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July 23rd 2022

a P.S. sort of.

   1. As an octogenarian, I still dream of starting a production company called Chloroform®. I won't explain why, you're bright, you can work it out. It would not have to do with a purpose - like producing a movie or anything of that sort. It would be strictly for shmoozin':
   Mogul: So...Henry, Harold, what's your game?
   Me: Movie producer. Chloroform®. My Production Company, yes?
   Mogul: Chloroform®..? Doesn't ring any bells, Har. Field me some titles.
   Me: Oops, sorry, Mog' gotta take this... Hola, Quentin, baby! Yeah..? Oh, groovy, dude!
    And off I drift, mobile to lug, over to the brunette with the dazed expression in the holding area nursing her steaming cocktail: Death comes for the Archbishop.
    I did actually have a company called Paranoid Productions® back in the day when I was a wrister doing bin-art in the advertising. The name never brought in a single job, but people remembered it, and it tickled my whimsical funny bone (not at all funny when y' bash your elbow on a doorpost).
    Another good name would be: Y'gottaLarf®...yes? Believe me, sitting through the plethora of production credits at the front end of any movie these days, the title-hungry producers will scramble for these gems.
  2.  I'm a philosopher, I wouldn't say a good one and I try hard to not let it out of its box, it can be wearisome for peeps, but it usually finds a way.
    Years ago I read Iris Murdoch's Under the Net. I'd forgotten having read it and I'm not suggesting that you read it now. Instead, go to her Wikipedia page where you'll find this quote: "All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular here. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net". The Wiki article also mentions Samuel Beckett's book: Murphy. Murphy is described as a seedy solipsist. (Don't ever use this word, it is confusing and contradictory, there is clearer, more communicable language to hand.) Notwithstanding, the wordplay of Beckett and Murdoch both, is delightful and if you read these books on the level of pure entertainment you're in for a good larf. But if you read them as a philosopher (which I think is the intention), you will go barmy.
   But these are not just very good funny books, unfortunately they are also examples of academic circles going round in circles, analysing analyses endlessly—get me outta here, gasp! (Ouroboros; don't use that word either, I just want you to know that I know it.) You can only indulge this literary excess when you are an actual paid academic or have enough readers buying your books.
   In Murdoch's biography, it is said, "...the title of her book alludes to Wittgenstein's Tractatus "The net of discourse behind which the world's particulars hide, which separates us from our world, yet simultaneously connects us." (Wittgenstein, yea! The guy knew what he was talking about, but no one else did—don't read him!)
   In other words, dear patient reader, instead of leading the mind out of the labyrinth of thinkythinkythinky (which is what the heroes of both books seek to achieve in hilariously bizarre ways) the writers steer us even deeper into the crazy maze.
   I'd say, experiencing life is different to understanding it, but who am I?
P.S. The name of the cocktail, Death comes for the Archbishop is from Anthony Powell's book, A Dance to the Music of Time. Brilliant.