[syndicate] that's really interesting

[Alan Sondheim]

That interesting, David was speaking at one point on the tape about 
2-handedness and symmetry as related to our fundamental notions of 
mathematics; I was taking a more platonic viewpoint.

What if philosophy weren't interesting? Weren't interesting at all, that 
is no investment whatsoever in it..

- Alan


On Sun, 12 Aug 2007, Bjørn Magnhildøen wrote:

> of course, an interesting post -
> inter- word from 'between' (of course)
> (truth) goes without saying
> truth is nothing interesting _as_ truth (of course)
> or only as a building block for something else which might be
> interesting as far as not a truth itself
> what is unresolved (yes (no))
>
> on the other hand -
> what other hand? how many hands? if you look at the body it's two into
> one, two brains, two hands, though the interior is one - sort of a
> functional truth - while the outside is interesting two - an
> operational two?
> in that sense 'interesting' is a clown in the circus, who entertain,
> or wordplays and puzzles, or mountaineering, drugs, religion, work,
> interest in death, and so on(!).
>
> dull things are not interesting
> sharp things are interesting
> sharp means distinction
> more distinction more words
> distinction goes down to quantums
> dull things like sea waves
> they are relaxing, self-destroying
> interest is self-encouraging
> each night we sleep
> we get tired
> the body says ok that's enough of interest
> the idea of the awake(ning) man
> who doesn't need sleep
> all is interest inte-rest
> i don't know what to say
> dull
> waves
> it's interesting
> aha?
> well well they are interrelated?
> the journey interesting-dull is interesting
> the journey dull-interesting is interesting
> the state? interesting is not interesting
> the state? dull is not interesting
> which sums up to process and transition
> the adventure
> life is an adventure
> now it became dull again
> to keep to the interesting one has to avoid a lot
> to avoid a lot one has to encounter a lot (at least once)
> an interesting person is a more dull person than normal
> the state of dull is interesting (indirectly then)
> nothing holds, not even interesting
> to hold is truth sort of local
> behind that no image no interest
> interest might be a big illusion
> let's keep them interested
> oh this boring person
> i was interested in getting born but life turned out to be dull
> what kind of life?
> we try to turn it as dull as possible
> interest management
> thoughts come up by themselves
> it's like a flow
> do they pop up out of interest?
> i don't think we own our thoughts a lot
> that's an idea from fill in
> the thoughts that appear - are they given to us by the mind to entertain us?
> oh we are hard to entertain
> animals are fine eating and sleeping
> sure we should fill that structure
> otherwise it would be empty
> and if it's there why not use it
> ok that was it
> partly dull maybe partly interesting
>
>
> 2007/8/12, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com>:
>>
>>
>>
>> that's really interesting
>>
>> it's always a wonder, what's really interesting, and whether interest, in-
>> terest-in, is a reasonable category of philosophical discourse. philosoph-
>> ical writing often appears scholastic, dry, abstract; it seems to contain
>> the semblance of power, that is argument for production's sake, production
>> for motive's sake, motives for lifeworld's sake. the latter is crucial -
>> that one inhabits one's work, replies, missions, admissions - exists with-
>> in the life of worlds, structures accordingly. but is that of interest
>> elsewhere, and what constitutes interest - there are two ways to think of
>> 'having an interest in' - one, fascination with discourse on a particular
>> subject - two, an interest in the sense of economic or other interest ab-
>> stractly controlled by a steering mechanism, habitus of power, and so
>> forth. i have a conversation recorded w/ david antin perhaps 30 years ago
>> we were discussing astrology and about what was of interest and what was
>> not and what sort of steering mechanisms or correlations there were and
>> how they connected to the universe and i remember beyond or before the
>> tape david saying that even if astrology were true it's not of much inter-
>> est and i could only agree since personality and mute matter correlations
>> mean relatively little and prove nothing in the long run, at first i was
>> going to quote from the tape we made but then this particular section of
>> interest was elsewhere, outside the thing itself so to speak. {} truth is
>> never interesting; if truth were interesting then it would not be the flat
>> greyness of existence. then it would be corrupted into landscape, furn-
>> ished with ridges, serrated edges, graspable, something fallen into lang-
>> uage - i have often said nothing could be farther from the truth. then and
>> there interesting philosophy embraces evil, abjection, obscenity; it rides
>> these, dis/comforts these, dis-inhabits the abstract, something's at stake
>> - what remains elsewhere is physics, let's hear and see it for physics.
>> "find the david antin text and what david antin says about things being
>> interesting also try to talk about the notion of truth as being inherently
>> neutral and not of interest because there's no error which allows distance
>> and through that reflection and opening up possibilities connected with
>> the lurid and abjection and perhaps one of the reasons systemic philosophy
>> went out of favor in the twentieth century was because of the amazing
>> amount of interesting information exploding everywhere and all of it veer-
>> ing in interesting directions, not those of axiomatic conclusions, but
>> those of interesting conversations always continuing. the more the world
>> becomes (seems to become) more interesting, the more systems are retired,
>> those systems which are steering mechanisms and not dialogs, even bell's
>> theorem on the other hand is a dialog of sorts." crystal radios, constant
>> chirping, western grebes, are interesting, tantra is very interesting and
>> full of sights, sounds, tastes, touches, smells, extremely interesting and
>> its truth is that of the back of the human being world-consorting, every
>> thinking of the motive and intention of thinking. and curvature, curves,
>> mathesis of every sort, is always of interest, the thinnest of beams
>> enabling nothing, holding up even less. {} now crystal radio is interest-
>> ing because it's driving high-impedance earphones and it makes me wonder
>> of course why the same electromagnetic waves couldn't be harnessed to
>> charge lithium batteries, run low-power computers, etc. i've often thought
>> of living in pre-transmitter times, turning on a radio - of course there'd
>> be static and atmospherics, but i think, am almost certain, there would be
>> something else. i am the last person on earth to await the carboniferous.
>> {} if philosophy could be presented in an interesting manner, what then?
>> would philosophy then be of interest? i'm thinking of nietzsche, kierke-
>> gaard, but also of witold gombrowicz, a guide to philosophy in six hours
>> and fifteen minutes. now the text is fascinating but i wonder if terms
>> such as consciousness, object, subject, being, existence, nothingness,
>> reduction, etc. couldn't be considered placemarkers for other terms such
>> as anhinga, tibet, arlington coupler, hohner victoria harmonica, vegan
>> sushi, and so forth? in which case the discourse might well be more inter-
>> esting - and what is the substrate of the original terminology, what holds
>> it both to a more philosophical habitus and to a re/configuration of the
>> world and what the world holds? texts are of course texts of substitution,
>> deferral, differance, narration, holding language much as the phaistos
>> disk holds language. and the phaistos disk is interesting perhaps because
>> it remains mute, presenting us with a diacritique of language itself. {}
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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