ALL FUCKING RIGHT!!

I am about to make me a blog post. I really need to start writing at home again, or to find a late night venue that I feel comfortable in. My comfort level is important for this purpose. I've also discovered that I can't write to relax, I write because I am relaxed. Or at least I write because I am not stressed out. Normally when I get stressed out I do all I can to fix the problem so I can go back to my normal life. For example tonight I am seeing the Lorax, hopefully with some people other than Corey but I can't be certain.

I could write about the whole car situation but it really doesn't interest me. What does interest me is the way knowledge is conveyed within an essay format. Anyone who knows me fairly well knows that I have a bizzare interest in foreign policy. I mean seriously of all the hobbies to have, I read foreign policy journals. I am pretty sure that if it wasn't for chance meetings I'd still be a virgin. Anywho so yeah I do that that for fun. I also have been amassing a suprising amount of historical information, some of it is a side effect of foreign policy reading, historical war gaming, EU3, pleasure reading, and my ability to take knowlage from a wide variety of sources and to make it into a coherent narrative. I've also read my fair share of historical journal articles while doing stuff for english.

It was the other day when I read 5 whole pages of the ASL rulebook without having to look something up that it hit me, why the fuck are English, and philosophy papers so obtuse. Lets set aside the actual scholarship on the subject and look at the orginal texts. So right now this means we are focusing on philosphy. When you compare Spivak, Deluze, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and even Wittenstein's the Tractatus (I don't feel like looking up how to spell it) all these authors set out to explain unusually complex ideas but they do so in unusually complex ways. Deluze and Lacan pretty much just do it to be annoying. I know this because Deluz's book on Masochism is extraordinarily clear and easy to understand and Lacan comes right out and says he likes to make his ideas overly complex. I am pretty sure Spivak wrote her works in her "distinctive" voice so that she could get respect from her male dominanted peers, the others have their reasons too I'm sure but I think there is something to be said for not writing in a dense impenatrable way.

I like it. But I enjoy reading forgiegn policy journals, A Serbian Film, and sadomasochistic sex rituals so it isn't like I am a good yard stick for judging these things. Also fine. The original texts are complex. I've come to realize that sometimes you need to use highly elevated language to get an idea across at first. Then you can use less elevated language to make the idea clear to others. That old maxim of, "If you can't explain the concept to a 3rd grader then you don't really understand the concept" rings true for me. So it would seem to me that a certain part of the scholarship would take place of a verbally deelevated level in order to enhance the understanding of the base concepts.

This is not the case. One pleasently interesting observation was made by one of the TTC lecturers at the start of the existentialism class. He said that a lot of people get trapped into a "cult of nessesity". It is the idea that scholars paticularly in the english/philosphy side of things get antsy about not being needed anymore. This is especially true since most people from either discapline can't eloquently verbalize a set of reasons for their nessisity. Personally I think that in order to upper division classes in an english department you should have to submit an essay to the department stating why you think your course work is nessisary and worth persuing but that's just me. Still I think that the cult of nessesity is really killing both English and Philosphy as disicplines. English went through that horrible period where they tried to make it more like a science so that people would stop cutting their programs and trust me, that was a terrible idea. Now it is coming back in a form much more insidious as we try to make ourselves seem so important by making our ideas incomprehensible.

There is a huge difference between making an idea deliberatly difficult for the sake of sounding more important, and making an idea sound difficult because you are straining your brain's ability to articulate ideas.

Anyway it sucks and people should produce actual good ideas not just complex sounding ones.

People should also have the ability to do it in plain language without the fear of being budget cut. I have more to say on this topic but work is calling me.