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J.R.R. Toykin's
Jan. 15th, 2004 01:03 amSaw the Simpsons episode today from whence the title of today's entry comes. Also, I watched the O.C. today for the first time ever so that I can have some idea of what Alanna is talking about when she waxes rhaphsodic about Adam Brody and his character Seth. Also, for some reason I've watched a bit of the Charlie Rose show the past couple days. Mostly because I've flipped past, and yesterday Al Franken was on, and today there were people with British accents, so of course I stopped to listen. And one of those people with a British accent was Kenneth Branaugh. Yes, I'm a sucker for accents and have just been reading some articles about accents, including one about how the Scots accent is the sexiest. (The article I read which links to that one has an amusing ranty bit.)
Fixed my computer yesterday. Mozilla tried to eat it a couple months ago, and I finally dumped all the Mozilla files I could find. Then I ran Disk First Aid, and hey, what do you know, it acutally repaired problems with the hard disk instead of giving me an error message like it had been doing. I'm guessing that the Mozilla mail client had something to do with the problems, because it wasn't until after I started using that Mozilla started messing with things. So I think I'll download Firebird, because I'm getting really damn tired of the pop-ups I have to deal with in IE.
Went to buy my books today, after stuffing IMS envelopes. Spent over $300, and I don't even have everything I need because quite a few books weren't in. But I also didn't have to buy everything, because there were four books I already have: Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse-Five (both of which are for satire), and Nietzsche's Gay Science and Plato's Phaedrus. And now for a list of the stuff I bought today:
( Read more indeed... )
There are some horrifically long books in there for Modern Philosophy. To wit: Kant, Locke, Montaigne, and Hume. The Montaigne especially makes me want to cry, given that it's over 1000 pages. We can't possibly be reading all the books in their entirety for that class. But hey, that's what I get for being a literature and philosophy type. I'm both terrified and absolutely delighted. Yay for intellectual masochism.
Modern Philosophy seems to be the only class for which I have all the required books for. Maybe the Indo-European class too, because I have both books which were listed on the flyer about it, but there seemed to be another book that was supposed to be on the shelf but was missing. Still need some books for Satire, Middle English, and Philosophy & Literature, plus everything for Drugs & Lit. Apparently those were ordered late. So I still have no idea what we're reading for that class.
I've been reading a book Alanna lent me, The Woman in the Body by Emily Martin. It's interesting, once I got past the initial warbling about problematic language. It's much better once she starts actually examining things. But I'm still having a bit of trouble with one of the passages on birth. (Trouble in this case meaning I want to argue about it.) Martin says, "Instead of seeing the Pithiviers [a clinic which allows greater freedom in the birthing process] women as engaged in a 'natural' lower-order activity, why can we not see them as engaged in higher-order activity?" This is after she criticizes the doctor who runs the clinic for emphasizing the "natural" aspect of birth and thus once again associating women with the domestic, cut off from "culture." But my question is, Why must we persist in seeing the "natural" as "lower-order." I can see how such a view arises. If we take Descartes' view, mind and body are separate. So we associate mind with culture and body with nature. And then we introduce a hierarchy, because people like to order things that way. And since mind and culture are associated with rationality, which has been revered since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, that gets to be higher order. So of course the body and all its attendant associations must be of a lower order. But what if we disagree with Descartes? I do (on more than this issue, too). I don't think of mind and body as completely separate entities, so there is no problem of how the mind influences the body. Instead, I think of mind and body as component parts of the same thing. Looking at things that way, it becomes rather arbitrary and absurd to assign either part to a lower or higher place within a hierarchy. So giving birth is no less noble than, say, writing a book. Both acts involve creation, which is of different type but not different worth. Perhaps at the base of it I just don't understand how birth can not be associated with the natural. Nor do I understand why natural has to be bad or devalued.
Fixed my computer yesterday. Mozilla tried to eat it a couple months ago, and I finally dumped all the Mozilla files I could find. Then I ran Disk First Aid, and hey, what do you know, it acutally repaired problems with the hard disk instead of giving me an error message like it had been doing. I'm guessing that the Mozilla mail client had something to do with the problems, because it wasn't until after I started using that Mozilla started messing with things. So I think I'll download Firebird, because I'm getting really damn tired of the pop-ups I have to deal with in IE.
Went to buy my books today, after stuffing IMS envelopes. Spent over $300, and I don't even have everything I need because quite a few books weren't in. But I also didn't have to buy everything, because there were four books I already have: Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse-Five (both of which are for satire), and Nietzsche's Gay Science and Plato's Phaedrus. And now for a list of the stuff I bought today:
( Read more indeed... )
There are some horrifically long books in there for Modern Philosophy. To wit: Kant, Locke, Montaigne, and Hume. The Montaigne especially makes me want to cry, given that it's over 1000 pages. We can't possibly be reading all the books in their entirety for that class. But hey, that's what I get for being a literature and philosophy type. I'm both terrified and absolutely delighted. Yay for intellectual masochism.
Modern Philosophy seems to be the only class for which I have all the required books for. Maybe the Indo-European class too, because I have both books which were listed on the flyer about it, but there seemed to be another book that was supposed to be on the shelf but was missing. Still need some books for Satire, Middle English, and Philosophy & Literature, plus everything for Drugs & Lit. Apparently those were ordered late. So I still have no idea what we're reading for that class.
I've been reading a book Alanna lent me, The Woman in the Body by Emily Martin. It's interesting, once I got past the initial warbling about problematic language. It's much better once she starts actually examining things. But I'm still having a bit of trouble with one of the passages on birth. (Trouble in this case meaning I want to argue about it.) Martin says, "Instead of seeing the Pithiviers [a clinic which allows greater freedom in the birthing process] women as engaged in a 'natural' lower-order activity, why can we not see them as engaged in higher-order activity?" This is after she criticizes the doctor who runs the clinic for emphasizing the "natural" aspect of birth and thus once again associating women with the domestic, cut off from "culture." But my question is, Why must we persist in seeing the "natural" as "lower-order." I can see how such a view arises. If we take Descartes' view, mind and body are separate. So we associate mind with culture and body with nature. And then we introduce a hierarchy, because people like to order things that way. And since mind and culture are associated with rationality, which has been revered since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, that gets to be higher order. So of course the body and all its attendant associations must be of a lower order. But what if we disagree with Descartes? I do (on more than this issue, too). I don't think of mind and body as completely separate entities, so there is no problem of how the mind influences the body. Instead, I think of mind and body as component parts of the same thing. Looking at things that way, it becomes rather arbitrary and absurd to assign either part to a lower or higher place within a hierarchy. So giving birth is no less noble than, say, writing a book. Both acts involve creation, which is of different type but not different worth. Perhaps at the base of it I just don't understand how birth can not be associated with the natural. Nor do I understand why natural has to be bad or devalued.
