josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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13 Nov '12 10:20:12 PM

Bicycle mishaps got me feelin like a Beckett narrator.

10 Nov '12 05:42:40 AM

'Diaries? A sign of the times. So many diaries are published. It is the most convenient, the least disciplined form. Good. Perhaps diaries will become the only kind of writing since everything else seems unbearable.'

9 Nov '12 06:26:41 AM

Aphorist, semicolonist.

9 Nov '12 06:24:46 AM

If you have a stash, that says something about your character; and what you have stashed in it says even more.

9 Nov '12 06:20:45 AM

Professionals ask, 'where was it published?'.

9 Nov '12 02:10:29 AM

A professional philosopher is a thinker skeptical of the relevance of any thought with no attested precedent; or of the value of spending any time on it.

7 Nov '12 11:52:57 PM

(Compare to the sign in the window of Kierkegaard's secondhand shop.)

7 Nov '12 11:42:51 PM

Scholars say that an author - usually of a philosophical text with literary dimensions - 'invites' us to do this or that, think of this or that, when they wish to treat the text as possessed of a sort of rigor, but also to avoid having to show how this rigor is essentially a matter of the literary dimensions of the text. This is like receiving an invitation, not accepting it, but passing it on to someone else.

'We've been invited!'

'Oh, how nice. Are you going?'

'Well you've been invited! We all have!'

'But what about you?'

I would like to say that this can't be done halfway. To acknowledge the text's rigor is to accept the invitation. The troublesome question should be, can it be accepted at all if one's response is any less literary than the original? And more troublesome: how will one make one's response just as literary, without loss of rigor?

7 Nov '12 06:39:50 PM

'We are working on ourselves. We are incomplete. We are never finished.'