In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books.
Permanent Read List:
The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne- “How the soul discharges its’ emotions against false objects when lacking real ones.” — Basically, a short essay on the human tendency to blame anything and anyone but one’s self and one’s own actions; Montaigne uses several great examples, my favorite being the man who blames his gouT on the “salted meats” he’s eating rather than blaming himself for eating the salted meats; I do much the same thing w/r/t eating eggs even though my cholesterol is a little high (but eggs are so damn good!). M. gets straight to the accountability part of this argument: either look at yourself or your actions or drop it and move right along.
M. also gets that “moving right along” is much easier said than done.
I am reading:
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace-Getting on into the period of analysis. The math is becoming increasingly difficult but if I slow down it’s still understandable...the book is also back to the point where it really is a history of a philosophical concept as well as a math concept. Given Wallace’s background in logical and analytic philosophy, no wonder that he’s going into some detail about Bernard Bolzano.
Hoping that DFW can continue to hew close to the philosophy because if the math gets much more complex, I am going to be lost.
Which, if I read my above entry on Montaigne, is really my fault.
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Spent a considerable amount of the last three days researching the Willis Ward project that I I somewhat haphazardly did for my Black Kos essay yesterday.
The usual danger (at least for me) in doing library or online research is that I inevitably run across other peripheral (or even non-peripheral) stuff that’s simply downright interesting even if it wastes a lot of time (and energy, since I frequently wind up never using some of the material, such as Gerald Ford's plans and proposals for civil rights or the intricacies of the No Man's Land crossover storyline in Batman (the picture that Donald Trump insultingly paints of African American communities reminds me a lot of the Gotham City of that period...a storyline where Lex Luthor also played a significant role...I started but abandoned the essay that I was writing).
Wanderlust always has been and always will be my state of mind, I suppose.
Thanks to Montaigne, I can’t even blame it on the gods anymore. Dammit!
But seriously, does anyone else get that distracted in, say, a library or in the process of online research when you are looking for something quite specific ?
Or do you make a note of the interesting but unrelated thing and get back to it at a time structured for it?
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