we missed a good party

for a friend who left. this isn't him:











but this is. his words are still present on the internet. (we still like these two.)

where did we go? to TX

which thinks well of itself.

port-partem

another contributing factor was that christmas left sort of a bad taste in his mouth.

so thoth needed a vacation

apparently he had a problem with drunkenly seeing things like this:

Photohistory

An histoire of our visit to the vast deserts of east Texas to follow, courtesy zee-ro.

Autonomously mobile blimps

Click title for .movs (scroll to bottom).

Blonde Joke

Because reading this joke is the best move you'll make all day.

Or is it a pathetic towhead?

Whaaaa? + Ooooooooh.

Did you know Beth Gibbons put out an album that's actually quite good (but not Portisheadesque)?

Also, I've been thinking a lot about the movement of my will lately. I mean, my desires are falling further and further under the direction of my will, and I'm not seeing impulsiveness fucking things up in my life as much as they have in the past. It's certainly the case that some of my self-improvement projects are still on tracik after a fair bit of time and if the engine isn't moving as fast as I'd like ast least the whole thing hasn't derailed.

Still, I can't help but feel as though there is a collision just ahead. As though all my good feelings are a sort of set-up by a cosmic force (not your usual benevolent deity) just to have a laugh at my expence. Not like real paranoia, like something is out to get me; just a general dread about an unspecifiable time in the future when things in my life or, maybe, my psyche will just totally collapse.

I once went to see a psychiatrist, a very good one, quite famous in fact, really well known in the particular area and anyway I went and we talked about things (this was many years ago) and he encouraged me to be myself but not in those words at all but the sort of words that you actually find convincing and can make you sort of not worry about the things you might do or say but kind of let loose and just you know be (oh, like groovy man, wow) but not hippy-style but more of a kind of well I guess unconscious animalesque way. Like stop overthinking. So okay.

Responsibility without freedom.

Having become fed up with previous attempts to reconcile free will with the laws of nature, I have come to the following idea. Instead of trying to preserve some notion of free will, or accepting that there is no "real" moral responsibility, why not attempt to rest moral responsibility on "rational choice"? Here, rational choice would be characterized without essential reference to the idea of some metaphysically significant free will as has been supposed to exist (unfortunately) through much of philosophy's history. We do not, after all, hold for example dogs morally responsible for certain of their actions, only humans. Human actions of some sort are the ones for which we may be held responsible. Instead of insisting that these are ones undertaken "freely" in addition to being rationally chosen, let us suppose that real moral responsibility hangs on rational choice whether or not there is some scientistic reduction of the process by which the choice was reached (and of course one can come up with examples of cases where un-"chosen" actions are held to be culbable due to their being violations of moral precepts, so this presents a hurdle for the view). I find that this project allows preservation of the general feeling that metaphysical free will is a humbug, while not ignoring the important research that is still possible with regard to free will and choice. That internal mechanisms of the soul or the will of God have been replaced by neuron activity does not itself "debunk" the existence either of choice or of morality, contra positivism.

One might suppose that an initial difficulty for many philosophers of morality, sc. Kantians, will have difficulty reconciling such a move even in outline with the ideal of (transcendental?) autonomy, or more weakly of "sponteneity", to be found in the sexless master's works.

gratuity

tha holdem tablez wuzen gud 2 me tonite but wtf a drunkle jingle 4 u fokes.

every day i wake up
hummin' a song
but i dont need 2 run around
i jus stay home.

an sing a little love song
my love, 2 myself
if there's something that u want 2 hear
u can sing it yerself.

cuz everything is free now
thats what i say
no ones gotta listen 2
tha words in my head.

someone hit tha big score
i figured it out
that we're gonna do it anyway
even if doesn't pay.

thx g. welch. tha life as art iz art; tha life as dream 'made flesh' n shizzle. b what u wanna be? b what u alreddy iz.

field

four to the floorboard rusted rumple
engine tumbles over from a dead stop
transmission hates weather

what the old farmers call the sky
in its untranquil gale driven clouds,
"weather"

but you stole my fuzzy dice (purple)
and that bandanna I wore one July day
when you asked me for lemonade from the window
of your cadillac

she'll be surprised when I donut
your lawn fertilized and green become furrows
and toss out shucks

smoke-colored weather, exhaust
fuming regret and her swollen belly
and your fender-bender

Fuck You Fridays

Hello, and FUCK YOU.

Today: lasers!

Tomorrow: planets!

pulsar 47 shew

saw good local band pulsar 47 @ club las nite. call it post-rock. sorta stuff sigur ros, explosions in the sky etc. doin'. played about 35 min. openin' 4 some crapass band or other whatevs.

gotta say lotta NRG inna room tho small crowd. 3 guit. plus bass drum piano cello 'n noize 'quipment make 4 a big sound. they got tha walla sound fx goin' on which is purticlerly a fav o' mine. added 2 new songz 2 tha set since last saw 'em inna summer.

kinda hypnotic building an' crashin' sound. tha melodies tenda b drones or looped figurez over like some small variations. mos'ly in 4/4, but still okay cuz inventive with mix of parts and arrangements that'r crude in places but overall display a collective an' complex development process. one downside iz that u get a lotta moments when you wish they'd put a kontroll on--tha anarchy gets away from inspiring blasts to discordant when u know they don' wanna b discordant. nothin' a good producer couldn't fix tho'.

gotta kinda vaguely mid/asian flavor 2 melodies or dom. harmonies but u cn tell tha memberz mos'ly got classical musix trainin'. brolly give it a B+ b/c uv a good vamp durin' a technical breakdown 1/3 in2 tha show.

mismanagement?

I wonder if google is carnivorous or merely thinks it is?

And: I blew my student loans.

You don't say

why, I'll be darned. And shit. So I'm sitting here in this dive called the Brass Rail and they're serving me 'cos I'm dressed like a hobo, and I'm thinking of some things that you should not say to women. Really. In no particular order.

1. "See ya." This sentence is like the death knell that indicates you are entering the so-called friend zone and only like some serious X-induced groping can bring it back.

2. "Consider yourself propositioned." Probably the least sexy way to say it.

3. "I want to be with you." What does this one even mean? It's like a fucking psychotic codependent thing to say. "With you." Yikes.

4. "You are pretty." Sounds like you're 14. Nuff said.

5. "Do you want ... ?" or "Would you like ... ?" Both of these presuppose that you are not man enough to know what a woman's preferences are before she does. Also, it implies that you are inferior to her. Never, ever imply anything like that unless you like wearing the skirt. However, "Will you ... ?" both appears to rest on equality by treating her as an agent while actually implying that her preferences are not rational enough to be mentioned, so it's a better choice when, for whatever reason, you think you have to ask a woman to choose.

6. "... cunt ..." Using this word is apparently a big turn off, except in certain contexts where fucking is already in the cards. I guess you're not supposed to demonstrate to women that you think their fun bits are unlikeable even though everybody knows they suck and are disgusting, and I think to some "politically correct" people the word has some negative connotations.

7. "I don't want to hear it." This is the thing you say when you want a woman to walk out on you.

8. "I've got a big ..." The blank is any word for your penis. for some reason it's considered rude to mention this about yourself.

Content

Robert Cummins' 1996 books has a great deal of interesting things to say about what representation could be, but having read through half the book one can only come out so far with the following questions. Assuming that representation consists in (a) a target (b) something the target is represented as, and that the content of the representation is not determined causally (sc. causal theory of reference), where does the content come from, and whence as well the target?

For what must be answered is why there is not a backdoor assumption of "aboutness" buit into the notion of reference. What is meant by this is, if one is trying to avoid all talk of intensional states (as Cummins claims he is), it is not clear how one can avoid prior importation of illicit intensionality (read as a so-far unspecified sort of aboutness) and not commit to a lawlike causal connection between world and "intender" (that which "does" representing) without assuming that content exists independently of the mind. That is, we are committing to a Kantian stance toward the empirical world in which things have their essences independent from what we think about them, though this need not raise any metaphysical issues about noumena. After all, to represent a |cow| entails that there are cows; but of course Cummins is a realist of a certain stripe.

The question that is most pressing, I think, is how to account for aquisition of various sorts of intenders. Cummins hints at this in speaking of cognitive systems without the resources to represent certain things, for instance a child who represents horses with |cow|s because she has no concept of horse. But then we have returned to an educational theory of language aquisition. Does Cummins wish to tell a use=meaning story about language but not about mental representations?

Or, if not, how can he get out of it without developing some sort of essentialism about concepts and their expressions? Well, we shall have to see, we readers of the book. The first move is to find out how structural features "intrinsic" to representations relate to the contents and targets of them.

Weather Report

A blustery bunched-up shoulders day; we project an 80% chance of oolong.

they's baaaaaaack

fuck. undergrads. back. term. damn. hellfuck. yeah.

Everything

Apparently McDowell reacts to the problem of the insufficiency of (physical) causal relations to justify our intensional states being about the world by just subsuming the (empirical) world into that which is intensional. That is, "the world" is shot through with conceptual content. The world is only "given" to us in the sense that that which is in the world is thinkable and therefore itself is conceptual. For of course a mere existing thing has no features--not even, say, spatial presence--that could be ascribed to it; but then it seems that there is only exculpation (release from responsibility) for thinking the world is one way rather than another. If one is correct, it would on such a view be only be chance and we could have no expectation of finding out whether any intensional state "about" the world actually is "accurate" to it. So, since the empirical world is conceptual, this solves the problem: all there are are things that can be content for conceptual states. Sense data is already conceptual and therefore contentful. So your cup of tea, or your windchime, these are things that are conceptual. It's not a property so much as their being things at all consists in filling out some conceptual profile or another.

Contrast this with Davidson, who seeks to merely make us content with causal relations. The problem of course is that since mental events (and I think we could gloss this as chunks (as opposed to time slices) of states) supervene on physical ones and the mental "world" is unlawful, there is no way to tell what mental events will follow one another. There is no external constraint on how intensional bits of the world relate (or don't) to the world. It may seem as though I am equivocating over states as opposed to events, and certainly Davidson would insist that events are what we must be talking about. But in fact I don't find convincing ground for preferring one terminology over the other, but would rather interpret them both as ways of describing a mereologically separated bit of what there is: a bit of the total state of affairs at a time(s).

The difficulty is seeing how the internal "rational" mechanism that McDowell insists upon would work. Like Kant, he is doing metaphysics that pretends it is not metaphysics, and like him the justification for the description of what's going on that he gives is more post hoc than anything. That is, he says "Well, it works, right?" and one has a hard time saying why not. Here we can intervene by a bit of positing that many would find objectionable. Davidson relies implicitly on the notion that causation is not purely physical causation, but often interpreters of his work seem to think that he does think causation works on physical or causal principles and so his talk of mental states turns out to be unintentionally disingenuous. We can bridge the gap between the two (and McDowell has admitted the distance is not so far as one might initially suppose) by adding in non-lawlike causal relations. Supposedly, on a McDowellian conception of autonomy what's required is a strong sort of freedom to create thought in order to have thought that we would recognize as our own going on in some mind. That is, reflective or "second-order" consciousness interposing in its own stream of thoughts.

Unfortunately, I am not a compatibilist (at least not in any remotely normal sense), since I think that although "freedom" is real it is nevertheless a product of our natural life (qua human) rather than a metaphysical object of independent standing. (This stems from my insistance, somewhat like Quine's ontology/ideology thought, that language use underwrites ontology and not the other way around.) The non-lawlike causal relation is that which holds between intensional events/states and their denotata, referents, etc. This view is a sort of anomic monism (related to Davidsonian "anomalous monism"), fitting in the space between Kant and Wittgenstein (barely), one would hope. Of course, no one would actually buy this view. After all, what would be the use of positing a causal mechanism that does nothing but give us an excuse to claim that mental events' being in sequence amounts to anything other than a series of computational states? Or, having looked at that question, look at this one: why would we want to hold on to the notion that there are nonphysical bits of the world, in the first place?

Speaking of which

It occurs to me that there is not an appreciation of play. I mean, word-play. And here I'm just Heideggerizing some stuff, 'word' and 'play', but anyway here's the point: language is fun.

Better still, language is that through which (and only through which) meaning is possible. What there is in the world, and what is interesting, if terrifying, about the world is mediated by our language. Poetry is word-play taken to extremes. Shakespeare can't be anything but word-play. And ordinary cleverness with words is the extraordinary expression of that quintessentially human mode of existence which is the conceptually embodied life. Or something.

Apologies to fizhburn for philosophizing without a license.

The Story: 5 in 60

With some technical support from Gdog, I managed to put together (finally) this mp3 compilation. Someone once told me I was good at mix tapes. Anyway I had some constraints: 1) a storyline in the music that's obvious to everybody who's told the "actual" story; 2) one song per artist; 3) mix up the genres; 4) be non-obvious. An alternative version with a slightly different emphasis appears, where different, in ital. Song then band.

1. Booze Me Up and Get Me High - Ween : All Night Thing - Temple of the Dog
2. Get Me Off - Basement Jaxx : Love Life - Fatboy Slim
3. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) - The Arcade Fire
4. Let's Get High (Reach out and touch the sky mix) - Lords of Acid & Rob Swift
5. Are You Experienced? - Jimi Hendrix Experience
6. Ring of Fire - Johnny Cash [okay, missed on #4. whatever.]
7. Sweet Surrender - Sarah McLachlan : Serene - Throwing Muses
8. I Think - Days of the New : Substitute for Love - Madonna
9. Angel - Massive Attack
10. For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her - Simon & Garfunkel
11. Bigmouth Strikes Again - Placebo : My Own Worst Enemy - Lit
12. Forfeit - Chevelle
13. (I can't get no) Satisfaction - PJ Harvey & Bjork version
14. Love me Two Times - The Doors
15. It's A Motherfucker - Eels : Missing You - Slowdive
16. Plump - Hole : Cry - Siouxie and the Banshees
17. That Day - Poe
18. Let You Down - Dave Matthews Band : Dose - Filter
19. Mama, I'm Coming Home - Ozzy Osbourne : Baby, Let Me Follow You Down - Bob Dylan version
20. Stand Inside Your Love - Smashing Pumpkins : Perfect from Now On - Built to Spill
21. Be My Wife - David Bowie
22. The Chain - Fleetwood Mac
23. So - Static-X : Aeroplane - Red Hot Chili Peppers
24. Bring Me Up - Lisa Loeb
25. Save Yourself - Stabbing Westward
26. Crucify (single remix version) - Tori Amos
27. Losing A Whole Year - Third Eye Blind
28. Suzanne - Leonard Cohen
29. Swallow the Knife - Story of the Year : Until the Day I Die - Story of the Year
30. Walk on the Ocean - Toad the Wet Sprocket : Honeyboom in Samsara - Star Sutra
31. Pretty Deep - Tanya Donelly
32. Cumbersome - 7 Mary 3
33. Col - Morcheeba
34. The Patient - Tool
35. Blow Up the Outside World - Soundgarden : Purple Rain - Prince
36. Pieces - My Vitriol
37. Demolition Lovers - My Chemical Romance [i got yer emo right here] : Clumsy - Our Lady Peace
38. I Just Wanna Get Along - The Breeders : Do You Love Me Now? - The Breeders
39. The Scientist - Coldplay
40. Naked As We Came - Iron & Wine
41. Laser Beam - Low
42. Baggage - L7 : Absentimental - Norma Jean
43. Creep - Stone Temple Pilots : Brena - A Perfect Circle [worse: "creep" by radiohead]
44. Drain You - Nirvana
45. The Fragile - Nine Inch Nails
46. Elite - Deftones
47. Into Dust - Mazzy Star : Lose my Breath - My Bloody Valentine
48. Hands of Time - Groove Armada
49. Over Now - Alice In Chains
50. Cannonball - Damien Rice : Sugarless - Autolux
51. How to Disappear Completely - Radiohead : Divorce Song - Liz Phair
52. Gone to the Movies - Semisonic
53. I Had My Chance - Morphine
54. Wishing Well - Porno for Pyros : The Speed of Pain - Marilyn Manson
55. I Miss You - Incubus : Stop Coming to My House - Mogwai
56. Here Comes Your Man - Pixies
57. Velvet Divorce - Sneaker Pimps : Another Girl - Jeffrey Lewis
58. Summertime - Nick Drake version : Summer Breeze - Seals & Crofts
59. Twilight - Elliot Smith : Are You Still Mad - Alanis Morissette
60. 25 - Veruca Salt : First Breath After Coma - Explosions In The Sky

Writer Stephen King was run down by a car in the 90's, and for a decade after that (more or less) it appeared in his writing in one way or another. It seems fair to me to suppose that this is the way a lot of things make their way into writing: scenes and themes that reappear are welling up from the author's attempt to assimilate recalcitrant experiences into her identity. Thus we all here are, I think, working from viewpoints that reflect our current obsessions (read: neuroses). benobo's are obvious, and fizhburn is in the mode of hashing out a peculiar naturalistic philosophy that I think even he does not know the extent of. Anyway, for those of you with interweb piracy expertise or large libraries either one and are happy puzzling out, puzzle out with the above soundtrack.

And in the winter of your twenty-fifth year the cold root of your heart will respire brisk new air. Yay for mixed metaphors!

funeral

yeh so i sed it b4 butt i sez't again on th'internetz: tha fire arcade's 2004 album'z still suspixisly good. almost too good. newz flash again: sonic youth is not that good. so stop like prayin' 2 them 'n shit. flame away, bitchez.

true. like that beer commercial.

eripsa! Dude!

p.s. Cheers you magnificanct bastards!

Take- (v)

...the verb-stem in combinations and phrases used as ns. or adjs. (mostly nonce-wds.):...
take-leave, a. of or pertaining to taking leave, parting, ‘farewell’.

Cancer (n)

3. a. Pathol. A malignant growth or tumour in different parts of the body, that tends to spread indefinitely and to reproduce itself, as also to return after removal; it eats away or corrodes the part in which it is situated, and generally ends in death.

1601 HOLLAND Pliny II. Gloss., Cancer is a swelling or sore comming of melancholy bloud, about which the veins appeare of a blacke or swert colour, spread in manner of a Creifish clees. 1671 SALMON Syn. Med. I. xlviii. 114 {Kappa}{alpha}{rho}{kappa}{iota}{nu}{omicron}{fsigma}, Cancer is a hard round Tumour blew or blackish having pain and beating. 1747 HERVEY Medit. & Contempl. (1818) 254 On some a relentless cancer has fastened its envenomed teeth. 1877 ROBERTS Handbk. Med. I. (ed. 3) 274 Cancer is decidedly a hereditary disease.

Visit (v)

I. 1. a. trans. Of the Deity: To come to (persons) in order to comfort or benefit.

1645 CARYL Expos. Job I. 636 When God comes in kindness and love to do us good, he visiteth us.

3. a. To inflict hurt, harm, or punishment upon (a person); to deal severely or hardly with (persons or things); {dag}to cut off, cause to die.

1382 WYCLIF Isa. xxvi. 14 Therfore thou hast visityd, and to-brosedest hem, and lost al the mynde of hem.

b. To afflict or distress with sickness, poverty, or the like.

1624 J. USHER in Lett. Lit. Men (Camden) 131 It pleased God to visite me with a quartan.

4. a. Of sickness, etc.: To come upon (a person or persons), to assail or afflict. Freq. in passive and const. with or by.

c1340 HAMPOLE Pr. Consc. 1980 Als we suld ilk day {th}eded fele, And byde noght til {th}e dede us vyset. 1645 CARYL Expos. Job I. 636 When a house hath the Plague,..we use to say, Such a house is visited. 1855 Poultry Chron. III. 148/1 Some which were..tended with constant care, all died: and similar mortality has visited others also.

II. 7. a. To make a practice of going to (persons in sickness or distress) in order to comfort or assist them.

b. Similarly with reference to individual cases.

Visit (n)

1. a. An act of visiting a person; a friendly or formal call upon, a shorter or longer stay with, a person as a feature of social intercourse.

1681 VISCOUNTESS CAMPDEN in 12th Rep. Hist. MSS. Comm. App. V. 56 My Lady Skidmore and her lord was at Mr. Conisbys house upon a visette. 1711 ADDISON Spect. No. 102 {page}8 Like Ladies that look upon their Watches after a long Visit. 1753 Scots Mag. XV. 36/1 Guilty of that most atrocious crime, the owing a visit. 1774 GOLDSM. Nat. Hist. (1776) V. 246 If the monkey ventures to offer a visit of curiosity, the toucan gives him such a welcome, that he..is glad to escape.

2. a. An instance of going to see, and assist or comfort, persons in distress.

1792 [R. CECIL] (title), A Friendly Visit to the House of Mourning.

b. An instance (or the action) of going to a place, house, etc., for the purpose of inspection or examination.

1787 BURNS Let. to M. Chalmers Wks. (Globe) 352, I have been at Dumfries, and at one visit more shall be decided about a farm in that country.

5. attrib. and Comb., as visit-day, -paying; {dag}visit-leg, a posture of politeness in paying a visit (cf. LEG n. 4).

1849 THACKERAY in Scribner's Mag. I. 522/2, I have been most remiss in visit-paying.

Aunt (n)

1. a. The sister of one's father or mother. Also, an uncle's wife, more strictly called an aunt-in-law.

1711 ADDISON Spect. No. 7 {page}4 A Maiden Aunt..who is one of these antiquated Sybils. 1834 GEN. P. THOMPSON Exerc. (1842) III. 45 note, What might have happened afterwards, is only known to those who can tell what would have come to pass if your aunt had been your uncle.

b. (in U.S.) Used endearingly of: Any benevolent practical woman who exercises these qualities to the benefit of her circle of acquaintance; cf. Sp. tia, and see AUNTHOOD. Also used dial. (see E.D.D.) as ‘a term of familiarity or respect applied to elderly women, not necessarily implying relationship’. Also transf. Cf. AUNTIE. (Universal aunt is taken from the name of a bureau in London undertaking such services, e.g. conducted tours, errands, as might be rendered by a maiden aunt. Cf. AUNTHOOD.)

1921 Star 28 Feb. 4/5 (headline) Professional Aunts on Hire.

6. Special collocations: Aunt Edna, used of a typical theatre-goer of conservative taste; Aunt Emma, used in croquet of a typically unenterprising player (or play); Aunt Fanny, in various slang phrases expressing negation or disbelief.

1963 Croquet Aug. 3/1 Aunt Emma is banished for ever. 1967 Ibid. Aug./Sept. 13/2 He played too much ‘Aunt Emma’. 1945 M. DICKENS Thurs. Afternoons i. 69 She's got no more idea how to run this house than my Aunt Fanny.

petty theft

Oh that little creep in the back
alley with his Boston Terrier
shitting amongst the cigarette
butts between the bicycle
tires. Get the hell out of my
yard the old man yelled and now
the droppings all go right
where I used to park until last
night when my bike was
stolen. Wouldn't you know it he
bought that damn dog a new
sweater.

Alexithymiac Imagination

For how can you predict behavior if you can't understand the internal mechanism of the character. Now this is seeming hopeless. Shit.

In lighter news: chocolate! Also: Texas!

Random thought

I've been in some real break-ups. How come I can't write the part of this story about a fake one? It comes out all not convincing.

Resolutions

I shall and will
with all resolve posthaste do this:
Gather grain to feed my sisters in Ghana.

Fill ten bottles with the message
You are loved, and set them adrift
in the South China Sea.

Save my antiviral medication refills and mail them
to my pen-friend in Johannesburg
whose daughter is dying from her mother's blood.

Eat only rice, corn, and peas until the Dalai
Lama speaks to the United Nations
on the day when Kashmir is nuked.

Nail my hand to a board at
the Capitol Steps on live television
just to show them real committment.

Whisper the location, in the ears of each of
the People the secret door to the world's
center from where they will return home.

Drink corn liquor and rainwater on the
Peruvian Andes' slopes and offer Pacha
Mama her due.

Smoke raw tobacco under midnight sun
on a rescue boat in the arctic waters
where the whale hunters freeze.

Give to my friends, each, a message
of my love for them, and another to
each of my family.