Daniel Silliman

Reading material

Current:
Flying Home,
by Ralph Ellison

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
37. Legacy of Ashes,
by Tim Weiner
38. Oblivion,
by David Foster Wallace
39. Seize the Day,
by Saul Bellow
40. Literary Theory,
by Jonathan Culler
41. The Absolutely True Diaries of a Part-Time Indian,
by Sherman Alexie
42. Slouching towards Bethleham,
by Joan Didion
43. War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,
by Chris Hedges

Daniel Silliman

16.3.02

Wanderlust

Today at lunch I was talking about the west coast--the mountains and the ocean and the valleys and the canals and the fields and the trees. Mentaly I drove from the North Olympic Peninsula through the mountains of Oregon and the San Juaquin Valley and the California desert.

I spent time in Seattle--riding the ferry east across the sound, standing on the back deck in the wind, watching the space neddle in the dark. I spent time in San Francisco, with fog rolling in from the Bay, and Berkely, hanging out Telegraph avenue with the students and having a picnic on Indian Rock. I crosse the Columbia river into Portland, eat pizza at Rocky's and spent hours in Powells, the best used bookstore in the world.

I drove back along the coast and saw the Redwoods and the cliffs and got a tan on my left arm from hanging it out the window as I drove.

I guess I'm feeling some wanderlust right now, strangely mixed with homesickness.

Today is beautiful. The sky is clear and blue. A slight breeze is blowing.

I'm missing my mountains and my ocean. The sky is so blue I look to the horizon to see the mountains in their beautiful clarity. I breathe the air to taste the salt, to feel the ocean in my lungs. The skyline is empty and the breeze is saltless.

by Daniel Silliman @ 8:30 PM. : Comments 0

15.3.02

The Day that Music Died
Dave Van Ronk and Waylon Jennings are dead and the great music of America--our native blues, folk and rock--has passed a little more into history.

Waylon Jennings cheated death on "the day that music died." Giving up his seat to J. P. Richardson, Waylon wasn't on the plane that crashed with Buddy Holly, Little Richie and Richardson--called the Big Bopper--when it crashed. Music didn't die, Waylon carried his bass sound onward for another 43 years.

He was a native of Texas and played the outlaw with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson while they rejected Nashville and held forth with the sound of hard living, hard work and true confessions.

Van Ronk, 1936-2002, taught Bob Dylan the Blues. Dylan said he heard House of the Rising Sun for the rist time when Van Ronk played it. Van Ronk was know as the founding father of the 1960s folk music. He was active in the hootanannies, helped the Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs and Janis Ian when they were rising artists, and was a king in Greenwich Villiage.

Out music is richer today because he lived. When he died on February 10 our connection to our musical roots died a little. But Van Ronk's work will live on whenever beat of blues, folk or rock are heard, whenever the music entwined with sweat and blue jeans and earth is played.

Thanks to Rolling Stone Magazine for the obituaries and the memorializing of these two men who forged our musical roots with the sounds of their guitars.

by Daniel Silliman @ 8:23 PM. : Comments 0

Physical threat
Today I have crossed a new threshold of journalism. In response to a story I wrote about the arrest of a Hillsdale College student and former basketball star I received a phone call from an angry unidentified male.

He said I had no right to write the story, should send my resume to the National Enquirer, some foul statements and then told me if he ever ran into me at a party he would hurt me.

I don't expect anything to come of it. I don't attend those parties and I think if he intends to act he would have already. The student directory lists the address as well as the phone number.

I knew that I would get such a reaction eventually and am glad to have crossed the line. The joke among my friends is that I am celebrating my first death threat.

A good journalist can't afford to be soft.

by Daniel Silliman @ 1:46 AM. : Comments 0

Race Card II
In response to my post, Seraphim clarifies what he intends to investigate. I'm looking forward to the article.

by Daniel Silliman @ 1:35 AM. : Comments 0

14.3.02

Race Card?

Seraphim, friend and fellow student journalist here at Hillsdale, thinks the Ed Carter case of stolen credit cards, one that I reported for the paper, may have some racial implications.

I doubt it does, beyond the fact the administration will avoid mentioning Carter is black. It seems fairly open and shut. The cards were in his pockets. A lawyer would probably have a rough time with this one. Carter could plead stupidity (do you begin to write your own name when signing for a purchase with a stolen credit card and then scratch it out and write the name on the card?) but that wont get him far.

A few points do seem to have potential chinks if they are to be found. 1, the suspicion of the jewlery store clerck may have been aroused by a black man buying jewlery (the clerck would be high on my list of people to find and interview). 2, the arrest may not be valid (meaning the evidence would be thrown out) and may be based racial description. Police arrested Carter upon recognizing him from a description given by a jewlery store clerck. Can they arrest you if you fit a description? If that description said something like "tall black male" then race could be brought in. (Carter has a large tatoo on his elbow but I don't know if that was covered up).

Intersting issue. Race certainly is hot, especially in this anti-affirmative action private school and the surrounding Midwestern culture.

I personally don't think racism is as prevalent as it is generally portrayed to be. It will be interesting to see the results of the investigative journalism.

by Daniel Silliman @ 6:48 AM. : Comments 0

Read the paper
Further evidence that televison news is a bastardization of journalism.

Want news? Read the paper.

by Daniel Silliman @ 6:29 AM. : Comments 0

13.3.02

Dualism, language of the universe, res cogitas and bianary code

In a previous post I quoted Einstien's reaction to the proposition that everything can be expressed scientifically. He said that describing a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure would be meaningless.

I though of this in philosophy class today when discussing dualism, and had a few thoughts.

All nature can be described in mathamatical formulas. All mathamatical formulas should be transferable into bianary code, a language/program used to run computers that uses only 1s and 0s. Shouldn't we then be able to program a computer to observe the universe in as good a way or in a superior way to humans?

We could program a computer to measure the pressure variations in a Beethoven symphony but at this point we would still say the computer does not listen to the symphony in the same way we do because we understand it and because we hear it as more than pressure variations. But, if everything can be expressed in mathamatical formulas and all mathamatical formulas can be written in bianary, then shouldn't we be able to discover the mathamatic description of our understanding and whatever "more" it is that we hear in a symphony, and translate it into bianary?

The computer then, with a bianary system, could be programed to understand in a way equal to the way a human understands.

I think this leaves us with a man made consciousness and artificial intelligence or man as physical machine. Is man merely a computer or can a computer become a man?

I'm certainly not happy with either conclusion. Hopefully I'm missing something in my logic or my premises.

by Daniel Silliman @ 11:17 PM. : Comments 0

Kant doesn't know what he's talking about
A philosophy paper writen last night about Immanuel Kant and some logical problems he has when trying to establish the catagorical imperative.

by Daniel Silliman @ 10:58 PM. : Comments 0

The only problem with education, from the position of someone who loves to learn and does so incessantly, is the limit of time. I am forced to work for classes, which limits time spent reading about physics or poetry or any of the other scores of things I am want to study.

Can you get an excuse for your late assignment because you were reading Dante for the fun of it? Can you miss class to delve into the intricacies of chess? Can you ignore homework to study epistomology?

Life is cruel in offering so much. The abundance of our world is glorious.

by Daniel Silliman @ 5:58 AM. : Comments 0

An Encounter
My good friend Jeff Nelson has writen and posted a piece of work called Encounter. If ever there was a romantic writing about restraining ones emotions this is surely it.

I read this when Jeff wrote it, a year or so ago, and was moved by it. I still am. It is strong, beautiful and a clear expression of Jeff's sober and hopeful additude toward romance, an additude with which I hearily concur.

by Daniel Silliman @ 5:58 AM. : Comments 0

Art, imitating life the way life is if we doubt or disbelieve everything we know about the world?

Listening to Simon and Garfunkel's album "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" and going a little crazy with Kant I hear the lyrics:

"Through the corridors of sleep
Past the shadows, dark and deep
My mind dances and leaps in confusion
I don't know what is real
I can't touch what I feel
And I hide behind the sheild of my illusion"

These lyrics, from the opening of the song "Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall," sure sound like Descartes with Cartesian doubt and the Veil of Ideas and the general state of confusion he leads himself and his reader into.

So, art is imitating the way life is if we can know nothing about life and if we doubt or disbelieve everything about the world we know?

It is a good song. I'm going a little crazy here.

by Daniel Silliman @ 4:39 AM. : Comments 0

Kant

I'm in the middle of a paper about Kant and the logic leading to his Catagorical Imperative. Kant's writing is dense, practically inpenatrable. His writing is practically a parody of bad philosophy writing.

I think Kant ofuscates because his ideas aren't as profound as he wants them to be.

I'm supposed to lay out his premises leading to the conclusion of the Catagorical Imperative. Finding his premises are no easy task, but linking them to his conclusion is a bear. I am looking for a logical error--that's the second half of the assigned topic--which might be why logic seems so hard.

Working with moral theories, we are looking at the is/ought problem. The problem being the logical impossibility of deducing an ought, a command about the way man lives, from an is, empirical facts about the world.

Kant, I think, has this logical flaw but undersatnding his logic enough to find the errors has been quite a challenge. None of the books in our school library or the sources on the web I have looked speak of logical problems with Kant's Catagorical Imperative or the is/ought problem. I find this strange and suspect my prof is a canny old man.

I let you know how the results of my search/paper go.

by Daniel Silliman @ 4:13 AM. : Comments 0

A Conservative Revolution:
How the American War for Independence sought to defend the old order.
By Daniel Silliman

The English ideal of self-government stretches far into the past. The idea of men governing themselves has roots in Hebrew law, Greek democracy, and the Roman Republic. Yet, the ideal of self-government was an idea Englishmen clung to as uniquely their own. It was a habit; a sentiment confirmed in the hearts of all Englishmen, it had become a self-definition.

Contined...

by Daniel Silliman @ 3:48 AM. : Comments 0

Student facing 21 years imprisonment
Former basketball player had stolen credit cards, marijuana in his pocket when arrested
By Daniel Silliman

A Hillsdale College student was arrested for allegedly stealing two credit cards Saturday.
Edward James Carter, 23, is facing six felony charges and one misdemeanor after he allegedly stole two credit cards from fellow student Adam Schaper. When arrested, Carter had Schaper’s Visa and Discoverer credit cards as well as a plastic bag of marijuana in his pockets.

Continued...

by Daniel Silliman @ 3:43 AM. : Comments 0

12.3.02

Physics and the Unification Theory
I've just started reading a book (outside of class) on the history of 20th century physics. It is called "The Second Creation" and promises to be very interesting. It is all about the history, focusing on the people involved, but not ignoring the ideas. I hope to gain a greater understanding of the concepts involved.

The book starts with Unification Theory or, as some physicists like to call it, the Theory of Everything. The conscepts, and the idea of the concepts, can be fascinating. "A complete description of the foundations of matter, space and time, a set of linked equations containing the elements of the cosmos," as the book, writen by Robert Crease and Charles Mann, says, would be a great breakthrough and have to be restled with among philisophical fields. It would deal with the disonance and the gap between Newtonian and Quantum physics, certainly a dissonance and gap where unification is needed.

by Daniel Silliman @ 2:05 AM. : Comments 0