thanks broooo

So we are supposed to be thankful for a classmate this week? This is so cheesy, Mr. McCarthy. Yeah I guess it fits the theme of Thanksgiving, but still. I’m thankful for Rich Chung. Why? Because I have a class with him before this class, and I can ask him to make sure I didn’t miss anything we had to do for Philosophy, like a book reading or something. I can also easily comment on his blog all the time to knock one of the two weekly comments off. Although I’m not even sure you read them, Mr. McCarthy. Do you even check them? Anyway, it’s also nice that Rich is in the class because he’s one of the few people I knew before the class. And because we have so much group work in the class, Rich is there to team up and do the group work all the time. He sits nearby so that’s also really easy to ask questions, and do the aforementioned group work. So thanks Rich. Thanks for being such a bro. Bro.

Dear Cormac McCarthy,

Dear Cormac McCarthy,
You write a lot of books that become movies. No Country for Old Men and The Road are already movies. I heard Blood Meridian is going to be a movie soon too. You crazy old fool. So many movies. No Country for Old Men was apparently a really good film too. But at least you vary your setting and stories to keep them interesting, unlike Stephen King. Him and his love for Maine and alcoholics. You write about the west, the post-apocalyptic word, a lot of different things. Your storytelling is also compelling, especially the way you write. You know, the lack of quotations in The Road, and stuff.

But I'm not sure if The Road was supposed to be all philosophical. Was it? I can never tell with authors. It seems faked a lot of the times. Maybe not in your work, but in other works,for sure. I guess we'd have to ask if you ____ is what you meant when you wrote _________. Literary criticism can be a bunch of total nonsense a lot of the time, making analogies and connections up where they never existed. But then you could simply say that the book means whatever it means to the reader. And we couldn't say anything about that, could we? But I digress.

In the end, your book is pretty spiffy. It's dark, sad, and the writing style is captivating. The Road is a great book, no matter what you meant in the words while writing it.

From,
Dohyun

DEFEND THE POET

I am so confused right now. What am I supposed to do? Defend Charles Bukowski’s gross decayed corpse from grave robbers and zombies or his point of view in Dinosauria, We and his life from critics? I’m going to go ahead and assume the latter. Although I’m not really sure why I’d want to defend this alcoholic dead man whose corpse is probably fermenting in a stone cold coffin in California, or his extremist poem that sounds like some deranged man at train stops preaching to the masses about the end of the world, I’ll try. I’ll try.

Charles Bukowski’s Dinosauria, We criticizes the way we live now, and then develops a “could be” apocalypse in the future, because of these factors now. We would create our own destruction and own extinction. Critics call it blown out of proportion, but there is some truth in Charles Bukowski’s words. If we are apathetic to the way we live now, there is nothing stopping what we create for the future. He describes all the problems in our lives today early on, but all that revolves around one large problem, apathy. The real problem is allowing these misdeeds to continue on. He views that society is ruined and while we should change it, and could to avoid the catastrophe of an apocalypse, we don’t. He views that our lives are hanging by a thread in balance, and once we go over, all hell, worse than hell, breaks loose.

We should not look at his poem for direct words, but the ideas. The ideas that what we create and our apathy, will bite us back in the end, whether through an apocalypse or some other disaster. We need to take action now to control the future.

A direction

I think the first question should be if we even need a direction. The way the class is moving now is a form of asking questions and then discussing. And isn't that how we learn? From others? We make arguments and discussions with each other, getting viewpoints and sharing our own. If we simply read a textbook that preached about the different viewpoints others had, it wouldn't be the same. We could not talk to the book the way we talk to each other. If we did, we'd simply look crazy. If we simply read a book, we could not get feedback, or opinions. All we would get is solid facts of ideas from dead people long ago.

Learning straight from a book is never good. It's rigid and stiff, with no room for change. To be honest, the textbook you gave us is possibly the driest textbook to ever exist. That’s probably why all of them are falling apart. The discussions are much more active and much more memorable. Reading books such as Candide and the Road are great, because along with reading good books, we get to discuss and question each other about not only the plot points of the book, but the themes and ideas behind it. It’s indirectly learning philosophy I suppose, and that is much better than being beaten on the head with the old and parched tome that is the textbook.

So all in all, discussions are nice as we get to express our thoughts and receive others’. Isn’t that what these blogs are doing now?

ALL THE BLOG ENTRIES

For ease.

9/10 Eulogy
9/17 The Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living?
9/24 Who is the Modern Gadfly?
10/1 Candide’s Punishments, Do They Fit the Crime?
10/8 God in 2010
10/15 Our Meaning
10/22 How Do I Know What I Know?
10/29 Father & Son, Mother & Daughter, Mother & Son, Father & Daughter
11/5 A Direction the Class Needs
11/12 Defend the Poet! (Charles Bukowski)
11/19 Open Letter to Cormac McCarthy
11/26 Thankful for a Classmate
12/3 Sports in My Life
12/10 Globalization
12/17 Winter Poem
1/7 I’m a Shoe
1/14 King Still King?
1/21 Good Food Review
1/28 Ultimate Recipe
2/4 I Knows This Means Something
2/11 Album/Track Review
2/18 X Marks the Spot
2/25 X is Known
3/4 McCarthy’s Birthday Week
3/11 We Have the Right
3/18 Art Review
3/25 Movie Review
4/1 A Book to Read
4/8 Invisible
4/15 Save the Earth, Do this!
4/22 Alone
4/29 Together
5/6 Surrounded by Cuckoos, but I was the crazy one
5/13 Thoughts about Earlier Thinking
5/20 Letter to The Prospective Philosophy Student
5/27 Me at the End