Em.. Sing it Sister!

A chest freezer full of organ meat? Sounds like it's time to make some haggis! YUMM!!!

I managed to understand half of that.

seriously, please write your blogs on a 8th grade level.

I've read several paragraphs of Finnegan's Wake and find that to be quite enough. I'm much more interested in a portrait of the punk rock poet laureate and nerd seductress as a young, awkward, unattractive nerdy kid with severe social dysfunction.

-TTm

I don't think Joyce has finished reading Finnegans Wake. I just read it for the quarks.

Our lives are so very opposite this year. You're saving - I'm pouring mine into a likely unprofitable venture. You're a paleo advocate, I'm still veg. You've returned to Southern roots, I'm still loving The Bay. We're overdue for a proper catch up. Geography's a bitch.

Its strange most of my real close friends are from only the last maybe eight years people from school not so much, its interesting who comes and goes and the ones that stick around, the two closest friends I will ever have I've only known about 5 years

it's hard to prove someone's read finnegans wake, I read the first couple pages and I don't even remember what those were about.

I think I will read everything you have ever written that is at my disposal today. Yes, this sounds like a task I am up to.

I am.so pretentious I named a dog I found on the streets of SFV Finnegan. And i use the book as my primary proof that Joyce is a stream-of-consciousness writer. Which shows how foolish I am.

Finnegan's Wake sits on my bookshelf, still taunting me after all these years. i've never been able to get past the first 5 pages. I had a friend named Jim who came bursting into my workplace one day, demanding I randomly open the copy of Wake he was carrying and start reading aloud. Pretty sure he was tripping.

A fine journal entry; I approve of this message.

I take it organ meats are part of the paleo diet you mentioned? I hear "organ meat", think "liver" and go bleecchhh! ... how does heart taste? And don't say "like chicken".
Reading Finnegan's Wake is one of those things on my "to do" list that I somehow never get to. Which makes me wonder what my library card is for... I guess that makes me the awkward UNattractive nerdy kid with social dysfunction who hasn't read it, dammit.
Onward and upward for you!

After I read your opening paragraph, the words "Winnegan's Fake" popped into my head. This struck me as completely hilarious, so much so that I felt compelled to write it here. However, even as I write this, it is beginning to dawn on me that "Winnegan's Fake" is not really all that amusing after all. However, some kind of strange momentum is compelling me to continue typing my unfunny joke much in the way that, once one has begun to take a step foward and having, at the last minute, perceived an obstacle, one is often unable to voluntarily arrest one's motion.

On another note, have you ever read anything by Dostoyevsky? I recently 'discovered' his writings when I came across a single volume edition of "Notes From Underground" and "The Double". Since then I have read "The Idiot".

"Notes From Underground" is more of a treatise than a work of fiction. It mostly contains musings on the human condition.

Philosophers (well some philosophers) and other scholarly types in general have tended at times to try to base their ideas concerning morality, politics, intentionality etc upon theories of human nature, making the assumption that humans are 'rational agents' and that, if only we could teach people to see which things are in their best interests, then everyone would behave rationally. Conveniently enough, behaviours which we think of as 'good' happen would come under the category of rational behaviours while behaviours which we think of as 'bad' would come under the category of irrational behaviours. Hence questions of morality, politics etc would neatly translate into questions of practical rationality. Once one goes down this route, one may even go so far as to suggest that, given enough data about the world and about which things are in the best interest of people, then it would be possible to reduce human nature and the study of morality, politics etc to a set of equations thus allowing law, government etc to be conducted along precise and scientifc lines.

Dostoyevsky's "Notes From Underground" was written as a challenge to this sort of point of view. He believes that humans often dont always act in their best interest, or to their "advantage" (to use the word used by Dostoyevsky, or rather the word used by the person who translated my copy of "Notes From Underground") and this is because, even when one has calculated and quanitified all of the known human advantages ("wealth, freedom, peace and so on), there remains one "abstruse advantage" which "doesn't fit into any classification, or cannot be accommodated in any list...".

Dostoyevsky states, by way of expanation, that we all know of someone who will "...expound to you, lucidly and grandiloquently, exactly how he should proceed according to laws of truth and logic..." and except that "...exactly a quarter of an hour later, without any sudden, outside mediation, but rather prompted by some inner impulse which is stronger than all his interests, he'll take a completely different tack, that is to say, he'll blatantly go against what he was just saying: against the laws of reason and against his own best interests - in short against everything...".

Dostoyevsky argues that, "...doesn't there exist...something that is dearer to almost everyone than his own very best interests or (not to violate logic) there exists one most advantageous advantage ... which is more important and advantageous that any other advantage and for the sake of which man ... is ready to oppose all laws, that is, reason, honour, peace, prosperity ... provided he attains this primary, most advantageous advantage which is dearest of all to him?" Dostoyevsky goes on to argue that the one advantage which outweighs all of the others, and which does not fit in, is the ability to believe that one is acting as a free agent. For Dostoyevsky, once we have "deduced your whole register of human advantages by taking averages from statistics and scientifico-economic formulae...", if we, "...do in fact discover one day a formula for all our desires and caprices - that is, what they depend on, exactly from what laws they originate ... and so on, that's to say a real mathematical formula, then man would immediatly change from a man into an organ stop or something like that...". Dostoyevsky's argument is that humans, knowing full well what course of action is to their best advantage, will assert their sense of free will by taking a course of action which is apparently disadvantageous, thus proving to themself that they are not an organ stop (or equivalent).