I'd like to meet:
A very ornery philsopher of science who throws empty gin bottles at noisy children, a radical revolutionary from the third world, people who are disgusted by other people who read Moby Dick, people who have read A Critique of Pure Reason and were reluctantly persuaded by it... maybe Pablo Neruda, possibly David Mitchel, but only if neither of them ruin my impression of them... my friends, later this evening (I mean, really, it's so important, but so easily overlooked)... Can I put down the Pope, even if I have already met him? I mean, I'm running out of people who will argue with me, and the two of us are in severe disagrement on several points... Actually, that's not true: if there is any public figure that I can say that I agree with, let alone agree with often, it's him...
Music:
I like Led Zeppelin. They make me want to read Tolkien.
Movies:
I have always loved movies, both serious, socially conscious cinema, and really bad remakes of really bad remakes of really bad films. It is my firmest, and hardest to maintain, belief that there is something redeeming and worthwhile about every movie ever made- whether it be Green Card or Citizen Kane. Ironically though, what is beggining to change that belief is a hisotry of motion pictures class that I am taking that has forced me into thinking that I am, in fact, a dork for enjoying movies such as The Incubus Terror and Armed Car Robbery (emphasis imagined). How can I excuse myself for enjoying these formerly not so guilty pleasures when the dungeons and dragons, black mesh from head to toe, grease boy sitting next to me enjoys the same filmic material on almost the same basis. Am I being harsh in my judgement? Do we only share this pleasure coincidently? Is he really an intersting individual with only a tragic sense of fashion for whom Bannana Republic is onbly a fleeting dream? Or have I been supressing my inner goth? I do not know the answer to these complex questions. What I do know is that I have been forced by my Christian conscience into placing my movie tastes under the proverbial layer of socks. I began to think about renting french films, only to realize very quickly that my understanding of french culture is about as developed and complex as George Bush's. What to do? Philosphize about the social constructs that create archetypes that influence society, creating relationships that bind subgroups with percieved notions of how to govern their lives? I'm not that smart. In fact, I don't even know what that was about. And so the questions continue......
Television:
Ok. So I used to date this girl who was an idiot. But, of all the stupid things that she said, one of them I agreed with. She used to rail at people who watched television. "Life is so awesome! Why spend it watching television?" I thought that was the proper sentiment. Now I am not so sure. Granted, there are things that I would rather be doing. Would I prefer climbing Everest over watching House MD? OF course; but there is a sense in which television seems to make my life better. I want to be a man in full, and part of that means (this I am absolutely sure of) having some vices. Laziness is appropriate for me. I am too driven, too work minded, to be a complete man. I need the superfluous, and I need it more than I think. This goes against much of what I have thought before. I am sure that some of you reading this have argued with me over this before. I am not going to apologize. I am not admitting that I was wrong. My opinion changes with the facts, and TV fits right now. Where would I be without that late-night, early monday morning, downloaded television show marathon? What can I say? It gives me pleasure.
Books:
I love books, but lately I have been losing my patience with them. I've found that if you want to learn from books, especially of the literary kind, school is the last place that you should be. Have I learned from any of the novels that I have read in my two lit classes this semester? Not really. I have had fun reading them, discussing them and writting about them; I have even become better at writting about them. But I havn't learned much from them. What does the author want me to take from this? How can his experiences lend themselves to mine? These things get lost in the classroom. We are too busy with the phenomenon of "Literature" and we discuss too much within that context and forget that the man who wrote the novel about colonial situations was there and felt the climaxes, the dillemas; he saw; he heard. These things have no place in the classroom, and I feel that even if they were forced upon the classroom we would find our own experiences too impoverished to deal with them. Is there any prognosis? What can we do, we literary scholars, to solve this problem. Drop out? Go on adventrues? I don't know, but perhaps even a little pretending, pretending that we can follow what is being told to us, would be better than what we engage in now.
Heroes:
Brock Samson, Patrick Kerney, and many other blond-haired, blue-eyed, tall men who are full of muscle, but not you Sammy; not you at all.