For some reason my phone thought that today was the beginning of daylight saving time and reset itself to an hour earlier; it’s off by a week. Luckily I was not fooled.
I.
About twice a year our Sunday writing group does not the regular three prompts (the first of which is always ‘use the following five words,’ followed by five words …), but rather one beginning prompt to get us going followed by a prompt contributed by each contributing writer. Redundancy intended. We call these Marathon Prompts.
This year the autumn installment fell … today.
Which is really rather handy. It’s both a way to wrap up October as well as a way to herald November and ‘NaNoWriMo’ (National Novel Writing Month). The latter is often accompanied for many by ‘No-Shave November‘ (NSN) (see also: ‘Movember’ ). I’d have a hard time completing a true NSN, as I couldn’t stand having a neckbeard, but I could stomach the Van Dyke (also spelled Vandyck, Van Dyck or Van Dijk).
Anyway: prompts. There were only seven this day, but still they took us to new textual territory, a little ‘Cabin in the Woods,’ a little Cloud Atlas, a lot traditional tropes repurposed again and again. The last is a bit of an in-joke.
My apologies.
II.
The other day I came across ‘Nerd Fitness‘. ‘Back in my day,’ I rumble grumpily, we had The Hacker’s Diet … and we liked it.
The nutrition data used by, well, NutritionData, is available to a great extent from the USDA’s ‘Nutrient Data Laboratory‘, which provides a lot of data for download … which is useful if you can import it into your database engine.
III.
It’s a wonderful autumn Sunday for me and Ms. S. to go out on the town, perhaps shop a little, peruse and perambulate, and so on. The wind is still twenty feet up or so; the limbs and branches of lower trees barely sneeze while those above wave and sway as if at a rave.
It appears that we have new neighbors, that the apartment upstairs is re-occupied. Or haunted, as there are squeaks and creaks upon the floors above us. Their floor, our ceiling … not quite the same as particle-wave duality, but it does make you think about it.
I’m currently being inspired by an 1898 text, Die Ästhetik als Wissenschaft der anschaulichen Erkenntnis (by Willi Nef). The expression “anschauliche Erkenntnis” goes back before Nef but was resurrected in the 1970s. “Anschaulich” basically means that which you can look at, directly perceive, etc. And “Erkenntnis” is knowledge, more or less; in the context of epistemology “anschauliche Erkenntnis” is knowledge through the senses vs. through reasoning, but it’s also not empirical knowledge in the sense of Locke or Hume, and so on. More, it’s meant as “intuitive knowledge,” a whole that is grasped, not necessarily “conceptual” or “rational.” I should back-track a bit on the “not empiricism” part, as depending on when it’s being proposed or what it’s being proposed in contrast to, that’s what is meant. In contrast to Leibniz, Wolff, and other rationalists, the more strictly empirical side is emphasized, I would say. In any case, the point being made here is that Baumgarten, a pupil of Wolff’s, more or less proposed aesthetics as this “science” of empirical-intuitive knowledge. In particular it’s not about the “clear and distinct” ideas of Descartes and Leibniz, the ones that lead to truth, but about gaining something through the “clear and/but confused,” that which is less “refined,” so to speak. This was not set up as an “alternative way of knowing” in the sense that so many New Agey things are proposed these days, but that’s a topic for another day. In any case, while I was familiar with how this material was covered in the 18th century, and rather familiar with the more recent (1970-forward) scholarship, I had for some reason overlooked Neff’s treatise.
A lot of “more or less” up there.
But now Ms. S. and I have a Sunday evening rotation to undertake … so it’s time to sign off.
