Up@dawn 2.0

Thursday, January 31, 2019

What usefulness, besides exercise, do you think walking has?

To me, walking (without a specific destination in mind) is a period in time to access inner thoughts that usually do not get reached daily. Walking allows creative ideas and a sense of relief from the hectic world we live within. Some of my best songwriting ideas have come from just walking around campus and becoming struck with an idea/

A Small New England College Struggles to Survive

Is there still room for unconventional schools like Hampshire College?

...Creative problem solving was emphasized. Our professors encouraged us to consider the big picture and the long view, and embrace risk as a life strategy. Failing spectacularly in pursuit of an ambitious goal was thought to be salutary, and the shellacking instilled some humility... There are no majors or grades at Hampshire. Instead, each student is responsible for creating his or her own course of study, and then devising a series of six “exams” that must be passed to graduate. Attaining a bachelor’s degree might require four years of study, or six. Or three, for that matter... (continues)



In 2013, a student’s senior project at Hampshire was to live in a 
130-square-foot “tiny” house and write about her experience.

Hampshire’s iconoclastic educational model is widely admired and deservedly praised. Given what lies ahead, however, it is not at all clear how much of the Hampshire philosophy — to say nothing of the Hampshire soul — will survive.

nyt

Happy 100th birthday Jackie Robinson



Ken Burns' Jackie Robinson
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At the beginning of the World Series of 1947, I experienced a completely new emotion, when the National Anthem was played. This time, I thought, it is being played for me, as much as for anyone else. This is organized major league baseball, and I am standing here with all the others; and everything that takes place includes me.
About a year later, I went to Atlanta, Georgia, to play in an exhibition game. On the field, for the first time in Atlanta, there were Negroes and whites. Other Negroes, besides me. And I thought: What I have always believed has come to be.
And what is it that I have always believed? First, that imperfections are human. But that wherever human beings were given room to breathe and time to think, those imperfections would disappear, no matter how slowly. I do not believe that we have found or even approached perfection. That is not necessarily in the scheme of human events. Handicaps, stumbling blocks, prejudices—all of these are imperfect. Yet, they have to be reckoned with because they are in the scheme of human events.
Whatever obstacles I found made me fight all the harder. But it would have been impossible for me to fight at all, except that I was sustained by the personal and deep-rooted belief that my fight had a chance. It had a chance because it took place in a free society. Not once was I forced to face and fight an immovable object. Not once was the situation so cast-iron rigid that I had no chance at all. Free minds and human hearts were at work all around me; and so there was the probability of improvement. I look at my children now, and know that I must still prepare them to meet obstacles and prejudices.
But I can tell them, too, that they will never face some of these prejudices because other people have gone before them. And to myself I can say that, because progress is unalterable, many of today’s dogmas will have vanished by the time they grow into adults. I can say to my children: There is a chance for you. No guarantee, but a chance.
And this chance has come to be, because there is nothing static with free people. There is no Middle Ages logic so strong that it can stop the human tide from flowing forward. I do not believe that every person, in every walk of life, can succeed in spite of any handicap. That would be perfection. But I do believe—and with every fiber in me—that what I was able to attain came to be because we put behind us (no matter how slowly) the dogmas of the past: to discover the truth of today; and perhaps find the greatness of tomorrow.
I believe in the human race. I believe in the warm heart. I believe in man’s integrity. I believe in the goodness of a free society. And I believe that the society can remain good only as long as we are willing to fight for it—and to fight against whatever imperfections may exist.
My fight was against the barriers that kept Negroes out of baseball. This was the area where I found imperfection, and where I was best able to fight. And I fought because I knew it was not doomed to be a losing fight. It couldn’t be a losing fight—not when it took place in a free society.
And; in the largest sense, I believe that what I did was done for me—that it was my faith in God that sustained me in my fight. And that what was done for me must and will be done for others. 
Jack Roosevelt Robinson
In 1947, Jackie Robinson pioneered the integration of American professional athletics by becoming the first black player in Major League Baseball. During his 10 seasons with the Brooklyn Dodgers, he played on six World Series teams and was voted the National League's Most Valuable Player in 1949.

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100 Images from the nyt






Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Philosophy Lyceum at MTSU

Bigger than Football: 
Fan Anxiety and Memory in the Racial Present 

Erin C. Tarver Oxford College of Emory University 

Understanding fans’ responses to football players’ protests against police brutality requires recognizing the historic and contemporary role of football fandom in managing racial and gendered anxieties. Tarver analyzes three distinct uses of memory by white football fans as they work through the anxiety that results when the sport fails to work in the way they expect. Drawing on opposing views of football taken by the American philosophers Josiah Royce and George Santayana, and on contemporary social science research on the behavior of sports fans, she shows that contemporary fan hostility to protesting players is consistent with the social ills that have surrounded football since the era of Royce’s critique.

Friday, February 15, 2019 at 5:00 pm, COE, Room 164
==


Super Bowl venue Atlanta stokes a civil rights conversation for some players
It is doubtful that the N.F.L. owners understood, when they decided early in 2016 to play the Super Bowl here, how the city of Atlanta, as the cradle of the civil rights movement, would serve as a natural forum for the many complicated social and racial issues that have roiled the league in recent years.

Now, many players are showing that the moment is not lost on them.

On Tuesday, Devin McCourty, a team captain on the New England Patriots, and several of his teammates boarded a bus to pay homage at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood of Atlanta.

“Today, when we have a little time off, guys are searching for something to do so they’re not just sitting in a hotel room,” McCourty said Tuesday. “With this game, everything is focused on playing Sunday. But when you step back and think about it, what better way to be on this stage, with this platform, but also to get a big dose of what’s really important.”

Often, the Super Bowl city is merely a prop for the game and parties. The Patriots, who face the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday, have played for the championship in Minneapolis, Houston and Glendale in the past five years. But Atlanta, and what it has stood for, resonates on a deeper level in light of contemporary issues in the league... (continues)
==
The Super Bowl That Trump’s America Deserves
The post-truth era has found its post-truth sport.

I’m not really sure why they’re bothering with a Super Bowl this year. Sure, a bunch of people will make a boatload of money, tens of millions of us will reflexively tune in and we’ll find rare common ground over how cheesy the halftime show is. But are we believers anymore? Will we really see the winner as the winner — or just as the charmed survivor of a grossly tarnished process? Be it the New England Patriots or the Los Angeles Rams, the team will have an asterisk after its name. And that asterisk is a big fat sign of the times.

I’m referring, of course, to the miserable officiating that’s arguably the reason the Patriots beat the Kansas City Chiefs and the Rams beat the New Orleans Saints, leading to the matchup in this coming Sunday’s season-finale game. The Rams in particular were blessed by the referees, who failed to note and penalize a glaring case of pass interference in the climactic minutes. I needn’t describe what happened. Footage of it has been replayed as extensively and analyzed as exhaustively as the Zapruder film.

And it has prompted an intensity of protest, a magnitude of soul searching and a depth of cynicism that go well beyond the crime in question. That’s where the feelings about the Super Bowl and the mood of America converge... (continues)
==
See "Against football" and other contrarian posts in the sidebar under Our Games... another NFL CTE victim...

Image result for new yorker football cartoons

Image result for new yorker football cartoons

Image result for new yorker football cartoons


Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Midterm group reports

Indicate the topic & text you want to work on. Reports consist of a 500-word blog post, 15-minute presentation (in any preferred format) plus discussion (be sure to give us at least a couple of discussion questions) and a quiz over your presentation (and over any material you'd like to assign for us to read/watch/hear in advance). Be relevant, interesting, and provocative. Have fun.

Put a "V" next to your name if you volunteer (for a bonus run) to go first on Feb. 14.

Section 6
1. El Jo and Kayla Schindler--Villains of Harry Potter - V

2 - Moussa Mikhail, Steven Czarnecki - Limitation of language to express thought

3 - Lillian Crawford, Emily Lloyd, Regine Chapman - Influence of Music

4 - Nolton Woods and Engy Ibrahim- The Benefits of Walking on Cognitive Function

5 - Olivia Edgar, Whitley Allen, Abby Pittman - Secular Buddhism

6 - Sam, Michael, Jake- Predestination and Free Will

7 - Tymeria Davis, Miya Wright, Andrew Fiscu - Childhood cartoons and how they formed us.

8 - Cameron Oldham, Jillian G., and Jordyn Rice- Twilight Zone and Philosophy

9 - McKayla, Sela, Jonathan - democracy

10 -

11 - Dominic, Renee, Carey  - ?

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Section 9
1 - Olivia Garrett, Sara Kate Martin, Emily Mannella, Ashley ??? topic: Martin Luther - V

2 - 

3 - Steven, Owen, Kong - Marcus Aurelius

4 -

5 - Moussa Issa, Colby Pearl, Alex Russell - Hobbes

6 - Ethan Hall, Matt, Nick- Machiavelli

7 - Gavin Dunn, Colton Williams, Joslyn Parker; "How to Live" Montaigne

8 - Zac, William, Kerolos: Francis Bacon

9 - Alex Walker & Rahimin A Rahim- Confucius

10 - Kory Cooke, Julia Hudson - existentialism (this topic would be more appropriate later, since it's post-Descartes)

11 - Native American Philosophy. Group Members: Terrell Horton, Cole White, Paxton Pigue.


==
Section 10

1 - Cosmic philosophy, Contact - Dean, Jesse, Pranathi V

2 - Simpsons Philosophy-Steven, Lesley, Frederic

3 - Philosophies of Native Americans- Jacob, Pablo, Warren

4 - Free Will - Kyra, Elizabeth Coram, Holden Neil

5 - "I think therefore I am"- Luke B, evangelista W, Lincoln P

6 - Fermi Paradox - Abriana, Austin and Omar

7 - Philosophies of Atlanta-Terany, Autumn, Francisco

8 - ?- Roberto, Garrison

9- Super Hero Philosophy- Blake, Will, Luke

10 - Life after death- Caevon L
==

Is it possible, as a Protestant, to renounce all supernaturalism?

I do not believe it's possible. As someone who has renounced supernaturalism, my upbringing of Southern Baptistism and Presbyterian Christianity has still kept me in slight wonder if there is a supernatural being.

Happy birthday Tom Paine


  • “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.” ...
  • “These are the times that try men's souls.” ...
  • “Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
  • “It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.”
  • “One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.” 
  • “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own churchAll national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” 
  • “I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.” 
  • “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” 
  • “THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country..."

Thomas Paine

WHO WAS THOMAS PAINE?Thomas Paine was an English American writer and pamphleteer whose "Common Sense" and other writings influenced the American Revolution, and helped pave the way for the Declaration of Independence. Biography

“Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be true.”
—Thomas Paine

Monday, January 28, 2019

We are all related


Whoever or whatever you call the Creator, this Lakota poem sounds the right notes of cosmic respect and gratitude.

To the Creator, for the ultimate gift of life, I thank you.

To the mineral nation that has built and maintained my bones and all foundations of life experience, I thank you.
To the plant nation that sustains my organs and body and gives me healing herbs for sickness, I thank you.
To the animal nation that feeds me from your own flesh and offers your loyal companionship in this walk of life, I thank you.
To the human nation that shares my path as a soul upon the sacred wheel of Earthly life, I thank you.
To the Spirit nation that guides me invisibly through the ups and downs of life and for carrying the torch of light through the Ages. I thank you.
To the Four Winds of Change and Growth, I thank you.
You are all my relations, my relatives, without whom I would not live. We are in the circle of life together, co-existing, co-dependent, co-creating our destiny. One, not more important than the other. One nation evolving from the other and yet each dependent upon the one above and the one below. All of us a part of the Great Mystery.
Thank you for this Life.
==
The Wisdom of the Native Americans
They shared in common a belief that the earth is a spiritual presence that must be honored, not mastered...



“Traditionally, Indians did not carry on dialogues when discussing important matters. Rather, each person listened attentively until his or her turn came to speak, and then he or she rose and spoke without interruption about the heart of the matter under consideration.” 

“But the old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So he kept his children close to nature's softening influence. — Chief Luther Standing Bear Oglala Sioux Some” 

“Our young people, raised under the old rules of courtesy, never indulged in the present habit of talking incessantly and all at the same time. To do so would have been not only impolite, but foolish; for poise, so much admired as a social grace, could not be accompanied by restlessness. Pauses were acknowledged gracefully and did not cause lack of ease or embarrassment.” 

“Indian faith sought the harmony of man with his surroundings; the other sought the dominance of surroundings.

“The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. ” — Chief Joseph, 1879 

“Suppose a white man should come to me and say, “Joseph, I like your horses. I want to buy them.” I say to him, “No, my horses suit me; I will not sell them.” Then he goes to my neighbor and says to him, “Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell.” My neighbor answers, “Pay me the money and I will sell you Joseph's horses.” The white man returns to me and says, “Joseph, I have bought your horses and you must let me have them.” If we sold our lands to the government, this is the way they bought them." — Chief Joseph Nez Perce

“The spirit of the Native people, the first people, has never died. It lives in the rocks and the forests, the rivers and the mountains. It murmurs in the brooks and whispers in the trees. The hearts of these people were formed of the earth that we now walk, and their voice can never be silenced ."
gr
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And see A.J. Jacobs on gratitude...



Speaking of gratitude, here's yesterday's most-shared NYTimes story:

The Blessing of a Rescue Dog

She looks like a cross between Groucho Marx and a dust mop, and she’s a bulwark against despair.

NASHVILLE — The scruffy little dog of indeterminate origin — she’s either a beagle mix or a terrier mix, depending on which veterinarian is guessing — reaches the end of the driveway and sits down. A gentle tug on the leash merely inspires the dog to lower herself completely, her face on her front paws. A treat offered in exchange for progress on this “walk” yields no better results. In the dead heat of August, she flops onto her side, extending all four legs and dropping her head to the blistering asphalt. Her point is clear. This is rescue-dog semaphore for “I would strongly prefer not to leave this yard, thank you very much.”
I can hardly blame her — she’s new to this house, and she may never have had a house before. Who would willingly abandon her own home, even briefly, if such a boon is new? If such a gift, as far as she knows, is only temporary? She came to the rescue organization as a stray, so no one knows where she’s been or what she’s been through, but she is clearly traumatized.
Her fear is ubiquitous. She’s afraid of other dogs, of course, and strangers, but also doorways, shoe-clad feet, her own food bowl. Every unfamiliar noise causes her to stiffen, on high alert, and every noise is unfamiliar. She doesn’t bark; she has never barked even once, but she yelps at the slightest unexpected touch. It’s more than a yelp, really. Something between a howl and a piercing scream. Soon I am feeling traumatized myself. My dog screams, and my heart starts to pound: What on earth did I do this time?
Despite her manifold fears, this damaged little dog is preternaturally gentle — “grandmotherly,” according to her page on the rescue organization’s website. She tries to understand what we want from her, and she noses our hands, apologetic, when she can’t understand. We named her Millie, for our late neighbor who lived a life of quiet kindness... (continues)
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And another smart & humane David Brooks column: Kindness is a Skill...


Kerry Jenkins, I come from a urban area in Memphis and I'm finally a member of this site so I'm excited and will be posting a lot. My mind moves at a rate of 400mph so whatever comes to my mind I will intellectually express myself.

Saturday, January 26, 2019

Josiah Royce, "America's Philosopher"-?

His brief moment of fame seems finally to have arrived. David Brooks's column on him is at the top of the charts this morning.
In 1900, there were two great philosophers working side by side at Harvard, William James and Josiah Royce. James was from an eminent Boston family and had all the grace, brilliance and sophistication that his class aspired to. Royce, as the historian Allen Guelzo points out, was the first major American philosopher born west of the Mississippi. His parents were Forty-Niners who moved to California but failed to find gold. He grew up in squalor, was stocky, lonely and probably knew more about despair and the brooding shadows that can come in life.
James and Royce admired and learned from each other, but their philosophies were different, too. James was pragmatic and tough-minded, looking for empirical truth. Royce was more idealistic and tender-minded, more spiritual and abstract.
They differed on the individual’s role in society. As David Lamberth of Harvard notes, James’s emphasis was on tolerance. We live in a pluralistic society and we each know only a fragment of the truth. People should give one another enough social space so they can be themselves. For Royce the good life meant tightly binding yourself to others — giving yourself away with others for the sake of a noble cause. Tolerance is not enough... (continues)

If my loyalty to America does not allow your community’s story to be told, or does not allow your community’s story to be part of the larger American story, then my loyalty is a domineering, predatory loyalty. It is making it harder for you to be loyal. We should instead be encouraging of other loyalties. We should, Royce argued, be loyal to loyalty.
Before Martin Luther King Jr. used it, Royce popularized the phrase “the beloved community.” In the beloved community, political opponents honor the loyalty the rival has for a cause, and learn from it
....evil exists [insert comma here, right David?] so we can struggle to overcome it.

Royce took his philosophy one more crucial step: Though we have our different communities, underneath there is an absolute unity to life. He believed that all separate individuals and all separate loyalties are mere fragments of a spiritual unity — an Absolute Knower, a moral truth. [Or better, compare Carl Sagan: "Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”]

That sense of an ultimate unity at the end things, shines back on us, because it means all our diverse loyalties are actually parts of the same loyalty. We all, he wrote, “seek a city out of sight.” This sense of ultimate unity, of human brotherhood and sisterhood, is what is missing in a lot of the current pessimism and divisiveness.
Image result for josiah royce and william james

==
DISSENTER FOR THE ABSOLUTE
COMMENDING JOSIAH ROYCE AS AMERICA'S PHILOSOPHER by Allen C. Guelzo

No American philosophy has as yet been produced,” complained Charles Sanders Peirce in 1866. “Since our country has become independent, Germany has produced the whole development of the Transcendental Philosophy, Scotland the whole philosophy of Common Sense, France the Eclectic Philosophy and Positive Philosophy, England the Association Philosophy. And what has America produced?” Whereupon Peirce took it upon himself to answer his own question, and in 1878 laid out the lineaments of what his friend and patron William James would call pragmatism. James would do more than name the new philosophy; he would popularize it so successfully that Peirce faded into the background of his own eccentricity.

James had no time for any sort of dualism of thinking and doing, believing and acting. “Beliefs, in short, are really rules for action,” he insisted, “and the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of habits of action.” An idea isn’t good because it’s true. It is good because the consequences of believing it make life better: “‘The true,’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking.”

That instrumental conception of truth changed everything. It turned philosophy into the determination of “what works best.” Pragmatism was the new method. It aimed to answer questions, not to speculate on first things. Pragmatists don’t wait for absolute truths to arrive and give us full contact with hard reality; that will never happen. Mind is an instrument, not a slate, and truth is provisional and ever corrigible. Even if eternal verities exist, we’ll never know them, so we should stop arguing over conceptual differences that have no practical consequence. Apply the pragmatic method to metaphysical disputes and most of them will quickly disappear and productive inquiry may proceed.

At least, that’s what James believed, and his persuasion was strong enough to become the main current of American thought. Translated into social theory by John Dewey and Horace Kallen (James’s student), poetry by Wallace Stevens (another James student), social science by George Herbert Mead, semiotics by Charles Morris (a Mead student), and jurisprudence by Oliver Wendell Holmes—not to mention the philosophy of F. C. S. Schiller, Sidney Hook (a Dewey student), C. I. Lewis, W. V. O. Quine (a student of Lewis), and many others up to and beyond Richard Rorty—pragmatism swept through the universities. It has become the national outlook, “one that,” in the judgment of William Goetzmann, “governs much of our behavior and certainly the politics and courts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in America.”

But as the pragmatists were transforming higher thought at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago, and in the culture at large, another thinker was extending pragmatism well beyond the instrumentalist conception. He shared some pragmatist principles, but he aimed them toward the Absolute. Like James, he began with concrete individual experience, but built up from it to a vision of a “Blessed Community” aligned with God. He has disappeared from popular memory, but he is worth remembering today as a moral contrast to the utilitarian viewpoint, a reminder that the good must always be subordinated to the Good.

Josiah Royce is the first important American thinker born west of the Mississippi. This was interpreted by him as a disadvantage. His ­parents were Forty-Niners who had journeyed to California expecting to find gold and wealth, only to find neither. Royce was born on ­November 20, 1855, amid the squalor of a mining camp in Grass Valley, California, and he never lost in his later years at Harvard the intimidating sense of being a rube among the roses. “I never was, in my youth, a person ‘cultivated’ in any aesthetic sense,” Royce recalled in 1912, “and I remain more barbarous as to such matters than you can easily suspect.” One of his earliest memories was of the enormous mountains that rimmed his home along the Sacramento River, but the impression they made was of imprisonment and isolation. Even at the beginning, Royce looked for something beyond the limitations of immediate experience... (continues)
==
Royce @dawn

Xenophon's Socrates

...Xenophon also wrote down his remembrances of a local philosopher named Socrates. Those who know Socrates mainly through the writings of Plato – Xenophon’s near-exact contemporary – will find Xenophon’s Socrates something of a surprise. Plato’s Socrates claims to know nothing, and flamboyantly refutes the knowledge claims of others. In the pages of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, however, Socrates actually answers philosophical questions, dispenses practical life advice, provides arguments proving the existence of benevolent gods, converses as if peer-to-peer with a courtesan, and even proposes a domestic economy scheme whereby indigent female relatives can become productive through the establishment of a textile business at home.

Socrates happily confesses to solo-dancing: it’s great exercise and freshens the appetite

Socrates’ conversation, according to Xenophon, ‘was ever of human things’. This engaged, intensely practical, human Socrates can be refreshing to encounter. Anyone who has felt discomfort at how the opponents of Plato’s Socrates suffer relentless public refutations and reductions to absurdity can take some comfort in Xenophon’s Socrates who ‘tries to cure the perplexities of his friends’... (continues)

Possibly the most repulsive depiction of Socrates ever:

Socratic dancing as imagined by Honore Daumier. Courtesy Musée Carnavalet, Paris

Friday, January 25, 2019

Idaho's Dark Sky Reserve

A good place to pursue cosmic philosophy.





(continues)
==
“We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.” Carl Sagan, Cosmos 

Peripatetic "football"

Aristotle's way to happiness

John Kaag reviews ARISTOTLE’S WAY How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life By Edith Hall
Three years ago, New Year’s came and I promised to eat only organic. I lasted two weeks. A year ago, I resolved to run before dawn and take a cold shower every morning. That lasted two days. This year, I don’t have a resolution. Instead I read Edith Hall’s “Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life,” and concluded I probably didn’t have to undergo some painful — and therefore temporary — transformation to remake my life. I just had to put some sustained effort into being properly happy.
There is a pernicious, but widely held, belief that turning over a new leaf always involves turning our worlds upside down, that living a happy, well-adjusted life entails acts of monkish discipline or heroic strength. The genre of self-help lives and dies on this fanaticism: We should eat like cave men, scale distant mountains, ingest live charcoal, walk across scalding stones, lift oversize tires, do yoga in a hothouse, run a marathon, run another. In our culture, virtuous moderation and prudence rarely sell but, taking her cues from Aristotle, Hall offers a set of reasons to explain why they should.
Hall’s new book clears a rare middle way for her reader to pursue happiness, what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, usually translated as well-being or prosperity. This prosperity has nothing to do with the modern obsession with material success but rather “finding a purpose in order to realize your potential and working on your behavior to become the best version of yourself.” It sounds platitudinous enough, but it isn’t, thanks to Hall’s tight yet modest prose. “Aristotle’s Way” carefully charts the arc of a virtuous life that springs from youthful talent, grows by way of responsible decisions and self-reflection, finds expression in mature relationships, and comes to rest in joyful retirement and a quietly reverent death. Easier said than done, but Aristotle, Hall explains, is there to help... 
(continues)

Thursday, January 24, 2019

Have you ever attempted to share your beliefs, convictions, core principles (etc.) in public?

When I'm working on creating lyrics for a song, I tend to aim for direct (and indirect at times) representations of my beliefs and past convictions. It's sometimes cathartic to get off my chest things that have complicated my life more than needed. At the same time, performing my own songs out in public gives me anxiety just thinking about it. I find it daunting and rewarding at the same time.

Mary Oliver, peripatetic poet

Cousin Mary was a peripatetic of the woods, a poet of the wild not unlike Wordsworth or Thoreau. Her rare interview with Krista Tippett in 2015 included the following exchange, which encourages us all to get up out of our chairs and from behind our desks to go and "listen to the world"... she agrees, "it is solved by walking." [P.S.-Check out the latest episode of "Fresh Air" to hear a contemporary novelist talking about walking, French flaneurs, and related matters.]

MS. TIPPETT:...you spent a lot of your time walking around the woods in Ohio.
MS. OLIVER: Yes, I did, and I think it saved my life. To this day, I don’t care for the enclosure of buildings. It was a very bad childhood for everybody, every member of the household, not just myself, I think. And I escaped it, barely, with years of trouble. But I did find the entire world in looking for something. But I got saved by poetry. And I got saved by the beauty of the world.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. And there’s such a convergence of those things then, it seems, all the way through in your life as a poet.
MS. OLIVER: Yes, it is a convergence. And I have a little difficulty now having lived for fifty years in a small town in the North. I’m trying very hard to love the mangroves. [laughs] It takes a while.
MS. TIPPETT: Well, I know. And I have to say, you and your poetry, for me, are so closely identified with Provincetown and that part of the world and that kind of dramatic weather — that kind of shore. And so when I had this amazing opportunity to come visit you — and I said, “Oh great, we’re going to Cape Cod!... No, we’re going to Florida.” [laughs]
MS. OLIVER: Yes, I just sold my condo to a very dear friend this summer. And I bought a little house down here, which needs very serious reconstruction. So, I’m not in it yet. But sometimes it’s time for the change.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah, though, for all those years, for decades of your writing, this picture was there of you. This pleasure of walking and writing and, I don’t know, standing with your notebook and actually writing while you’re walking. [laughs]
MS. OLIVER: Yes. That’s how I did it.
MS. TIPPETT: And it is. And it seems like such a gift that you found that way to be a writer and to have that daily — have a ritual of writing.
MS. OLIVER: Well, as I say, I don’t like buildings. The only record I broke in school was truancy. I went to the woods a lot with books. Whitman in the knapsack. But I also liked motion. So I just began with these little notebooks and scribbled things as they came to me and then worked them into poems later. And always I wanted the “I.” Many of the poems are “I did this. I did this. I saw this.” I wanted the “I” to be the possible reader, rather than about myself. It was about an experience that happened to be mine but could well have been anybody else’s. That was my feeling about the “I.” I have been criticized by one editor who felt that “I” would be felt as ego. And I thought, no, well, I’m going to risk it and see. And I think it worked. It enjoined the reader into the experience of the poem. I became the kind of person who did the walking and the scribbling but shared it if they wanted it.
MS. TIPPETT: And you also use this word — there’s this place where you’re talking about writing while walking, you know, listening deeply. And I love this, “listening convivially.”
MS. OLIVER: [laughs] Yes. Yeah.
MS. TIPPETT: And listening, really, to the world.
MS. OLIVER: Listening to the world. Well, I did that and I still do it.
MS. TIPPETT: I was going to ask you if you thought you could have been a poet in an age when you probably would have grown up writing on computers.
MS. OLIVER: Oh, now? I very much advise writers not to use a computer.
MS. TIPPETT: But it seems to me that more than the computer being the problem, the sitting at a desk would be a problem.
MS. OLIVER: That’s a problem. Lots of things are problems. As I talk about it in The Poetry Handbook, discipline is very important. The habit — I think we’re creative all day long. And we have to have an appointment to have that work out on the page. Because the creative part of us gets tired of waiting or just gets tired. It’s helped a lot of students, young poets doing that, to have that meeting with that part of oneself because there are, of course, other parts of life. I used to say I gave my — when I had jobs, which wasn’t that often, but I’d say I give my very best second, second class labor to...
MS. TIPPETT: ...to the job.
MS. OLIVER: ...because I’d get up at five, and by nine I’d already had my say...
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“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”


Image result for mary oliver wild life quote

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Just remember 🎝

You're standing on a planet that's evolving and revolving... 🎜🎶🎝


No need to feel frightened or scared of the universe; after all, you're IT. But it's perfectly appropriate to feel intrigued, mystified, wonder-struck, and (especially, as the Pythons show) amused. 

Log entries

Don't forget to document EVERY base you claim, in your personal log, before claiming runs on the scorecard. Hypothetically, for example:
"Jan 22 - Came to class (1 base); started the computer/projector (1 base); posted two comments, two alternative quiz questions, and two discussion questions under the quiz (6 bases), one comment under "Happy birthday Francis Bacon" (1 base), shared a link to a YouTube video on Carl Sagan (1 base), had 9 correct quiz answers (9 bases). TOTAL: 19 bases/4 RUNS."
NOTE: If this hypothetical student had posted just one more comment, he'd have been able to claim all 5 available daily RUNS (instead of stranding* a "runner"). It often pays to do just a little more, to come up with just one or two more relevant comments or other contributions. Try not to leave any runners on base ("LOB"). Knock 'em in ("RBI").

A suggestion: keep an updated tally of your runs on the scorecard. Below your daily total, also record your current grand total. For instance, if on a given day you scored 4 runs and now have a total of (say) 48, indicate that in the box across from your name thusly: 4/48.
==
*FAQ

Do bases carry over to next class? No. Next class is a brand new inning.

What should I put on the scorecard if I came to class but didn't score any runs? A "0," or a line on the diagonal between home and 1st base.

What if I don't know where 1st base is on the scorecard? Ask.

What if I have to miss a class? Can I score any runs that day? You can score 3 runs on days you have to miss by posting a relevant essay of 500 words or more within the week. But don't make a habit of it.

Image result for baseball scorecardHow many runs do I need to guarantee an "A" in the course? Within 10% of the 3d-highest run-scorer's final total. For instance, if that total is (say) 175, you need 157. Of course you might still get an "A" even if you come up a bit shy of 157, if you distinguish yourself with exemplary reports and exam scores. In the past, top performers have averaged more than 4 runs per class.

What if I have to leave for my next class before I get a chance to mark the scorecard? Just make sure you have the correct info in your log, and mark the scorecard next time.

Why keep score? It's fun, and it keeps your head in the game.