breakfast sunday

There's a good piece by Jim Holt about the writing of philosophy in today's The New York Times . He invokes a definition of literature by Evelyn Waugh: "literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance." Waugh listed lucidity, elegance, individuality as distinguishing literature from other forms of written expression.

I've thought for a long time that philosophers are poets and poets are philosophers. They both see language as the main game in the act of acting human and are not constrained by what is otherwise known as clear thinking,  though clear thinking all by itself can make for some pretty good writing.

{Time for breakfast}

The number of contemporary poets who refer to Wittgenstein, directly or indirectly, in their poems is astonishing! Because I am reading Bin Ramke, Bin Ramke for one comes to mind.

Wittgenstein for one went to great lengths thinking about the difference between a word and a picture. "A logical picture of facts is a thought," he wrote. I read this to mean that a word and a picture are one and the same.

What's the point and who cares? If you're hungry and don't have health care, no number of poems or paintings can feed you. However, there may be some truth in what a friend of mine said yesterday, that everyone needs ee.cummings in their house.

"The world is everything that is the case," wrote Wittgenstein. Whatever.