#leviathvn

[sterwood-blog]

vvervvolf replied to your post: vvervvolf replied to your post “leviathvn replied...

also chris isn’t a horrible writer he’s full of poop

[sterwood-blog]

vvervvolf replied to your post “leviathvn replied to your post “Seriously though: that how to write an...”

Gonna be honest, although in some ways I still write like this horrible ppt tells me to, in others I write more like you're suggesting... anyway reading Nick Land helped with my writing more than anything else in the world, so I get this here

Yeah, I mean, I slide into that sometimes too, when super pressed for time and all that. But there's something to be said by the fact that I'm pressed into that style of writing when I'm unable to give my all - it's an easy essay, but a shitty one.

But like I said in the tags on that original post, I've had to do the standard 5-paragraph essay thing twice in the past week because of in class essays. Those things are hell.

And I haven't found anyone's style that I really like a lot yet, though I have found a few that I loathe (I can't stand Sartre's writing, and I think it goes along with my dislike of him as a philosophy, e.g.). I really do need to read Land sometime though. Ugh, too much to read always.

givemeabody replied to your post “leviathvn replied to your post “Seriously though: that how to write an...”

I just think you should read and write every day while writing a paper :-) advice from a good frumpy art historian I've had for a few seminars. She says do work for most of the day and alternate between reading and writing

When I have the time, and really want to work on an essay, this is what I try to do. It usually involves a preliminary sketch/outline of an essay from what I remember about the source materials, then trying to find quotes/passages/etc. that go along with what I'm doing, and then alternating between writing the essay and reading the source material (or other stuff) as well. So, yeah, I agree!

leviathvn replied to your post “leviathvn replied to your post “Seriously though: that how to write an...”

it makes sense, but that did nothing for me--which is why I wonder about it. I manage to be a horrendous writer precisely because I have read so much, which is why this seems to be a sort of an unreachable ideal to me.

Really? Because of your reading? Wow, that just seems really foreign to me. I'm not doubting you at all, I'm just surprised.

Jeez, you must be the token to my type description :p But seriously, half the reason that I'm always buried in some book of philosophy is because I'm trying to figure out their style, the way they philosophize rhetorically, and to see how that would work for me. So, again, this just seems weirdly foreign to me.

[Also, don't be so hard on yourself - the bits and pieces of your stuff that I've seen on here have been great, and definitely better than some of the grad student stuff I've read.]

[sterwood-blog]

leviathvn replied to your post “polymomial replied to your post “polymomial replied to your post “So,...”

the way I look at it, coming from a poor family, is "how do I want to go into debt? being miserable or doing something I love?" and I take this to be The Highest Realism so

Same! I think of that quote from the lead singer of Wilco that floats around here sometimes, where he's like "Yeah, I try to imagine telling my super poor father that I didn't accept a couple tens of thousands of dollars from some big company because I didn't want to seem like a poseur, and then I try to imagine how incomprehensibly irate he would be". Like, how stupid would it be going to my hella working class parents and being like "So, I decided not to go to grad school because, I don't know, I'm being wistful".

That's probably some of my biggest push to try and go into it - just this nagging "oh god my family would be [rightfully] pissed".

Also, I never took you for a pragmatist :p

tanacetum-vulgare replied to your post “So, out of the blue question born from anxiousness: For those of you...”

I think it's worth it but I also think it's good to spend time outside if it while you're young. One year is a shitty break because you can't commit to anything, you know it'll be over soon so you don't really have the time to pursue much.

I've also considered just floating for a year or two after to see where I end up, but there's all this pressure of "No, you have to apply for grad schools as young as possible or else none will accept you anyway!" floating around and...

Who knows??? Like I said, I'm really just free-floating through these considerations right now. Ahhh!

[sterwood-blog]

So, out of the blue question born from anxiousness:

For those of you currently going through it, do you think grad school is worth the pursuit?

I've had two people whose opinions I really respect give negative opinions on this question today and I'm always already in oscillation about whether or not it's worth pursuing, so I thought I'd make the question open.

I've really got to think this through over the next year or so, so opinions are very worthwhile.

[scowlofminerva-blog]

leviathvn replied to your post: Bertrand Russell on Spinoza

"But No She-Bears Attacked Spinoza: An Investigation of Rationalism in the Seventeenth Century"

too perfect. 

[scowlofminerva-blog]

leviathvn replied to your post: oh, and you should tell m...

#2 sounds like way more fun because the imagination in the rationalists is like the most interesting question ever

and then i could even get in a dig at the end about intellectual intuition!--and the joke my professor told me about god coming in the night to tell spinoza and schelling how the universe worked.

[sterwood-blog]

[T]he Kantian project can actually be characterized not as one that adopts subjectivism in order to do away with the objectivity of cognition, but as one that grounds objectivity in the subject as an objective reality.

Adorno, "Kant's Critique of Pure Reason", Lecture 1, p. 2.

[sterwood-blog]

leviathvn replied to your post: mattersofconcern a réagi ...

Mimesis would actually be part of my answer to this as well. Given that there is no autonomous subjectivity that is inaccessible to others, lost hopes and dreams, destroyed cultures, etc lag on in history as immanent to our very conditions of possible experience

Yeah, I don't disagree with this at all. And it's pretty much the reason for bringing up that question, even though I wasn't thinking of it in terms of mimesis exactly. I just mean to say that this tendency to say something like "You can't understand my experience of poor because you never were" [I use this example because it does kind of correspond to personal experience] seems to rest on two presuppositions: (1) that my lived experience is totally independent of your lived experience (even if that's just 'experience as belonging to some 'x' oppressed category) and (2) that my knowledge about the historical circumstances that make (my understanding of) such an experience possible is more 'pure' because I belong to the current situation of that experience. 

And both of those presuppositions make me really uncomfortable. Maybe this is where I start feeling really uncomfortable with the way things like 'privilege' are discussed on this website (and more generally).