February 14th, 2005 Fellow Combatants of Ignorance, Nietzsche once wrote that, "The greatest ideas are the greatest events." In my nineteen years of brainstorming I have schemed a great number of things at great length, but to no great avail. Howeer, I find this time to be different as my thoughts entered into fruition this weekend. I present to you gentlemen the online home of intellectual debate http://k.1asphost.com/ElectronicSymposium. It is capable of making papers and other materials available online for download as well as live discourse, e-mail and numerous links. I hope this will be useful in some manner and thoroughly enjoyable in others. I already placed Marks links on there, please share any ideas for improvement. In other news, I recently finished Harold Blooms Where Shall Wisdom be Found. The book entails a twenty-five hundred year journey through text pitting poetry against philosophy and Montaigne against Bacon with an interesting section on the Gospel of St. Thomas. I would recommend the read especially the parts on Emerson who I knew little of beforehand and whose elitist faith in ones self I admire greatly. Well, I will bid you gentlemen adieu for now, and I leave with Blooms thoughts on reading, "We read, I think, to repair our solitude though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become." ~Bacon
Mark A. Brooks
February 14th, 2005
Bacon and Hamilton, I hope this is the first of many intellectually engaging and informative emails that outlines whatever kind of literary, philosophical, historical, or trivial everyday occurance from which we can derive meaning. Write about whatever you feel is relevant to enhancing everday life. I think this will be a great idea for one to keep us all in good touch and also to broaden our understanding of those stallions who came before us (Galileo, Shakespeare, Kepler, Plato, Plath, Queen Elizabeth, Bach, Mozart, and Sean Connery to name a few). I think that music and movies should also be included if you find anything good because you two gentleman have the best taste that I have found for that sort of thing. Anyway I will extend a few words following this that outline a few pieces I have recently read, and I hope life is treating you both well. P.S. Famous quotes would be awesome as well to add a little inspiration or degradation. The book that I am reading now is a novel part of a series of around twenty. It was written by Emile Zola, a 19th century realist whose goal it was to depict the depravity of the common French pauper's life. This is at the time when people are just starting to fill up cities and the conditions under which many people lived were shitty. This novel however is really powerful in that it is translated by Margaret Mauldon to such precision that, after brooding over slang dictionaries and hearing everday colloquialisms, Mauldon manages to accurately change Parisan slang into contemporary slang. This vicisstude can be illustrated by the following quotation from the novel, "Fucking Bitch! This 'ill rinse off your muck. Have a wash for once". Zola, like Shakespeare uses language to depict social class, where the less intelligent populace use profanity and grammatical fallacies and the upper class are characterized by a more dignified speech. The novel is engaging because of its racy nature however it is a realist novel and cannot compare to the novel I read before it called "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino that I have already spoken about in brief to you both. In other news, dmb is coming out with a new album and if interested go to www.dmbnewstudioalbum.com. It is supposed to be more jam-bandy, funkish which I am pretty pumped about. Also, a great website for downloading music from other college people is www.i2hub.com (and yes andy I know you are pissed at me for stealing music so I apologize in advance...the website was more for bacon.) I look forward to hearing from you both and to witness Tom's daily exponential increase in intelligence. Peace out niggas Brooksy Friends, Romans, Countrymen....or wait was it Romans, Countrymen, Lovers...either way if I am to appeal to your reason like Brutus or you emotion like Marc Antony, one will get the job done. I finally read 'Eloisa to Abelard' by Alexander Pope and found it to be befitting to the hallmark holiday that characterizes February 14th. Goes along great with finally seeing the movie which steals a line from the poem for its title: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The movie was pretty good and the poem was lyrically and themeatically superb. I always enjoy a good unrequitted love poem so here are what I (and the writer of the movie) find to be the most powerful lines,"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! /The world forgetting, by the world forgot. /Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! /Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;" I love ending a paragraph on a quote because all of my teachers do not, haha. Anyways I would like to extend my gratitude for your generosity, creativity, and computer literacy whence your intelligence has blossomed and formulated a delicious website Bacon. I love the idea and perhaps say we all meet up for a chat every now and again hopefully accompanied by a pipe and some tea (scrumpets too maybe). But really the site is good looks and perhaps we could post the emails, or at least the interesting parts of the emails in like an archive format for use at a latter period. Such that if you remember reading something betimes in our electronic discourses you could go back and perhaps use the relevant information in the email archives. Feedback? Here's another befitting movie quote for the day, howe'er I enjoy this one as well (from 'love actually'), 'Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.' --say no to thugs brooksy February 15th, 2005 Scholars, I had an epiphany today that completely changed the way I have been reading "L'Assommoir", or in English "The Dram Shop" (using quotes instead of underlining the title due to the silly nature of my email program). So, the dram shop is a term that insurance people still use today, because they are all into that archaic terminology for some reason like myself, to describe bars and how they can receive liquor licenses. Though, the actual translation comes to a meaning closer to that of "to desensitize" which is ironic in a novel that is structured around sensationalism and at times almost voyeurism. What I am getting at can be summed up by the following tropes: indirect discourse (he/she said without actual quotation marks to denote speech), direct discourse (quotation marks used to denote elocution), and finally the most prevalent in the novel free indirect discourse. The latter being statements that are delinked from character attributions, or rather words understood to represent a character's thoughts. Here is an example from the novel of f.i.d., "Of course the Coupeaus had only themselves to blame. However hard life may be, you can always get by if you're methodical and economical, witness Lorilleux who regularly handed over their rent on the dot..." The aforementioned quotation illustrates the depravity of the Coupeau family due to their inability to overcome alcoholism in an industrial society that already erases their innately good characteristics and replaces them with a robotic vacuousness. However, Zola (thats the author) is also revealing, through f.i.d., that the middle class who is reading the novel and is getting off on seeing the poor get really fucked all the time is in fact just as bad as those poor who sell their souls to the machination of the industrial revolution. The sentence about the character Lorilleux, who by the way is a selfish fop in the novel, depicts what 19th century middle class readers (as well as myself to the bums of boston and detroit) think about the poor: basically they can 'always get by'. This however brings up another aspect of the novel which is the individual (somewhat enlightenment ideals) versus society and whether or not society's hooks are dug so deep into the poor of the cities that they cannot distinguish between their alcoholic, robotic, routined self and their morality/ethos. Also, if the middle class reader (yes the novel sold mad copies to that class during its time) enjoys reading about the decay of the poor human, then the moral fiber of the middle class is twisted. It is as if the industrial society is erasing human reason due to the mindless nature of the work attributed to a machinated society. One other point I found interesting that can be connected to Camus' "The Stranger" is that Lorimer, another character who is not an alcoholic...one of the only characters who isnt, is addicted to sweets. This brings up an almost existential element to the novel where the poor indulge themselves in immediate physical pleasures such as sweets and booze to escape using a rational mind (thinking to John Locke and how a reasonable human being can think ahead to the future and thus avoid the state of war that accompanies Thomas Hobbes's state of nature....i can elaborate if this is vague). They escape thinking ahead and using reason, like Meursault-drinks coffee and eats chocolate all the time, because they are so used to doing mindless work all day in industry that they do not really want a true glimpse at what their useless lives have become. The free indirect discourse of the novel is structured around this idea in that it goes from addressing individuals at the beginning to addressing the neighborhood as a whole at the end. Therefore, is there an escape for the 19th century French pauper who is indulged in alcoholism and industrialization so much so that it (and society) infects their innate goodness? Well I am an ideal person and feel that, though an answer may not be presented in this realist novel, one can be provided by Albert Camus, "In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer". This is why Sisyphus was happy rolling that fucking rock around all the time according to Camus. Find meaning in the meaningless my friends. To end this crazy letter in which I still have many thoughts to be later expressed I will quote our hometown friend Jeffery Eugenides, "1913 was the year humans stopped being human"--on account of the assembly line...Tom do me a favor and if you know where that quote is in "Middlesex" please check to make sure my quotation is accurate and if its not please send me the correct one because I plan to use it in a paper and I don't have that book here at school. Hope all is well gentleman Brooksy February 16, 2005 Lads, I just started reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's, "The House of the Seven Gables" and find it to be rather intruiging, but more on that later because I would like to propose another idea to further advance our intellectual capacities. I propose that we add, or rather that Tom-because he is the webmaster genius, a link to the Symposium that will encompass the following: a list of solid, advanced, and erudite words that are good for using in papers along with their defintions. I feel that this will aid in the advancement of out vocabulary and therefore our everday elocution and written pages will be that much better. Ergo, Tom when you get the chance please just add any words to this soon to exist link that you find salient and when andy and myself think of good ones we will email them to you as we have been. I have found thus far that this endeavor is wholly beneficial and is a reflection of our connaturally intelligent and good natures. Therefore I will start the list with the following: aphotic: having no light apropos: adj=Being at once opportune and to the point adv=At an appropriate time; opportunely. By the way; incidentally prep=With regard to; concerning torpid: Deprived of the power of motion or feeling; benumbed. Dormant; hibernating. Lethargic; apathetic That should be a decent start. In other news I am writing a history paper on Locke and the stuart kings this weekend where I plan to discuss why Locke believes that absolutism is not a legitimate form of government; citing specific historical examples from the reigns of James I and Charles I to illustrate my points. Any salient advice on this subject would be appreciated. In addition I have an upcoming paper that both of you could provide great points on I am sure; it being about the philosophies of Locke and Thomas Hobbes in relation to Plato's 'reason controlling passion' as well as intertwining it with the gothic elements of repressed history (like our american genocide to the indians and what we dont talk about) and ultimately how that all leads to a call for a new epistemology (another great word to add to the list by the way). I will ask for advice on this later though and hope to find you both treated well by life this evening. One more thing to add, Gary Bettman is the fucking antichrist and he is on his way to ruining the greatest sport on earth...sorry little upset about the official lockout. take care -Brooksy
February 20th, 2005Fellow Polymaths, [Pachabel's Canon plays in the background]...[St. Charles river is flowing just outside the window and there is a fan blowing in the corner of the room, propped betwixt the window and its pane, dissipating all reminence of what was once the incense of gigglybush] Bacon, thank you for the information concerning the Eugenics movement I will engross myself in the aquisition of such knowledge betimes. Andrew, loved the art response email and now must read at some point the 'Art of Motorcycle Maintenence'. I have watched the first hour on string theory and so far am extremely intrigued. The video is put together well with its constructivist structure. Bacon I have a topic that I think you would like and actually found that cliff notes had a synopsis that is more lucid than one that I could provide for you. Therefore, here is a link to the website that will discuss T.S. Eliot's criticism of Milton's task and perhaps you could, if you so desire, develop an argument qualifying, with, or against that of Eliot's. Decent format for these kind of papers I have found, which take this as just another of the many forms of constructing a paper, is to state your position based on Eliot's remarks/quotations and then organically go through 'Paradise Lost' in order of the poem to provide examples to refute or assert Eliot's argument in Milton's poetic words. Andy and I did something similiar in Williams classes and it is a good paper structure. Nothing much new here I will have a more detailed email in the future concerning the end of "The House of the Seven Gables" and how the paper went as well as emailing Tom some essays and what not. Constantine sucked my balls...never go see it...not even if you are red- eyed. -Brooksy Post Script: I need some good classical music to download similiar to Canon and that prelude you had on that one cd for me Tom so if either have good suggestions that would be gracious. Post Post Script: A quote befitting to how we all feel about Bananafish and Hypocrites from our good friend Shakespeare and my favorite piece of literature of all times; 'Hamlet': 'Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, And recks not his own rede.' --this quotation influenced a whole book that I read first semester called 'The Vicar of Wakefield' where the hypocritical religious family that are the main characters of the novella have the last name Primrose. February 22nd, 2005 Fellow fans of Satchel Paige, This email will be short and sweet due to the fact that I have a sick amount of work over the next two weeks before spring break including two papers, a midterm, and an absurd amount of reading. Howe'er expect a detailed intellectual email soon. Just found some more words to add to the lexicon, some take from Tom's erudite last email and others from my readings: matutinal: adj. Of, relating to, or occurring in the morning; early. chimerical: adj. Created by or as if by a wildly fanciful imagination; highly improbable. Given to unrealistic fantasies; fanciful. often chimeric Of, related to, or being a chimera. tophet: n. An extremely unpleasant or painful condition or place. Hell. abtruse: adj. Difficult to understand; recondite. See Synonyms at ambiguous. sophistry: n. Plausible but fallacious argumentation. A plausible but misleading or fallacious argument. a priori: adj. Proceeding from a known or assumed cause to a necessarily related effect; deductive. Derived by or designating the process of reasoning without reference to particular facts or experience. Knowable without appeal to particular experience. Made before or without examination; not supported by factual study. a posteriori: adj. Derived by or designating the process of reasoning from facts or particulars to general principles or from effects to causes; inductive; empirical. Justified by appeal to experience. Knowable from experience neoteric: adj. Of recent origin; modern. penchant: n. A definite liking; a strong inclination. See Synonyms at predilection. -The email entitled the Rape of Lucretia will have to wait... Bacon, those classical treats were a delight however I would also like to know the names of the two songs, one being ave maria but by what singer, that you put on that mix for me (the other being strings). Hope all is well gentleman and I will be replying more pensively soon enough -Brooksy Post Script: The John Locke paper went pretty well I believe and I will be shipping that along with a few other papers to Tom for Symposium updating with my next letter. Andy, I got the fleece today and thank you very much. Post Post Script: Tom, if you are going to visit Andy around the 16th of March you twain must venture down to the city of champions where we have better than a 2004 minor league baseball team and we three must spend some time consuming libations and gigglybush in excess over St. Patty's day (we can go down to southy and see all the classic west dublin micks running around masted).
Andrew T. Hamilton
February 14th, 2005
To my fellow intellectuals- I am honored to be counted among you in what is to be the far greatest symposium since our dear predecesors whom we all admire. Granted I shall only attempt to keep up with the two of you in both my reading and advancement of my own intellect. Mr. Bacon, I have heard of this website that you have created (or are going to create) and watch be much obliged if you could send me the addresss so I may visit. Good form on the poem by Alexander Pope Mr. Brooks. I actually enjoy another one of his works, his "Essay on Man" that has several delectible quotes. So to add to our memorable quotes, I leave you two with this, and hope to hear from both of you soon. "Then say not man's imperfect, Heaven in fault; Say rather, man's as perfect as he ought: His knowledge measured to his state and place; His time a moment, and a point his space." adios andy February 15th, 2005 My fellow scholars, Leave it to you Mr. Bacon to start the first dialectic of the Electronic Symposium. Oddly enough, I was actually planning on bringing up a similar issue myself. What is art, and what is its purpose? In my belief, art is anything of human creation that is done for the sake of beauty and or happiness, therefore being all inclusive to all written, visual, aural, and comprehensive matters. its purpose is separte for each person who experiences it. Art can be made for the provocation of thought or emotion, the recording of events, the provoke political, social, and moral change or revelations. In essence, the purpose of art is boundless.I realize this is a bold statement and it immediately brings up several red flags. Is beauty in itself a definable entity, but then again is art? Is beauty always purely subjective to the eye of the beholder, or is there a way to harness such a vast issue into a discrete definition? I would argue (and Mr. Bacon please let me know if you agree) that art could be compared very closely to that of quality as discussed by Phaedrus in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". But that is a separate dialectic in itself. In getting to what I said at the beginning was a similar topic that I had been contemplating, I turn to Plato himself. I urge you if you have the means to read the beginning of Book X in "The Republic", for my paraphrasing does not do it justice, and it is far to long to paste in an email. Plato (or rather Socrates) discusses both the poet and the artist in extremely harsh manners. Socrates argues that the poet (or craftsman or poet; all of whom are creators in their own trade) are nothing but imitators. Rather, they are only making "copies" of that which already exists. He eventually breaks down all creators into three categories: 1. The original creator (God), 2. The human maker, and 3. The imitataor, or rather the painter, or poet whose art is only an imitation very much removed from the truth. Here is a good selecetion of what Plato is saying: "�As easy way enough; or rather, there are many ways in which the feat might be quickly and easily accomplished, none quicker than that of the turning a mirror round and round � you would soon enough make the use and the heaven, and the earth and yourself,and other animals and plants, and all other things of which we were just now speaking.� Is the artist only a great imitator? or rather THE Great Imitator? Finally, since we its has been said that we should include movies and other such media to deeping our intellect, I highly suggest that both of you see "I Heart Huckabees" as soon as possible. Two words: Existential Detectives. There is one scene imparticular that I am certain shall win you over. I shall hear from you both soon I am sure. Take care. Brooksy, your coat is in the mail...and Bacon, I shall be calling you soon about Spring Break. Peace, Andy February 22nd, 2005 >Fellow advocates against the continuation of unintellignece: I must begin this letter with a disclaimer: I do intend on recounting some of my thoughts on Sal and the rest of "On the Road", however, it has been a year since I have actually endulged in the actual text, and having no hard copy in front of me, I must rely on my personal recollection. Therefore, I apologize for any inconsistencies or fallacies. On that note, I must inform you that my most recent assignment is a critical paper on one of the greatest films ever made, American Beauty. As I watched the film, and with the addition of Mr. Bacon's input from On the Road, I began to notice some seemingly strange similarites between the two. (Warning: Mr. Bacon if you have not finished the book, I do not wish to unfoil the eventual outcome of the story, and that of the character Sal, you may want to pass this next paragraph.) One of the most interesting aesthetic qualities of the film is the recurring images of bars and confinement before Lester and Carolyn actually go through their character revolutions. Windows, the blinds, and several other features provide these allusions to the jail cell. In comparison to On the Road, we see an almost paradoxical situation. On the one side, we see Lester, who upon being confined, is able to break out of the jail and eventually find fulfillment. However, with the character Sal, we have a character who has the entire open road, and thusly the entire width of the United States, and is everything but confined as the images in American Beauty. However, it is in this openness that Sal is trapped, and therefore never able to capture or unearth anything he had set forth to discover. It is almost arguable that had the two coexisted, they could have been interesting character foils. For Lester finds his road, even though it eventually results in his own death, whereas Sal never truly finds his road, which perhaps means there is always more than "two roads diverged in a yellow wood". (As I said before Mr. Bacon, if there are any disagreements or inconsistencies please let me know, and forgive my lapse of memory) I encourage both of you to read a very short essay entitled "Criticism" by Matthew Goulish. It provides a very atypical view of the purpose of criticism of art. It is only roughly three pages, and is easy to get through, but I found it to be extremely enlightening. WIth that I shall leave you with a quote from that very same essay.: "And as our approaches to the rain increase, so too increases our understanding of the fleeting and fragile qualities of human life. And as our ways of understanding the rain multiiply, so too will we begin to see the presence of rain in even the driest of subjects. We will realize at last that our objective all along was to understand that it is always raining." I hope this email finds you both well. A bid you both adieu, Andy PS - Mr. Bacon, we shall hopefully be speaking very soon on the details of your travel out east with me, and then can decide when to visit that city of pussy-ass red sox fans (sorry brooks, had to) if you wish to see a city with sub par athletics until as of late. PPS - If either of you scholars have any input for me on my paper on American Beauty, I would very much like to hear. Thanks you.