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joculumYou will recall that this historically overlaid, weirdly repetitive Dreamwidth account was expanded in the wake of the sale of LiveJournal to Russian commercial interests who established new operating rules under the laws of the Russian Federation, rules for which the English translation was not to be regarded as definitive.
The original purpose of the account, however, was not to serve as the repository of everything in the original LiveJournal account (which it now is) but to be a new beginning, an attempt to summarize what then seemed the valid parts of joculum.livejournal.com and move their insights onward towards something closer to a definitive conclusion about the human condition.
As a visiting philosophy professor whom I despised used to say in his seminars in my long-ago days as a doctoral candidate, “Good gosh, what rubbish.” I am still determined to make some sense of our fast-changing models of the human condition, and to dissent from them in ways I deem appropriate, but I must accept that I shall appear like, and perhaps actually be like, the legendary autodidact who ran a used bookshop out near Stone Mountain, a regional geographic feature that he regarded not as the site of an immense, aesthetically dubious bas-relief homage to the Confederacy but as the repository of nothing less than the Akashic Records of theosophical fame. I acquired a copy of his rare, memorably confident self-published book defending this thesis, and am going to get around to reading it just as soon as I finish reading a host of more intellectually fashionable but possibly not any more defensible disquisitions on the nature and destiny of the human species.
But since it seems time to move some of my speculations out of the realm of Facebook, where I have been keeping them in friends-only seclusion against potential assaults by the world’s increasingly violent trolls, Joculum (Grady Harris’ sobriquet for my online presence, derived from my old artpapers.org address of “jcullum,” and a Latin word meaning either “little joke” or “I’m kidding,” depending on whether it is read as a noun or a verb) is back.
Mr. Harris, of whom little has been heard since he was subsumed into the localized artworld in which I earn my infrequently compensated living, used to encourage me to temper my speculative bent by reading genre fiction, which I still mostly do not do. I believe, however, that Mr. Harris had it backwards; genre fiction at its best is a way of positing opinions that the writer actually holds but has no way of subjecting to empirical tests, or opinions that the writer deeply suspects may be true but would prefer not to advance as actual hypotheses. At its second best, of course, genre fiction of the misnamed sci-fi or fantasy variety is a way of having erudite fun, with no deeper purpose in mind; but the beauty of what we know about the unconscious mind (a concept that has come back into seeming plausibility in recent decades) is that fantasy is often a way of creating defenses against a model of reality that the writer is unwilling to admit may have more to it than she or he wishes to contemplate. The problem is that even after this realization by the reader, this sort of fiction tells us nothing more than the state of the author’s own unconscious mind; even if it resonates deeply with our own, its intuitions probably need to be tempered by a skeptical reading of other people’s off-balance serious speculations, whether those speculations are autodidact booksellers pondering material repositories of immaterial akashic records or New Atheists pondering the just-so stories of evolutionary biology. Otherwise we go off the deep end in bodies of water in which we are ill equipped to swim.
That said, I hope to post here some of the leftover fragments from my upcoming fulfillments of editors’ assignments for the various magazines and websites for which I still write from time to time.
The original purpose of the account, however, was not to serve as the repository of everything in the original LiveJournal account (which it now is) but to be a new beginning, an attempt to summarize what then seemed the valid parts of joculum.livejournal.com and move their insights onward towards something closer to a definitive conclusion about the human condition.
As a visiting philosophy professor whom I despised used to say in his seminars in my long-ago days as a doctoral candidate, “Good gosh, what rubbish.” I am still determined to make some sense of our fast-changing models of the human condition, and to dissent from them in ways I deem appropriate, but I must accept that I shall appear like, and perhaps actually be like, the legendary autodidact who ran a used bookshop out near Stone Mountain, a regional geographic feature that he regarded not as the site of an immense, aesthetically dubious bas-relief homage to the Confederacy but as the repository of nothing less than the Akashic Records of theosophical fame. I acquired a copy of his rare, memorably confident self-published book defending this thesis, and am going to get around to reading it just as soon as I finish reading a host of more intellectually fashionable but possibly not any more defensible disquisitions on the nature and destiny of the human species.
But since it seems time to move some of my speculations out of the realm of Facebook, where I have been keeping them in friends-only seclusion against potential assaults by the world’s increasingly violent trolls, Joculum (Grady Harris’ sobriquet for my online presence, derived from my old artpapers.org address of “jcullum,” and a Latin word meaning either “little joke” or “I’m kidding,” depending on whether it is read as a noun or a verb) is back.
Mr. Harris, of whom little has been heard since he was subsumed into the localized artworld in which I earn my infrequently compensated living, used to encourage me to temper my speculative bent by reading genre fiction, which I still mostly do not do. I believe, however, that Mr. Harris had it backwards; genre fiction at its best is a way of positing opinions that the writer actually holds but has no way of subjecting to empirical tests, or opinions that the writer deeply suspects may be true but would prefer not to advance as actual hypotheses. At its second best, of course, genre fiction of the misnamed sci-fi or fantasy variety is a way of having erudite fun, with no deeper purpose in mind; but the beauty of what we know about the unconscious mind (a concept that has come back into seeming plausibility in recent decades) is that fantasy is often a way of creating defenses against a model of reality that the writer is unwilling to admit may have more to it than she or he wishes to contemplate. The problem is that even after this realization by the reader, this sort of fiction tells us nothing more than the state of the author’s own unconscious mind; even if it resonates deeply with our own, its intuitions probably need to be tempered by a skeptical reading of other people’s off-balance serious speculations, whether those speculations are autodidact booksellers pondering material repositories of immaterial akashic records or New Atheists pondering the just-so stories of evolutionary biology. Otherwise we go off the deep end in bodies of water in which we are ill equipped to swim.
That said, I hope to post here some of the leftover fragments from my upcoming fulfillments of editors’ assignments for the various magazines and websites for which I still write from time to time.
