Close-in day at the library. It feels more like last call. A few people were straggling up until 11:30 but they've pretty much stopped now. The piles of books on the counter that I remember from years past aren't there. There's no chaos, no noise, no stressed student workers, no people carrying in fifty books to return at once. The library is shutting down with a whimper. The only witness is the crazy-looking old woman who's started coming in this year, with gray hair like a decaying beehive or, perhaps even better, like a cloud of dirty smoke that follows wherever she goes. She has a face that has been flattened by life, every last bit of life and hope squeezed out. She walks like a Romero zombie in her loose-fitting early 20th century clothes and gigantic plastic glasses, shambling like a lost soul at a bus station that closed down years ago. And now I blow out the candle, and the semester is over.

Every so often I come face to face with the fact that I'm not all that fond of literature, at least not most of what is considered high literature. Case in point:

I read an essay that made me rethink my distaste for audio books. Previously, it had occurred to me that all my driving was just killing my reading time. I took classes at UNM for the 2009 fall semester, so for the last few months I've been driving to Albuquerque three mornings a week. Until now I had been listening to my poor overlooked CDs, but I was starting to feel the loss of time more acutely, and audio books are an obvious way to try using the down-time that driving requires. The essay convinced me to give it a try. "The audio book performance will influence my interpretation, but I can abstract from the performance interpretation to form my own interpretation, i.e., understanding and appreciation, of the work." So I decided to try it out, but the only audio books available to me easily were those in the St. John's library. As you can imagine, these aren't the kind you'd typically want to listen to during a drive. I passed up Herodotus, Dostoyevsky, Homer, etc. and decided on Dubliners. At least it's fiction and was written in English, the earliest story not much more than a hundred years ago.

I have read Dubliners, but long enough ago that I didn't remember almost any of the stories. Back then I had a sense that it was simply important to read. I don't really feel that now, but I have a generally positive opinion of Joyce.

And so I started. I felt distaste for the reader's voice, but as the essay suggested, it was a relatively trivial matter without much influence on my ultimate interpretation.

And that brings me back to the point with which I began: I don't like interpreting literature. The reasons are made more apparent than usual with Dubliners. I have nearly no aptitude for figuring out stories, on every level. I don't know what part of a story is supposed to be vague; I don't feel at all secure guessing at what I'm supposed to understand from things that are left vague; and I just don't enjoy trying. I have a hard time supplying what is missing, in literature and in life. I can't read between the lines any better than I can read Navajo. I find almost any level of vagueness displeasing and unsettling.

I feel quite the opposite when I read criticism of literature, summaries, and other people's interpretations (as long as they seem plausible). It makes no difference to me if it's Wikipedia entries, short essays intended to help students, or scholarly interpretations, I like it all even if I like some better than others. Reading literature itself is unnerving and often baffling experience. Reading about literature: now that I find fun.

Dubliners is anything but straightforward, and is carefully constructed to require interpretation, as are almost all modern texts. They are generally praised for this feature, and praised the more for being especially hard to understand (or "ambiguous" or "open to interpretation"). Whenever I read something like that I realize that I just don't like it.

In short, I am a philistine when it comes to literature. I am also, unfortunately, unable to accept this as saying anything but bad things about me.

There are perhaps two ways of describing teaching and learning in an appropriate
manner. The one is that of begetting and conceiving. The word of the teacher
acts as the form which in-forms the material of the learner's soul, in-forms the
capability this soul has, and transforms it into a knowing soul. This is, on the
whole, the Aristotelian view. The process of learning and teaching is a
generative one, and a great deal depends not only on the activity and
effectiveness of the teacher's word, but also on the receptivity and
potentiality of the learner's soul. The other way of describing teaching and
learning is that of soliciting and gaining insight from within. Through
questioning and arguing the teacher compels the learner to pull out of himself,
as it were, something slumbering in him at all times. This is, on the whole, the
Socratic and Platonic view. Here again a great deal depends on the quality of
the teacher's questions and on the quality of the learner's soul. But just as
questioning has its place in the Aristotelian scheme, begetting is an important
element in Socrates' practice. Learning from books, by images, through
associations, and whatever other ways of learning may be mentioned, falls easily
into the patterns of those two fundamental views. I doubt whether modern
psychologies of learning have added anything to them.

-Jacob Klein, On Liberal Education, a lecture delivered March 25, 1965

If I've ever read anything more tragically stupid, I'm sure I read it in another St. John's lecture.

Yes indeed, nothing better than looking over old emails at work to delete ones I don't need and realizing that I am occasionally a damn fine writer. Every so often I look up from my stupor of days and investigate my life, and I realize that I've lost the impulse to write. It never seemed like a big deal when I had it. I'd write long blog posts and emails and journal entries, and I was always pulling out my pocket notebook to write something down, but I very rarely wrote stories. Since that was my benchmark of being a writer, I didn't think I was doing anything worthwhile. Now I look back at how frequently I wrote in my late teens and early twenties and I wonder what the hell happened.

When I started this blog, I saw it as my responsibility to publish things in it, almost like I had been hired to write a daily column for a newspaper. My deadline was midnight every night. I could take vacations without getting prior approval, but it was on the understanding that I might lose my two or three readers.

I later learned that (a few) other people read my blog at various points but never left comments, so I didn't know it at the time. If anybody I don't know personally has read my blog, I still don't know it. Over time, though, I must have lost all of my readers, mostly to my own neglect.

I meet very few new people these days, and I've fallen out of touch with most of the old ones. I became friends with library students the first two years I was a supervisor, but in the third year, I really haven't. I don't feel a desire to hang out with people in my German class, and even if I did, they live in Albuquerque. And I get tired and misanthropic in most social settings involving more than one other person.

Writing is a famously solitary action, but that clearly isn't the whole story. Without a sense of audience, I often have no urge to write. The more time I spend alone, the less time I spend thinking and, of course, the less I have to describe anyway.

Also, I guess, as I get older I'm continuously losing my engagement with the world. My curiosity is mostly intact, but I primarily focus it on things that other people have written. I get little sense of wonder from encountering new things in the world, and indeed very little seems genuinely new. I often seemed to have an unlimited desire (but very limited ability) to observe and probe people, the way they think and speak and dress and move, the bizarre shapes their relationships with each other take, the mystery of personality. I thought about it often, but to little effect. I've been thinking about it less and less, and I don't know why it is that I no longer become fascinated with people any more.

I can still get plenty annoyed with people, though. As I type this, someone in the preceptorial that meets in the study room attached to the library is polluting my ears with his overwrought, high-pitched, percussive laughter. The sound is like an evil clown in a Saturday morning cartoon, only it has a genuine lunatic quality that cartoons can't match. I wonder if it isn't the student Anne dubbed "hyena boy".

So there, I've met my digital quota for the month. Here's hoping I keep it up tomorrow.

Last night I dreamt that M. Night Shyamalan had died in a plane crash, or perhaps it was from a horrible disease. What a tragedy it would be if we lost the worst Hollywood filmmaker of the present era (if not ever), and thus all the terrible movies he'll produce in the future. It is a great relief to check google news and find that the top Shyamalan hits are still about this historically important director being invited to the White House as a guest at the state dinner for Manmohan Singh.

fumbling toward ecstacy

Epicenters of hamhock faces:

Sports Center
Boston, MA
ex-members of Saturday Night Live
high school sports coaches
reporters for Men's Fitness
County Kerry
John Kerry
Kerry O'Malley's brother Mike O'Malley
Martine Kerry O'Michael O'Malley
McDonalds in Ohio
Ted Mc'O'Hamhock Shyamalan Kennedy
within twenty minutes of any cornfield
and, I'm sure, also in Heaven

Anybody still reading? Read these two paragraphs from the Daily Howler about how poorly people understand the way the media and the government work in the U.S.:

Like Henneberger, Simon described a strange dual system. One side gets to yell objections—the more absurd the better. The other side is somehow required to make an impossibly complex presentation. One side is required to yell two words. The other side has to tick off long list of complex points.

To our ear, Simon and Henneberger were each describing a political system they can’t quite explain. One side gets to yell crazy things—and the other side is required to make intensely detailed presentations! And yet, the side which yells the crazy things is the side which constantly wins! It’s almost like a dream from Kafka—a dream our side can’t quite explain. Then too, we thought of a passage from Wittgenstein: “We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.”

From: http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh082609.shtml

The following sentence appeared in an email from Conference Services about carpet being installed in the library:

Please do not “get in the way” of the crew when you stop by as we need them to get done with this project.

Can anyone tell me what she thought she was doing with the quotation marks? I really want to know. I'm strongly tempted to reply to the email and ask.

The world contracted again.

In the library, I came across a book from 1956 that was put together as an attempt to re-establish English political philosophy (since it was an English editor, who characteristically refers to none but the most significant philosophers outside England but will discusses minor British names at equal length). It's fascinating in a small way, since it contains thoughts on political philosophy which are recent enough to be recognizable, but far enough in the past that it examines subjects which are now taken for granted. The preface, for example, deplores the fact that English philosophy (from Russell through Ryle) killed the three-hundred-year-long tradition of political philosophers writing in English, who "concern[ed] themselves with political and social relationships at the widest possible level of generality." This tradition is dead, and it outright says that the Logical Positivists killed it. And also the Marxists and the social scientists, the first because they were incorrigable relativists who looked at political theories as necessarily contingent, the second because they thought politics were too important to leave to the philosophers.

Topics in the book include an examination of the possibility of multiple moralities as opposed to a single, rationally decidable answer to every moral question; the grounds for the theory of natural rights; whether or not such a thing as the general will exists; and the philosophical justification of punishment. These topics are all discussed in contemporary writing, but I never see the premises so clearly laid out as they are in older texts, where they were still fresh. There's also an earnestness and sophistication of literary style in the old writing that is generally lacking today, alongside of a naiveté--charitably, a willingness to be naive when necessary.

It's not a book I want to read straight through, but I guess I'm glad it's in the library.

I'm currently looking through Insound, trying to find things to buy and shifting between two poles. The first pole is thinking that I have the money and I would like to support Insound, the bands I like, and the physical music industry in general. The second pole is thinking, what am I, a capitalist cheerleader?

I feel nostalgic for the early years of this decade, when I spent hours every day downloading music, renaming the files and putting them in neatly ordered folders, driving to Sound Garden in Baltimore and buying a hundred dollars of CDs, alphabetizing the new purchases on my shelf, setting up a record player in my room and moving up half my parents' old LP collection, adding new LP purchases, finding bands to shop for, asking friends what I should buy, looking at all the album art and reading band interviews and dreaming of product . . . and sometimes listening to it, too.

But even the nostalgia is compromised by thoughts of how silly it all is. I look back on it and it now seems to me that I was trying to break through the album covers and into a fantasy world, a place where the music of the spheres was "I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One" and the shifting landscape took on the shapes of indie album art, populated by sixties rockers in their youth who lounged in the fuzzy pastel-green hills and climbed the rotating, swirly discs of color.

I don't ever feel like I'm in this world anymore. I think I'd still want to live in it, but I know that if I ever get there it won't be through buying lots of records.

In the early days of music downloads, I only got albums rather than just the songs I knew, and I burned everything onto CD. I even made cases, getting blank CD cases from Office Depot, downloading the album art and printing it out or making my own covers if art wasn't available. I would listen to music at the computer too, but if I wanted to play it in my room, I needed it on CD.

It was only much later that I got a digital music player, and I brought it to work with me every day, but I also brought a CD player and switched between the two.

For my freshman year of college, I bought a large CD tower and I brought every CD I owned into my dorm room, along with a large CD book full of burned discs, having finally decided that I decided could do without CD cases for most of my burned albums. My collection had grown by Sophomore year, but because of limited space I went without cases and just used the book. Then I took a year off from school and lived in Los Angeles, with few possessions at first but, even though I had no income, a steadily growing music collection. For Junior year I took a move that was radical for me, bringing no music players to Santa Fe but a turntable, a portable Discman and a pair of head phones. As a result, I almost never listened to music in my room even though I kept buying a bunch of CDs online almost every month.

Skipping ahead to my move to Santa Fe in 2006, even though I knew I would be living there for a long time and almost certainly never moving back in with my parents, I left most of my CDs behind in Maryland to save space in the car. I had an 80 GB iPod, and Anne had another 20 GB or so I could fill on her laptop, and so finally in 2006, almost a decade after I became aware of mp3s, I went mostly digital. With vinyl. It's apparently a very common combination these days for people who identify as music fans--CDs are mostly pointless when digital music is so easy to get and listen to and carry around, but people are unwilling to cut ties to music in physical form, or perhaps even just a representation of music in its physical form.

And I'm somewhat there with them, but that part of myself is currently losing the argument with what I guess is a saner and wiser Greg who says, "screw you, hipster. Go find a crumbling urban loft with bad central heating to worship your physical representation of music in."

Not that I have anything against following that hypnotizing vinyl with your eyes as it spins on its metal axis until you feel like you've stepped inside the music like it was some pulsing fun house, holding your breath as it coils and coils, tick tick tick up the big roller coaster climb, so high you can see the ocean from up there, and hey, so that's what the world looks like from outside the atmosphere! And then the release finally comes, your and it breaks your heart with joy.

And also, if there weren't such a thing as album covers, a dimension of band identity would be lost, illustrators would have one fewer way to build a reputation and sell their art, and people like Anne would have no way of choosing music to listen to when browsing a store*. And still, after all these years, I have almost never fallen in love with a band and added them to the music library in my head just by downloading their songs. (Here's to The Bees--known as Band of Bees in the U.S.--for being the first and so far the only one.)

There's another reason I still feel like buying music as well, which is that there's a difference between getting a CD put out by Sony or BMG or Colombia, and buying it from a band, an independent label, or Insound. If I ever put out a book or an album or whatever other physical result of creative effort, I know I'd want people to buy it. I want a world in which artists don't need day jobs, as long as they can find an audience who likes them; I want a world in which people who spend all their time thinking about music can make a living selling it; and in the modern capitalist system, the only way that can happen is if people buy recordings and band merchandise, and go to shows.

But at the same time, I also want a world in which everybody has access to health care, education is extremely well-funded or free, nations aren't divided between masters on the one hand and the slave-producing societies on the other, and nobody gets killed for money, ideology, drugs, or prestige. Buying music isn't going to accomplish any of those things. It isn't even going to get me to my bougie world between the grooves. So I think I'll trim down that Insound shopping cart, or even sit on it for a while.

*I'm not making fun of this practice. Honestly. It is kind of an interesting phenomenon, though, and it probably has something to say about the physical representation of music.

I just received a book of German philosophy through interlibrary loan; I knew at the time I was filling out the request form that I couldn't possibly want it once it arrived. The book is by an 18th century thinker named Salomon Maimon. Last names were rare for Eastern European Jews of that time, but he picked one to fit in better among German philosophical circles; he chose this name because of his respect for Maimonides. The book, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, is Maimon's comments on Kant's first Critique, which I'm still interested in even though six years ago I would have scorned someone who continued focusing on program authors in a non-academic setting. I requested Maimon because I read in a book on the history of philosophy that Kant said in a letter, “none of my critics understood me and the main questions as well as Herr Maimon does.”

When I first graduated, I decided to put off more school for a while, and ended up getting married and having to put off school for longer while Anne gets her undergraduate degree. For the first year after graduation, when I read philosophy (which was rare) I read somewhat contemporary work like Deleuze and Alasdair MacIntyre. Mostly I read novels and news. In the years that followed, every so often I got into a phase where I obsessed about a single subject and read about it all the time, for months: early English plays, biological anthropology, Flaubert, Roman history, the French Revolution. Inevitably, my interest would fade before I had read everything I'd planned to read. The reason is that every time I become interested in something, I keep pushing it back further and further. The interest in plays started as an interest in Shakespeare, but I just kept looking for more context, and I had to consciously stop myself from learning Old English. I read about ten old plays (including "Everyman" and the so-called "Mystery Plays") before I gave up. The interest in Roman history started as an attempt to read Gibbons, and I decided to look at his sources first; I read some Livy and Polybius, but never got past the first chapter of Decline and Fall.

Currently I seem to be approaching the end of an interest in contemporary philosophy, and I've done particularly poorly this time. I pushed back to (of course) the roots of contemporary philosophy, first making a big reading list of philosophers to at least skim (initially starting with Leibniz), then I decided to fill in the reading list with stuff I hadn't heard of, so I checked out a history of modern philosophy . . . and then another . . . and then five more . . . and then even got a book about histories of philosophy, like the history of the historiography of philosophy, but I still haven't read anything written in the 20th century except Austin's How To Do Things With Words, Derrida's Limited, Inc., and several journal pieces about the conflict between Derrida and Searle found therein. I've also read a number of journal articles written by Analytic philosophers, some about the limitations of Analytic philosophy, others about the limitations of certain Continental philosophers, still more about the origin of the perceived divide into these two oddly designated branches.

I still don't know what I would focus on in grad school, but maybe it would be philosophy after all. But no--no, that would be just too horrible. Even Comp Lit would be better than that.

And yet, here's this book with its pleasingly flexible spine and its corrugated green cover--I've never seen a cover like this, with the texture of finely ribbed corduroy that makes my finger vibrate when I run my nail over it. I can't read it without looking up thirty words per page, but I'll probably get through a good bit of it nevertheless. It fills me with more dread than pleasure to see it, and I even expect the contents to be boring, and yet I couldn't resist at least glancing at it. And what does that say about me?

I went almost two months without any translation jobs, and now suddenly, all at once, I get two big jobs that are due very soon. I knew that one of them was on its way, since a company I worked for in the past told me there were getting a 500 page document and were looking to break it up among their freelance translators. They asked how many pages I thought I could do between 2/27 and 3/12, and I said I could do about 30 pages. Then they sent it on Friday, all 30 pages, and said that actually it was due on 3/4--so I have eight fewer days to translate it.

Also, I got a call on Friday around 7 a.m. from a German who, thank God, was speaking English. I had sent an application to his agency at the beginning of February, and he asked, "Have you done any contract work?"

"I've only been a freelancer."

"No no, have you done any contract work for an agency?"

I thought he was asking if I had ever worked for an agency, so I said yes.

Then a little while later he sent the document and it turns out he meant had I ever translated a contract. Which, no, I hadn't, although I would have answered the same way. It was a five-page document which I would have asked around 80 € for, but I asked him how much he would like to pay and he said 150 €. So that was lucky. It was kind of fun to translate, too, because I was able to find what all the terms meant, and then I had to contract it up in my translation, make it contracty. There's also a translation forum I go to for help, and a few people gave really useful explanations of legal terms.

So I turned the contract in last night, and now I'm on to the catalog. For the first ten pages it was pretty easy, just product specs for which I was mostly able to figure out how to phrase it in English. Then I came to the middle of the document, where it switched suddenly from parts for heating systems, to parts for energy production plants. If anyone knows why these would be in the same catalog, I'd love for you to tell me. Anyway, now I have to figure out how things like building management systems, control protocols, cable ties, automation systems, setpoint values, and other things I'd never heard of all work together. I need a Rosetta stone-like document that is talking about the same sort of thing, in English, as my document is in German. If it's a dual language document, well that would be peachy.

Our wall broke. Our poorly constructed house has a cheap layer of drywall covering the adobe, and the wall by the shower eroded to the point where the tiles have nothing to hang on to anymore. So now I have to clean up the house and the yard as quickly as I can before calling the landlord, and God forbid, maybe they'll pin the eroded wall on us. Any thoughts, non-existent readers?

It's been too long . . .

I may have forgotten how to blog. I might be testing that theory in the next few days. Someone whose name begins with an X was reading through here and leaving comments tonight, and it seemed a shame to me that I haven't updated since November. I'm once again amazed, looking my old posts, how different I seem to myself when I read what I've written. I have a personality that doesn't come out in daily life very much, particularly now that I no longer live near any close friends from school. I go months without having an intellectual conversation with an interested partner.

I recently finished Steven B. Smith's Reading Leo Strauss, one of no fewer than six "apology of Leo Strauss" books in the St. John's library. After reading Reading, I could see myself going through Strauss's major works at some point, even though I'm still unclear why he's so thoroughly opposed to historicism, and I don't know what evidence there is for his esoteric readings of Plato. I read the book because the lecturer last week spoke on Alfarabi, and this week it's on the statesmanship of Lincoln--two obviously Strass-influenced lectures in a row--and so I thought I'd finally try to figure out what the origin of this stuff was.

I still have an enormous preference for the philosophy of Richard Rorty, an avowed historicist whom the Straussians would, furthermore, likely consider "unserious" or something like that because he doesn't have a central enough focus on politics. Oh well. It takes all kinds to make an ivory tower.