if we start at the beginning, it's a big bang

i guess since i have this going on screen in the ouc (reads like a verse in the national anthem) i better get to the biz of posting for our class. everybody is ahead of me which means there are no trails to blaze just now.

i started reading the foreword and found me in huck finn land again...like finnlandia. one important note was the idea of introducing ways of reading, not endorsing any methodology. the heuristic approach is how i do most any reading. unless assigned, i give any book at hand 25 pages to establish a relationship between text and reader. fair enough i think. i try to keep favorites in my collection. oh, i don't like huck finn like i did centuries ago. one of us grew up, maybe.

a book grabs me visually first, like a buffet item. it might be the title, but usually the cover design is the bait. the finn thing again: sawyer's claim that doing things different from what's in the books and get things "all muddled up." that doesn't even work with recipes in cookbooks.what does work is taking a look, trying what's interesting, and not being too intimidated by the unfamiliar (which reminds me of the angst i was in getting bloghand going). sawyer trusted books, making simple actions complicated.

then mr. bressler brings in Flannery O'Connor's "...Good Man...". That story surprised me and serves as a warning should i choose to read more of O'Connor's works. Grandma wasn't shot in the head; maybe so she'd look "good" at the funeral, if the body is found soon enough. What did the gang do with the family's vehicle? any text, printed, painted, carved in stone, is going to have multiple meanings. we are not copies of each other. i'm glad. a comfort for me is that there is no metatheory under which we all must stand.

chapter 2 takes us to the 5th Century BCE era, with socrates and his thinking progeny. that's about the time prince guatama dumped his present to seek beyond all time. i mentioned buddha in class and that was right as well as wrong. if we are to study one sport, we need not investigate all of them. i hope i use two words often enough to remember them: "ontology" and "epistemology" are the two. there are many more, but it seems like to know we have to have a being to experience.

Plato's assertion that poets must be banished reminded me of buddhist teachings that include burning buddha images and using sutras (scripture) to wrap fish. the idea is that images and texts keep one from the internal exploration which is how buddha became what he was. maybe that's why this post seems boring to me. that being the case, i don't expect anybody to get more from it but something has to show up here. i'll blame it on the blog's appearance. a bland blog blah. maybe i'll fix it.

i think of me as a gypsy scholar, from some text i read somewhen. just read a henry james story: "Daisy Miller - a study". it took three hours but it was worth much more. his brother, William James, is a familiar name among psychology students. in our text, james is said to have declared that "good novels show us life in action and, above all else, are interesting." Daisy's story fits that.