A Number of Syncretious Posts

So, in the repetition of a little November custom I have (more on that immediately) and in the pre-requisition of thought in preparation for something new (more on that much later), and because I am just the sort of weird guy to do it, I found myself sitting down with my copy of Heidegger's Being and Time last week.

This book is a lot of things. Above all, it's pack to the walls with stuff. After you've first tangled with it, unless you are making your career on its back, it's the sort of book you read a few passages of at a time, and then put it back on the shelf. Luckily it's so packed full, and arranged into relatively small, detailed, topical sections, that it bends itself in this direction.

Due to recent interests of mine, and the items mentioned in the first paragraph, I decided to turn to the sections on temporality. Everybody (everybody?) knows about Dasein, or "there-being", but it's easy to forget that the second half of the title is actually about good old Time, the more interesting half of metaphysics, in my view.

What I'm going to do here, is to re-write section 73 of Being in Time, entitled The Vulgar Understanding of History and the Occurence of Dasein. Interspersed with these paragraphs, I'm going to insert my own commentary, explaining just what I found so interesting in this passage, as relates to some of my favorite ideas about cyber-time, atemporality, history, perception, and materialism.

Why I'm doing this, other than flexing my atrophying philosophical muscles and wasting blank space on the Internet we will never be able to recover, as well as minutes of your life and mine which we will never get back and therefore be that much closer to death, is actually a blog post in itself, which you can read about in full here. Whether this post comes first, or that post comes first, is a little vicissitude we'll leave up to Blogger, because I'm going to post them at exactly the same time. Maybe the other post is the main point--or maybe this one is. Maybe neither are. But, more on these problems... in time.

Witty puns 'til November...

Hey, its November! A great month all around!

Our five regular readers will remember that this is pCARL month.

pCARL is the pseudo-Creative Annual Ritual for Literature, birthed from my perhaps wry, failing sense of humor and my theoretical disappointment with National Novel Writing Month.

Basically, the idea is that the exercise of attempting to write a "novel", (a specious idea in itself, as the only constraints seem to be fiction and +20,000 words) in one month, while perhaps helping those who work best under arbitrary deadlines and contest-like project rules, is not really a very helpful stimulus to writing.

However, a yearly celebration of writing does sound like an awesome idea, especially if conceived as both a writing exercise, a celebration of the writing community, and a general stimulating project for new and current writers.

I thought pCARL might be be a better idea. You can read the entire argument in the link above, but generally, the idea is that we re-write a novel that we already enjoy, pretty much word for word. It's a close-reading study, a mimicry exercise, and something to do while we wait for our own creative juices to start flowing (which we hope that they would be, all year round).

Last year I re-wrote the first chapter of Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. It was a lot more work than I originally thought, for just re-typing a short printed chapter. It was fun, and I had planned to do more, but then immediately my own creativity grabbed a hold of me (for better or worse) and I embarked on a long string of other projects, one being my recently published novella. Goodness, that smug feeling of self-promotion gives me a rush.

I don't know if I will do a pCARL this year. I'm still swamped in other projects. Megan is working on one, (code name: Cookbook) with even further goals of re-publishing! I'm helping too, but so far she has done most of the re-writing.

If you are interested in taking part in pCARL, for a book, a story, a chapter, or even a page (hell, just do a sentence if you want!) let me know in the comments section. I'm interested to hear how other people experienced the project.


Also, there is the pCARL blog, that still exists. You can post your experiences there too. In fact, if you write them up in a nice paragraph, (or more) I'll even post them!

happy pCARL!