10th January 2005

Autodidacticism, or Quacking like a Duck

posted in Philosophistry and Stuff, The Proprietor, What Democracy Looks Like |

Betty writes about the game she is developing:  "The objective of this game is to collect the most happiness for the least amount of work without going broke."  Her cousin Norm posts today a complete essay by Jonathan Rose, "The Classics in the Slums."  Buried deep in this essay, we find the following homage to Thomas Carlyle:

No doubt Thomas Carlyle was a cranky male supremacist, but for
Elizabeth Bryson (b. 1880), the daughter of an impoverished Dundee

bookkeeper, he offered "the exciting experience of being kindled to the
point of explosion by the fire of words." Carlyle’s "gospel of work" so
inspired her that she was driven to win a university degree and become
a distinguished New Zealand physician.

Another cranky male, although no supremacist, has been taking Carlyle to task in these parts for his unmitigated racism, among other things.  The Carlyle/Emerson bond and the puerility of privileged Brahmin transcendentalism rub Chris the wrong way.  There’s a not so subtle irony here considering that Chris Locke, one of our era’s more profound non-conformists, feels such antipathy for one we might judge his intellectual progenitor.

Emerson can’t be all bad.  He gave Thoreau a place to crash more than once.

By his personal example Thoreau put into practice the Transcendentalist
principles of self-reliance, personal integrity, and spontaneous
intuition. About the uplifting spiritual energy within he wrote,
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable
ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor."
For Thoreau philosophy was not clever logic or formulating a doctrine,
"but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates,
a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."
He exhorted, "Explore thyself." We must learn to obey
the laws of our own being which will never be in opposition to
a just government. Thoreau’s great innovation is in the ways he
suggested for opposing an unjust government in order to be true
to the higher laws of one’s own being.

Today Dan Gillmor reminds us that Free Speech Belongs to Us All. 

…in a time when the lines are blurring between journalists and the rest
of us, remember that freedom of speech (and religion and the right to
peaceful assembly, etc.) belongs to everyone. It is the foundation of
liberty.

I’ve had some professional training and some higher education (hoo boy was it higher! esp. the part in the sixties~)  but my practice is that of the autodidact.  The sad news is that my memory is shot and my rationality ain’t that grand and I use cheap shot ad hominem debating tactics so all this autodidacticism goes for naught… I am at best a legend in my own mind.  I don’t remember a single line of Rupert Brooke.  The satire of Thomas Love Peacock is lost on me.  When Norm’s uncle loaned me Hersey’s The Child Buyer back in 1960, I read the book and promptly forgot every word. When Betty’s husband loaned me Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions eight or ten years later.  I stashed it and only read it while I was blowing dope.  This is not a course I’d recommend for the serious student.  This is not even a course I’d recommend for someone who simply wants to lead a happy life.  I don’t recall ever returning that book.

Not that I didn’t enjoy it.  The weed I mean… I don’t remember a word of the Kuhn.  But I think I inhaled more deeply and more often than Bill and Hillary and you see where that got us.  I live in this little rat shack on the swamp and they live in the posh totty suburbs not too far from Manhattan.

These days I read all there is to read of Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Larry McMurtry… oh and Tom Wolfe, and all the great airport novelists like Grisham and Clancy.  Sometimes I get stuck reading Feynman and recently I’ve been forced to swallow great chunks of theory of mesh wireless networking talk and such, but that’s in hopes of staying employable.

One thing most of these novelists aren’t doing is exercising their rights of free speech very strenuously.  You have to go to bloggers like Chris Locke, Norm Jenson, and Dan Gillmor for that.

I do read a lot of blog posts too I guess.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 10th, 2024 at 9:25 and is filed under Philosophistry and Stuff, The Proprietor, What Democracy Looks Like. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 4 responses to “Autodidacticism, or Quacking like a Duck”

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  1. 1 On January 10th, 2024, Norm Jenson said:

    Can you believe that cousin of ours, designing games. Pretty damn cool, but as you know she has no takers yet. I think I’ve found the key to her success and have already emailed her with details. The missing piece is a Pet Goat What do you think? The most amount of happiness with the least amount of work I could live with that, now what was the part about not going broke. Oh yes, and just to set the record straight it was my son Chris that posted the Rose essay and what a dandy it is.

  2. 2 On January 11th, 2024, fp said:

    A pet goat could be the answer. They’re easy to care for, delightful and smart. The goat would craft her own relationship with the cows. She’d surprise you in the morning from her perch atop the high point… think picnic table here. Yes. A pet goat.

    Thanks to Chris J. for the Rose essay!

  3. 3 On January 11th, 2024, Norm Jenson said:

    Betty is not enthused about my goat idea. She writes, Well, you know what they say about goats - if a fence will hold water, it will hold a goat. That seems like a plus to me in a game you need winners and losers a goat would assure a fair share of losers.

  4. 4 On January 12th, 2024, bmo said:

    All the reading you’ve forgotten - supposably (I love that word, I’m going to use it until it becomes proper) forgotten - has washed over you and shaped you. That you can’t remember a line of poetry you read some thirty years ago is somewhat irrelevant. Somewhat: in the sad sense - a reflection of the value our educators put on memory. But that’s their job. Teaching us to be stupid. Still, the truth, to be found in your reading has shaped you, and you are a rock on the beach.

    Which is supposed to be a compliment, though rereading it I see it’s more like an insult.

    Free speech is one thing. But art is another. I’ve been really struggling lately. Struggling with that which I read on the blogs, which informs me, but doesn’t sustain me. I’m beginning now to wonder if the Cluetrain notion that markets are getting smarter isn’t flat out wrong. That markets are getting dumber. Information and conncectivity alone cannot sustain a human. He/she needs art. In fact, the more info I take in, the less human I feel. Number.

    That’s what I pulled from deep within the Rose essay - one of the best things I’ve read in some time. Free speech and free information have nothing to do with art. Think of art as the workaround, and primary in a free speeking free thinking human being’s development.

    Other than Tom Wolfe, I’ve not read any of the writers you’ve mentioned so I can’t judge whether they’re excercising their right to free speech or not. And Tom Wolfe I find to be a very good middle of the road commercial writer, but would in my books any way, fall short as an artist. (doesn’t matter why, here)

    The point being - and I do have a point here Frank - is this: art makes us. The classics - Shakespeare, Homer, Plato, Blake, Spinoza - whomever, throw in Picasso and Mozart as well, and for my money, of the living Americans, Bellow and Roth - give us spine. That’s what I took away from the essay more than anything.

    My education was appalling. The education my children are receiving is even worse. Art, literature, and music have been kidnapped, killed, stuffed, and mounted on the walls of as trophies in a stuffy room.

    I speek freely, am half-informed, and have no spine. I’m like everybody else round here. But still, every once in a while, when reading, or listening, or looking the spine tingles. I won’t go on here, but my thought might best be summed up thusly: in the commercial culture of North American there is a strain of anti-intellectualism that is borne of the intellectual and academic and educative class itself. That art itself is proprietory.

    More later.

    I have to make lunches for the kids. They can’t be late. It’s career day at school today. How fitting. Grades six and eight and they want them thinking about a job. God, somedays just start out wrong.

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