Such a development would in turn damage the quality of research, they argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily as a video clip of Britney Spears’s latest hairdo. – NYT: At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web

As digital distribution breaks apart traditional content forms, you’re going to hear all sorts of whining about how harmful it will be. “Downloads ruin the sanctity of the album.” “Blogs aren’t as objective as real journalists.” “They’ll never replace the smell of a good book.” The fact of the matter is that all these “forms” exist as a function of the physical constraints of distribution. It is extremely dangerous to assume that “they way things were” is and will continue to be the best or the most reliable. Rarely do traditions resulting from a lack of options rest upon solid foundations. Now that the restraints have been released, change must happen.

In the case of scholarly journals, they existed in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries because it was only way to widely distribute mid-length content. Papers couldn’t be sold individually so they had to be packaged and packaging creates gatekeepers and “respected” publications. The idea that a paper is credible only if published in certain journals came second the physical realities. Distribution dictated the process, not the other way around. Albums are the same. If they weren’t, the so called “classics” would be downloaded evenly instead of one or two tracks disparately more popular. The concept of a local newspaper was created in a time where the events in another community had little relevance to the reader. And the economic structure was designed with that in mind. The way we format movie scripts is based on the assumption that all writers are using a typewriter.

We made the best possible system based on the environment we faced. Today, the marketplace is fundamentally different, so it is time to do it again. That’s all. The rest is just short-sighted people complaining because a powershift effects them personally. They’re too attached to a system to see its glaring flaws.

The thing I think we can learn from these comical protests over forces we can’t control is that you shouldn’t ever base your identity on external factors. Otherwise, you’re a slave. And you look like a jackass longing for an ideal that never really existed in the first place.

From one of my favorite books…

The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others–the living–are those who have pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and and Later.

But the edge is still Out There. Or maybe it’s In. The association of motorcycles and LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means of to an end, to the place of definitions.

Here’s what I have learned about edges: They are neither as dramatic or cool as Thompson makes them out to be. I think he’s totally right, they can be really scary. The only people that can tell you about them have crossed a chasm that makes it impossible to ever relate to The Way Things Were.

But if you go around associating them with motorcycles and cliffs and Capital Letters, you’re going to miss all the little ones that are right there in front of you. And you’ll forget all the others you already had the balls to cross and didn’t even know about.

There is reading and then there is researching. When you find a book that you really like, you owe it to yourself to do the research.

Tucker explained much better than I can. He said “ideas have consequences” and we have to look at the person that birthed and embodied the book. Just looking at the ideas themselves isn’t enough, you have to look at what those ideas have done. It’s not always the case, but still–it’s short sighted to act as though the author exists in a vacuum where they can separate their ideas and their personal lives.

The easiest way to combat this is to find the work’s place in history and then explore both backwards and forwards. This is something I have done for a while. After I read Seneca, I kept wrestling with the idea that he may have been an enormous hypocrite. So I started with Wikipedia. There wasn’t much there. Then I went on JSTOR and found a paper called “Seneca on Trial: The Case of the Opulent Stoic” that gave a lot of perspective. (Basically, our notion of his hypocrisy can be traced backed to a single begrudged person) Then I talked about it with Robert Greene and he told me what he knew–his personal history of the work. From there, I got to The Annals by Tacitus which spends a ton of time dissecting Nero and the influence of Seneca. Now, I feel like I can make some conclusions.

If you want to try it with Marcus Aurelius, you should read some of these:

The Opium Addiction of Marcus Aurelius

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume I, Chapters III to IV (which cover Marcus and Commodus)

Marcus Aurelius by Mathew Arnold

On Liberty – John Stuart Mill (mentioned briefly but significantly in the middle of the essay)

The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadot

The introduction and the last two chapters are crucial to understanding Marcus. The concept of an “inner citadel” was a brilliant metaphor for Marcus’ philosophy. Hadot says that Marcus worked to create a core that fate, hysterics, vice and outside influences could never penetrate. And that he wrote to himself to strengthen the walls. . He warns against the psychological historianism–the idea that we can judge Marcus as a person solely through his work is false. There is no way it embodies all of him, just like this site is only a small part of me. So we have to go deeper, at his rule, his letters, what he strove for. (This is essentially what I am saying here) Hadot is also critical, he examines the passages where Marcus literally begs for death, why he surrounded himself with such awful people, and so on.

The History of the Origins of Christianity Vol. 5 & 6. (I haven’t read these yet but I plan to. Renan is quoted throughout The Inner Citadel and I liked what he had to say)

I am going to start doing this with all my books. It coincides with a project Tucker and I are working on to make sense of his library (with my paltry contribution). If anyone has read deeper on anything I’ve put into my book list, it’d be great if you could email them to me. I am trying to find some way to organize the casual chain of books…