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Location: Blogs Vienna Team Blog |
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| Posted by: Team Member |
6/18/2007 |
With less than two week to our departure there are a lot of things running through my mind. Like:
- Why are the Cardinals STILL 6.5 games behind the Brewers? THE BREWERS! Are
we the world champs because right now the Redbirds aren't even playing
as well as the state champs of Missiouri. June, overall, has been
better than April and May, so maybe they're warming up to the idea of
playing baseball like it oughta be up there in the 'Lou. I do think
we'll actually be at .500 by the All-star Break. It's not all
hopelessly bleak. Some of it is hopefully bleak.
- Why aren't more people listening to Gov't Mule? This is a great,
great band. Sometimes, like today, I just get in a mood where I gotta
listen to some Mule. Warren Haynes was 21st (or 22nd, I can't remember) on Rolling Stone
Magazine's most recent list of the greatest guitarists of all time (he
was one of four former Allman Brothers Band guitarists on the list). On
Gov't Mule's MySpace page you can listen to a live acoustic version of
"Soulshine" (it's my favorite by the band). On YouTube you can find a
really cool rendition of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" as well a medley of
the 90s anthem "Hungerstrike" and Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy." Why are
you not checking this guys out? Stop reading this and go listen!!!
- The Panters were stupid to release Keyshawn Johnson. I know a lot
of people don't like Keyshawn, but he's been a very good receiver for a
very long time. I know Steve Smith is Mr. Unstoppable, so it doesn't
really matter who runs the Y and Z route, but Keyshawn still had two or
three years of 800+ receiving in him (and it'd probably been more than
1,000). I kind of ascribe to the Bill Parcels' school of NFL receiving:
if you have a big, strong receiver with good hands it doesn't matter if
he's not as fast or shifty as a cornerback, he's going to come down
with the ball.
- Why has the Church of Christ become so infatuated with "seeker"
churches? Sometimes, I'm even a little bit scared that we've really
bought into the Willowcreek model of doing things. They are, afterall,
HUGE!!! I understand their influence, and I think they're are plenty of honest intentions about "getting
the people in the pews," but I believe that seeker churches rewrite the
"theology of the church" (if I can use that phrase--i don't think I
can, but I'm going to so as to prevent carrying this paranthetical
thought to four times its current length). I wish English translations
of the Bible would stop translating ekklasia as "church" and start translating it as "assembly." Then, perhaps, we might once again place emphasis on assembly,
on building up the body. That's why the first Christian's
assembled--"to build up the body, which praises the head" (John
Harrison's phrase, not mine). Evangelism wasn't the point of the
assembly!!! We're not supposed to establish flashy programs so that
those seeking spiritual things will be attracted to our worship
service--we're not supposed to attract these so called "seekers," we're supposed to be the seekers. We're supposed to go out and seek and save the lost.
The Great Commission was "GO!" It wasn't "If you build it they will
come." (Frost and Hirsch address this in their marvelous book The Shaping of Things to Come).
- I think I'm going to challenge Curt Niccum to a fight. I think I
could take him. I feel like "beat up language nerd" would look get on
my resume. I also think "Local Langauge Nerd Gets Smacked Down by Former Student" would
make a catchy newspaper headline.
- I'm tired and weary from the last six months (it has been craaazy)!
I just spent two minutes trying to decide if "catchy" was spelled
c-a-t-c-h-y or c-a-c-h-t-y. I used to be decent at spelling and grammar
before I took Linguistics in college. Deep structures and
deconstruction ruined my ability to spell or write by conventional
standards. I like my writing better now, it just seems to make people
upset whenever they ask me to read over something and I respond "I don't
see any reason why not." every. single. time. I now ascribe to the
thesis of Heidegger in his essay "Langauge"(Die Sprache) that we don't speak language but language speaks us.
- Do you really think I've read Heidegger? Because I have. I didn't
understand it, but I've read some of his stuff. I don't know what the
thesis of "Language" is, I read that "languge speaks us" stuff in the
introduction to the essay in the Norton Anthology.
- Speaking of which, I really miss my Norton Anthology of Theory
and Criticism. I shipped it in the container with the rest of the stuff
we're taking to Vienna.
- Ferdinand de Saussure is consider the Father of Structuralism.
Saussure never wrote a book. After he passed away his students
collected together their notes from class and A Course in General Linguistics was
published. Unfortunately for those compilers, Saussure himself never
used the same lecture notes twice, if he used them at all. Of course,
from Structuralism evolved Post-structuralism (Dut-dut-DUMMMMM).
- Despite all of the great 20th century advancements in industry, technology, art, philoshopy, I maintain that these
great thinkers, innovators and artists were terribly uncreative when it
came to naming new cultural movements and/or advancements (no, this
isn't the longest sentence I've ever written; for that you'd need to
see my eighth grade science paper on plate tectonics--one sentence
lasting five handwritten pages, front and back thank you very much). (I
was influenced by Samuel Beckett's works at an early age.) Every time
something new was identified, those guys just put "post" in front of
it. This bled into the mainstream media and was thrust down the
collective throat of the American television viewing audience at an
audacious rate (e.g., post-Columbine, post-9/11, post-WWII, post-Nixon,
post office...no wait, that one's been around a while).
- I like parantheses. (For Josh).
- I love the word "audacious." I also like the word "noodle." Another favorite of mine is "willy-nilly."
- Once I told Curt Niccum that I was going to compile all of
the student notes from Greek class and publish a book in his name
introducting the philosophical practice of Non-structuralism. Maybe I
should remind him of that. See if I can provoke him into a fight.
- Tomorrow Alisha and I are going to Portland. I don't know what my
favorite American city is, but Portland and St. Louis (Go Cards!) are
definitely near the top. If we ever come back from Europe, I want to
live in the Northwest. I'm also intrigued with the Great Lake region.
In Oregon they have espresso shops like Oklahoma has bait shops.
- I am annoyed by people who mispronounce "espresso" as "expresso."
- The truth is I could live my whole life in Vienna (I think). It's really a great city. No baseball. No football. No real
football (real football requires helmets, in case you're not sure which football is the real football). But I could live there.
- OK. That's enough from me. Until we meet again.
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Re: From the Mind of a Twisted Madman, or the Affectionate Musings a Future Post-human--Brian |
By Haskew on
6/19/2007 |
whew! For a minute I thought you were going to blame your spelling problem on your close proximity to an Engineer over the last 9 months.
Dodged a bullet there! |
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Re: From the Mind of a Twisted Madman, or the Affectionate Musings a Future Post-human--Brian |
By Brian on
6/20/2007 |
| Don't worry, there are plenty of other things in my life for which I hold you culpable. |
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