A Philosopher's Guide to Voting

Say what? Election day, is it? I'm not normally one for politics. As a follower of that great Stoic philosopher Paininthenes, I have ever sought to steel myself against the variations of fortune and fickleness. When something goes wrong -- let us supposons with the crapper-- I swallow my rage, clench my jaw, and, pinching my nose without haste or eagerness, enter into that noble state of ataraxia wherein all things are held in the palm of the hand - in this case, a plunger. The preceding analogy applies as well to government as any. For, as with a backed-up toilet, to blame government is not nearly so noble as to endure it. Ask me not whether I am for or against any man or party - readers, I am for myself. I can neither tell a member of the Gumption Party, from one of your Ghibelline boys so much in the news today.

Yet, admiring the ancients as I do, I one day felt a slight prick of conscience somewhere between my lower-back and spinal cord. I was thinking of Cicero ( I was carrying a Costco six-pack of mega-sized margarine). Voila un homme! There was a complete man. Who else, I asked myself in the condiment aisle, had so successfully combined the rigorous honesty of political office with the popular appeal of abstruse philosophy? Setting down my load at once I dashed to the nearest writing desk with the zeal of Thomas Jefferson on a cool Pennsylvania's morning. Quill in hand, and hand in pie, I composed the following definitions. They are above all for the thinking man who, in the height of his intellectual ecstasy, finds the rigamarole of modern politics too base to handle. I trust they will serve as patches, out of which an industrious philosophe can fashion a make-shift inflatable dingy to bear him from the halcyon shores of Philosophy over the rough and rather unaccommodating Sea of "Everyday Affairs".

Let us start then, ab ovo.

Man: According to Aristotle, man is a political animal. Hitherto the emphasis in translation has been that man is a political animal, whereas I believe it ought to be that man is a political animal. Similarly, man can be said to be an animal for anything he desires passionately and devours willingly. Thus just as in common parlance one man is a sex fiend, and another, a beast for the Cheetoh, man as a whole is bananas for politics.

Plankton: Not a political animal. Very much to its credit.

Politics: Originally the act of carrying an umbrella out on a sunny day just in case. Also, in common slang, refers to a very broad sphere of activities undertaken by a very narrow group of people.

Debate: A technological advancement in the state of nature (which is bellum omnium contra omnes - a war of all against all) whereby the death-dealing rock or pointed stick have been replaced by more civilized forms of argumentation e.g. the flinging of faecal matter (and others?).

University: A club for men with good taste and bad manners.

Prison: See University (above).

Government: A club for beating men with good taste and bad manners.

Women: A nuisance. In the last century have brought sanity, orderliness, and strong leadership to the political sphere, much to the detriment of Politics (see above).

Issue: Any numbered edition of a particular comic book. To "raise an issue" is a form of political rhetoric in which the moral import of an act by Spider-Man, Superman etc. is debated and judged by the discerning electorate.

Party: A verb roughly equivalent to "debauch". Also, a means of governing. In either case, man is as much a political animal as he is a party animal. See Gang Violence (below).

Education: At minimum, a mandatory fifteen years of training in the art of answering multiple choice questions as quickly as possible.

Voting: The carrying out of Education (above) in the sphere of everyday affairs.

Public Transportation: Transportation that looks, smells, feels, like a camel. Is not a camel.

Democracy: A fear of crowds and open spaces.

Agoraphobia: A form of government in which the common people determine their own policies. Representative Agoraphobia is the most common form available in today's market.

Canada: A country in the frozen North, ruled with an iron fist by Santa Claus, its eternal God-King.

Bail-out­: Synonym for "woops".

Arts and Culture: Anything having at all to do with Stephen Fry.

Ballot: An unused movie ticket. Often confused for a delicate form of European dance, or for Bail-out (above).

Gang Violence: A censure used by one group of thugs concerning the activities of another.

Results: A form of "special effects" used by politicians at convenient moments, question periods, etc.

Alas, I find, at this juncture, that I must stop. This yakking could go on forever, and then, when, je demande, would the real work get done? To the polls!

From R.H. Blyth

I found this old quotation I jotted down in 2008. That the writings of R.H. Blyth are so difficult to find, even online, is not surprising, but upsetting all the same. I myself only discovered the man by accident, pawing through the fifth floor of the Carleton Library in search of a palliative for a feminine cholic I was feeling right in the jumper. My good daimon led me to thumb through "Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics", first edition nineteen forty something, Hokuseido Press. I was leery, seeing that the author was not Japanese, but a kind forward from D.T. Suzuki seemed to suggest it might be worth reading... Within a paragraph, folks! and I'm a pupil. I've since gone AROUND him frequently -- but he's one of those writers I don't think I'll ever get PAST.

Campaigns have brought back Vivaldi and Bach. I think one day I shall campaign for Blyth:

"Ummon said, “The entire Universe, the Cosmos, and the Great Earth, and I, this old monk in this world! With my staff I give it one blow, and say ‘It is smashed to smithereens!’”

It is in this spirit that we must face death, and, more important by far, face impudent children, and hysterical women, and our own pusillanimity. "

The Antiquities of College

Like the Frenchmen who wandered south-east in the Spring

and come through the verdure to mouldering Rome

Beforehand prepared by a Latin sequence of poems

Are, arrived, fallen deep in the dusts of the thing

And consider of Earth, and its splendour

How marble comes often apart

As Time with her cronies depart

So too how do men to their essential powder.

Like these when into the Bookstore

the First Year, before his first class

enticed by a wood-cut or antique looking cover

Finds when he gives the money over

And to his learning (thinks he) comes at last

The whole of his hours to bore, bore bore...

Before and Aphorisms

Recently discovered, the hidden "Wastrel Books" of a great, underground Russo-German thinker, Fyodor Hindenquarters, are garnering much attention from nervous philosophy departments. They are like to explode, if not literally (for who knows if the man had dynamite) but at the very least, figuratively, with reams of slavish professors wailing in choruses of woe, tearing up over the following pages of raw, un-breaded truth. This new, alas, fragmentary translation of his final fragments, delivered piecemeal because of the vile editorial hands of his second cousin (a noted anti-termite) will have to suffice for the current generation. It will take many hours of scholarship to extract the real meat of Hindenquarter's philosophy from the execrable (and frankly rude) doodlings of his twilight years. A warning - this text is wont to shake mountains and coke-bottles alike.

Have you not heard the tale of the madman seeking God in the marketplace? "Whither is God?" he would cry, lighting his way from face to hapless face with only a flambé quail held aloft in his hand to guide him. "I've lost my God, and I don't know where to find him." The townsfolk stared. "About yea big?" the madman measured his arms about the size of an imaginary chicken. Increasing mumbles. "How shall we comfort ourselves!" The townsfolk were just beside themselves - such a poor little thing - and in their town! They gave the fellow a hot cup of cider and sent out a search party of the heartiest lads and gents in the quarter. The madman felt quite taken care of. "Whither, whither..." he mumbled quieter and quieter. Eventually they found God sniffing about - a stout looking sausage-hound licking himself at the corner of Church and Leibniz. His name was Hugo. That evening at Christmas supper, he, he himself, the mad-man, carved the roast beast.

Self-love is the fattest puppy in a prize litter of piglets.

If men were to be considered as the positive sex, and women, the negative, then all the world would declare basic arithmetic worth looking into.

As Plautus said: man is the wolf of man, homo homini lupus. Wolf-man is also the wolf of man.

Religion is the laudanum of the masses - that is an alcoholic herbal preparation containing approximately 10% powdered opium by weight (the equivalent of 1% morphine). Religion is therefore useful as an analgesic and antidiarrheal. Catholicism enhances the tone in the long segments of the longitudinal muscle and inhibits propulsive contraction of circular and longitudinal muscles. The pharmacological effects of Judaism, however, are due principally to its morphine content. The quantity of the papaverine and codeine alkaloids in Protestantism is too small to have any demonstrable central nervous system effect. Note that oral doses of religion are rapidly absorbed in the gastrointestinal tract and metabolized in the liver. Peak plasma concentrations of the spiritual content are reached in about one hour, and nearly 75% of the content of the Holy Ghost is excreted in the urine within 48 hours after oral administration.

Self-love is the key which starts the ice-cream truck.

I have an unseemly wart, at an unseemly part of my body. Yet I am not afraid to show you the whole of me. See? There it is. Seneca says, "warts, verily, are indeed the grossest of the pustulae." Ah, life!

What if a goblin should creep up to you in your sleep, at the dead of night, and slowly whisper into your ear, "all that you have have experienced up until now, all your aches, pains, sufferings, shall occur again, and again, and again, for all eternity - unless you get your hands on some Pepto Medi-Drink, for upset stomach and all that ails you, now in extra strength formula?" Would you have the courage to venture to the pharmacy? Or would it be an affirmative da capo on the toilet all evening!

What are all the strivings and gyratings of the twelve virtues and the ten faculties in the hearts of men, if not the soggy cereal in a bowl of self-love?

To philosophers of the future! ­- Please shut the fridge door in the faculty lounge ALL THE WAY!!! Thanks :)

Plants are like men. They have deep roots, and high aspirations. They murder each other, and come in all shapes and sizes. The mighty pine is never known to the dandelion, except as a puny rival, or a towering god. Once I even saw a tree stump that looked like two...Well, anyway. Plants are the men of the plant kingdom, as Pliny saith, aristis homo aristorum. Rue the salad-bowl then, for you cover in dressing and serve out in fine bowls, your very mirror selves!

The aim of all art is the neutralizing of the will and the entrance into a state of pure observation, wherein subject becomes "pure knower" of an object without direct interest in the object outside of the purely intellectual realm. A single example will suffice to prove the eternal verity of my proposition: imagine a painting, perhaps by Renoir, of a gentleman in a dashing new outfit, cocked hat, hands be-felted in the smoothest glovewear, breathing a fine Parisian breath, spiced like that of Europa's Bull, onto the lens of a brand new pocket-watch. Meanwhile, to the left, we see merely out of the corner of the canvas, the foot of a local tramp raised and impressionistically daubed with such subtleties of movement that it must be aimed squarely, and surely, at the gentleman's ball-sack. Ah, l'art, c'est pour toujours!

This maxim is brought to you buy the cool, refreshing taste of self-love. Get some now at your local chemist - and COOL your ARDOUR!

Postscript - A Hymn to the Sunny Countenance of the Will to Shower

Let us search out the secrets of knowledge

From the depths of our innermost college

For as once Aristotle

Declared of his wattle:

"What ain't big must thus suffer from smallage."

The Penguin Scholar

Culture has broadened and flattened. If you were a dramatist, you might say the Internet is the death of the age of depth. But what became the Internet is the capstone; the real pyramid has been a drive to publication - a commercial will to found a reading public that spends money. But that stuff has a remarkable dessicatory quality; it sucks dry the giblets and leaves the bone. Hence an affecting similarity between the image of a casual reader of "the classics", and the Paleontologist.

Specifics: a body can come home after work, pick up a Penguin classic, and read, in a fairly good selection of translations, any tradition he pleases. Moreover, these things lie in bookstores ready to ambush him. While his right hand is massaging the Princesse de Cleves, his left has found the spine of Fear and Trembling, while his feet are already making contact with Cao Xueqin near the end of the row.

Most everybody can read these things. They are there to be read, and moreover, are in normal English. This does not disvalue learning a language, but it does mean that now more than ever a man can "get at" the significant wisdoms of the Earth via English. Only the specialist need learn a foreign language. If we do learn them, it's to speak them. Reading a work of literature "in the original" is a fetishistical notion that blurrs the easiness of the actual deed. Literary English is the best preparation for any other literary language; as is usual, they are more akin to each other than to the dialect.

This state of easy literacy likens us almost to monolingualism. The culture of Confucius and Homer was monolingual. Or rather, was more focused on interal dialect and accent over completely barbarous tongues. The culture of Jefferson and Voltaire, and of data hungry Europe and America in the early 20th century, by contrast, was polylingual.

On the list

"We read, we read" they say "evER-y-day!"

Say my gen., who've time for novels

.................but little for poetry.

The denser the text, shorter the wordcount;

there's not much in a few pages

.................to brag about.

Of indecorous Villon, pushy Catullus, and steady John Donne

big-hearted Du Fu, muck-loving Basho, or even whimpering Novalis

.................they'll have little or none.

Short and steep; long and casual;

That people go where others lead

.................Is it so unusual?

Notes toward another Librarianship

Introductory Serious Question on Librarianship

Can the “ship” be turned to the establishing of the people? Is there anything humane left in the profession?

All I mean to suggest by these notes is first of all that the current way of doing librarianship is not conducive to culture, civilization, charity, or anything beyond what exchanges used to occur at the video rental counter. Second, I look over alternatives - notes to be considered, and if there might be anything in them, tried out at convenience.

Information Age?

We are told by experts that at some point in the 90's the ages switched, from industrial or post-industrial, to information. Hesiod might wonder. We are less informed as to how to stand up straight and feed ourselves - who's to speak of culture in the Information Age?

Information is now "immeditaley accessible". And what has it been before now? What were we up to before we had our magic mirrors on the wall? If a man wanted to be informed back then...Would he not have to trudge through hail and ice, civil war, and repressive bureaucracy all the way to library? And before that - read his Bible, hear his priest, poke a stick at an apple!

What does this magic substance do, our "information"? I can now know that a man in Australia is as wicked as my neighbour or myself; can glean very little else...

Let us be honest with ourselves. We have nothing new under the sun. We are simply all the more susceptible to distraction. Whatever age this is, who will contradict the Viscount St. Alban:

"Reading maketh a full man."

ABCs

I am afraid for literacy today; not afraid for its extinction (would that not be a blessing?) but rather for its dissemination over too wide an area. Letters! Our all-healing moly - have we not diluted it, reduced its god-confouding potency to watery alphabet soup? Most people can pick out phrases and sentences; some few notice words; who is left that can nail down proper definitions? We have dictionaries, etymologies, and philological discussion - but who reads them? We have museums, libraries, concert halls - to assuage the cultural guilt of the many, but to nourish only the very few. Perhaps this must always be. I for one would like to help those few - or however MANY - by preserving the strength of their heritage, by slowing down its decline, and by making it easier for them to communicate with themselves and eternity.

This means, above all, cultivating disdain.

The decay of letters is called cliché, the process by which this occurs, stereotype. This is a natural process; when the road is not well built, the ice and sun contract it, shatter it, and the dandelions grow in the cracks. I define as "natural" those patterns which attend the passivity of human action. If you fail to see how detrimental the decay of definitions is to civilization, I suggest you run a favourite painting, first through a photocopier, and then, taking that copy, scan it, print it, then, fax it, and so on, until the strength of the image is blurred over to oblivion. Try listening to an old record of Bach over the phone...

Those of you who think yourselves to be post-modern, de-centred, de-constructed etc., will ask me about the "essence" of definition, and proceed to pick at the target like a turkey-vulture at roadkill. There is nothing so helpful to an old building as when its landlord has sounded out its wobbly points, essential faults, and the like, and is constantly aware of them. This does NOT mean evicting all the tenants for a loose tap. I take Derrida at his word when he spoke of the healthy, strengthening effects of deconstructive thinking. It is a method for making better, sounding out faults, and not an excuse out of the afternoon's chores.

We are being duped. Our books are mouldering in the meanwhile. What do you intend to do about it? Put aside your information-ages, as-technology's, your sweeping e-reader vistas and digital wonderland's- and take one deep thought - how are we best to get at our books today?

Principles?

Where are our organizational principles? The current is a step lazier than "laissez-faire", might even be called "lazy faire" - even if he didn't want it let alone, he is to lazy himself to do anything about it. If we have to nail down the modern principle, insofar as any organization is really going on? A vague sense of direction between the Scylla of public fads and the Charybdis of financial viability. We are far from the Phaeachians.

Method?

Proposed method for digital materials: our first step is to re-claim the conception of digital dissemniation from the bores. The current cliché must be overturned.

The goal: catalogue and metadata as DIGEST, as the TELOS of the primary library materials - the TRUE goal of digitization - the readable catalogue. Or if you like, the well-crafted tool. (The well implies the aesthetic value of handicraft and its resurgence among the petty bourgeois).

What it ain't

Textbooks are the scam of the century. They are almost sincere DaDaism. I mean, the dictatorship of format, font, and graph, with a cream filling.

Wikipedia isn't it - isn't even the front lawn. Plot summaries and accumulated prejudice do not a good 'reading' make.

Academic/annotated bibliographies, “further reading” lists etc. are the unread fine-print - and what's more, usually of better quality than the main show (ie monograph). Even still, composed to be an after-thought, a follow up, rather than a proglomena - it shows in the care! Compilation for someone you take to be an expert is far different than a guide for the beginner.

Introductory books of the “Dummies” specie are to be avoided at all costs, to say nothing of Cole's Notes. They ignore everything important and give you names and dates. If you think any substance can cling to these bones, be forewarned that they have been thoroughly bleached and sterilized.

All of these might be useful as negatives - what they deal with is he dross, avoid at all costs etc. This is what accumulates when the writer is unprepared in reading.

Agassiz and the fish

"A post-graduate student equipped with honors and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.

Post-Graduate Student: 'That's only a sunfish.'

Agassiz: 'I know that. Write a description of it.'

After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.

Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.

The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.

By this method science has arisen, not on the narrow edge of medieval logic suspended in a vacuum."

Roots and branches

You cannot truly have organized the books until the catalogue is readable - real cataloguing doesn't give superficial access - real access comes with acclimitaztion and mastery of the books themselves. To be readable...This means to go from cover to cover, with some sort of profit.

王何必曰利？

“Why must your majesty use that word 'profit' ?”

The librarian must KNOW his books - must be a summarizer.

The danger of him not? And offering what he himself doesn't properly own? Nobody can give another what he does not have himself - what he thinks to have done is irrelevant when the patron comes out muddled.

The only person who can do this has been educated in a real sense. Has been taught to read from Bacon:

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things."

The end of reference is not to refer reader to a cheap snack:

"The medical man tells us we should eat what we truly have an appetite for; but what we only falsely have an appetite for we should resolutely avoid. It is very true; and flimsy, desultory readers, who fly from foolish book to foolish book, and get good of none, and mischief of all — are not these as foolish, unhealthy eaters, who mistake their superficial false desire after spiceries and confectioneries for their real appetite, of which even they are not destitute, though it lies far deeper, far quieter, after solid nutritive food?"

The Mission

How to introduce a non-reading public to books? Summarize the books, give them the books in pill form, then, if the cure takes effect, they will look up the references and go back for more themselves.

The purpose of the librarian is to tantalize.

Thus the aphorisitic and well written catalogue entry will stick in the throat like a ball of molten lead. Cannot be thrown up or swallowed, but will stick.

There is a chain, tying in librarians, the "information need of the patron", all the way to the digests of the Confucian school and the middle ages - even to Thoreau, who read his Iliad while sitting on a pumpkin.

Librarianship as economy above all - the one maxim I agree with in current scholarship. Save the reader time.

In an age of museums, where the culture is stored away so that it need not be confronted, the librarian has a poetic function.

Composition by compilation and comment and digital presentation...

Regularity and format of metadata into "stanzas"...The fugue and the sonnet already relate to the practice of cataloguing as it currently exists.

You can infer from the above that I do not reccomend ordering as alphabetical, subject, date...Rather, by idiogrammatic and creative connotation. Interpretative bibliography.

Librarians, a breed of people who can guide one through the periplum of culture with bibliographic methods, avoiding dangers, adapting lists to the susceptibilities of characters.

Not a random pathological rant like Burton, but a crafted course or digest. Peter Lombard. Pedagaogues but not pedants

Poverty in style (as opposed to poverty OF style) in an editor is good. The mission proves aesthetics are not so far from responsible public thought.

They will not be so quick to send people away to what they do not understand. They will be SURE of themselves, and, despite their limitations, the librarian will KNOW what he reccomends at least. Rather than all fuzzy - limited, but sure.

The use of "subjective hierarchy" based on one's own personality and reading - what shades of culture and history could be revealed...

Quick Order

“It is much easier to "sit pretty", keep one's mouth shut or speak of any author as a whole or apply general statements to a whole book, than to risk picking out the good and the bad, the brilliant and the dull—which latter IS the critic's job, especially in an age when the plenum of books and knowledge is increasing. There is more to choose FROM, and the best 100 books or the best 100,000 or million pages DOES not remain the same 100,000 or million from one age or decade to another.”

-E.P.

"It is by the Odes that the mind is aroused. It is by the Rules of Propriety that the character is established. It is from Music that the finish is received."

-Kung