Early Evening with Otto and Lian

Lian is reading my last blog post and asking - when did you write this?? Was I up??

I have to say, too much of my time has been spent trying to manage my option trading - which took a big hit due to fslr tanking, and me not understanding how Interactive Brokers allocates margin requirements. I am still in the green, but it is a dim green, as opposed to last weeks neon green. Anyway this has taken up too much time from my other projects (like my yoga breathing iphone app inspired by a conversation I had last week with Jessica H.) Nov options expire next week at which point I am going to take a week off from the markets. I am only going to trade the last 2 weeks of expiry.


I am almost done reading 'The Temptation to Exist' and that is good because I just picked up Paul Farmer's Infections and Inequalities. The Temptation to Exist - I like Ciorian because he melancholic and world weary - like me - and so whenever he writes something I cannot help but say 'so true'. The one thing about Ciorian that I suppose mars many late 19th early 20th century thinkers is their confluence of metaphysics with race.

Today we talk about biology as destiny or not making biology destiny. For example, if I am a woman I should not be relegated to certain roles, or denied access to areas of work and study.
Back then it seems, race was destiny. So for example, the Jew (disclosure I was born to a jewish family) is ascribed all these sorts of pathologies or ways of being in the world on account of him being Jewish, a dessert nomad, members of a legislative religion, etc.

Ciorian spends a few essays discussing the modern world in relation to the Jew - this is sort of like discussing 'the noble savage' and it is sort of unfortunate that his thought has focused on such irrelevant bunk. Is this sort of inquiry really useful for philosophy, or is it some sort of observable art, a pseudo science - anthropology. And is it best engaged by an outsider (gentile in this case) or insider (jew) or both? What is the purpose of such a discourse? The most interesting thing is that this topic was worthy of serious philosophical discussion. I wonder what topics today will suffer the same fate of irrelevance?

But Ciorian, he makes thought provoking pronoucements. Thoughts like: poetry exists on the fringes of society and only an established culture can create a prose literature. I think this is worth exploring. Prose literature is about rules, methods, codified learnings, poetry is about ecstacy and unmmediated expression. Prose is mediated. High culture is mediated, high culture is anything an actual thing itself. It is an aggregate of acceptable culture - it does not exist without someone (a critic perhaps) creating it and labeling it.

Anyway I digress - I have to go fix the permissions on my rapidsms-documentation cron job - apparently it has been failing since I updated sphinx (the documentation system)