April 7, 2009
yoga is turning me into an optimist…. so is the symposium. …Back to Eryximachus’ speech.  He is the most rational.  I think he is most relevent speakers to our times.  Whether he is driven by emotion or not is regardless, none of the actions of these speakers line up with their words.  However, his words seem to imply that he is not driven by emotion but by a sort of reason that nicely fits into his view of life.  He’s a specialist and filters everything through his understanding of the body, his understanding of how to fix and rid the body from afflictions.  He has misunderstood his reason though.  The problem is that he only has an understanding of a part.  Socrates says he prefers his own condition of openness to the whole to an almost perfect clarity about a part bought at the expense of forgetting the whole.  We see the specialist’s imperialism all over the place, among economists, who interpret man totally in terms of the market, or anthropologists, who interpret everything totally in terms of culture, each peddling a competence that can interpret the whole from a perspectival nook that even the most superficial analysis would show is far too narrow.  It is interesting that though Eryximachus is utterly unerotic, he is wholly concerned with the body and not the soul.  The body, which we typically equate with eroticism. E never mentions intellectual pleasures; he knows only of bodily pleasures hence the Pandemian (lower) Eros is really his Eros and not the Uranian (higher) Eros.  Because pleasure is a part of the Pandemian Eros, the doctor compromises with it, trying to box it into his compartmentalized life.  He talks about the need for dissimilar things. To have harmony one needs to have opposites. Then! he prescribes nature’s disordliness with the affliction of the Pandemian Eros.  But that begs the question of why wouldn’t the storms, plagues, etc that happen by nature just be parts of the relations between opposites that constitute nature? Is this all just a prescription for the things that inconvenience man? the doctor represents man’s self-preservative instinct, which is essentially unerotic and inimical to wild, death-defying Eros.

yoga is turning me into an optimist….

so is the symposium.

…Back to Eryximachus’ speech.  He is the most rational.  I think he is most relevent speakers to our times.  Whether he is driven by emotion or not is regardless, none of the actions of these speakers line up with their words.  However, his words seem to imply that he is not driven by emotion but by a sort of reason that nicely fits into his view of life.  He’s a specialist and filters everything through his understanding of the body, his understanding of how to fix and rid the body from afflictions.  He has misunderstood his reason though.  The problem is that he only has an understanding of a part.  Socrates says he prefers his own condition of openness to the whole to an almost perfect clarity about a part bought at the expense of forgetting the whole. 
We see the specialist’s imperialism all over the place, among economists, who interpret man totally in terms of the market, or anthropologists, who interpret everything totally in terms of culture, each peddling a competence that can interpret the whole from a perspectival nook that even the most superficial analysis would show is far too narrow. 
It is interesting that though Eryximachus is utterly unerotic, he is wholly concerned with the body and not the soul.  The body, which we typically equate with eroticism.

E never mentions intellectual pleasures; he knows only of bodily pleasures hence the Pandemian (lower) Eros is really his Eros and not the Uranian (higher) Eros.  Because pleasure is a part of the Pandemian Eros, the doctor compromises with it, trying to box it into his compartmentalized life.  He talks about the need for dissimilar things. To have harmony one needs to have opposites.

Then! he prescribes nature’s disordliness with the affliction of the Pandemian Eros.  But that begs the question of why wouldn’t the storms, plagues, etc that happen by nature just be parts of the relations between opposites that constitute nature?

Is this all just a prescription for the things that inconvenience man?

the doctor represents man’s self-preservative instinct, which is essentially unerotic and inimical to wild, death-defying Eros.

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This is for me to hash out in my brain(S).

You can read this though. You, being Hancock, since no one else (thank goodness) reads this sick little blogduo:furtheringsuccess thing we’ve got going.

Let me start by saying that I think we should learn to be able to justify our sexual tastes and practices.  “Judgment, which was one of the most cherished of the intellectual virtues, has become a vice, which we recognize when we call someone judgmental.  This change may or may not contribute to a more tolerant society, but it surely provides a ready excuse for scanting that most valuable kind of judgment, the judgment of oneself”.

—We’ve got it all, and need neither justification nor encouragement.  all this tends to reduce sexual acts to their bodily and brutish expression and to repress a natural need to celebrate them in speech, while encouraging thoughtlessness about things that are of capital importance.  Such thoughtlessness may seem to make things easy, but it robs us of more than half our pleasure.—

Man responds to two different and powerful appeals in the good and the beautiful, and this dialogue investigates that dualism.

When I first read Eryximachus’ speech about the god of love, Eros, i met it with so much aversion that I had to look into it further.  The first two of the seven speeches (the first 3 being from Phaedrus, a politcal man, Pausania, a lawyer and Eryximachus, a doctor) didn’t have too great of an effect on me.  The first 3 speakers are poor drinkers and turn out to be less erotic.  Speech 4 (Aristophanes), Speech 5 (Agathon) and Speech 6 (Socrates) are from the view of 2 poets and a philosopher.  The last is from Alcibiades (who is in love with Socrates).

I guess we can start from the beginning and work our way to the poets.

Phaedrus focuses on shame—shame being the best motivator for nobility.  But wouldn’t such a concern for the opinion of others be problematic?  I know that too much self-awareness (rephrase! self-doubt in the face of others) leads to self-deception, rejection of reason, and “corruption of pure love of virtue”.  Phaedrus emphasizes the negative, the avoidance of vice rather than the positive—the attraction and charm found in virtue.

But Phaedrus is the youngest and the one who has the greatest sensitivity to drinking, or rather, who is satiated more quickly than the rest. One thing Plato shows through these speeches is how the view of love is very closely woven in with the view of oneself.

Nature is more difficult than Law. Nature is more ambiguous.  Nature must  be studied and reasoned about, whereas a law requires only obedience.

Socrates’ discipline comes not from being unerotic or not possessing the desire. Au Contraire, he is wildly erotic. His discipline indicates that the most unconstrained expressions of desire connected with food, drink and sex must be disappointed if intellectual satisfaction is also to find its place.

….to be continued. dinner calls.

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March 10, 2009

optimists live longer than pessimists.

damn.

mission #4: become an optimist.

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March 4, 2009
i’m going to get the one with the naked woman on the elephant tattooed on my side and i want you there with me when i do. oui?

i’m going to get the one with the naked woman on the elephant tattooed on my side and i want you there with me when i do. oui?

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February 18, 2009

i was going to post something really bitchy but i just couldn’t submit it to the web. call me. 8 o’clock tonight. oui?

it has to do with elitism. and how i’m starting to get puffy-headed.

i crack up every time i see that picture of nina simone as my icon.

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February 15, 2009

Mary Poppins is tired of piecrust promises.

This is a post dedicated to the word: perfunctory. because it’s such an elegant word. and aren’t we all hated for our elegance? hah.
dear burrito, you say! tsk, tsk..child’s play, i say: dear cherry pie, chardonnay, chocolate kisses, oily cheeseburgers, fried mushrooms, gin & tonic, red wine, newcastle, marshmallow valentine rose, thank you for being with me on valentine’s day. i love you all equally and abundantly.
perfunctory.
also: while we’re thanking people. thanks skanky drunk girls. thanks for always being there to make me look sober by comparison. i need you drunk slutty girls. without you, someone wiser, someone smarter (someone sober-er) might be thanking the world for that typical loud hot pants wearing drunk ass who thought she was a comedian/hip hop dance star all night.
keep on sleazin’ in 2009, youz bitcheZ, you hoeZ.
for real though, perfunctory. i think i mastered the aloof, perfunctory glance last night even under the heavy and coercive influence of alcohol beaucoup. i said, nope, if he is straight i will tempt him with my valentine’s sultry glance and if he is not tempted by said perfunctory glance, he must luva zee cock.

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February 13, 2009

i’ve started reading virginia woolf because she was such a delicious woman. she was fierce and crazy and misunderstood.

in Mrs. Dalloway she writes a lot about women’s interaction. she comments that the woman’s gift is “of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be”.

so what if i’m not strikingly beautiful, i sure am charming. :)

The title of my Anti-Valentine’s Day Mix is “Comfort me with apples”  [for i am sick of love]

i’m boiling, boiling, boiling.

-book time. check
-healthy eating. check.
-skipped classes, justifying it by telling myself i was investing in my personality. classic. check.
-going to look fine in my all black valentine’s dress. check
-created yet another awkward situation for myself and maybe seem like a stalker. check.

what other sticky situations can i get myself into this evening and then ever so delicately pull myself out of?

don’t you dare ever show or tell eric about the blogs for fear that he may start to question our sexuality.

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oh. it’s friday the 13th. i got invited to a “bleed your heart out party”

gross.

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okay.. so

my first order of business is to significantly cut back on the amount of facebook spending that has been going on in the first part of the year. i think we can attribute most of the reckless spending due to weird love stalking and sick infatuation furthered by a really good facebook profile and the aloofness that just drives an inman wild. :)

my second order of business (in the BBY program—Be-a-Better-You) haha…is to stop eating like ravenous beast monster.

i want a body like this:

but am on the path to this:

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February 12, 2009
just a spoonful of sugar. and a spoonful of mystery. roger.that.hancock.

just a spoonful of sugar.

and a spoonful of mystery.

roger.that.hancock.

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