new

I realize that it's been a while since I've posted anything in this. But not for no reason. Grad school has finally started after an almost start a year ago, followed by the said year, and then here I am. The move was good, and I finally feel like I'm starting to get settled.

As far as the program goes, I'm really excited for it. It seems to be a department that is on the upswing and is in transition. Or maybe it's at this fork in the road and the exciting part is that it's making decisions as to which way to take (don't even bring in Robert Frost here, please). So that's a good thing. Initially I was worried as to just what classes would be like, but after going to a week of them, they are essentially the same, just on a much higher level.

With that said, I feel like I'm way in over my head as far as a knowledge base goes. While undergrad got the ball rolling for me, a lot of my learning came from me myself. That being the case, I feel like I'm somewaht playing catch-up here. The exciting thing, though, is that I feel that all this information is sinking in faster than it ever has. Maybe that was the problem; it just never sank in before. Anyhow.

I'm taking Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit", Heidegger's "Being and Time", and Philosophy of Walter Benjamin. Hegel is an eye-opener. Not in the sense of, man I've never really looked at the world in this way, so much as its the goddamn hardest thing I've ever tried to read. Upside of things with that is that the class is being taught by Tom Rockmore, who is big name in the world of philosophy. Look up Hegel in Wikipedia, and the first bibliographic entry is Rockmore. So he knows his stuff; but what's interesting is that he has this super progressive/controversial reading of Hegel that nobody seems to like. Instead of Hegel the proponent of the Absolute, of a religious Spirit, or of an dialectical reading of history that somehow gave rise to both Marx and Fukeyama and their respective 'end of history's', you get a reading of Hegel as this historical contextualist, almost relativist. So that's refreshing. If you're going to read Hegel, it might as well be interesting.

The Being and Time class is good too. It's being taught by Dr. Rodemeyer who is a Husserl scholar. So we're reading Heidegger through somebody who studies Heidegger's teacher, which should bring in some good historical lineage stuff, or however you want to put that. In other words, we get to see what Heidegger is coming from also. She's real thorough in class and has an intersting class structure, the most exciting of which she previews the reading for next class, and thereby gives the main points/structure of the reading that we'll be doing at home. That way you have an idea of what you're getting into when you start reading, and it eliminates basic questions next time for class. I'm interested to see how the text gets interpreted in class.

And the last class is the Walter Benjamin class. For that, we're reading his "Arcades Project", which is this gigantic text, wherein which he examines 19th century Parisian Arcades. Sounds dry, but the way the book is set up is really cool; it's a bunch of extracts from various texts of the period that Benjamin collected and reassembled, interspersed with his comments and notes, etc. What it ends up being is this analyses of the beginning of capitalism, but read through the eyes of a marxist of sorts that is all the while a mystic Jew to some degree. So there's this interesting dialectical structure going on, as well as this complex relationship between one who dislikes the tenets of capitalism, though is still very open to the glamour and beauty of things, of commodities. It deals with fashion, art, technology, etc.

So yea, that's enough for now. New entries to come; they won't really be political anymore, but will probably be me trying to work out ideas for stuff I'm dealing with in class and these texts, and eventually paper ideas. So until then and stuff.