'He followed orthodox techniques in the arrangement of his compositions as he did in the writing of them. If we follow the path from the first notes Nietzsche wrote along the various stages of rewriting and arranging we can recognize the so called quinque officia (five duties or rules) which Cicero formulated [?] as the stages to follow when composing a discourse. In the first phase, the inventio, the material is gathered. We recognize this in the many notes Nietzsche wrote down: his own thoughts, quotes from books he read or from conversations he had, and the first experimental elaborations of his thoughts. The second phase, the dispositio, we find in the many attempts to adjust the formulation and to add aphoristic characteristics. We also find it in the many outlines for arranging his notes into chapters and books. The elocutio is seen in the final draft in which Nietzsche often makes some stylistic changes, making sure that his sentences will sound as they should. Here he also makes the final decision on maintaining certain word choices and manners of expression or withholding them, be it provisionally or indefinitely. The pronunciatio is the published text, and it is often arranged in order to accord with the rules of a "mnemotechnics" (GM II,3), so as to bring one to the phase of memoria.'

I seem to be caught in the middle of some scheme of punishment, because the same two Cee-Lo songs, that I never liked much in the first place, keep coming up on shuffle - 'My Kind of People' and 'Evening News'. I thought the album was fine in parts and less so in others before, but the more these songs get stuck to my shoe the more and more vindictive I feel toward the record as a whole.

Having listened only once to the new Brad Mehldau record, I would like to lodge the complaint slash insult 'overly feely chromaticism', but I'm not sure if it fits the technical details. Whatever. Let a guy play piano by himself and the whole goddamn rhythm section goes out the window.

(Hint: pianos are supposed to be part of the rhythm section!)

Sometimes I feel like one of those guys in an old timey sanitorium, slowly gathering my music-critical strength by sitting out in the garden and letting the world pass me by. But I've been approaching it again, slowly, for a long time. For one thing, as opposed to last year, I think I may have heard in excess of ten whole new releases this year. I've been trying to keep them playing, letting them sink in perhaps a little more forcedly than I should be, so that I have strong feelings about more than just the Junior Boys and Sonic Youth records. It makes the frenzied rate of consumption I used to maintain as an undergraduate seem all the more pathological, the more I try to keep up, now.

I've also started sorting out my singles list. While gathering together some stray things I haven't heard tonight, and making sure I know what was released what year, it occurred to me that I could come up with ten singles that I've had strong feelings for in the past year, before even really trying to survey the field and give everything a chance. I'm still going to, but it's nice to have some convictions about something. Or, to feel a tiny bit alive, at least:

Memphis Bleek ft. Freeway - Just Blaze, Bleek & Free
D12 - My Band
Houston ft. Chingy, I-20 & Nate Dogg - I Like That
Junior Boys - High Come Down
R. Kelly - Happy People
Alicia Keys - If I Ain't Got You
Christina Milian ft. Fabolous - Dip It Low
Petey Pablo - Freek-a-Leek
Usher ft. Lil' Jon & Ludacris - Yeah
Kanye West - All Falls Down

Those are in alphabetical order, silly.

I wish I could find evidence that the Bleek track was an honest single, the way Jess is treating it. Because I like it far better than the ones from M.A.D.E. that I know to have been singles.

I'll be excited to put Fab's new single, 'Breathe', on my list at the end of the year, once I've listened to it more. I downloaded it a while ago after this post which at the time had a great poster for the single. Too bad Fabolous' webmaster changed the file G & W were stealing, ha. But I was surprised to see 'Breathe' at #1 on 106 & Park tonight, since I haven't turned it on for a long time. I would've thought the song was too plain. For the world, I mean, not for me. I'm still waiting to see if I ever convincingly wrench myself out of the gravitational pull of the mid to late 90s New York hip-hop sound. As the thing I'm comfortable with, I mean. By default.

'Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings toward the ocean with me.'

I had nothing to say but felt compelled to show some outward sign of my inward life, even if it is lately muted and contorted. But as it happens, even quotation has its sincerity, or lack of. So I have this here, instead.

'Out of the consciousness of their truth they both are suspicious of truth in its more naive form of scientific knowledge. Not that they doubt the methodical correctness of scientific insight. But Kierkegaard is astonished at the learned professors: for the most part they live their lives and die, imagining that things would continue this way; and that, if it were granted to them to go on living, they would comprehend more and more in a continued direct ascent. They do not experience the maturity by virtue of which there comes a critical turning point, where, from this point on, it is a matter of comprehending, increasingly, that there is something missing that cannot be comprehended. Kierkegaard believes this is the most terrible way to live: to enchant the whole world through one's discoveries and cleverness, to explain all of nature, yet not to understand oneself. Nietzsche is inexhaustible in his devastating analysis of the types of scholars who lack the real sense of what they do, who are not able to be themselves, and yet believe they can grasp, with their ultimately vain knowledge, Being itself.

Because they both question the ability of all self-enclosed rationalities to communicate truth as a whole, they become radical opponents of the "system," i.e., that form which philosophy had assumed through the millennia and which led to its last burst of glory in German idealism. For them, "system" implies distraction from actuality, and hence lie and deception. Kierkegaard understands that for God existence can be a system, but not for an existing spirit; system and closedness correspond to each other, but existence is exactly their opposite. The philosopher who builds a system is like a human being who builds a palace but lives in the adjoining shanty: this phantastical creature does not himself inhabit that which he has thought up. Yet a man's thoughts must be the edifice in which he lives; anything else would be perverse. The fundamental question of philosophy, i.e., what it is itself and what is science, is posed anew and relentlessly. Nietzsche wants to be better at doubting than Descartes; in Hegel's foundering attempt to fit reason into the developmental process, he sees a Gothic attempt at storming the heavens. For him the will to create a system shows a lack of integrity.

Both express in the same way what they understand knowledge really to be. For them it is nothing other than interpretation.

Interpretation, however, has no end. Existence, for Nietzsche, is capable of an infinity of interpretations. For Kierkegaard, whatever has happened or was done in the past is always open to fresh understanding: as it is interpreted, it becomes a new actuality that has been hidden until then. Therefore temporal life can never be quite comprehensible to man; no man can penetrate absolutely his own consciousness.

Both use the simile of interpretation for knowledge of Being, moreover in such a manner as if Being were deciphered in the interpretation of interpretation. Nietzsche wants to strip the original text, homo natura, of succeeding layers of writing and to read it in its actuality. Kierkegaard assigned no significance to his writings other than that they are to be renderings of the original texts of individual human conditions of existence.

Connected with this fundamental thought is the fact that both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche - these most open and candid of thinkers - show a seductive penchant for concealment and the mask. For them, the mask is necessarily tied to being true. Indirect communication becomes the only way of communicating genuine truth; and indirect communication, as expression, belongs to the indecisive nature of truth in temporal existence, in which it must still be grasped in the process of becoming out of the wellsprings of each Existenz.

In their thinking, both encounter that ground which, in man, would be Being itself: Kierkegaard counters the philosophy that has asserted, from Parmenides through Descartes to Hegel, that "Thinking is Being," with the proposition: "As you believe, so you are," "Believing is Being." Nietzsche sees the Will to Power. But faith as well as Will to Power are mere signa, themselves not showing directly what is meant but themselves capable of limitless interpretation.

For both, honesty is the decisive motivating factor. For both of them it is the expression of the ultimate virtue to which they submit. It remains for them the minimum measure of the unconditional that is still possible within the confusion where all content becomes questionable. But it also becomes the vertiginous demand of a truthfulness that brings even itself into question, which is the opposite of that expedient brute power that believes it possesses the truth clearly in barbaric certitude.

It is a valid question whether anything at all is being said in thinking such as this. Indeed, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are conscious of the fact that the comprehension of their thinking is not open to man merely as thinker. Rather, it is a matter of who it is that understands.

They address the individual who must bring with him and must bring forth out of himself what they can say only indirectly. Kierkegaard believes in Lichtenberg's epigram which he cites: Such works are mirrors; if a monkey peeks in, no apostle can peek out. Nietzsche considers understanding him a distinction that has to be earned. He states that it is impossible to teach the truth where the manner of thinking is base. Each seeks the readership appropriate to him.'

WTF!?!

'From this it is evident that, although two attributes are conceived as really distinct - that is, one without the help of the other - we cannot infer from this that they constitute two entities, or, two different substances. For it is of the nature of substance that each of its attributes is conceived through itself, since all the attributes that it has were always in it at the same time and one could not be produced by another, but each one expresses the reality, or, the being of the substance. It is therefore far from absurd to ascribe several attributes to one substance. On the contrary, nothing in Nature is more clear than that each entity must be conceived under some attribute, and that the more reality or being it has, the more attributes it has which express both necessity (or, eternity) and infinity. Consequently, nothing is clearer than that an absolutely infinite being is necessarily to be defined (as we stated in Def. 6) as an entity which consists of infinite attributes, each of which expresses a certain eternal and infinite essence. But if anyone now asks by what sign we can recognize the diversity of substances, let him read the following propositions, which show that in the universe there exists only a unique substance, and that this is absolutely infinite. So the sign in question would be sought in vain.'