What it means to miss Middlesex

Awake

light streams cloudy through the window early

but not too

Wife already up at work

Mother in law up even earlier

for a day too long

at work

and joy

The hardwood cool on my feet

the floor smooth from stair ledge

to bottom step

Close door opens into a room awash in morning light

First thoughts are of coffee

the pot shimmers from the light

shining in from the back window

Chip chip

chip chip chip

The high strained call

—beckon?

—warning?

of the Chipmunk staring at me on the cement wall

Morning Doves coo

the Jay shrieks

The Nuthatch upside down

and Mr. Tufted Titmouse with his pointy coiffure

all jitter and bounce from feeder

to ground

to feeder in their morning dance.

Without contractions

I have tried, for a number of months now, to eliminate all contractions from my writing. This includes my dissertation, all text messages, and facebook and blog posts. I have also tried to no speak using contractions, though admittedly this was a bit tougher. My interest was peaked after seeing "True Grit" and hearing the unique, albeit almost poetic, way in which the characters spoke.

Two things arose in my thoughts. First, I should try and write, and speak, in a less contractual style. Secondly, how accurate was that style of speaking? As to the latter, here are two sites (the first links to the second) describing the use of apostrophe contractions in the English language. As the second points out

True Grit (the novel) has definitely got a lower frequency of contractions than the other two works, even though it's not in fact contraction-free; and this pattern is not a true picture of the 1870s southern or south-midland vernacular that its characters (like Mark Twain) presumably spoke.

If True Grit (the remake) has an even lower frequency of contractions, its picture of "how people talked in the period" is even less true, at least from the perspective of mere historical fact.

Despite this historical fact I still find the absence of apostrophe contractions almost liberating. I feel somewhat freed from normal (contemporary) linguistic conventions, and I enjoy the way this liberation sounds. I will try and continue to exclude contractions but the second website implicitly hints that certain contractions are certainly more common (it's/it is; that's/that is), and, for the lack of better wording, I find them linguistically more fluid as well as helpful.

PS We write the uncontracted form of "can't" as "cannot" [no space], but we do not write the uncontracted form of "won't" as "will not" and "don't" as "do not" [notice the spaces]. Why is this?

Returning to loving running

This book is doing for my perception of running what Ernst Gombrich's book Art and Illusion did for my perception of pictures—both blow my mind. I need to make an extended post about this book, but for now I will have to say that how I look at running has changed. The mental cubbyhole in which I place the concept "running" has been dramatically expanded. In fact the cubbyhole as been blown to pieces and replaced with, what? A vast expanse of endless possibility.

The essential meta-question of my disserting

My dissertation deals with the work of Ernst Gombrich, the industrious and widely renowned Austrian art historian (though he was undoubtedly much, much more than that!). But the essential question that I am pursuing, the snark that continually buzzes around my head, is how it is that pictures represent. That a painting shows an orange, a hillside, or a beautiful nude and that all of these things can be seen in a painting is beyond doubt. But what makes that painting a picture of an orange, a hillside, or a nude?

More generally, what makes any "naturalistic" painting or photograph a representation of its subject? (Max Black, 1972, p. 95)

It is the answer to this question that I am hunting; it is the answer to this question that is always delightfully eluding me. Perhaps, as Black concludes, the landing place we seek is not as concrete or fixed as we would like—perhaps there are no necessary conditions for a picture's depicting its subject. At the same time however, "the disqualification of some proposed condition as a necessary or sufficient criterion by no means shows that condition to be irrelevant to the application of the concept in question." (Black, 1972, p. 126)

For Black the concept of depiction is a range or cluster concept. There is no single criterion that makes it such that a picture is said to depict its subject. Black checks off four possibilities:

1. Causal history
2. The producer's intentions
3. The information in the picture
4. Resemblance or "looking like"

All of these are deficient conditions for clarifying depiction, though, as I pointed out above, this does not make them irrelevant to depiction. This may be the case, but I am wary of carrying Black's torch—after all, I am trying to defend Gombrich's position and he seems to disagree with Black. (Of course Gombrich never attempted to explicitly tackle the problem of explaining depiction. Should we therefore fault him for our failed attempts to pinpoint an established position in his writings?)

Smart Flesh. live & exquisite

Went and saw them with Katrin. They played an Alt-Caberat show at the Mass MOCA. Here is a link to the review of the concert. Wish I had the setlist so that I could pine over not being able to relive the night over and over again.

A thought on a dog.

It is amazing the trepidation and, dare I say it, fear that accompanied the thought of taking on responsibility for another living being. Perhaps there are those who take such a job more lightly—they enter into it on a whim, with only the immediate thought of the lovable, bounding ball of fur and tongue and tail. They might well become wonderful owners, parents, to their pet—my goal is not to dismiss their impulsiveness as reckless or inappropriate.

For myself, however, with that impulsiveness always came the fear of failure, the fear of doubt. Perhaps I held myself to too high a standard of what an owner should be; or perhaps I was just scared and unwilling, despite my vocalizations to the contrary, to commit. It does not matter now, because as I look at the living, breathing, loving being chewing up the last scraps of an edible tooth-beneficial-toy on our new carpet, I cannot imagine my life without him.

The philosophical experience

I was reading through the first article ("Why is football [soccer] so fascinating") in my christmas present, Soccer and Philosophy, and I really enjoyed what Paul Hoyningen-Huene has to say about the "genuine philosophical experience." He writes that:

It works like this: you are familiar with a certain phenomenon. You know it, you've experienced it many times, you've shared your experience with others, and it's just a common thing, nothing special. Suddenly, the being-taken-for-granted of the phenomenon cracks. Suddenly, the phenomenon, at least aspects of it, becomes mysterious. That's the philosophical experience: something entirely self-evident loses this quality and becomes a puzzle, completely unexpectedly.