Void after one year

So where’d the years go?
All the time we had?
Being poor was not such a drag in hindsight

I do not wish to return to Madison after a year in Berlin; on Friday I realized I might have taught my last class in this city. Wearing a wig.

Are you proud of what you possess?

Can you approach all the objects you “own” and openly claim them as yours? Are you willing to make your “guilty pleasures” public knowledge and accept them as part of who you are?

It is that time again ... time to consider what to keep and what to throw away. Time to compress, conserve, and categorize.

Going through data and records and files I note that I compartmentalize to an extent; some people know me one way, others a different way, and while I do not put much effort at keeping them apart, nor do I make any attempt to freely mingle them. We all have secrets and by their very nature secrets must be held, not disclosed, and so in a way a secret is not yours to tell and thus not yours at all.

I have no secrets of earth-shattering importance.

Rationality itself is to an increasing extent equated more mathematico [Latin: in mathematical terms] with the capability of quantification. As much as this took into account the primacy of the triumphant natural sciences, so little does it lie in the concept of the ratio in itself. It is blinded not the least because it blocks itself off from qualitative moments as something which is for its part to be rationally thought.
—Adorno, Negative Dialectics

A useful quote, that.

I updated the site a bit today by creating a few photo galleries—nothing tremendous, but a few had been due for completion, such as my handful of pictures from Shawn’s farewell gathering. I plugged my scanner back in and digitized a few old Halloween photos.

Yesterday my federal return showed up in my mailbox. I will cash it the next time I head to the credit union. I wrote dissertation “material” ... all for the introduction. It is slow work. The necessity of doing work leads to procrastination, which leads me to be productive with regard to things other than that which needs doing.

Hungarian

Hungarian note of the day: “The suffix -g was not productive in this period, despite its vogue in word-inventing linguistic circles, and has not been productive ever since.” (from a page on the Hungarian equivalents to crowd)
Several abstracts of papers on a variety of Finno-Ugric topics—one states that “Leibniz, one of the most prominent scholars of his time, was interested not only in natural sciences, mathematics, philosophy, etc. but in linguistics as well. As is known, he was presumably the first to declare the close linguistic connection between the Finnic languages and Hungarian.”
Dr. Tibor Baráth asks “Was Hungarian the language of the ancient Eastern Cultures?” It is a wonderfully non-scientific article ... by which I mean that it is full of logical fallacies and leaps of logic. Quite amusing.

Art?

Mary Devereaux updates us on “The Philosophical Status of Aesthetics”
There is also a collection of Film-Philsophy online writings.
The Rebel Sell the article is part of a larger, book-length work of the same name; The Onion trashed it, but I find the essay itself rather illuminating in some regards.
Freud and His Discontents: Taking Freud’s famous 1930 work as a starting point, Lee Siegel points out that in the wake of Civilization and its Discontents psychological characterization died, and Freud killed it; at the same time, Freud’s study and thus his model of the human psyche was based on psychological novels of the 19th century. As Siegel indicates, it is a curious irony ... but one, the author maintains, that liberated film, and while I am not sure I completely buy into his thesis, it nevertheless provides food for thought.

—May 10 2005

S.KRAUSE

Void after one year