Too much aussie pride on the forums lately; I think its incumbent on the rest of us to stem this before it goes too far. For instance, the Sydney Opera House looks like a bunch of nuns seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The Thorn Birds? more like The Dumb Birds!

Why is that information useful and interesting to this discussion? — ttjordy

I just like to ask questions about sex; some people get on me about it, but I think its better to be open.

A lattice-work crust
Holes are blobs of darkness
Has been placed across the road
You can't walk out too far that way any more
They say the children are demolishing
The insides of the woods
burnt orange
That it's spectacular

New to this thread, wondering if the OP is sexually active?

:blush:

Mistake on my part

I would like to enroll
In the new course
At the study center

Weeds what you call them
These things sitting like mail to be read
Toward the end of afternoon
Things the mailman brought

I was thinking
Now that the flowers are
forgotten
A whole new frontier
Backing around the old one are
Swamping its former good ideas
Plowing under the errors to
In its tin maelstrom : the overloaded
Ferryboat slowly moves away from the dock
Are these dog-eared things

New Poem : Farm II

I'll use this picture as a 'main post' signal, if necessary. It's a close-up from the book's cover, a painting by El Greco called The Entombment of Gonzalo Ruiz, Count of Orgaz, from a Legend of 1323. I think it's a good 'main post' signal in two ways: (1) it has a close tie to the book & (2) it's big & striking. It'll jump out if you scroll down through a thicket of nested arguments.

Ok, onto the book itself: Johnston, naturally, has introductory remarks.

Introductory remarks are hard to distill, because they are already distillations. But here's at it:

He says there are two problematic paths to travel down. The first is preaching, repeating religious dogma. The second is the mere rehearsal of materialist dogma - i.e. 'consciousness is just the brain, of course, how could it be otherwise?'

He thinks this strict either-or has bad effects. The first is that it funnels those members of the general public who aren't partial to either of those two dogmas toward impoverished "new age" thought. If there is no good option for people who don't recognize themselves in either sheer religiosity or strict materialist dogma, they'll gravitate toward snake-oil spiritualism.

The other problem, related, is that he thinks this framing feeds into the clunky Science vs Religion debate. [It seems to me like what he's rejecting here is easy, snarky 'this vs that' frameworks of the kind you'd see in either glib pop science or glib religious rejections of science]

I also have a copy of that book! its fascinating, but I haven't had a chance to read closely yet.

I can't compare them because I haven't read either in full yet, but it's my impression that this book isn't about how the family survives the death of a loved one, as important a topic as that is. It's about consciousness surviving the death of the body (though in a very qualified way)

oooh that song is good, hadn't heard of them before, thx for that.

[end of poem]

Living with the girl
Got kicked into the sod of things.
There was a to-do end of June,
Comings and goings
Before the matter is dropped.
But it stays around, like her faint point
Of frown, or the dripping leaves
of pie-plant and hollyhock,
Also momentary in defeat.
No one has the last laugh

A protracted wait that is also night.
Funny how the white fence posts
Go on and on, a quiet reproach
That goes under as day ends
Though the geometry remains,
A thing like nudity at the end
Of a long stretch. "It makes such a difference."
OK. So is the "really not the same thing at all,"
Viewed through the wrong end of a telescope
And holding up that bar.

New Poem : Farm

[end of poem]

@StreetlightX Courtney Barnett is great. She's one of the best of the last decade. But, moving beyond music - as always, australian bluster compensates for this that and the other.

i might be wrong, maybe there was a parallel discovery of the rihanna song, independent of rihanna.

If Peak Aussie humor has to nest itself in an explicit Rihanna Parody, using american music video tropes, i guess its hard to see the homegrown thing.

Ah. it's about parodying 2007 american music?

It wouldn't be the first time the endlessly subtle australians outstripped the rest of us . damn. If your humor is that impossible to translate, I can only imagine what the music's like. Let us in, some day.

theres got to be a more robust tradition of poop jokes that the indigenous and colonizers alike can draw from? A humor bread line? Like, I get it that Australia is a nothing pile of dry sticks for everyone, for all of time, but still the internet can help overcome that, surely?

Because people want bullshit products, so bullshit workers make sure that bullshit gets on the bullshit shelves. — Hanover

wait, really do you think it's like this?

better, better

you're australian, no?

Fox is televised excrement lol. Like, if you put an actual, live picture of a freshly laid out warm turd on TV and labelled it 'Fox', you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. — StreetlightX

oof, say what you will about americans, but these poop jokes are squarely backwater

News of some thing we know and care little of,
As the distant castle rejoices to the joyous
Sound of hooves, releasing rooks straight up into the faultless air
And meanwhile weighs its shadow ever heavier on the mirroring
Surface of the river, surrounding the little boat with three figures
in it.

But living with it deep in the midst of things.
It it is civilization that counts, after all, they seem
To be saying, and we are as much a part of it as anybody else
Only we think less about it, even not at all, until some
Fool comes shouting into the forest at nightfall

My job wasn't work-from-home, but has become so. I'm new to the company (started in January) but I'm just doing customer service. We manage fuel cards. A fuel card's for when you have a trucking company and need a way for your long distance big rig truckers to fuel up on the company dime without too much hassle. Instead of a master card, you swipe a fuel card. Problems arise, so there's customer service. If it isn't working right, you call in to get it fixed.

I can tell you frankly I'm not proud of my job; Still, I don't think it's bullshit, yet. I don't think current AI could do it. But that's not my main thing I want to say, because I agree with the thrust of your post.

Our company cut a lot of people. It lost massive value, even more so than the general stock market plunge. A lot of mid-level jobs got cut. I think I kept mine, not because my job is high-caliber, but exactly because it's low caliber. The top and the bottom stayed, the middle got thinned.

(biographical aside: this work-from-home thing has led the company to expand work-from-home even post-all-of-this. I lucked out - I've been wanting to get out of this city for a while and move back to my pretty rural home town, but there's been nowhere to work - now I can, and am about to move back, to work and finish my degree remotely in peace)

I think - I hope - that what this whole thing is ultimately going to do is accelerate the disjunction between jobs and physical location + cut out the fat, the bullshit. I think this is a really potent and exciting mix of two things happening and its hard to say in advance what the ramifications might be. But it could be good.

Never responded to this thread, but I'd like to now. I like the three categories and have found them useful recently. This will be scattered, because my thoughts are.

I think we'd probably both agree that thinking-for is nested. I've tried to suggest recently that philosophy is, at base, a thinking-for explanation. By that I mean that the broadest philosophical circle, the outer (or inner) matryoshka, is explanation. To explain is to find something static that underlies flux. This (static idea) explains that. Novalis said, and Heidegger requoted: 'Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere." That sounds right to me : wherever you are, and whatever is happening, you can bring it back into explanation, you can re-domesticate it. Now, of course, this is just what a lot of contemporary philosophers militate against - Derrida's differance is the obvious example. But this is still a concept one returns to in thought, which still effectively grounds no matter how many times you erase or strike-through a word. At the limit, the impossibility of final explanation takes the function of final explanation. Wittgenstein, decontextualized, but perfectly apt - 'You are sitting at a loom - even if it is empty -and going through the motions of weaving.'

I still think this is broadly right.

And I also think thinking-for (and -of and -with) are all handy tools outside of that context.

I think I've mixed up two things in the past. One is philosophy, in the sense outlined above, and the other is academic discourse. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to talk about the intersection of academic discourse and philosophy. Obviously, most of academic discourse is not discourse about philosophy, but that's what I'm going to talk about here.

Academic Discourse isn't necessarily trying to find an ultimate explanation, as with philosophy. The explanation has already been effectively decided upon. A shared methodology has determined in advance the kind of thing which will be accepted as an explanation.

From this, a family of thinking-fors crop up. One is thinking-for the massaging of inconsistencies latent in the current discourse, to be the one who does the personal labor of working them out. You develop what's there. Another is thinking-for the application of the discourse to fields as-yet untouched by it. Another is thinking-for Iconoclasm, trying to tear the whole thing down by finding a fatal flaw.

Most of these are, of course, nested in a broader thinking-for-recognition -- which of course, that's a primal human need.

At the end of the day, everything I'm saying breaks down into something middle school english simple - man versus society. Thinking-for always has to involve the social whole. But there's also a thinking-because-you-have-to which is just the mind and body (of the individual or a sub-societal group)working itself out, as one composes a song because one knows what note comes next, or as a group spontaneously creates what they need to.

But There's something about the intersection of philosophy and academic discourse which seems to take the social aspects of academic discourse and the inherent self-tail-biting aspect of philosophy and fuse them into a self-perpetuating machine. What is the thinking-for here? It seems like it has to do with a certain enclosed and ambivalent relationship toward recognition.

:party: :fire: :sparkle: Happy Ten Thousandth! :sparkle: :fire: :party:
(& glad you're digging the poems)

Perhaps all that is wanted is time.
People cover us, they are older
And have lived before. They want no part of us,
Only to be dying, and over with it.
Out of step with all that is passing along with them

Before and now seems infinite though encircled by gradual doubts
Of whatever came over us. Perhaps the old chic was less barren,
More something be looked forward to, than this
Morning in the orchards under an unclouded sky,
This painful freshness of each thing being exactly itself.

We have them all, those people, and now they have us.
Their decision was limited, waiting for us to make the first move.
But now that we have done so the results are unfathomable, as
though
A single implication could sway the whole universe on its stem.
We are fashionably troubled by this new edge of what had seemed
finite

You and I and the dog
Are here, this is what matters for now.
In other times things will happen that cannot possibly involve
us now.
And this is good, a true thing, perpendicular to the ground
Like the freshest, least complicated and earliest of memories

And ideally the chime of this
Will come to have the fascination of a remembered thing
Without avatars, or so remote, like a catastrophe
In some unheard-of country, that our concern
Will be only another fact in a long list of important facts.

Perhaps, sinking into the pearl stain of that passionate eye
The minutes came to seem the excrement of all they were passing
through,
A time when colors no longer mattered.
They are to us as qualities we were not meant to catch
As being too far removed from our closed-in state.

The way the date came in
Made no sense, it never had any.
It should have been a caution to you
To listen more carefully to the words
Under the wind as it moved toward us.

Distant corner is rounded, everything
Is not to be made new again. We shall be inhabited
In the old way, as ideal things came to us,
Yet in the having we shall be growing, rising above it
Into an admixture of deep blue enameled sky and bristly
gold stars.