Andy's recent posts

Recent public posts (showing 41-60 of 281).

Gail wrote: "While perhaps human nature remains much the same, would you say that we have covered it with at least a veneer of civilization, so that we have perhaps more control of our impulses than they had, or than they thought was necessary or wise"

I'm with Michael on this one: "When we think about that, is the case for human progress that clear?"

Progress in terms of change? Yes. In terms of "improvement"? That argument can be made. In terms of failure? That argument can be made, too.

Control our impulses. There are plenty of rapes and murders right here in the good old civilized U.S.A. And we're still bombing the shit out of innocent women and children in Afghanistan, with no plan to stop as far as I know.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/0...
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/07...

And the impulse to screw over our neighbor for a buck will live on forever, no matter how civilized we get, it seems.

Candy, your earlier post made me reflect on my own experiences hunting and fishing. There is something very strong in our culture that resists the notion that we are indeed hunting and gathering. Some sort of fear of wildness? Fear of being uncivilized? I think culturally it is easy to find security in "civilization" but sometimes don't you ever get freaked out when people bare their teeth in a smile or make weird laughing sounds. In an earlier post, somebody disparaged grunts and early utterances. Some days I feel like we're still making some elemental grunts and calling it language. And let's not even get started on humping... :)

I agree Russ, we probably are working with a sliding scale as far as the timeline is concerned. I guess I took it way back to the beginning of language. Though, to be fair, the point I'm trying to make--language is philosophy--necessitates my going back that far. And that point does speak to language use from that time forward. I have no idea how many years ago language developed.

You've mentioned the issue with "the same" before. I'm not sure if I used the word "same" but I suppose I was getting there. I do think there are similarities in how language is used from today to those very early times. I did some training in conversation skills once--researchers suggest when people talk, they generally talk about one of three things: Themselves, the person they are talking to, or their shared circumstance. I don't think much has changed about what we talk about. The circumstances themselves have changed greatly, but the fact that we talk about our circumstances probably remains "the same".

I hope that clears up how I was using "the same". Like I said, I believe as long as people have language, they have done philosophy, because there just isn't that much else to talk about.

I suppose it depends on how we are defining philosophy. Surprise surprise, I have a wide definition of philosophy :) I don't believe people have to do what Emerson was doing to be considered philosophers. I will stick with my idea that story is philosophy, so nearly everybody is a philosopher and people, as long as there has been language, have always been doing philosophy.

We're probably using a fairly modern definition of philosophizing. It's hard to believe any people existed who didn't have some form of ritual or spirituality. It may not have resembled ours in any way. I suppose several thousand years ago, people did not have pointy headed people writing incomprehensible books in ivory towers.

To me, to say a person doesn't have the capacity to philosophize is basically a way of dehumanizing the person. Making meaning is one of the functions of our species that makes us human. It seems to me that once our humans had language, part of having language was related to meaning making. I mean, what else is there to talk about really? Even if you are discussing the plan for the next day's hunt, you might consider that a form of spirituality, or you might be talking about where the berries were last year, there again, you're making meaning out of your experience, maybe you develop a way of recording where the berries are, maybe you use stories as mnemonic devices as a way to remember. Yes Theresa, good point about death. Does anybody really think that people with language saw somebody die and didn't have some sort of explanation for what death was? The same goes for birth. If you are a group of people with language, you are going to develop some explanation of birth. (I've never given birth, but I hear it's a rather powerful experience.) And reproductive cycles, and changes in the human life cycle. And changes in season. And changes from night to day etc. I'm no expert on the history of language, but it seems that if language developed as a product of evolution, it was because language gave people who could speak some sort of survival advantage. The advantage must have been the ability to make some guesses about what was happening around them. Those guesses would be meaning and that meaning would be philosophy.

Thanks for the link to the Cunliffe book, Michael, I have been interested in this period of European history for a long time. It seems to me there is much interest in Native American cultures, but less so about "Native European Cultures". People don't even really talk about Native Europeans, I don't understand why. I'll have to look at that book.

I tend to agree with Theresa and Candy on the question of time spent philosophizing. The little I've read on the topic has always suggested to me that subsistence cultures actually "work (ed)" less than we do. 40 hours per week (not including commute) at a hum drum job, week in and week out for 30-40 years is a strange behavior, imo, and not necessarily designed to support the creation of a meaningful life. 100 years ago, I'd probably be working 80 hours per week, which would leave even less time for "fun". And I think right now there are plenty of populations that work 80 hours per week in fairly lousy conditions.

Which leads to the notion of better and worse. Ordering things in terms of "better and worse" can be a fun and useful exercise, but it's certainly one of the more subjective approaches to meaning making. It's very clearly a way of considering the past through the lens of right now. While I think it is the way history is discussed, I have some problem with considering history in terms of better and worse.

So, IMO, history should not be taught as a set of facts separate from the politics of knowledge, concept, narration, and meaning making. Subsistence cultures "work" less than we do. And it is not entirely useful to consider history in terms of better and worse.

Also, I would like to posit that, one thousand years from now, the history we are creating today will be every bit as confused and jumbled as the history of one thousand years ago. Even very broad facts and dates will be understood differently and "incorrectly". Humanity is capable of a lot of change and error in the course of one thousand years.

Thom wrote: I had a friend who went to Writing School in Arkansas and I remember he had a text by one Falkner (not Faulkner, FALKner) which was a ...a workbook of some kind for sentence construction. Kind of a back-to-basics thing, I'm guessing, and this from a prestigious school of creative writing. He was excited about what he was doing, had become a believer in their program. Maybe one could get some info from them on line ?

I had a prose style class as an undergraduate. One of the few classes in college that was worth taking. Plus the teacher was excellent. I even went on to teach some of the material in a community writing course.

Let's see, we discussed things like the seven levels of punctuation (a kind of alternative punctuation theory); using absolutes, relative clauses, and present participle clauses; idea movement within paragraphs (that is some interesting stuff); we analyzed articles from Harpers magazine and wrote submissions for The Sun; gosh I wish I could remember some of the other material. Oh, we talked about academic writing--how it works and why it doesn't work outside of the academy. One of my favorite parts of the course!

It was great stuff and really changed the way I thought of writing. The textbook was The Writer's Tools, or something like that.

The book you mentioned sounds a bit elementary, but who knows? There are a lot of techniques that many people would never arrive at without some outside instruction.

Faulkner, Claude W., Writing Good Sentences: A Functional Approach to Sentence Structure,
Grammar and Punctuation (3rd Revised Edition), New York, Scribners 1981.

I imagine it was hard to concentrate but you'd never even know it. You present yourself very well. I think you seemed more comfortable and knowledgeable than the woman interviewing you!

Thom wrote: "Have you ever come back to something you wrote on line only to find it doesn't make any sense ?
This happens to me all the time with my Constant Reader posts! Mwa ha ha ha ha!

Thom wrote: "I have heard of school where students copy out--in longhand--paragraphs of Hemingway, say, or Proust"

I'm a firm believer in copying others. I've tried it here and there over the years, usually I can't figure out how to do it so it feels right. But lately I have developed an exercise where I copy Alice Munro's style of character description. She has a couple approaches she uses consistently, so I've basically broken it down into a mad libs kind of deal. Then I think of people I know and try to write a Munro-style description of them. It's a satisfying exercise. (One thing I learned right away is that she describes people in terms of what they're doing, which is something I would not naturally do. Also she does a lot of the absolute description: a __________ man, a ________, __________ person... --the underlines being adjectives, usually two concrete, one more abstract-- And she uses a lot of "with" and similes of course.

Also, I've been messing around with stealing story structures from short stories. Kind of like with the descriptions, but instead of a paragraph, it's working out a couple of pages in a more general way. I have a big stack of notebook and journal and poem writing I've done in the last year or so I use as raw material if I need to come up with some material. It's a different approach; I'm not coming up with the great American short story, but I believe it's a useful exercise in training the intuition. I've even been doing this exercise collaboratively with a woman in Germany, we each take a stab at one particular section, then send it back to the other.

If nothing else, I think of it as a gross revision or reappraisal or round of processing for all that old writing that was just kind of sitting there doing nothing.

Thom wrote: "I know that Writer's College in Arkansas spends a lot of time on syntax"

Can you describe this a little more? What kinds of stuff do they do?

Congrats on the interview, Janet!

Interesting stuff about how doing history is a kind of roleplaying, a way to achieve understanding of the self, from an essay on history by Emerson. (And this was before the post-modern challenge of the last 40 years or so!)

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, -- must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that loss by doing the work itself. Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had long been known. The better for him.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, -- see how it could and must be. So stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson, before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches, before a fanatic Revival, and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that we under like influence should be alike affected, and should achieve the like; and we aim to master intellectually the steps, and reach the same height or the same degradation, that our fellow, our proxy, has done.

All inquiry into antiquity, -- all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis, -- is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself should also have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are now.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/transcend...

I'm interested in what you mean by sets. Is a mathematical set something like a function? I'm no mathematician, but I'm thinking of a function as a processor. You have your input (everything), you have your math (process, human body), you have your output (poem). I think functions are related to sets somehow.

I was thinking of this thing I read in relation to your post, Candy. It's from Readers Write in The Sun magazine:

A woman at a meditation retreat develops a mad crush on a man at the retreat, but they never exchange a word. He leaves suddenly and she never sees him again:

In the language of these retreats, such episodes are called 'vipassana romances.' They are supposed to remind us to be with what is and stay apart from the 'story.' But, I must confess, I rather like the story.

After reading that passage a few months ago, I remembered it hazily as a way of meditating story away. Like 'story' is a process or function we do that crunches data and gives us output. She seems to suggest that a goal of the meditating at the retreat was to reverse the story process within her; I see her in her meditation walking backwards through the story she's created and as she walks, the elements that make up the story (the man, the setting, her history) break apart from each other and exist as separate, unrelated factors.

Thinking of the opposite of narrative is like going from sense back to abstract nonsense. Like a reverse function.

I do see a lot of numbers in the poem, Candy now that you mention it. And time references:

first time
night
winter time
six
night
bad time
A year
nothing
two o'clock
four miles
night
without a dime

Good point, Ruth. Poetry publishing is something I don't know anything about. It's a very different world than I'm used to because poets actually know there ain't no money. :)

My experience is limited to non-fiction books. And I'm apparently feeling bitter today. Sometimes I wonder if the people running my company have any freakin' souls at all.

Russ2 wrote: "To me, making a post here on Constant Reader is publishing. This thread has 98 views. That's a pretty big audience for any piece of writing.

Andy,
That question of what constitutes "publishing"..."

I think you're still in good shape, Russ. Traditional publishers don't consider forum posts to be publishing.

Arguably, this question of definitions is a major problem for traditional print publishers. I also consider in-person writing groups to be the purist form of publishing. Or maybe telling a story at a bar is even more pure than a writing group.

Publishers want us to want the validity they provide. A lot of people think if they publish their book through a traditional publisher, they will gain both money and validity. But most authors won't make any money at all, because the economics of book publishing is profoundly fucked up. (Or they'll make the equivalent of fifty cents an hour for all the time they put into their book.) And plenty of times, the author who has already established his own validity in a category is the author who gets published. So really, there is very little money and validity to be made in traditional publishing.

Of course, new publishing groups are born all the time as people realize that traditional publishing is something of a confidence game that anybody can play at.

There are some benefits of traditional publishing: small advance (in exchange for handing some editorial control to the publisher); production expenses assumed by publisher (in exchange for giving control of the general package: title, cover art, marketing category); publishers usually have better distribution channels; and an author will learn something about the business of publishing. A smart author will ask about 5,000 questions and will be an assertive pain in the ass, fighting for the publisher's time and fighting for the vision of how she thinks the book should be. The publishers have one million and one ways to tell authors to buzz off, but the author who is most passionate and most aggressive often ends up with the most benefit (of course, the publisher might drop the author and smear them if she is too much of a pain in the ass)

But hell, now this is devolving into a discussion of the business side, and here I am trying to get more onto the art side of things. To that end, my newest venture is one-on-one poetry exchange. An audience of one. That's pure, man.

Oh, thanks for the heads up on Zoetrope Ruth, Beverly and Jim. I joined up last night, I think it will be exciting. Unfortunately I won't be able to really participate in the critiques until next year due to time considerations, and their different forums are not quite what I'm looking for. In the meantime, I will continue to surf the Internet in search of the PEOPLE WITH EXACTLY THE RIGHT THOUGHTS, FEELINGS, POLICIES, CHEMISTRY, ATTITUDES, APPROACHES, ETC that makes me feel like home when I get there. I'll let you know when I find it. :)

Cool poem, Ruth. I wanted to read something by this guy so I'm glad you posted it here.

It reminds me of the business of the roleplaying that may or may not be happening in Free Radicals, the Alice Munro story we read a while ago.

It's like he's describing the way adults continue the make-believe of childhood.

It's interesting that Pessoa wrote books under pen names, pretending to be different characters. Is that the fakery he is talking about? A manifestation of the fakery?

It seems to me that writing poetry (or fiction for that matter) has something in common with acting. An actor tries to understand a different character or self through physical process, just like writers try to understand other selves through physically writing and reading to an audience.

I have a friend who is from Brazil who seems to have an unusual interest in empathy (he is an alternative dispute resolution practitioner). I wonder if there is something about the Portuguese language that lends itself to acting and empathy. (So this poem and my knowing one Brazilian person is hardly a strong case...) But it does seem that this poem can be interpreted to be about empathy, compassion, feeling together...

Here is another version of the second stanza that suits my comment better :)

And those who read his cries
Feel in the paper tears
Not two aches that are his
But one that is not theirs.

Reading some more of these translations, and considering the title, it seems the poem may be suggesting that the poet is feeling empathy for himself.

Still another translation of the second stanza suggests that the writer is teasing out a sense of empathy in the reader:

And those who read his writings
will feel the printed pain,
not the two that he has suffered
but the one that they must feign.

And it seems to me that the fifteen translations linked in the original post have some bearing on the history discussion some were having in that other thread. If the poem is a record of what Pessoa was doing at the time that he wrote it, there seems to be a lot of disagreement among the translators as to what he was actually up to.

I'm going to read some more of these poems!

Writer's Digest and The Writer have forums but I'm not very impressed with them. For me, they are too focused on marketing and getting published. It would be cool if there was a writing forum that somehow drew out passionate writing in the posts. I think I could find as much passionate writing on a forum for paint drying enthusiasts as I could on those two forums.

I'm looking for a forum that has more discussion of process, collaboration, and the intersection of art and life, rather than talk of marketing and publishing.

To me, making a post here on Constant Reader is publishing. This thread has 98 views. That's a pretty big audience for any piece of writing.

This is a book I believe translated from Spanish. I think it is described as the life work of an old man in Central or South America. I believe all the vignettes were discovered in a trunk after he died. I remember seeing it on goodreads, but I can't find it for the life of me and it is driving me crazy. There is a woman who suggests getting a certain edition from a certain small publishing house. Argh.

It's the Book of Disquiet by Pessoa

It might be interesting to do some kind of study of fragmentary writing. There are some fragments in Kafka's The Penal Colony, and I was reading about a book of fragments called the Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.

I'm not sure of the publishing history of the Penal Colony or the Book of Disquiet, but certainly some writers have been drawn to writing fragments. I think the publishing history of such work is notable, perhaps Berry preferred to be the decision maker when it came to determining line breaks. Write the same passage as prose, and the determination of line breaks goes into somebody else's hands.

Plus, there probably aren't very many venues in which to publish or read fragments. But turn the fragment into a poem, and it has some shape and character and a little more weight.

This particular poem traverses a lot of time for such a little poem. There's a moment of waking, a back story going back who knows how long, a different moment by the fire, then a fast forward over a day. The use of ping ponging time seems notable.

If you go to Chicago, you MUST take a picture at the bean. It is the law.

Also, if you are in Chicago on a summer weekend, Millenium Park has a music series in the amphitheatre. Concerts are Friday and Saturday nights. I'm very sad I will not be able to go to any of the concerts this summer, me and my friend went to a bunch last summer and they were very beautiful.

Russ2 wrote: "But I still can't resist: has anyone else heard the notion that writing history is not that much different from writing a fictional novel, in the decisions made about selection and presentation of material, at the least, and just possibly also in making it flow and interesting to read? And possibly also giving it a theme?"

Russ, I liked what you had to say about historians choosing material. I would submit that for all these great records of things that have happened, much of what we know about past events is chosen and recorded quite arbitrarily. Take time for instance. There is no absolute time. All clocks in the world, like the clocks in my apartment, are off from each other! So historians choose the time stamp for events.
Time is essentially abstract meaning created by humans. When we think of time, we are processing information with our collective brain and putting order to it. I believe this has some bearing on the present discussion, in the sense that doing history is a way of processing, a way of applying arbitrary meaning to events that may or may not have cosmic meaning apart from what is happening within and among humans.

Candy wrote: "Often there are so many participnats on the internet who love piping in and saying … " the confusion between a notion in physics and quantum theory has been applied to common sense!"

Well damn it, Candy, I was going to bring up how physics seeps into general culture. Not only Heisenberg but Bohr saying things like The opposite of a great truth is another great truth. Of course Einstein's relativity (subjectivity in physic's clothing) and Thomas Kuhn on scientific revolutions (all paradigms will eventually change)... I think it is worth noting that their work can be interpreted as changes in the nature of logic, and of course those changes seeped into other expressions of logic, including the popular understanding of logic, at least part of the way we have arrived at this argument today. And a theme of American Pastoral?

Michael wrote: Andy, of course my teachers reflected the zeitgeist. What's baffling is that so many of us assume those teachers were limited, but today's much superior! Anyway, that's another matter.

Michael wrote: "My point here is to try to distinguish between the zones of what's knowable and what isn't; what's reasonable conjecture or unreasonable; and what's a valid interpretation, based on available evidence, and what's less valid or downright preposterous.

It seems to me all too easy for someone to use your very argument, below, as a way to dismiss fairly accurate (or likely) interpretations of events, in order to replace them with others that are simply a part of a larger agenda.

agenda
I'm not one for applying the better or worse label, Michael. Though I think it's interesting that you bring it up. Would you consider yourself a competitive person?

I'll happily admit to an agenda. Like you, I enjoy spending time helping to draw the boundaries of what is reasonable conjecture and valid interpretation. My agenda, I suppose, is drawing the lines in a way such that my own experiences will be included within the lines. I want to be included on my terms.

I have been drawn to theories of the fallibility of truth, I suppose because of my personal history. I have embraced and rejected two religions. I have a family. I have ambiguities in my social life. You call me lazy for maintaining ambiguity and uncertainty. I say I have been trained to be okay with irrationality, and that that view works just find for me. But yes, I do like to come here and express myself and seek support and understanding from others who might feel the same way. I admit I have had this argument before online, I have it a couple times a year. I like to argue with men around my father's age in relatively safe terms. Have you had this argument before online, Michael? Just curious. Have you noticed Constant Reader doesn't have a non-fiction thread? I noticed from your profile that you enjoy fiction? Why?

Michael wrote: "To answer your questions, Janet, no one I know has ever dismissed the Holocaust or the sacrifices this nation made to fight in World War II. Do you know many who do?, there are Holocaust deniers out there, but it's not through lack of exposure to the facts. It's from some innate bigotry or hatred -- something that no degree of education may be able to eradicate, in most such cases. "

Candy wrote: "What I meant was that often ambiguity and the concept (a wise one) that we can't know everything is used to argue against wisdom or learning (not wise). And I've heard it used to dismiss or pooh-pooh diversity, to dismiss or pooh-pooh new research and ideas"

This is so funny because I thought avoiding absolutes was a better way of dealing with bigotry. And I absolutely disagree with Michael's assertion that bigoted or hateful people can't be educated to feel differently. Especially children.

I feel that this is an arena where an appreciation for ambiguity can aid both teacher and student. Say a student grows up in a family of holocaust deniers. A teacher finds out and works with the kid to expose her to different facts than what the kid is getting at home. Does the kid go home and tell their parents that they are wrong? Does the kid accept the fact that her parents have one set of truths and her teachers have another set of truths? What are the determining factors in how the kid handles this situation? It's hard to say. Probably has something to do with the kids temperament, etc. I was talking to a friend about this very topic and he said he was arguing with his parents about bigotry at age six, but then later he admitted he instructed his own children to hold their tongue when they disagreed with the educators at the parochial school they went to on topics of bigotry.
I was on a field trip once, and kid, a recent immigrant from southeast Asia, told me his neighbors were (n-words). I could see in his face that he was testing the word out to see what I’d do.

Is it possible for that kid to love and respect his parents even if he can't convince them their language use is morally wrong? What about empathy? Should the
kid empathize with his parents or not?

Russ2 wrote: " Valkyrie "
Interesting point, Russ. I remember thinking how tricky it must have been for the movie makers to get us to root for a Nazi. I've watched enough "making-of" documentaries to know that people making big budget movies will work very hard to make sure people like the hero. It's funny that to like is the same word as is used in the simile, to be like.

I remember history teachers telling us stories. In a way, teachers are selling knowledge in a way similar to film makers.

Let us not forget cognitive errors. You can try to be a hard ass and keep your imagination out of your understanding of history, but, in my opinion, just by the very size of the project of History, all the people who stick their noses in it, history will change to suit people's agendas. Claims of purity should be discounted.

In certain sects of Buddhism, there is an exercise where people attempt to disrupt the human impulse toward narrative. It is interesting to at least consider that creating story and meaning is as arbitrary as placing numbers to the sensation of time. Is it strictly a process, like an Excel spreadsheet adding up a column of numbers?

As Russ suggested, maybe history is written by people who have a need to tell a story, for the same reasons people write novels. Or for the same reasons people march armies across the world.

Introduce yourself or post ideas here.