a purpose in life

[tinkerjack]

I was going to make it twenty but that was months ago, now it should be at least forty. got dam these metafiscal blues. going to make it fifty Clay. If I had more faith I would make it a 100. The money is rolling in, I find myself over-employed but I also find myself with a family in need. What is your friendship worth to me, more than I could aford to give. I been trying to duck paypal, I had a spooky situation there. My card won't work there anymore. I would just like to mail you a money order but I know that is a hassle for you.

I guess maybe a prepaid cash card might work if I could use on paypal 50 bucks clay I hope you are doing better.
jt
I will send this along in a PM later. I got to go back to bed for a while, I got this easy money gig through December but I am sure it will run out pretty soon.

Do you remember the line from firesign
"Increased spending opportunities mean harder work for everybody"
amazing how my day to day expenditures for smoke drink food shelter and so forth have increased along with my income. Everytmonth a struggle to come out even, but still the bills acrue. Oh well, when I owe a million bucks I will be a millionaire my rich uncle from Bethesda Maryland used to tell me

miss you cousin

[silent woman]

I don't think so, don't think Tropic of Cancer is an ebook. Be interesting if it was.

Thinking about another reason to live, my sister's cat.

He needs me to open and close the outside door for him twenty times a day.
He sits there and meohowls until someone does.

I watch his languid stroll out side, he snifs the air before his first paw steps out then I watch the muscles move his fur with each step, alive, alive alive, like flash back, so vidid for the moment he carries my consciousness with him.

yeah pussycats are worth living for

"like an angel from montgomery"

[stilltrucking]

Today's is the day, got one more day left on this debit card going to make it all I can.

[stilltrucking]

finally did that what a relief

final day of march and I think I heard a deadline go swooshing bye
I am a prisoner of shine,

[stilltrucking]

I got an ereader but the books I thought were good to be a couple of bucks are way too expensive to me, I looked at one the other day which was $51.

Oh well a chance to catch up on the classics for free.

I was trying to watch this tonight but I am too tired to stay up any longer

Patti Smith Dream of Life

[SadLuckDame]

Congrats on getting the ereader, Jack. That is awesome! Which reminds me I need to get mine fully charged. Reminds me too of the trip I had on the greyhound bus going home with like five or six books in my bag. Had Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and a copy of A Portrait of a Lady that I gave to some little ten year old girl on the bus who was bored, told her to read that.

This next trip I'll have my neat and easy to carry kindle, but doesn't mean I still won't come home lugging a bunch of used books that I needed to grab. ha ha The beauty of it all.

My space bar is not clicking each time and my number three keeps sticking.

[stilltrucking]

the problem with ebooks is there is no middle ground. The books I want are either free or very expensive. i wanted this one but it was like fifty bucks.

>going to put link to ebook here<

I have not picked up tropic of cancer again in over two months, it was too good, made me feel so stupid or awkward, he truly was one of the great "public intellectuals" of the 20th century.

Some people say the 20th century was the american century but I think it was Nietzsche's. And so far the 21st century for me is turning out to be Camus'

the tropic of cancer is available as audio book


Tropic of Cancer Audio Book

David allen coe only had one song that I ever rreally liked it was called "Pumpkin Center Barn Dance"
only one line stays with me
"Mama could never understand how Lucifer could lead a man to the pumpkin center barn dance"

Still reading the anti-christ now about three months into it about half way through slow going. I guess he is teaching me how to dance, Henry did not have to quote from the Gospel according to Nietzsche, he assimilated it into his core. But Henry is a healthy gentile while I am a sick jew.

well I got to go contemplate my belly button for a while,
I finally been able to meditate a little
I meditate on the belly button of joy.

I have to meditate before I go to work,
shiff gears, calm down from the rush that I get when I am in an open text box here on S8
I still have two other jobs one is in the rag trade selling clothes for one of those companies sort of like LL Bean.

but I think I am blowing the job
my belly gets all tied up in knots
anxiety about "dead air"
as I navigate through the customer's order
they want to me to build rapport with my callers, 95 percent of which are women. I am supposed to schmooze, build sales by suggesting addition accessories. I love women's clothers but for some reason I just don't like selling them. Maybe because I would like to slip into a dress myself.
what a trip
working for the yankee dollar
drinking rum and coca cola

see you later thanks for dropping bye

[the mingo]

I'd like to see mitt romney in a dress...finished off with a pair of rattlesnake skin high heels. i was thinking about pencils the other day - what an amazing idea they are. Henry David Thoreau made pencils, it was the family business. he actually made improvements to the thing that are still followed today. Of course this was long before "Tropic of Cancer". If he read that it might have changed things - then again the human mind can only stand so much. the "n" on my keyboard don't always work, i can't trust it. always have to go back and see where it didn't make it & if i miss where it didn't make it it goes out with the post.
It's simple things like that that make jack the rippers out of mild-mannered reporters. I read somewhere once where an author said the 20th century belonged to jack the ripper. When something happens i'm with it, right in there, all over it - but once it's past i'm not likely to remember all the details or anything at all, in fact. it's not physical i don't think it's just that i never understood why i should give a shit. damn "n's" anyway.

[stilltrucking]

mingo wrote:

I'd like to see mitt romney in a dress...finished off with a pair of rattlesnake skin high heels. i was thinking about pencils the other day - what an amazing idea they are. Henry David Thoreau made pencils, it was the family business. he actually made improvements to the thing that are still followed today. Of course this was long before "Tropic of Cancer". If he read that it might have changed things - then again the human mind can only stand so much. the "n" on my keyboard don't always work, i can't trust it. always have to go back and see where it didn't make it & if i miss where it didn't make it it goes out with the post.
It's simple things like that that make jack the rippers out of mild-mannered reporters. I read somewhere once where an author said the 20th century belonged to jack the ripper. When something happens i'm with it, right in there, all over it - but once it's past i'm not likely to remember all the details or anything at all, in fact. it's not physical i don't think it's just that i never understood why i should give a shit. damn "n's" anyway.

I don't think much about thinking as I do think about feeling.

Read an interesting article about pencils the other day

This is going to be the century of phosphorous pencils and albert camus
we will not destroy ourselves
we will leave it to mother nature
that is why saint jack is such a good Catholic

connecting the dots is such hard work every once and a while I have to stop and type away kind of like a nervous tic, or chewing gum

so many unwholesome emotions have washed over me I am a weak man,
I could never bring myself to kill
must be grace, even so
my local selective service draft board knew what they were doing in 1962 when they declared me mentally unfit for military service. I wish I could have served in the navy too, such a sea longing in me

i was just chewing the cud with arcadia and talking about pencil dicks too
funny about her, all those years I exchanged posts with her and thought she was a guy.
Ha, must be the zen

Anytime I see something posted about the "Falkland" islands I don't expect much objectivity.

The sun never sets on the British Empire I have heard.

I found that link about Buddhism very helpful got me started on a whole train of "unwholesome thoughts"

I thought this was a pretty good song nothing to do with anything, it just got me thinking about my unwholesome thoughts again




I will check out the new links later get backafter my nap

http://studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.p ... &start=150

Thinking I should have put an emoticon after this

it just got me thinking about my unwholesome thoughts again

I guess this would be the best one


I don't meditate, I am an ignorant child about zen
All I can say is that it appears to me as a way,
like saint jack said, I think glorious amuk has it as her tagline
"there is only one way, your way."

I don't worry much about unwholesome thoughts, although I do think I might be mildly autistic, ha isn't everyone to one degree or another.

No it is unwholesome emotions that I float above.
maybe if I meditated more I could control my thoughts, all it seems to me that I can do is not get too attached to my thoughts, lordy when thought and emotion coincide it can be tragic. I have come close to murder more times in my life that I want to say. If I would have won the billion dollar lottery last week I think I would have establish a nation wide network of zen centers for our returning combat veterans an former citizens of our penal system or maybe victims of our criminal justice systerm nothing like what happened in your country but bad enough.

sorry about the ramble

I think I might have chose too many topics today

[stilltrucking]

American Nietzsche

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University of Chicago Press, £19.50)

A famous moment in the career of George W Bush came in 1999, during an early debate in the Republican presidential primary. Asked to name his favourite political philosopher, Bush said “Jesus”—a tactically perfect answer that led to much copying by the other candidates.

Perhaps the question was not really fair. If any candidate had said John Locke or Thomas Jefferson, little light would have been shed on his actual policies; and he would certainly have been tagged as elitist. But imagine what would happen if an American politician, faced with the same question, were to choose Friedrich Nietzsche as his favourite philosopher.

Many American politicians could find support for their ideas in Nietzsche. A Tea Party Republican might choose Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’” A secular liberal could turn to the strident atheism of Beyond Good and Evil, while an unapologetic, Dick Cheney-style hawk would have plenty of quotes to choose from. What about, for starters, “You should be such men as are always looking for an enemy—for your enemy”?

Yet the very idea of an American politician publicly proclaiming himself a Nietzschean sounds like a punchline. It was daring enough for Barack Obama, during the 2008 campaign, even to include Nietzsche on a list of writers who were “most significant to him”—well down on the list, to be sure, after Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and other American standards. For in the popular imagination, Nietzsche remains a dangerous figure, whose most famous ideas are hostile to the American character. America is a pious country; Nietzsche wrote a book called The Antichrist. America is a democracy; Nietzsche railed against the herd. The kind of ethics Americans glorify as “family values” Nietzsche despised as “slave morality.” Then there is the long tradition linking Nietzsche’s praise of conflict and admiration for aristocratic virtues with German militarism and Nazi racism—a link that the determined efforts of philosophers and scholars have never quite effaced.

Real complications arise when the philosopher’s name becomes an adjective. “Nietzschean” brings to mind not just a student of Nietzsche, but someone who aims to challenge traditional values, overturning conventional Christian morality in favour of the total freedom of the superior individual, the Übermensch or “Superman.” In this active, committed sense, being a Nietzschean is, paradoxically, more like being a Christian than a Cartesian.

For all these reasons, Nietzsche often figures in American culture as a sinister guru of the violent and deranged. When Jared Lee Loughner, who murdered six people in his attempted assassination of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, turned out to be a close reader of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, an old stereotype was confirmed. Indeed, the title of America’s best-known Nietzscheans goes to Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the teenagers who in 1924 murdered a boy with a chisel because they took seriously the philosopher’s belief that the “Superman” is liberated from conventional notions of good and evil. (Their lawyer, Clarence Darrow, blamed the effect of Beyond Good and Evil on their impressionable minds in his 12-hour defence speech.) If you were to include fictional characters, Leopold and Loeb might have a rival in Howard Roark, the arrogant architect in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Rand, a favourite writer of so many libertarians, capitalists and teenage monomaniacs has surely been the most influential American conduit of Nietzschean ideas. Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in his book The Age of Turbulence that “I was intellectually limited until I met her.”

In her new book, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen focuses on writers, academics and the clergy, showing that Nietzsche’s influence on American intellectuals has been durable and wide. Everyone from the feminist and birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger on the left to Francis Fukuyama on the right could, Ratner-Rosenhagen shows, could claim the label “Nietzschean.”

To these writers and academics, nothing could be more abhorrent than to be linked via Nietzsche with someone like Jared Lee Loughner. In America, philosophers and theologians and novelists may have admired Nietzsche, and learned from him, but they were never Nietzscheans in that vulgar, all-too-literal sense. On the contrary, the major lesson of Ratner-Rosenhagen’s book, and its comedy, lies in her demonstration of how deftly the American genius has drawn on Nietzsche but cushioned and contained his challenge to democracy, religion, and humanitarianism in general.

***

The great example in recent American philosophy is Richard Rorty, the pragmatist philosopher and liberal sage who died in 2007. Ratner-Rosenhagen shows how Nietzsche provided the inspiration for Rorty’s controversial view that philosophy’s search for stable, objective truths was misguided—a hunt for something that did not exist. “It was Nietzsche,” Rorty wrote, “who first explicitly suggested that we drop the whole idea of ‘knowing the truth.’”

For Nietzsche, however, giving up the belief in objective truth was no mere “drop”; it was a vertiginous, unstoppable fall. It changed everything. Rorty, by contrast, suggests that there is no reason why mankind should not be able to set up a white picket fence in the void. In his 1989 classic Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he argues that people should continue to fight for social justice even while acknowledging that justice, like truth or goodness, is an essentially meaningless term.

This is the position of Rorty’s ideal man and citizen, the “liberal ironist,” who combines Nietzsche’s all-devouring scepticism with a commitment to the common good. If you were to ask a liberal ironist why he cares about others, in a world where such caring is neither commanded nor justified, the answer would be that he just does. To want more, such as an answer to the question “why should I avoid humiliating another person?” is to consign oneself to the benighted ranks of the metaphysicians—those who still cling to essences and absolutes.

For all his philosophical radicalism, it is hard to avoid seeing Rorty as one of the “lauded wise men of the academic chairs” whom Nietzsche railed against in Zarathustra. These types promote virtue on the grounds that “one must have all the virtues in order to sleep well.” Why does this kind of complacency about the Nietzschean challenge, the certainty that one can have one’s nihilism and eat it, feel so quintessentially American?

One reason, American Nietzsche clarifies, is that Americans have been adept at taking from Nietzsche only those ideas that reinforce their own beliefs or political goals. Around the turn of the century, the journalists James Huneker and HL Mencken led the movement to popularise Nietzsche’s ideas—and, crucially, the tragic story of his life, the genius cut down in his forties by madness. Mencken, in particular, used Nietzsche’s elitism and scorn of the mob as a weapon in his fight against the “booboisie” and the “Bible Belt.” But as Ratner-Rosenhagen says in her chapter on “The Making of the American Nietzsche,” all varieties of social reformers embraced “a writer who railed against the pretentions of tired orthodoxies in an age clamoring for revolt against inherited authority”—even though Nietzsche was often as hostile to “progress” as he was to tradition.

Thus Margaret Sanger, who set up America’s first birth-control clinic in 1916, embraced Nietzsche’s attack on Christian sexual morals while ignoring his notorious misogyny. The first translations of Nietzsche’s work in America were published in the anarchist newspaper Liberty, whose editor, Benjamin Tucker, was drawn to Nietzsche’s free thinking and libertarianism. Yet (Ratner-Rosenhagen writes) “Tucker confessed that the predatory quality he detected in Nietzsche’s writings”—the extolling of conquest and conflict, the praise of the Übermensch—“struck him as a ‘dreadful weakness’ and made him ‘hate Nietzsche at times.’” Tucker advised that the philosopher be used “profitably,” not “prophetably.”

It is undeniable that the Americans who have become all-out Nietzscheans are rarely intellectuals of the first rank. In Europe, Nietzsche fertilised the geniuses of André Gide, DH Lawrence and Thomas Mann. In America, he was most closely identified with journalist-propagandists like Mencken and Huneker, and the literary work that bears his stamp most clearly is Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

The truest American Nietzscheans might in fact be the totally unknown admirers whose letters, excavated from the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, form the basis of Ratner-Rosenhagen’s most interesting chapter. “American Nietzsche” begins with a fan letter the philosopher received from a German-American admirer in 1881, long before he had any kind of reputation in Europe. “Esteemed Herr Doctor,” wrote Elise Fincke of Baltimore, “Perhaps it is of little concern to you that here in America three people… often sit together and allow Nietzsche’s writings to edify them… but I don’t see why we shouldn’t at least tell you so once.” In fact, it mattered to him quite a bit: on the back of the letter, he scrawled, “Initium gloriae mundi.”

However, some of the letters sent to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the sister who took charge of his legacy after he died in 1900, are more eccentric. Jennie Hintz, a 67-year-old from Yonkers, New York, explains that she had Nietzsche’s ideas first, “but I remained mute, keeping them for myself.” Francis Langer of Pittsburgh identifies with Nietzsche because “I was born in the same year.” But the ultimate in appropriation came from one John I Bush of Duluth, Minnesota, who wrote to inform Elisabeth that he was the very Superman her brother had been waiting for: “May you hereby have the consolation and delight to have lived long enough to know that the visions, prophesies, and hopes of your brother have been fulfilled to the very letter; for the author of this scribbling is the very man prognosticated in [Zarathustra].”

In America, the readers most receptive to the idea of the Übermensch turn out to be the most lumpen of Untermenschen: the deluded, frustrated and envious—exactly the kind of people Nietzsche would have denounced as the herd. Thoughtful and educated Americans, on the other hand, usually managed to make Nietzsche the servant of their own purposes, no matter how different those purposes may have been from his own.

Of all the messages in Nietzsche’s books, the least mixed is his hatred of Christianity. Yet there were more than a few pastors, Ratner-Rosenhagen shows, who found Nietzsche “a valuable moral stimulant that would energise Christians and an intellectual astringent that would enable them to do some long-overdue spiritual, ethical, and liturgical housecleaning.”

After blasting what one Anglican priest called the “milk-and-water sentimentalism [which has] usurped the once austere name of Christian piety,” these Christian Nietzscheans naturally urged a reinstatement of a more austere faith, not the Dionysian liberation Nietzsche recommended. Only one cleric, the theologian George Burman Foster, seems to have followed the author of The Antichrist all the way. After getting expelled from his Baptist church in 1909, he began preaching a new saviour, “a man who, as no other, embodies in himself all the pain and all the pleasure, all the sickness and all the convalescence, all the age and all the youth, of our tumultuous and tortured times: Friedrich Nietzsche!”

***

Depending on how you look at it, there is something either pathetic or reassuring about America’s ability to learn from Nietzsche without becoming Nietzschean—or, in Ratner-Rosenhagen’s words, to create a “philosophy that never abandons… humanistic promises.” It is as though the American mind had been inoculated against the worst symptoms of Nietzscheanism—the admiration of conflict and conquest, the animalisation of the human being, the abjection before “great” men. These are, of course, the very tendencies that made it so natural to see Nietzsche as the patron saint of Wilhelmine militarism and Nazism.

That Americans no longer think of Nietzsche that way is partly thanks to Walter Kaufmann, the German-Jewish scholar and translator who did more than anyone to rehabilitate the philosopher’s reputation after the second world war. Ratner-Rosenhagen devotes a chapter to Kaufmann, discussing how his vision of Nietzsche as an Enlightenment philosopher, concerned with “self-overcoming” rather than conquest, helped to disinfect Nietzsche’s reputation during the Cold War period. This very sanitising of Nietzsche led to a strong reaction against Kaufmann in the 1970s, with the rise of the postmodern, radically relativist “French” Nietzsche of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Yet Kaufmann, who escaped to the US from Nazi Germany in 1939, was writing very much in the American grain when he cast Nietzsche as a messenger of “liberation and self-reliance.” That last idea is key. Americans have been inoculated against Nietzsche, one might say, by prolonged exposure to Emerson, the 19th-century transcendentalist essayist and poet who is one of the most revered American writers.

Unlikely as it may seem, Emerson, as Ratner-Rosenhagen explains in a prologue, was one of Nietzsche’s own greatest influences. “The most fertile author of this century so far has been American,” Nietzsche declared, and it is uncanny how many of Nietzsche’s central ideas turn up, slightly disguised, in Emerson’s essays. “The only sin is limitation,” “the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it,” “the civilised man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet”: it is the expression more than the substance of these sayings that mark them as the product of Concord, Massachusetts, not Sils Maria.

Emerson’s insistence on the sovereignty of the self, his scepticism about traditional morality, his metaphysical irony, all prefigure Nietzsche. So why is it that the word “Emersonian” has an infinitely more benign sound than the word “Nietzschean”? The reason may have less to do with each thinker’s propositions than with the spirit, and the prose, in which they are advanced. Nietzsche’s Superman and Emerson’s Oversoul are not principles to think with, like Kant’s categorical imperative; they are experiences to be sought. As with all such experiences, they cannot be divorced from the language that induces them; they are, in the strongest sense, literary.

That is why the difference in style between Emerson and Nietzsche is more telling than the similarity in their concepts. Emerson’s spacious, rippling, blurry prose is the insignia of his trustfulness, just as Nietzsche’s aphorisms communicate his sarcasm and aggression. Because Americans recognise in Nietzsche the bearer of Emerson’s alienated majesty, they hear the Nietzschean provocation muffled in the old Emersonian reassurance: “Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess today the mood, the pleasure, the power of tomorrow, when we are building up our being.”

The prospect that tomorrow may not bring pleasure and power, but in Nietzsche’s words “profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished” is—even in these days of recession and uncertainty—a notion as remote from American thought as from American experience.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/ ... am-kirsch/

[stilltrucking]

RE:
(£19.50)
Man I can't believe I quoted the whole thing.
That is a long quote.

My older self mourning my younger self.

e_dog poem here>

a purpose for my porpoise
my kingdom for a porpoise