Eewwww, poetry!
Sorry, I hate poetry. Or loathe it. Might pick up the book though.
Then there's no need for this sentence.
Sorry, I hate poetry. Or loathe it. Might pick up the book though.
Then there's no need for this sentence.
I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's
- Thread starter alec
- Start date
welsh
Junkmaster
You might want to check out the book and discussion on Kuhn and Popper.
Here's a recent book review-
http://www.economist.com/books/disp...N=ea2609-c0ef4731-62d7-4bff-a519-020481cbc179
Also I will forward you a pdf that deals with some of these issues. Hope it helps.
Here's a recent book review-
http://www.economist.com/books/disp...N=ea2609-c0ef4731-62d7-4bff-a519-020481cbc179
Also I will forward you a pdf that deals with some of these issues. Hope it helps.
Blade Runner said:
Bertrand Russel, right? I believe I have one or two pieces of the collection lying somewhere around the house. In my opinion, Störig is better. One thing about Störig, though, it's more a reference work than an information source, it kind of assumes you already have a basic knowledge of philosophy, which I assume you have...
Blade Runner said:
Good. Only good poem I ever read was the Raven by old Eddie Poe...
welsh
Junkmaster
Kharn- jeez are you missing out by ignoring poetry bud.
I highly suggest picking up a copy of Neruda's 20 poems of love and a song of dispair.
This is the reason why women threw their panties at Neruda when he toured Europe.
I like his Ode's especially.
You might also look selectively at Cummings or at Frost.
Here's a favorite about letting go someone you love-
it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch
another's, and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart, as mine in time not far away;
if on another's face your sweet hair lay
in such silence as i know, or such
great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;
if this should be, i say if this should be--
you of my heart, send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands
Here's one about "getting it on"
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new
- and finally, one about relationships (given to me by an old girlfriend who got me to read poetry for the first time)
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what is is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
I highly suggest picking up a copy of Neruda's 20 poems of love and a song of dispair.
This is the reason why women threw their panties at Neruda when he toured Europe.
I like his Ode's especially.
You might also look selectively at Cummings or at Frost.
Here's a favorite about letting go someone you love-
it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch
another's, and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart, as mine in time not far away;
if on another's face your sweet hair lay
in such silence as i know, or such
great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;
if this should be, i say if this should be--
you of my heart, send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands
Here's one about "getting it on"
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new
- and finally, one about relationships (given to me by an old girlfriend who got me to read poetry for the first time)
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what is is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
welsh said:
That's a fact allright. But I'm afraid a lot of people think the way Kharn thinks, and that's probably why poetry is so marginal nowadays (at least in Belgium and the Netherlands).
My favourite English (actually American) poet is Jack Spicer. Listen to this, Kharn:
Thing Language
This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
Now: ain't that just beautiful?
welsh
Junkmaster
Damn.
I don't think you can appreciate a language unless you can appreciate its poetry.
AH but now we are talking systems again (and lets not make this a poetry thread!).
Did you get the stuff I emailed?
I don't think you can appreciate a language unless you can appreciate its poetry.
AH but now we are talking systems again (and lets not make this a poetry thread!).
Did you get the stuff I emailed?
Ugly John
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
Blade have you red "god's debris" by scott adams? It pitches in some wierd insight on how we see the world, god and ourselves also on how god sees us , himslef and the world.
As for poetry, i took the required class allong theater and the other is called roman in french (it's basicaly a reading class) way back in college. Turns out i'm a numbers kinda guy. But i do read at least one book a month.
As for poetry, i took the required class allong theater and the other is called roman in french (it's basicaly a reading class) way back in college. Turns out i'm a numbers kinda guy. But i do read at least one book a month.
welsh said:
Hm. Little problem there: my internet provider makes it impossible for me to read forwarded messages. I mailed you about that. I'm guite interested in that Waldner presentation, though. Any other way I can get my hands on it?
Ugly John said:
No, I can't say I have. Isn't Scott Adams the creator of Dilbert or something? Might check that out if I can find it around here.
Darn. So much to read and so little time...
Ugly John
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
Yes he is. It's also available in e-book format for about 5$ US. If you take the adobe version you can even print it.
welsh
Junkmaster
Blade Runner said:
Hey Blade Runner-
The article is titled- Anti Anti-Determinism: Or What Happens When Schrödinger’s Cat and Lorenz’s Butterfly Meet Laplace’s Demon in the Study of Political and Economic Development
and can be found at-
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~daw4h/articles.html
Hope it helps.
welsh said:
I think it will. Reading the first pages of the paper already got me drooling (although I will have to use the dictionary very, very often, I'm afraid)... Schrödinger's cat... Lorenz' butterfly... Laplace's demon... I guess that's what the main character in my book really is: Laplace's demon, a thinking machine that consumes itself while thinking. Hm. He's probably related to Monsieur Teste, one of Paul Valéry's characters.
welsh said:
That sums it up nicely. While desperately trying to explain reality, he will get more and more estranged from it. Hm. I wonder if I should let him go mad and become suicidal or if maybe I should create a female character (with a nice, firm body - that goes without saying) that eventually saves him. Hehe. So many ways and possibilities to influence the life of literary characters. I'll definitely make him an insomniac, though. No wisdom and no truth without insomnia.
Anyway, thanks for the url. Appreciate it.
welsh
Junkmaster
Well again, I would check Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. -
The idea that constructs of the mind that seek to explain science are themselves false or imperfect but are given strength because people believe them.
Part of that idea, with Eco, was that people believed all this superstitious bullshit and would actually kill to keep it. Look at some academic debates at it gets the same way. In Eco's book the main character's wife is the one that tries to pull him back to reality.
SO you could develop the story as such-
Young grad student comes to the University, perhaps because he's recently orphaned from fairly well off parents, and pursues the quest for knowledge. Perhaps the parents were wealthy enough so he doesn't have to work. Perhaps he's doing this to make sense of the loss in his life.
(Note that Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge is about a person seeking spiritual understanding after witnessing the death of a friend in War- this would be another model as the character also goes through a series of understanding the spirit and the mind.)
(You might also want to revisit Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- which is partly about a philosophy and rhetoric student who gets caught up in the pursuit of knowledge, of what's important, and eventually loses his mind and has to refind himself).
I think you should also note that both of the above are basically travel stories. THe journey the characters take is both spatial and internal (as good travel stories should be).
Our hero goes to a University and soon gets caught in the varied debates about the nature of reality, and the battles of paradigms, models, concepts.
A romantic interest, perhaps an art student, tries to pull him into the world of sensation and creation but he is resistent- his goal is near.
As he nears madness the truth becomes revealed. It's really a matter of Ontology, your prior belief system shapes the way you see the world.
Liberated now, the hero seeks to share his knowledge with the world. But by escaping the bonds of clashing epistomologies, he alienates and rebels at the prevailing order, and the status quo- the academic community- crushes him ruthlessly (or as ruthlessly as they can).
Love interest either sticks with him or betrays him for her own "artistic" model.
Finally, when he loses all, he abandons his hopes and ambitions- becomes a hermit and is killed by a bunch of guntoting rednecks.
(ok, so I am not sure about the end).
The idea that constructs of the mind that seek to explain science are themselves false or imperfect but are given strength because people believe them.
Part of that idea, with Eco, was that people believed all this superstitious bullshit and would actually kill to keep it. Look at some academic debates at it gets the same way. In Eco's book the main character's wife is the one that tries to pull him back to reality.
SO you could develop the story as such-
Young grad student comes to the University, perhaps because he's recently orphaned from fairly well off parents, and pursues the quest for knowledge. Perhaps the parents were wealthy enough so he doesn't have to work. Perhaps he's doing this to make sense of the loss in his life.
(Note that Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge is about a person seeking spiritual understanding after witnessing the death of a friend in War- this would be another model as the character also goes through a series of understanding the spirit and the mind.)
(You might also want to revisit Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- which is partly about a philosophy and rhetoric student who gets caught up in the pursuit of knowledge, of what's important, and eventually loses his mind and has to refind himself).
I think you should also note that both of the above are basically travel stories. THe journey the characters take is both spatial and internal (as good travel stories should be).
Our hero goes to a University and soon gets caught in the varied debates about the nature of reality, and the battles of paradigms, models, concepts.
A romantic interest, perhaps an art student, tries to pull him into the world of sensation and creation but he is resistent- his goal is near.
As he nears madness the truth becomes revealed. It's really a matter of Ontology, your prior belief system shapes the way you see the world.
Liberated now, the hero seeks to share his knowledge with the world. But by escaping the bonds of clashing epistomologies, he alienates and rebels at the prevailing order, and the status quo- the academic community- crushes him ruthlessly (or as ruthlessly as they can).
Love interest either sticks with him or betrays him for her own "artistic" model.
Finally, when he loses all, he abandons his hopes and ambitions- becomes a hermit and is killed by a bunch of guntoting rednecks.
(ok, so I am not sure about the end).
Welsh, man, maybe you should write the book...
Nah, just kidding. But I like your ideas, you obviously know how a book kind of works and you obviously understand the "mechanics" of writing. You teach stuff like that, maybe?
Hm. This probably would work just fine, but I think the orphan-thing is kind of maybe a bit cliché. I went for the "his-parents-recently-got-divorced-thing". It's cliché too, somehow, but it's more in tune with these modern times, me thinks. The main character (a university student, indeed) was raised in a very conservative way and now, due to all the drama in his life, he needs to redefine, re-interpret the values and morals he was brought up with. One thing leads to the other.
An art student, of course! That's a damn good idea, so I'm gonna steal it from ya! No really, it would probably make the whole love affair a lot more interesting. The clash between reason and imagination! The passion! She has to break his heart, though, that's mandatory. No insights without lots of pain.
And these insights should be fragmentary, he should only see a glimpse of what he was looking for, the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.
On the other hand: maybe a divorce just isn't sufficient to trigger all of this. Maybe becoming an orphan is actually better. Car crashes are very common nowadays. Main chraracter feels totally f***** up afterwards, inherits loads of money, starts to do a lot of drugs and drinks a lot and f**** around a lot. Hm. Something then should trigger his obsession with patterns and structures. Maybe the drugs. Nah, ...
I'll have to think about that a little further.
Nah, just kidding. But I like your ideas, you obviously know how a book kind of works and you obviously understand the "mechanics" of writing. You teach stuff like that, maybe?
welsh said:
Hm. This probably would work just fine, but I think the orphan-thing is kind of maybe a bit cliché. I went for the "his-parents-recently-got-divorced-thing". It's cliché too, somehow, but it's more in tune with these modern times, me thinks. The main character (a university student, indeed) was raised in a very conservative way and now, due to all the drama in his life, he needs to redefine, re-interpret the values and morals he was brought up with. One thing leads to the other.
welsh said:
An art student, of course! That's a damn good idea, so I'm gonna steal it from ya! No really, it would probably make the whole love affair a lot more interesting. The clash between reason and imagination! The passion! She has to break his heart, though, that's mandatory. No insights without lots of pain.
And these insights should be fragmentary, he should only see a glimpse of what he was looking for, the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.
On the other hand: maybe a divorce just isn't sufficient to trigger all of this. Maybe becoming an orphan is actually better. Car crashes are very common nowadays. Main chraracter feels totally f***** up afterwards, inherits loads of money, starts to do a lot of drugs and drinks a lot and f**** around a lot. Hm. Something then should trigger his obsession with patterns and structures. Maybe the drugs. Nah, ...
I'll have to think about that a little further.
welsh
Junkmaster
Thanks, and yes, I try my hand at a bit of writing. Nothing so big however. Least not yet.
I know a lot of folks don't like to look at others to see how they handle it, but I would look to the three books mentioned above.
Somerset Maugham's the Razor's Edge is really a great travel story. It also deals with the issue of loss of life (a friend's death) and the person's spiritual journey to make sense of things.
Of Human Bondage is also a good fit for you, as deals with a young man's quest to find his way in life between being a teenager to his 30s after he has been orphaned.
This should be an important aspect of your protagonist's crisis- growing up. The mere process of aging between the teens and into your 30s is a difficult story of passions, maturity and understanding.
Anyway, you also have this quest for truth and identity in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There the character has lost his past and is trying to rediscover it again. He has lost it, and his mind, when he achieves his epiphany, which essentially blows his mind.
The idea of death but now transend then to a modern era. Perhaps something like a Donnie Darko, a young character who suddenly gets a lease on life, but explores the problems of modern culture.
So perhaps this. He's a young fellow entering university. It begins with the idea of go to school for an education, get a job (maybe in finance) so he can make a lot of money, have a good lifestyle, make his family proud, party, get chicks, etc.
Family tragedy. His younger, more despondent brother is having a hard time dealing with his parents divorce (parents are moving in different directions due to clashing personal interests - careers), and kills his parents, maybe a sibling and self.
Protagonist is shocked by this. In a sense he is forced to reevaluate the values with which he has been raised (essentially a modern lifestyle in which intellectual and emotional nourishment is sacrificed for material ambition- which worked for his parents), and then asked to makes sense of what went wrong. This is the beginning of his quest for knowledge and understanding.
I agree about the love interest. One way to play it is that as he pursues his quest for understanding (getting locked in interlocking yet conflicting structures and systems) his relationship with the girl becomes increasingly estranged. So estranged in fact that the girl leaves him without him even realizing she is gone. He discovers that she has actually with someone else (a more nourishing partner) than himself (a self interested seeker) and thus learns two painful lessons-
(1) that relationships require two people who are mutually supportive, that love requires responsibility to another person, and commitment, and of putting your interests second.
(2) that you often don't realize what you got till its gone, and then its too late.
Maybe that's too cliche.
Anway, that should work for you as both point of entry- young student pursuing a college education to get a head and get more toys.
Initial crisis- family tragedy forces personal reevaluation of self and motives
And later, pivotal crisis- Loss of love forces second reevaluation and maturity- Understanding pain teaches one responsibility.
Sounds cool.
I know a lot of folks don't like to look at others to see how they handle it, but I would look to the three books mentioned above.
Somerset Maugham's the Razor's Edge is really a great travel story. It also deals with the issue of loss of life (a friend's death) and the person's spiritual journey to make sense of things.
Of Human Bondage is also a good fit for you, as deals with a young man's quest to find his way in life between being a teenager to his 30s after he has been orphaned.
This should be an important aspect of your protagonist's crisis- growing up. The mere process of aging between the teens and into your 30s is a difficult story of passions, maturity and understanding.
Anyway, you also have this quest for truth and identity in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There the character has lost his past and is trying to rediscover it again. He has lost it, and his mind, when he achieves his epiphany, which essentially blows his mind.
The idea of death but now transend then to a modern era. Perhaps something like a Donnie Darko, a young character who suddenly gets a lease on life, but explores the problems of modern culture.
So perhaps this. He's a young fellow entering university. It begins with the idea of go to school for an education, get a job (maybe in finance) so he can make a lot of money, have a good lifestyle, make his family proud, party, get chicks, etc.
Family tragedy. His younger, more despondent brother is having a hard time dealing with his parents divorce (parents are moving in different directions due to clashing personal interests - careers), and kills his parents, maybe a sibling and self.
Protagonist is shocked by this. In a sense he is forced to reevaluate the values with which he has been raised (essentially a modern lifestyle in which intellectual and emotional nourishment is sacrificed for material ambition- which worked for his parents), and then asked to makes sense of what went wrong. This is the beginning of his quest for knowledge and understanding.
I agree about the love interest. One way to play it is that as he pursues his quest for understanding (getting locked in interlocking yet conflicting structures and systems) his relationship with the girl becomes increasingly estranged. So estranged in fact that the girl leaves him without him even realizing she is gone. He discovers that she has actually with someone else (a more nourishing partner) than himself (a self interested seeker) and thus learns two painful lessons-
(1) that relationships require two people who are mutually supportive, that love requires responsibility to another person, and commitment, and of putting your interests second.
(2) that you often don't realize what you got till its gone, and then its too late.
Maybe that's too cliche.
Anway, that should work for you as both point of entry- young student pursuing a college education to get a head and get more toys.
Initial crisis- family tragedy forces personal reevaluation of self and motives
And later, pivotal crisis- Loss of love forces second reevaluation and maturity- Understanding pain teaches one responsibility.
Sounds cool.