I had no time to blog all semester because it was the busiest semester of my life. I think that's what having classes that you care about will do to you; I never wanted to just put in the minimum, because I loved the classes and professors so much. I felt like I owed it to them (and me) to not just crank out projects because they were due.
also, I had by far the best experience of my short teaching career, teaching fiction. I cannot express how much I have learned by teaching what I'm studying. let's just say that by the time I had read all fourteen stories turned in as final projects, my idea of what a story ought to be was 50x stronger. crazy.
but now school's out, and I'm planning a nice summer with my books, beer, and my balcony. apparently I am interested in some kind of overview of civilization, maybe because I never felt like taking that "western civ" course in undergrad, and my sense of humanity's progress is accordingly dim. I am actually voluntarily reading a book that is half full of shit, bertrand russell's history of western philosophy, which has such wonderful paragraphs as:
The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant. This habit began to be important with the rise of agriculture; no animal and no savage would work in the spring in order to have food next winter, except for a few purely instinctive forms of action, such as bees making honey or squirrels burying nuts. In these cases, there is no forethought; there is a direct impulse to an act which, to the human spectator, is obviously going to prove useful later on. True forethought only arises when a man does something towards which no impulse urges him, because his reason tells him that he will profit by it at some future date. Hunting requires no forethought, because it is pleasurable; but tilling the soil is labour, and cannot be done from spontaneous impulse.
I looked for some indication in the surrounding text that Russell was being facetious or ironic; it seems to be in line with the rest of the writing, so I must conclude that Russell was fine with sounding like a prick. I hope these terms ("civilized" and "savage") are just outdated and would not be found in a modern anthropology text. "hunting is pleasurable"? what the fuck is that about? I mean, I sort of understand what he was trying to say, here - that society changed when we became farmers instead of just hunter-gatherers - but this entire book is just filled with condescension and almost pity for other cultures.
a much more enlightened scholar on many levels is joseph campbell, who absolutely never fails. I discovered this quote, which explains a lot about how he seems to always be writing from a place of infinite wisdom:
So during the years of the Depression I had arranged a schedule for myself. When you don’t have a job or anyone to tell you what to do, you’ve got to fix one for yourself. I divided the day into four four-hour periods, of which I would be reading in three of the four-hour periods, and free one of them.
By getting up at eight o’clock in the morning, by nine I could sit down to read. That meant I used the first hour to prepare my own breakfast and take care of the house and put things together in whatever shack I happened to be living in at the time. Then three hours of that first four-hour period went to reading.
Then came an hour break for lunch and another three-hour unit. And then comes the optional next section. It should normally be three hours of reading and then an hour out for dinner and then three hours free and an hour getting to bed so I’m in bed by twelve.
On the other hand, if I were invited out for cocktails or something like that, then I would put the work hour in the evening and the play hour in the afternoon.
It worked very well. I would get nine hours of sheer reading done a day. And this went on for five years straight.
The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work
first of all, I love (although I'm sure he didn't) that he lived in a "shack"; shows major character. also, reading for three-hour spans is by my measure extremely impressive. I mean he probably didn't literally sit there for three hours in the same spot, but I get tired in my brain after an hour and a half. I've been quizzing people lately, people who work in academic disciplines, on how their work schedules run, and the responses vary a lot. PhD students have way more discipline than I do, and are probably more on the level of joseph campbell up there. it seems like for me, my "studying" (aka sitting in a space with a bunch of books thrown everywhere, picking them up lackadaisically and staring out the window for long periods of time) consists of half reading and half thinking and processing. I can't just read straight through a text; I have to stop and write down ideas that struck me, and that often leads me off into some tangent that might last for days. if I were confined to a reading schedule I don't know what I'd do.
then there are days when reading seems totally inappropriate, and I drive to michigan to play bocce ball.
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