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RECENT IDIOCENTRISM POSTS:

From Asininity to Assassination

The Pynchonesque but true story about an eccentric fringe-party Presidential candidate. My piece will have to be rewritten.

Nine Theses for the MLA Convention

8. What is inevitable is not necessarily good, and the methodologization, etc., of literary studies is really the shitty colonization of an ultimate value or form of play by instrumental, productive, positivist, and bureaucratic forms of organization.

Aristotle and Mollusk Sex

Aristotle usually figures in cultural history and in the history of science as a rationalist philosophizer, one of the men who put The West on the non-empirical, non-experimental, unscientific track of logical abstraction and argument -- someone whose influence had to be thrown off before science would be possible.

This picture is really quite misleading. Aristotle was criticized in his own time for undignified activities such as the dissection of hermit crabs, and his biological writings show us that as an  experimentalist he wasn't as far removed from Darwin as people think.

To make my point, I've excerpted Aristotle's writings on the sex lives of the mollusks -- since you can hardly imagine a less-dignified area of empirical study.

From the Shores of Tripoli

The American wars against the "Barbary pirates" around the turn of the nineteenth century featured an American suicide bomber attacking Muslims, a peace treaty declaring the United States not to be a Christian nation, and the namesakes of several naval vessels: first, the inadvertent suicide bomber Lt. Richard Somers, and second, one Reuben (or Ruben) James. A few decades later, a mutiny on the USS Somers, commanded by Herman Melville's' cousin Guert Gansevoort, was the likely prototype for Melville's Billy Budd (and perhaps also his story "Benito Cereno"). Later still, the WWII USS Reuben James lent its name to a famous pro-war agitprop folk song -- which was later retrofitted as an anti-war song.

Surf Music as Minimalism

Surf guitar  (created with jimmied equipment) sounds great with a dirty saxophone, regardless of whether either of the players can play. This is absolute music in its purest form -- the rock-bottom music of the state of nature.  How could anything be more minimal  than this?  It's nothing but "a sound". But then the people called "minimalists" took a great idea and ruined it.

Les Érudits Maudits: Education and Class

So only the few and the proud will be interested in my érudit maudit concept. In fact, however, our society is opulent enough that it is possible to live decently at quite a low relative economic level. And while certain pleasures and comforts will need to be sacrificed, the most painful sacrifice will be success itself. People often talk about “true success”, but nobody really believes that success is anything but money. Those  making the bohemian sacrifice will have to choose between taking a lot of ribbing and nagging about their personal failure, and just cutting unsympathetic people out their lives. Neither option is an appealing one.

Could Friedrich Nietzsche have married Jane Austen? / Does the Bush Protect the Little Bird? / The reality of Time III / Theory and Me II / Zizek's Wedding / Relativism and Ethics / A Pedantic Autobiography / Bird Milk, Reptile Milk, Fish Milk / Poetry Month / Donald Davidson / Erik Satie: À bas Paladilhe et Lenepveu! / The politics of Genghis Khan / Etymological Vaginas / The coming of the Age of Iron / Hello, Bitch persons / Erik Satie, La Princesse de Polignac, and the Sewing Machine / An Enemy of the People / Why Relativism? / Real Gothic Cathedrals / Soames and Rorty / What is Philosophy? / Sex Life of the Squid / Drakon and Solon / Debate on Analytic Philosophy / Michel Meyer II: From Logic to Rhetoric / Michel Meyer and Practical Philosophy / Killer Snails / Unconscious humor in Lope de Vega / Liberal-hatred / Silk and Memes / Influential Disconnections / Starting from Greenland (or, the Turkish Kayak) / More Rorty / 2000 Years of Barbarians / Water and Permanence II / Murder Most Foul: Chinggis Qan's Mother Speaks / Kenneth Burke Faked it Too  /  Ressentiment and Schooling / What Happened to Philosophy? / Menina e Moça Project  /  The Translation of the Ruins of Rome / A Pragmatist Descartes / The sex life of the squid / W. C Fields, Dear Abby, and My Grandmother / Loons / The Barbarian Reservoir / The Waters above the Firmament: / "How History Made the Mind"  / "History of the Caucasian Albanians" / Freud and Me / Hemoglobin and its substitutes / Melville's "The Confidence Man" and Panurge
 

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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