I talked to our crazy factota today!!
& Kelsey, or someone else with the master password, can you email him an invitation again? It's jlm59@cornell.edu.
I also gave him the blog website- so unbeknownst to all he has been reading the site unable to post.
Has anyone seen the Phantom of the Opera movie?
(i honestly thought it was shameful. But maybe the music was worth it)
aimee
p.s. guys, though i never post, i read this thing all the time. :)

posted by aimee   [4:42 PM]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JACOB!

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [11:48 PM]

'I could well put the same question to you, madam,' Don Quixote replied, 'and so I do put it to you - am I quite safe from attack and ravishment?'

- Cervantes, Don Quixote

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [11:19 AM]

Tae-Yeoun sends a virtual shout-out to Bryan, whose once and future project she would plagiarize for her Descartes paper but can't, simply because she doesn't remember enough of it.

Type-o of the day: "monads" to "monas."

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [4:23 PM]

Listening to the C minor mass now I realized that it's Wolfie's (that sounded really terrible) birthday tomorrow and I urge everyone - or at least Monica, Eunice, Matt, and anyone else who found it worthwhile to stay up till 3:30 in the morning the night before Once and Future Project presentations watching The Movie That Got Pushed Back to Give Way to 8 1/2 - to watch Amadeus in celebration. No movie is more relevant to Creativity, Mystery, Creative Mystery, the Mystery of Creativity, and the likes.

And so I quote, insetad of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus because I can't find it, Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri:

These are tears
I’ve never shed before: painful but welcome,
As if I had discharged a heavy debt,
As if the healing knife had cut away
A throbbing limb. Mozart, dear friend, these tears...
Pay them no mind. Play on, play on, make haste,
And saturate my soul with sounds!

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [12:11 PM]

Good Luck Eunice!


Here is a photo of the counter-inagural activities, hopefully our resolute cold-bearing spirit will help energize you (20-25 thousand protestors of which I was one had some frost nipping at our noses).

And way more photos at www.unodemocrats.com/blog
And an aside to Matt- I have finally seen the capitol! I stopped by Nelson's office and got the staff tour. I envy your pre-tasp year even more now that I've seen the awe-inspiring inside.

posted by john owens-ream   [4:41 PM]

AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

I felt obliged to share my cathartic (and primal?) scream upon finishing two of my exams. Two down, two to go...and one seminar exquisitely tied to our TASP to hope for. I'm crossing my fingers and toes...

posted by Eunice   [4:00 PM]

Trilobite 

posted by Adrian   [10:27 PM]

I feel like a stranger among friends for having not posted in so long.
Rocking picture John... and I hope everyone remembers Monica's feminist jokes.

For those of you who just finished finals, I hope you did well and I laugh at you.
It is very cold here.

Who's taking a class they really really are excited about?
Two words....wait, no, no it's three:
History of Life.

posted by Adrian   [9:58 PM]

Just finished finals... Now done with half the western canon.

posted by Matthew Schmitz   [4:21 PM]

While the Harvardians are recovering from finals and while we wait for intellectual/spiritual wankery to resume, I have a quick question for all of you who actually read Crime and Punishment: did anyone read Professor Monas' translation? I can't seem to find it anywhere even though it's apparently a mass paperback edition. With a hideous cover. :(

People from my dorm were going to get together to watch Clockwork Orange last night - the planning went perfectly, everyone was really psyched up about it, I listened to Beethoven to immunize myself against involuntary twitching (I didn't really, but I would have), and then of course we forgot to rent it. But we're making up for it with a Kurosawa tomorrow. I love how TASP movies last forever.

Speaking of which, I forgot to mention I watched The Princess and the Warrior sometime last year - same director, same actress as Lora Rehnt. I highly recommend it, because it was so much fun, even though I've stopped updating the recommendations list (sorry. someday.).

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [5:49 PM]

Thank you Alex! Thank you Adrian! Thank you Tae-Yeoun!
And, though it is late to be saying this, I was back in Cambridge on the 3rd and we have yet to take our finals. Alex Y, we can wallow together in our early return to school.

posted by Eunice   [9:09 AM]

a rule: all future tasp reunions should have a theme, and that theme should be new wave.

(now back to your regularly scheduled intellectual/spiritual wankery)

posted by Kelsey   [1:42 PM]

That's amazing Matt! I came within inches of quoting The Brothers but didn't because the details in my head were too hazy and I couldn't find the passage I wanted. If I had read Dostoevsky before Tasp I would have quoted him the way I did to Milan Kundera and Sarte.

There is a wonderful website at www.thecry.com which is my homepage for stuff like this. The section on existentialism always seems to have an answer for me- even if it is not the one I want or agree with. Specifically, on the site, there is another much shorter work by Dostoevsky called "The Dream of the ridiculous Man" which also reminded me of this.
If it weren't so long I'd recommend it.

Also- in the ridiculously over my head and yet best things I've ever read category is this essay by sarte which sums up most things I have ever read and agreed with into one essay (albeit a crazy long one). So I'm officialy recommending it- and reiterating my question about what conclusions people reach when they read that story Alex B posted, if any.

posted by john owens-ream   [12:37 AM]

This turns my mind to chapters 35 and 36 of Brothers Karamazov.

Chapter 35 is a collection of true stories Dostoevsky collected from news reports of children's sufferings, including a serf boy being ran to earth by a nobleman and his hounds. Also a story of a young girl tortured horiffically by her parents ( only a syllogism away from humans and their heavenly father).
Chapter 36, "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor", is precisely such an interrogation of God (here, Jesus) by man. These chapters, written by the Orthodox Dostoevsky contain probably the most powerful atheistic "diabolodicies" ever written and, perhaps, the seed of their answer. Well worth your time.

http://www.online-literature.com/dostoevsky/brothers_karamazov/

posted by Matthew Schmitz   [11:57 AM]

Thank you for the link Alex- I read it with interest. It feels like I have been asking and not finding answers to all those questions since I hit the age of reason. That's not what made it a good essay though, everyone from Sarte to Salinger has written better essays explaining (but not answering) those questions.

What made the essay worthwhile, for me, was the contextualization of the tsunami with religious and atheistic masses on sites like beliefnet. The existentialist in me shouts out the perfect absurd lurking inside of all of it. 150000+ people die, and survivors use the internet to yell at each other about whether God should be thanked or despised! So absurd. It feals like reality are those corpses still washing up over thousands and thousands of miles of coastland, and here sitting at the computer in Rogers Park Chicago is the dream world. Except C.S. Lewis in Screwtape asks 'why is death and gore reality but the girl playing in the field with a kite somehow not real?'

Anyway, that's my response to the essay/column. Me and that guy, and a whole lot of other people, are going to go on asking those questions and not getting answers. Or at least, considering I've mentioned at least 3 authors in this post, we're not going to find any answers in books, that's for sure. What was your response Alex? What kinds of questions did it make you ask? (And dare I ask what kind of answers?)

posted by john owens-ream   [11:25 PM]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EUNICE!

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [5:10 AM]

[ website ] :: [ contact ] :: [ home ]

XML