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Will Wood (Is Hard to Crack-- Would You Get Me an Axe?)

 Will Wood is -- well, bombastic is a good way to describe the opening of many of his songs. 2econd 2ight 2eer opens with a blaze of trumpets and horns, Laplace's Angel does the same with a descent of brass screams, Willard! with a symphony of woodwinds and other horns. These are not representative of all his work, some songs like Vampire Reference in Key and Cicada Days open with softer guitars, lulling strums and quieter piano supports. But the likes of Willard, Laplace's Angel, Thermodynamic Lawyer and such are the face of Will Wood's work-- loud, sure, if not slightly crazed. The Will Wood persona follows up and plays into this slight crazed effect he has -- his live shows are described as 'delightfully unhinged', at times intentionally botching his own performances for his intended message to reach the audience. The subject matter of his songs-- brimming with a positive post-modern and sligthly nihilistic humor-- fits with the Will Wood persona, which he descri...
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Osamu Dazai and Yuko Tsushima -- The Suicidal and His Daughter

 "He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost."(Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human) “Just as my mother belonged in the kitchen, my father belonged in the graveyard.”(Yuko Tsushima, Of Dogs and Walls)     It came to light recently that the book I've been reading for this class has done little to capture my attention, and even now, some weeks from where-ever off in the audiobook I was, I dully remember that this artist was not kind to her children. Something about how her children-- who succeeded in life, came to write memiors-- became celebrated people , seemingly at the expense of her mother. I can't say whether or not she was a good mother, that artist-- I think people are odd like that, that they can be a good artist and a good person but a horrid parent . It's not that off, really, that some people succeed in different ways, I suppose it's more strange that someone that we come to idol may have so...
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Descartes probably wrote like that because his life wasn't the best-

 While not necessarily the stereotype of a 'creative', Rene Descartes did introduce what many honors students have learned is a system of methodological doubt (otherwise known as your first academically fueled existential crisis. Not an academic crisis, or a self-worth related crisis-- those were likely born during a time of reading Homer's Odyssey during our first weeks in Honors. Nevertheless, I digress;) Descartes's Meditations are important to the western philosophical movement as a whole-- outside of Honors, I've had the fortune of covering the man and his works no less than thrice, analyzing him within a historical context, others through his role in epistemological development, and others by proxy of Descartes' work. Establishing a system of doubt, as I have been taught, was relatively novel for the discipline as a whole, but within the context in which Descartes lived, such doubt was expected.  A major war was occurring in Europe at the time of Descartes...
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