Blog of Blood
This is the necessary blog for my portfolio. I will write it in English and Spanish. I will deal with basically two topics: my leisure readings and my television viewing.
Re-reading Poetics by Aristotle
I sat today at Barnes & Noble with an Americano coffee and three textbooks that I had to read. I have to say that I read very slow in any language –most of my readings are in English, Spanish, and once in a while Italian or Portuguese. In between my readings about hypertext and visual rhetoric, I re-read Aristotle’s Poetics. It was like looking at old pictures or at my oldest shoes: comfortable, “oh-yeah,-I-remember-that”s, and “God, why don’t tv writers read Aristotle?” My previous two readings of this treatise were “homework readings” and they were focused on certain sections only; one those times was the diction part, and I believe the other one was the part about the difference between epic and tragedy.
Today I finished the book thinking about the concept of mimic. This blog is a mimic of other blogs and whatever I write here is a mimic of what I think I think, which may be true. What I write is true up to a certain point, since I don’t want to say everything I know, think, believe, hear, or see in a page that maybe no one except for me and two other individuals will read.
Here I am mimicking other blogs to comply with a requirement. I mimic, you mimic, etc. What would the world be without mimic? Mimic is borrowing, imitating, using other people’s art and thoughts, movements and words. The newspaper says that even the earliest tasks learned by humans (kids) are difficult for apes to learn and master.
Aristotle, Aristóteles, Ἀριστοτέλης Aristotélēs has been mimicked so many times, that when we read him we may think that he was not original, because we have learned what he said somewhere else.
El próximo gato o pez beta que tenga se llamará Aristóteles y su sobrenombre será Ari o Teles. Todos los días pensaré en darle de comer a Aristóteles: comida seca o comida de lata, hojuelas o biscochitos. Pensaré en la filosofía, en la mortalidad de las mascotas, en la sencillez de la Poética y la fragmentación de la misma. Hablaré con el pececito de lógica aristotélica, le explicaré al gato que lógica es lo que le falta; y a la persona que me pregunte por qué el animal se llama así la convenceré de que ese es un buen nombre, de que uno debe repetir el nombre de Aristóteles tres o cuatro veces al día, y que uno deber releer las obras de este filósofo al menos dos veces en su vida.
Add comment September 9th, 2007
