[lit-ideas] Re: Daughter of a Female Dog

Paul Stone:

"and so *********! (Sorry Phil - are you still in here, or there?)"

We are NOT amused!

I suppose it has been some time since I last contributed to the list.  A
combination of the interference of life and a lack of interest or spirit.

I was briefly tempted to respond to Walter O. and his comments on Kant, but
having recently attended a conference on Kant, the joy just isn't there.  I
think the lack of joy has to do with being around 'true believers' and their
ability to drain from a subject any quality that might make it interesting.
For instance, on the question of whether an embryo is or is not a person, a
conference presenter pointed out that Kant failed to provide an answer and
so we must search his corpus for clues as to what his opinion would be if he
were alive today.  I immediately wondered whether he would still be in
Koenigsberg or, having lived a few hundred years more, at some point he
might have gathered the courage to travel beyond the city limits.

I am preparing myself to start marking papers that I hope have as their
subject some variation of themes on democracy, civil society, Indonesia and
Islam.  I don't know where this habit came from, but it seems that academic
papers written in Indonesia must include lengthy biographies and definitions
that have no obvious connection to the argument but nevertheless take up a
lot of space on the page.  I tried to address this problem by setting a
limit on the number of pages I would read of any one essay, but this had the
unfortunate consequence of reducing the number of pages that had meaningful
content.  I am not sure what to expect with this latest batch.


Sincerely,

Phil Enns
Yogyakarta, Indonesia

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