So now, at last, in my "Just Barely Accredited Online Master's Program" I have reconnected with why I like academia ('love' would be going to far on this, the first date of my senescence).
The class I hate the most so far, some shit about poetry, has me off in a corner reading a painstakingly stolen (cut and pasted one page at a time, baby!) book by the mad priest Willy Ong. A little treatise on the difference between literate (writing) cultures and oral (get your mind out of the gutter you tramp) cultures and how this affects thinking.
I won't get into all the clever things he says, or how it makes me think that the literate culture must shortly die as technology (tv... blogs... podcasts) is recreating an oral culture. But reading this piece, on my computer in the bar?
Reminds me of the decade I learned most of what I am. Locked in a series of silly apartments in the Berkely/Oakland area drinking gallons of beer, often snorting illegal substances, but blessedly alone, without expectation (I had done a fairly keen job of scaring my friends and family off). All I did was read and write and think. I suppose it was, minus the drugs, porno, and odd (in all senses of the word) girlfriends, a monastic lifestyle.
Reading Ong I long for the time to sit, read and think...
Korea?
please?
;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment