I'm off work for a nice sunny day.
Nov. 9th, 2006 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ffloDebating beginning the tackling of the can o' worms construction problem, in addition to (or even instead of) the chainsawing of the fallen tree. Surely I can find a way to get something moderately weather resistant going there before winter descends fully? Gotta do SOMEthing, after all, and winter is a long time.
There's a big Caterpillar street-scrapey bulldozer outside my window, shaping and flattening the dirt section of the road. He's respecting my re-grown grass re-claimed strip, too. Ha! It's all city property, but if I hadn't staked out my assertion that grass go back where that last sloppy road gravelling messed up the edge so nastily, that Cat would be flattening and making driveable another 2-4 feet closer to where I sit at the moment.
I used to know the names of many fundamental kinds of heavy equipment as a kid. Not cuz of those popular videos for children of the big construction machines---they didn't have those yet. Cuzza having a big brother who was into that stuff.
The only Tonka truck I seem to have retained, however, is an army Jeep one.
Well, off to the world in a sec, but wanted to say this: there's something about this Language Log entry that rings the big bells in my head that say there's danger in getting too into the synapses and the happiness located so fundamentally up there/here--- in this guy's case, in linguistics and the meta- kinda level of reading & experiencing meaning. It's a too-in-yer-head thing that is another metaphorical cousin of what I identify with about the striking line in Henry and June (and perhaps in Anais's diaries) when the dude warns her, regarding letting herself get into "aberrant" sexual practices, that (basically) it might well ruin the vanilla for her entirely. The many ice cream flavors of sexuality and their relative appeals to the palate aren't such fraught territory for me. But...
One fear that that "Warning! Don't go too far!" thing has connected to for me for some time is that encouraging too sophisticated or rarified aesthetic tastes to take over seems, to my gut, to have the potential to undo the ability to appreciate many of the "lesser" pleasures of the arts (yes) and of the broader cultural junque-du-jour. That too-in-the-head thing, though: there's an even scarier danger there. Please, goddesses of personality and pleasure, don't let me get to the point that I take the kind of delight Geoffrey K. Pullum does in the coincident tropes. At least if my hunch that he's lost so many more simple pleasures is even a little dead-on.
I want more of the joys of my life to be in, for one, the things of the physical world, and my experiencing/appreciating my entire physiog (such as I can manage), but in, indeedy-do also, at least a good number of more common pleasures of broader swaths of ---okay, fine: bright, but kinda regular and/or connected and/or appreciative-of-the-ordinary fellow human beans.
There's a big Caterpillar street-scrapey bulldozer outside my window, shaping and flattening the dirt section of the road. He's respecting my re-grown grass re-claimed strip, too. Ha! It's all city property, but if I hadn't staked out my assertion that grass go back where that last sloppy road gravelling messed up the edge so nastily, that Cat would be flattening and making driveable another 2-4 feet closer to where I sit at the moment.
I used to know the names of many fundamental kinds of heavy equipment as a kid. Not cuz of those popular videos for children of the big construction machines---they didn't have those yet. Cuzza having a big brother who was into that stuff.
The only Tonka truck I seem to have retained, however, is an army Jeep one.
Well, off to the world in a sec, but wanted to say this: there's something about this Language Log entry that rings the big bells in my head that say there's danger in getting too into the synapses and the happiness located so fundamentally up there/here--- in this guy's case, in linguistics and the meta- kinda level of reading & experiencing meaning. It's a too-in-yer-head thing that is another metaphorical cousin of what I identify with about the striking line in Henry and June (and perhaps in Anais's diaries) when the dude warns her, regarding letting herself get into "aberrant" sexual practices, that (basically) it might well ruin the vanilla for her entirely. The many ice cream flavors of sexuality and their relative appeals to the palate aren't such fraught territory for me. But...
One fear that that "Warning! Don't go too far!" thing has connected to for me for some time is that encouraging too sophisticated or rarified aesthetic tastes to take over seems, to my gut, to have the potential to undo the ability to appreciate many of the "lesser" pleasures of the arts (yes) and of the broader cultural junque-du-jour. That too-in-the-head thing, though: there's an even scarier danger there. Please, goddesses of personality and pleasure, don't let me get to the point that I take the kind of delight Geoffrey K. Pullum does in the coincident tropes. At least if my hunch that he's lost so many more simple pleasures is even a little dead-on.
I want more of the joys of my life to be in, for one, the things of the physical world, and my experiencing/appreciating my entire physiog (such as I can manage), but in, indeedy-do also, at least a good number of more common pleasures of broader swaths of ---okay, fine: bright, but kinda regular and/or connected and/or appreciative-of-the-ordinary fellow human beans.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
elucidation
Date: Nov. 9th, 2006 06:11 pm (UTC)being of the literary critical profession, i do think of that constantly and of the ways not to kill the sense that some people can/could hear the music and the others simply could not and that we want to give proper credit to those who could (while also acknowledging the price of it; byron would be a case in point). so i'm thinking this is not about the danger of being one with one's synapses and their operatations, but about the willingness and urge to report on those to other people and demonstrate control and mastery.
also thinking about how much this reminds me of people who explain to you what was funny in the joke they had just told you. something patently offensive there that you can't even begin to report back to the offender. something about the respect for the unstated and the unopressive and for the miracle of resilience of the 3D world in which thinking, mirthful people operate despite everything.
Re: elucidation
Date: Nov. 10th, 2006 05:03 am (UTC)He had no end of interest in analyzing what was funny. For him it was with a purpose in mind. He really wanted to figure it out. So he could use it. Preferably, somehow eventually, to get laid, I'm sure.
On the relative dangers of the drive to show mastery and the pull to get sucked up into the squirreling-away into the head, sans or avec audience, I'm guessing what you and I fear there may differ slightly because of where we're each at. (Pardon the final preposition in that proposition.)
It's really late now, though. I watched 3 episodes of The Sopranos this evening. Humphrey just hunkered down between me and the back of this ReUse Center office chair, right into the small of my back, as he does sometimes, like a custom-fit heating pad with a soul, but I may get up soon anyway, disturbing him, to lie down and sleep.
resilience, 3D world, thinking, mirthful people... trying to rally my belief there. perhaps in the a.m.