French Vanilla coffee, and cold weather with a little bit of snow, and you think you're having a good day. Probably not as good as mine. How can you wake up in a bad mood when it's snowing outside? Snow is the greatest form of water God ever created. Though I wish it were actual snow more than icy sleet but i'll take what I can get when I get to wear my heavy coat and a scarf.
I am listening to a rhetoric lecture by Daniel Coffeen about Roland Barthes. Do you even know what rhetoric is? and no it's got nothing to do with composition. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. I believe that Daniel Coffeen gives the greatest lecture on Roland Barthes "Death of the Author", if you are ever in the mood to think, and think seriously, deeply and intellectually and want to feel smart because you understand partially what this guy is saying, listen to this guys lecture.
I told my boss today that I am seriously considering attending UTA for graduate school because I would be able to keep my job twittering. I also told him that it's a bit difficult for me to take in everything quickly because i do not come from a marketing background and dont really know much about the internet world other than wikipedia, facebook, myspace, twitter (now), and google. Google is the greatest invention in the world, I believe. I wonder who sat down and thought one day, "hmm, what if we had some sort of device that you could type in ANYTHING in the ENTIRE world into one little text box and find an answer." it's like ask.com, who seriously thought of that? I know I wouldnt ever come up with something like that, isn't that what dictionaries are for, persay? But google.com and ask.com are much much more intellectual and "worldly" than a dictionary because you can type in phrases. Actually now that i think about it, Google has probably made humans lose a particular part of their brain functions, it lets us not think, not absorb, not learn.
Take a look at Aristotle and Leonardo Di Vinci, had they had Google in their day would that have created such great art and power? Aristotle wouldn't had thought of the things he had thought of, he would not had formed his own ideas, and own theories had Google been around, because today it seems as if everything is a repeat of history. I know they say that history repeats itself, and it does, i believe because we have become lazy. we have lost the power to be singular and our own.
This is an excerpt from the lecture.
"we have beginnings but there are no origins...what else is creation but theft which is different than plagiarism... stealing something is different than copying, with plagiarism you copy the same thing, but with theft, you steal something and make it your own."
"an origin is a fixed point, everything is always a quotation." Ex. God creating the world.
"God declares it, he says 'let there be light.' The bible doesn't say God made light, God made the world, he says 'let there be light' which he is already quoting he's already in language. Later in John when it refers back to Genesis it says 'in the beginning was the word.'"
Meaning there is no origin because the language, the word was already there; it was just the beginning.
DOES THIS MAKE ANY SENSE TO YOU?
because this is the 100th time ive listened to this lecture, and i still dont understand it fully.
what do you think?
so since i always forget about blogs unless i see something to remind me, i've just gotten around to reading this. that quotation is a pretty groovy argument i've never heard before, but really, makes a fairly accurate point. What I drew from that little segment is basically that we aren't the beginning of the story but we only know of our own story. There was much more before us, yet we have no history of it.
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