Journeying, Day 73

No video today.

This morning I’ll be heading up to Canada. Regina today, Edmonton tomorrow.

Yesterday, I got a copy of Dead White Guys: A Father, His Daughter and the Great Books of the Western World via interlibrary loan. It's a nice book, but it's not useful to me and I'm glad I didn't buy it. I'll be sad if I lose my access to ILL services when I'm no longer at BSU. The local library can do ILL as well, I guess. We'll see how that goes. In any case, a brief "inspectional reading" of this book convinced me I didn't need to go further. It's way too much of a father's letters to his daughter, and way too much about illustrating selected passages from the great books with anecdotes from the author's life. Although I'm happy the author was interested in comparing foundational texts like Plato, Plutarch, Machiavelli, and Montaigne to his experiences in the contemporary world and then communicate these insights to his daughter, it seems a bit too random to me.

That's a good thing to know, however. The anecdotal nature of this book leaves room for me to do something. I think reviewing the Great Books could be part of my note-making project. If we're going to make notes and understand how to make content we study and read our own, we might as well include the foundational texts of western civilization. Not only them, but certainly they should be included.

My perspective on this "western canon" is different from most people's, I think. I disagree with the "circle the wagons around the canon" conservatives who insist that everything wrong with the post-modern world can be blamed on our rebellion from this tradition. But I also disagree with the "throw it all away" liberals, who reject the texts that were central to western culture for centuries. Yes, they were often written by and for elite white men, in support of institutions that benefitted elite white men. But we can read them critically and we can supplement them with additional texts that explore other ideas and subvert these power structures. The fact that I understand the limitations of the canon but am still interested in engaging with it critically may make my contribution valuable, I suspect.

So I'm thinking at this point of creating a free-standing note-making site, where I focus on tools, techniques, and examples of how to read, research, make notes, and write. Part of this will include examples of such work. Part will include reviews of things others have written about elements of this work. But maybe I'll focus it on the idea of self-education and explore that a bit.