Gutenberg Slim

original reviews and musings on literature in the public domain

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Soon…

I’ll be merging this into the regular fishhook theater blog. 

There are two main reasons for this:

  1. There’s not really any benefit to having two blogs as loosely themed as mine.
  2. The most recent Gutenberg Slim post wasn’t about public domain literature (which is the stated purpose of the blog.)  This got me thinking about it and I realized point 1.

Also, the name Gutenberg Slim is a jokey pun on Iceberg Slim, a man I knew enough about to make a play on his name, but in doing so I basically ignored its possible implications.  I doubt anybody was offended and I doubt anybody thought I was a pimp.  I’d been thinking about changing the name, but now that I’m goin to merge, I no longer have the need.

So, to anyone who follows this, please do so at the other blog, if you don’t already.

Thanks.

Filed under literature books

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Gutenberg Slim #6

Works Considered: 

Bunches by various

Lately I’ve been taking in a good bit of theory, hypothesis, and opinion, directly and indirectly: the educational and addictive History of Philosophy podcasts, the essays of Eliseo Vivas and Jorge Luis Borges, the prose portions of Poetry Magazine’s 100th anniversary series, some existentialist fiction in Sartre and Lagerkvist, inconclusive discussions in internet forums.

Where can all this lead me? What can all these things possibly have in common? The thread I’ve noticed (though it’s likely not the only one) is the struggle to know, or more specifically, the difference between coming to know and already knowing. This is the topic of at least one of the Socratic dialogues and underlies basically any non-scientific inquiry or discussion, from tastes in music to theoretical aesthetic postulation to the possibility of meaningful living.

Through science we come to know by observing, categorizing, comparing, etc, until we know what is what, what isn’t what else, what causes what. In non-scientific inquiries, things get less cut-and-dry. You may argue your point logically, regardless of whether or not you arrived at the point itself by way of logic, or you may ask questions and express and re-express your point until your fellow arrives at the conclusion that they already know what you’ve been trying to say.

Read more …

Filed under philosophy lit books poetry logic literature sartre borges vivas opinion