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    1. Catherine Ryan
    2. Catherine Ryan

      Stereotypes about woodchucks will only serve to hurt the woodchuck community in the longterm. They have many other skills, apart from chucking wood.

    3. Catherine Ryan

      My (not so secret) shame is that I almost never watch films. Isn't that weird - a whole major section of popular culture written off, just like that.

      I saw Easy Rider recently. I enjoyed that. "Beautiful cinematography", I thought to myself.

    4. Catherine Ryan
    5. Catherine Ryan
      iamtheblob responded to Naxos 7 Jan 10

      I can see who you are, but that info doesn't get published when I answer a question. That's just how the site works!

      And the answer to number two is possibly ego gratification? Who knows! I thought it might be interesting.

    6. Catherine Ryan
      iamtheblob responded to Naxos 7 Jan 10

      I like his written style very much. Very much! Deleuze is a great stylist. Check paragraphs like this (from Dialogues):

      "I liked writers who seemed to be part of the history of philosophy, but who escaped from it in one respect, or altogether: Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson. [....] They proceed only through positive and affirmative force. [....] These thinkers have few relationships with each other [...] and yet they do have them. One might say that something happens between them, at different speeds and with different intensities, which is not in one or other, but truly in an ideal space, which is no longer a part of history [...] but an interstellar conversation, between very irregular stars, whose different becomings form a mobile bloc which it would be a case of capturing, an inter-flight, light-years."

      But I'm not very sympathetic to the fact that he wants to frame his philosophical project in ontological terms. I think it weighs him down.

    7. Catherine Ryan

      Are we talking Nietzsche in his vegetative state?

      Nietzsche's philosophy is nimble, lithe and explosive. Spinoza's is foursquare and Euclidean. On that basis, I say Nietzsche.

    8. Catherine Ryan

      Oh God this is the sort of question that might just set off a crisis.

      I "like" a lot of philosophers. I like Nietzsche, I like Foucault, I like Seneca, I like Spinoza. But then I also consider many philosophers to be "very interesting" (terms in scare quotes I consider to be wishy-washy). These include Kant and Deleuze, for starters. I've certainly read a lot of Deleuze.

      But I don't know what my actual philosophical bent is. It occurred to me yesterday that perhaps I am too tolerant of differing philosophical views - I seem to be able to find a place for aspects of all sorts of philosophical views. I am a reconciliationist! Aah! I suffer from the error of the beautiful soul that Deleuze talks about! Everything must be harmonised! Oh no!

    9. Catherine Ryan
      iamtheblob responded to Naxos 7 Jan 10

      Because I find him to be a very repetitive writer. Or more accurately: he seems to continually promise that he is about to say something new. After all, his 'materials' (the constant references to books, films, songs, poems etc) are very diverse. I draw the inference, therefore, that he has something to say about lots of topics! But then, no, what is animating all of his references, all of his bits of collage, is the same essential point: 'what exists is pure variation, evaluation must be creation...' Perhaps the headache is more a sense of fatigue.

      Also, I have various study-related projects that mean that I HAVE to read Deleuze. And everyone knows that that's the best way to take the fun out of something.

    10. Catherine Ryan

      Last night I finished reading Flaubert's Madame Bovary. I decided to read it because a) Ranciere kept talking about Flaubert and b) it occurred to me that at my current pace, I will probably die before I read most of the classics.

      I'm also reading, in a very desultory fashion, Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation. That is to say, the book is sitting open on my desk. Someone said something about Schopenhauer being a beautiful writer, so I thought I'd give it a go. I will probably not get very far with it. But I will feel bad about that. (And then feel bad about feeling bad as I am currently in an anti-feeling bad regime.)

    11. Catherine Ryan

      Whatever it is, I need more of it, as I am constantly running late.

    12. Catherine Ryan

      In my head, the French bit in Lady GaGa's "Bad Romance". Otherwise, various things on a mix cd by a certain Tim Finney (http://getphysical.blogspot.com).

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