ken robinson says...

that in education creativity is as important as literacy and that we educate our kids out of their creativity and that we stigmatize mistakes and teach kids to be afraid of being wrong and that education is all about the brain (and slightly to one side) and doesn't teach kids to think with their bodies and that we treat our bodies as mere vehicles for our heads and that our entire education system is deeply flawed because it was created to sustain the industrial revolution. ok. watch it here, it's the best use of the next 20 minutes you were about to dither away on facebook or whatever.

Amy Stein- "Domesticated" series

This is cool: Domesticated

from her website: "My photographs serve as modern dioramas of our new natural history. Within these scenes I explore our paradoxical relationship with the "wild" and how our conflicting impulses continue to evolve and alter the behavior of both humans and animals. We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature. Within my work I examine the primal issues of comfort and fear, dependence and determination, submission and dominance that play out in the physical and psychological encounters between man and the natural world. Increasingly, these encounters take place within the artificial ecotones we have constructed that act as both passage and barrier between domestic space and the wild."

4 days, 5 crazy men

Hegel... Kierkegaard... Hiedegger... Derrida... Deleuze...
intensives are a bad way to do philosophy- especially existentialist and postmodern philosophies. 8 hours a day, monday through thursday= mental overload and existential despair. this kind of abuse makes me want to dissociate in unhealthy ways- hopefully i'll stumble upon pure being.

logos

last summer i took a philosophy course which explored, among other things, the origins of the word logos which appears in the epic opening of john's gospel. lately it's been on my mind a whole lot. we translate it into "word" yet this option does little to convey the meaning of this loaded word. it was coined in the days of the pre-socratics and developed by plato himself. the logos is the idea- mind, word, pure intellect, reason. when aristotle began to categorize the universe, he unpacked it piece by piece, all the way down to the question of what is the essence of being? the answer was logos- a thing is defined by the pure idea behind it. christ was born in a world that can be described as jewish-hellenism in thinking. the logos was a common concept- so john opens his text by stating that this man jesus is literally the pre-existing idea or reason behind all things. to state simply that christ is the logos is problematic to me because of the extracted, non-contextual and non-holistic nature of "pure reason." but for john to then say that this logos became flesh (interjected into the particular, contextual and holistic realm) was to turn centuries of greek thought completely on its head- for the greek had been concerned with unpacking the universe in search of the logos, john said "here he is, and he carries his greatest meaning when he is non-abstract." for me, this is a call to live in the particular, to venture outside the world of theory, to crash into one another and be with- mud, blood, sweat, tears, laughter, dirt... humanity.