Friday, November 28, 2003
(8:22 PM) | Anthony Paul Smith:
I love middle-aged women
Just stopping by to update you folks on Hayley and my financial situation. The bad news is we had to pay off the original ticket and the good news is we got out of the 750 dollar fine.
We woke up early on Wednesday to go and set a court date in order to fight the ticket and before we could even ask the kind middle-aged desk lady asked, "Well can you pay off the rest of the ticket today?" When we said "Yes!" she told us she would erase the contract and take care of it for us. Just goes to show you, if middle-aged mothers were in charge of Kankakee we'd all get out of our tickets.
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Wednesday, November 26, 2003
(1:53 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Happy Thanksgiving
I will soon be heading back to scenic Davison, Michigan, to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family. I cannot make any promises about the frequency of posts until I return to Kotsko HQ, although hopefully my loving co-bloggers will provide you with fresh, insightful material to help you get through.
Before I leave, I would like to offer my thoughts on the non-commercialization of Thanksgiving. First, we will note that it is not a Christian holiday, but was proclaimed by our holiest and most righteous president, Abraham Lincoln. It celebrates a highly idealized scene of the peaceful settlement of this continent by our hard-working, self-controlled forebears. All it requires for its celebration are food and family, the key elements to any American holiday, and its symbols are generally close to the earth. We Americans are not good at giving or receiving gifts, as on Christmas. We are not good at reflecting on heavenly hopes, as at Easter. What is holiest and most meaningful to Americans is abundance of food and fellowship with family, and therefore I propose that Thanksgiving is the holiest day of the American civil religion. It is a day when people spontaneously wish to go to church, although no church authority obliges them. It is a day untainted by military triumphalism or crass commercialism. It is a day when strangers are welcomed in. It is a good day.
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(3:01 AM) | Robb Schuneman:
Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die. Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever.
Okay. Upon reconsideration of a previously unstated belief that Explosions In The Sky was not the greatest band in the universe, I must state that Explosions In The Sky is the greatest band in the entire universe. I used to like this band called Godspeed You Black Emperor! for my post-rock needs. They were from Kanada. They spelled it with a K. That was great and fine. But I haven't seen them live.
Tonight I saw Explosions In The Sky live. They are from Austin and spell it with an A. They are the greatest band in the world. I am downgrading from universe only because typing that the first time scared me. I can't describe post rock. Take classical music to start with. Fast forward through time until now. While fast forwarding, pick out all the mistakes music has made along the way. Now, pretend people never found that vocal chords could be used as instruments. This leads us to a sort of repetitive music. It is repetitive, but not in a Britney Spears way. Repetitive in the way that Beethoven's 9th carries a theme throughout so many different sub-themes. This also leads us to a music of massively cascading dynamics. This also leaves us with some guitars and stuff. Pretend you find some people who are incredibly talented at playing these instruments.
This is the post-rock. Explosions In The Sky is the greatest Post Rock band in the world. This is controversial. People love their Godspeed. People love their "Mogwai." There's another band called Mum. Sometimes people like Do Make Say Think. Sometimes people even like A Silver Mt. Zion, which is a Godspeed subgroup. Your mom, by now, likes Sigur Ros, and they only debatably fit in this category anyway. I apologize to all, but my friends exploding in the sky win. Be thankful for the post-rock intro I just gave you in this paragraph and take my word for it.
It is strange music. The crowd at music performances by these bands is weird. It's not a rock show, and yet it doesn't fit anywhere but rock clubs. It isn't quiet by any stretch..the louds are as impactful as anything the greats have ever written.
Whatever the score, go and buy it. If you have been charged a ridiculous 750 dollar fine by an assinine city (Oklahoma City, roughly 18.5 times the size of Kankakee, has free parking on the streets after 5. Free parking in the garages after 8 when there is no big event downtown. I think New York City and others may be similar. That Kankakee feels the need for a city-wide parking sticker is laugh out loud funny - until it hurts, then we cry. I am sorry Anthony. I'm also sorry to you all for making this the longest parenthetical thing ever, rather than posting it in the comments below) than download it with the intent to buy when life smiles upon you again, as it will soon, I promise. The band wouldn't seem to mind that sort of thing too much.
If nothing else, just go to some cool little indie shop near you and listen to the thing. It's worth it to catch the genre that your kids will be getting into 20 years from now.
Entirely too long. I suck like a duck that costs less than a buck.
Eternally Prancing Around Without Ever Landing Upon The Dreaded,
-Robb
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Tuesday, November 25, 2003
(10:56 PM) | Anthony Paul Smith:
Bite! Bite its head off!
I suppose no one ever said life was going to be easy but I wish someone would have told me how hard it was going to be. Hayley and I are very poor, or at least poor enough that we can't pay our bills. Not that I am talking about cell phone bills or clothing costs. No, I am talking about heating, electricity and the basic needs of living in some kind of modern shelter (our internet is free). We have been doing ok by not answering the phone and leaving the bills unopened until after we are payed. We even had a plan to be caught up by the end of my winter break.
Then the wonderful City of Kankakee stepped in.
We received a ticket for not having a city parking sticker that one must have in order to park their car anywhere in the city. We didn't buy the sticker because we did not have the money and now this wonderfully stupid city ordinance has cost us 200 dollars. We were on a payment plan with the city but we had to let it fall by the wayside for a couple of weeks. This, evident now, was a very stupid decision. We were served with an order to pay the city 750 dollars for not paying our last 40 dollars of the ticket and if we are unable to pay the 750 up front they will kindly garner it from our wages. How nice of them!
Now, I realize we, even if it is a stupid law, broke the law but why does it seem that the city government exists to make more people poor in Kankakee? What kind of idiot creates a law to fine a person 750 dollars because they don't have money to pay off the rest of their ticket? Are we living in the 1700's for the love of that is holy?!?!
On top of this they have raised tuition at DePaul so I know have no extra financial aid money for living expenses. Thanks guys!
This little turn of events is very troubling and I've had to consider dropping out of school for an indeterminate amount of time in order to work off these little problems. It is just sickening that these amounts of money are so staggering to me that I may have to drop out of school and it could happen in America of all places! The terrorists have already won.
This is life I suppose. I would be able to say that in French, but I won't get that far in the course.
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(3:05 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Bill Clinton's Greatest Hits
My close personal friend and confidant, CalPundit, has a nice post up with a list of Bill Clinton's favorite books. One of them is his wife's book, but then, the list is twenty-one items long, so we can safely assume that the real point is to list his twenty "sincere" favorite books. As a result, I have decided to list all of my favorite books, and unlike the supposed "Rhodes Scholar" Bill Clinton, I am going to italicize the titles instead of put them in "quotes." Hopefully this will help to reveal how smart I am and how unfair that impeachment debacle was.
Escape from the Cubicle Police by Scott Adams
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis
God Without Being by Jean-Luc Marion
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams
Tarrying with the Negative by Slavoj Zizek
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book by Bill Watterson
Protagoras by Plato
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Repetition by Soren Kierkegaard
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
The Bible by Moses, et al.
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
I tried not to make this as "calculated" as the president's apparently is, but there are some biases involved. First, my bookshelf with Fr-Z is closer to me, so books whose authors are in that part of the alphabet might be over-represented. Also, I decided not to include representative samples from my fantasy/sci-fi days aside from the Douglas Adams, though I'm sure those books have had a much greater formative influence on me than any philosophy crap.
If my list turned out more pretensious than I think it did, any and all commenters are free to post comments in the form: "You put _________ on there? Come on!"
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Monday, November 24, 2003
(2:21 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Jesus is my categorical imperative
Today, Dennis Bratcher weighed in on the appropriate way to respond to those who are perverting the gospel. I think it's stirring and wonderful, but it sounds suspiciously like the way conservative pundits recommend the Democrats should behave. That is, don't advocate your principles, but act them out, and don't waste your time denouncing those who act otherwise -- and when your time comes, bend over and take it.
Whether or not that is the route Jesus actually took, this sounds to me like the categorical imperative. Christians think that if everyone would act according to the gospel, the world would be far better, and they believe that they need to follow the gospel regardless of the outcome. Universal applicability and unconditional obligation are the key components to Kant's concept. Also, interestingly enough, even though his idea is often derided as rule-following, what's that famous quote? Oh yeah: "Two things amaze me: the heavens above me and the moral law within me" (paraphrase; emphasis added). Don't Christian writers take Jeremiah's saying about "writing the law on your heart" to refer to Jesus? I know that Kant's a modernist and we should hate him, but still.
I posted on this on dialog before, but only one person responded, and a variety of emotional issues related to God kept me from responding with the kind of vigor people are accustomed to getting from me. Also, I have Kant at second hand, mainly from Lacan, Zizek, and Zupancic, so maybe there's something that I'm missing. I plan on plunging deeply into Kant and Hegel by this summer at the latest, so I'll recant (ha) if it seems that Lacan, Zizek, and Zupancic are all completely wrong.
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Sunday, November 23, 2003
(5:01 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Get off my back
You know how sometimes you'll meet someone for the first time, and during the course of the conversation, some peripheral interest of yours will come up, and from then on, that's all the person will want to talk about? Or how sometimes people will try to make a "memory" out of a marginal event that you don't actually care about, or try to make some kind of inside joke with you, because they're pathetic people who are incapable of making any kind of real connection with people and instead latch onto the first, stupid, superficial thing they can find?
I think Amazon.com is like that in a lot of ways. I've been trying to borrow a copy of Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison, but since no one has it, I just broke down and bought it off Amazon. Now I know that for the next three months, whenever I go to Amazon, everything is going to be Bonhoeffer.
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(2:45 AM) | Anthony Paul Smith:
The first time is always a bit akward
This is my first contribution to The Weblog, the best unsung blog of 2003. Adam asked me to contribute and after the shouts of joy subsided the reality of the situation sunk in. I I have been trying to come up with a great post ever since. I was going to discuss Derrida's Religion sans Religion and liberalism. It was going to be striking and clever, without dumbing down the material for the common blog reader. Then I realized I didn't know anything about Derrida's Religion sans Religion other than sans means without. This was not enough to write a post about. I had some other ideas but they required proof-reading and I hate proof-reading so instead I will relate to you my experience being kicked off of Christian public forums.
I just found out today I have been removed from Olivet's Academy listserv. This is the second time this year. I always wonder why I'm removed and when I ask, I find that I am always put back in without explanation. The first time I think it may have been a misunderstanding concerning me and a suggestion put forth to some of my right leaning "we're not right-leaning" friends on the listserv. I simply attempted to end the debate by suggesting we meet somewhere and brawl it out. I will never know if they accepted or not because I didn't get any e-mails since I was removed. If they did accept I wonder if they went to a field somewhere and waited for me and then I decide that's better than reality so I pretend that's what happened.
Hey Mark Miller, remember that time you went to the field to fight me but I didn't show up? That was some fun times.
So why was I removed this time? The only thing I can figure is that I did insist that Voegelin was not the master of philosophy and I had a little fun with Nietzsche quotes. Now if I had been having fun with Bataille quotes I'd understand. Maybe Adam Smith knows. Though my calling for Michael Pogeski's (or POTUS as he likes to be called) impeachment ought to have been a little more offensive.
The place I was kicked off leaving behind a legacy of profanity and harmful theology was called Decapolis. Decapolis is a evangelical, pseudo-punk rock heaven and when I found it at the tender age of 15 I was a evangelical, pseudo-punk. My stay there didn't start well and it ended worse, from the outgo I fought with people in the "Faith" section (an abuse of the word if there every was one) over women in ministry. Then it went to Arminism v. Calvinism, always ending with the Calvinists crying "heretic" and explaining that it was ok for heretics to be burned back then, but God's grace doesn't work like that now. I was kicked off after yet another debate over homosexuality spurred by the Episcopal Bishop being ordained. The debate was going badly and got worse after one very enlightened young man declared that homosexuality in the church would bring the judgment of God on America. In turn an old man, a kind of creepy old man who spends much of his time on a teen message board arguing Calvinist theology, declared that "Homosexuality is the judgment of God on America."
Now, at this point I should have just let it go. This message board has always been full of very close-minded people, who have told me Christians need to worry about their neighbors, not those Christians dying in South America. Instead I, very maturely I might add, called the man "the biggest fuck I've ever met." The next day my I.P. address had been blocked. Now this is against their rules and I wasn't kicked off with no reason but again, like the Academy listserv, there was no formal message given concerning my deletion.
I am forced to wonder, is this a Christian practice? Are we really that cold to excommunicate without any hope of rentry? Or that spinless to allow the person to come back without discussion? Sadly, I am sure the answer must be answered affirmatively.
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