synergies

just now on the subway i heard one little girl deliver the clearest explanation of how to blow a bubble i've ever heard. i want to try now.

i read marcus aurelius's "meditations" a couple days ago. i /really/ wish i'd stumbled upon this sooner. i mean, i'm no stoic, much less a Stoic, but it directly addressed several of the moral questions i've been stumbling over. more on this soon.

current reading list:
e. l. doctorow, "the book of daniel"
foucault, "madness and civilization"
w. james, "the varieties of the religious experience"
ngai, "ugly feelings" (still)
m. amis, "yellow dog"
pynchon, "the crying of lot 49"
the rough guide to china
wallace, "consider the lobster"
nussbaum, "frontiers of justice"
banville, "the sea"

i love christmas book-buying.

Books, today and yesterday

Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: Later Masters
Franken, The Twenty-Seventh City
Polanyi, Personal Knowledge

--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

I love old literary criticism

So today at the bookstore I wanted to buy "Theory's Empire" to console myself for being so hungover. It's a book of essays critical of Theory, trying to preserve its insights while pointing out some of the worst abuses. But I realized that I'm too susceptible to the arguments I read and hear to buy this book without also reading something from the other side. So I wanted to get the "Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism," too, but that would mean I would be buying 70 or 80 dollars worth of books for the hell of it.

So I bought "Mimesis" by Erich Auerbach. It's fucking amazing. His readings are so fucking spot-on and link together in insightful ways and are incredibly grounded in the text.... I keep reading a couple of pages and then looking up and thinking about it and then reading more; the book feels more than anything like a really good class.

Of course, looking up, when I'm in a Starbucks on 24th street on a Saturday night means dealing with the fact that the world is full of unbearably beautiful people who are not sitting in a Starbucks and reading on their Saturday nights. I don't feel unattractive, per se. The world just seems to be filled with another species of people, who are--in Diana's words--shinier than I am. Which isn't in itself a problem, either, except I don't know how to find more less-shiny people.

And somehow--and I know I'm wrong about this--the decision to become shiny seems to require focusing on surface over depth. I don't really understand my ethics here, but when I think about deciding to work out and dress better and so forth, it always seems vaguely problematic. But I don't BELIEVE in a surface/depth distinction with regards to people! I suppose I'm letting my jealousy turn a specific set of differences into a generic difference: replacing "they are better at x" with "they are x-people." And, defining x-people means classifying myself as y.

I remember Nilo pointing out the difference in meaning between "disabled people" and "people with disabilities."

I feel like my head is full of layers upon layers of maladjusted and problematic reactions. But I want to be a good person! (I'm trying to figure out what Wittgenstein would make of that particular desire. It's clear that this is a unique use of the word "want," but where do I go from there?)

Where do I go from here?

(i realize that was an annoying post. i've gotten a little obsessed with lists of books, though. i just read benjamin's essay on book-collecting--it's the one piece in that book i can get into without getting confused--and i've spent a couple of hours playing on amazon.com, trying to get it to recommend things that i like. i've put in a couple of hundred books and it's getting marginally better, but not to the point where it's reading my mind.

i don't know why my expectations are so high. except that the automatic-movie-picker thing was pretty good.)

Decadence

Books purchased in the past two days

Steinbeck, East of Eden
Heschel, Maimonides
More, Utopia
Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music
Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
Rose, Black Noise
Hoagland, Donkey Gospel: Poems
Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me: Poems
Di Filippo, The Steampunk Trilogy
Wallace Stevens, The Letters of Wallace Stevens


Using gift certificates and buying used books: total cost to me: $35

(I've Forgotten How To Blog)

Movies I Want To See
•Batman Begins
•Howl's Moving Castle
•Hustle and Flow
•Saving Face
•The White Diamond (http://filmforum.org/films/white.html)
•The World
•Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

Books I Want to Read (This Summer)
•1599
•Kafka On The Shore
•The Emigrants

Things I'm In the Process of Learning
•How To Rent and Furnish an Apartment
•Perl

Supreme Court Decisions I Disagree With But Grudgingly Respect
•Van Orden V. Perry

Governmental Branches With Terrible (c. 1995) Websites
•Judicial (http://www.supremecourtus.gov/)

Problems With This Blog Post
•Alphabetization
•Bulleted Lists
•Lists With Only One Member
•Not Funny
•Self-Referential "Problems With This Blog Post"

Numbers Higher Than 7
•Nine and a Half
•63