You come at the King, you best not miss...

Inspiration is a cruel mistress. And an ironic one at that. Derrida is what got me on this philosophy path for real and now that I'm required to write on him...of course I'd be tired of writing. Yet I need to write it. Perhaps more because of the thought that it evokes than for the actual paper itself.

It's a paper about mourning. It came out of the questions I had concerning mourning after Justin died. What exactly is this work of mourning that was so horrible and yet so necessary? I work through the feelings of narcissism, denial, and self-delusion. I am not alone in this. But the paper's generation out of the expiration of that beloved friend only marks it as a betrayal. The confinement of genre betrays the expansiveness of who Justin was, of the plurality of relations he had, of the entire world that he worlded that is no more. So I betray my friend by trying to keep faith with him.

He'd have said my paper wasn't that good anyway. And then beat my ass at halo...with grenades. Always grenades

--------------------------------------------------

The Wire is the second best television show I've ever seen next to Deadwood. Arrested Development comes in third. The pattern that emerges from these three shows is that I enjoy complex plot maneuvers, fully developed characters, and deep content. Exception being AD which doesn't offer up the deep content but rather mocks it and mocks it well. I like my TV to make me think and not just be something passive. That's what videogames are for.

----------------------------------------------------

"Just because you surround yourself with interesting things doesn't make you an interesting person" wrote Ben Gibbard in Paste earlier this year. No, Benji, it doesn't make you interesting but it doesn't hurt you either. I like to surround myself with excellent things. Or at least I want to be associated with excellence. It won't make me a good scholar or a better philosopher. Won't hurt either. And maybe just maybe I'll get to come back at Gibbard with a quote by Ricky Bobby.

"I piss excellence."

--------------------------------------------------

There really are too many arbitrary new web mooblies to make hardly any of them matter to me. Sorry friends, organizing data just aint my thing. Give me a good book, a good cup of coffee, and a few hours to talk about the ideas that make this world such a wonderous place. DB is okay I guess.

2008: The year that kinda wasn't in music

So I'm still in love with the music from 2007. It was a cultural onslaught unlike any year of music and film I've experienced. So much good, so much to be excited about. Unfortunately, this year has been a bit more stale. I've only gotten excited about a handful of music and as a result I went back to stuff I had missed. This was the year that I discovered My Morning Jacket and The Hold Steady despite their best albums being made in 2005. They both had records come out this year and I like them both. But nowhere as good as Z and Boys and Girls in America. So here are two lists...first what I actually listened to the most this year courtesy of Last.fm and followed by what i thought were the "best" records of this year.

Last.fm List
1. tie (Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago, Minus the Bear: They Make Beer Commercials Like This in Heaven)

2.The Album Leaf: In a Safe Place

3. Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes

4. mewithoutYou: Brother, Sister

5. Tie (Sufjan Stevens: Illinois, Pedro the Lion: Control, Headlights: Some Racing, Some Stopping)

6. Owen: At Home With Owen

7. Marvin Gaye: #1's

8. The Swell Season: The Swell Season

9. Explosions in the Sky: The Earth is not a Cold, Dead Place

10. My Morning Jacket: Z

I'm surprised at how many times i listened to minus the bear but that ep really is damn good. Some of these I swear I just left the computer running while I went out for the day...lame I know. Anyway, here's my personal list.

1. Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago
2. Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes
3. M83: Saturday = Youth
4. Broken Social Scene Presents Brendan Canning: Something for all of us
5. Deerhunter: Microcastle
6. Headlights: Some Racing, Some Stopping
7. Paper Route: Are we all Forgotten EP
8. Old Crow Medicine Show: Tennessee Pusher
9. The Notwist: The Devil + You and Me
10. Stars: Sad Robots EP

i think i'm a big believer in the ep as this list attests. honestly, the only music i got really excited about was the first two although m83 has been coming on stronger with each listen.

Honorable Mention: MGMT, Colour Revolt, Sigur Ros

The Culture of Life

There is only one thing that I will say in regards to the political theater that was the vice-presidential debate. It is nothing concerning the policies of the candidates. Nothing about their demeanor or their body language. Nothing about vacuous answers or repeated talking points. What I have to say stems from something Sara Palin said but never elaborated on. At one point during the rambling-more-than-the allman bros.-never-pronounce-g's-on-the-end-of-words response to the question regarding abortion she said "we need a culture of life." Granted, this term is probably politically loaded, like saying you're "for the little guy" or that "Delaware does not deserve statehood" (it's a PA thing) but I also found it a rather interesting notion.

What would a culture of life look like? What constitutes culture such that it is not immediately associated with life, bios, zoe, etc.? If what is needed is a culture of life, are we presently residing in a culture of death? And what constitutes a culture of death?

To make an ambiguous statement like she did is not, in itself, a bad thing. It might be the only thing that I agree with her saying. But what this means, what this relationship between a culture, that is, something we make with others and life in all its permutations and levels seem much deeper than what is intended by making that statement in a debate in the middle of other commonly understood phrases. The ambiguity of the statement and its intention to sound good conceals the radical nature of a statement such as "we need a culture of life." It's that radicality which I am so interested in.

To say that we need a culture of life presupposes that culture is not immediately linked to life and also assumes that "life" is something that is understood (and that "culture" is understood for that matter). Culture, cultus, cultivate...there is a kind of non-natural creating that goes on in culture. It is not self-generating but communally generating. I cannot create culture. Only when I am in relation to the other is culture possible. That other may be the natural world (say a plant or squirrel that is angry at having his park bench occupied) or another being but they are what is essential to culture.

Life, on the other hand, is a bit harder to interpret. I will focus on meanings of life related to physis, or "nature" as precarious, provisional, and narrow as that description might be. Life, as I describe it, here refers to growing and dying, generation and termination, a process of flourishing and floundering. It is a kind of self-generating. More than just a biological (though not excluding this aspect) account of life, we can look to the imaginative, spiritual, social, and emotional accounts to round out this idea of "life".

If it has not yet become apparent, there is an entangling of culture and life at the very core of their meaning. Life is generating AND dying; we can have a culture of life and a culture of death. This has clarified this concept of a culture of life only provisionally. If anything, thinking about "culture" and "life" along these lines has problematized the idea of a "culture of life." However, if there is to be a culture, a creative and creating set of relationships, that is "of life", related to life, valuing life, emulating life, then would it not be one that embraces more than just an anti-abortion stance? Would it not focus on a culture which sees this process of generation and termination, life and death intertwined? Is the life of which this culture is a part directed towards the horizon of its own impending demise?

I find it difficult to understand how a simple phrase like "we need a culture of life" can clarify the present problems with american, or for that matter global, culture at large. If it is to be a culture of life then it will have a culture of death present within it already. It will be acquainted with the dead, with death, with dying and termination alongside birth, becoming, generation and life. I guess, in a practical sense, it is hard for me to accept the idea that an anti-abortion stance is precisely the very thing that qualifies what one might call a culture of life. What if a culture of life were more exhaustive? What if it included cultivating a concern for the biological world we live in, a concern for the emotional health of its creators and participators, a concern for the loss of arts and imagination as an essential part of education and critical thinking, a concern for the "culture of death" which devalues other human beings to the point where they are still sold into slavery, ravaged by famine, disease, and war? What if it included those things? How would that change your policy stance? How would that shape the way that you mobilize the state?

Yes, I think we need a culture of life. But we need one that focuses on more than just one issue, one policy stance, and pretty sounding platitudes that answer nothing. I long for a culture of life that embraces natality and mortality, birthing and dying, arts and sciences, books and movies, music and silence, solitude and friendship, peace and suffering and all the ways that "life" is intertwined.

I do scholarly things

The year has begun officially for me. The amount of work I do now trumps any previous year but I, unsurprisingly, love it even more now. Anyway, despite being bogged down with Derrida and Plato's Theaetetus, I have determined that the time has come for me to begin to submit papers to conferences. That is, it is time for me to do scholarly things. So here, below, is my first paper proposal. I find it an interesting dilemma to think about given our current political climate and the identity politics that go along with it.

(On a side note: why are we not encouraged to ask great philosophical questions when the two candidates debate one another? What could be more needed than a mediation on the differences between the importance of judgment (Plato's Republic) and experience (Aristotle's Nicomachian Ethics Book 1)? I tend to side with Plato on the matter...but seriously, where's the questions about the importance of these "virtues")

Paper Proposal for Wesleyan Philosophical Society Conference 2009

Narrating Evil: Emplotment, Truth, and Human Suffering


The experience of evil and the human suffering caused in its wake lends itself to narration. The emplotment of these experiences serves as a basic human act which intends moving from a sense discordance to concordance; from disorder to the semblance of order. However, within this act of narration, one finds that the experience of a common life-world and the experience of interacting with the other creates the possibility of a conflict of interpretations regarding experiences of evil.
My question, then, is “what are we to do when narratives of evil and suffering come into conflict with one another and yet remain true?” Other, related questions might be “How do we account for the omission of acts of evil in certain narratives or the inclusion of innocent parties in evil actions?” and “What is the responsibility of the narrating subject to account for what would appear to be a conflicting or contradictory interpretation of the truth of events of evil?” My proposal for exploring this issue is to use the hermeneutic work of Paul Ricoeur as a guide for delimiting the act of narration and relation to conflicting notions of the truth of an event, determining the role of responsibility on the part of the narrator and the reader/hearer of such a narrative, and making a gesture towards a hermeneutics of narrativity that can account for both the suspicions and affirmations one might have concerning the truth of any story.



It would be nice, and terrifying, to get this accepted. But I hope I do.

The New "Old, Weird America"

I've always been nostalgic for that "old, weird" America that we dream up in our songs. A land where people work harder than they should and stand up for others and do whats right 80% of the time. The rest of the time they are the connoisseurs of vice and perversion. The swindlers with a heart of gold. Hoboes, hippies, beats, punks, and maybe--if they're lucky--hipsters. They're all swindlers, and I'm one of them, sometimes proudly sometimes not. We dream of a world that never really existed and even if it did, it was never ours. I guess it's the romantic in me that longs for a promised land that isn't quite utopia but it's close. Then again, utopia has always been with us, always longed after, popping up in all those weird places that make America what it is.

There are a couple of analyses of utopia (Graham Ward and Paul Ricoeur in particular) that point out this impulse. It is most prevalent today in the dream of the suburbs, our idea of what the 1950's were like, and in political rhetoric. What becomes most disconcerting to me is that, as Ward has pointed out, the utopian dreams of "cities of endless desire" or "cities of eternal ambition" are dystopian from the start. As any urban hipster who digs folk and old-timey music will tell you, city living is no utopia. We city dwellers have become The Hollow Men. Perhaps we're not as desperate as these headpieces filled with straw, at least I don't feel that desperate, but I do find that the utopian dream remains.

Perhaps its not such a bad thing, to dream of the world as it is not. Certainly, the utopian dream can lead to a neglect of the sufferings of the present but it doesn't seem like the wrong dream to have. It is simply a different kind of utopia that I actually desire. It is the promised land of Woody Guthrie songs, John Steinbeck novels, and Wes Anderson movies. It is the "old, weird America" that Greil Marcus documents in his book of the same name that I long for. But it is the New, Weird America that I live in.

The New, Weird America bears a striking resemblence to the old one. Except this one has technology. Less hand cranks, gears and sprockets; more cables and remotes and keyboards. And the utopian dream still lives on in the new, weird america but it takes on new ways of dissemination, that is, new forms of distribution. I'll focus on one aspect of the new, weird america--partisan narratives.

As a philosopher partial to Narrative thought I should be happy about the way that people are throwing around narratives for their parties and how knowledgable about their construction. But my problem is precisely that which, I believe, most important: Content Matters. What the old, weird america did was create a narrative based on issues (at least from my recollection). Problems had solutions and you chose what solution you wanted. I know that I am generalizing and maybe overly so. What I've noticed in our political rhetoric, what angers me the most, is that these narrative swindlers spin their stories not about issues but about ways of life. My people, their people, us v. them, the people v. the elites, etc. On and on they go until they've made us suspicious of our neighbors. Maybe this is what they mean by identity politics. The problem with this, besides its questionable morality, is that it thinks that ways of life are fixed. But any student of history knows that the narrative keeps changing. Aristotle reminds us in his Poetics that action is what makes a drama a drama.

So when there's a farmer buying parts for his tractor on ebay and an urban hipster like myself listening to Dr. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys without the slightest feeling of irony or anachronism, the narrative hucksters are dead in the water. Those narratives about dumb hicks loving their guns and porn and nascar are just as absurd as those narratives about the coastal ivy-leaguers with their indie music, art films, and smarterer-than-thou attitudes. Certainly, there are those people who we all know who make those stereotypes somewhat true. But to craft a whole demographic of people who are ruining it for everybody because they live a certain way, like certain music, movies, restaurants, etc. is completely bogus.

Sometimes these narratives are necessary; in particular I am thinking of energy use narratives. They give us a story by which to judge our actions and in the best cases, give us reasons to change. Here, in the New, Weird America, we can tell the most outlandish stories because they are true, Ivy-Leaguers do actually love appalacian music and farmers do have ipods. And if these narratives are good, they'll be big enough to incorporate both farmers and pharmacologists into their tale and hopefully provide us with new, weird utopian dreams to hope for.

Cultural Artifacts pt. 2

Doodles.





popesaysitsgood #1






that son you planted grew into a fine tree







its a lot bigger than you thought it would be

The Cultural Artifact

Right now I'm watching one of my favorite things ever put on film...Danielson: A family movie. Its hard to describe how a movie about a band I don't like filled with music that can be repulsive at times makes me feel positively joyous. Things with integrity do that. It's why My Morning Jacket's "Z" is a phenomenal record. It's why "For Emma, Forever Ago" by Bon Iver is a phenomenal record. Its why "Gilead" is a phenomenal book. Integrity.

Anyway, watching this documentary has me thinking about cultural artifacts. One of the ways that we construct how people used to live is by reconstructing the culture that they lived in. What books they read, what movies they saw, what games they played, etc. So I guess I'm wondering how would you use cultural artifacts to describe a specific place and time? Or maybe how you would use media and art to describe your life? The best parts or the worst parts or both?

Perhaps I'm not being clear. I don't think I'm clear about it for myself. So I guess I'll just make my list of the things that remind me of the best parts of life.

-"Torches Together", mewithoutYou!
-The Bleached Madonna
-Recording the last/lost Amnesty Letters songs in the basement of Young House
-Compline by candlelight
-Danielson: A Family Movie (Or Make a Joyful Noise Here)
-Arrested Development (as a whole)

Like I said, I don't know exactly what I'm talking about. I guess I'm groping at some feeling I have about history and culture and memory and the gumbo it's mixture produces.

Full of Tone Full o' Tone

Some of you know that, while I'm not the worlds worst tone freak, I take my guitar tone pretty seriously. Debates about true bypass vs. active bypass not withstanding (i tend to side with the mentality that you need active bypass at the beginning and end of your signal but the middle is fair game) I have been in pursuit of a really good sound for a long time. While the amp that I really want is out of my price range, I've managed to gradually make my tone better. It's weird for me to think back to being at Greenville and running my DeVille's overdrive as my only overdrive. Or when I had that boss dual overdrive moded. It did sound good but sadly...it had to go in place of something far better....the Jekyll and Hyde. For a time I even used my Turbo-Tubescreamer in conjunction with the JK. It's what's on the Marcel ep and, honestly, I think it sounds pretty good.

Sadly, the JK has seen better days. I've been having trouble with it and it's to the point where it works only when it wants to. In the words of Derrida, this is not sufficient. So I've been doing some research...seeking out that pedal that would meet all my needs. It has to be thick but not muddy or sound too much like fuzz. It has to have multiple forms of overdrive, that is, it has to be versatile. And most of all, it has to sound good. I walked into guitar center today looking for a reverb and found them very lacking (why am I not surprised). However, I was struck that they carried a certain boutique overdrive pedal that I had been thinking about. Maybe 30 seconds into playing it I knew that I had found what I was looking for. Thick, versatile....sexy? Probably not but it sounds damn good. So I have now joined Wes, Chase, and Mike in being the proud owner of a Fulltone Fulldrive 2.

Yes, yes, I know I've committed post-rock heresy by not getting a big muff but that's just not my bag. Besides, bigmuffs are uglyass pieces of equipment and rarely sound good. But I'm super happy with the overdrive and am getting happier with my setup and overall tone the more I play it. for any who are interested here it is.

[Gibson Les Paul Classic-->Boss TU-2 tuner --Fulltone Full-Drive 2--Line 6 Delay Modeler--Digitech Digiverb--->Vox AC15]

so now that I've engaged in such vanity as writing about my pedals...i'm gonna go play.

Twentysomething? or If you weren't cool two years ago now you'll never be

Holy week. Its about this time that I remember lent. I attempted to be more responsible with my life over the course of this season and what a disaster that has been. Perhaps disaster is the incorrect word to describe my "lenten journey" as it is so called. Fizzle is a better word for it. Forgetfulness, non-intentional, laziness, malaise...all of these are good words to describe what happened in a corporeal sense. Reflecting back on the past forty days, the only thing that seems to have benefitted from this attempt at responsibility is reflection itself. I have found myself asking "am I being responsible if I do X, Y, or Z?" This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. Far from it. But the attempt was to bring the whole of my life-the mental, material, and interpersonal-into some sort of responsible practice. Did that happen? Not entirely. Parts of it did. I don't eat out as much. I'm more mindful of what I devote my time to. I ended up practicing guitar (doing scales and chords and exercises and such which i never do) which has been a pleasant surprise. I read more but that's nothing new.

Along the way of this church season, I became acquainted with this little internet based show called "Quarterlife". It's not terrible but it isn't an amazing show like The Wire, The Office, etc. What it tries to do is both comment upon twentysomethings and speak for them, er, us. That tends to be a difficult task when you are in your 40's like the writers are. However, their portrayals of what it means to be a post-college middle-class (white) American is fascinating to me. The biggest thing watching this show has done, combined with the Lenten accentuation of reflection, is lead me to question what it means to be a young white American male in the city. What does this time mean?

Meaning is a volatile mistress, provoking one to wrestle with the many possibilities, both good and bad, that any actions or times might have. So what is the meaning of being a post-college twentysomething? Where does one find purpose in one's vocation? But I guess the question that plagues me the most is:

What good can a graduate student in the humanities, specifically philosophy, do to make the world better through one's vocation?


Of course the philosopher in me begins to deconstruct the very question I've asked at the moment it comes into being. Why portray the humanities in a negative light? In an age where science abounds and technology is the double-edged sword that provides a myriad of possible connections and yet pushes us more into atomized existence...do we not still need to understand what it means to be human? Why is philosophy seen as such a superfluity (unnecessary discipline)? Is it not important to ask these questions of meaning, to question meaning, to question questioning, etc?

Sometimes, I find this rather funny blog "Stuff White People Like" kind of depressing. The entry on Grad-School is particularly unnerving albeit something of a truism (especially if you ever go to a philosophy party). Honestly, it got me a little depressed for a bit. And then I read some Heidegger and it made me feel better (how weird is that). But I guess the point of this is that the majority of people see philosophy as less than worthwhile. The concern is with something other than the history of ideas, or new ways of thinking. So it's kind of depressing when you find out that you're going to be studying something that people won't value near as much as other things. And yet, I am reminded that I didn't get into this world of academics because I wanted to be valued or thought of as cool. I didn't get into it because it fulfilled my need to have my intelligence validated. I got into it because I saw the worth in learning about the way that we view things, the way we value things, the questions of what it means to be human, to live in the world, to do the right thing, etc. I got in because I didn't want to be the kind of academic that perpetuates the ivory tower but the kind that as my cousin in the Navy says "breaks it down to show that war is not the answer."

There is, I think, a myriad way of living life as a twentysomething. More than any show or blog could chart or describe. Certainly, there are trends and funny quirks that are elevated over others but there are also idiosyncrasies that are untellable and inexpressible to more than the parties involved. And there are so many questions. There is the wrestling with the idea of "a way of life" that seems to be highlighted in these middle twenties that I"m progressing through that doesn't lend itself to an easy answer.

Identity, purpose, communication...all of these things don't go away as I move on. Some answers become more adequate, others are revealed to be little more than a mask. But I think that the comedian and philosopher Steve Martin revealed the best way to move through these questions. In a recent interview with Charlie Rose he said (I'm paraphrasing)

"Be so good that you can't be ignored"

Timely advice. And in light of the resurrection, there is a touch of the divine in those words. A rumination of what that means is for another time, but at least there is comfort coming at the end of this afflicting season of Lent.

This Picture Looks Dusty

Lent is here. I never participated in Lent when I was growing up largely because the church I attended didn't practice the Christian year. There were three holidays that we celebrated with vigor: Christmas, Easter, and the 4th of July. So sacred time is still a relatively new idea for me. I started out with Lent around my freshman year of college (Spring 2003...man that seems so long ago) and gave up soda for a while. It was easy-ish and was combined with learning about the Christian year, sacred time, and all that those things entail. Now, however, my perspective is different.

My life, and I would venture to say that most lives, consist of patterns of behavior that were started, intentionally or as a reaction to something, and now seem beyond immediate control. What I mean is something like this: you did not naturally start brushing your teeth. You were taught and now it is a habit that is not immediately under your control...you probably don't constantly think "oh man, i need to brush my teeth in 5 hours" although I wouldn't put it past some people...it is a part of the pattern of your life. But this Lent, I'm stepping back from that pattern and trying to look at what constitutes how I spend my time, how time spent places value on activities and objects, and how this pattern of my life is a part of other patterns. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I feel like the pattern of my life is not as intentional as I have thought it to be and that it is crucial for me to examine what is going on in order to assess where meaning is to be found.

Automatically, my philosopher's ears cringe at the thought of solipsism, that is, of being all wrapped up in oneself. But self-assessment is not entirely about being wrapped up in oneself or being focused on the self before others. Self-awareness can be the result of the collision of egos, of the experience of other people, of other things, of different places, of patterns changing. All of these things are beyond control and tend to happen beyond any intention for them to happen. Being a shy man, I tend not to assert myself into conversations with people which explains my ineptitude at small talk. But conversations happen to me.

This gets to a bigger phenomenon I've noticed. Patterns of life that are interrupted beyond the intention to be can involve a kind of giving over of the self to new ways of living or behaving or even pattern making. In other words, when we interact with things that are different, truly and remarkably different, they can change our patterns of living. I am one who believes that the truly and remarkably different is to be found all over---but I am distracted. I am distracted by the larger pattern of goods and services that attempts to assess the amount of meaning my life can have and tries to fit me into it's pattern. However, this is not necessarily the best way to live. A lack of self-reflection leaves me blind to the patterns that I have unintentionally given myself over to or have imposed themselves gently on my life. This should not be.

So this Lent, this season of reflection, I'm attempting to look at the pattern of my life and see just what is driving it. What guides my movements, what blinds me to the remarkable and extraordinary that surrounds me, what demands me to value some things and services over others? These are the questions I'm asking, difficult as they might be.

One more thing. You should check out The Story of Stuff to get a decent view of what I would call the larger pattern of goods and services. It's a fun, simple little video.

It's not the devil in your bed but the angel on your shoulder that's causing you to lose sleep

So this is the new year and my how things are different. I find it amazing and humbling to be here in Boston doing what I really feel I'm supposed to be doing where I'm supposed to be doing it. I am so much more aware of how blessed I am to be here and so much more aware of how my life is built upon the foundations of those who have come before. A trip to Greenville will do that.

I've never been more convinced that community is the most radically subversive and radically necessary element of human existence. Seeing all those friends together around a table sharing a meal and not needing anything other than each others company to be nourished. Rarely has the eucharist been so alive for me. Holy moments like a shared meal, a picnic by the dinning commons, a frisbee toss in cornfields, and the singing of songs, sneak up on me. Rarely do I realize just how sacred, just how separated from the mundane they really are. Nor do I realize that it is in these moments that come so naturally, despite being so rare, I am being transformed.

Why is it that around these people I feel like I can actually be good? I can be funny, and begin to become wise? Perhaps wisdom, not intelligence, exists only in a community of people.