danielcoffeen's Podcast

This is the second part of a series in which I read the title of my new book, Reading the Way of Things. In this episode, I focus on how the phrase "The Way" functions. A way is an action, a trajectory, a mode of going. It is limited and yet emergent and infinite. I discuss Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai; the relationship between the infinite and the limit with reference to the calculus; the reality TV cooking show, Chopped; Epictetus, the great stoic; Deleuze's notion of the one as many. And more!

I discuss why use the word "reading" in the title of my book (Reading the Way of Things). I reference the implications for writing and teaching writing; Deleuze's readings of things; the pleasure and power of reading as distinct from what we consider literacy.

As far as I can tell, everything is multiple — which shifts the demands of life. For if everything is in fact multiple, how do we articulate it? How do we seek it? Amplify it? The will to multiplicity is different than the will to the definitive; this will can be found in irony, in humor, in Monty Python, Louis CK, Clarice Lispector, Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari.

(Thoughts on my soon to be released book on Zero Books) Before we're even born, we are taught how to process the world. After all, we are prefigured in the womb as a baby soon to arrive as a child, as male or female, as having a name and parents. Which is to say, we come to this world already enmeshed in elaborate cultural institutions, discourses, and ways of operating. There is no such thing as a clean slate, no immaculate birth. We are born somewhere, as something, a cog within a m This mode of processing is institutionalized in school as well as in the media. But this mode is not neutral or natural. It entails a a certain architecture of relations between people, concepts, and knowledge. Mentioned here: Geometry, Foucault, Bergson, viewing art, being creative, new ways of making sense, and more!

The Worldly Experience of Thought

Theory doesn't explain art; theory is art.

Some thoughts on the plenum and how the space between things is full, filled to the brim with forces that are social, local, global, cosmic all at once. With reference to Merleau-Ponty and online dating.

Diet, Knowledge, Time

Watching The Graduate again recently, I was struck by the hilarity of youth thinking it understands life when it knows, we all know, our perspectives, feelings, horizon changes, relentlessly and necessarily — with some references to Gadamer and Bergson.

Sense is the way bodies cohere, or don't, in a perceptive field. Sense is not the meaning of an experience; sense is the meaning + the immediate affect + temperature + speed + intensity + color + shape and the diverse terms in which different bodies interact and cohere, more or less, with other bodies (visible, invisible, organic, machine, vegetal (yes, that's redundant)). Sense happens at the cusp of events, in the seams of bodies assembling and disassembling. Sense is always at the point of its own dissolution, fragmenting infinitely into chaos or cohering too rigidly into cliché or meaning. William Burroughs, in his cut-up method, plays at the borders of sense and chaos. It's often a subtle, tenuous, and moving line that separates one from the other. Artists reckon this moment at every moment.

The distinction between sense and meaning.... Meaning is abstract, general, changing very slowly over time. Sense is an immediate configuration of bodies.

On the notion and experience of having hostility to life with reference to: - Wilhelm Reich - Nietzsche and amor fati - Alan Watts & Taoism - Derrida and there's nothing outside the text - Neti pots

It suddenly occurred to me the other day that this cliché of a question has persisted because it's a profound existential, ontological question: If I experience something and no one hears, sees, knows did it happen? The answer, of course, is yes.

A brief discussion of: - Why we read important books — sacred books — over and over - The power of book spines on the shelf - Changing environments when the baby is screaming - The power of local spaces with reference to Carlos Castaneda

This is a ranting revelation I had while walking in GG Park, feeling, uh, good, as it were. It is a tad profane but I was just speaking to myself at the time.