Gaudete Sunday

Apparently the rest of the East Coast had snow yesterday? We did not, although we had rain, and then wind.

Last night I went to ladyphoenixmage's graduation party. It was nice seeing her for the first time since before the semester, even if we didn't get to talk much. Finally gave her her birthday present (Godel, Escher, Bach). I missed my BFF.

Yesterday was also Preposition Day at languagelog. Check it out; I've been absolutely fascinated by prepositions for years. Not only are there the issues about stranding and pied-pipering and whatnot, which I love thinking about (you may have noticed?), but the relations they express between semantic units, the way we X to Y but A on B, seem so natural but are really so incredibly arbitrary (as anyone who's taken a foreign language quickly realizes).

Okay, I need to write my Nietzsche paper and my prettylightsfic fic by the end of the week, and then I have to write my 3_ships and work on my incompletes.

Meta Rec wrt Heinlein

The comments to Scalzi's post on OTW actually turned intelligent again (thank the Lord!) after that hetero/sexist detour I posted about previously, and have well and truly broken the 500-comment mark at this point. (I can count on one hand the number of times I've broken the 50-comment mark and have had my threads collapse.) But I've seen, here and there, references to a post about Heinlein where the comments were also nearing the 500-comment mark, and being the huge fan of Heinlein that I am, I went over to read. It's here.

I haven't read the comments yet, but the post itself is fantastic. I don't always agree with it;Scalzi seems (at best) ambivalent as to whether Heinlein was a sexist (and other things), and I can't really accept that, although I'll concede that trying to construct the author-function based solely on the published fiction is a more difficult prospect than it seems, because one quite quickly finds oneself coming up against a wall of unreliability: yes, a lot of his point-of-view characters sound alike (hardly a bad thing, IMHO, since the voice is so engaging) and it's tempting to assume they're all mouthpieces for Heinlein, but the fact of the matter is that Maureen Johnson and Lazarus Long hold differing positions (assuming one can trust them to be espousing the positions they actually believe in, which is always iffy with Lazarus) on any number of issues, and Heinlein undermines his narrators' reliability in other ways as well.

None of this means that Heinlein wasn't a sexist bastard. (I think other accusations, such as heterosexism and racism, are fair but more subtle-- he embraced his sexism wholeheartedly.) Just that texts don't speak with moral voices, as I might have mentioned before in this journal?

(If you have an hour, I'll give you my reading of Atlas Shrugged as advocating Rortian liberalism.)

Anyway, read Scalzi's post. It's intelligent and powerful--just like Heinlein at his best.

ETA: Note also that my favorite Heinlein books are the later ones--Time Enough for Love through To Sail Beyond the Sunset. I asked for Laz/Lor for yuletide. And I like the Starship Troopers film too--but then, you already know I'm not a purist.

Nietzsche and Emma Frost: Two names which make more sense together than the context actually demands

My Nietzsche class was one of those sorts of classes where the whole thing is structured to work you up to One Big Idea. In practice, it got a little repetitive, but I don't really have a problem with it in theory; when the day comes (hopefully) when I'm designing syllabi for real, I wouldn't be surprised if I do something similar.

But I think I get the One Big Idea--call it postmodernism, call it mysticism, call it whatever you like because words won't quite capture it and that's the point--and I think I ably demonstrated it in my midterm. (That's what "A+" usually means, right?) I even persuasively criticized some of the terminology he used (all language falls short of truth, but I'm struggling with whether some terminology is just beyond rehabillitation; I argued no pace Rorty in my undergrad thesis, but now I find myself arguing yes).

Anyway, now I have 15-20 pages to write by Friday (not to mention my prettylightsfic) and I have nowhere else to go. I mean, sure, there's more than one way to communicate the One Big Idea; I'm not Wittgenstein, dropping out of philosophy after writing the Tractatus. But. . . .

The solution is take on an issue technical enough one doesn't get caught up in abstraction. I know this. But none of his suggested essay topics really seem to lend themselves to it.

So I'm reading the three Emma Frost digests instead.

. . .

Emma's actually a pretty horrible candidate for ubermensch, although she might make a decent example of the ascetic ideal.

(Which reminds me to work on that essay on Buffy and Nietzsche I've been meaning to finish for years.)