One of the ways to start talking about something is to, well, start talking about it. To that end, here is the first in a long series of podcasts! Unfortunately I pulled out the mic when we were already a little bit into the conversation, so here's an intro.
We were talking about Jacques Ellul's book On Freedom, Love, and Power in the context of a discussion about how we use stories, especially in a culture where we have stories that can tell us what to do in every decision. Do we view our myths and stories as boundaries, boxes, that we must live in, or do are they less boundaries and more guides? Do we have a mixture of the two? Our discussion is here:
Were we made for the story, or the story made for us?
And a second link via Spreaker with it's own forum for comments
And an addendum - here are links and citations to some of the texts and stories referenced in the course of the the discussion.
Brown, Wendy. States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Vol. 120. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
As it Happens interview with Tariq Ali on the death of Hugo Chavez
Ellul, Jacques. On Freedom, Love, and Power. University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Ingold, Tim. Lines:: A Brief History. Routledge, 2007.
Selmanovic, Samir. It's Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian. Jossey-Bass, 2009.
The Hebrew Yeshua versus the Greek Jesus, a presentation by Nehemia Gordon, a Karaite Jew
Choice: a podcast from Radiolab.
Many of the other stories referenced, The Bible, Rambo, The Shawshank Redemption, The Hurt Locker, and The Hobbit you'll have to find for yourself, as well as the two works by Joss Whedon referenced, Firefly and Angel.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Why this forum?
Over the past good while myself and a a friend have been in the process of writing a book - or to be more accurate co-writing. To be more accurate still would be to say that we've spent several hours each weak discussing everything that we want to write about, but very rarely writing. This blog will be a way of giving us a forum to write in, to post some of our discussions, and to give others a chance to tell us how ridiculous we are.
The subject matter will vary across a few disciplines, but will always be linked back to one question - why? If that's too broad, I could narrow it to the domains of critical theory, religion, love, narrative, story, friendship, language, and hiking. Even narrower, subject matter will almost always be relevant to our own lives, and the stories that we interact with regularly - urban vs rural, academia vs "normal", Adventism, the outdoors, television, gaming, and board games. If that's too broad, you'll have to either read later things that I've written, or listen to the podcasts that I think we'll be posting in the near future.
Finally - the title of this blog. I originally wanted to go with -ee-apachitayaan ninagataweyihchigan, which translates as "as I am using my mind" and is in the Michif language, one of the unifying tropes I use across my blogs. On second thought (after being reminded that it's not really that easy to remember [only 14 syllables!]) I went with Taanshi, meaning Hey! or How's it going?, also in Michif, but roughly twelve syllables shorter.
The main reason I chose it here is because it seems that most blogs dealing with this sort of subject matter go for Latin names referring to some sort of religious concept, and I think it's silly. Unfortunately the convention is so well established that I can't really think of an English title that I could use! So my act of rebellion has been to reject Latin in favour of a language that is the beautiful bastard child of French and Nehiyawewin, preserving many of the strengths of both, and differing most significantly from Latin in that it is not friendly to metaphysics of any kind, as in its syntax, morphology and culture it tends to ground discussion in bodily action, and concrete implementation. I'll probably talk about this at some point.
Finally, please interact! If you post interesting questions here, and we find them interesting, we'll probably try to find our own answers to them and post them either as posts or as podcasts.
update: we have a new title! "Storying Life" so although I still love "taanshi", it's going to be the url, not the title from here on in.
The subject matter will vary across a few disciplines, but will always be linked back to one question - why? If that's too broad, I could narrow it to the domains of critical theory, religion, love, narrative, story, friendship, language, and hiking. Even narrower, subject matter will almost always be relevant to our own lives, and the stories that we interact with regularly - urban vs rural, academia vs "normal", Adventism, the outdoors, television, gaming, and board games. If that's too broad, you'll have to either read later things that I've written, or listen to the podcasts that I think we'll be posting in the near future.
Finally - the title of this blog. I originally wanted to go with -ee-apachitayaan ninagataweyihchigan, which translates as "as I am using my mind" and is in the Michif language, one of the unifying tropes I use across my blogs. On second thought (after being reminded that it's not really that easy to remember [only 14 syllables!]) I went with Taanshi, meaning Hey! or How's it going?, also in Michif, but roughly twelve syllables shorter.
The main reason I chose it here is because it seems that most blogs dealing with this sort of subject matter go for Latin names referring to some sort of religious concept, and I think it's silly. Unfortunately the convention is so well established that I can't really think of an English title that I could use! So my act of rebellion has been to reject Latin in favour of a language that is the beautiful bastard child of French and Nehiyawewin, preserving many of the strengths of both, and differing most significantly from Latin in that it is not friendly to metaphysics of any kind, as in its syntax, morphology and culture it tends to ground discussion in bodily action, and concrete implementation. I'll probably talk about this at some point.
Finally, please interact! If you post interesting questions here, and we find them interesting, we'll probably try to find our own answers to them and post them either as posts or as podcasts.
update: we have a new title! "Storying Life" so although I still love "taanshi", it's going to be the url, not the title from here on in.
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