08 Sunday Jan 2017
Posted in A Little Wisdom, Philology, Philosophy
Tags
Authors should have responsibilities in relation to God, nature, and mankind — and those who have survived the ages have and do, although one has to be flexible as regards the great breadth of great libraries.
What about readers?
Do we have responsibilities?
–33–
11 Thursday Sep 2014
One may differentiate between casual audience comfortable with the world it knows and humanist-intellectual audience with amateur or professional background and buy-in with regard to shaping the next world.
If you are here, you are either between those broad classes or in the latter, and if there’s even just a tiny bit of appropriate education or training back there, then you may be trusted to read critically, to both demand and sift data, to argue about dimensions and variables with a subject of interest, to engage in introspection and reflection as well as judgment, and to think broadly about what would be helpful — anthropologically, ethnographically, evolutionary — in the creation of a greater, more peaceful, more progressive global commune.
The prompt was a piece in Honest Reporting about pandering.
Pandering is a form in lying predicated on the enforcement of loyalty by the panderer. The seminal fairy tale that is “The Emperor’s New Clothes” applies; it really is not a favor to be told how brave, glorious, and self-sacrificing one is by a personality inclined to sacrifice you in the interest of their own aggrandizement and unbridled glorification.
With the review of media coverage of the latest war in Gaza, the political skewing of the news devolves both to overt Hamas intimidation of the press and the reluctance of the same to either give up a story or taint the same with an acknowledgment of the compromise of their integrity.
Compromised journalism comprises its casual audience.
As suggested at the top of this post, not all audience is casual. In fact, while a vast global intelligentsia has come into being with the development of the World Wide Web — the numbers may be low but the distribution must certainly be global — a large analytical class has also been present in the world either with partisan loyalties or greater humanist and spiritual motives. From the “desk analysts” of national security bureaus to the latest in NGO do-gooders, there are plenty of readers who read for data and the arguably most accurate picture they may obtain from the same. While some things lend themselves to a technocratic objectivity, from conventional defense arrangements to road building coupled with economic development, other themes require a broadened vision of humanity — that “anthropolitical psychology” I’ve mentioned on this blog — and also a world of poetry and consideration for the remaining 7,000 or so living languages in the contemporary human inventory and the cultures and individuals suspended in them in time.
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21 Friday Dec 2012
Posted in Journal
I am reading Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, a volume well reviewed in 2003, and shall probably go on to Robert S. Wistrich’s A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism, for Antiquity to the Global Jihad, for, quite accidentally, the ease of typing faster than I can speak — about 80-WPM if hot — has been interrupted by “the most common bed-making accident”: jamming an undersized fitted sheet beneath a mattress, only finding the fist, middle finger (yes, that one) foremost, jammed between the mattress and sloping leather foot-board.
It was a postmodern accident in a way: my insurer’s “urgent care” was an hour and two counties away, much aligned that with the nation’s health care imbroglio, so I got the busted digit figured out using digital resources online. With the assistance of retired local doctors and active pharmacy clerks — while in the drugstore and on the line to Kaiser, the wait for advice alone was 30 minutes, so nix that service too — and the presence of very good comprehensive pharmacy in the vicinity, I got the skinny on 3M “micropore” waterproof tape, useful splints, and the best advice from former patients (same thing): “Six weeks, don’t monkey with it!”
It took a while for the foam bed of the splint to collapse, the tape technique to get simple, the necessity of holding that knuckle down to become clear (“Mallet Finger” it looks like, and I want the tendon — now the two parts of it to grow back long on to the shortest scar tissue possible) and am now in the “lessons learned” portion of the first phase (e.g. wear a mitten outside because the metal splint will freeze the tip of the affected finger; also type flat fingered: in fact, any curling action needed — start with lifting a frying pan — the left hand gets the work).
So I am in reading for long hours instead of hanging out here blogging or chatyping on Facebook.
This may turn out a blessing in disguise: writers need long hours, and long hours with a book becomes what reading can and should be: an alternative wakeful experience in depth.
There is nothing like it.
I may go so far as to say the sinking into long reading stands a fair chance of defragmenting my own drive and with it my approach to time and freedom.
When the splint comes off in mid-January, I’ll be back, busy, and available for editorial and research tasking.
In the meantime, I cannot tell you how much one’s hand needs one’s chief offending finger to do the simplest things . . . .
Still, it’s not like it’s the end of the world. 😉 😉
12 Friday Oct 2012
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