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Only a chauvinist ichthyphallologist
Mar. 23rd, 2006 11:59 pm
High today, here: 2. Dewpoint then: -5. High dewpoint: -3.
High today in TO: 3. Dewpoint then: -3. High dewpoint: -3.
Low today on the balcony: -2.5. High: 2.1. Currently: 0.4.
After a good couple of weeks, including back-to-back two-goal performances by CuJo, goalie meltdown tonight. At some point last night, I determined that the Leafs are hot, and the Habs are not, so I should play Tellqvist, not Huet, tonight. Now, the thing is, I have Huet in both my leagues, and in one of them--the less competitive one, fortunately--I only play him when he loses. This is a bad policy. Now, today, I thought I might defeat this trend by pulling him out of my lineup at the last minute, but of course this is just hubris. Fate is indefeasible, and is more than happy to work with attempts to defeat it, and I should've left him in so the Leafs could win, at least. The Leafs are, as it turns out, so not hot. Now, the question is, do I play Huet against the Leafs on Saturday?
Saw Fellini's 8 1/2 in class today. What a fabulous piece of self-indulgent bullshit. (Saying which is, in the movie, a hanging offense. Hi-larious!)
Went to look for Fukuyama's End of History ... in the York library today: missing. Went to look for Some Straussian's Postmodern Platos: missing. It's a bad time of year to be looking for books in the library. Bad people are hiding them, so they can have them to themselves, indefinitely, for their term papers. They are also marking them up with pink hiliters, writing "YES!" and "NO!" and "QUOTE THIS!" in the margins in blue pen, and ripping out the odd particularly important page. O, how I long for summer. I did collect a book by Strauss himself, with chapters on the Republic and Aristotle's Politics, and Rosen's book--and I just made it out of the The Bookstore Beside the World's Biggest Bookstore with Bloom's book with scant minutes to spare before the Greyhound. So I'm well stocked for a Republican spring.
Speaking of which, we're in a nasty fall-ish pattern here. The sky looks like Thanksgiving again. Big area of high pressure stalled over Manitoba, big area of low pressure stalled to the east, wrapping warm air aloft, cold air at the surface, back around in rolling stratocumuli, for days now. It's not cold, but it is chilly.
And: read a good chunk of Steiner's Heidegger book on the Greyhound to and fro. I had the mixed fortune of hearing Steiner on TVOntario's "Big Ideas" a few months ago; he has one of those--to me--unlocatably cosmopolitan European accents, in which his book is now, of course, reading itself to me. Steiner numbers among The Last of the Famous International Polymaths. (Who else? Umberto Eco ... anyone else?) He is NotAPhilosopher, as he points out at least a couple of times so far, which he suggests may, at times, render him liable to inaccuracies of interpretation--and, in fact, this is a seriously and fundamentally mistaken book, in that it completely fails to grasp the "ontological difference", Heidegger's most basic thought, the difference between being and beings, that being is not a being: in the introduction added to the book in 1992, Steiner says that where Heidegger writes "Sein" one might, clarifyingly, substitute "God". A common, and fantastically wrong, thought. (And one which, in Steiner's case, may be largely due to a simple typographical error: Steiner points out that the first edition of the 1943 afterword to "What is Metaphysics?" says that "being is without beings", and then in subsequent editions it says that "being never is without beings". Steiner thinks this indicates a radical shift in Heidegger's thinking. But somewhere or other--annoyingly, I can't remember where--I've seen it noted that that was a very (very!) unfortunate typo, in the first edition.)
But: by virtue of trying to say something to someone, this book is so much better than so much of what gets written on Heidegger--even despite Steiner's preoccupation with Nazism. He, at last, devotes some persistent attention to Heidegger's etymologies--it takes, after all, a language scholar (a philologist, I think one might have said, once), and NotAPhilosopher. He, like Derrida, has Heidegger going after the One True Word, which I don't think is right--so now I have a foil, finally, if I ever go back to that.
A curio: the In Place of a Foreword (I wonder how many books are foreworded with In Place of a Forewords in place of forewords) has as its epigraph, "all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare", attributing it to Spinoza and giving it first in Latin. That is, essentially, a saying that Plato repeats several times in the Republic and elsewhere. You'd expect Steiner to know that (and maybe he does, but, say, prefers the Latin), but it reminds me of something I read once in an esay on the art of quotation: you should always (when free of scholarly strictures against doing so, anyway) mis-quote, just a little, so that your audience knows you didn't have to look it up. Mis-attributing, or attributing to someone other than the originator, works just as well. (You sometimes see Descartes quoted as saying there's nothing so foolish that no philosopher has believed it. Descartes was actually quoting (without attribution) Cicero--assuming, of course, that Cicero wasn't quoting someone else. Though, of course, one might object that the proposition is so obviously true that it's undeserving of being credited with an originator.)
Tomorrow: karaoke?
High today in TO: 3. Dewpoint then: -3. High dewpoint: -3.
Low today on the balcony: -2.5. High: 2.1. Currently: 0.4.
After a good couple of weeks, including back-to-back two-goal performances by CuJo, goalie meltdown tonight. At some point last night, I determined that the Leafs are hot, and the Habs are not, so I should play Tellqvist, not Huet, tonight. Now, the thing is, I have Huet in both my leagues, and in one of them--the less competitive one, fortunately--I only play him when he loses. This is a bad policy. Now, today, I thought I might defeat this trend by pulling him out of my lineup at the last minute, but of course this is just hubris. Fate is indefeasible, and is more than happy to work with attempts to defeat it, and I should've left him in so the Leafs could win, at least. The Leafs are, as it turns out, so not hot. Now, the question is, do I play Huet against the Leafs on Saturday?
Saw Fellini's 8 1/2 in class today. What a fabulous piece of self-indulgent bullshit. (Saying which is, in the movie, a hanging offense. Hi-larious!)
Went to look for Fukuyama's End of History ... in the York library today: missing. Went to look for Some Straussian's Postmodern Platos: missing. It's a bad time of year to be looking for books in the library. Bad people are hiding them, so they can have them to themselves, indefinitely, for their term papers. They are also marking them up with pink hiliters, writing "YES!" and "NO!" and "QUOTE THIS!" in the margins in blue pen, and ripping out the odd particularly important page. O, how I long for summer. I did collect a book by Strauss himself, with chapters on the Republic and Aristotle's Politics, and Rosen's book--and I just made it out of the The Bookstore Beside the World's Biggest Bookstore with Bloom's book with scant minutes to spare before the Greyhound. So I'm well stocked for a Republican spring.
Speaking of which, we're in a nasty fall-ish pattern here. The sky looks like Thanksgiving again. Big area of high pressure stalled over Manitoba, big area of low pressure stalled to the east, wrapping warm air aloft, cold air at the surface, back around in rolling stratocumuli, for days now. It's not cold, but it is chilly.
And: read a good chunk of Steiner's Heidegger book on the Greyhound to and fro. I had the mixed fortune of hearing Steiner on TVOntario's "Big Ideas" a few months ago; he has one of those--to me--unlocatably cosmopolitan European accents, in which his book is now, of course, reading itself to me. Steiner numbers among The Last of the Famous International Polymaths. (Who else? Umberto Eco ... anyone else?) He is NotAPhilosopher, as he points out at least a couple of times so far, which he suggests may, at times, render him liable to inaccuracies of interpretation--and, in fact, this is a seriously and fundamentally mistaken book, in that it completely fails to grasp the "ontological difference", Heidegger's most basic thought, the difference between being and beings, that being is not a being: in the introduction added to the book in 1992, Steiner says that where Heidegger writes "Sein" one might, clarifyingly, substitute "God". A common, and fantastically wrong, thought. (And one which, in Steiner's case, may be largely due to a simple typographical error: Steiner points out that the first edition of the 1943 afterword to "What is Metaphysics?" says that "being is without beings", and then in subsequent editions it says that "being never is without beings". Steiner thinks this indicates a radical shift in Heidegger's thinking. But somewhere or other--annoyingly, I can't remember where--I've seen it noted that that was a very (very!) unfortunate typo, in the first edition.)
But: by virtue of trying to say something to someone, this book is so much better than so much of what gets written on Heidegger--even despite Steiner's preoccupation with Nazism. He, at last, devotes some persistent attention to Heidegger's etymologies--it takes, after all, a language scholar (a philologist, I think one might have said, once), and NotAPhilosopher. He, like Derrida, has Heidegger going after the One True Word, which I don't think is right--so now I have a foil, finally, if I ever go back to that.
A curio: the In Place of a Foreword (I wonder how many books are foreworded with In Place of a Forewords in place of forewords) has as its epigraph, "all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare", attributing it to Spinoza and giving it first in Latin. That is, essentially, a saying that Plato repeats several times in the Republic and elsewhere. You'd expect Steiner to know that (and maybe he does, but, say, prefers the Latin), but it reminds me of something I read once in an esay on the art of quotation: you should always (when free of scholarly strictures against doing so, anyway) mis-quote, just a little, so that your audience knows you didn't have to look it up. Mis-attributing, or attributing to someone other than the originator, works just as well. (You sometimes see Descartes quoted as saying there's nothing so foolish that no philosopher has believed it. Descartes was actually quoting (without attribution) Cicero--assuming, of course, that Cicero wasn't quoting someone else. Though, of course, one might object that the proposition is so obviously true that it's undeserving of being credited with an originator.)
Tomorrow: karaoke?
