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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18 Apr '13 05:46:36 AM

'… one learns that without this trust in one's experience, expressed as a willingness to find words for it, without thus taking an interest in it, one is without authority in one's own experience. (In a similar mood, in The Claim of Reason, I speak of being without a voice in one's own history.) I think of this authority as the right to take an interest in your own experience. I suppose the primary good of a teacher is to prompt his or her students to find their way to that authority; without it, rote is fate. The world, under minimum conditions of civilization, could not without our cooperation so thoroughly contrive to separate us from this authority. Think of it as learning neither to impose your experience on the world nor to have it imposed upon by the world. (These are sorts of distortions of reason Kant calls fanaticism and superstition.) It is learning freedom of consciousness, which you might see as becoming civilized. Unless spoken from such a position, why should assertions concerning the value of, for example, film be of any concern to us?'

18 Apr '13 03:31:44 AM

'you ain't nice / regardless of your publishin deal / you can't write'

18 Apr '13 02:25:48 AM

The way culture works is that there can be people who want to get into Dylan, people who can't get into Dylan, people who refuse to try to get into Dylan, and people who can't see how you could not be into Dylan, and mostly when they talk to each other nobody feels like anything anyone else says could really be sincere or at all in touch with reality, kind of inexplicably, since how hard can it be to listen to a record? Then they talk some more about it.

17 Apr '13 09:15:21 PM

A typo, 'septics'.

17 Apr '13 09:25:32 AM

'…all / The dreary intercourse of daily life…'

17 Apr '13 08:44:30 AM

How many drafts can I delete before I concede, I'm just not going to be sharing my thoughts with anyone today?

17 Apr '13 03:45:02 AM

There's an official way of doing things. In what ways can it be questioned? In the official way! …say officials.

17 Apr '13 01:54:12 AM

Revolutionary praxis chiasmus!

16 Apr '13 09:25:53 PM

'Whatever I can steal.'