Nick Wellings > Recent Status Updates

This sounds cool: http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/01/03/hy...

Learned two new concepts/words today!

Soramimi
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soramimi

And Mondegreen
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondeg...
The Soramimi examples are hilarious (and fascinating) esp the Russian/Palestinian mishearings!

Pleasantly diverting melange of gobledeegook.

Pynchon's "Inherent Vice" set to become a movie? Oh dear.

Dear friends,

2013 is winding to a close. What were your 5 top books of the year? or 10? or 15, or as many as you like? Thank you :)

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20...

Audio for Orson Welles'radio adaptation of Heart of Darkness.

Fantastic essay by Sybil Wolfram (mother of Stephen) nuancing differences between asserting, saying, believing true or not true propositions. As Richard showed (and Priest too) philosophy runs aground on the rocks of real-world usages. We CAN countenance contradictions. p and not p, p and q.

only 8 pages in but very exciting already. This is perfect for me: Existentialism/phenomenology, analyses kf Heidegger, Bourdieu's 'Practice' and anthropology/ethnology. Just bloody delightful.

Thought this was cute:

Authors write about books they hate.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8...

Lots of Proust "hate"!

Aww no...Another great leaves us. Doris Lessing died. :(

Excellent fun. Richard is expressing as best he can circumstances which stretch the limits of philosophical language. It is almost amusing to read the contortions and shapes he has to write himself into and out of, always well reasoned. And that is the problem, which philosophy may never be able to address: we are so much more than reason machines. Attempts to explain behaviour without acknowledging this will fail.

Saw Simon Schama on the train today. He sat across from me and busied himself leafing quickly through the free newspaper. No-one spoke to him. He looked pretty grumpy (a male 'bitch shield'?) and um, fleshier than off the TV. I didn't speak to him either. He's off to do some film festival up the coast. The End.

Moments of tectonic thought-alteration in the reader meet moments of silliness, eg "the interpretive movement (the hermeneutic circle) is less between the whole and its parts than an elision of presence and absence to imply an intimate objectivity" (ok) and silly: the idea of 'symbol' being pernicious as it is a 'product of radically distinct political epistemology, Romanticism.'

'We have great difficulty explaining or interpreting the ordinary [. . .] Actions in situ and their unintended consequences remain sufficiently contingent as to make a mockery of theorizing. Most of what humans do remains -and I suspect will always remain -delightfully intransigent to explanation if not to over interpretation.'

Excellent analysis of how damaging 'the Literary Turn' in humanities has been so damaging. Intellectual fashions and fads are pernicious. (Take note, Zizek...you are fighting a mythic dragon with an equally mythic sword.)

"Above all, imagining or stating that you have knowledge all too easily justifies not enquiring too carefully or critically lest it upset the illusion. The greater the claim to global dominion, the more such knowledge is likely to ignore what people are actually doing in the world."

"Oddly, dualism is often held to be the attribute of ‘primitive societies’, not of ourselves – an example of the tendency to displace onto ‘the Other’ what is uncomfortable or unspeakable in our own categories."

'Far from rationality always being opposed to ritual, we ourselves revel in rituals of rationality.' Good discussion, once again highlighting how parochial debate over Law of logic and thought is, and how nonstandard logics must be admitted as viable and useful.

Stronger chapter on Balinese logic vs 'Hellenic', and repercussions for the idea of universal ways of thought.

In which Jaynes also discusses metaphor by using the example of a simile. Oh dear.

A worrying coincidence between Jaynes writing and the indices of crankhood, most noticeably the use of bizarre neologisms, wholesale 'demolishment' or refuting of ideas in just one sentence, shaky premises and argument. But even so, engaging.

Mark Hobart probably cries himself to sleep.

This book appears to be a fine example of the 'reflexive turn' anthropology took a few decades ago. Self agonising, self urticating, investigating how academic definitions and ethnographic enquiry do injustice to subjects. Navel and shoe gazey; 'problematizing' practices as apologia. In sum conflicted but interesting.