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Thursday, June 24th, 2004
It occurs to me that a question that ought to be answered before I start writing this essay is, why am I writing it? What drew me to Eliade and to Nietzsche? What interests me so strongly about the notion of constructing history by forgetting events? Thinking about this today, I came up with a tentative idea that I am interested in this because of my apocalyptic worldview -- for many years now I have lived with a fear or expectation that soon, within my lifetime, would come a major catastrophic event that would mark the end of this historical era (the era that has been in progress in the west since the beginning of the Renaissance). I have not always acknowledged this fear; but it has been present on some level at least all of my adult life. Could this be what draws me to the thesis I am working on now? Hard to say -- since I have not even formulated what the thesis is besides that it has something to do with history and with forgetting -- but I am going to take as a working hypothesis that at least a large part of my interest in these books stems from this fear. While this is not going to be foremost in my thoughts approaching this essay, one potential side benefit of working on it should be a better understanding of the fear, and of its costs and benefits.
posted evening of June 24th, 2004: Respond
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Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004
Here are some first attempts at phrasing some of the questions that I want to answer in my writing about Nietzsche and Eliade. All this is going to be quite disjointed for a while yet. I want to thank in advance, 3 people with whom I am corresponding about these ideas; they are Ed Antoine, who introduced me to Eliade; Kai Lorentzen, who has given me a lot of help with Nietzsche over the years; and Randolph Fritz, who is helping me examine my ideas a bit more closely for coherence than I am used to. Oh and of course, thanks to John Holbo for introducing me to "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life"* How strongly does Nietzsche advocate living in the moment? My first impulse was to say that he favored it absolutely; but this is silly and wrong as he makes clear toward the front of the essay: "However, the fact that living requires the services of history must be just as clearly understood as the principle, which will be demonstrated later, that an excess of history harms the living person." Building on and spinning off of the last question, to what extent is it proper to view Nietzsche (and Eliade) as advocates pro or contra history and memory? Nietzsche is clearly setting his essay up as an argument against "an excess of history"; and it's probably okay to take this at face value. But I was oversimplifying when I wrote to Randolph, "Note however that "losing [ones]elf in the stream of becoming" is bad by Nietzsche's lights." So this needs to be developed some more. Eliade on the other hand does not put himself forward as an advocate, or does not seem to me to do so. More later.
*The translation I am reading is the Cambridge edition, translated by R. J. Hollingdale; however when I post quotations I will generally be using Ian Johnston's translation, which I think is not quite as well done but which is available online for cutting and pasting.
posted evening of June 22nd, 2004: Respond
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I got to work this morning to find this in my inbox, as dictated to Ellen: dear dada
i am holding my cards. i have ten cards. some are the same, some are not. two cards are clear. two cards are grey. TWO CARDS ARE GREEN. The cards are rectangles just like the buttons on the computer.I'm going to use the cards for when i go to the movie. We're going to see Clifford with black dog and his little baby.the end.
i love you dad.
sylvia
posted evening of June 22nd, 2004: Respond
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Friday, June 18th, 2004
We went to a Kerry house party tonight, at Mark and Marina's place. It was a very nice time -- not quite inspirational, but definitely encouraging. Kerry's elder sister Peggy spoke about the campaign, and about her brother's commitment to getting the U.S. out of the hole it's presently in. Ellen and I decided to do some volunteer work over the summer. Lots of digging in store for me tomorrow! I hope it is not too hot -- Ellen has a lot of plants for me to put in the ground, plus two large bushes for me to take out of it. (One is dead, and the other needs to be transplanted.) And I want to make a start at extending my stone path back along the side of the house, underneath the gate I built. Tomorrow afternoon there will be a going away party for Jim (who is moving to Vermont).
posted evening of June 18th, 2004: Respond
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Today I picked up and started reading Untimely Meditations -- specifically reading the second essay, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History in Life", which John Holbo made reference to a few days ago. I must say I'm blown away by the writing! Far from intimidatingly abstruse, this essay is positively engaging! This is the Cambridge edition, I'm not sure who the translator is because the book is not to hand right now, but it sure is well done. My plan is to write a paper comparing the role of forgetting for Nietzsche's happy man, with the tribal groups in The Myth of the Eternal Return, who use forgetting as a way of turning their history into myth. (When I say this is my plan, be sure to take it with a grain of salt -- I have not written anything much longer than a page in years.) I have this idea that I've been working on since 1987 or so, about two different ways of visualizing time, that I think Nietzsche and Eliade may be good representatives of the two ways.
posted evening of June 18th, 2004: Respond
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Thursday, June 17th, 2004
Brad DeLong pointed me to a very nice site: Joel on Software is the musings of Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software and a very insightful guy.
posted afternoon of June 17th, 2004: Respond
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Thursday, June 10th, 2004
Here is a new (to me) lyrics/chords site that I think will prove very useful: P.J.'s Guitar Chords Tabs and Song Lyrics Site -- I think his chords for The Night They Tore Old Dixie Down are spot on and he has lots of other interesting stuff too. And speaking of such things: RUKind.com looks promising too.
posted afternoon of June 10th, 2004: 2 responses
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Wednesday, June 9th, 2004
John Holbo has an interesting post up examining Bookslut's laws of adaptation, in which he includes this passage from Nietzsche's On the Use and Abuse of History for Life: The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness or fear, will never know what happiness is. Even worse, he will never do anything to make other people happy. Imagine the most extreme example, a person who did not possess the power of forgetting at all, who would be condemned to see everywhere a coming into being. Such a person no longer believes in his own being, no longer believes in himself, sees everything in moving points flowing out of each other, and loses himself in this stream of becoming ... Or, to explain myself more clearly concerning my thesis: There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which living comes to harm and finally is destroyed, whether it is a person or a people or a culture. In order to determine this degree of history and, through that, the borderline at which the past must be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, we have to know precisely how great the plastic force of a person, a people, or a culture is ... It seems to me like this could tie in pretty well with Eliade's stuff about transformation of history into myth as a way of forgetting. Though I am still not sure quite what Eliade (or Nietzsche) is getting at... -- and sorry, yes, about posting such cryptic notes on my reading of this book -- I am finding it kind of mystifying. In particular I can't really get a sense of the book as an essay -- he is cataloguing a lot of disparate observations that seem somehow to be related but is not (as yet) doing the work of pulling them together in a way that I can recognize. But perhaps in the last half of the work it will start to cohere. I do find the disparate observations quite intriguing.
posted afternoon of June 9th, 2004: Respond
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Sunday, June 6th, 2004
It was a good weekend. Eva came to visit yesterday, with her newish baby Benjamin (6 months old, extremely cute). We had a great visit and went for a nice long walk. I got the second gate up and it works according to specifications. Ellen and Sylvia drove to Bethlehem today, to visit Joyce and her daughter Susanna, and I got a good bit of time to myself. This afternoon's jam was excellent -- Doug came, who has not been able to for the past couple of months, and everyone was playing at the top of their ability. I had the idea today to play a meddley of "Rocky Raccoon" and "Rag Mama" -- pretty easy to do as they are almost the same chords -- and they both sounded better this way than on their own.
posted evening of June 6th, 2004: Respond
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Monday, May 31st, 2004
At the jam today, we finally agreed on chords for "City of New Orleans" -- this is a bit historic as every time we have played it before, we've gotten bogged down in arguing about the correct chords. Here it is: Intro:
| G / / / | G / / / |
G / D / | G / / / |
Riding on the City of New Orleans
| Em / C / | G / / / |
Illinois Central Monday morning rail
| G / D / | G / / / |
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders
| Em / D / | G / / / |
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail.
| Em / / / |
All along the south bound odyssey,
Bm / / / |
the train pulls out of Kankakee
| D / / / | A / / / |
Rolls along past houses farms and fields
| Em / / / |
Passing towns that have no name,
Bm / / / |
freight yards full of old black men
| D / D7 / | G / / / |
And graveyards of rusted automobiles.
Chorus:
| C / D7 / | G / / / |
Good morning America, how are you?
| Em / C / | G / / D7 |
Say, don't you know me, I'm your native son.
| G / D / | Em Em7 A7 / |
I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans
| B♭ C D / | G / / / |
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.
Dealing card games with the old men in the club car
Penny a point ain't noone keeping score
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumbling 'neath the floor
And the sons of Pullman porters
and the sons of engineers
Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel
Mothers with their babes asleep,
rocking to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.
Nightime on the City of New Orleans
Changing cars in Memphis Tennessee
Half way home we'll be there by morning
through the Mississippi darkness rolling down to the sea.
But all the towns and people seem
to fade into a bad dream
And the steel rail still ain't heard the news
The conductor sings his songs again,
the passengers will please refrain
This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.
 Update: what I mean to say is, the above is some chords that Jim found via a Google search when he was looking for the lyrics; they agree almost completely with the chords which we all had agreed on, independently of looking at that transcription. (The main difference is, we had F instead of B-flat in the last line of the chorus -- I think the transcription is probably correct here, though F sounds pretty good too.) Ignore most of the 7's and 9's in the transcription, which are good flourishes to put in but not an essential part of the song's chord structure.
posted evening of May 31st, 2004: Respond
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