evaluating people

One thing that, i guess, would help to understand me, (assuming anyone is trying to which is kinda arrogant but anyway), is the way i evaluate people. Because, you know, i am kinda good at the whole understanding people thing, which came as quite a surprise to me, when i realized it was the case. And of the various things i can or cannot do, this is one that does not translate easily into words, it is something that is very awkward to explain. So maybe it is not really straightforward, let me try to talk about it a little.

lucidity, or rescuing the project of Enlightenment

A long time ago, a bunch of fellas like Kant and his fans came up with this thing called Aufklärung or Enlightenment which meant that human reason would finally make us humans mature or free or, you know, take us to rainbow-land where the trees sing and everyone is happy. This same endeavour appears in contemporary colours everywhere, in the likes of Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Now on the other side of the intellectual ocean people like Foucault went nuts over the whole thing, claiming it was a sort of dictatorial attempt at nullifying subjectivity. Since mostly i sit firmly in this side of the fence, being a silly fanboy of Derrida, i usually sound very derisive of the first bunch, but as of now i’d like to try and make amends.

Reason got conflated with a very specific (and somewhat misguided) shade of science, that was indeed a little hasty. But maybe instead of this “reason” we could just have lucidity.

father

Day before yesterday i was having some coffee at the best cafè in town, and an olg man came in, ordered 3 coffees to go, chatted a little with the attendants, and left. He was an old, businesslike, conceited little old man. He hauled around the heavy arrogance of a fake power, a power that (who knows) he might even have but is still fake in that it is more important to show it than to use it. The weight of a lifetime of morality and harshness bogged him down (and he likely took it as raising him above the chaff). The lightness of his thin frail bones shone him a mysterious beauty (and he likely took it for his undoing). He reminded me of my father, with all the ambiguity this image had to me, with all the pain that this memory entails. And the memory of my father is still the memory of not being good enough, not being accepted, being left behind and him giving up on me. And this memory is also my shyness, this abandonment the reason i don’t feel worthy of love, the reason i don’t pursue my desires, that my passion always needs to be justified and rationalized. This is the broken sword of legends. And it is pain.

With tear in my eyes i post this on facebuk, and 16 random people “like” it!

500 is easy

Last post was the 500th of this blog. An old sports magazine had a cartoon of a cat saying that reaching 500 issues was easy, he dared them get to 5000. Because years back the same cat had said 50 was easy. Actually i was supposed to write something about all this on post 500 proper, but i got sidetracked, and i confused the day the rant about presence was supposed to air, which is ok since that text is exceedingly decent to my usual standard, therefore here we are, a 501st post called 500 is easy. Which is not particularly easy, it turns out.

The plan was a very bland, composed, politically correct, presence-managed, and easily readable announcement that thet Temporary Referential fanzine had reached number five and was finally available in good revised PDFs and also collected in a fabulous comemorative pack (costing all of 5 dinheiros).

But then a fabulous dirty-faced girl told me she was in crisis with her blog, that she had been writing for the wrong people, and you know it kinda got me thinking… So, while i do think, i’ll just leave it like that.

Also: If you do have some of the zines but not all, you can go print them, but you can also SEND ME AN EMAIL (the address is down here somewhere) telling me exactly which ones you lack.

Now excuse me, i’ll check out Fernando Gonsales as he premieres Vostradeis, an old favourite of mine. Till
next time.