Category: Autobiographical

Three Friends

The blogosphere has been good to me, having brought me a number of friends, some of whom I have met face to face.  For now I will mention just three. 

Having read my announcement that PowerBlogs will be shutting down at the end of November, Keith Burgess-Jackson kindly sent me a number of unsolicited e-mails explaining how I could import the  PowerBlogs posts, together with comments, en masse into this Typepad site.  I had forgotten that the Typepad platform allows for multiple blogs.  Keith's idea was simply to set up an archival blog and dump the old posts there.  As usual, the devil is in the details.  But a  careful perusal of his-emails gave me all the clues I needed to get this project underway.  Eventually, I will install a link to the PowerBlogs archive on my front page.

Keith is one my oldest blogospheric friends. We met early in 2004 not long after I had entered the 'sphere.  He has been more than kind in promoting my efforts over the years.  I fear that I have not reciprocated sufficiently.  So I want you to go to his site right now and read his current batch of offerings.  I should also mention that if it weren't for Keith I would never have met philosopher Mike Valle who lives a few miles from here. 

I can't recall how exactly I met Ed Feser; it may have been via Keith's old Conservative Philosopher group blog.  In any case, we have had a number of invigorating discussions.  We have our differences, but our common ground makes their exfoliation fruitful.  I am presently gearing up for another round as I study his latest book, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (One World, 2009), an inscribed copy of which he kindly sent me.  Ed chimes in on his blog in agreement with my recent rant about copy editors and their political correctness.  Please check it out.

Last but not least, Peter Lupu, who, though not a blogger, is the Real Thing as philosophers go.  Such birds are rarely sighted even within (especially within?) the academic aviary.  He discovered me via the old PowerBlogs site and left the best comments there that I have received in five years of blogging.  To my great good fortune he flourishes here in the Zone and we see each other regularly. Last Thursday he came by and we talked from 2 to 9 P.M.  He would have gone on til midnight had I let him.  I have met in my entire life only one other philosopher with whom I could have as deep and productive a discussion, and that is my old friend Quentin Smith who I met in my early twenties.  Like Smith an avis rara, Lupu has become the Smith of my late middle age.

So the blogosphere has been good to me.  Today's stats hit an all-time high of 1,212 page views.  I have nothing to complain about.  Thanks for reading.

Travel Disruptive but Good for the Soul

For me travel is disruptive and desolating. A little desolation, however, is good for the soul, whose tendency is to sink into complacency. Daheim, empfindet man nicht so sehr die Unheimlichkeit des Seins. Travel knocks me out of my natural orbit. Even an overnighter can have this effect. And then time is wasted getting back on track. I am not cut out to be a vagabond. I Kant hack it. I do it more from duty than from inclination. But I'm less homebound than the Sage of Koenigsberg.

Books and Reality and Books

I am as confirmed a bibliophile as I am a scribbler. But books and bookishness can appear in an unfavorable light. I may call myself a bibliophile, but others will say 'bookworm.' My mother, seeing me reading, more than once recommended that I go outside and do something. What the old lady didn't appreciate was that mine was a higher doing, and that I was preparing myself to live by my wits and avoid grunt jobs, which is what I succeeded in doing.

All things human are ambiguous and so it is with books and bookishness by which I mean their reading, writing, buying, selling, trading, admiring, collecting, cataloging, treasuring, fingering, storing, and protecting. Verbiage, endless verbiage! Dusty tomes and dry paper from floor to ceiling! Whether written or spoken, words appear at one or more removes from reality, assuming one knows what that is.

But what exactly is it, and where is it to be found? In raw sensation? In thoughtless action? In contemplative inaction? In amoral animal vitality? In the fool's paradise of travel? In the diaspora of entertainment and amusement? In the piling up of consumer goods? In finite competitive selfhood? In the quest for name and fame? Is it to be found at all, or rather made? Is it to be discovered or decided?

It appears that we are back to our 'unreal' questions about reality and the real, questions that are asked and answered at the level of thought and written about in books, books, and more books . . . .

Why Am I So Hard on Liberals?

A reader comments by e-mail:

I sometimes read your website. I'm generally impressed by (and envy) your clear-headedness and detail when it comes to technical questions, but I find myself turned off by some of the more "poetic" stuff and the political analysis (the former because I hate poetry, more on the latter below).

[. . .]

Why are you so harsh with liberals? I can see why you might be annoyed by the mainstream liberal media . . . but I don't think the mainstream conservative media is any better. [. . .]

Continue reading “Why Am I So Hard on Liberals?”

Reasons to Blog

Different bloggers, different reasons.  I see this weblog as

Study Everything, Join Nothing

Do I live up to this admonition? Or am I posturing? Is my posture perhaps a slouch towards hypocrisy?

Well, it depends on how broadly one takes 'join.' A while back, I joined a neighbor and some of his friends in helping him move furniture. Reasonably construed, the motto does not rule out that sort of thing. And being a fair and balanced guy, as everybody knows, I recently joined the Conservative Book Club to balance out my long-standing membership in the left-leaning and sex-saturated Quality Paperback Book Club. (It would be interesting to compare these two 'clubs' in respect of their target memberships — but that's another post.)

Continue reading “Study Everything, Join Nothing”

Kerouac 5K

Marycarney Jack Kerouac's "Springtime Mary" was Mary Carney, described in the novel Maggie Cassidy and depicted on the left; mine was a lass name of Mary Korzen from Chicago.  She didn't get me into running, my old friend Marty Boren did; but she lent my impecunious and sartorially challenged self  her shorts in which I stumbled in my heavy high-topped boots around the Chestnut Hill reservoir on my first run in the summer of '74.  35 years a runner, but going on 41 years a Kerouac aficionado:  I read and endlessly re-read On the Road as a first semester college freshman.  (And a week ago I found a copy of the original scroll version of OTR which came out in 2007 (1957 + 50) in a used bookstore; completist and fanatic that I am, I of course purchased it.) Running and Kerouac being two constants of my life, I was happily surprised to hear from a local runner that Lowell, Mass. hosts an annual Kerouac 5 kilometer road race.  Kerouac was a track and football star in high school, winning scholarships to Boston College and Columbia.  Had he chosen BC he would not have met Ginsberg and Burroughs the other two of the Beat triumvirate, and I wouldn't be writing this post.

Appropriately enough, given Kerouac's prodigious boozing which finally did him in at the tender age of 47 in 1969, the race starts from Hookslide Kelly's a Lowell sportsbar.  Here is a shot from Kerouac's football days, and a photo of one of the covers of Maggie Cassidy:

Football_med

200px-Maggie-cassidy-cover 

Antioch College: Death by Political Correctness

I have a sentimental connection to Antioch College. An inamorata from the '70's graduated from there, as did my old friend, the philosopher Quentin Smith. During my tenure at the University of Dayton in the late '70s and '80s I would often make the pleasant drive over country roads to the sleepy little town of Yellow Springs, Ohio to take in an art film at the Little Art theater or buy incense at a '60s style 'head shop' or chase a burger with a couple of beers at Ye Olde Trail Tavern, or hike in Glen Hellen, a nature preserve behind the campus. At home, my FM tuner was set to WYSO, which emanated from the campus of Antioch College and was a rich source of out-of-the-way folk, blues, jazz, country and other music. I may be a conservative, but I am a BoCon, a bohemian conservative, or perhaps a HipCon, or maybe even a Bobo (to adopt the term if not quite the sense of a David Brooks coinage), a bourgeois bohemian.

There is also the Twilight Zone connection. Rod Serling graduated from Antioch, taught there at one point, and featured the statue of Horace Mann on campus in one of his best episodes, The Changing of the Guard.

So it is too bad that Antioch College has suffered Death by Political Correctness. This excellent piece confirms my view of contemporary liberals: they are simply incapable of arresting their slide into the looniest precincts of hard Leftism. Quentin Smith was on campus during the beginning of the end in the early '70s. I recall him telling me about the bringing onto campus of unprepared ghetto blacks who proceeded to terrorize the place with Black Panther type demands and armed thuggery.

UPDATE  (21 July 2009):   Relevant YouTube clips (HT: Mike V.) Antioch College 1858-2008? Antioch University Decides Womyn's Center Library is Garbage; Water Damage at Old Main

 

Of E-Mail and Doing Nothing

I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyperkineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying:

Dolce Far Niente

Sweet To Do Nothing

which saying, were it not for the inefficiency lately mentioned, would have been by now inscribed above my stoa. My paternal grandfather had it emblazoned on his pergola, and more 'nothing' transpires on my stoa than ever did beneath his pergola.

So time each day must be devoted to 'doing nothing': meditating, traipsing around in the local mountains, contemplating sunrises and moonsets, sunsets and moonrises, and taking naps, naps punctuated on one end by bed-reading and on the other by yet more coffee-drinking. Without a sizeable admixture of such 'nothing' I cannot see how a life would be worth living.

Not a Joiner

Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. II, p. 117:

He is not a joiner because of several reasons: one of them is that joiners are too often too one-sided in approach, too limited in outlook, too exclusive to let truth in when it happens to appear in a sect different from his own. Another reason is that too frequently there is a tyranny from above, imitated by followers, which forbids any independent thought and does not tolerate any real search.

On the other hand, going it alone does not guarantee safe or speedy arrival in the harbor of truth. It can just as easily leave one rudderless in the samsaric storm.

Life's a predicament.