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Hullo, I have been busy all night working on a godawful paper I need to finish in the next few days, comparing... *drumroll*... the Platonic worldview (how to live life and what the afterlife is like) with that of Shin Buddhism (that's Pure Land Buddhism for those of you who weren't paying attention that week in Art History or whatever). I have an inch-thick stack of printouts, only because I decided that I probably had enough information there to trip liltingly through ten pages or so. I could have kept printing and printing and printing. But they've been sitting around for about 8 months and tonight I finally dug into them again.
Always write a paper when you're actually in the course, because no matter how busy you are, your brain is there in the topic. I haven't really given a second thought to Nietzsche or Russell since late April, and I'm feeling it, feeling intellectually distanced from that. I'm really glad that I did a paragraph-by-paragraph precis of Phaedo, and don't have to actually read it again, because I would really be hurting right now if I hadn't.
Right now my head is in... oh, things like the "Chariot Queen" show I watched the other day, about the excavation at Wetwang in Yorkshire and the circa 300 BCE chariot they excavated and reconstructed. It's frustrating because I learn so much from those shows, but at the same time I've watched them on subjects where I have greater expertise, and sometimes they are really erroneous. (However, it's usually A&E or History Channel productions that have terrible errors; stuff shown on the various Discovery channels tends to be more reliable.) With the Chariot Queen in particular, it was an odd thing to watch; when they got the skull into the lab and realized what was going on with it (the woman buried in the grave was disfigured by a hemangioma that began when her skull was still forming and likely never went away), they devoted most of the rest of the show to the reconstruction of the chariot buried with her. Although it's possible that cuts were made from the original BBC version of the program for the purpose of airing on US tv, I think the people working on it saw the skull and thought, "Oh dear, well, she probably wasn't very attractive; let's spend less time on facial reconstruction coverage and more time on the chariot."
My head is also on all the knitting I need to finish before xmas, and xmas cards, and good heavens, the Not Very Much Fun Brigade, which consists of me and a cleaning caddy. I wish I could get my head back to Plato and Amida Buddha, soon, otherwise I'm kinda screwed.
Always write a paper when you're actually in the course, because no matter how busy you are, your brain is there in the topic. I haven't really given a second thought to Nietzsche or Russell since late April, and I'm feeling it, feeling intellectually distanced from that. I'm really glad that I did a paragraph-by-paragraph precis of Phaedo, and don't have to actually read it again, because I would really be hurting right now if I hadn't.
Right now my head is in... oh, things like the "Chariot Queen" show I watched the other day, about the excavation at Wetwang in Yorkshire and the circa 300 BCE chariot they excavated and reconstructed. It's frustrating because I learn so much from those shows, but at the same time I've watched them on subjects where I have greater expertise, and sometimes they are really erroneous. (However, it's usually A&E or History Channel productions that have terrible errors; stuff shown on the various Discovery channels tends to be more reliable.) With the Chariot Queen in particular, it was an odd thing to watch; when they got the skull into the lab and realized what was going on with it (the woman buried in the grave was disfigured by a hemangioma that began when her skull was still forming and likely never went away), they devoted most of the rest of the show to the reconstruction of the chariot buried with her. Although it's possible that cuts were made from the original BBC version of the program for the purpose of airing on US tv, I think the people working on it saw the skull and thought, "Oh dear, well, she probably wasn't very attractive; let's spend less time on facial reconstruction coverage and more time on the chariot."
My head is also on all the knitting I need to finish before xmas, and xmas cards, and good heavens, the Not Very Much Fun Brigade, which consists of me and a cleaning caddy. I wish I could get my head back to Plato and Amida Buddha, soon, otherwise I'm kinda screwed.
