The Demiurgic: Composing Rhetorica

This oil painting features orbs and satellite design(s) in cloud formations and deep, blue black space(s); again, assisting Deus in principio et criatura ex nihilo.  

Nota Bene: the above painting has been awarded and recognized as the new cover art design for the new Introductory Composition Student Guide: "Composing Yourself: A Guide to Introductory Composition at Purdue"; moreover, a $200 prize is sponsored by Fountainhead Press. At the time of the contest, the new title of the oil painting is:

The Demiurgic: Composing Rhetorica

Oil on Canvas: Immortal Verde, Secular Sun

This oil painting uses primary yellow and shades of green to usher in the immortal, golden ratio; this is Pi: faith in chaos.

Oil Painting: the fruit of Genesis

This oil painting on canvas imbues the Genesis account:

in principio deus alongside the fruit of possibility

and was painted at home; it is part of a series of 5 which are inspired by the mimetic Hand of God and the agitation of the human condition to explore, to expect, to transgress. I hope you enjoy the image.

Grand Central Perc: a "new" cafe s/p(l)ace

I forgot how I came to find out that a new cafe had opened on Central Avenue, but here I am. The space is large enough boasting decent front window parking, plenty of seating, wireless, free art gazing on the walls, and of course a good caffeinated liquid high.

Impressively, there is no uber coffee scent and my machiatto (double shot of course) is strong and consistent on my tongue and palate. The official location is 2444 (easy enough) Central Avenue, St. Petersburg, FL 33712.

The street out front is a busy one, but GCP (if I may) allows for an escape from, to borrow from Hardy, the maddening crowd.

As I sign off and prepare to teach I am left toe tapping my Calvin Klein, cognac-colored driver slip-on to the cadence of Chapman and her "you got a fast car," and I am left to wonder: do I? Well, gotta go be someone, be someone.

The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (HFGF): an application toward an application...

The HFGF (if I may)--
is of some considerable interest to me as both an educator and a peace-lover; the foundation recognizes critical work from both the natural and social sciences and humanities which, and I quote:

promise to increase understanding of the causes, manifestations, and control of violence, aggression, and dominance

I will be applying for their dissertation fellowship award of $15,000 (US) in order to complete my doctoral thesis from Purdue University. I am comfortable, and my body is not at rest, as I am armed with the following works (in no particular order, but in a particular theme/pattern):

--Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribener's Sons, 1960).
--Hent de Vries' Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
--Rene Girard's Des Choses caches depuis la fondation du monde (Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1978).
--Rene Girard's La Violence et le sacre (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1972).
--Valentin Groebner's Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Middle Ages (New York: Zone Books, 2004).
--Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Gesammelte Schriften: Dialektik der Aufklarung und Schriften 1940-1950 (S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 1987).

Collectively, these texts should provide me with a scaffold toward a genesis of violence and a theory toward its dissolution and containment but not its resolution; again, violence is ever-always with us and will not be erased any more than adipose cells can be eradicated. As the (medical) scientist is aware these cells, like memes of violence, can ONLY be decreased to a given capacity.

My location is a nice holding cell right across the new Dali Museum where I am also a research fellow; The Campus Grind is a fantastic site--though not quite the Widener--it remains a quaint and quiet enough interstitial s/p(l)ace. And now, let us get to it...

Bioethics: Christmas to remember...

This morning I came across a rather provocative article on the subject of personhood, a mythical yet tangible category concerning the middling aspects of the human animal.

The information can be found below:

The American Journal of Bioethics, 7(1): W1–W4, 2007
Copyright c Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1526-5161 print / 1536-0075 online
DOI: 10.1080/15265160601150352

One qoute stood out more than others concerning PVC, or persistent vegetative condition, and I recall it here in length:

By now we hope it is clear that we are not advocating a
naturalized conception of personhood. What we are doing is
addressing the relation between the moral concept of a person
and the natural world, and in that sense we are assuming
that the natural world is relevant to moral theory. Although
moral principles themselves may not require empirical validation,
they do refer to entities in the real world, and for bioethics in
particular the way in which we anchor such principles in empirical
reality is crucial. (AJB 4)

Ahh..the natural world IS relevant to moral theory huh? I could agree but our societies and communitas esoterica create mythologies by which we live, support, exist, tear down, replace, (re)edit, et cetera. Santa Clause is of this construction. Is Christ? Not necessarily seeing as how there is/was a historical analog labeled Yeshua, Jesus (or, James).

This year forget about the traditions, which are mythos--supported and (re)apply topically the love for the human animal, the person and quotidian event/phenomena of the neighbor. Let us be Levinasian in the sense that heaven can exist on earth amidst those seeking the other's good without reciprosity.

What a Christmas to remember, no. Be well.

The Death of the Year: 2010

I've been on the run for some time now travelling the first quarter of the 2010 year to St. Croix, St. Lucia then back to St. Petersburg, Florida. The middle and end of the 2010 year allowed me to do some more travelling; this time to Indiana to defend my doctoral prospectus and place me as a Ph.D. candidate.

Currently, I am in Michigan visiting my wife's family for the Christmas holiday; then, proceed to St. Croix to visit my side of the family: mom and lil bro (who is not so little anymore). Our plan is to also visit St. John and possibly Puerto Rico.

Finally, we are going to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico sometime Spring 2011. The point? We are never at rest; we are always subjects of the travelling body; the corpus that is always-ever on the move.

This is why I firmly believe in travel, exploration, discovery, et cetera. Global no longer really exists, but cosmopolitanism is still possible. I hope to exceed my travelling from this 2010 season and at least double it in 2011. My ambitions are second to none, and the work I have to put in to live and breathe and move the way I would like are in my possession.

Resolved: to do me; to not listen to the haters and nay-sayers who would rope me into submission within their concept of time and expectation. Black Phoenix will not only rise again and again and again, but he will be...