apologia
This was supposed to be a Friday Philosophy piece on a topic related to why this blog is called Learning Aesthetics, but as they say, “Shit happens.” I hesitated to use that phrase given that LA is, however unofficial, related to my professional life. I considered briefly using ‘S..t happens’ thus engaging you in a moment of shared comradery, assuming that comradery can be shared across the gender lines of readership, a premise which given the topic seems at best problematic. The problem is that I’ve never understood exactly why ‘S…’ or ‘S..t’ was preferable to ’shit’*; the only logic I can bring to it is that we are protecting the children (or women if you’re of a somewhat more chauvinist bent) from encountering yet another ‘vulgar’ Anglo Saxon signifier, the signified of which these same children at a slightly less socialized phase experienced as a perfectly suitable material for finger-painting and thus artistic creation. It’s the logic that escapes me; I understand that the elision would demonstrate my own socialization, while preserving a certain masculine childish rough charm, or hipness, or something. I get that, but I don’t understand it. All that aside, what happened was that this week the day job interrupted the philosophical in that Mike Morrison turned me on to a really cool GPS application from HP that promises to be the critical piece in a project that I have been working on for the past couple of months. More on than anon. As for the FP piece there’s a draft that’s not near long enough, that I need to work on till it’s too long, and then cut back till it’s halfway readable. Maybe next week.
