August 2011
71 posts
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Buster...
- Buster: I'm a scholar. I enjoy scholarly pursuits.
- Lucille: Suddenly playing with yourself is a scholarly pursuit?
aesthetically uninteresting →
hitrecordjoe.tumblr.com
It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that’s gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like “It’s really important not to lie.” OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don’t feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can’t trust you. I feel that I’m in pain, I’m nervous, I’m lonely and I can’t figure out why. Then I realize, “Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie.” The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting — which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff — can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can’t, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel.
“We have abandoned the idea that the university invites the student to become part of a universal community of scholars, part of a universal community of human civilization, where you achieve individual self-definition through participating in a universal human civilization. Now what we tell you is, what’s your ethnicity? What’s your race? What’s your gender? That’s who you are. You don’t define yourself. You are defined by race, gender, class, ethnicity, and cultural background. And that isn’t just stupid, that’s evil. I’m fighting against that, but I think a lot of people now accept that. They think that’s perfectly legitimate. And one way to put it is to say that traditionally in America, such things at that were regarded as accidental. It’s like you’re blue-eyed or you’re left-handed. You don’t build your life around being left-handed, and you don’t build your life around your ethnicity or your race. These are just stupid accidents of your birth. The serious professional intellectual regards it as an accidental fact that he or she was born of a particular race or a particular gender. You create yourself as an individual intellect and that’s what counts, and we will invite you into membership into a universal human community of advanced culture. And within that community you can create yourself as a serious individual. But now we’re telling otherwise innocent children, “Look, you came from this background, that’s who you really are.” And I think to say that is to abandon one of the fundamental advantages of the university education, namely, before we told you, yes, okay, you came from this background, you can be proud of this background, we’ll offer you something better. We’ll let you redefine yourself, giving you the resources of the whole of human history to redefine yourself. Now we’ve even got this stupid Ethnic Studies requirement where we make people study American cultures where the idea is you’re supposed to celebrate various forms of really quite ordinary phenomena. There’s nothing intellectually special about having been born a certain race or a certain gender.”
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John Searle (via philphys)
THIS 1000Xs. Someone needs to remind every Elmhurst College multiculturalist this 1000Xs.
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July 2011
54 posts
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“Director Alex Proyas is set to helm a 3D adaptation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The 17th-century epic poem is about the Satan’s temptation of Adam and Eve and the pair’s eventual expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Variety says the project, “will be crafted as an action vehicle that will include aerial warfare, possibly shot in 3D”
—Barf
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
—Ernest Hemmingway (via story-dj)
“I want a toilet that looks like the Iron Throne. (With proper protection for my jewels, of course)”
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