Monday, February 18, 2008

The Un-Maker


Edvard Munch
The Scream
Here.

You'll notice some new reading up on the booklist. I've gone through a few more issues of Y: The Last Man and Doom Patrol. I'm not going to talk about it too much, except to say that the latest issue of DP is an actual fight between mind and body (as in a disembodied mind and a mindless body), with a number of jokes about Cartesian Dualism. Seriously, guy(s), what's not to love!


As for the The Scream up top, well, you might say I've been doing a bit too much reading. This is not evidenced in the booklist as the majority of the reading has been for school, and who among you really cares what I think of scientific demarcation as it relates to Intelligent Design. As a matter of fact, it's gotten to the point where I almost don't care about what Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and the rest of that crazy, crazy bunch have to say anymore. If you're reading this, Professor G___, I'm just kidding; they're not crazy, and I love reading about them all the goddamn time.


Seriously though, folk(s), I signed up for it, and I am enjoying myself, but the thing about philosophy is that if you read it too much, words seem to lose their meanings, everything starts to look strange, you read pages and pages only to realize you have no fucking clue what any of these people are talking about, and more importantly, you've stopped caring about anything except trying how many pages are left in the reading, and how likely it is that you have the energy to walk to the vending machine three stories down.


The other reason I'm not including this sort of reading in the booklist (other than that it would bore you to death) is that it would make me look like a douche, and who wants that?


Here's an annoying pitch: if you like writing creative non-fiction and go to Oberlin, you might consider writing for The Wilder Voice. Email wildervoice@gmail.com. Also if you draw, you can draw for us. That's the end of the pitch.


Finally in a perfect case of art imitating life. The second-to-last Doom Patrol issue involved the un-making of the universe. Words would simply disappear from reality--dictionaries, books, people's minds. This is, strangely, what seems to happen when I've read philosophy for too long.


But, alas, in the words of the Oberlin Review, Oberliner is a "no-whining zone." So I'll shut up and get back to work.