backstage notes

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Finishing “creative fidelity” feels like a milestone, not because it’s especially comprehensive of what I want to do going forward (it’s not) or difficult (not), but because it draws closure on something that began over a year ago, and this is somewhat represented by “c.f.”’s frequent linking back to earlier pages. I feel I’ve won a justified freedom now to write as eccentrically as I please without contradicting (or undermining) my fidelity to living very ordinarily wherever that’s apt—ethically, cogently, and graciously. But that’s as if life isn’t theater; yet life is theater, to my sensibility. Particularly theatrical is the pretense that life isn’t theater.

to be really realistic...

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I’m simply me. It’s not complicated. I can make it complicated.
But I don’t seek that.

I have the interests I have. So it goes. I get enthusiastic about things easily, and I’m thankful. It’s not egoistic to be thankfully enthused about things that don’t interest many others, if I don’t blame others for not having my interests (which would otherwise be very silly.

as if there’s no news

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a note on dancing lightly in a thematological map

I know the leading news of the day, the past week, every week (of recent decades). If you’re reading this years from now (Jan. 15, 2011), you might have no idea what the leading news has recently been, probably in part because time dissolves a vibrant Moment into so many wakes. However, I don’t wish to give long-range salience to this week’s leading news. Besides, significance to Time is likely not immanent, though intimated in the Moment, invisibly to most witnesses (and commentators).

There are themes that become trends, and some that last for the lot of us, even some born fully in a Moment. But we likely don’t know which Moments, themes, or trends will endure. This season’s leading events will vine with uncounted others to give a weave to their season (which, you know, I rendered earlier), maybe at the scale of an era to be later defined by those who define eras.

pre-positional soup

He’s in love
with a complex, some Intimacy of Flourishing
in resonance with questions
of domainity as such (thus interdomainity),
legacy and scholarship irt lifeworld
consolidation of learning, reading, and thinking—a world
irt (and/or versus) a life, easily
presuming on itself an implicature
of the world, the World—to a life, at least,
surely (if unclearly) the world of one life,
nebulously open to where it’s going,
how best to further its wayfaring,
as the world does idealize a confidence expressed
by the rhetorical lucidity of the specialist,
like a professional theorist,
let alone a connoisseur of conceptual design,
classically the organotechnologist called a “philosopher,”
now to be a strange hybrid of academia
entwined in our evolutionarity of mind:
no happenstance but enactive
mirrorplay of drawing and evincing,
argument and teaching.

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deconstructive nostalgia

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One chapter of Designing Positive Psychology (re: yesterday’s posting) criticizes the field for not enough appreciation of “dark sides of the human psyche” (that’s part of a chapter title).

I know those sides, home to transgression of comfortable boundaries, thrilling for some of us (not frightening). I came to know what the shadows know.

We come back to comfortable light and we smile, like Maureen Dowd confessing on Christmas a Patti Smith behind her eyes.

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descent time

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Holidays away from a scheduled world cause happy warps in lived time. It’s like 2 weeks ago that the past 11 days began. Posting a story 22 hours ago, anchored by a party 48 hours earlier, seems 4 days ago.

It’s time to forget, as I’m back in HyperNet City tomorow, but not possibly of it all.

Sherry Turkle’s new book, Alone Together, evidently details the pathos of the social networking planet that keeps everything pervasively vacuous for maximal marketing effect. Do I want to read about that? No. But one should. Facebook today was valued by investors at $50 billion. The only reason could be that Facebook is a marketer’s dream. Know what? I’ve been on the web from the beginning, but I’m not on Facebook (not actively; I have one of the earliest accounts, but don’t use it). You can know nothing more about me on the web than I’ve chosen.