Results of Ruminations

Note: This is the third and final essay in my quasi-epistemological analysis of Truth. The first and second parts are also available. Additionally, this is the last planned daily essay on this website. Additional content can be found at my website. Thank you for reading.  Third Assumption We have a duty to learn as much Truth as possible. The meaning "obligation or duty" is tucked into the Greek word deon- and is usually known through the Kantian system of ethics known as deontology . And though I'm familiar with his work, I can't boast to have read all his works. So if he's on the same wavelength as me on this aspect of the application of his moral philosophy I don't know. Nevertheless, I think it can be rationally asserted that it is incumbent on every human being to learn more about the world. It satisfies the categorical imperative in his maxim "Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal ...

During my sojourn south this summer, I did what I now consider an important tradition for my writing retreats: I bought a new album. Now, I should say that when I say "new", I don't mean "newly released" or even, necessarily, new to me. I mean, I buy what I'm interested in hearing at the time, regardless of its newness. In this case, I picked up Metallica by, no surprise here, Metallica. I've always liked the radio friendly, but I was curious to see if there was something more on the album itself. And though I listened to a podcast about the album Master of Puppets, I wasn't sure if I wanted their earlier stuff, middle of the road, or new sounds. I went with the safe bet and snagged their self-titled (often called "the Black album"). I regret it not. The album is fantastic, but that's old news. (The thing came out in, what, '91?) The cuts that didn't make it to mainstream radio aren't surprises ("Throug...

Screen capture from here . This word describes Shakespeare's work, and in no other case is that more apparent than  Hamlet  (and, as is so often the case, Hamlet). Despite my parenthetical aside, I'm again struck by how the meanings and depths that Hamlet  plumbs are...you guessed it, indefatigable. I have read, seen, or taught Hamlet  countless times--not countless because I can't count that high, but because I can't remember how many I've seen or read or taught. The safe guess is that I've gone through that play, in one form or another (not counting The Lion King , my favorite of the Disney Renaissance films of my childhood) at least fifty times. I always get something out of it, I always realize something new, I always feel there's more to explore. Hamlet  is a well from which I can never overdraw, as it is like Juliet's love: Infinite ( Romeo and Juliet 2.2). How did Shakespeare pull this off? Part of it is that he allowed himself to luxuriat...

In terms of pedagogy, I follow Socrates in weird ways. If you've heard of the chap, you know Socrates is known for asking questions. We always think of Socrates and his method as being question-based. While that isn't necessarily wrong, it's important to note how Socrates uses questions. Think of the beginning of  Book IV of Plato's The Republic . There, we see Socrates being asked a question by Adeimantus, but most of the first major section of text is Socrates' answer (after having asked a clarifying question of his interlocutor). He doesn't necessarily spend a lot of time asking questions and listening to others.* In fact, he often posits his own ideas at great length, occasionally asking for input from the others. It's important to note that he sets up his arguments with large, important questions. Book I of The Republic  starts off with this question: "Is life harder toward the end, or what report do you give of it?" (11). That launches th...

Counting this post, I have five remaining essays on the Results of Ruminations blog. This isn't to say that I'm giving up my non-fiction writing--that isn't changing at all--but I will be shifting over to my author website, stevendowdle.weebly.com . This is a mixed bag for me, but I think it's time to start generating more content in the place that I'd like to see people visit. While I'm not an SEO guru or anything like that--and, it seems, I'd probably be better off outright buying the domain to let it start percolating through the search engines--I feel that having visitors to a Blogger site isn't that worthwhile. I don't pretend that someone will read an essay I write, then think, "What else has this kid written besides essays?" and will then try to find my website. But if they're already there and want to look around? Then it's easy. I have additional features on my website that aren't on the blog. For example, there are...

In speculative fiction, we use the phrase "worldbuilding" (sometimes with a space, sometimes not) to talk about the process of creating the rules about the imagined worlds in which our stories take place. Tolkien is held up as the gold standard, what with the fact that he created complicated and diverse languages, then used his story of The Lord of the Rings  as an excuse to showcase the people and world that spoke that language. He points out in his "Foreword to the Second Edition" that he doubted anyone would want to read it: I desired to [write these novels] for my own satisfaction, and I had little hope that other people would be interested in this work, especially since it was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues. (xxii)  Maps, languages, histories, and other sundry notes were compiled posthumously in The Simarillion  and other books, all under the direction of ...

This is the fourth music video analysis (the others are all found here ). These essays try to use the visual medium to help encode an interpretation that the text both supports and obscures, allowing the director of the music video to provide an additional analytical lens. I'm looking at an artist whose music I stumbled into because of the instrumental work that she's best known for. The album, Shatter Me , features the eponymous track with singer Lzzy Hale, even though most of the tracks on Lindsey Stirling's records don't have a lot of vocals. There's a soft spot in my heart for Stirling's stuff because it is the music that most galvanizes me when I'm trying to write. I'm almost afraid of listening to it for fear that its power will be broken, but whenever a track from Shatter Me comes into my playlist, I find my ability to focus is heightened. (I have a hypothesis for why this happens, but it's immaterial here.) The Set Up This is the musi...

Growing up a bookworm, most of the family's vacations saw me in one of two places when it came to buying a souvenir: The stuffed animals section, or the book section. The former comes from a still-present appreciation of cute things (though I don't want to pet anyone's animals because that means I have to go wash my hands). But it's the latter that, as I reflect on my hazy self-memories, I begin to see the stirrings of the bibliophile that I would one day grow into. No one is born able to read, and I have memories of my own illiteracy. My mother was paying bills one day. I know this was before I went to school, so it was likely the late morning, early afternoon. Sunlight spilled over the kitchen table on which the sundry bills were spread. My father, a free-lancing guitarist since before I was born, would get the money from work (gigs, as they call them in the industry, doncha know) and my mom would crack open the checkbook, fill out the amounts, seal the envelopes, a...

Moments of mortality strike in ways that we rarely anticipate. While terminal diseases or the advancement of age can give a person the opportunity to prepare for the final departure, too often it happens abruptly and shockingly. A coworker of mine came close to losing his life in March when he was struck by a truck whilst riding his motorcycle. As he's said since then, one gains a new perspective on the priorities of life when that happens, and things that supposedly mattered turned out to not matter nearly so much. On Facebook yesterday, the sad new came to my attention that one of my high school friends, Dylan Thornton was killed in an accident on I-15, the interstate that connects the state from its Idaho border down to its southern extremes. I was never particularly close to Dylan, but he was definitely within my broader circle of friends. Back in the late nineties, we spent a number of evenings together. We made jokes in class. We were part of each other's dance groups...

Unless you're new to my posts, you've probably already figured out that I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As a life-long Mormon, I've spent a lot  of time thinking and learning about the teachings of my church. I've learned that some stuff isn't real stuff but cultural stuff (e.g. having to wear a white shirt to Sunday meetings; caffeine isn't the thing that's forbidden in the Word of Wisdom). I've also learned some cool stuff that is real stuff (e.g. God's love for all His children; the grace of Christ is monumental and beyond capacious). But one thing that I never really learned about in official Church settings (General Conferences, Sunday Schools, Institute/Seminary classes) was the broadness of religious thought that the world has yielded. Despite being awash in my religion, I've never gone deeply into religion s . There's an explanation for this, of course--plenty of them. One is the fact that Mormon...

By my count, I've consumed approximately 80 titles so far this year. Those titles include podcast series, narrative-based video games, audio books, comic books, and novels. I include the narrative-based video games because they're lengthy and textured enough to give me a lot to think about. Because video games have different ludological goals, I don't include every title (like, how would I ever "finish" a game like Overwatch ?), and there are only a couple of them, but I feel like they're an important part of the narratives that I consume in order to improve myself as a person and a writer. I don't count movies, though. Maybe I will next year, and amp up my goal from 100 titles in a year to something more like 150. Film has been pulling me in more and more lately, in part because of its compact nature (though some long-form storytelling, like Netflix's Stranger Things  is hardly compact). It takes an investment of only a couple hours to get the whole...

At the time of this writing, Hurricane Irma is venting its fury on Florida . The hurricane pummeled Key West, then swung up, smashing into Florida's Gulf coast. With Hurricane Harvey hardly in the rear view mirror, and Hurricane Jose on the way, it's pretty clear that there's some catastrophic weather happening at the time. Florida--southeast Florida, to be exact--has a special place in my heart: I served my two-year long mission in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. While I never personally went farther south than the Kendall/Hammocks area, my mission boundaries included everyone in Key West up to West Palm Beach, with the Everglades on the east and the Bahamas out in the west. So though the hurricane is currently pummeling the western part of the peninsula, the areas where I served thirteen to fifteen years ago are in rough shape. So, even though Hurricane Harvey's deluge of Houston was in my country, and my heart, thoughts, and prayers went out to them, seeing my o...

When a youth from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints decides to volunteer for an eighteen- to twenty-four month mission, said youth agrees to abstain from a lot of things that generally comprise the majority of a kid's living experience: No dating, no popular/secular music, no contact with home save emails once a week and a couple of calls, and no watching movies, especially not in the theater. This list of Don't Commandments is designed to strip away the distractions of normal life so that the limited time as a missionary can be focused on the purpose of dedicated missionary life: Preaching the gospel. So it makes sense within the internal logic of the Church's system and it is, for the most part, an effective maneuver that does help keep missionaries honed in on their purpose. The fascinating thing about this forced fast of films is that there's an unspoken but fairly well understood cultural expectation on the other end of the service. Young women (a...

I took my kids to the Walmarts nearby in order to buy not one, not two, but three  birthday presents for my second son's friends, all of whom are celebrating their birthdays over the next three or four days. This wasn't a big deal, save that we were 1) in Walmart and 2) I forgot my wallet in the car, necessitating hauling all of the kids from the toys section (which, in case you were wondering, yes, my four year old was sobbing as we left because I wouldn't buy him a Spider-Man glove) and back out to the pinnacle of suburban success, the minivan. Not my actual car, but it gives a sense. Source Wallet obtained, I trekked back into the store, reclaimed the birthday presents, bought the kids some over-sugared, under-nutritioned drinks, and headed out to the parking lot. As we walked, I teased my oldest about running into a sign, and pretended to be a bee, buzzing and stinging him. We marched along, everyone holding someone's hand, and arrived safely at the car. The...

Okay, so maybe the title is a little misleading: We didn't mock  Machiavelli. But it sounds cool, so I wrote it. We did study some of The Prince  in class today, and it's interesting reading it whilst under a state whose actions I tend to disagree with, instead of the opposite. For as long as I've been teaching, I've been able to study The Prince  through the point of view of being in favor with most of the policies coming out of Washington. Under the Obama administration, there were a lot of areas in which Machiavelli and President Obama differed, and those areas where there were parallels were worth considering. Under President Trump, it's fascinating to see how much more is there. For instance, we talked today about how a prince (or state) can get and maintain power. In Machiavelli's words, he says [..I]t is necessary for [a leader of a state] to be sufficiently prudent that he may know how to avoid the reproach of those vices which would lose him his s...

Writing advice is like underwear--certain styles work for certain people, but it's really there for support. Man. I feel like that should be a meme, like with flowers or something. Y'know, an inspirational Instagram photo. Hold on a sec. Yeah, that's more like it. Source . Just like you probably shouldn't try on every type of underwear simultaneously, not all writing advice is useful at the same time. And some doesn't work at all for the individual. One piece of writing advice that always requires a little bit of tailoring would be the "Write what you know" advice. Taken too literally, it makes it seem as though the only thing people should write is a journal--after all, what one knows is what one has done. I think there's some value to that. Some people lead interesting lives. I'm not one of those people, so I prefer my fictional stories to be a little bit more than recitation of my minutia. One thing that I believe about writing fict...

I'm reading a book about Reconstructivists, a particular brand of fundamentalist Christianity that is better known for their effects than for their name. The book, Building God's Kingdom , looks closely at the manifestations of Reconstructivism within the purview of education. It's the backbone of the homeschooling movement, as well as school choice and other cultural and political reverberations of similar ilk. Julie Ingersoll explores this mostly through a close reading and careful history of a fellow named Rousas John Rushdoony and the manifold ways in which his vision of education in America ought to be constrained by biblical teachings and interpretations. He and his followers (even those who disagree with some of his points and modify them to fit their own means--as followers often do) have cast the world in a binary: Theism and humanism. Now, I'm a sectarian humanist, which may sound like a contradiction in terms, but that's because "secular hum...