might be out of the race, but still in your acid-induced trip outs.
ladies and gentlemen, rick perry.
(Source: anastasiabeaverhaausen)
“For at bottom there is in Joyce a profound hatred for humanity - the scholar’s hatred. One realizes that he has the neurotic’s fear of entering the living world, the world of men and women in which he is powerless to function. He is in revolt not against institutions, but against mankind…Ulysses is like a vomit spilled by a delicate child whose stomach has been overloaded with sweetmeats.” - Henry Miller
— James Joyce burn! Do something! Don’t just pine!
Frontline →
Super interesting doc on for profit universities/colleges in the US. Frontline in general is pretty great as a documentary resource, mostly US focused though.
“You understand and therefore hate Stephen Dunn (from The Vanishings)
because you hate the passivity of understanding
that your worst rage and finest
private gesture will flatten and collapse
into history, become invisible
like defeats inside houses. Then something happens
(it is happening) which won’t vanish fast enough,
your voice fails, chokes to silence;
hurt (how could you have forgotten?) hurts.
Every other truth in the world, out of respect,
slides over, makes room for its superior.”
Pop Quiz
On a Scale from 1 to 10, how much do you miss the ocean?
(1 being not at all, and, 10 being submerge me I’ve forgotten what salt tastes like).
a.) Today (December 29, 2011): 8
Uplifting. Hilarious. Kate Bush.
If we read the new masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it those reflections of ours that we despised, joys and sorrows which we had repressed, a whole world of feeling we had scorned, and whose value the book in which we discover them teaches us.” —- Proust
Holy Heidegger (redux)
Finally finished Being and Time. Probably, more importantly in understanding Heidegger I read an amazing essay by Satre on Existentialism as Humanism. The jist is that Satre responds (I believe in the 1950s?) to critiques that portray existentialism as anti-life/apathetic/delimiting epistemology. Important read for North American audiences. We never really got knocked flat on our asses like Europe did (post WWII speaking) and tend to lack the historical empathy that birthed existentialism. Basically Sartre builds and understanding of man as an ongoing process—no tabula rasa here gents.
“For we mean to say that man primarily exists – that man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life…”
This quote is particularly cool because Sarte (knowingly?) uses the discourse of his critics to turn those critiques around; subjectivity is/has been largely embedded in a previous understanding/conception of self, which is exactly what existentialism argues against. Well, against a previous, existing self prior to action. Despite this, Sarte includes some phenomenological tidbits with a nod to ‘possessing’ a subjective life. Subjective, felt life exists (he’s not taking away the everyday reality of a felt existence, something that existentialism gets a bad rep for), instead he’s laying down the foundation for arguing that subjectivity is a built project that is both conscious and unconscious.
In this sense, Sarte’s essay moves existentialism towards a metaphysical framework (ie. begins to take in not only how we as humans operate, but how the whole world is constructed through us). Rad fucking stuff. Especially when you start getting over excited and link it to deconstructionism/Derrida (Derrida light that is…Personally I’ve never been 100% on board with his emphasis on language, gets too abstract at a certain point for me).
Really cool when you start to think about Sartre’s eventual writing on the tension (I avoid dialectic here…so passe) embedded in subjectivity as a relational object and subject. Definitely links back to Rosseau in ways? re. “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains”. You can define yourself completely, through everyday existence, such is the meaning of life (look back to Heidegger and Hegel), but you ultimately end up drawing your own boundaries. And those boundaries are very much relational—knowing oneself is conceived as a cerebral groping about in this sense. A project that involves bouncing around and feeling around for the edges of who we are and who everyone else is. Sort of begins to tie in Sarte’s “hell is other people” quote…But I’m just getting ahead now because I dearly love that quote (so much so I have it on a pillow).
Digression/derail. Whoops.
