Writing On Plato

Earlier in this blog I wrote about my love of (obsession with?)  office supplies.  I especially like colored ink pens and I really, really like using colored ink pens to write on xeroxes of readings!  Why? Well, colored pens are easier to read than pencil.  When I was an undergraduate I used to write all of my marginal notes in pencil--I guess I had more respect for books back then?  But now I go back to those texts and I can barely read the faded notes.  Maybe that's not so bad, maybe that forces me to carefully re-read and make new notes. Are notes a way of responding and questioning?  That's one of the questions I was getting at in my last post.  I sort of think they are--although I'm not convinced it is really the same as being able to talk to the writer of a text in person. (Which writer would you like to talk to?)

Here's what part of this week's reading looks like in my copy of the course packet. I'd like to continue the argument I made in class about the importance of annotating by taking you through some of the process I went through.  


We never really read the same text twice because what we bring to the text changes.  For example, in planning this semester, I've been thinking about problems of serious discussion as opposed to entertainment (look for this in Unit 3!).  In reading this page of Plato, I saw the distinction between earnestness and play in a new, and newly important (to me) way.


What else happened as I read?  The first thing I underlined is the word father; here I was reminding myself that Plato is comparing artists or writers to fathers; artwork or texts are like children. This isn't a complicated metaphor--it's used all the time--but since he keeps going with it, it seemed key to give myself that visual reminder. It's a sort of mental shortcut.


As you can see, I got kind of excited in the middle of the page when he started talking about a word that "knows to whom it should speak and before whom to be silent."  This is the thinking, or prethinking, that went into my last post. You can see that I was trying to make connections between the different uses of "know" and the issue of living people, or living audiences:  knowledge, as Phaedrus comments, that seems to "mean the living and breathing word of him who knows."  At the same time, I started to see a connection between these ideas of audience and the distinction between the writer/ speaker's intention as either earnest or delightful and amusing.  


Is all of my thinking worked out?  Absolutely not, but when I went back to my notes to write up the last post, I found I had alot to say!