Academics, Part III
Shall I begin with a mythos, or a logos? A story, then, because it is more pleasant.
First, my computer desk at work comes with a comfortable wrist pad to support excessive keyboard typing. It's really squishy. Unfortunately, one of its seams ripped last week, so the pad has been spewing its innards on my lap all week. The squishy stuff inside actually resembles yellow, sticky boogers which attach themselves to clothing, books, and sales reports.
I sinned and skipped my Socrates class yesterday afternoon, to look at my 3rd apartment for the day. The first I saw was too dark and narrow, and was shown to me by Bob of K&G, who pees in his Nalgene bottle whenever he goes camping in the mountains. The second was a private Drexel apartment shown by a kindly old Chinese man, but the tenants had so destroyed the place (bootprints in the shower, gas burners mysteriously wrapped in tin foil) that Rose almost started crying from the ungodly skeeziness. The third apartment was shown to us by Mario of Blackstone who was (according to Sarah) "corpulent." The place, however, was remarkable, having been immaculately cared for by med students. Three bedrooms, two baths, a dining room, a living room, and a sunroom. AND a fireplace with built-in shelving. AND a dark wooden arch under which we can perform scenes from Pinter's The Homecoming.
The apartment demands a dinner party, whose guest of honor requires a certain unnamed Shakespeare professor.
So, we have an apartment for the 4 of us at $1700/month. I'm still getting used to the fact that I just leased an apartment. Strange especially was how I wasn't able to get in touch with my parents before we even found the place. I feel I seem to be making a lot of the those big decisions more and more independently of my family, which is uncomfortable and makes me feel guilty. Not that it's a decision going against their wishes, but I must imagine that it's a shock to have your son call and say, hello, I miss you, by the way I just leased an apartment, could you send a sack of money?
My latest dilemma with academics is my tendency to be too much of a SPONGE. I think I have a knack for understanding theories and ideas pretty well, but I only understand them in the author's terms. By "thinking" a theory only from the author's perspective, I'm unable to critique it, which would require thinking it from an outside perspective. I'm not at all selective in the information I absorb. For example, I've read works of gender, psychology, anthropology, political economy, and political philosophy this year, and in my mind, there is no conflict between any of them. Forced to speak in class, I would say something like, "well, reality is probably a complex mix of all of them, isn't it?" Rather than being open-minded, though, I think that's just lazy. Fine, all these ways of explaining the world aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but even if they are all mixed together, they must be present in definite proportions. Weber and Durkheim, though they both examine religion as a driving force of individual human action, are very much in conflict with each other. I can't just overlap them and tuck the problem away. This, however, is what I tend to do. It's been seven months since I last read Freud, and I think that I've read a lot of stuff since then that makes Freud irrelevant or even incorrect. But now that I've picked him up in SOSC, I'm finding him just as seductive as ever. Apparently I am not questioning much that I read. It just so happens that whoever I happen to read at the time tends to dominate my view, like the old children's book, of The Way Things Work.
Is it better to be open-minded and democratically accept everything that you read? Or is it smarter to erect a filter? If I were to "design" my brain, I would build a mechanism that might let all the water in first so I could pick out the dead bugs later.
What got me thinking was Sinaiko's class, in which he recounted that his initial reaction in college to Plato's Protagorus was to get angry with it and throw it against the wall of his dorm room. I've never really gotten indignant with a piece of writing, much less thrown a book. But I feel like I should have. There are a lot of books that I've conditionally loved, but not a lot that I've conditionally hated. I want a visceral reaction, but if I don't have any older principles, notions, or beliefs to get offended, nothing sticks. I love learning new stuff, but if there's no friction, then I don't believe there's anything really important happening in my mind.
Furthermore, I have a bad feeling that I'm going to start reading Leo Strauss this summer.
Shall I begin with a mythos, or a logos? A story, then, because it is more pleasant.
First, my computer desk at work comes with a comfortable wrist pad to support excessive keyboard typing. It's really squishy. Unfortunately, one of its seams ripped last week, so the pad has been spewing its innards on my lap all week. The squishy stuff inside actually resembles yellow, sticky boogers which attach themselves to clothing, books, and sales reports.
I sinned and skipped my Socrates class yesterday afternoon, to look at my 3rd apartment for the day. The first I saw was too dark and narrow, and was shown to me by Bob of K&G, who pees in his Nalgene bottle whenever he goes camping in the mountains. The second was a private Drexel apartment shown by a kindly old Chinese man, but the tenants had so destroyed the place (bootprints in the shower, gas burners mysteriously wrapped in tin foil) that Rose almost started crying from the ungodly skeeziness. The third apartment was shown to us by Mario of Blackstone who was (according to Sarah) "corpulent." The place, however, was remarkable, having been immaculately cared for by med students. Three bedrooms, two baths, a dining room, a living room, and a sunroom. AND a fireplace with built-in shelving. AND a dark wooden arch under which we can perform scenes from Pinter's The Homecoming.
The apartment demands a dinner party, whose guest of honor requires a certain unnamed Shakespeare professor.
So, we have an apartment for the 4 of us at $1700/month. I'm still getting used to the fact that I just leased an apartment. Strange especially was how I wasn't able to get in touch with my parents before we even found the place. I feel I seem to be making a lot of the those big decisions more and more independently of my family, which is uncomfortable and makes me feel guilty. Not that it's a decision going against their wishes, but I must imagine that it's a shock to have your son call and say, hello, I miss you, by the way I just leased an apartment, could you send a sack of money?
My latest dilemma with academics is my tendency to be too much of a SPONGE. I think I have a knack for understanding theories and ideas pretty well, but I only understand them in the author's terms. By "thinking" a theory only from the author's perspective, I'm unable to critique it, which would require thinking it from an outside perspective. I'm not at all selective in the information I absorb. For example, I've read works of gender, psychology, anthropology, political economy, and political philosophy this year, and in my mind, there is no conflict between any of them. Forced to speak in class, I would say something like, "well, reality is probably a complex mix of all of them, isn't it?" Rather than being open-minded, though, I think that's just lazy. Fine, all these ways of explaining the world aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but even if they are all mixed together, they must be present in definite proportions. Weber and Durkheim, though they both examine religion as a driving force of individual human action, are very much in conflict with each other. I can't just overlap them and tuck the problem away. This, however, is what I tend to do. It's been seven months since I last read Freud, and I think that I've read a lot of stuff since then that makes Freud irrelevant or even incorrect. But now that I've picked him up in SOSC, I'm finding him just as seductive as ever. Apparently I am not questioning much that I read. It just so happens that whoever I happen to read at the time tends to dominate my view, like the old children's book, of The Way Things Work.
Is it better to be open-minded and democratically accept everything that you read? Or is it smarter to erect a filter? If I were to "design" my brain, I would build a mechanism that might let all the water in first so I could pick out the dead bugs later.
What got me thinking was Sinaiko's class, in which he recounted that his initial reaction in college to Plato's Protagorus was to get angry with it and throw it against the wall of his dorm room. I've never really gotten indignant with a piece of writing, much less thrown a book. But I feel like I should have. There are a lot of books that I've conditionally loved, but not a lot that I've conditionally hated. I want a visceral reaction, but if I don't have any older principles, notions, or beliefs to get offended, nothing sticks. I love learning new stuff, but if there's no friction, then I don't believe there's anything really important happening in my mind.
Furthermore, I have a bad feeling that I'm going to start reading Leo Strauss this summer.
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