Heavenly mydi~intercourse: v/d hak op de takjes?!!

Gestemd. Zoals gewoonlijk op groenlinks. De idealen van de jaren zestig van de vorige eeuw zijn wat mij betreft nog steeds geldig in het groot & klein. Open, eerlijk, betrokken, rechtvaardig, mededeelzaam, geweldloos, vredelievend, nieuwsgierig & bewustzijnsverruimend (I hope ..............)!!

Vandaar dat mydiary voor mij gewoon 'n voertuig is voor tijd- & ruimtereizen om een & ander met elkaar te vergelijken: wie schrijft blijft vrijer?

For all these reasons I hope that these entries & the questions they engender will be read, talked about, & written about not as "definitive" but as challenges to the still-prevalent notio. That there is a bifurcation, analogous to that between orality & literacy, between the real world & the world of scholarship. Perhaps this notion is a heritage of the monastic conception in which the scholar-anchorite is allowed at most a distant view of the sensuous delights of earthly intercourse. Yet even where it IS grounded in an explicit (chaotic) ethos of renunciation, scholarship, like speaking & listening, like reading & writing, is a way of being in the world. Scholarship, like language, is inseparable from both dialogue & domi-nation, & most oft. Contains an admixture of the two. Can the ethnography of reading, as a reflexive stance& as a positive rubric, prove a re-warding tool for the detection & the enhancement of dialogue? These essays suggest that it can & will! Also we are placing reading somewhere inbetween ancient Israel, medieval Europe & our present situation(s) all over the world: communication comes & goes, but never really stops ...

Reading for pleasure is an extraordinary activity. The black squiggles on the white page are still as the grave, colorless as the moonlit desert; but they give the skilled reader a pleasure as acute as the touch of a loved body: these pleasures of reading in an ideological age are more or less vigorous descriptions of (& in defense of) the European practice of reading literature for pleasure. I hasten to add that this "pleasure" does not mean a hedonistic experience, but rather one of affective identification the characters, an experience understood in our culture to be gratifying, but nonetheless edifying & improving of the reader. Several of the distinctive features of this practice are already identified: very few people will take the trouble to read a novel or story unless they can somehow 'identify' with the characters, live with them inwardly as though they were at least 'real' for the duration of the reading ...