Daniel Silliman

Reading material

Current:
Oblivion,
by David Foster Wallace

For the year:
1. Prophecy & Apocalypticism,
by Stephen L. Cook
2. The Salmon of Doubt,
by Douglas Adams
3. Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
4. Farewell, My Lovely,
by Raymond Chandler
5. Ham on Rye,
by Charles Bukowski
6. The Inner Circle,
by T.C. Boyle
7. Breakfast at Tiffany's,
by Truman Capote
8. The Crying of Lot 49,
by Thomas Pynchon
9. The Poet,
by Michael Conely
10. As I Lay Dying,
by William Faulkner
11. Slumdog Millionaire,
by Vikas Swarup
12. 2666,
by Roberto Bolaño
13. Teaching a Stone to Talk,
by Annie Dillard
14. The Most Beautiful Woman in Town,
by Charles Bukowski
15. White Butterfly,
by Walter Mosely
16. The End of the Affair,
by Graham Greene
17. Fathers and Sons,
by Ernest Hemmingway
18. Into The Wild,
by Jon Krakauer
19. Close Range,
by Annie Proulx
20. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,
by David Foster Wallace
21. By Night in Chile,
by Roberto Bolaño
22. Killshot,
by Elmore Leonard
23. This is Water,
by David Foster Wallace
24. Public Enemies,
by Bryan Burrough
25. Breath,
by Tim Winton
26. The Savage Detectives,
by Roberto Bolaño
27. Loving Che,
by Ana Menedez
28. Ender's Game,
by Orson Scott Card
29. The Short Stories,
by Ernest Hemingway
30. Cities on the Plain,
by Cormac McCarthy
31. Charlotte's Web,
by E.B. White
32. The Selfish Gene,
by Richard Dawkins
33. Good Omen,
by Terry Pratchet & Neil Gaiman
34. Where I'm Calling From,
by Raymond Carver
35. The Armies of the Night,
by Norman Mailer
36. The Street Lawyer,
by John Grisham

Daniel Silliman

1.11.03

His note on my door read:
"So sorry. The All Saints Eve service was actually at 6. I feel terrible. Andy."

My note on his door read:
"Well. I guess I won't become Catholic then. Silliman."

by Daniel Silliman @ 10:53 PM. : Comments 0

31.10.03

The peasants call her the goddess of gloom
Now if you see Saint Annie
Please tell her thanks a lot
I cannot move
My fingers are all in a knot
I don't have the strength
To get up and take another shot
And my best friend, my doctor
Won't even say what it is I've got.

by Daniel Silliman @ 5:43 PM. : Comments 0

29.10.03

With philosophy in both hands
If you didn’t believe me when I said I’d sold my soul and now I’m a philosopher, consider: I’ve just spent the night (midnight – 7 a.m., with breaks) reading 15 pages of philosophy, writing 160 words of notes on those 15 pages, and then writing over 560 words about that philosophy here.

I was seized, riveted through the entire process. This is not something I need to read for class and will appear on no text I am taking.

I'm not joking when I say philosophy is all I have.

by Daniel Silliman @ 1:27 PM. : Comments 0

Killing the Reference Theory
Killing the Author
Adventures with Jack Derrida: on reading of the first 15 pages of Limited Inc.

If a statement can be understood without reference to a referent, then referential theories aren’t necessary to explain how a statement can be meaningful.
If I say “the sky is blue” and you don’t see the sky – or even if I don’t see the sky, am mistaken, am lying, etc. – the statement is still an acceptable (grammatical) statement. This phrase can be formed and uttered even if it is false, that is to say the statement can serve as a reference even if the referent is empty.
If the referent is empty – the case for Santa Claus and unicorns – then our reference isn’t to a non-linguistic object and isn’t a referent on the measure of the reference theory. If “unicorn” can pick out no unicorn then it can not be designating that exists outside of language or prior to it. One can never break out of language by pointing to the object when the object does not exist outside of language. We have here a baptism without a baptized; a reference without a referent.
A statement like “the grass greens” makes no sense/has no meaning for grammatical reasons, not referential ones. A statement like can have a perfectly acceptable sense in the grammatical system of Russian. It doesn’t have any meaning in English because English grammar has no place for a the verb “to green.” How can we say whether “greening” refers to something in the world? Is there such a thing as “greening” or not? We cannot say there is or is not something de re that is “greening” but we can approve or disapprove or the phrase as a linguistic thing, given the working linguistic economy,

The crisis of meaning is not the crisis of language.

A text exists only with the radical absence of the author.
If the author is always present with the text, that text could never in any way be removed from its original context. If it could never be separated from its original context, it could never be cited and never be incorporated into another context.
For a text to be closed totally by a context is for the text to be strangled. A fully fixed text, resisting all interpretation but the authorial intention, would not exist outside of the instant of its situation, and would not be a text.
This is to say that the text without an absent author could not be heard/received, it could not be repeated/ retraced/ recontextualized. For the written to carry soley and fixedly carry what the writer means, is for the written to be exhausted at the instant of being written.
It is basic to the structure of writing that it contains a “force of rupture,” a separation from the scriptor that allows it to mean allows it to be received (reiterated) in allowing it to exist outside its birth’s instant.
The possibility of authorship is its impossibility.

Without the death of the writer there is no writing.

by Daniel Silliman @ 12:35 PM. : Comments 0

Words
Reading Limited Inc.

INFELICITIES: Something inappropriate, ill chosen, unhappy.

PREFORMATIVE: Forming beforehand, prefixed as aformative element.

ITER: n. The record of proceedings during a circuit, (from the circut of itinerant judges, preachers); v. to repeat, renew, (so, reiterate).

by Daniel Silliman @ 10:15 AM. : Comments 0

Two theories on why I exagerate personal characteristics/allow others to exagerate personal characteristics:

1) I'm ~~a little~~ mythomanic, and will take an interesting inaccurate story about myself over a correct but less tellable story.

2) I'm more interested in what I'm doing than who I'm preceived as, and find the details of a precise description petty and can't be bothered.

by Daniel Silliman @ 5:14 AM. : Comments 0

28.10.03

'Cause hell's broke loose in Georgia/ and the devil deals the cards

“So I’m thinking about Spinoza …”

“Dan, you realize that they’ve got you? They’ve taken your soul and now you’re a philosopher.”

So I guess I'm going to reconsider grad school. I've had too many projects that I'm told are doctoral level work. But then Prizio was saying that writing a groundbreaking philosophical work is great because there are like three people in the world that know what the hell you're talking about and two of them violently disagree with you. I don't know. It's not even like I wouldn't be a good teacher. I think part of me is still caught in a blue collar ethic and is having a hard time finding the ivory tower legit. I'd be good in the ivory tower though, and if I was good at it then I'd enjoy it. I'm meeting with Dr. Stephens next week to talk about it and find out what my chances actually are for getting in. So it goes.

by Daniel Silliman @ 11:29 PM. : Comments 0

An attempt to list the blogs in the Greater Hillsdale Blogging Community. Nice work guys.

by Daniel Silliman @ 1:36 AM. : Comments 0

27.10.03

A touch of Spinoza on the papers page.

by Daniel Silliman @ 12:42 PM. : Comments 0

Phenomenologically speaking
They can't kiss me without kissing philosophy.

by Daniel Silliman @ 11:56 AM. : Comments 0

Philosophical explorations
What I'm working on: A Wittgensteinian way to dissolve the mind/body problem (esp. the problem of overcausation in the mental causation of physical events) with a double aspect theory that works as a linguistic parallelism.

Claim: That the mind/body problem are resulting from confusion because we have two languages, neither of which describes the world totally. Attempting to explain/describe the world fully, we go back and forth between languages, creating this confusion. Thus, some questions are answered with one language and others with another, leading to confusion in traditional dualist and materialist talk of causation, etc. E.g., Mathematical and phenomenological descriptions of a screw.

Double aspect theory: the mental and the physical are two aspects of the same thing, irreducible to each other.

Linguistic parallelism: My name for my attempt at incorporating the linguistic functionalism (of Sellars, Quine and esp. Wittgenstein) into the mind/body debate. I think I want a parallelism in that the physical and mental always keep pace/run parallel without interacting, but argue the distinction between mind and body is a linguistic one.

(So far as I know, this is not a developed/established philosophical theory. The closest thing might be Spinoza.)

by Daniel Silliman @ 7:18 AM. : Comments 0

Taking on the world
My father once ran into a wall to win a race.

My grandfather once stuck his hand into a boiling pot of tar to win a $5 bet.

It wasn’t a thing of stubbornness, thought that was there, but of an underlying aggression towards the world.

I’m a lot like my father and his father.

by Daniel Silliman @ 1:38 AM. : Comments 0

A funny story of crying
She related a funny story at dinner and they laughed, they laughed at the table while in the story they cried and yelled, going away broken and hurt.

by Daniel Silliman @ 12:12 AM. : Comments 0