Monday, December 17, 2012

mondaynote



Beginning again, after a long hiatus, should be cheery, like greeting someone after returning from a long trip. Aren’t we glad to be here today.

It’s not a question, but the kind of thing a first grade Teacher might say to her kids—and it would be “her.” “Let me see your smile.”

One first grader last Friday said, while their terrified teacher’s entire class huddled in their bathroom, “I know karate, so it’s OK. I’ll lead the way out.”

That night, another was quoted as saying “One thing good today: I didn’t die.”

I thought this morning my tearing up was gone. It was all news now, beyond active grief, for my part. But this Sunday photo broke me again.




Saturday, September 01, 2012

night forest shrouded in fog
with full moon beams



Late evening tonight on a Berkeley hillside overlooking the bay
behind me: glowing expanse of rays through so many eucalyptus arms

ethereal


Thursday, August 30, 2012

flowers and leaves

from the May 11 NYTimes review of “Lives of the Novelists: a history of fiction in 294 lives.”



My posting title is originally from a collection of poems by Guy Davenport, now-dead Professor of English at the University of Kentucky—a title which became an attitude of mine toward child development, teaching, romances, and how learning never ends, from one era of life growing and going into an other.


Sunday, August 19, 2012

to a skillful violin playing far away
in a summer night



I don’t know where exactly you are among trees on the woody street. Some window you’re near, as if serenely singing to the quiet dark without need of being held or bowed.

I should have some expansively poetic pithiness in complement, something prepared for days or weeks to which you’re a preface.

What I have is having given lots of time to a new web-based discussion group that’s very unique, and lovely—which I can’t fairly depict briefly. But they’ll be implicitly integral to writing I’ll link to, from here later.

One member of the group wrote earlier this month (which I quoted in my comments for one post tonight, in part) about her:
…soulmate....the one your heart, body, mind, and soul are screaming out for, and that love really is something so special, that so many others will never find.
—which I mourn a little [I replied], as I wanted that so much in the loves I had—loves I’m no less thankful for, yet—

I’m a creature of my own romanticism. Where you all (some of you) found your soulmate …and made it the love of your life, I wanted the love of my life to be the other side of myself I never found, which I idealized as a sister I didn’t have.

So, I support the best in others, and enjoy my romanticism as something known to be realistic for the hopes of those who haven’t yet found The One.

It’s not that the Love of your life should be like Love [you’ve found], but that Love be what is expressed at best here. Lovers’ experiences will always be so varying, at least in the terms we choose. Yet, what we want is what’s expressed here—which is something never finished! It’s always to be reached or kept thriving. We fall away and journey back wiser, better mates. I know that. I found that. But I didn’t find the soulmate. That’s OK!

[…]

…because knowing The Gift can be given whatever way we can.


...though my confessional posture was fiction.


Monday, August 13, 2012

mondaynote



Life is rough, when you’re trying to have fun and life’s business unwittingly throws wrenches in the works.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

sporting life



One more week, two at the most, before I’m back to posting more often than Sunday.

I’m really tired of saying things like that. I want to just get on with it! But “it” won’t be worth the time if it’s not set up well.

If I didn’t have to go to the office every week—if I had continuous time to do this work I want to do—I’d have gotten through my fecund mess of notes earlier.

It’s like trying to build a house on weekends. “I just wanna get on with the party here.

So to speak.

Enjoy life (in good health) and leave a good (memorable) legacy, I say.

I say, good show in London—but I’m not giving time to viewing it.
[Olympics] In the beginning, B.C.E. Athens could create olympics because wealth without war (i.e., leisure culture) gives time for turning freedom to sport. For the living well—who thrive continuously—life becomes commonly sporting.

So it is with adventures and drama and other arts of living—gardening, too (conceptual and otherwise) beyond vanity fairs.

“It’s all about the hunt, old sport”—first, roots and berries, sex, land, monumental memory, great things, realized peaks or other highs...

However, corporate sports (what turns up in a sports section of a newspaper) is boring. In that regard, I’m not a good sport.

Yet, I have olympic aspirations for conceptual gardening! [smirk]


Sunday, July 22, 2012

solar-systemic living



We’re commonly a world of inestimable volumes of little messages born of episodic attentions (which is all a market needs) grown from ephemeral interests. We give more attention to what’s shocking than to what matters. A string of “newsfeeds” fills our need for narrative (which hardly needs integrative sense when one’s own life mirrors the limitless improvisation of being in time), as if a simulacrum of meaningfulness is a sophisticated realism.

The essayist is a nuisance, along with moralists.

Anyway, a writer has a pleasure of defining by exclusion what’s not worth attention, as well as a burden of scarce time to detail all that’s so worth appreciation, so much that truly matters.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

yea, earthlings



The music video “Where the Hell is Matt? 2012” (link below—but hasn’t everyone seen it?) starts off nicely, then quickly seems kitschy, but quickly gets delightful, inspiring, and deeply touching.

Note the marginality of locales (“where in the world…”), the sweetly simple vs. grand choreography, an incredible happiness in the concept, as if there’s an ethic of humanity in it all. A daddy’s wonderful gift addresses the immortal, aspiring child in our being.



P.S. After you’ve seen the thing, here’s some history.


Monday, July 09, 2012

imparting text



I guess vanity causes me anxiety about not posting recently, as if my tiresome promises of major departures were more vanity.

Non sequitur: “Texting” isn’t talking literally, but is talking-as-text—enamored with its abbrevity, but unconcerned with its textuality as such. Yet, writing has always been texting, and the structuring of narratives (stories, cases, verbal displays, etc.) has always involved architextual design, and conceptual design is environmental, implied by later detailing it routes or constrains, like a scripting that provides lots of freedom for stance and movement, inter-stancing and performative enriching, but determines to its degree what’s there worth determining, including (to my mind) some love of abstraction, true also to painting, dance, poetry, reflective conversation, and so on and on, generally speaking (texting).

Enough non sequiturs bricolaged in a given space through some design can compose a good Thing.

I got a lot of textual designing done the past few weeks, even gaining a sense of an ending yesterday which was elating, but oddly caused Ana to tease me dismissively, invisibly, making me a caricature of accomplishment, which I enjoyed. (I love her so much I can’t stand it sometimes.) But a bit of post-partum blues came this morning: What now? Too much still to do before departing.

Soon, I promise.


Friday, May 25, 2012

Habermas and news, realism with idealism



While I’m privately integrating everything I’ve shared online during the past year (given free time, for the sake of specifically benefitting from upcoming readings of others), I feed my addiction to news, including Habermas’s view of EU politics, which I give too little time now to fairly discuss, because I prefer to “lose” myself (no, regain myself) in thinking through what I’ve earlier written, even substantially clarifying some of it, e.g., my idealism of mind.

I love a living resonance between dailiness and conceptual venturing. And I so wish for more free time sooner than later. (But the extended freedom will happen later: early 2013.)


Saturday, May 19, 2012

saturdaynote



Today’s weather is as perfect as I can remember—another day
in paradise.

At Cheeseboard Pizza (pesto and mushrooms today, sprinkling of blue cheese), I sat on a sidewalk bench next to a lone girl-woman in breezy rose-colored dress, old high-laced shoes, old denim jacket (vintage sartorialist), and dissheveled dark brown hair, finishing her baklava
from somewhere.

She remained afterward, aimlessly entertaining the surround.

I knew she thought I wanted to talk to her.

True—yet, I didn’t.

Two strangers under a tree’s gentle sway.

I almost blurted chirpily “Another day in paradise.”
But I was more interested in the silent dramaturgy of my desire
to start an entertainment.

I watched a very old guy walk by “us” with his manicured poodle.
I felt like Woody Allen in “Annie Hall” exuberantly scripting passers by. I might have turned to her and started babbling—as she was standing up, and walked away.

She admired my restraint.


Sunday, April 15, 2012

“Dear Professor Jennifer,...”



I sent a letter (email) today to Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Professor of Philosophy, and I actually began it “Dear Professor Jennifer.” You’ll see shortly (a posting) that I wasn’t presumptuous. But I was a little vain.

Anyway, J.A.G-F masterfully exemplifies what philosophy of literature can be. 

Friday, March 30, 2012

remnants of a letter on Habermas’s “Heidegger”


revised ending, May 20

I began my day with the news, which led to a curiosity about the “free rider problem,” relative to my interest in the constitutionality of the “individual mandate” to have health insurance being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court. (They took their first vote on the matter today, in secret.)

That led to noticing that the article on “Authority” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy failed to mention Habermas, though Habermas’s career is about that as much as anything. 

Sunday, March 18, 2012

writing for writing



“But now, I just want to get back to what I love,” I ended Thursday
(“ sunrise, sunset,...”).

He seems resolute.

I am. Yet, what I love is too much to distill into something both cogently fair to the love and brief (one would hope).

In particular, intending to write a good long posting today drew itself
into a skeletal mitosis by late afternoon that could be fleshed out as
at-least-nine essays.

That’s good—but not practical.

However, I could turn out a focused essay quickly, if I had an imposed
deadline.

But given free time, I thoroughly enjoy the mental heights. I do know to stop when there’s need—to transpose ongoing elation into a promise of future time I make room for, in terms of points in my garden (themes, notes, allusions, resources) that would be obscure to anyone else, but which work for me. 

Saturday, March 17, 2012

creative life as manifold order



Have you ever wondered, faced with a definition of a personality disorder, what the correlate order might be? For example, what’s a bipolar order?

Consider the upside of it (relative to DSM-IV): I know very well that there’s nothing inherently problematic about exuberance or elation that extends over a week or more. This is one reason I love vacation periods. Extended “elevation of mood” is a great thing! What becomes problematic is not being able to effectively divide fidelity to the heights from needing to work with persons who can’t share your enthusiasm while intensely needing their appreciation of you (which can be a mistake). If you can keep the heights from intimidating others (i.e., pretend well that you’re as vacuous as the persons you need to collaborate with) and not need their recognition of the value of your inspiration, then you can better make the heights work for you, and not overly concern yourself that it doesn’t work for them.  

Thursday, March 15, 2012

sunrise, sunset, winter, spring



1976, a “girl” (25), Kathryne, loses a love, Gary (27), because the boy returned to a doctoral program (already half-finished) a continent away, as she’s beginning hers. The passion of mental growth in the life of each separately causes them to reconcile to time. He was supposed to return, but didn’t. Decades later, each one’s partner died, but neither knew that about the other. So it goes. 


Monday, February 27, 2012

mondaynote



I can’t stand it. I might have gone my whole life without looking up ‘nulliparous’.

I can stand it. No sheepishness for me. I’m a master of stoicality (whatever).

You can make such lovely images of your day. Or be so funny, then heartrending.

Your foot documentation lives!

I thank the gods you crossed my path.


Wednesday, January 18, 2012

a validity of candor



For decades, I’ve lived with or felt nearest to persons who are emotionally open, trusting, caring, and therefore candid. I’d welcome being told by a friend that I seemed, say, “emotionally disabled,” because—well firstly, that would be funny to hear; but mainly that would be a chance to understand myself better through their sensibility, a chance to learn something about myself, as well as better understand her or him.