Some bigoted fun.

So, Samantha Clark, Max's sister, is, like, sort of a 'continental philosopher', whatever that means.

The following came out of the blue in the middle of a friendly conversation about how peering behind the scenes at Disneyland destroys the magic/imagination/etc. of the Disney experience. A nice, harmless conversation. And then...

S.C. (with play-derisiveness, perhaps disguising genuine derisiveness): You know who kills imagination? Those Analytic Philosophers at Biola University.
(a beat)
J.W. (with a grin): If by "imagination"...
(Max begins to laugh uproariously, because he had anticpated a retort of this color.)
J.W. (continued): ...you mean "vagueness" and "obfuscation".

She'd poke fun a little later at the business of dividing everything into rigid and well-enumarated points and subpoints, etc.
I forget whether I responded by saying it beats intoning capital-B 'Being' like a mantra, though the thought had crossed my mind.

Ben Rohrs, my roommate, has noted that any other Biola undergrad would probably have conceded to S.C. that Analytic Philosophy does have its drawbacks along the lines of her playful critique, etc., proceeding to bring S.C. around to seeing its merits as well, evangelistically striking a happy ideological compromise. "Of all the people to raise that attack against," he says, "you're the Biolan to holler back 'That's right! Because Continental Philosophy is a load of b*******!"
Now, this was fun to banter about with Ben, but it seems a slight mischaracterization of my position. I don't think Continental Philosophy is trash or anything; but that's just it--I'm just not sure what it is. The most I can confidently say (and, what's more, with a comedic intent to keep to continental verbiage) is that it is "Other". Or is it "The Other"?

But yeah, I love analytic methodology. I love it more than I like the content itself of traditional analytic philosophy. I just like the way they roll.

Combination #2

I think I like being conscious in the morning.
My sleeve is wet from sink-basin water that splashed this morning upon shaving.
I like having shaved non-electrically.
I like being reminded of the architectural texture, if there is such a thing, of that one main street in Edinburgh, because my sleeve is wet.
I like posting blogs that consist of a roll call of things I like and am currently experiencing.
I like self-referential blogs.
I like self-reference.
I like that English can be used to reflect on its own semantic machinery.
I like 'em all together. Altogether all together.

Birthday Roast

Here is the text from one of the Docs open on my computer:

MAX CLARK AND JONATHAN CHARLES WRIGHT
CORDIALLY REQUEST THE PLEASURE
OF YOUR ATTENDANCE AT

JONATHAN CHARLES WRIGHT’S BIRTHDAY ROAST,

A FORMAL DINNER
AND PRESENTATION OF ORATORICAL BATTERY
IN THE FORM OF
TRENCHANT CRITICISM AND DERISIVE OBLOQUY
DIRECTED AT
AND IN HONOR OF
JONATHAN CHARLES WRIGHT.

SATURDAY, THE NINTH OF FEBRUARY
AT 5 O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING.

THE CATCH OF ANAHEIM.
1929 S. STATE COLLEGE BOULEVARD,
ANAHEIM, CA 92806






DINNER IS 26 DOLLARS, WHICH INCLUDES
ENTRÉE, BEVERAGE, DESSERT, TAX, & TIP.
SEMI-FORMAL ATTIRE IS REQUESTED.
R.S.V.P. by FEBRUARY 5.

Tom Lehrer: Wernher Von Braun.

Tom Lehrer: So Long, Mom.

Yesterday in la-la-logic.

Instructing Logic is my favorite thing I do on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but I won't get to do it anymore after tomorrow, since Ashley is coming back to assume her class. Boo hoo.
Anyway, yesterday we were working on translating sentences from ordinary, everday English to sentences worthy of formal logic. So, first we made sure we knew which parts of speech were essential to a proposition if it is to play a role in formal syllogisms: the quantifier, the subject, the copula, the predicate.

Take for example:
All X are Y.

"All" is the quantifer.
"X" the subject.
"are" the copula.
"Y" the predicate.

We were to spend the classtime figuring out the best methods for morphing everday sentences into propositions of this particular structure, in hopes that we could eventually plug them into formal syllogisms and then, in time, check the validity of these syllogisms.

'Alright,' I said, 'so, we have "all", "X" "are" and "Y".' Immediately after saying this, I started screwing around a lot. I started to demand of my studens that they tell me which words were in any given sentence.

J. 'Which words are in the sentence I'm uttering right now?'
K. '"Which", "words", "are", "in", "the", "sentence", "I'm", "uttering", "right", and "now".'

I couldn't stop.

J. 'You know kids, "You", "know", "kids", "are", "all", "in", "this", "and", and "sentence" are all in this sentence.'

Combination #1

I like the first track on the new Radiohead album.
I like the clicking noise of the burner trying to ignite.
I like the smell of gas.
I like them all together.

Allow me to ramble.

Note: this blog post is not particularly well written. It did not take much mental energy, nor would it take much mental energy to read. Recommended circumstances for reading are those in which the reader's focus is below %65 working capacity. So, if you feel "pooped out" and don't want anything too rigorous or anything too interesting, feel free to give this one a read. Otherwise, avoid what follows.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Right now I am in a motel room with Daniel and Max. Max is asleep on the bed, Daniel is across from me, complaining about the temperature in the room, and I've just finished punching the scores in for my classes, and now I just have to prep. This morning I woke up and when I took my shower I used soap with the word "body" printed on it and shampoo with the word "hair" printed on the bottle. Now Daniel is stripping down, slowly inching his way next to Max, intent on assuming the position that has come to be known as "spooning". I just watched some youtube videos of Feist talking to interviewers. She seems intelligent enough. She talked about brainwaves and creativity and she said she thinks watching television is bad for you, and had some seemingly valid support for her claims. She even seems to have a sense of humor. Cat Power, on the other hand, is typical. She used to be an alcoholic, and so now has cliched things to say about alcohol and getting over it, etcetera. Daniel is facinated by the existence of room service. Max muttered from his slumber to ask about prices. Daniel says it's "a lot expensive". We walked across the street to go to Denny's for breakfast. We talked about child-rearing procedure/pedagogy/methodology/theory/etcetera. I'm drinking grape Gatorade that Daniel has discarded. He refuses to drink anything with fructose corn syrup in it. He has assumed a very scrupulous diet recently. It's nice to write this but I know it won't be nice to read, because it's so choppy and lacks any undergirding theme, project, etcetera. Why is this grape Gatorade blue? Sometimes choppiness can be played up to literary effect, amounting even to virtue, but here not only is the prose choppy, but it is bland. "I did this, Daniel did that", and neither the this's nor that's are in themselves interesting. I hope it is evident that in this blog I am not exerting mental energy to any great degree. I hope that my mental exertion is evident in other blog posts of superior quality. It would be a shame to me if this did it for my reader in the same way as previous, more thought out blogs. I will not move to Idaho come summer, but maybe come fall. Jenny Swingrover is helping to arrange my birthday party at the Catch, which is great. She is cutting me a great deal, and all I have to do is get her a 2-carat diamond on a platinum band. Done and done. My right wrist is sweaty now and so I'm going to stop.

A nice phrase from Dostoevsky.

"...running with the hare and hunting with the hounds and deceiving the fools."

From the SSP annual conference program:

4:00 - 6:15 Panel Three: Topics in Metaphysics and Epistemology

Mark Alan Grant, New York University, “Some Thoughts on Peacocke's Metasemantic Theory of the A Priori”

Chrysoula Gitsoulis, CUNY Graduate Center, “Are the Real Numbers Listable?”

Jonathan Charles Wright, Biola University, “The Instability of Arguments for Moderate Contextualism”

Justin Clarke-Doane, New York University, “Platonic Semantics”

Cause for laughter.

Not only did I laugh at this, but I am still sighing my laughter away.

From Borges' John Wilins' Analytical Language. My guess is that what follows is fabricated by Borges himself.

...These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.
...


I have just read that Foucault apparently has cited this list somewhere and has elevated it to a place of philosophical popularity, which is a shame, but makes me want to read Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge, whether or not it is the text in which he mentions Borges.


I used the italics function three times in this blog post. Four times.

Some Greek and Latin words to help my very first blog post:

Logos vs. Lexis.
Res vs. Verba.

Now, the question for me is, which words are used in Plato's Ion, and does that affect things.

S. J. in THE LIFE AQUATIC.

notice that at youtube.com, a written response to this video reads: "very good!"

A sentence or two about myself.

He walked with determination, fixating on his self-appointed personal incumbency to exactly articulate in written words his doubts about the possibility of exact articulation, silently storming from his room to the kitchen, that place now pregnant with meaning, moving with lithe seriousness, holding like weapons two nearly identical volumes in each hand: Borges' Fictions and Borges' Non-Fictions, steel blue and olive green, spines facing the ground. He walked in this way, and then became hopelessly distracted by his doing so.

Further groping after the ineffable.

My spirit quails in the thought that any comprehensive and robust communication is impossible; I fear that the most we, intelligent beings, have to relate are approximations and guesses.

Here I quote in full Borges' The Yellow Rose:

It was neither that afternoon nor the next that Giambattista Marino died--that illustrious man proclaimed by the unanimous mouths of Fame (to use an image that was dear to him) as the new Homer or the new Dante--and yet the motionless and silent act that took place that afternoon was, in fact, the last thing that happened in his life. His brow laureled with years and glory, the man died in a vast Spanish bed with carven pillars. It costs us nothing to picture a serene balcony a few steps away, looking out toward the west, and, below marbles and laurels and a garden whose terraced steps are mirrored in a rectangular pool. In a goblet, a woman has set a yellow rose; the man murmurs the inevitable lines of poetry that even he, to tell the truth, is a bit tired of by now:

"Porpora de' giardin, pompa de' prato,
Gemma di primavera, occhio d'aprile..."

Then the revelation occurred. Marino saw the rose, as Adam had seen it in Paradise, and he realized that it lay within its own eternity, not within his words, and that we might speak about the rose, allude to it, but never truly express it, and that the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity had dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world's contents.
Marino achieved that epiphany on the eve of his death, and Homer and Dante may have achieved it as well.

----------------------------------------------------------

Giambattista Marino was a Neopolitan poet. I have a poor mangled translation of the poetic fragment quoted within the story, done by yours truly with the help of Google Language Tools.

"Purpura of the garden, pump of the lawn
Gem of Spring, eye of April..."

Purpura is a disease causing purple/red spots on the skin. I can only assume the poem is referring to a garden of roses. Also, I wonder if the "pump" is connotative of the heart or not.

----------------------------------------------------------

Now, to the point. I have just, within the last hour or so, had a sort of aesthetic experience, which I would like to communicate. The experience means something special to me, and so now you can likely grasp why I am afraid. Borges, more literate than me, projects, whether in his typical sincerity or typical jest, upon Marino, perhaps more articulate than Borges, the sudden insight that humans are incapable of expressing anything. Yet, I do not want to allude merely to my sensation, but to express it; not give a faint hint of it, but incarnate it. I know I will in all likelihood fail.

With hypersensitivity, maybe due to the stagnant cold in this house, I dwelt on the following qualia: the smell of coffee in my mouth, the weight of my arms as they extend from the well-fitting black shirt I bought in Oxford, locks of rust-colored hair tinging the upper periphery of my field of vision, the slightly prickling tactual friction between my hand and unshaven jaw (oh please, please try to imagine what it feels like to move Jonathan Charles Wright's hand against Jonathan Charles Wright's short and scanty whiskers!), the music playing from my laptop--"Can't Love you Like I Do" by the Zombies, which can't help but have post-romantic connotations for me. Tara and I were going to have the song play during our wedding. She was going to walk down the aisle as it played. We listened to it frequently in the car, during one of the better chapters of our relationship. It carries with it emotions from back then, untinted by the history of which they are a part: the naive infatuation and happy thrills of sharing a playful, lighthearted, and unflinchingly trivial estimation of life with a beautiful and timid girl.--, I dwelt also on the fact that it had been a long long time since I'd heard the song, and I dwelt on the passage I just read from The Amber Spyglass, in which the boy Will has made it into the cave to rescue the girl Lyra and is faced with the dangerous Mrs. Coulter, whilst outside there is the thunderous noise of zeppelins and helicopters, the fusillade of machine guns and rifles and explosions, the moonlight reflects off of both Mrs. Coulter's pistol and the shards of the Subtle Knife, which has inexplicably inexplicably broken, the situation is violent and hopeless, and then:

'"What's happening?" Lyra said. Where are we? Oh, Will, I had this dream..."
"We're in a cave. Don't move too fast, you'll get dizzy. Just take it carefully. Find your strength. You've been asleep for days and days."
Her eyes were still heavy, and she was racked by deep yawns, but she was desperate to be awake, and he helped her up, putting her arm over his shoulder and taking much of her weight. Ama watched timidly, for now that the strange girl was awake, she was nervous of her. Will breathed in the scent of Lyra's sleepy body with a happy satisfaction: she was here, she was real.'

My heart beat quickly with the drama of the scene, and yet I was taken by a joy at Will's realizing in the midst of all the danger and noise, even if only on an unconscious and physiological level, that he loves Lyra.--
These sensations coalesced together just as I heard a housemate refer to a unordinary name, which, for whatever reason, immediately brought to my mind the names I intend for my daughters and sons, should they ever exist. I paused from reading, with all the previous feelings vying for my attention, and thought of my future children. I heard their names. I imagined them learning things. I imagined their skin and hair and arms and hands and voices. Then I imagined my saying their names, as if in the simple utterance of a few sounds I embodied all my current sensations, along with the fecundity of thought and emotion and pleasure which to them is attached: Arianne, Esme, Walter, Marvel.


There. Let that suffice.

An analogy in defense of potential contrary evidence offered against two beliefs.

Not only do I believe that creativity can be forced, but I believe that the results of laying creative duties, sans inspiration, upon oneself can yield beautiful results. In accordance with these beliefs, I'd like to provide an image as an analogue to the creative process qua incumbency. When one forces oneself to be creative, I believe they will tend to begin their creative endeavors with poor results; their ideas won't be as imaginative or clever as they'd like, their writing will lack the eloquence they're after.
Now my analogue: Just as turning on old pipes produces first gunk and decay, themselves results of the desuetude of old plumping; yet, one must help, not hinder, this feculent grime to spew its way out in order for water to follow. At first this water may at first be contaminated, though with enough passage of flow, it run clean and clear.
This analogy not only recommends an allowance of poor writing at the beginning of a forced creative project, but it demands it as a necessary prelude to any steady current of creative success.

This addition to my blog, qua RSS feed, will result in an alert sent to Louis.

Louis, this is for you.
Now that I have the floor, incidentally, I'd just like to write that I feel strange.
I have the sense of being powerful and depraved, perspicacious and aloof, clever, lonely, self-reliant, funny, self-critical, self-absorbed, self-loving.
I may or may not be legion.

A minor beauty:

I am struck by a lyric's beauty in itself and moreso in its context.

Ray Charles, who was blind, sang this lyric:

"Georgia, a song of you comes as sweet and clear as moonlight through the pines."

the Third one.

The Future Mrs. Jonathan Charles Wright Performs:

Second post of 2008.

Can't Wait.

First Blog Post of 2008

I love Chico.