Playtest

I’ve been struggling with my writing for the last couple of days, as I’ve gotten to a point of my introductory chapter where my arguments are supposed to congeal into a sort of ‘and so that is why I’m doing it this way’ kind of statement. I’ve kludged something together, and its not particularly strong at the moment, but I was getting bored of staring at the blinking cursor, so it’ll will have to do for now until I can bring myself to read back through this 9000 word chapter written almost as a stream of consciousness just like Kerouac, J., but with less references jazz, hitch hiking, and homo-social relationships.

Hopefully a book I ordered from Readings a month ago will turn up this week. Apparently they had to get it from US suppliers, but I was still a little bemused by how long they said it would take. I could have gotten it of Amazon, but I’m in no particular hurry to confuse myself with more phenomenology and existentialism anyway, I might already be approaching that limit =).

I’d decided to buy my mother a book for mother’s day, so on Saturday I visited a book shop run by a friend of a friend. Looking through the books I came across Camus’ ‘The Outsider’, and picked it up for myself. I was less than surprised when a book described as ‘a classic existentialist novel’ opened with the death of the protagonist’s mother, and no more surprised with the ending closing on the impending death of the protagonist himself. Even Google Books lists its subject as death. Its an interesting, if short, book, the indifference and aimless tone of the first person narration is very effective.

I’m trying to catch up with my thesis writing at the moment, I’m not doing too badly, but then again I just cut and pasted a chunk of text from one of my conference papers into the introduction, so it feels a little bit like cheating, though I will have to rewrite it slight;y to fit the flow of the chapter anyway.

I’ve added a photo of myself to my ‘about’ page. No particular reason for it, I needed a photo for a staff profile on the course I’m teaching blackboard page, so I thought I might as well put it up here as well. It is in sepia tones, but this is more to hide the fact that it was taken using my housemates MacBook Pro under fluorescent lighting, and I looked a bit like a zombie with normal colours.

I’ve just about finished reading Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, being into the final chapter. Its taken me a while, as I’ve generally been reading it on the train too and from Uni everyday, and the trip itself is usually only about 15-20 minutes or so, so I don’t get through much in a day unless there are delays or cancellations, which are, admittedly, quite frequent. And it is quite a dense book, even the copy editors have missed a few spelling mistakes in the edition I have.

I’ve been wondering if I should move next to Heidegger’s Being and Time, I mean, its only another 550 or so pages of complex, foundational philosophy to read. Despite my reluctance, It did feel quite awkward trying to write about Heidegger in relation to Merleau-Ponty, when I’m only drawing upon Dourish’s briefest of accounts, and a few other mentions of his work in a couple of other texts. There is a book I’ve come across called Phenomenology and Existentialism by Robert Solomon, that seems to be a fairly collection of essays and excerpts on, well, existentialism and phenomenology that I was thinking of ordering from Readings, that includes sections by Heidegger, and also another on Heidegger’s approach to the concept of the tool. Maybe I should put some of those hard earned tutorial dollars to work.