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Take a sabbatical, start a discussion group. Isn't that just the way? Nancy and I have been chatting. Pleasure/Hedonism/Self/Culture has, just moments ago, been born from that discussion. I'm going to get the first several exchanges up here in a minute as the first post on the list.

Nancy was reading Gilligan's Birth of Pleasure and ruminating, and she ruminated with me, and now we're off. That book started us, but it's not the only text that wants out of the Old World we're watching desperately try to hang on all around us. We're interested in what we mean by pleasure and hedonism, our relationships to them, our official culture's confusions of them, and how pleasure might be a basic value in a New World. A New World, not The. We take our idealism with salt.

The talk will be intellectual, interdisciplinary, polyperspectival (yes, you can make up words when you want to), spiritual, civil, and dedicated to each other's well being. Bring your education, bring your dreams, bring your experience, but don't bring a will to use to whack other list members on the heart. EG: I make a reference to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy (on which G's title plays, on purpose), and it turns out Nancy hadn't read it. So, I'm about to go out and get some links that will help her get the sense of the thing so that we can talk to each other as peers. Get it? No blunt force trauma allowed.

Come play, but play nicely, or I'll send you back home to the Old World.