Month: December 2008

Caffeine Abstinence

I am a coffee addict, drinking 16 cups on some of the last days of last semester. It has now been almost three days since my last cup of coffee. I feel agitated, ill, and a bit cantankerous. I spent all evening curled up in front of the television, drawing the hood of my wool parka tight, drinking shiraz and snacking on strong cheddar and dark chocolate. Every time I close my eyes, I see hot, black cups of coffee, and imagine the bitter taste on my lips. I don’t suffer the worst of withdrawals: I haven’t had the headaches that most people report. But I have had a constant, muted pain in my sinuses.

My goal is to abstain until I am back in Chicago. Then, I am going to Intelligentsia to enjoy the best coffee of my life.

PhD pursuits

2009 is the year, that I set in stone years ago, that I would make a thoroughly serious and dedicated effort to apply to a PhD program in philosophy. That means that my applications will be due in roughly 11 to 12 months. I do not know if anyone will accept me, but everything about my application has changed. I’ve become very familiar with a narrow subject that I want to pursue (17th century philosophy,esp. Spinoza), I’ve got years of college philosophy teaching under my belt, I’ve got a much stronger general knowledge of the history of philosophy, I understand upper tier graduate level work, and I will soon be a published author (although not directly tied to my field). If I do not make it, then roughly 15 months from now, I will need to do some serious soul searching. But if I do, it will be the fruition of many, many years worth of work and dreaming.

I’ve just started to research the schools that I would wish to attend. It looks like these are my dream choices, given particular professors, funding, and areas of specialization.

1.Princeton

2. New York University

3. University of Wisconsin, Madison

4. University of California, Los Angelas

5. Yale

This is rough; certainly, I need some safety schools (UW-Mad is not,by any means, a safety school for this subject, I believe), and I need to make sure that the profs teaching at these schools are truly people that I would enjoy having as a mentor. There is so much work to be done, but I am looking forward to it!

Christmas Shopping

So, this morning I decided I may as well start my Christmas shopping for the season.

Yes, procrastination is my day job too.

Seriously, though, my family isn’t celebrating until the 30th anyway, since that’s when my brother and his fiance are coming into town. This lets me take advantage of all those marvelous post-Christmas sales.

I decided to do my shopping at the infamous Mall of America. Most of my friends sneer in disgust at the name, but I like to indulge in the excess of the mall every so often. Since I don’t live in Minnesota anymore, and only visit infrequently, this means one or two visits every couple of years or so. Today, of course, was incredibly busy. I felt like I was walking down some strange, advertisement saturated bazaar. The people around me were not just consumers: they were gluttonous, advertisement consuming machines. Every inch of many people was covered in designer products. Every sentence I heard come out of their mouths was about products; what they received, what they bought, what they intend to buy. Lives purely dedicated to being tools of the marketplace. One must admire such fanatical focus.

Anyway, I was able to buy what I wanted. For all its faults, if you are willing to spend a couple hours calmly roaming the shops and corridors, you can get a lot of ideas for appropriate, and inexpensive gifts.

I am tainted by the consumer zombie.

Poetry of the Ignorant

I haven’t always had the best relationship with poetry. At least until I was partway through college, I would have to read a poem a dozen times before it made much sense to me. I even felt a little stupid with my lack of comprehension, and decided that my brain just wasn’t geared for poetry. I felt a little better when I read in Charles Darwin’s biography that he had similar feelings about poetry. At some points in my life,I have discovered that I can understand poetry better than at other times, but the spikes of poetry comprehension usually correspond to depressions in philosophy comprehension–and since I have focused so much time and energy into philosophy, I even decided for awhile that if poetry costs me philosophy, then I ought to just steer clear of it altogether.

In the past, I have had an admittedly narrow, dry mind. I like the clear reasons and explanations that philosophers aim for, and became annoyed with the ambiguous or vague symbolism in poetry. The art was lost on entirely.

That has changed in the past year or so. Gradually, I found myself picking up poetry spontaneously, because I wanted to expose myself to it. Still, my comprehension was low, despite my increased desire. Then, about six to eight months ago, I found that I was slowly comprehending it after a read or two, like my powers of comprehension had actually grown. What was obscure before was now clear, like someone who had learned years of mathematics in a short amount of time looking at equations and formulae as they had never seen it before. I don’t know what accounted for this change, but in the time since, I have expanded my poetry collection quite a bit. It’s still not large, but I buy more as I read more.

Even more recently, I have started to write a bit of poetry (as demonstrated by two recent posts). I do not feel talented in this, but the value of writing, I’ve found, has more to do in the writing than in the sharing. Something about poetry writing forces me to confront my self in ways that other types of reflection and writing do not. Each time I write something, I experiment a little more, and find something new in my act of creation. I look forward to doing more of it.

A History of Ideas

Over the last few days, I have been digging into Ideas:A History of Thought from Fire to Freud, by Peter Watson. It’s a thick book, around 750 pages, and dense. But so far, it has been a fascinating read. In short, it’s a fast moving intellectual history of damn near everything, although I think it leaves out anything that does not influence Asian, middle-Eastern, and European thought. Except for covering theories about the early migrations from Africa through Australia and the America’s, there has been virtually no mention of sub-Saharan Africa, Australia or the Americas. I believe that is because Watson selects not those ideas that are merely brilliant, but those that contribute to the larger flow of intellectual progress. And as isolated as these places were, despite the ingenius ideas they had, they could not contribute until later ages. And so far, I am roughly 170 pages in, which is covering the birth of Judaism, Christianity, and the beginnings of post-Confucian Chinese culture.

But other than this fault (if you want to even consider it a fault) the book is stimulating. It shows how certain ideas grow and grow, usually out of necessity from certain conditions, into more advanced ideas, and how they influence new ideas. Why were the Greeks so advanced in the sciences of the day? How was the Greek science culture different than the Chinese? Why is the “conquest of cold” such an important intellectual step in cultural progress? Why is the Jewish religion so different from others of the time, and how did it become so influential? Watson tries to stay away from pronouncements, but brings forth huge amounts of research of relevant experts, and goes through the trouble of discussing great points of controversy. (Although it seems like Watson is biased toward western culture and against the authenticity of Bible in parts, he discusses–and provides endnotes–arguments from other point of view)

If you want an excellent summary of history from the intellectual development perspective, and you’ve got sufficient time to plow through this book, I definitely recommend this book.

“Shovel the Driveway”

At home

Not alone

Monotony, distraction, decays

Shovel the driveway, he says

Okay, okay

Thick leather boots

Soft black coat

Denim and cotton armor me

Dry white sand on black stone

To be won.

It’s cold, nothing is done.

Push and push

Lift and throw

Scrape and chip

Again,

Black shows through,

but it is not clean.

Push and push,

Lift and throw

Scrape and chip

Obsession for snow.

Cold, focused, alone.

Calm in the air, in my heart.

In childhood a chore,

Reluctant even now I go,

Pleasure and soul found.

It’s done; pure black.

Thin lines of white in the wrinkles.

I am done,

I am proud,

of such a simple task.

The best looking driveway on the street.

My escape, from home.

Now inside, I return.

To what? He is gone.

My escape, a good?

I thought, but I’m wrong.

Driving South

Today, I started with a pleasant morning conversing with my hosts, then got in my jeep and drove south toward my dad’s home near St.Paul. The roads were sometimes covered in snow and ice, so I took it slow. The wind forced itself through the cracks in the Jeep’s canopy, and onto my face. The scenery was pretty, though: large expanses of pure white fields and lakes, interrupted by snow frosted pine forests and small towns. I crossed perhaps ten rivers, including the Mississippi three or four times. As I drove south, the Mississippi became wider and wider, until near the end, a perfectly straight strip of unfrozen water ran down the middle of the otherwise frozen surface, indicating the location of the current.

Being the shortest day of the year, it was pitch black as I pulled into my dad’s home. This is where I grew up, but it is just him and his new cat now. But it still fels like home.

Book of a Sadistic Nature

I’ve been doing my best to get some diverse reading done while traveling. On my bus ride from Chicago to Minneapolis, I read through a solid chunk of the Marquis De Sade’s ‘Philosophy in the Bedroom.’ If you are not familiar with the Marquis, he is an 18th century French intellectual dedicated to advocating extreme sexual liberation. I am interested in the book for a few reasons: one is that I’m interested in all aspects of the intellectual revolution of the 17th and 18th century and everything that ties into it. Second, I’m very curious about what constitutes 18th century porn. Well, I am not disappointed on either account. The word ‘sadist’ is derived from his name, largely due to the extreme nature of the sexual liberation he advocates.

Philosophy in the Bedroom proves to be racy at the beginning: the main characters are a 36 year old man who is sexually experienced and largely homosexual, but who basically approves of anyone capable of giving him pleasure, a young woman who is married, her brother, and a fifteen year old girl who is a virgin but curious. Near the beginning, all but the brother soon engage in some explicit sexual activity that focuses on the senior members instructing the younger in various pleasures.  In between sexual encounters, the three engage in deeply philosophical conversations about the importance of pleasure and sexual liberation.

Frankly, this is fascinating. I must admit, I think I was raised in a highly traditional and conservative environment regarding sexual relations and relationships is general. This book is showing me another side to things. And although I have realized the limitations of my prejudices on this matter before, the realizations were purely intellectual; it was not until reading this book that the realizations awakened me psychologically. In other words, seeing the reasons for liberating myself have been around for years. Something about reading this book, however, changed me in another way.

So, I see myself being more liberated in the future. However, I want to keep this claim modest. Changes like this do not occur overnight without also being somewhat destructive to the person, I believe. Or at least, I generally do not undergo too much change too fast without some self-destruction. I am actually proud of myself for how much I have changed in the past 12 years of my life; I have become talented at that. But there is a moderate rate of change, and excessive rates as well.

Furthermore, although I find reading de Sade helpful and growing, there is some seriously twisted stuff in this book. The term ‘sadistic’ doesn’t mean what it does because of menage et trois’s, after all. There have been sections of the book, that I will not write about here, that physically made me cringe and feel nauseous. And just now in the beginning of the book, they are beginning to engage in physical acts of torture for the sake of pleasure. Bleeding has been involved.

This is a fascinating and worthwhile read for a number of reasons, but proceed with caution.

Bemidji

I arrived in Bemidji yesterday after a long drive from Chicago and through Duluth. I love it here. The air is so clean, the forests are pure and white, towns are small, and there is little noise. I am staying with one of my old professors and her family. They have a beautiful log house far out on the woods, maybe 150 from the Mississippi. I walked outside this morning and the only thing I could hear was the chirping of a single bird and a dog barking far away. The house is surrounded by forest, and I could see nothing other than trees covered in snow. Everything is still and beautiful.

Last night I went to a Christmas Party hosted by some old mentors and friends. The conversation was exciting, and refreshing.  I lost count of the amount of wine I drank, or how many old friends I saw for the first time in years.

I feel an energy here that I never quite achieve in Chicago. This place gives me great hope about my future.