13T23:09:00.000-08:00

Walter Benjamin:

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

I've experienced this many times. An idea comes to mind, but I don't write it down for quite some time, maybe for months. I rarely trust notes. Generally if I make a note of something, I'm never going to expand on that note. Outlines and notes are for after a piece of writing is already half-formed, for when something has already been tested.

Impressions

2011-10-16T15:04:00.000-07:00

The disappointing thing about Nietzsche is that he admired Emerson.

The strangeness in reading Foucault is that he cites basically no other scholarship on what he's writing about.

What do you do with the body?

2011-10-13T18:18:00.000-07:00

For ten years I concentrated on how to become more and more ethereal, how to lose my substance. For the last four, I've learned how to become more and more material.

How does the body lose its materiality? How does the immaterial gain substance? Those are the questions that have bothered me for a long time.

econ 101

2011-10-10T22:46:00.001-07:00

The question I find myself asking in regards to politics, laws, policies, and regulations these days, especially in terms of economics, isn't who will benefit but who will benefit the most. What does it matter if a change in laws will help small businesses when it will help the large corporations even more? Likewise, the question isn't who will lose out but who will lose the most.

This is also the question I have in regards to, say, gay marriage. Who will benefit the most from institutionalizing gay marriage? Probably the divorce attorneys and conservative politicians who can split the gay vote. As I've heard, it was a debate in the gay community, whether or not legalized marriage was even a good goal to strive for, even if there seems to be little debate now.

The kicker is that what's good for the party isn't good for the politician. Legalizing gay marriage probably won't lose the party many voters (where would they turn? to the liberals?), but it could definitely lose a politician some votes.

conservative evolutionists

2011-09-23T15:19:00.000-07:00

I'm convinced that in a few years, if it hasn't happened, conservative Christians will realize that there's nothing in evolution counter to their theology. Evolution still provides as much of a mechanism for hereditary sin as creation does (I mean, it makes as much or as little sense with evolution as it does with creation, it just doesn't necessarily start with Adam and Eve). The only thing that might have to change is their understanding of the Bible, but they will probably adjust to literalism being the 'intentions' of the writers, so that the literal truth of Genesis is that it is mythology. That's just my prediction.

15th Ave 7-11

2011-09-09T11:01:00.000-07:00

The neighborhood paperboy was burning out his lungs and blowing smoke rings in the parking lot when I rolled up. He looked at me then looked away as I walked to the door. I couldn’t blame him.

I’d seen the type of place before: flashy neon lights and bright paint on the outside, a wall of windows and, on the inside, shelves of packaged food. But this joint was different, somehow.

It didn’t take long for me to find what I was looking for: a packaged burrito and a can of soda. These burritos taste like cardboard but the price is right.

Behind the register, the cashier was filing her nails and watching some old soap on the television.

“You want a bag with that, mister?” I could tell she was a classy broad because she had a full set of teeth. Around here, that still counts for something.

I ignored her question, leaned over the counter and said, “What kind of square feet you think this place has? Five hundred?”

“Whatever you say, mister.”

“You been working this gig for very long?”

“Well, that depends. Is six years a long time?”

Something seemed fishy but I couldn’t put my finger on it so I said, “Lot of lights in this place. You must run up a hundred bucks a month in electric bills alone.”

“This ain’t my place,” she said. “So do you want a bag with that?”

They went in the bag even though I didn’t say anything. I slapped some bills on the counter--enough for the tab and six dollars for a tip, one dollar for every year she’d worked there--grabbed the bag and walked outside, back into the night. The paperboy had cleared out, and I figured I’d better do the same.

repetition

2011-08-15T14:13:00.000-07:00

From Repetition by Soren Kierkegaard.

If, on the other hand, there is nothing in particular one has to accomplish on one's trip, one can just wait for something to happen. One will sometimes see things in this way that others miss, look past the important sights, catch an accidental impression that has meaning only for oneself. Such a careless vagabond does not usually have much to communicate to others, and if he does try to communicate something, he easily runs the risk of undermining the positive opinion good people might have concerning his moral character and manners

Isn't this what is at work every time I go walking, or engage in conversation, or perform music, or even every time I read? There's a certain amount of gambling to each of these things, but a part of every gamble is being aware of the very real possibility that it will end in catastrophic loss or humiliation or, maybe worse, boredom.

My priorities in reading have very little to do with comprehensive knowledge of a work, or the ability to detail main arguments and trajectories and define terms. And I rarely feel embarrassment about failing to remember, or the way that my memory of a text works (I can never remember cold, I almost always need triggers). Perhaps because, in my opinion, forgetting is the only way to make sense of something or, perhaps, because my interest in smaller matters has usually looped me back around to the heart of the matter anyway.

sewer baptisms

2011-08-11T13:32:00.000-07:00

While reading an article about the Paris sewer system, I came across this pasage.

The sensuous flow of water (and even the advocacy of cleanliness in readiness for sexual pleasure) struck at the heart of conflicting concerns with moral purity, hygiene and social order. Washing had long been associated with pagan sensuality in early Christian belief, and, for most of the nineteenth century, the bathroom was restricted to the homes of the rich, tourist hotels and luxury brothels.

Which of course makes me think of baptism, or further connections between morality and cleanliness. This passage makes me notice how infrequent the connections are in the new testament between baptism and moral purity. More frequently, baptism is coupled with death. For instance, in Romans, "By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life." Dead to sin, not cleansed from it. Sin as neither crisis nor structure?

A cursory investigation indicates that in the gospels, cleaning and washing are almost always in reference to the body, physical cleanliness and especially disease. The epistles are where cleanliness shows up in reference to morality.

Orientation

2011-07-24T21:15:00.000-07:00

Orientation of the windows in rooms I've had for the past 13 years.

Happy Home - South and East Windows
Mosers - East
House in Nang Lae - South and West Windows
House in Bandu - South
Isaksons - West
Dorm Room 1 - North
Dorm Room 2 - Northeast
Basement at Zach's - North
Wallingford - West
Queen Anne 1 - South
Oxford - South
Queen Anne 2 - West
Capitol Hill - East

East: 3.5
West: 4
North: 2.5
South: 5

East is the ideal direction, for sunrise. But I would take any orientation of window, or any size of room, for a room that wasn't ground level or basement.

My window at the Bandu house caught a lot of the afternoon sun, and a lot of my books were subsequently damaged.

fashion

2011-07-20T20:09:00.000-07:00

'Last Stand' Canvas Mocassins - $70
'White Flight' Single-Source Cotton Socks - $25
'Emergency' Topless Jumpsuit - $180 (belt loops available by special order)
Pinstripe Rayon/Polyester Shirt with Pre-Popped Collar - $120
'Blu-nibrow' Indoor Shades - $65

21st Century Scientists Have it So Easy

2011-07-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

After several years of collecting specimens and keeping journals in the Amazon, AR Wallace was on his way back to England when his ship caught fire and sank. He ended up spending 10 days on an open boat before being picked up by another ship. He notes in the November, 1852 issue of Zoologist that "The only things which I saved were my watch, my drawings of fishes, and a portion of my notes and journals. Most of my journals, notes on the habits of animals, and drawings of the transformations of insects, were lost."

A few pages down, I started reading about another naturalist named Julian Deby. The account is that "suddenly he was himself seized with the malignant fever of the country, and had his whole body covered with tumours. He was for six weeks completely laid up, and nearly all the time unconscious; when he came to himself, his first thought was for his collections: alas! his Indian servant had forgotten to fill up with tar the plates laid under the bench which supported his boxes, and the ants (a small red species) had devoured every specimen in his collection."

I love that whoever wrote up that second report paused to specify what type of servant failed to protect the research, and what type of ant ate Deby's collection. A true scientist.

markets

2011-07-12T20:31:00.000-07:00

In the Malay Archipelago, written in the 1860s, AR Wallace comments on the state of Timor. He notes that it is more trouble than profit to the Dutch and Portuguese rulers, proposes a few changes, then finishes with this:

Under such a system the natives would soon perceive that European government was advantageous to them. They would begin to save money, and property being rendered secure they would rapidly acquire new wants and new tastes, and become large consumers of European goods. This would be a far surer source of profit to their rulers than imposts and extortion...

While Wallace didn't anticipate the end of colonial rule, isn't this more or less what has happened? The formation of new desires and new markets?

The Kind of Barber I Want

2011-05-29T17:30:00.000-07:00

The last time I went to a barbershop for a hair cut, I was 15. In the 8 years since then, I've cut my hair myself with a little help from my friends and mom (to trim up the back) and have even handed over the scissors to my girlfriend to do the whole thing. Reading Arabian Nights, I came across a barber who makes his customer miserable with endless talk. He says this about himself:

God in His bounty has provided you with a barber who is also an astrologer, a chemist, an expert in natural magic, grammar, morphology, philology, rhetoric, eloquence, logic, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, religious law, the traditions of the Prophet and the interpretation of the Quran. I have read the relevant books and studied them; I have a practical knowledge of affairs; I have commited to heart a perfect knowledge of the sciences; I am a theoretical and practical master of technical skill. There is nothing that I have not organized and undertaken.

Now that's the kind of barber I'm looking for. I've considered a few barbers at various times, but at the moment of decision I've never gone through with it. If I found a barber shop that was open at 3 in the morning, an all-night barber shop, I would have gone a long time ago.

Night Walks

2011-05-26T15:44:00.000-07:00

Since I was a teenager I've enjoyed walking around at night. Most nights while vacationing on the Gulf of Thailand, I'd walk up and down the beach and, while visiting other cities, I loved walking around the night bazaars and streets to see what was happening. I kept this up when I moved to the States for college, but I was disappointed to find that not much happens in Seattle outside, after dark.

Charles Dickens was a big walker, and a big night walker, and started out a piece on the subject this way:

Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a distressing impression caused me to walk about the streets all night, for a series of several nights The disorder might have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed, but, it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise.

I think he was on to something. All of last year, when I was working on my project on Dickens, Darwin, and Nietzsche, I suspected that I would have breezed through it if I'd written all through the night, rather than trying to write during the day. I never had the guts to do it.

architecture

2011-05-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

…but another aspect (or spectre) of architecture is how sedimentary it is, either the different buildings in a neighborhood or city, or the difference in the building (renovations, I guess). And what is sedimentary? Differences of materials used for construction, the money and means available to whoever was bankrolling the project, restrictions that speak to different building codes at different times, the technologies first included or added on afterwards (some more successfully than others). And then there’s the history that gets wrapped up in a building through fire, earthquakes, vehicular accidents, etc.

Returning to Thailand after the economic crash in 1997, one of the first things I noticed was how many buildings were left half-built after the funding disappeared. Most of them are still unfinished.

And, of course, while we often know who rents or even owns a building, the designers and, especially, the builders disappear.

Many other professions depend on form, materials, and aesthetics working together, but a lot more depends on the structural integrity of, say, a 6-story apartment complex, or a half-mile suspension bridge than on the structural integrity of a 12-string guitar.

a little vision of hell

2011-05-08T23:27:00.001-07:00

The man's girlfriend pretends to be pregnant so that he'll marry her. They come to hate each other. They raise a pig and when the butcher is late, slaughter it themselves. After that she starts throwing his books around the house

'Leave my books alone!' he said. 'You might have thrown them aside if you had liked, but as to soiling them like that, it is disgusting!' In the operation of making lard Arabella's hands had become smeared with the hot grease, and her fingers consequently left very perceptible imprints on the book-covers. She continued deliberately to toss the books severally upon the floor, till Jude, incensed beyond bearing, caught her by the arms to make her leave off.

Jude the Obscure is off to a great start.

a partial list of books I own but haven't read

2011-05-02T21:30:00.000-07:00

Pickwick Papers - Dickens
Pictures from Italy - Dickens
The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot
Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure - Hardy
Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
The Persian Expedition - Xenophon
The Ticklish Subject - Zizek
The Plague of Fantasies - Zizek
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Hardy
The Long Valley - Steinbeck
The Storm - Daniel Defoe
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
Lost Illusions - Balzac
The Wings of the Dove - Henry James
Mardi - Herman Melville
The Confidence Man - Herman Melville
Letters from My Windmill - Daudet
The Three Musketeers - Dumas
The Bostonians - Henry James
The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
Spring Currents - Turgenev
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
McTeague - Frank Norris
The Secret Agent - Conrad
The Octopus - Frank Norris
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Annals of Imperial Rome - Tacitus
Barchester Towers - Trollope
Moll Flanders - Defoe
A Pair of Blue Eyes - Hardy
The Nature of the Universe - Lucretius
Felix Holt - George Eliot
Jonathan Wild - Henry Fielding
Vanity Fair - Thackeray

And the list goes on.

One of my teachers in high school told me that he really didn't start reading until after college. While I'm still reading a lot, I don't think many of my friends do. Some of them have embraced the book totally as an aesthetic object, used mostly for design purposes in a room. A full shelf looks good. A full shelf of good books in good condition, even if you've never read the books to know they're good, looks great.

The real question is how the hell I got so many Thomas Hardy books when I didn't even really like the one book of his I did read, the Mayor of Casterbridge. Jude the Obscure I picked up in Vancouver, CA while on a trip with friends. Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess I bought because I thought I'd have to read them in Oxford. a Pair of Blue Eyes I grabbed off a free table in a hospital...

dusty

2011-04-26T16:04:00.000-07:00

Many things can, and often do, disturb my reading: bad lighting, an uncomfortable seat, too much talking or not enough, the wrong type of music. Then there are problems having to do with the book itself. The story's boring or the style is bloated, the book's spine doesn't bend right, the font is hard to read or the pages are too thin and I can pick up the writing on the other side of the page (Norton anthologies.) I become confused and agitated, have trouble concentrating. But the most crippling obstruction for me is dust.

At first everything seems normal and then my nose begins to run. I wipe my nose on my hand (which is now dusty from holding the book), my nose runs even more, and my face starts to itch. Most of the time the books I read are clean enough that this is not much of a problem--I'm careful now about smelling the used books that I buy to check how dusty they are even if they otherwise are undamaged.

I can remember a few books that were dusty enough to make me miserable while reading, most recently Stendhal's Scarlet and Black, which always left me itchy and snotty. It happened most distinctly while reading Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. Even now, when I ask myself whether I liked the novel or not, I think, "Well, it was so dusty." I have almost no recollection of what happened in Portrait of a Lady, and had almost no recollection immediately after finishing it, and I blame this in large part on the dust.

Several years ago I lived for a summer behind a used bookstore and, several times, went through their dumpsters at night. After sitting in the sun for a summer day, the dumpsters were quite warm, and warmer still since I would close the lid back down once I was inside. One of the books I found in the dumpster was Saturday by Ian McEwan and, sure enough, when I read it my nose always ran.

France

2011-04-20T16:06:00.000-07:00

I would never have made it in a 19th century French novel. From Stendhal's Scarlet and Black.

He flew up the ladder, he tapped at the shutter; a second or two later Mathilde heard him; she tried to open the shutter, but the ladder was in the way. Julien clung to the iron hook placed there to keep the window open, and, at the risk of coming hurtling down time and time again, gave the ladder a violent shake and shifted it a little. Mathilde was able to open the shutter.

He flung himself into the room more dead than alive.

'So its you, my dear!' she said, rushing into his arms.

Painting, I was never comfortable enough on the ladders to perform this maneuver. I would have either had to climb down and reposition the ladder from the ground (not romantic), or I would have tried to move the ladder while on it and fallen to my death (also not romantic). Luckily, my friend who is moving to France has more talent up on the ladder.

sinners

2011-04-15T16:07:00.000-07:00

Slavoj Zizek writes this in the Sublime Object of Ideology"Society is not prevented from achieving its full identity because of Jews: it is prevented by its own antagonistic nature, by its own immanent blockage, and it 'projects' this internal negativity into the figure of the 'Jew.'" He was writing about anti-Semitism, but the same logic applies to the figure of the radical Muslim, the illegal immigrant, etc...

And in the church? Perhaps what happens there isn't so much a negative type in response to an internal problem or blockage, but the creation of a positive type whose non-existence or absence can always be posited as an explanation for why things are falling apart. Zizek talks about how, in anti-Semitism, perceived counter-evidence is absorbed as evidence for anti-Semitism: "The fact that this Jew doesn't seem xyz just demonstrates how dangerous they actually are." And sin works similarly in the church: "...this shows just how deceptive sin is..."

fitzroya cupressoides

2011-04-14T20:50:00.000-07:00

While walking through Edinburgh's botanical gardens with my friends, I happened across this plant, the fitzroya cupressoides. Considering that I had just read Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, I had the captain of the Beagle, Robert Fitzroy, on my brain. The right name from the right place. And I felt like I saw it at the right place (the city where Darwin went to school) at the right time ("the Darwin Year," and when I was in the middle of reading, thinking, and writing Darwin). So I took this picture to remind myself to look it up later.

Well it turns out I was right, that the fitzroya cupressoides was named after Robert Fitzroy. It ends up being an interesting plant, a giant tree that is the only species in its genus. In the late '90s, one tree was found that was over 3000 years old...

mechanics

2011-04-03T22:02:00.000-07:00

What I've come to be wary of is any idea that can move from from place to place with losing or gaining anything. This is the trouble I have with activisms and fundamentalisms of all kinds, with protests and campaigns.

Karl Popper makes a similar point when he tries to demarcate between science and non-science, where he says that what is perceived as the strengths of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis is actually their weakness, namely their ability to absorb and explain all new data. Zizek, I think, makes a better point (though still one about weaknesses perceived as strengths) when he writes in the Parallax View, "In other words, the fact that sexuality can spill over and function as a metaphorical content of every (other) human activity is not a sign of its power but, on the contrary, a sign of its impotence, failure, inherent blockage." But, here Zizek is talking about content moving from form to form, molded into different shapes, and what I'm interested in here is the same form moving from content to content without ever bending or changing shape.

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes about idealism in this way: “All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are significantly better than the other causes in the world; they do not want to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all, it needs exactly the same foul-smelling manure that all other human undertakings require." And, actually, I would think this goes both ways: not only making use of the foul-smelling manure but at the same time creating it, constant reworking.

flak

2011-03-14T22:30:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, a bus in New York crashed bad. So far 15 of the 31 passengers are dead, and there are some accusations that the bus driver fell asleep at the wheel. Apparently the company he worked for has been flagged for problems with fatigued drivers, which reminded me of a section from Marx's Das Kapital.

Marx writes about a railway accident that occurred when some railway workers fell asleep on the job, resulting in the deaths of hundreds. But, “Everyone knows the consequences that may occur if the driver and foreman of a locomotive engine are not continually on the lookout. How can that be expected from a man who has been at work for 29 or 30 hours, exposed to the weather, and without rest?”

The workers were charged with manslaughter but, of course, there were no consequences for their employers.

finishing up

2011-03-07T19:38:00.001-08:00

I've been finishing a lot of books lately, including a few that I've been reading since summer. Today I finished reading The Challenge of Jesus by NT Wright. Here are the 4 main things I thought were interesting:

1. Wright insists that the parables are to be read, and were delivered, as stories about the nation of Israel, rather than about individuals.

2. Truth, not as "a set of doctrines or theories but as a person and as persons indwelt by that person."

3. One of the huge dividing lines in the church, one of the real ones, is in the distribution of weight between the crucifixion and the resurrection. Most Christians I know put all the weight on the crucifixion, and read the scriptures that way. Wright argues that every early Christian theology was focused around the resurrection, and that a bodily resurrection.

4. Did Jesus know himself to be God? "It was in short the knowledge that characterizes vocation. As I have put it elsewhere: 'As part of his human vocation, grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be."

retrograde

2011-02-05T13:03:00.000-08:00

After talking about rejecting metaphysical ideas, especially theological ones like original sin and salvation, Nietzsche puts this forward: "Then, however, a retrograde movement is necessary: he must understand both the historical and psychological justification in metaphysical ideas. He must recognize how mankind's greatest advancement came from them and how, if one did not take this retrograde step, one would rob himself of mankind's finest accomplishments to date."

I'm not against metaphysics to the extent that Nietzsche is, but I do think there is something very important here in terms of ideas and how they are approached. What I find boring about much of philosophy, theology, and even history, is that first movement that Nietzsche talks about, where energy goes towards assent or rejection, proof or disproof. What I find more interesting is asking the question of why an idea is valuable and powerful, how it functions, and what it has done. I may not believe in substitutionary atonement, but I still find it to be fascinating for just these reasons. Not to mention, arguments centering around assent and rejection are unlikely to change anyone's minds, but arguments focused around function can be much more revealing.

Where I also get bored of philosophy and theology is the treatment of ideas as fixed forms, as stable entities, and as essences. I'm not sure that ideas ever reach a fixed state, in spite of various attempts to construct or identify stable systems of thought and how each part of the system works together. The history of an idea isn't just about how an idea passed through time, or even how it changed through time, but also how the manipulation and multiplicity of a single idea is necessary for it to function.

Books in 2010

2010-12-29T20:05:00.000-08:00

40 Books. Written in German, Spanish, English, Russian, French, Japanese, Portuguese. Authors from Germany, Spain, England, Russia, France, Algeria, Slovenia, Chile, USA, Japan, Canada, Portugal, Scotland. 3 books were written by women, 37 by men. 21 (just over 50%) were written within the last hundred years. 23 were fiction.

The List
Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche
Don Quixote (Part I) - Miguel de Cervantes
Joseph Andrews - Henry Fielding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction - Michael Tanner
The Kreutzer Sonata - Leo Tolstoy
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Dust - Carolyn Steedman
The Great Divorce - C.S. Lewis
The Plague - Albert Camus
The Orthodox Way - Kallistos Ware
Christian Doctrine - Shirlie Guthrie
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Fragile Absolute - Slavoj Zizek
White Noise - Don DeLillo
Endless Forms Most Beautiful - Sean Carroll
The Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - Max Weber
Cathedral - Raymond Carver
Drood - Dan Simmons
The Irresistible Revolution - Shane Claiborne
The Comedians - Graham Greene
2666 - Roberto Bolano
Israel Potter - Herman Melville
Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault
Underground - Haruki Murakami
The Parallax View - Slavoj Zizek
No Name - Wilkie Collins
Sputnik Sweetheart - Haruki Murakami
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh - Michael Chabon
Therese Raquin - Emile Zola
The Last Day of a Condemned Man / Claude Gueux - Victor Hugo
Theory and Reality - Peter Godfrey-Smith
The Bonehunters - Steven Erikson
Fado Alexandrino - Antonio Lobo Antunes
Travels in the Interior of Africa - Mungo Park
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell

Thus Spoke Zarathustra isn't my favorite Nietzsche, but I am going to read every book Nietzsche wrote, eventually. Human, All Too Human is on my shelf right now, and I'll probably break that open in the next few weeks, once I finish a few of the non-fiction books I'm reading. Beyond Good and Evil, unlike Zarathustra, got under my skin, stayed on my mind for quite a while.

Reading Nietzsche and Zizek is what made me interested in Hegel, who I'd always written off as a kook, which maybe he is. The Fragile Absolute is advertized as a book by Zizek, a devout atheist, about why the "Christian legacy is worth fighting for." Most of the book has nothing to do with that, and it reads more like a group of essays than a book with a central thesis. Still, that aphoristic quality is part of what made the book, and Zizek in general, and Nietzsche, so fun to read. The Parallax View has more sustained arguments, but still had those great aphoristic qualities.

Sputnik Sweetheart is definitely not Murakami's best effort, and seems sillier when read around the same time as Underground, which is a stunning piece of journalism. Even so, Murakami's worst books are more interesting to me than a lot of other novels being published....Raymond Carver's Cathedral was great to read alongside Murakami, partly because Murakami read and translated Carver's books into Japanese and knows him extensively, partly because that attraction existed for a good reason. Both of the writers make great use of the ordinary, even though Murakami is mostly thought of in terms of magical realism.

Dust is a book that my friend Dan recommended to me, and I'm glad that he did. Among other things, it's a book about archives and waste, which I'm come to think a lot about since I've started archiving medical records.

Of all the books I read this year, I may have had the most visceral response to the ending of Origin of Species, which is a fine piece of art besides a fine work of science. Reading this at the same time as Endless Forms Most Beatiful (the title comes from a line in Origin of Species) was fascinating, reading one very famous evolutionary text from the 19th century and another evolutionary text, of lesser fame, from the 21st. At the same time, I was reading some of Stephen Gould's essays on Darwin and evolution. I wouldn't reccomend Darwin or Carroll to everyone, but I would reccomend Gould to anyone who has even a passing interest in science, especially evolution.

Therese Raquin and Madame Bovary are both 19th Century French novels about adultery. Madame Bovary is the more famous for many good reasons. Both end up feeling very judgmental in the end, especially given how clinical and objective both authors were attempting to be. Dickens has much more of a reputation for preachiness, but Dickens revels in the criminal and deviant scenes of Oliver Twist, they give all the weight to the novel.

2666 was a long, sometimes great, sometimes tedious novel. Since reading the novel I've been much more interested in Ciudad Juarez. The repetition of abduction, rape, and murder, over and over in the novel doesn't seem so excessive once you begin to read the news about Juarez, or the news about Mexico.

And that's all I'm going to write about that!

A few books I'm looking forward to finishing next year:

The Decameron, which I've been reading off and on for the last 4 years.
Das Kapital vol. 1 by Marx, which I've been reading since August. When I read the Communist Manifesto for the first time a few years ago, I wasn't that impressed. I read it again this year with some selections of the German Ideology, and couldn't get enough. North and South I read because I'd been meaning to for a while, and I'd been told it was good to read alongside Das Kapital.
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I don't pick it up often, but everytime I do I think it was a good decision.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, which I've been reading for almost a week now. I'm enjoying it a lot. Mysteries of Pittsburgh, his MFA piece, was fun to read, and was enough for me to know I'd like reading something else of his.

What I'm most excited to read over the next year, and it will probably take me that long, is the new translation of Arabian Nights. Arabian Nights is usually advertised as stories for children, and so the stories are printed for children and heavily censored. The new translation is, as far as I know, the first complete translation since Richard Burton's in the 1880s. I've read a dozen or so of the stories in Burton's translation, which is great.

This will be the first year that I've not been assigned books for school, so it's unlikely CS Lewis or Jane Austen will show up in next year's list.

6 Years Ago

2010-12-26T17:58:00.000-08:00

Was the tsunami in south east asia. For many thousands of people, boxing day will always be the day that everything drowned... 230,000+ dead.

more on marx

2010-11-26T17:01:00.000-08:00

This last week, I finished reading Fado Alexandrino by Portuguese novelist Antonio Lobo Antunes. Among other things, the novel is about (and structured around) a Marxist revolution in Portugal back in the 70s. Reading this alongside Capital vol. 1 by Marx, I've been thinking about Marxism's history, and how condemnations of Marxism always entail pointing towards its bloody revolutions, Soviet Russia, Stalin, Mao, etc.

I've never read a Marxist defense of these things, which I imagine would be about as interesting/boring as hearing Christian defenses against the history that is leveled against it: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch trials, slavery, church corruption, etc. I imagine the typical responses would be the same, "That's not real Marxism," "That's not real Christianity." And then there are the historians, "Well, that's not really what happened during the Crusades," or "Well, if you look at the Inquisition in the context of 16th century Spain..." The appeal to purity or history is always a losing argument, or at best a back-pedaling argument.

What's more interesting for me is to take things full force, to say, "Yes, let's suppose all this is true, that the church really did institutionalize murder, genocide, and torture..." A better question, but one I'm not satisfied with either, is "What about Marxist ideology was useful for revolutionaries, or fascist leaders, to appropriate?"

What I think is disappointing about this last question is that it still puts the ideology first, as the motivating factor behind genocide and torture and exploitation. What's more convincing to me is that the ideology is secondary to the torture, that the torture serves as a justification for the ideology rather than the ideology for the torture....

illness

2010-11-20T19:57:00.000-08:00

Often when I'm sick, and I've been feeling sick off and on for the last few weeks, I think of Darwin and Nietzsche. Mostly because both of them were sick for significant portions of their adult lives, chronically sick. Part of my interest here is that they had very different responses to their illness. Darwin comments often in his autobiography about what his illness prevented him from doing: prevented him from going on hikes, from getting work done, from being in society (though he sees some good in this).

Nietzsche, on the other hand, writes some about illness in Ecce Homo: "In the midst of the torments that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine, accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialectician's clarity par excellence and thought through with very cold blood matters for which under healthier circumstances I am not mountain-climber, not subtle, not cold enough." The obstructions and difficulties caused by sickness here are the very vehicle for surmounting other obstructions and difficulties....

Well, I don't think that's quite right, or quite what Nietzsche is getting at, but it's a starting point.

beards

2010-11-01T16:46:00.001-07:00

Scottish explorer Mungo Park lived as a prisoner in Western Africa for several months in 1795. Writing about his time among the Moors he said, "if any one circumstance excited among them favourable thoughts towards my own person it was my beard, which was now grown to an enormous length, and was always beheld with approbation or envy. I believe in my conscience they thought it too good a beard for a Christian."

At least I know that if I'm ever held captive by 18th c. Moors I'll be held in high esteem.

Capitalism, time and space

2010-10-19T13:11:00.000-07:00

Over the last two months I've been reading the first volume of Marx's Capital. Today I was reading, among other things, about the compression of time and space in manufacturing, how divided tasks are brought together into a close space (the factory, for instance) and how the time between separate stages of an article are shortened so that the "establishment and maintenance of a connection between the isolated functions requires that the article be transported incessantly from one hand to the other, and from one process to another" (Ch. 14).

Talking about the division of labor Marx also mentions the specialiazation of instruments and tools and how in Birmigham, for instance, 500 different hammers were made for all sorts of different processes. I'm curious about how these two different issues, compression of time and space and specialization of instruments, play out in the archive.

What's curious to me here is the excessive nature of the archive, the lack of utility for all sorts of different records and collections. The factory compresses space and time while the archive expands it, constantly requiring more space for more entries, keeping things stored that will, probably, never be accessed or used. Of course criminal records are used be prospective employers, credit records or used by landlords and lenders, driving and medical records are accessed by insurance companies, but I suspect that these utilize the minority of records and statistics being kept and compiled all the time (especially taking into account, for instance, records of dead people). Part of what was interesting about working in a library was how much of the collection is never touched, the thousands of books and records that are never looked at and probably never will be looked at until someone finally decides to throw them away.

Which shows the reverse for the specialization of tools: that the specific and potential uses for an instrument disguise all the situations for which its totally useless. Prime examples just in the home are kitchen appliances and garage tools.

I'm also interested in time and space in reference to work and home, or the degree to which the workspace is identical with home. Isn't part of the point of factory work, or archiving and office work, that it cannpt take place at home? In other words, part of the point is an expansion of time and space. Not that no one works from home anymore, a lot of the shops in Thailand have either a back room or upper living quarters, and certainly there are sections of the underground economy that operate out of homes. But then there are other spheres of work that seem entirely impossible to conduct at home, like large varieties of scientific research and experimentation, the tools for which are expensive and rare enough that they won't be owned individually. A curious contrast to, say, Darwin who worked almost entirely at his own house, or to the early and mid 19th century in general, where amateur science was not equivalent to incompetent science...

the only reason I would resist the legalization of drugs...

2010-10-09T12:11:00.001-07:00

...is that it would mean the gentrification of an entire industry. Other than that things seem good.

meaning

2010-09-23T22:51:00.000-07:00

The question of meaning always comes up in talking about interpretation: what did the author mean, what is the meaning of this phrase, etc. Most of the times I've seen it brought up, except within biblical hermeneutics, the point is to talk about the impossibility of returning to an original or inherent meaning within the text. My own interests have, perhaps, gone towards what Hegel writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit: "We learn by experience that we meant something other than we meant to mean; and this correction of our meaning comepls our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it in some other way."

My own interests, in other words, have moved towards functions, the functions of statements, beliefs, statements, stories, especially functions obscured by the apparent objectives (the meaning...) of what has been written.

Familiarity

2010-09-20T22:30:00.000-07:00

"I love grilled cheese sandwiches because I used to have them everyday" might just as well be "I hate grilled cheese sandwiches because I used to have them everyday." The one makes as much, or as little, sense as the other. Who knows where the difference comes from...

cosmopolitanism

2010-09-10T08:37:00.000-07:00

Isn't what is missing from cosmopolitanism the recognition of the other not as an external object but an internal voice? Isn't the celebration of many voices, heterglossia as we called it our studies, missing the same? And what does the inclusion of the voices of the other actually accomplish?

What I'm curious about is the internal difference and in the other, less as the difference between my self and others as between my self and myself. I worry that cosmopolitanism attempts to be too objective, literal objects bearing the distinctions of identity (race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, etc). Appreciation for the other in this way functions just like bigotry, by making room for what makes the other distinct. For instance, studying queer or ethnic or women's literature as such. Doesn't Slavoj Zizek address this same concern when he writes, "Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly (acts like providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities, and so on). The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active," to "participate," to mask the Nothingness... of what goes on"?

On the other hand, apprecation for the other does examine the internal difference as hybridity, bisexuality, hermaphroditism, etc. What's disappointing about this is that the hybridities are still posited as distinguishing marks between groups, so that what's happening isn't a disruption of the logic of the system as much as a brief alteration in taxonomy: what is pathological is revealed, finally, to be normal.

But that turn towards understanding the pathological as normal is also where I think this all begins to go right, focusing on a logic of madness. What I want to see is the normal become pathological, so that heterglossia isn't so much about the inclusion of different objects as different subjectivities within the same object.

Blah blah blah.

economy

2010-08-30T22:24:00.000-07:00

What is interesting about economics is economy, or relationships of exchange where every gain is also a loss. What's disappointing about economics is that it doesn't deal enough with annihilation, where there's pure loss, or where the one thing exits the relationship. Aren't suicide bombers totally irrelevant to economics?

This is one of the interesting ideas in the history of science to me, that there is not pure scientific progress involving increasingly accurate representations and understandings of the natural world. Instead, scientific progress necessarily involves some sort of loss of knowledge as well. Thanks Thomas Kuhn.

Isn't the same thing true about changes in belief? That there is no pure progress of understanding, but each change is a gain as well as a loss. Isn't the idea that scientific research is pure gain just as ridiculous as the idea that change in religious belief is pure loss? Or, to put this another way, aren't scientists who ignore scientific history just as ignorant as believers who only pay attention to religious origins and have no concept of changes in belief?

history

2010-08-17T22:47:00.000-07:00

The best thing that could happen for historians of our present is a massive catastrophe that wipes out massive chunks of the internet and digital history. Otherwise good luck.

Police Report, circa 1891

2010-08-03T12:19:00.000-07:00

In 1891 Bolton Rogers was appointed as chief of police in Seattle. In his report for the year, he includes this peculiar note to explain why he hadn't collected nearly as many fines as his predecessor: it was "the custom prior to my advent to collect fines once a month from all gambling houses and houses of prostitution, and in that way make the Police Department what was called "self-supporting," in other words turning the department into legal blackmailers, fining law breakers for breaking the law, and at the same time taking the fine as a license to allow them to continue to break the law."

Isn't this exactly what Michel Foucault was talking about in Discipline and Punish when he wrote that "the existence of a legal prohibition creates around it a field of illegal practices, which one manages to supervise, while extracting from it an illicit profit through elements, themselves illegal, but rendered manipulable by their organization in delinquency" (280)?

Rogers story is an interesting one. The mayor removed him from office just a few months after he wrote that report, because they didnt get along. Rogers bounced around for a while, started a private detective agency, was reappointed as chief of police, ran some gambling dens, then died of brain fever.

Public Health, circa 1899

2010-07-20T19:59:00.001-07:00

Today I went down to the library and read the Seattle health officer's "Annual Report of the Health Officer for the Year Ending December 31, 1899." Here are a few gems:

Unsanitary Localities: One cesspool of vast magnitude and long standing, covering the greater part of two squares on Jackson Street between Second Avenue South and Fourth Avenue South, has engaged our attention at different times, but without any improvement whatever. The region is a disgrace to the city, and time only adds to the magnitude of a nuisance which, in summer especially, is a serious menace to the health of the community."

Among the health officer's other concerns and suggestions were installing public urinals downtown to provide a "great convenience and remove a disgusting and oft-complained-of nuisance in the shape of filthy alleys"; forbidding peddlers to yell because their yelling tormented the sick; requiring scavengers to register for licenses and finding "some rational means of disposing of garbage" so that no one should have to deal with massive mounds of rubbish.

Another serious concern of his was the fact that even though there were public sewers being dug around town, no one was connecting their house to the sewers.

Which all reminds me of what I recently read in Slavoj Zizek's Parallax View: “one definition of being-human is that disposing of shit is a problem” (194). Of course it's not just about shit, although it is partly that, but aren't we learning more and more all the time about how much trouble our garbage is?

Baudelaire

2010-07-11T20:02:00.001-07:00

I don't know anything about Baudelaire, except that he was a French poet, but I do know enough to say that his Flowers of Evil shouldn't be shelved in the gardening section at a book sale.

I know quite a bit more about Murakami, and enough to know that Sputnik Sweetheart shouldn't be shelved in the romance section at the same book sale. But hey, it worked out well for me.

Short story abut my life: Last night as my roommate and I were brushing our teeth, getting ready to go to sleep, etc, we hear some fellows outside yelling about the "fucking raccoons." We hurried to the window of our apartment and looked across the street, where three or four raccoons were crawling over the chain link fence. Appropriate response to the situation? Grabbing the raccoon pelt from my room and throwing it out the window at the yelling spectators.

crimes

2010-07-01T17:01:00.001-07:00

Here's a list of crimes perpetrated on my friends, my acquaintances and I in Seattle over the last 4 years.

4 stolen bikes (including my own)
1 stolen car (later recovered)
1 stolen i-pod
my professor's house was burglarized/trashed
1 case of breaking and entry
1 case of identity theft
1 stolen car radio

That's all I can come up with right now, although there's more that I'm forgetting. As far as shady activity on the part of my friends, the list I can come up with is shoplifting, growing/selling/buying pot and underage drinking. Not enough material to start writing a crime novel.

2010-06-23T10:28:00.000-07:00

From Haruki Murakami's Underground

"Haven't you offered up some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on a 'narrative' in return? Haven't we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not that System at some stage demanded of us some kind of 'insanity'? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else's visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares?"

This idea has been on my mind for sometime, although my interest isn't that the dream turns into a nightmare, but that the content of the dream and the nightmare is exactly the same. Or perhaps it is that the fantasy and the nightmare are exactly the same. But I'm also intrigued that in Murakami this shows up in such close proximity to insanity, or to a madness built upon the excesses of any system or narrative.

How to Write Your Essay

2010-06-12T11:37:00.000-07:00

1. Begin by describing the novelty of your essay, and how it disrupts the conventional view of a text, history, identity, etc.

2. Draw out the essential core of the text, or history, or culture.

3. Do this by first introducing disparate phenomena and demonstrating how what appear to be disparate are actually part of the same pattern. Or...

4. Introduce a pattern and demonstrate that what appears to be homogenous is in fact marked by rupture.

5. Anything you treat seriously, treat as a tool to be used. Do not contextualize it.

6. Contextualize anything you do not treat seriously. Philosophers you disagree with are artifacts of naivete.

7. Make sweeping generalizations about how history led, necessarily, to the pattern or disruption that you've described.

8. Dismiss disciplines you know nothing about.

9. Use penetrating metaphors to maximize your audience's pleasure.

10. Finish like you begin, with your own novelty. You are the hero, and you're saving everyone else.

That's what I learned in college.

environmentalism, capitalism, pacifism

2010-05-14T20:35:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking lately about the relationship between capitalism and environmentalism. In part my thinking on this started from a paper I wrote years ago on tourism in Thailand, and how a lot of the money and impetus for preserving various ecologies comes from tourist revenue. Then a few months ago I came across a historical work called Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism by Richard Grove. He talks about this issue in a variety of ways, finally saying that "modern environmentalism...emerged as a direct response to the destructive social and ecological conditions of colonial rule" (486). I suppose what's interesting to me isn't particularly the historical component, demonstrating that environmentalism emerged out of colonialism, but the ways in which environmentalism acts as an appendage or apparatus of capitalism, no matter what its history is. Whatever you say about capitalism, it's difficult to ignore that the preservation of environments (even beyond what is natural) leads to never-ending profits. Likewise, there's nothing anti-capitalist about sustainability.

I've also been curious about the connections between pacifism and capitalism, or the extent to which pacifism functions as an appendage of capitalism. Once again, it doesn't matter, in a lot of ways, what the origins of pacifism are, just how it functions and to what ends. Then again, war itself is a huge money-making machine (e.g, all those billions spent for waging war don't just disappear), so who knows?

tulip

2010-04-25T22:08:00.001-07:00

Today I went to a Tulip Festival for the first, perhaps the last time. It's late in the season, so most of the fields had been chopped. We did find one garden and wandered through it. No one ever told me that tulip names were so bad-ass. Here's some of the gems:

Dreaming Maid
Scarlet Pimpernel
Graffiti
Oriental Splendor
Moneymaker
Dutch Master
Flaming Parrot
Queen of the Night
Temple of Beauty
Ninja
Aladdin

Way more exciting than the Calvinist tulips.

friends of the library

2010-04-18T21:36:00.000-07:00

Here are the books I bought at the sale. $11.

McTeague - Frank Norris
Scarlet and Black - Stendhal
Love - Stendhal
Therese Raquin - Emile Zola
Mardi - Herman Melville
Spring Torrents - Turgenev
The Long Valley - John Steinbeck
Never Let Me Go - Ishiguro
Letters from My Windmill - Daudet
Pictures from Italy - Dickens
The Storm - Defoe

I'm very curious about how my standards for buying books changes. Generally, I only buy books in good condition (not too ripped, little or no underlining, not too dusty). Lately I've been more interested in older copies of books, curious about them not only to read but as artifacts. Also, my interest in books often goes in waves of publishers. Recently its been Penguin. Eight of those eleven books I bought were published by Penguin.

Also, pretty much any Stephen Gould book can be bought for $3 at a used bookstore. This will be useful to me whenever I decide I want to read more of him. Good, readable essays on natural history.

The Naive Realist Manifesto

2010-04-05T21:38:00.001-07:00

Principle First: the principles of naive realism do not need to be explained, because they are self-evident.

children

2010-04-04T13:01:00.000-07:00

A few thoughts.

1. Pedophilia functions as a fantasy of absolute good and evil. What I mean is that when it's discussed, its discussed as an example of something that everyone can believe is absolutely and self-evidently evil. In this sense children function as the object of fantasy for both pedophile and anti-pedophile.

2. The concentration on pedophilia and child molestation disguises the way in which children are more comprehensively exploited. This is not just in a general or ideal sense but in a very physical sense. The infant body is used to sell a variety of products, some of them having nothing to do with children. But of course in these cases what is noticed is how cute the babies are, and somehow that's separated from how the children are simultaneously being used/sold/exploited. Children similarly function as a fetish in pedophilia and advertisements.

3. There is a paradoxical discourse about sex and the body, first that the exploitation is traumatic and real because it involves sexuality, second that the exploitation is bad because it involves sexuality. More specifically, the horror is when children's bodies are the product, but there is no horror when children's bodies are used to sell the product.

4. In a more general sense I've been intrigued for a long time about how quick people are to talk about prostitution as exploitation (because it involves the body) but ignore the ways in which all jobs of any kind involve selling the self and permitting control over one's own body by the employer (if not always the customer). Another irony is how the alienation of the laborer from the product is condemned, but prostitution breaks down that alienation (then again, I'm not convinced that the product sold in prostitution is the prostitute's body.

darwin and nietzsche

2010-03-16T16:25:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts on what has been surprising to me about reading Nietzsche and Darwin over the last 5 months.

1. Darwin isn't an environmentalist. In his travel writings, Darwin shoots and kills any strange animals that he finds, and cuts them open. In Origin of Species he talks about performing all sorts of experiments on animals, etc. He also isnt too worried about the extinction of specific species, or about the invasion of foreign plants onto domestic territories. No save the whales here. But he does set things up quite nicely for environmentalism, especially when he talks about the relationships between different life forms, or when he describes how the breakdown of coral could lead to the death of an island of people.

2. It's very difficult to disentangle both Darwin and Nietzsche from everything that has been said about them, or from how they have been used as weapons for different causes (or as targets for different attacks). Nietzsche isn't as much of an atheist as people want him to be, and he's not much of a nihilist (many of his arguments are critique's of nihilism). Darwin doesn't really talk about the origins of life in the origin of species. It's difficult to disentangle Darwin from contemporary biology and genetics.

3. I appreciate how easy both are to dip into when I'm not a specialist in science or philosophy. Darwin's arguments are complex (more complex than they are represented), but not in the way that a contemporary science journal is complex. As a casual observer, I can pick up Origin of Species and have some understanding of the arguments and details of what Darwin is writing. Likewise Nietzsche is more complicated than he is represented (either by enemies or fans), but reading bits and pieces of him gives me a lot to digest. In a more general sense, Darwin wrote in a variety of different genres (travel/memoir/autobiography/science), or somewhere between the genres.

Whatevz.

nature

2010-03-02T16:47:00.000-08:00

Some people talk about discovering God in nature. Some people enjoy hiking and spending time out of doors, in the wilderness. I don't. In part, I just don't believe that nature exists, either nature in terms of wild life, wilderness untouched by humanity, or in the sense of nature as essence, as the real thing.

I don't find God in nature, in the diversity of plant and animal life, the fragility and complexity of an ecosystem, or even in the evolution of species. That is all very beautiful and moving, but what I find isn't God.

What I find is a system of taxonomy and invention, a system of language superimposed over the world. And I'm skeptical of the bases of taxonomy, of differentiation between species, etc. So when I go on hikes, I think of the systems of order that people believe they are discovering in the world, of the categories and qualities of a species that places it in one place or another in a taxonomy, and of the limited value of those taxonomies.

Also, how the whole idea of nature is a system of values, the basic value being the drive to catalog and systematize everything.

On the other hand, I love beaches and am all for environmentalism, prefer buying organic foods and minimizing waste, have very dear friends who care for the earth, and support them in their recreation, efforts and discoveries. Go figure.

free will

2010-02-26T18:48:00.000-08:00

Why is free will considered to be a good thing? That is the question that has been bothering me lately, and one that I don't have an answer to. But free will is constantly talked of as if its existence is a good, and its nonexistence is an evil. God must have free will, and if we didn't have free will we would not be able to love God or others. I suppose I disagree with the assumptions that God has to have free will and that there is much choice in loving others (even the self-sacrificing sort of love that people rail on about). Regardless, I'm curious about how people talk in these ways as if it is self-evidently good. That is a much more interesting conversation than the one about whether we have free will or not.

The arguments always seem to be, to some degree, dishonest. People don't look at the evidence and decide whether or not free will exists (actually, whether or not to believe that free will exists), they value or don't value free will and move forward accordingly. Additionally, it seems dishonest from the love side, because I don't think anyone starts there. The idea that free will is a good is wrapped into a whole range of assumptions about economics and morality, and how we can treat people. Basically, we want to believe in free will because it allows us to be cruel to others, or at least to see cruelty against others and believe that we are not responsible in some way to alleviate their suffering.

Ah, but if we don't believe in free will why would we believe ourselves responsible?! That is the other problem with the conversation, which supposes that its one or the other, or that the complexity of life can somehow be dropped into nice categories (compatabilist, incompatibilist). It all starts to seem like someone started it out as a joke, and everyone who heard the joke took it seriously, and the rest of us have paid for it ever since.

I suppose the only real good that can come from the conversation is talking about the consequences of believing or not believing in free will, and the values in assuming that it is good or not good. It doesn't really matter whether we have free will or not, just whether or not we believe we do.

I'm not sure that "free-will" ever means very much, but it really doesn't mean anything when applied to God.

2010-02-15T00:12:00.000-08:00

A few thoughts in reply to a commentor on my last post, and some connected issues.

1. Where is the impetus for thinking that God's priority is to be understood? Especially to be understood in some essential way, or as an absolute truth? The closest thing to an absolute understanding of God is touching Jesus' body. In general in the gospels Jesus speaks quite ambiguously and mysteriously, and confuses the people around him, and is quite content to do so. When he explains what his parables mean (the sower and his seeds, for instance) it really only adds another layer of ambiguity, and often he only explains things after his followers ask him to. What is important is how God's interactions with people in the bible are non-repeating and unique, and this includes Jesus' methods and interactions too. Repetition leads to essentialization, and difference ends it. God constantly reveals himself as different from his self. Perhaps the impetus for projecting a desire to be understood onto God is our drive to understand God, which is our drive to atheism, to minimize God and conceptualize him as a linguistic proposition, as an ideal.

Any use of language is giving up on absolute truth. Whenever God "speaks" it is always a limitation on God's self. Language doesn't have the capacity to hold truth, especially taking seriously what Jesus says when he identifies truth as person. Incidentally, the more I insist that God is a being and person rather than an ideal, the less it makes sense for me to have a relationship with Jesus. For some reason its very popular to talk about being humble and killing off yourself (take up that damn cross, son), and to talk about God humbling himself in the form of Jesus, but this is never extended to God humbling his own statements, or humbling truth. Probably because truth (as an ideal, and as the bible, not as a person) is worshiped more than God is ever worshiped.

1.5. To talk about the meaning, you always have to extend your argument to something outside of the text, something that isnt present, that isn't there, something that's added or subtracted. Give it a whirl: read anything at all, ask yourself what it means, and if you think you know, ask how you know and on what basis you're making your interpretation. The interpretation always extends to something outside, which means that meaning is a sort of glue from the outside that holds everything together, rather than an internal tissue.

Of course, it's ignorant to say that this means you just pick and choose, as if everyone isn't already picking and choosing. The whole process of interpretation is picking and choosing different patterns of repetition and difference to spin out some sort of ideal and some sort of argument. More significantly, there are still good interpretations and bad interpretations, the standard for which is probably more based on ability to persuade someone who has read the same text, rather than on adherence to any sort of genuine meaning in that text.

2. I've heard many different people make this sort of statement, "The bible is so amazing, every time I read it I find something new!" What that usually conveys to me isnt anything about the bible but something about the person. Usually it means that the person hasn't read very much at all, and whatever they have read they haven't reread. That sort of experience of discovery is the experience you will have reading anything, and it happens because when you return to the text you've already read it, you've heard other people talk about, and you are a different person than the last time you read it. It has nothing to do with a special or magical quality, or secret knowledge that is being revealed. But most people don't read, so why should they know that? The bible is worth reading and rereading, but so are thousands of other books.

3. Is God omniscient? When you talk about God, 'omniscience' has no meaning.

coherence + Christianity

2010-01-26T22:52:00.000-08:00

When did coherence emerge as a value of Christianity? This question has been on my mind for some time.

Christ's teachings were not systematic or coherent in the way that contemporary theology and teachings attempt to be.

Paul (probably the most popular savior in Christianity, although Jesus is a close second) is similarly not very coherent or systematic in the way that people want him to be. This doesn't mean that either of their teachings were incoherent (as a code word for nonsense or babble.)

If Christ meant for his teachings to be systematic, coherent, we would certainly have the Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Second, Christ not writing his own teachings meant that he was quite willing for his teachings to be misappropriated, misrepresented, misremembered, represented incompletely and ignorantly. If Jesus were concerned with the truth of his teachings, in the way that contemporary teachers, preachers, theologians are concerned with the truth and coherence of their own, we would have the Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

If we say that Christ came to be abused, why don't we extend this to the abuse and forgetting of his teaching by his followers, by those who came after him? This doesn't begin with misintepretations of the gospels but the very act of writing the gospels.

I'm not trying to call the gospels into question, or projecting sinister intentions on the writers of the gospels, because I dont see any such sinister intentions. But Christ gave up some very important claims when he left his legacy with his followers!

I'm also interested in the way that valuing coherence leads to splintering and disunity, just as valuing truth as an absolute necessarily leads to division. The idea that we can know truth combined with the value for coherence (the total domination and reconciling of knowledge) is totally antithetical to the ecumenical drive. The steady splintering of the church over the millenia derives from this drive to coherence, from the will to truth, as Nietzsche puts it (or does he?).

So where did all this begin? Augustine? Canonization? Aquinas? Probably none of them, since they themselves aren't enough to explain why coherence has emerged as a value.

reward and punishment

2010-01-07T00:10:00.000-08:00

There is no connection between offense and punishment, or action and reward. There is no connection in value, no way to make the two equivalent in value. Steal a car and get placed in jail? Where is the connection? What is the system of values that allows these equations to take place? Likewise, rewards. Spent 10 hours lifting boxes and receive 100 dollars? Where does the connection come from?

Seeing offenders punished is pleasurable, but pleasure in others suffering feels guilty, so we believe that they've deserved it! Hard work is a pain, and we want to believe that it means something. But there isn't a connection between hard work and reward (or virtue and reward).

The logic can be maintained by saying that there are natural consequences to certain behavior, but why would I want to maintain that logic?

heroism and memory

2010-01-04T08:44:00.000-08:00

Why value heroism in ethics? Where does it come from? In part, I think Christians have simply picked up the model of the bible itself, and the form of memory that is found within the text.

For years I have heard people talk about the bible as if it contains stories about ordinary people ("called to extraordinary things"). But this really isn't the case. We have very little in the text about peoples ordinary lives. They are introduced as ordinary figures, but they never remain that way, and we see only the heroic moments of their life.

Perhaps most obviously this takes place with the gospels, and Jesus himself. Why is there a twenty plus year gap in the record about his life? Presumably this is because the writers of the gospel believed that what happened in those years was unimportant. They privileged the spectacular events of his early and late life over the mundane events that took place between, and now we are forced to read poorly written inspirational novels to have a sense of what might have happened in those years.

To be part of the biblical story then, Christians are forced to see themselves as heroic figures. To the extent that they are not heroes, they are not part of the story. Or at least that seems to be the easiest response to the memory at work in the bible.

I am curious about the fact that people are so willing to find moral lessons and warnings in the texts and stories of the bible, but cant extend lessons to the form of the bible itself! In other words, you can talk about how awful a person was, but not how awful the letters and stories they wrote are. You can learn the mistakes from their lives, but not from the values at work in what they wrote. Obviously, I think that's a distinction that has no worth.

What I Read, and How I Did It

2009-12-28T20:02:00.000-08:00

38 books total, which is quite a bit less than the 68 I read last year. But I have a feeling that I actually read more this year, just that more of my reading was consumed with short stories, excerpts, chapters, articles, plays (8 Shakespeare plays, for instance). I kept a partial log of all those, but it got exhausting after a while. The other part is that 19th century novels made up the largest bulk of what I read.

There are books here by people from England, Scotland, Japan, USA, Turkey, France, Germany and Australia. Only 3 were written by women. 21 were written in the 19th century, 11 in the 20th, 6 in the 21st.

The List
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
In Xanadu - William Dalrymple
Cosmopolis - Don DeLillo
Palm -of-the-Hand Stories - Yasunari Kawabata
Hard Times - Charles Dickens
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea - Yukio Mishima
Lying Awake - Mark Salzman
The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
Kokoro - Natsume Soseki
The Language of God - Francis Collins
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Mountains Beyond Mountains - Tracy Kidder
South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami
The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
Daniel Deronda - George Eliot
The Aspern Papers - Henry James
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Other Colors - Orhan Pamuk
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Washington Square - Henry James
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens
Goldfinger - Ian Fleming
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
The Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Autobiographies - Charles Darwin
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
Archive Fever - Jacques Derrida
Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Europeans - Henry James
A Fraction of the Whole - Steve Toltz

Top Ten (in no particular order)
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
The Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Other Colors - Orhan Pamuk
The Aspern Papers - Henry James

There were very few books that were easy to eliminate off-hand this year. The quality of what I read was quite high over the year! I might do another post on book covers, since that's something that's become more interesting to me over the last year. If they were in particular order, Moby Dick would be at the top as the best book I read over the whole year. In part its because its such a strange book, but especially when I was reading it in the middle of a dozen other novels in the 19th century, none of which are very similar to it at all, at least in form.

After last year's list, I made a list of what I wanted to read in the next year. Out of the ten books/authors listed I only ended up reading Dickens (much, much more Dickens than I expected) and Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. What about this year? First, I anticipate finishing Origin of Species, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, and Discipline and Punish. But here are some other titles I have sitting on my shelves that I'd like to read this year :

2666 by Roberto Bolano.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon.
Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill.
Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee.
Underground by Haruki Murakami
The Octopus - Frank Norris
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro.
All the Names - Jose Saramago.
Dona Flor and her Two Husbands - Jorge Amado.

Funny that the last three were on the list last year, too!

christianity, heroism, ethics

2009-12-23T23:58:00.000-08:00

The highest priority in Christian ethics is to be a hero, to do something extraordinary and extraordinarily difficult. This begins with the altar call, which is a conversion from cowardice to heroism, weakness to strength.

The non-Christian is weak, constantly giving in to sin, continually unable to resist the desires of the self. The Christian life begins with that act of aggressive heroism, standing in the middle of a crowd of strangers, always as part of a minority of other heroic figures, and moving to the front of the stage where you are entered into the army.

Likewise, Christian ethics are always talked about with the taint of heroism: chastity and purity as total sexual abstinence, for instance. But hypothetical ethical situations are always made as extreme (heroic) as possible: if you went home one day and found a man raping your wife, would you kill him?! Will you sell everything you have and give it to the poor?! Would you go to hell for someone else? If God came to you today and asked you to be a missionary to cannibals in Africa, would you go? These questions are so absurd that even I couldn't come up with them on my own!

Christian ethics is a game to invent new sins which are even more precise and difficult to follow than the old ones. Is it a sin to burn music? Is anal sex a sin? Is it a sin to not give someone money when they ask? These questions are as useful--read, useless--as when someone asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Of course, Jesus didnt answer the question, because there was no way to answer the question without assenting to the assumptions behind it, which were flawed to begin with. The question of whether something is a sin or not is the same, it is a movement towards heroism, towards making the self as strong as possible.

The same is true of analytic philosophy, which always analyzes takes a situation to the greatest extreme. I suppose this is to have the most distance, to see a situation with the greatest clarity possible. But how many of us are going to go home one day and find our wives or husbands or children being raped, and have the power to commit or not commit murder? Very few. The trouble is also in creating relationships between that extreme situation and someone punching me in a bar when I mouth off, or say something by accident. Treating them as the same, when they're not. Part of the problem with heroic ethics is, obviously, that they cannot incorporate the mundane lives that all of us live, we will always be disappointed that our friends are not being raped, because how are we to exercise our heroic ethics if a heroic situation does not present itself?

Incidentally, this is not just legalism. Legalism is only possible when its supported by the heroic ideal which tells people that they should be heroes. And I think that heroism doesnt need legalism, even if they fit together very well.

God is actually never depended on. Christian ethical heroism depends upon the strength of the self not of God. The assumption is that when the Christian "falls into sin," it's because they are not depending on God, not "finding strength in God." I suspect that to some degree the reverse is true, that erasing "sin" from a person's life is not God's highest priority, that giving people heroic situations to practice their ethics in is not God's highest priority, that God is quite willing for people to sin, having higher and better aspirations for their lives. I suspect that God does not want everyone, including all who follow him, to be Christians.

In any case, the solution for me is not to interpret the mundane as heroic but to do away with the heroic ideal altogether. As long as your priority is to be free from sin, there is no chance that you are "depending on God." But of course, I feel embarrassed to even use that sort of language, since I don't think that it means very much.

Similarly, I dont think that hypothetical ethical situations are good for anything, except for heroic boasting, or heroic self-deprecation.

representation and recollection

2009-12-20T08:32:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking some about images and representations, especially those used in the church. For some time I've been uncomfortable hearing how an image or action represents something else. Specific parts of an image represent certain ideas or ideals.

I'm uncomfortable with this because of the distinction made between objects which represent something, and objects that do not. This extends to the interpretation of sections of scripture, when the language is looked at for metaphors and representations and symbols. This is uncomfortable to me because of the assumption made that there is language which is not metaphorical, representative, symbolic. All language functions in those ways, and trying to make a distinction between what language is metaphorical and what isn't is a waste of time.

I'm also uncomfortable because of the jumps made between the image, action, text, and what those things represent. The idea is that they really do represent something which is being discovered and pointed out, rather than a connection that is being made in the mind of the interpreter. The jump is still a jump even if the explanation and interpretation are made by the creator of the object, text, action. Meaning and object are not fixed together!

But I really do like artwork in church, I like texts and stories, I like traditional practices which supposedly represent something. But what I dislike is the explication of these phenomena.

What I would like to see is a move towards seeing all of those things as reminders, as objects which aid recollection. Being splashed with water does not represent our baptism, it reminds us of baptism. Communion bread and wine does not represent the body and blood of Christ, it reminds us of them (or actually is so). Texts dont represent reality or history, they remind us of it.

But what history are we reminding ourselves of? This is where I'm stuck, because I'm also uncomfortable with the idea that history or reality is out there just waiting to be discovered and grasped and represented as a whole instead of as fractions, which it is. Still, that's one of the benefits of thinking of these things in terms of memory rather than representation: all of us are aware of how fragmented memory is, and we dont have to pretend that our objects or texts or practices are complete.

translation

2009-12-19T07:09:00.000-08:00

Another to do over Christmas:

Find a copy of Haruki Murakami's first novel, in Thai, buy a good Thai dictionary. Then overtime read and translate it (disclaimer: obviously not for commercial purposes, since as far as I know that's not legal). I've been curious to read it for a long time, since Murakami wont let it be translated into English, I'm also curious to see how my translation of the translation compares to English versions (which I know are out there...). The idea of translating it is a late addition, but I'm curious enough about translation to want to give it a whirl. It will probably be a religious experience.

Christmas Break

2009-12-09T17:58:00.000-08:00

Things I'm going to do this break, in no particular order.

1. Read Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche and A Fraction of the Whole by Steven Toltz.
2. Make my top ten of the year list, as Luke just mentioned in a comment!
3. Watch the Sherlock Holmes movie once it comes out.
4. Gain weight by actually eating. This probably wont happen until I'm back in Thailand.
5. Revise a short story I've been working on
6. Eat fruit
7. Drive my motorbike around

over-valued

2009-11-30T15:09:00.000-08:00

Coherence is overvalued and exists by ignoring a multitude of counter examples, excesses, and idiosyncracies. What I appreciate about Derrida is that he makes explicit what other writers try to hide, or are ignorant of. The desire for coherence is the desire to dominate something completely by knowing it completely, and requires violence to what lies outside of what is already explained. The mass accumulation of facts, treatises legitimating methodology, synthesis of information all disguise that there is never enough accumulation, that methodologies are always built on unjustified assumptions, and that there are a multitude of other ways information could have been synthesized. We are obsessed with truth because we are obsessed with our own selves and our own power!

Coherence ignores its own aphoristic energy by ignoring its gaps, by ignoring the jumps and assumptions between the points that it "connects," by creating a form of logic to be followed, when the form itself has no basis.

sermon illustrations

2009-11-29T12:15:00.000-08:00

Last week I went to a certain coffee shop. I was there for a short time because I had to go to a library before it closed, but also because the coffee shop had a song on loop that played over 7 times in a row, and was still playing when I left. I went there again today, thinking that my experience must have been a fluke. The first hour that I was there, they once again played a song on repeat the entire time. I started to get a headache and become angry, could not concentrate on what I was reading. So I went downstairs to ask them to turn it off and found that the stereo was on the staircase, so I started pushing buttons and accidentally turned it off. Then the manager come to see what was going on, and I told him that I was getting a headache from it being on repeat. So he said he'd get a new CD, and I returned to my seat. But when he put a new CD on, he once again left the song on repeat, for the rest of the time I was there (maybe an hour). I only noticed when I went downstairs that the baristas can't hear the music on their floor, which is the only reason they must not have gone crazy by this time.

Last Friday I was walking to the bus station to go to Edinburgh, when I saw someone drop one of his gloves. I pointed it out to him, he said thank you, I went to the bus station. In Edinburgh at a museum, I lost one of my gloves, and found it at the reception because Brent had lost his hat and went there to look for it. Certainly, the two situations are linked to each other. Perhaps on his way to the bus, Brent saw someone drop a hat, and did not tell them? That is the Christian explanation, or at least a nice sermon illustration.

games

2009-11-15T08:32:00.000-08:00

Some of my memories about games:

The night before my ankle got chopped in a hiking accident, my brother and Nathan (whose house we were staying at) played darts for quite sometime. I remember laying on the couch the whole time, but I don't remember if I was doing anything or not, or why I didn't play. I know I didn't want to be there (and had just decided the next morning to enjoy myself anyway when we had our accident).

When I was nine I played lots of ping-pong at Happy Home, the children's home my parents were working at. I remember getting better as time went on, but I can't imagine I was very good.

Before we moved to Thailand, my dad used to go to monthly pinochle parties, and it always seemed very intimidating. After years of good times playing with the Franciscuses, I got to go back to the states and play one of those nights. And I actually played very well, I think the old people were impressed. I felt like a hot shot that night.

Down at the beach, my friends always played Phase 10 in the mornings, and I never wanted to play because it took too long. But in the evenings I was happy to play speed scrabble with everyone.

A few times, my school had field trips where we bussed around Thailand for a week. We played lots of cards in the evening and on the trips. I was annoyed that people always wanted to play speed games rather than good games like hearts.

Sophmore year I would spend most of my Friday evenings playing video games by myself. My friends always asked me to watch movies, but I never wanted to watch movies. It was the time of the week that I could finally be by myself. It was good to have that time to myself, but I wish that I'd done more with them.

There have been many many nights that I was out late with my friends Zac and Caleb playing video games at LAN shops. Typically those were good nights. Strangely, though, the night I remember the most distinctly is the last time that I went out with my brother, Luke Wilcox, and Zac Franciscus (I think?) before Luke left for Australia. I remember it being very cold that night on our motorcycles going home.

(non)existence

2009-11-01T03:50:00.000-08:00

I recently went to a lecture on Darwin by Pietro Corsi. After the lecture, someone asked Corsi a question about Dawkins, and he responded, "Christians love Dawkins: 'God doesn't exist!' he says. 'Yes he does!' they say. They love him!"

This reminds me of the controversies surrounding the Da Vinci Code a few years back, and the industry that surrounded it. Dan Brown's book provided a huge (if temporary) industry for Christian writers and speakers, and that gap is perhaps being filled now by responses to Dawkins et al.

I have been thinking some about the question, Does God exist? And I'm becoming more and more convinced (by myself) that it's not a meaningful question, or that there isn't much difference between answering 'Yes God exists' or 'No God does not exist.' Both answers provide the illusion that something meaningful has been established, but both answers work into the same logic, and provide answers based on the same criteria (generally evidence). The real winner in any debate over the existence of God isnt which ever argument seems to win (existence; no existence). The real winner is the logic and form of knowing that undergirds their arguments, that is reified even by responding to each others arguments as meaningful arguments. I'm not interested in these arguments over the existence of God precisely because I'm not interested in the logic behind them, or with the binary of existence and nonexistence, or convinced that there is a great deal of difference depending on how you answer that question. Along with this question we could ask if Genesis or the gospels are "historically accurate," or whether miracles really happened, or if Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes, or if a band sings Christian music, or whether Muslims go to hell, and in all of these cases those are the wrong questions to ask, and summarily any answer (usually an either/or) is the wrong answer. Answering the question without altering the question is assent to the logic behind it.

Another question to be added to this list is the question of right and wrong, and whether specific actions are/were right or wrong. Questions of right and wrong are always anachronistic, in the sense that the situation doesn't matter (I'm not sure if situational ethics are actually very situational). I want my understanding of the past and present to be much more sophisticated than a belief that history can be written as a history of right and wrong (often the Christian view of history). I'm much more interested in talking about utility: cause, effect, function, forces upon a system, including the forces working upon your system that make it impossible for you to agree with me, or me with you.

Most arguments are empty arguments in the sense that people are secretly agreeing with each other by validating the system of knowledge in use by the involved parties. In the cases where systems dont agree, the other party is written off as absurd or crazy. To this degree, when someone's belief changes because of an argument, they're not convinced by the other person, they're convinced by themselves.

interest

2009-10-26T05:25:00.000-07:00

My question today is who benefits the most from the belief that the bible is the infallible word of God?

My answer is that the publishing companies benefit the most from the perpetuation of this belief (myth), and have perhaps even more interest in this than your average believer. Why? Because the myth encourages people not just to buy one copy, indiscriminately, but to buy multiple copies to compare to one another (to really discover what is really there). It also creates the paranoia that one doesn't have the "right" translation, that maybe this translation was good when I was fifteen, but now that I'm 22 I need to buy a more "literal" translation, or what I really need is something paraphrased, annotated, expanded. Without the belief that there is a real truth in the text that needs to be translated properly, the industry would never be able to support as many different translations in English as it does. What other text supports this many translations?

Part of the difference is that the bible has been translated into English more than any other work in a foreign language. But while I could name 15 different translations of the bible, I could name a maximum of two translations for any other work (Constance Garnett and Richard Pevear translating Crime and Punishment, for instance). The interesting thing here is that no one knows who translated the translations of the bible. Certainly, they're listed in the credits, but if anyone in my church could name one bible translator except Eugene Peterson, I would be shocked. The benefit of this (to publishers) is that it provides the illusion that something objective is being captured. The translator is hidden because we are supposed to forget that it is a translated work (and because there are usually a lot of translators).

Of course, money is just one type of benefit, and I'm sure there are many people who maintain their own power by perpetuating the myth. But I'm coming to see text as commodity, and more observant to the ways in which the object of the text is advertised and sold. It's unavoidable that text is designed to sell. Once again, lets think of bible versions, of which there is a huge plethora to supply any translation in any shape and format. Each is designed to interest a certain buyer, whether that buyer wants features or the illusion of the text on its own without features or commentary (the stark, leather covered "The Holy Bible" bible is just as designed to appeal, as it simultaneously claims to be avoiding all forms of appeal).

In what house are there so many copies of the same book? Everyone needs a personal copy of the bible.

This is significant to me in some ways because the rise of the printing press coincided with modernity and its conceptions of truth as objective, factual, literal.

tricks

2009-10-22T10:50:00.000-07:00

Recent idea of mine: if I ever publish a book, I will also write and try to publish a review of my own book that totally slams it and points out all its weaknesses and urges people not to buy it. As one friend pointed out to me, this means that my critics would have nothing to say!

As far as my biography, I am worried about an absence: my correspondence. I am bad about keeping a clean inbox, but there's still so much I delete, and that others delete. How will my correspondence be preserved? Is it even significant enough for my biography? Is it well written? I suppose I can't win at everything.

I'm interested in the ways in which criticism and interpretation act as narrative. That is, there have been certain cases lately where I have read criticism on a book, then read the book, and been shocked by how little of the book's narrative was contained in the criticism. I've read the book and found a drastically different narrative than what I believed the narrative would be. This happens when I write my own essays, of course, because there's too much too account for. But it's interesting to me that criticism and interpretation is really a creative process that ends in a new narrative, more than it is an explication of "what is there." Of course, this is unaccpetable to anyone trying (for example) to discover truth "what it REALLY says" by interpreting the bible, since any interpretation alters the narrative itself, so they're no longer interpreting the bible but telling the story they want to tell (or feel obliged to tell).

I'm also interested in precision as an excess of information, and editing as a necessary economy of information. At times I feel obliged to explain myself or my thoughts as precisely as possible. Lately, I've been discarding this for the sake of communication, and as paring away excess information, where precision would be too confusing or counter to my purposes in communication. Partly this is in writing, but partly in just talking to people, telling people about my day, etc. Sometimes this means I alter the details of a story: it is confusing and disengaging to say I heard something from a friend who heard it from a friend, rather than saying that I witnessed it myself, or heard it from a friend. When it's actually important, I'll maintain the accuracy of where I received information/narrative, but usually it's not important. But I operate on the assumption that people are always on the point of not listening, or not reading, and feel the need to explain things in a way that is either entertaining or brief.

I also, I assume that no matter how precise I am, people still won't understand, so I might as well exaggerate and/or edit. I don't mean that to be dramatic about myself, but about anyone, everyone.

I've also noticed recently how little I talk about theology on here, whereas that used to be 90% of what I talked about. In part, that's just because I'm not thinking about it much, and in a lot of ways I don't know what use God or Jesus have in my life.

But in other ways I think it's because I don't know yet how to do theology, and that most of what passes for theology isn't theology, it's biblical exegesis (in Leviticus we see this...therefore God is _____ ). I think theology is supposed to be much more creative than that, and perhaps what we should learn from the bible is half what the writers say and half to do what they do, which is invent and create and discover, and to stop acting as if the bible is "truth" or that our own inventions are supposed to be truth and represent truth.

Part of what I'm also feeling is a reluctance to be an exhibitionist about God and "my relationship with him." Why is that something that anyone needs to know about? And how respectful is it to broadcast my thoughts, feelings, stories, opinions of God out to the world? And how arrogant is it to try to figure God out, like a math problem, or a trick?

interview

2009-10-19T09:54:00.000-07:00

Here's an interview that I conducted with my brother, Zac Franciscus, and Jaci Wilcox right before they graduated, 7 years ago. I'm not sure how funny it will be to people who didn't grow up with them. Just think of it as fuel for my biographers.

Also, considering I just read Moby Dick and loved it, I thought their comments about the book were funny.

Alex: What's the stupidest thing you've ever said to a teacher?
Zach: Uh
Jaci: Oh boy..Hah, Alex
Zac: Alex is a geek.
Zach: I've never said 'Alex is a geek' to my teacher
Zac: I never said that to my teachers
Jaci: Neither did I
Alex: I'm cutting out the insults
Zach: I don't know, I don't think I've ever said anything mean to my teacher. I think I'm just a bright, shining… [Interrupted by Jaci]
Jaci: I'm a smart person, I don't say anything stupid to my teachers.
Zac: You mean teachers here, or ever?
Alex: Ever.
Zac: Um, I was in 4th grade and my teacher threatened to give me a report on rivers and so I smart-mouthed her and basically just told her I really didn't care. So she let the class vote on how many words it was supposed to be and I ended up writing a 1,000 word paper that night.
Alex: What class do you wish the school could have had?
Jaci: Uhhhhh
Zach: Home Ec.
Zac: [Laughs]
Jaci: Actually I really do wish they did had that one…
Zach: Oh yeah, me too.
Jaci: [Giggles.] [Unprintable]
Zac: He hasn't answered seriously and I'm still thinking. I'm going to hit you. Um.
Alex: Hey, Zac, I hear rumors that on the break you're gonna be teaching Home Ec. classes, is that true?
Zac: No
Alex: I can cut anything out I want.
Zac: Umm
Jaci: Heehee, and add anything that you want.
Zac: I…I wanted…I know I wanted something a little bit ago, just trying to remember what it was.
Jaci: I wish I could have done the woodshop class. I'm pathetic when it comes to practical things like that.
Zach: I would just like anything that would broaden my horizons.
Zac: I think I should hit you. Caleb, do your work.
Zach: Can we have the next question, please?
Alex: Fine.
Zac: Yeah, I abstain.[Giggles]
Alex: What was the best year here at the school?
Jaci: I think this one.
Zach: This coming year.
Zac: Yeah, so far for me, I'll agree with Jaci. Leave Zach out on his lonesome to be an idiot.
Zach: I dunno, having Luke around was good.
Alex: How about the worst year?
Jaci: Uh..Uh..I think the second year I was here.
Alex: Why?
Jaci: 'Cause I hated school.
Zach: I've never had a worst year because I've always loved school and all my teachers.
Zac: I need a knife.
Alex: How have you contributed to the school?
Zach: Being here.
Zac: I brought about the journalism department.
Jaci: I light up the room.
Zac: Only when she wears Christmas lights around her though, that's really funny, that's only when she's drunk. Wait, we're gonna edit this.
Alex: What do you guys think of the uniforms, are you planning to burn them when school's out?
Zac: If my mother wasn't giving them to the rest of my family, I, I would.
Jaci: I like our uniforms, I think they're way better than what some people have. But I would rather not wear them
Zac: I don't think we should talk to Jaci anymore.
Zach: I think uniforms are a very wise decision as they are culturally sensitive. It's good for the community to see us wearing them.
Alex: Alright, here's a serious one. What are you guys planning to go into, your plans for after school?
Zac: A building.
Jaci: I'm gonna do a [Discipleship Training School] and then apply for medical school.
Zac: I'm doing a [Discipleship Training School] then hanging out in Pennsylvania for two months then going into Journalism at Pitt.
Zach: I'm still kind of confused about this whole part.
Alex: What was the worst book you ever read here?
Zach: Moby Dick without a question.
Jaci: Moby Dick.
Zac: If I would have read it, I would most likely agree with them. Um.
Zach: You chose to read it over the Grapes of Wrath.
Zac: I haven't started it yet.
Jaci: Choose the Grapes of Wrath, do not read Moby Dick.
Zach: I agree, by all means.
Zac: [Chuckles] I want to experience the same pains as you so I can relate to you.
Jaci: There is two remotely funny parts in the whole entire book and they wouldn't be funny if you hadn't been reading Moby Dick.
Alex: [To Zac] Worst book, worst book.
Zac: What?
Alex: Worst book.
Zac: We're having a conversation, go away.
Alex: Worst book.
Zac: Um. I really didn't like Brave New World.
Jaci: That was interesting.
Zac: I thought it was pointless and depressing.
Zach: I loved it.
Alex: What kind of animal do you think the school mascot should be?
Jaci: A weasel. Actually, I don't think I've ever seen a weasel.
Zac: Mint.
Zach: You. You animal, you.
Zac: [Throaty growl]
Alex: What's the biggest stunt you ever pulled here at school?
Zac: I switched all the locker doors one day. Remember that at our old school it would happen a lot.
Zach: I didn't wear my uniform once.
Alex: Rebel.
Zac: You rebel, you.
Jaci: Uhhh..
Zac: Lock you up now.
Alex: Jaci's another one of those rebels.
Jaci: Yeah, I'm a loser. I didn't do anything.
Zach: However I was a uh, I was uh, at least I knew about it, I could have prevented Kevin from coming in and crashing the middle school party.
Kevin: Can I object?
Zach: No.
Zac: Be quiet, Canadian.

the accident

2009-10-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

When I was 16 or 17, I played ultimate frisbee every saturday afternoon at a field several miles from my house. I would drive there on my motorbike and on the way home would often stop at the local market to buy dinner. One night I was going home, it must have been later in the year because it was getting dark early, and I bought fried chicken and sticky rice. Back on the highway, I stopped at a roundabout to turn around to go home. As I was waiting for an opening in the traffic I heard a crashing sound and looked behind me to see people and a motorbike flying through the air, and then skidding along the road at high speed.

I immediately pulled off the road and went over to the first woman, who was mostly delirious and scratched up, but probably not very hurt. I carried her to a roadside restaurant where some people cleaned her off with rags. She'd bled on my bag, and I think I had some on my hand, and thought about AIDS. In hindsight, it may not have been smart for someone like me (totally without medical training) to move her, but I don't think it did any real harm. I dont remember if there was a little girl, too, but I think there may have been. I left the woman with some of the Thais and went over to the second woman. By this time, there were plenty of people crowding around on the road and it was starting to rain. The second woman was bleeding from her head (none of them were wearing helmets), and there was a puddle as thick as ketchup around her head.

I must have had a cloth, because I remember I was going to hold it to her head to staunch the blood flow, but the Thais nearby stopped me, and I couldn't understand how we could all stand there and watch her bleed out of her head, and no one would touch her or help. I still don't know why, if it was fear of disease, or of touching a dying person, or of liability, or some medical reason, but I still feel ashamed that I didnt do more to help. Eventually an ambulance came and took them away, and I went home.

A week or two later I took some friends by and showed them where it had happened, and there was still a blood stain on the road where the woman's head had been. I haven't told this story to many people, not when it happened or since. I'm not sure why. I don't think of it very often, but I was thinking about it today for some reason.

Another night, after a school dance, I was driving to a friend's house when up ahead I saw several motorbikes and a group of men on the roadside. When i drove past, I saw them dragging someone into the ditch by the side of the road. I stopped a little ways up the road, and they looked at me, but I didn't know what to do, and I was scared for myself, so I kept driving. On the way home, I went back and shone my light into the overgrown ditch, and looked around, but didn't see any bodies or any one. I still don't know what happened, whether they were helping their drunk friend throw up, or if someone was seriously injured or killed, and I witnessed them hiding a body.

a short history of (my) money

2009-10-09T16:55:00.000-07:00

1 (0-12): the earliest memory I have of money is getting a 2 dollar allowance per week. My brother spent a lot of money on nachos, we both spent money on baseball cards. Mostly, I spent money on books, legos, and playmobile, or I just threw everything in a chest that I had. When I counted up my change, it was $30. Apparently for quite a bit of this time my family was pretty bad off financially. I never felt it or felt stressed about money.

2 (12-14): When we moved back to Thailand, my parents gave us (weekly) our age with a 10x multipler (12 years old meant 120 baht a week). Once again, I have no idea what I bought with my money. I went to LAN shops sometimes, bought some snacks, but I also saved a lot of my lunch/snack money. I always had money, never had to think about it.

3 (15-19): Saved even more money, but never felt like I couldnt spend. There just wasnt that much to buy. Kept buying books, fried chicken. Parents reimbursed me for gas. Took bus rides to other towns, went to movies, went to LAN shops till all hours of the night, gave money to strangers. I always had more money than all my friends, and never understood how they could be short when I felt like I wasn't careful at all but I always had money. Never bought clothes, if I did my parents paid me back.

4 (19-20): Moved to the states and got a job. Made $5-6000 in 2 months working at a JanSport warehouse. Became extremely conservative with money, especially because of college, when I barely had enough to make my spring quarter payment. Never went out to eat, rarely bought books except for school, never went out to eat, didnt go to the doctor at times I probably should have. Before this time, I never had to consider the cost of anything. Worked in the cafeteria. Over the summer, made $2500 working for a Lutheran parish that gave me free rent. Gave money to friends for things they cared about.

5 (20-21): No job, started going to coffee shops. My friends kept me in the dorms spring quarter by giving me $2000. Went out to a lot of coffee shops, sometimes out to meals.

6 (21-22): Started going to bars, eating out more, paying monthly rather than quarterly rent and food costs. Worked at the library over summer and school year, went out places a lot, bought books I wanted, went to Oxford (where my plane tickets were paid for me by strangers, $1000+ of tuition was given to me by strangers, received $7000 in scholarships I wasnt expecting and hadnt applied for). Still feel guilty every time I dont give money to those who ask for it and those in need: "Whatever you have done for the least of these..."

I generally live my life assuming that if something is good, the money will be provided. So far, that's turned out to be true, and I don't regret giving away any amount of money, no matter how ridiculous, to anyone, whatever they spent it on. I also think I've been damn lucky, or blessed, or whatever you want to call it.

travel writing

2009-10-07T11:47:00.001-07:00

In which I start talking about travel writing and end up talking about how no one actually cares about what pictures are taken of.

I started reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle the other day, and was surprised by how little of Darwin there is in it. The Voyage is a memoir of five years of travel and research that he did aboard a ship (although he spent about 3 of those years on land), and in these memoirs he dives into biology, anthropology, history, and geology (and who-knows-what-else in what I haven't read yet). I'm interested in this on two fronts: first, how little there is of Darwin; second, how much this would fail if attempted today.

First: by reading the Voyage we would know very little about Darwin. He doesn't include anecdotes of his past or his own history, even though he is willing to talk about the lives of the people he meets. He subjects everything in his narrative to a level of observation that he never extends to himself. Darwin is in some ways the center of the text, everything is written by him and more or less about his experiences, but we learn about him not through anything he says about himself but by what he writes about everything else and the methods he employs to discover.

Here is where I swim a little into the deep end where I mostly have speculation without data.

Second: any travel writer today that attempted to make observations that are disciplinary in nature would not be taken seriously by academics or researchers. Biology, anthropology, geology, and history have solidified enough that there are acceptable methods and necessary bodies of knowledge to be able to enter into those discourses as someone who was something new and legitimate to say. So the plight of the travel writer is that someone else has studied much more in depth and systematically the things they are experiencing and observing, so that for a travel writer to make claims about social structures and customs doesnt have much weight. What's left then? The self and the experience that the self has. Without the ability to talk about what is outside, all that's left is the inside.

I'm also interested in this in correlation with photography and the development of the camera as a popular, affordable product. Most people (that I know) aren't good at writing about their traveling, and dont do it very much. Instead, they take a lot of pictures. But what is the point and what is the subject of these pictures?

One option is to use them as social commentary, but I think that just falls into sentimentality and essentialization. For instance, I show you all a picture of a Latvian man sitting on the sidewalk from my recent travels to Latvia, captioned with this: "Unemployment and poverty are sky-rocketing in Latvia." This sort of social commentary with photography is, I think, pretty useless unless it's backed up by actual research or by interacting with the subject of the photo, because what do I really know about that man, who am I to make him stand in for Latvian poverty?

So what is the point of photography? The dismal side of it is that most pictures are not unique. By that, I mean that anyone could reproduce the same picture by standing where I stood and pointing their camera at the angle I pointed. There is some level of personality in what is selected and edited, but it could still be reproduced easily. Not to mention (like someone was saying to Brent, Nate, and I the other day)...I don't know what I'm seeing. I can take a picture of hundreds of interesting buildings and alleyways and streets, but I don't know anything about them, so my selection might be informed aesthetically, but ultimately uninformed socially, culturally, politically. And the aesthetic is what most people compliment about other peoples pictures, the texture, definition, color, angle, balancing, etc. But noone would care about these pictures of the same objects if they were low resolution, pixellated, unbalanced, blown out. That is why I think that few people actually care about the subject/object of their own photography or other peoples photography.

In this sense, I think photography mostly points to the self, the one who took the picture, rather than the subject/object of the photo. Photo albums have very little to do with what is in the photos (stonehenge? who cares? there's a million better pictures out there). The function of photo albums and photography is to point to the experiences of the self: I went to Stonehenge, or Riga, and took this photo and edited it, even if I know nothing about what I'm photographing, and if the object doesn't matter to those who are viewing it. After all? Wouldn't people have the same level of appreciation of my pictures of Latvia if I claimed they were pictures of Lithuania, Estonia, Czech republic? Very few people would know enough to say that I was wrong, and no one would care in their aesthetic appreciation of it.

Perhaps this is the reason that I take absurd photographs and don't really care to put up photo albums, or to take pictures very often. The only pictures that are really interesting to me are pictures of human interactions and processes, pictures that couldn't be reproduced because no one could go back to the time/even/location of where it happened. Too bad my camera can't replicate those moments very well. And, I suppose it's really a false distinction to make between pictures of processes and pictures of still life: there is no still life, everything is a part of ongoing social, chemical, biological, economical processes, and is always changing. The idea of still life has to be scrapped!

But it's not all glass-half-empty, who says any of this is a bad thing? I suppose my instinct is to be angry about it, but I don't know that I have good reason to be.

thoughts on scholarship

2009-09-28T13:16:00.001-07:00

In the last few weeks I've had to read (or skim) quite a lot of academic books written on various historical topics. What brings most of them together thematically is how poorly they're written. Most are composed of long paragraphs that argue nothing but quote extensively (sometimes multiple blocked quotes in a single paragraph) and list list list different things. They read like extensively annotated bibliographies, and often that's the most interesting thing about them: the primary sources they point to and, occasionally, other secondary sources. I've been surprised by how unconscious many of the writers are about their own methodology, the theory undergirding what they're doing, and how sparse their arguments are. Some of that might be surprising because most academic work I've read has been literary criticism or theory, and the argument is much more central there, theory much more common. Anyway, I suppose the quick retort is that I haven't accomplished anything good, so I should be quiet. Maybe so.

I did read an article by F.R. Ankersmit the other day, where Ankersmit was talking about over-production in history, and how historians need to stop investigating the past and start thinking about it. That's very appealing to me, even though uncovering new sources or discovering obscure sources also has its appeal.

other countries

2009-09-24T14:31:00.000-07:00

First things first: due to demand, I've created an email address for my biographers. If you'd like to contribute to their efforts, please send images, stories, and memories to apm.biography@gmail.com. Your work will not go unnoticed.

I was reading earlier in an article on the heritage industry by Robert Hewison: "Steam is now safely part of the industrial heritage, let nuclear power adopt the same camouflage." This is something that's been on my mind lately, not so much energy, but the ways in which commodifying history hides the present, so that going on tours of 18th century prisons hides the presence of incarceration in our present states; touring Victorian warships disguises the ways in which the British (or American) military is being deployed around the world; displays of dead states hide the real and present states. This isn't my feeling about history as a discipline, not at all, but I do feel that way about the different exhibits I've gone to here. And I am really blind to the present, I have no idea about prisons and the justices or injustices that are taking place in them.

And yet I wonder if that's a fair dichotomy to make, between commodified and uncommodified history. If there's a history article, journal, or book that I'm reading, it's because its publication was considered to be economically beneficial. This isn't to say that the writers are making a ton of money, because they are certainly not except in rare cases, or even that publishers are necessarily making a ton of money (I'm guessing, but not sure, that academic presses make less profits than popular presses). But, I would be shocked if anyone published what they thought wouldn't sell, and what would have no demand (hence, books go out of print). History, like everything else, has to be juicy and commodified, or it will never become public (unless the blogosphere erupts with historians). I'm not necessarily comfortable with thinking about everything in these terms, but I am becoming much more fascinated at the intersections between money, power, and knowledge, in all areas of knowledge (replace 'history' with 'science' in this last paragraph, and it would probably be able to stand up unrevised, for instance). Maybe for that reason, I'm becoming really interested in the publishing industry throughout its existence. even before the publishing industry, what has been considered to be worthy of replication and dissemination.

time is on my side

2009-09-21T13:56:00.000-07:00

If I were to become a historian, and I almost certainly won't, I would be interested in writing history totally without references to dates or years, or calculated divisions of time. From there, I would refuse to call anyone by their 'name,' although this would lead to even bigger problems of reference and narrative. I'm more interested in time, and in writing history in this way as an experiment, to find how substantially different it is. Hundred Years War? Never happened.

Ironically, I have an acute sense of time and narrative in regards to my own life, and perhaps organize events primarily according to the year in which they happened. It always startles me when other people don't. I have no idea how other people organize memories.

In other news, I've been thinking lately of how disconnected I feel from 'the news' or world events at large, even more so than I did in the states. Over there, I may have only rarely read the papers, but I at least processed them at work, saw the headlines, heard other people talking about things. Here, I never even see newspapers, or anyone reading them. In London, they were more common, but it all looked like more tabloid news than news I'm interested in. It's not something I'm entirely comfortable with, but the chances are slim that I'll do anything to change it anytime soon.

2009-09-19T06:11:00.000-07:00

Herman Melville wrote this in a letter to Hawthorne after finishing Moby Dick: "I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb."

I never feel more at peace with God than when I am blaspheming him.

I have been meeting a lot of new people lately, and making a lot of jokes, which is pretty typical for me. It's always interesting to see which people get when and why I'm joking. Generally comments I make about the nature of reality, truth, identity, language, and knowledge are thrown out as jokes, to make people laugh, but are pretty serious. Ditto when I make jokes about being Jesus. This has been my habit for years and years.

Apparently I essentialize the self as a joke.

biography

2009-09-17T09:50:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about my biographers lately, and wondering what sort of materials they will have at their disposal to write my life. The internet makes archiving things so much easier, but it's also so much easier to erase things totally (at least I think it's easier to click a button than to burn or throw something away). Out of sympathy to my future biographers, I promise to never delete another email, or throw away any note or notebook or photo, never throw away anything that I've owned. Keep all receipts, bills, and bank statements.

This blog isn't about me, it's all about my biographers.

artifacts

2009-09-02T13:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I went to the British museum and looked at artifacts. There were many ancient things from all over the world but, to me, the most interesting artifact was the museum itself. Arguably, this is actually what's most important to everyone who goes there, who don't go to see Celtic spoons or Turkish tiles, they go to see the museum itself, and to be able to say that they went there. Viewing every gallery, the entire museum, is more important than any of the individual displays.

But, maybe that's just me.

Of the actual displays, I particularly enjoyed the pieces from persepolis. But, along with most of the other artifacts on display, I couldn't help but see on these objects the traces of imperialism and colonization.

there is no true culture

2009-08-30T06:57:00.000-07:00

I dont believe there is such thing as authentic culture that can be discovered and described, authentic as in essential, or more true. For instance: food. It always puzzles me when people ask me whether Thai food tastes "authentic" or not, as if they judge whether or not hamburgers are "authentic" American. In that case, its either a good burger or bad burger, not a burger that is representative of American culture and cooking. That said, it seems like there are patterns of behavior among localized groups that can be generalized and described, but not as authentic or true.

Now that I'm in England, this is something I've been thinking about. Especially that culture might primarily be a commodity that is sold in souvenir shops, restaurants, sites, and books, or used as a strategy to sell specific commodities. I'm also interested in the ways that history is used to the same ends. London has many "historic" sites, but I wonder to what extent they exist as carefully produced and reproduced commodities. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but its hard for me to get excited about things being authentic or historical when those terms are used primarily as selling strategies.

objectification

2009-08-19T22:36:00.000-07:00

1. The other day, my brother's ipod was stolen out of his backpack when he forgot it for an hour in the bathroom of a bubble tea shop. I'm not sure what there is to say about this, I'm sure an easy route is to talk about depraved human nature, but I don't believe in that (or think it's very interesting, unless it's in a Cormac McCarthy novel, perhaps, which isnt the same animal). What's interesting to me is how the theft was anonymous, and yet I almost certainly saw the face of the person who stole it, and I wonder if they knew who they were taking it from, and if they saw my sister in law bring the bag out.

2. Quite often I hear advertisements or various media criticized because of the ways in which they objectify women, or turn women into objects. Maybe I just don't understand the ways in which the word is being used, but I don't think this is a very strong or illuminating criticism, because nothing can be represented without objectification, including the self. On here, I cannot represent myself or even use 'I' without turning myself into an object to be utilized and analyzed, where a part stands in for the whole.

But, that isn't to say the concerns about how women are represented are unfounded. However, I do think that some of the other criticisms are not backed very well. For instance, lets say that an advertisement is criticized because of the way that it not only turns women into objects but turns them into sex objects, or how representations sexualize women, or split the body from an inner self. But this seems like a projection of the response of the viewer to the image, rather than something that is inherent in the representation. Things are only sexual if they are perceived to be sexual. The criticism is a projection of the feelings of the viewer onto the object, rather than something in the object/image that is discovered and revealed.

In the same way, images are essentialized by the viewer/critic rather than the images being essentialist in themselves. For instance, I might criticize an image for how it turns women into sex objects. My claim is that the image itself projects a way that all women should be viewed, or a gaze that should be assumed when turned towards women. But once again this seems like a projection of the viewer rather than something inherent, when I say that an advertisement is making claims about all women, I am the one who is making that woman (or women) stand in for all women in all cultures. And that, to me, is sometimes scarier than the image itself, because then I am complicit, and even if I reject the totalizing/sexualized image, I replace it with a different essentialization, which I think is not very much improvement, if any.

That isn't to say that there are not real problems in advertising, or music, or videos or video games, only that many of the criticisms are not very self conscious about the methods of their criticism (and of course, I'm not talking about professional critics, just pop criticism that I hear from the people around me).

Anyway, I'm just using the issue of women and advertisement as an example, but it really bleeds into a lot of identity criticism.

decay

2009-07-20T23:20:00.000-07:00

From Darwin's Plots by Gillian Beer:

"These examples show one of the difficulties on the path of evolutionary theory. It is a theory which does not privilege the present, which sees it as a moving instant in an endless process of change. Yet it has persistently been recast to make it seem that all the past has been yearning towards the present moment and is satisfied now" (11).

While I don't question her arguments in regards to biology, it seems that this does not necessarily transfer into other realms. The church constantly behaves as if the early church was the best model we have for what Christianity should be, and that the early Christians had better theology. Summarily, we try to discover what it was that they believed so that we can believe likewise, and sometimes it seems as if the arguments over what Paul did or did not mean when he said what he said wouldn't even be important unless we believe that what Paul and the early church believed is what we should follow. Similarly, that the early church best understood Jesus and what he meant in his teachings, and how we are to follow him. Are there any good or compelling reasons to believe that? Especially when the gospel accounts so consistently emphasize how much Jesus' followers didn't understand. That alone seems to be encouragement to press forward, rather than backwards, to discover new ways of meaning rather than trying to replicate old ways of meaning.

I think, also, that this quest for origins is accompanied by the idea that the world is consistently getting worse (more sinful), that there was a time (even in our own or our parents' own lives!) when things were better, more pure, and people really, genuinely followed god. We have to return, then, to the better time of before, we have to have revivals to bring back to life something that used to be alive.

I'm all about survival of the fittest, or maybe just of what Neruda writes, "Let us be weary of what kills, / and of what doesn't want to die." Extinction and death are important parts of life, and revival just means killing the new life. Let's be scared of anything that doesn't change.

In other news, in the library today I discovered an Un-American Activities in Washington State Report from 1948. It was transcript of various hearings of "Un-Americans," which translates to commies. I was proud of the English professor who refused to testify, and instead quoted Shakespeare and Plotinus at his interrogators.

some things used to be different

2009-07-19T23:05:00.000-07:00

Recently, I read about various debates in Victorian biblical hermeneutics. One of the questions (that I think is still being debated today) is whether or not the bible can/should be interpreted as all other literature and writing is interpreted. 1) I hold pretty strongly that the bible being 'scripture' doesn't free it from the problems (and peculiarities) of all other writing. 2) No one reads literature as a set of moral lessons or instructions. Discourse and ideologies are examined, but narrative is not reduced (at least in literature studies) to attempts to discover how I should eat or who I should sleep with or live with (but of course writing has these political/ideological/moral conversations). But even if such lessons are prescribed, this doesn't transfer into prescription for how to live my life.

Attempting to turn writing into instructions, morals, ideologies to follow is disrespectful of text and author, and transforms the text into propaganda, or uses it for the purpose of propaganda. Similarly, trying to find an emergent discourse or lesson out of a text (what does the story of David and Bathsheba teach us? what does "The Bible" say about faith and deeds, etc) is really blinding. The bible is not the location of a single or coherent theology, it is many theologies. The bible is not the location of one coherent or systematic truth. What interests me more at the moment is thinking of the bible in terms of dialogue: each book with the others, with itself, with its readers, with other literature that has appropriated the bible and biblical narratives. And trying to find "lessons" in the bible is the source of the problem, it flattens the entire bible and the many voices found within.

Also. I've been thinking about history lately. I read an article on transatlantic literature in the nineteenth century last week, and one of the arguments being made was that the American writers in that time period were very concerned with the issue of history, precisely because their country was new and in this sense they had a chip on their shoulder compared to their european counterparts. What I see there, then, is deliberate rejection of ignorance of history in early US history. I don't know how widespread this was, but it is easy for me to see how this might have evolved into the current America (or American church). BUT, let's not talk about cause and effect, because that can be easily rejected, because I simply don't have evidence.

Instead, I'll say that I wish the church in America had more of a sense of and appreciation for history, especially hermeneutical history, for which interpretations that seem to be traditional and orthodox (the infallibility of the bible? "literal" creation story? etc.) are either new species of interpretation or were moot questions historically. Even more of an understanding of modernity, and conceptions of truth that were developed in modernity (perhaps post-modernity would not seem threatening to people if they understood that much of what is being rejected is not something that has been passed on from the beginning of the church or civilization or time, what is being rejected is a species of belief that is still relatively young, if powerful. But no one wants to study history: it's terrifying to learn that the present is not the same as the past, and is not always better.

And history is boring of course.

various

2009-06-25T10:34:00.000-07:00

The imagery in most worship music is boring. This is because most Christians worship the Bible, and not God, and do not see a difference between representations of God and God himself. Consequently, imagery in worship music becomes rehashes of the Bible rather than anything creative or new (how many worship songs reference rising "on eagles wings"?). And, for the bible-worshippers, it might actually be considered a good thing, because to come up with something new is a violation of the idea that truth is timeless and so anything new is false. Fortunately, the writers of the bible did not see things this way, since they were constantly creating new imagery (while being intertextual and referencing previous imagery). Or, songs rehash other worship songs (how many songs have referenced Amazing Grace, for instance). Creativity is not spitting out verses from the bible. That's a not very articulate rant, but it's been on my mind for some time.

Here's a thought about facts: inasmuch as facts exist (and I'm not sure they do), facts in and of themselves are meaningless. Meaning is external to the fact (for instance, if we take it as fact that Jesus died, there is no meaning in that, we must examine the implications/interpretation of the fact to arrive at meaning). Meaning is always external rather than intrinsic and internal.

I was looking the other day at a portrait photo, and thinking about how creepy portrait photos are. I'm thinking of photos of a single person against a blank backdrop, and how the blank backdrop totally strips the event of any sort of narrative or history, and how much more I like photos that are set somewhere. Perhaps this is why I dislike flower and plant photography, too, because the close up could be of any flower anywhere, and there is nothing happening.

audience

2009-05-31T20:38:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking lately about how important audience is me. Not necessarily thinking of a specific audience for x or y, but in imagining or finding the existence of an audience. Here's what I mean:

Lately I've realized how central an imaginary audience is to my sense of humor. Most of the jokes I make and strange things I do are not for the people I'm around, but for an outside observe, whether real or imagined. So most people just feel confused by my humor, whereas an audience would find what I do to be much funnier, and what I think I do that is funny is funny to me when I imagine an audience watching. This is something I'm discovering rather than something I've been aware of or conscious of.

Similarly, with writing. I've heard creative writers given the advice to write as if no one would read what they wrote, write for themselves. I function in totally the opposite direction. My work only gains quality if I assume or imagine that at some point, some one will read what I'm writing. My writing takes on clarity, focus, and creativity, whereas without an audience it would be sloppy and self-indulgent.

Similarly, with music and performance. I can never bring myself during practice to perform as well as I do during the real thing. For instance, in my Shakespeare class last week I had a performance in front of the class, and did better during the actual performance than during any of the practices. With music, I sing better and play more creatively in front of an audience than during practice.

And I think this is why I don't enjoy "theatre" more, even though on an every day basis I'm constantly acting, throwing up masks and tricking people. With theatre, the artifice is too apparent. If I'm going to be acting, it has to be for real.

tradition

2009-05-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

Many people, when they're stressed or unsure, adhere to tradition. I've noticed in the last year that I am the opposite, that when I really need to find a way to relax myself, I break with tradition and habit of what I've done before. No better or worse, just the way it is.

Over the last year, though, I've become even more deliberately at odds with tradition, especially tradition and origin as a source of authority. In part, this is why Derrida's arguments on the futility of trying to find origins for words (as a source of authority) is very appealing to me. This has become especially frustrating to me in trying to play music with people this year. I generally don't think it's a relevant question to appeal to the way we've played songs before as the way we should play them. Or, the way they were written or recorded by previous artists.

In this sense, I don't think of any part of a song as stable, or something that must necessarily be kept. I don't care about maintaining the melody, or the chords, or the words, or the mood, or the tempo. Likewise, when I'm playing music by myself, I rarely play a song the same way twice, so that I'm not creating a new authoritative version even for myself. More interesting to me than tradition is the creative impulses people are feeling at a given moment, and the context that the song is being played in, rather than anything absolute about the song. Of course, I can appreciate those sorts of tradition questions just for the sake of efficiency, or trying to remember a specific part so that people aren't confused, but not for anything more. Anyway, that's just how I work best.

In the end, I just feel embarrassed doing the same thing twice.

humanism

2009-05-18T22:06:00.000-07:00

Up until recently, humanism has been very appealing to me. There seems to be something wholesome and true about the notion of human value, about equality of humanity, about inherent worth in humanity that has appealed to me. Further, the idea of a human condition or experience has been appealing to me, especially thinking of Jesus as entering experiencing the human condition (and by human condition I don't mean "sinful human nature.") While this human condition or nature often means sinful to people, it hasn't meant this to me for some time. I've seen people as basically good, and I liked that.

But there are certain problems to humanism that I do think are worth considering. For instance, humanism has the capacity to conflate and disrespect human experience and suffering. It assumes a oneness in humanity that means I have the capacity, on some level, to empathize and understand your suffering, and you mine, and of a oneness throughout time. In other words, it confuses people with one another and makes their problems the same. Humanism in this way acts as a metatheory or metanarrative that subordinates individual narratives into one human experience. And I do think that's a significant problem.

To break this down even farther: humanism is variously loving and non loving, respectful and non respectful of humans. Right now, I don't know what to do with metan-theories or meta-narratives, or essentializing claims, and this means I don't know what to do with humanism. Although, to be honest, "humanism" is probably just a red herring. I don't actually care about "humanism," I care about how I am to see, know, and understand myself, the people around me, and the world.

3 years

2009-05-10T22:22:00.000-07:00

I recently passed the 3 year anniversary of my return to the States. I'm not sure what to say about it except that it happened, and that I haven't been disappointed.

And this is significant to me because I've been thinking lately about disappointment, and how inevitable disappointment is in life, in work, in relationships, in projects, in conversations and situations. And yet, when I look back over my life this far, I'm not disappointed. Ultimately, I'm not disappointed in the education I've received at SPU, or the time that I've had here. Of course there have been disappointing aspects, as there have been throughout my life, but in general I feel like what has happened has been good. And yet, part of me is still attracted to inevitable disappointment, to the idea of being old and looking back on life with great disappointment. Maybe that will happen, perhaps not.

Three years is a long time.

objectivity

2009-04-23T00:11:00.000-07:00

Many times in my life, I've heard pastors, worship leaders, and missions groups pray for God to eliminate them from speaking, leading, and acting, and leave only God's will. I've prayed this prayer myself, in regards to worship or my daily life. More recently, however, in the last year or so, it's begun to seriously bother me, and I want to try to articulate some of the reasons that it does. This isn't directed at anyone, I just want a place to articulate what I'm thinking.

1. It never works. When a preacher prays for God to let them only say what is from God, and that all their ideas and thoughts, whatever is of them, be erased, it doesn't work. Sermons are still shot through with the personal opinions, biases, and beliefs of the speaker. Similarly, missionaries act based on theory of how they should act, and this theory is their belief rather than something handed down from God, and worship leaders sing songs with bad theology that are inappropriate for the situation, and choose songs based totally on preference rather than the work of God. Incidentally, I think its ridiculous to assert that the introduction of subjective elements into a sermon have anything to do with sin, that a pure believer would be able to totally erase themself.

2. I think this posturing of eliminating the self also eliminates all passion from worship, action, and teaching. Witness what happens when, as a worship leader, you don't believe the songs that you're playing, or try to choose songs on some sort of objective criteria. It's a miserable, deadening experience. Similarly, it's incredibly boring to listen to people talk about things they don't care about. And, more than boring, it's not rhetorically persuasive or appealing (thanks lit theory for inspiring that thought). And I think that the one leads to the other, that trying to eliminate the self from faith experiences results in not caring anymore about what you do.

3. The only way I can listen to speakers and participate in ,and not go crazy, is to think of them as expressions of belief, not as statements of truth. I hear people pray those prayers, and then say awful things to the extent that if those things are from God, I want no part in God. And that's what makes those expressions interesting, is that they are provisional, they're never quite there. I don't go to church to find truth, or to find God, I go there to be with the church.

4. Where does this posturing even come from? Perhaps from Jesus, from his claim that the things he teaches are not his own ideas but have been given to him from God, or ultimately from his decision to go and die. Or perhaps from Paul, "I have been crucified with Christ and no longer live..." These are nice sentiments, but I don't believe that Paul's writings were handed to him by God, or that Paul and Paul's personal, subjective beliefs were eliminated from his writing. That is to say, I dont think that Paul's letters could have been written by anyone except Paul. That's something to be celebrated. If what Paul meant was that he's an empty vessel for God to direct and manipulate and erase, he was wrong. It didnt happen. Eliminate subjectivity and you throw out the Bible and the entire Christian tradition.

In part, this is a subset of a larger problem for me. I hear people admit that objectivity is impossible, but that it's something to strive for. Something in that feels off to me, but I don't know how to articulate it at this point. In what sense do they mean I should try to be objective? Is what these people mean by objectivity actually objectivity? People go crazy trying to be objective, because inevitably they are forced away from objectivity any time they choose anything. I don't want to go crazy.

covers

2009-04-13T23:33:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about book covers recently. Mostly what I've been wondering is whether classic books could be published with contemporary art work on the covers, and whether or not contemporary stories could be published with classical artwork. Or maybe the question I'm getting at is whether they would sell as well and whether people would take them as seriously. Does publishing a book with contemporary art work imply that a certain standard of writing, a certain way of ordering the world will be found within, and the failure of the two to synchronize would result in discontentment? In other words, would people feel cheated if David Copperfield was published with the same cover as The Savage Detectives?

This also, I think, has to do with "don't judge a book by its cover." In my experience, books should absolutely be judged by their covers. That is, covers and imprints are usually marketed towards a certain audience and with certain genres and standards in mind. Similar covers imply similar content and experience created for certain audiences. In general, I've found that when I dislike covers, I'm usually not very interested in the blurbs about the books, and often if I read them they end up being low quality, unenjoyable works. Then again, a lot of this has to do with layout, font, page and font size, paper quality, binding quality, etc. I suppose part of the argument is that David Copperfield published with two covers is actually two different books, and so it's impossible to equate or conflate separate readings of each.

In other news, I feel that my life is always a balancing act between production and consumption, where when I don't consume, I feel empty, and when I don't produce, I feel stuffed. There are times when I can't read anymore until I do something productive, especially writing or music, and times when I need to read because I've been producing too much. I feel like the general trend of my life has been tow

Publish Post

ards consumption of knowledge and information, but more and more I see it drifting towards production, or at least towards a balance between the two. I want to produce, and sometimes having to take in more and more just gets exhausting, whereas I don't think the same amount of information would feel exhausting if I were producing more. Hence this blog post.

o my sinuses

2009-04-04T20:41:00.001-07:00

When I was growing up, I didn't pay any attention to the nutritional quality of the food I was eating. Not until I was 17 or so. I was, in general, very healthy and fit. Since then, as I've become more and more careful about what I eat, I get sick all the time. Additionally, I was eating food from all the street vendors in Thailand, while now I'm buying from supermarkets in the States. In other words, I need to start eating more junk food, sit around and play video games, and move somewhere warmer so I don't have to deal with all these little sicknesses.

I've been thinking recently about atheism. I wonder if more people become atheists because they can't find a use for God than from a lack of reasons to believe in God's existence. I wonder if much of the believing life is trying to find a reason to keep God around, to find something that he sustains or changes, to find some activity that he takes part in. This has become more and more difficult for me to do over the years, especially in my movement away from a morality and sin basis for understanding who God is: before, I believed that I needed God to be a good, moral person, but I don't believe that any longer. Why? Partially because I don't believe that morality is God's main interest in my life, but also just because most of the time where I do wrong or do right, God seems to be totally absent from the entire process. I don't want to invent uses for God and insert him into processes where he does not exist. That's lead me to better, healthier territory, but problem territory.

I've also been thinking about how much I hate people in general, and like them in particular. When I go around in life and see all the messes that people make, how inconsiderate, cruel, and irresponsible they are, I hate them. But when I come up against a single individual who makes a mess out of life, who is inconsiderate, cruel, and irresponsible, I often like them. Often, but not always. I think that what I hate is really an imagined person, a sort of straw man target that I mentally abuse, but who doesn't exist in reality (this is, arguably, how Jesus functions: he condemns the pharisees as a faceless, nameless mass, but he treats individuals with great compassion.) Or sometimes I bitch about people, in my head mostly, when they're not around, but then when I'm with them, whatever I'm bitching about doesn't seem to matter that much.

Contrary to contemporary Christian pop theology, I don't think it's possible to love someone unless you like them. Without liking them, you may be able to treat them with courtesy and respect, to make sacrifices for them, but I don't think it's possible to really love them when you dislike them. To like someone, I think, is to take joy in the essence of who they are, and without that joy, I don't think that love is possible. "Love the sinner, hate the sin," is also nonsense to me, along similar lines.

Let's not forget that justice isn't only about punishing those who do wrong, it's restoring those who have been wronged. When justice is talked about in the first sense, I am bored and repulsed. When it's talked about in the second sense, I'm excited. And, it is possible to have the second without the first.

Anger about the injustices in the world inhibits learning about those injustices and, summarily, inhibits the solutions to those injustices. Get angry once you know something.

I'm obviously writing my own book of proverbs.

trip

2009-03-25T00:16:00.000-07:00

Tonight I'm sleeping in the living room of my house. I'm sleeping there because tomorrow morning I'm driving to San Francisco for a few days. I just washed my sheets, and I feel like my return home will be much more satisfying if I come home to clean sheets, so tonight I'm sleeping in the living room to not get my sheets dirty.

coincidence

2009-03-12T12:32:00.000-07:00

Recently I received an assignment for one of my classes to write about what makes a story satisfying. My answer is that what feels like real life is satisfying, and for me that means a high degree of coincidence: random meetings, chance encounters, chaotic events that often are not purposeful or guided but lead to a meaningful end. That's how real life feels to me. Sometimes I think of this as God, leading life to a meaningful end, but I don't always want to or feel the need to take it that far. Sometimes coincidence is providence, sometimes it's just coincidence. When I look back on my life, that's what I see, a string of coincidences without which I would not be where I am today.

music

2009-03-11T00:10:00.000-07:00

I'm insecure about my music. Not music that I've written (which doesn't exist, for the most part), but music that I like and listen to. I'm always very nervous about putting it on, no matter where I am. Mostly, my music isn't appropriate for any sort of social situation, except maybe travel. I listen to car music. For instance: Weezer. I couldn't put Weezer on during dinner time when I'm sitting down with housemates. Most of my friends listen to easy listening music that's appropriate in many situations. In other words, most people don't like the music that I like, and I feel nervous about putting it on. So, I usually just listen to music when I'm alone.

In other news, I've been wondering lately how much salvation is a universal process. As in, I am not fully saved until everyone else is also fully saved. Why? Because I don't think it's possible for any human to be fully "saved" while anyone else isn't. In fact, it seems that being fully redeemed, fully saved, fully human, would mean that it was impossible to feel that way. This is especially true if you believe in hell (which I don't). How can anyone be happy in paradise knowing that someone else is suffering eternally in hell? That seems to be the exact opposite of how humans are supposed to love and feel for each other. I also don't think it's a very satisfying solution to say that God will simply hide the knowledge from us...

domestics pt 2

2009-03-01T15:19:00.000-08:00

Thinking back to how I grew up, I realize that I never lived in a messy house. There were certain rooms that were messy (my bedroom, offices), but the public areas were always kept very clean and tidy. Implication: do what you want with what's your own, but keep clean what belongs to everyone. Of course, there were times when I was forced to clean my room, but this was not robustly enforced by the time I had graduated. Not to mention I did a better job of it at that point. Similarly, my dad used to fine me and my roommate Toby if we hadn't taken a shower by 7pm. That also fell away. In any case, that's what I grew up with and what I prefer. Now, I don't like clutter and dirtiness in public areas, and don't like leaving my things in the public area of my house. And, I deal a lot better with clutter than I do with dirtiness. Clutter in my room doesn't usually stress me out, but when the sheets are dirty and the floor is covered in hair and my shelves are dusty (or my fan blades, in Thailand), then I like to clean.

Also, I think the ants in Thailand were a big part of growing up. Consider: if any food was left out, there would be ants on it within an hour or two, sometimes less. If food was left out, it would become stale immediately. Summarily, it's always very confusing to me when I see a bowl of food sitting somewhere in the house for days. That's a lot grosser to me than build up of hair in the drain, or the mold in the shower (until I think about it) or dirty toilets.

In general I don't like leaving my own things around the house. Usually when I go to bed, my things are either in my room or in the study room. This is more from paranoia than consideration for my housemates, though: if I leave books around, I worry that someone will spill on them or kick them and bend the pages. If I leave my computer downstairs, I worry about robbers coming in and finding it right away, or else that someone will step on it or drop something heavy. I assume that what's left in a public area is liable to be destroyed.

Living with seven other guys has also made me think about how much I hate doing things when people are around. I prefer cleaning and cooking when the house is empty. I don't like getting in peoples ways, and I hate feeling like I'm being observed. Also, when I lived by myself two summers ago, I was much more organized than I am living with seven other people. For example, I made my bed almost every day. In part, that's because it was a couch, not a bed, and I didn't want to have blankets on there when I came back and read in the evening. But, I think I just do well when I don't have to worry about getting in the way. Or, perhaps it's more that I hate being interrupted, and so I do things better when I'm alone because I don't have to worry about interruption.

In any case, I like living at my house.

souls

2009-02-08T13:48:00.000-08:00

I no longer believe that I have a soul. Or at least one that is separate from my body and that will live on after my body is ead. I suppose this is the natural result of discarding dualism, but it's come as sort of a surprise to me. Part of it is probably thanks to one of the professors: "Christianity does not teach the immortality of the soul but the resurrection of the body." And, that is what I see when I look at the creeds and at the bible. I'm not really interested in the mechanism of resurrection (how will God resurrect those whose bodies have been vaporized?) and I don't know how useful it is to ask questions about those bodies (what age will my body be? etc, etc,) but that's where I've come to and I feel pretty good about it. Souls are a useful concept, but they have outlived their usefulness to me. And what reason do I have to believe in them in the first place?

Recently I have been wondering how well a person holds together. I'm in a fiction workshop this quarter, and people keep bringing up certain actions as contradictory, and therefore the character doesn't make sense or hold together. And yet...the contradictions they are criticizing are contradictions that are real and present in peoples lives, and probably actually aren't contradictions to begin with ("he thinks about serious things but also likes to have a good time"). Anyway, it just makes me think of how making sense of someone necessarily simplifies them, cuts out the anomalies to create a solid concept. Except this solid concept doesn't actually have basis in reality. I don't think that a person holds together as a stable form that can be known. People are gooey. And they don't have souls. Maybe these two concepts go hand in hand, that without the soul there is no unchanging aspect (specter?!) to a person that can be known, just a changing aspect. Perhaps belief in the soul as a stable component to identity that can be removed from the body hinders us from properly knowing each other.

In other words, everything begins to make sense once you believe in evolution. Thank God for Charles Darwin. I'm also beginning to approach Christianity and the bible much more as mythology. I prefer the term mythology to allegory or figure or metaphor ("Genesis should be read as figurative rather than literal"), because I don't think that figurative actually captures what is going on or how it was written. Mythology suggests that there is no difference between reality and metaphor, reality is metaphor and metaphor is reality. I'm becoming more and more frustrated with hearing people talking about Genesis as figurative, because they're still trying to apply a modernist framework of understanding to it, that it's okay to read it as truth if we read it as figurative with the understanding that it wasn't written to be scientific or historical. I think that reading is going most of the way, but not far enough, into mythology. People don't like mythology, though, because it makes them think of something primal, unsystematic, and arbitrary. And those are probably fair elements to pick out, but I do think that is missing the point (there is nothing more satisfying than to say that someone else is missing the point.)

Anyway, I don't want to come across as a bully ("you have no soul, you have no solid state, believe in evolution, stop reading Genesis literally or figuratively"). I don't think that you're intellectually lazy, or an academic invalid if you believe the things I'm whining about. Just consider...

matthew

2009-01-20T23:55:00.000-08:00

I've been reading through the gospel of Matthew with group lately, and here are some of my thoughts and comments on little parts of it.

"So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift" (5:23-24).

Most of the time when I hear people talking about these verses, it's in the context of worship services. In that scenario, it means that if you come to worship and are mad at someone, you should talk to them before you worship. I don't think that's what it's getting at though. For one thing, I think it has to be read in light of the verses that come before it, which talk about words used that will drag you before the council and words that will put you in danger of hell. The point here is that there are words that you use that offend people, but there are things you communicate to other people that put you in danger of hell. This is the difference between me telling someone as a joke to fuck off, which might offend people around me, and me telling a person that I think they are a wreck and failure at life, where what I'm communicating is much worse even though I'm using tamer language. In this sense, I think we have to see the altar thing as what pleases humans and what pleases God (and really, a lot of the sermon on the mount is about that). So, I think what's going on here is that placing gifts on the altar is an act of piety that is impressive to people, but what God cares about is redemption and reconciliation with other people. I don't think that this is a hard and fast rule for whether or not you need to confront someone before a worship service, since I don't think that's always wise or loving, but is really done out of guilt and a desire to be pious before people (which is what this is against).

"So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. What I tell you in the dark, utter in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim upon the housetops" (10:26-27).

The first part of this verse, I've usually taken to be referring to sin and God's judgment: everything bad you have done will eventually be revealed. I don't think it's actually this particular verse that I'm thinking of, but almost identical passages either elsewhere in Matthew or in another gospel. In any case, that isn't what it's about. This passage is surrounded on both sides by talk about the two kingdoms (thanks, Bob) and about God being on the side of the disciples who are being sent out. Immediately before that verse it talks about how the "servants" will be maligned even worse than the "master" has been. So, what Jesus is saying is that what is covered (that they really do follow God, not Beelzebul) will eventually be known to everyone. In other words, it's a statement about identity and which kingdom they belong to rather than anything to do with sin or judgment, or a reason to fear. People say that these servants serve evil, but in the end God will say that they were part of his kingdom. The following verses talk about how important it is to not be afraid, which fits in just right with it.

Also, I've been noticing how physical Matthew is, and struck but how critical this physical side was to Jesus' mission. When John asked if he was the messiah, Jesus says that the sick are being healed and that good news is being given to the poor. He doesn't mention anything about forgiving sins (even though he's been doing that,) or about changes in peoples behavior and morals. Which isn't to say that those things are not important to Jesus, only that their importance has been exaggerated in contemporary interpretations (and thanks to Augstine!) Similarly, when Jesus sends out his disciples they are to heal the sick, cast out demons, and talk about the kingdom. The physical world is critical to Jesus' mission and the mission of his followers, and cannot simply be discarded as something that will pass away.

innocence

2009-01-17T17:50:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about innocence lately, and about people talk about it as a virtue, but what they mean by innocence is mostly ignorance. I don't think that ignorance is a virtue, and I have been thinking about what it means to be innocent, or why it is that I think some people are more innocent now than at other times that I've known them. People talk about children as being innocent, but I don't think that children really are innocent. I don't mean this in the original sin, depravity, born into sin sort of way, that children are born sinful and are therefore not innocent. Not to mention I've learned over the past year about how this image of innocent children has really only developed in the last two hundred years, and seeing its origins makes me much more skeptical and disgusted when people talk about childhood as the seat of innocence and virtue and imagination and nostalgia. I don't want to be a child, and I don't think that I was more innocent as a child. I want to imagine innocence being something that can continue even once people know, and that in fact requires them to be able to see reality clearly, rather than shying away from it. I don't know why I'm interested in redefining this word, but I am. I suppose I'm thinking of innocence as the capacity to see reality and still believe, to have hope, to have hope as an epistemology (thanks, Lindsey,) rather than a state of perfection or sinlessness or ignorance. I don't think that children know enough to really be innocent.

Who knows, maybe being an innocent is really just being dumb.

And...unrelated: rereading the story of "the fall" recently, it struck me that this story never mentions sin, and that the author of Genesis is interested in this story as an explanation of how death entered the world rather than how sin or evil entered the world (though sin is mentioned soon afterwards in the story of C + A). It's about the problem of death rather than the problem of evil. This is interesting to me, especially because I'm not really against death, or afraid of death, and because I don't think there has been a time in the universe when things lived and never died.

prayer

2009-01-05T00:36:00.001-08:00

I haven't prayed, really, for about a year. Last fall quarter I prayed quite a bit, and it was such a traumatic experience that I really haven't taken it up again. By prayer, I mean setting aside a chunk of time to speak to God and to listen to him, which I think is actually a quite limited understanding of prayer. But I haven't prayed like that for some time, and I think that soon I might be able to again.

But what am I praying? Prayer lately has been thinking about those around me who are suffering. Most of the time I don't know what to pray. Everything seems arrogant or insufficient. I feel arrogant when I pray towards a certain solution or end, and I feel arrogant assuming that I know what would be a good or appropriate result for a situation in a person's life. So mostly what I pray is for God to have mercy on them, and on me*. This is really the only way I have been able to pray for months, praying for both the living and the dead.

This isn't mercy as in "they really effed up, now please don't destroy them," because that's rarely what I'm praying.