I’ve found possibly the niftiest little blog in all of poetry:
They are here to let anyone and everyone poem. I have already started to poem all over them.
"Come September" by C.P. Harrison, a submission to LPP's September contest.
In other internet news, I’m kitbashing a real-deal site together: chrisjsf.com. Yes, it’s up. No, it’s nothing fancy yet. There’s a lot of rust to scrape off my scripting skills! I’ll keep you posted on its developments.
Chris
Now that the hard metaethical stuff is out of the way, dear reader, let’s get into the lurid, super-fun, hands-on ethical questions! I mean, of course, disposing of fetuses and no-holds-barred consensual consanguineous fucking. Look, we need to take a position on these things eventually – who knows what our friends will get up to when they’re drunk enough?
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal calling out a couple of jerks.
Q25: Is it objectively wrong to torture innocent babies just for fun?
They might get up to this. Way to start the post with a bang.
Continue reading ’101 Philosophical Questions Part 7: Babies, Sex and Friendship’
The last post in this series dealt with only half of a single question: is morality relative? After I went through the troubles inherent to moral realism, I set the stage for how relativists might build morality in an inhospitable, amoral universe and, more importantly, tried to justify why we might want to. This post is meant to sketch out some moral ideas which can survive – or, perhaps more accurately, cope with – the skeptical and nihilistic feelings that inevitably seem to surface when we accept that no external moral code for us to follow is simply going to be handed to us. It’s not going to be a full treatment – I’m not nearly well-read enough to put an academy-grade ethics together – but I hope it’ll be enough to put to loose use for the rest of the 101.
Continue reading ’101 Philosophical Questions Part 6: Question 24, Part 2′
One of the wonderful things about graduating is the abrupt discovery of time to actually get some reading done. Anyone who takes any post-secondary program seriously enough will never find any time to read any book that isn’t part of a syllabus somewhere. So, aside from a few experiments – and reviews for Culture Vulture, of course – my creative writing side has been, for the most part, inert. For Spiderman’s sake, I rescued two shelves of lit journals from FIA203 before UVic demolished the shelves for legroom (a fair trade for six-foot-something, mostly-leg monstrosities like me) and they weren’t going to read themselves. Also: Kurt Vonnegut. Aside from a lot – a lot – of Team Fortress 2, I wasn’t wasting too much literary time.
Imagine sticking your head out the window to take a really deep breath a few seconds after loosing a very long fart. Reading after graduation is sort of like that.
Uncomfortable metaphors aside, I’m back in the mood to do a lot of typing about things like Godzilla and global warming and feelings and Hello Kitty. So I’ve set some goals to up my textual output.
New writing projects make me feel sort of like this.
Project #1 involves another step towards my inevitable total corruption by the internet. I got a Twitter. Here it is: CFtickertxt. It is blank. It will stay that way until my age formally increments on June 4th.
The ticker text in the title refers to the Ticker Text Project which I blogged about here, almost a year ago. The final version was so impossibly cool (if only to me) that I’ve decided to do what all good poets do with things they like: run it into the ground until nobody else can touch it ever again. The plan, or the rules, by which I will do so:
The madness starts in two weeks, and will eventually churn out around 51100 characters worth of poetry.
Project #2 is less a project and more just a commitment. Four lines or more a day. That’s all. I’ve been handed the keys to a group poetry blog called Sum Whit, so if I figure out how Tumblr works then I can start updating there. I’ll probably do this on a weekly basis, since I suspect these fragments to be less self-contained than the Twitter poems (read: will actually go somewhere). The details and a schedule will come out with the first posts. All said, this project will manufacture at least 1460 lines of poetry, or around 58 poems of an appropriate length for a magazine or journal, which is kind of neat.
The plan is also to start this different, more acceptable brand of madness on June 4th.
How do I think this will go? “Good enough” is a good enough answer, I hope. I’m not holding my breath (see what I did there?) for a long, deep seam of poetic coal to burn but quantity has a knack for finding quality eventually. If I get just a whiff of where to go next artistically, then I’ll breathe a sigh of relief on my next birthday.
And probably get fall-down drunk, too.
…I really like Dylan Thomas.
This post has been a long time coming! The subject: morality. A mixture of IRL things have postponed it and a mixture of IRL reading and writing and thinking has thrown many of the answers I was going to give back into question. I figure this sort of thing happens to everyone in their early twenties (except maybe Hiltons and royalty) when the real world hits and we have to think about what principles we can afford to keep. It’s not pleasant or easy trying to be good on limited resources – Peter Singer once diagnosed the feeling as “I don’t want to be the only sucker” – and it also isn’t pleasant to try to square the facts of our life with the values we want to fulfill in it. The good news is that this sort of trouble leads me directly to my first point.
And we’re off!
Continue reading ’101 Philosophical Questions Part 5: Question Twenty-Four Part 1′
Click the image and ready yourself for the hyperreality of FRIDAY FRIDAY GOTTA GET DOWN ON FRIDAY —
I love you, 4chan. Don't evar change.
My roommate got me Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature for Christmas (for the record, I got him a collection of essays called College Sex and Philosophy) and after a month of reading it in the lunchroom at work I’ve finally finished it.
Richard Rorty was like this before he got pancreatic cancer and died.
Richard Rorty is a genius. I’ll have to write about him in detail sometime. Generally speaking, though, where he succeeds most is in stripping what’s good in Continental philosophy from its pretentious vocabulary and knee-jerk hostility to science and technology. I’m looking at you, Heidegger.
In the man’s own words, from pages 388 and 389 of the 30th anniversary edition of the book:
“The fear of ‘science,’ of ‘scientism,’ of ‘naturalism,’ of self-objectivation, of being turned by too much knowledge into a thing rather than a person, is the fear that all discourse will become normal discourse … the fear that there will be objectively true and false answers to every question we ask, so that human worth will consist in knowing truths, and human virtue will be merely justified true belief. This is frightening because it cuts off the possibility of something new under the sun, of human life as poetic rather than merely contemplative.
“But the dangers to abnormal discourse do not come from science or naturalistic philosophy. They come from scarcity of food and the secret police. Given leisure and libraries, the conversation which Plato began will not end in self-objectivation – not because aspects of the world, or of human beings, escape being objects of scientific inquiry, but simply because free and leisured conversation generates abnormal discourse as the sparks fly upward. “
Right on, Richard Rorty.
