Old Hat?

Perhaps you are familiar with my school: The Gallatin School of Individualized Study. This school lets people come to what some might call a really reputable university to pursue a a curriculum of their own design, for example, a curriculum I am continuing to design in "Interdisciplinary Creative Writing." (I would have to say that Yeats, Keats, Pater, T.S. Eliot, and all of the Modernists would probably call me an idiot under their breaths if they found out.. or just say "Old Hat, Xeen."

Some majors others pursued or at least have claimed to pursue:

Rock N' Roll (Not sure of the choice of phonetics for that person, but I went with N')

Computer Science and Philosophy (Too bad the teacher wasn't the creator of Sim City, who is currently working on a simulation that takes you from the existence of an atom with particular characteristics, to form a specific being and create your own universe.. that would have legitimized Everything.)

Some majors I wish I had pursued:

Labelmaking, Pirating, and Hacking

Psycadellics and Children's Book Writing

Steven Spielberg and C.S. Lewis

Harry Potter and English Culture and Homeless People

Cooking and the Internet

Netflix and Library Science

In any case, lately I have been synthesizing a few of the things I am reading, and it's all become incredibly structural ever since I read this book: The Artist and the Mathematician, , which disguises itself as a historical or biographical mystery as a marketing scheme, but is actually a mathematician's understanding of the interconectedness of anthropology, linguistics, psychology, fine arts, and literature through the lens of history.

For a person like me who feels as if I cannot concentrate on a specific academic framework without losing the essence of the interconnectedness of it all, but at the same time, as if i cannot possibly be so lazy as to not attempt to understand at least one complicated and intricate structure (i.e. scientific, historical, mathematical) to have a framework in which to organize everything I am interested in, this book is the God-sent bible.

Amir D. Aczel might either be an "old hat" or at least a cheap one for those of us who can translate and digest and absorb books while we are eating spaghetti or sleeping (don't worry I actually have an example of such a person coming...) because people who write popular essays write in colloquial terms... ON PURPOSE! Fine with me... I can't read Kant on the subway, I just Kant.

In any case, this guy will talk to you about Descarte's connection to Mysticism, the Kabbalah and Fermat, or in this case, maybe "New Math" and Dada. If this guy went to Gallatin, the dean would be tempted to say "Old Hat." And then Dr. Aczel might say, "Bullshit Hippie School Dean is an old hat, too."

This book make me understand myself, my interest in a diverse array of subjects, and the fact that I have only been narrow-minded enough to call myself "unable to make decisions" since pursuing a ray of subjects hoping to find an intersection or at least a transversal that runs through many parallel structures is a choice.

Maybe I should stop drinking Red Bull. So Far, I don't think so.

Anyway, I also started reading "The History of the Modern World." Which is a text book from my AP European History Class, (which points out the narrowminded misnomer of the book, but also shows how teacher's buy books with dumb misleading ethnocentric names to keep us dumb.)

Rereading your history books and the intertwining of events really helps you understand that "Nation" and the formation of our ideas of different cultures is truly lacking, or at least is far too compartmentalized into seemingly unrelated things. Well let me tell you what brothers and sisters, we're all related:

Things you probably forgot about history:

Europe's neolithic age:

when a culture starts to settle, make tools, "weave cloth, and build living quarters", happened 2000 motherfuckin years AFTER that of the "Near East" (Egypt, the Euphrates and Tigris Valley.)

In the 1300s the idea of CHIVALRY basically died when the English showed the "noble knight" french people that Long Bows beat romanticism any old day. So stop trying to pay for everything and open the doors, okay? Because I have a long bow. (FYI boys, some chicks like that old shitvalry... I hear them complain about its medieval death all the time.)

The Greeks stole the homeland of the "Cretans."

The Romans stole the homeland of the "Greeks" (though didn't do much besides organize in this genius, but authoritarian Mussolini way.

"At the same time (400 AD or so) the idea that no ruler, no government, and no institution is too mighty to rise above moral criticism opened the way to a dynamic and progressive way of living in the West." Uhh.. Duh die-hard Democrats or Republicans who call criticizing anything "un-american." I know it's a duh for you guys, but THINK about how many people buy into that pseudo-democracy propaganda.. My Ass.

The people's of Asia who first populated what was later to become Europe brough languages that link modern-day tongues in Iran and India with all romance languages.

When the Roman civilization collapsed, there were three parts left: The Muslim World had Baghdad. Their palaces kicked ass.

The Byzantine or Greek cultural group had kickass writing, navigation, law, and the best city.

The third place was the leftover area that the Byzantines couldn't hold and the Arabs couldn't conquer: Latin Christendom: France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, and Britain. Here is how they discribe this ish: "But the presence of the invaders (germanic/ Celtic) armed and fierce amid peasants and city dwellers reduced to passivity by Roman rule, together with the disintigration of Roman institutions that had gone on even before the invasions, left this region in chaos." Yeah, this section of people was still deciding who was guilty by seeing if they floated (which meant they were guilty, and if you were innocent, you were dead... never understood that.)

PEOPLE: The point is, we are leftovers. We shouldn't treat the third world like this. We shouldn't be greedy hogs, although this one is particularly cute! We'll get ours someday, but by then we'll all be dead because of some natural disaster.

Googling Postmodernism, etc.

Which leads me to the next things I have been reading:


1. An essay by Peter Barry on postmodernism that describes how nowadays every symbol or image we see is not real, based on the idea that back in the old God-fearing, pre-War, faith and reason are great days, one thing had an underlying meaning, i.e. an image of a woman portrayed as a delicate woman, meant that it showed something innate and real. This is all Baudrillards theory, which can be broken down as this:

"...the loss of the real ... the view that in contemporary life, the pervasive influence of images from film, TV and advertising has led to a loss of the distinction between a real and imagined, realty and illusion, surface and depth. The result is a culture of hyperreality..."

Here is how Meaning is Gradually Decreased until we have our current state of Meaninglessness and Hyperreality or what we college kids call "postmodernism" while rolling around on the ground rabid with hemmoraging mushroom brains:

Firstly, the sign represents a basic reality, i.e. a painting of mid-century life for people in an impoverished people showing repetitiveness and monotony; As signs then... a basic reality is depicted.

Secondly, the sign can misrepresent or distort the image behind it. Take a painting of the same impoverished people romanticized to make it seem better than it was.

Thirdly, The sign disguises the fact that there IS no corresponding reality underneath.

Fourth, the last stage, the sign bears no resemblance to reality at all.

That's all from Baudrillard vis Peter Barry.

Okay, so understand that the THIRD step, for example saying that "Disneyworld" is a sign of "America" makes us think that everything in Disneyworld is fantastical or just a "symbol" and the "real" Fantastic america that it represents is lurking out there: Here's the thing: It's All disneyworld. There's no america. They just paint a fake border between real and fake to make you think that what's happening now is real.

Fucking Crazy, right?

SO: after this I read this Book called Super Minds, which is a young adult book I found a year ago, about people with different abilities, i.e. a guy who can see into people's bodies and access any person's unconcious mind, even if he is nowhere with them to find the cure for any sickness. Think of it as having ultimate google brain.

Other people had the ability to sense matter, i.e. oil in a field, just by looking at a map, or go through "shaman' like reincarnations where they were a rabbit, then a dog, then a baby, and saw time fold into itself. Other people could tell people who they were reincarnations of and hook them up to their old friends who were also reincarnations.

Which links with the history: because we keep making the same historical, greedy mistakes. Because maybe Hitler's still out there. Maybe Abe is still out there. Maybe JC came back as Martin Luther King. Right. What's with the continuing need of tyrrany alternating with martyrdom, huh?


Black Holes



SO last but not least, was the NOVA special on BLACK HOLES. There is a hole in the milky way three million times the density of the sun and the galaxy closest to us is spinning towards us, which is worrisome, because galaxies exhibit cannabalistic behaviors: they eat one another.

Which means that TIMESPACE does get warped sometimes. Maybe these people with special powers are born on certain days and feel the pull of strange things happening far far away.

COMMENTS. I DESERVE SOME. That was hard work.