Saturday, September 14, 2024

summer 2024


See the site home page for the current update.

I expect upcoming discussions to no longer focus on the presidential campaign (which seems fated to elect Harris). I’ll get back to engagement with practical conceptual interests.


Sept. 11 | “For the best of America” weaves phrases from the leading speeches
of the Democratic National Convention into topics of my own. Also, the “campaign 2024” page is no longer in chronological order. The top four discussions are primary for me; the other six are supplementary now.


Sept. 9 | “Ours” is a short discussion, relative to the now-forgotten (?) Democratic National Convention, about the importance of words for binding us in kindred belonging. That will be followed soon by a discussion of DNC specifics for a progressive realism.


Sept. 6 | “Democratic mindfulness” introduces a continuum of person-al life as background for considering some aspects of the Democratic Party Platform and the focal spheres of the national convention.


Sept. 4 | The four Sept. 3 discussions here (“supplementary” now, late Sept.) begin a series about progressive politics. Three more discussions, dated Sept. 4, continue the “campaign 2024” project. These discussions are especially relative to recent media views about the campaign. That will be less so in coming weeks, I expect, since the fast-paced political race outpaces thoughtful comment by anyone not glued to the day’s news.


August 18 | Additional advice about inquiring and creative life is that there’s nothing like a fiction which effectively postures itself as non-fiction. To wit: marketing secrecy about the “fact” that the extraterrestrials are among us.

Actually, the aliens are among us: artistic lives and researchers drawn into very complex interests. Being in the clouds is transcendent.


August 15 | “some advice on inquiring and creative life.”


August 17 | I’m still not at closure on development of themes for near-term posting. But I’m close! The ever-receding horizon (self-shifting goal post) is nearly captured. I just need to finish organizing four years of mainstream media articles which are directly pertinent (a topography of value conceptuality in terms of mainstream news, especially scientific advances), which is part of bridging externalist (gedavis.com) and internalist (cohering.net) interests usefully, because my prevailing disposition is very conceptual (internalist). But, as you can see, I can stay casual.

Early September (?), I’ll post at length weekly for the foreseeable future (through 2025?).

Along the way, these days, I’ve commented at an article by the NYTimes or/and the Washington Post almost daily, sometimes twice or thrice a day. Sometimes, I’m uncomfortable with the degree of time each day I spend as a news junkie. But the reading gives me a singular sense of reality.

Comments over the past month (35 to date) have been mostly related to the Harris campaign. One was offering some fine points about reproductive rights (very Pro-Choice), some on Putin the “Great,” a couple on the Israel-Gaza war, and a few which further frame “Bozo” (Pelosi) Trump.

You can see some of the Harris-related comments as July/August “Replies” at my X account.

I keep a copy of every comment and its article link. I’ve been doing that for years. That has resulted in a large archive of comments (but relatively slight in size, compared to my archive of topical media sources—evidentiary points—for conceptual prospecting: many hundreds of URLs). That couldn’t interest anyone but me.

Someday, I could group the comments/articles by topic area and copy them all by topic into web pages, as part of “being in Time”—for readers who don’t have anything better to do.

But I do have better things to do.

Anyway, I’m a good read, I hope—but I read myself as a narrative character, an authorship, who sometimes seems strange to me, and worthy of sardonic framing or dismissive meta-narrative.

So it goes for the conceptualist mind: a chronic sense of surreality.

I trust that this update is important to you, because you are my fantasy reader (a standard writerly plight: anonymous audience), confession of which probably further undermines my academic credibility to persons who presume that conceptual work should intimate logocentric desire or formal tropology.

Whatever.

Also, some days I do lengthy email responses to academic authors of articles. I’m a happy gadfly sometimes, but mostly appreciative of their engagements.

Finding flowers (appealing work of others) and appreciating the Flow-ers’ flourishing is more good reason to love the day, and worth sharing.


July 20 | Democratic Party drama draws me into many long comments at articles by the NYTimes, which I could organize into a political narrative which is non-redundant across comments and independent from the specifics of the articles. But I don’t want to give time to that now. I’ll say this, though: If undecided voters prefer the low-energy, meandering conceit of a poseur over an authentic small-d democrat, the world is in greater risk of global autocracy than I’ve feared.


July 11 | I’m not ready for a new discussion yet. Thanks for stopping by.
Here: Have a sprout.


June 25 | “Free associations of a nomadic species” wanders across types and kinds of distinctions which are integral to my interests, but whose formal integrability isn’t intimated yet.


June 22 | I’m enjoying my tropical landscape—too much to do an update today —or tomorrow?.... Sorry. Home soon. Live lightly. Cheers.


June 16 | A sense of distance between the ostensible “Bloomsday for greater humanity” and abstract “a conceptual point” (below) would trope the condition of holistic interest in bricolagic life: no proximal constellation—yet. But all
of my conceptual venturing ultimately coheres.


June 4 | interface, interaction, interplay,…”interality.” I prefer ‘-ality’ over
‘-ness’ because that doesn’t as much connote substantively; and I want
a generative (or process) connotation rather than a state.


June 3 | “A conceptual point” is about conceptuality: a perspective on the point of being conceptual.