nagel, v. To sense, vaguely, that something crucial but ineffable has been left out of account.

Storm's coming. There's been no rain yet, only a few ecstatic bursts of enormous hailstones, but there's an epic quality to the wind; the top branches of the pines are moving in full circles, and superiposed on a sky that isn't black but livid, vivid pinkish at the horizon and radiating up. I went to bed and got up again, and padded dowstairs barefoot to find someone had left the agarbathi still burning. The wind, the shadows, the feeling of enormity beyond the glass - all very melodramatic, and I don't think I'm going to sleep through this.

Which is faintly exasperating, as I went to bed early to sleep off whatever lurgy I have contracted this time - it's a sort of swaying-from-side-to-side, my-mother-is-chasing-me-with-an-auroscope kind of lurgy - and am failing quite conspicuously at that. I imagine I'll drop off when the rain starts.

So, in the meantime, I am going to do gloriously productive things like, er, memes, and reformatting my iPod for the Mac (which has a name! it was originally "Julian", which didn't stick, so I tried again with Nemi Montoya, after the Norwegian comic character, and this seems to be working), and er, maybe read more on Descartes. (I have spent two days reading pretty much nothing else, and am reaching the conclusion that I don't like him much. Well, I like bits of him. I like the Dreaming Argument far too much, because it's a cliche and it's a cliche for a reason. How do we know we're not dreaming? We don't, is the answer. Isn't that neat? It's a question with a straightforward answer. Round about the week I started thinking about it for the first time - well, explicitly; I'm told I asked this question at a fairly tender age, which probably says rather a lot about me - I was walking down the High Street past Exam Schools and saw, at eye-level, done in white chalk, the words: "are you awake?"

It's still there, I believe. I say I believe, because I could have dreamed it.

The problem here, of course, is that Descartes' project of discovering indubitable truth can't be done if he's mad - his word, although what he means is probably reducible into suspension of rationality - but it can be done in a dream. Maybe he dreamed his entire project, but still. That makes me, reading it four hundred years later, part of the self-same dream, and I, like him, have to assume my own continuing rationality.

(Now I come to think of it, this is why philosophers go crazy. They start the day by consciously assuming their own rationality.)

Anyway, yes. I like the Dreaming Argument. I even like the cogito, because it's got a lovely feel to it, phenomenologically speaking; you can complain at length about his unexamined metaphysics and his confusion of normative and factual indubitability (oh my, I love my subject), but that comes later: first of all, you go through sensory perceptions, the Dreaming Argument, through madness and malevolent forces and you find yourself exactly where he was, in the aha, I exist! place. I doubt, therefore I am. Isn't that great? I sit here and I can't know who I am or why I am or what the world is like or if it exists at all, but I am.

Then, of course, you end up getting enormously distracted by his "proofs" of God, which I dislike immensely, but the First Meditation is wonderful.

...er. Amazingly enough, I did not open this update window in order to talk at length about Cartesian doubt. Um. Go and look at the Philosophical Lexicon. It makes me laugh far too much, and does not involve (much about) Descartes.

Moving swiftly on, yes. The reason I had been putting off reformatting my iPod is because it would reset all my play counts to zero, which is a little disconcerting after three years. They're going slowly up again, although it may be a while before I've listened to Dar Williams' "The Ocean" 246 times, again. (It amuses me still that likethesun2 happened to tell me in a rec-your-friends-specific-things meme that I must listen to the song, I'd love it - and I, because I am just that predictable, proceeded to listen to it about fifty times in one day. The day in question is the on which I wrote "What The Ocean Can Know of a Body", so there was a happy ending all round, except for Mulder and Scully.)

Speaking of Dar Williams, she is great and never stops being so. She's one of the few artists I primarily like for her lyrics; my current most-played song is "February", which is very simply arranged and sung, but the lyrics are just... haunting. (and I tried to remember, but I said, "what's a flower?" / you said, "I still love you")

Also, and infamously, "When I Was A Boy", which used to be the first song on a playlist I had called "the personal is political", because I'm subtle like that. It's one of her anecdotal songs, which starts off as a song about how gender roles inhibit and damage girls and women, and it's poignant and nice, until the last verse, which twists it all around and.... yes. Yes. Again, very simple musically, and the lyrics break me.

My other song of the moment is, courtesy of chiasmata, "Ghosts" by Laura Marling - again, lyrically lovely.

Yes, yes, iTunes, do get on with transferring 1692 songs, I appreciate it. Oh, ye gods, I am dull. This is what happens when I sit at home vaguely lurgyfied and read a lot of continental rationalism. Thankfully, bright and early on Thursday morning, I am going far up north to see hathy_col for the first time in a million gazillion years - three months - and help her perambulate a giant inflatable Dalek electoral candidate around the streets of St Andrews. There will be joy and non-computer-based social interaction and rampant geekery and jelly babies and joy again, and I love how some things, at least, don't ever change.

Rain. Sleeeeeeep.

memememe

I decided early this morning that if I didn't leave the house soon, I was going to go stark raving insane. So I walked the thirty-five minutes into the village to get a pasty from Sayers - actually, let me have a point of digression here while I talk about how great pasties are. I did not know, until I moved to Oxford, that despite the fact there has been one everywhere I've lived - and there used to be one on the way into school, and I'd pop out during the afternoon and get flaky pastry all over the library carpet - Sayers are Liverpool-based only. I was delighted to discover, therefore, that there are in fact places that sell pasties in Oxford. But. But, these are pasties that you have to pay £2.50 for, that have, I don't know, ingredients, whereas a real pasty is made of indefinable vegetables and something-that-might-be-meat, all covered in astonishingly-bad-for-you pastry and is much too hot to hold, let alone eat, before you have carried it around with you for half an hour and made a glorious amount of mess, and it should be 79p, because more than that would imply that it were made of food.

Enormous digression aside, I bought a baked-bean-and-sausage pasty and a luridly purple fairy cake, and dropped in on the bookshop on the way home. I do like it when people are pleased to see me. At any rate, I stepped in and was greeted with, "Oh, fantastic, Iona, can you answer the phone and tell Assistant Book Monkey to give up smoking?"

I did both, to limited avail, and ended up idly stickering signed copies on the counter while they told me what I've missed through being away for three months. One of the reps has taken up astral projection ("Well, he said he'd spent a month in Birmingham sort of flying around, and people didn't believe him when he said he'd been projecting himself. There were a lot of Jamaican guys in the street selling weed. Yes, that is a funny coincidence, isn't it?"), Assistant Book Monkey is still in love with Her Upstairs ("She's gay, I'm an optimist"), Setch has gone to Loughborough and isn't at all falling into the insanely-sporty stereotype ("He came in the other day and told us he'd named his biceps.").

A customer came in at that point, but I just couldn't resist. "What has he named them?"

They looked at each other, looked at me, looked at the little old lady customer, and chorused, "Pinky and the Brain!"

Also, Anne Fine came in to sign books and, despite her epic amounts of kids' books (including Flour Babies and Goggle-Eyes, both of which I loved), she apparently doesn't like children ("Such bloody shrill voices!") or, indeed, Jacqueline Wilson ("I've been saying that for years, but no one ever listens to me," I sighed at that point); Katy Flynn has written yet another squidgy book of squidge and dedicated it to us; there are so many books exploding through the back of the shop that they've had to fill one of the toilets with proof copies and OS maps.

Situation normal, I said, promised to help out over Easter weekend, and paused to ask, before I went home with my luridly purple fairy cake, "If you could fly anywhere you wanted, would you stick around in Birmingham?"

"He's moved now, anyway," they told me. "In fact, you should look out for him."

("Passing through on a nearby jetstream?" I said, but no, apparently the Bloomsbury Astral Projection Rep now lives a couple of doors down from where jacinthsong and potatofiend lived last year. I take all of this as proof that all it takes for my life to get surreal again is for me to step out of the house.)

Anyway! I actually made this entry as an excuse to use this icon - which is great and marvellous, and probably indicative of much talking-about-philosophy I'm going to be doing - and for a meme, seen everywhere but most recently with glitzfrau:

Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post or comment about it. Ask for anything: latest movie watched, last book read, political leanings, thoughts on yaoi, favorite type of underwear, graphic techniques, etc.

I'm pretty sure I write about everything that pops into my head, but we shall see. And now I go back to doing some actual work, rather than eating cake and babbling.