It has taken me nearly eighteen months to reach the stage where I felt mildly comfortable writing this summary and I began the task with great trepidation and with a sombre appreciation that I could not possibly do it justice. Shai was a deep thinker which influenced the way he chose to live his life. This meant that to meet the challenge of describing his intellectual journey, I would actually...
Editorial notes: One of Shai’s special skills was writing short stories in a style used by famous authors. The two short stories below are a reflection of these attempts. The first written in the writing style of the American-British novelist and screenwriter, Raymond Chandler[I] and the second in the writing style of Jorge Luis Borges. Instant Noodles with Egg by Raymond Chandler The night...
A man receives a vision in the psych ward that causes him to perceive his own life in its terms. *foreshadowing* [The rest was added much later. That line was an idea I once had for a story about a man who is studying history and a crime that occurred in the past, when his (original idea was for neural disease/cancer) delusions overlap his life with the past, and he discovers that he was the...
Parallel story of Saul and Shabbatai Tzvi to create a single narrative that turns the conversion of the latter into an act of secret heroism, frame the whole story as being told by Monsieur Chouchani as a commentary to the story of Isaac’s celebration by his father, to a street urchin called Avram in Paris 1945, revealing to him that the secret of the story is not helplessness and confusion, but...
Contextual auto-horizons as determining originary experience of television-serials[1] Editor’s Note: Written c.2006 1. Introduction In the 30 years since the zenith of reader-response criticism, aesthetic theory, as it appears in our venerable institutions, has become increasingly focused on its subject field’s relevance to fields outside itself. This attempt to self-validate by associating...
{24/10/2016} Even approaching the approaching of this thing requires consideration. {24/10/2016} The goal is a proper study. The means is to know how to study. The precursor is to wonder how to know how to study. More premises: The subject of the goal is an Aleph. (#Borges) A premise of the means is that the value of a study can vary. A fundamental question within wondering is, how is a personal...
Editorial notes: This essay appears in two versions, the first documented as a draft in Shai’s A BASHFUL HOPE blog (see For the Complexed (v1)) and another version found as a Google Document. The two versions have a similar structure but somewhat different content and the version showing here has been adapted to merge the two versions to form a more complete version of this document. It...
Editorial notes: This essay was not made available (published) in the original blog and is visibly incomplete. It is published here in its original state. It was last updated on 12/12/2016. This essay appears in two versions, the first documented here, and the second, For the Complexed (v2), recovered from Shai’s Google Drive as a set of a four-part series. The two versions have a similar...
Editorial notes: On this day Shai publishes his first post dedicated specifically to Judaism. This is significant as it is the beginning of the fourth phase in Shai’s intellectual journey. After having first devoted a substantial body of writing to scientific inquiry and to the study of ancient and classical Western philosophers, and having recently commenced his study of Eastern Wisdom, Shai...
Before I conjure the writings that this “place” deems cut off by the delineations (as if there were such a thing) of time, let me pause. First to orient myself (here and not there) and then to suggest some directions. All that really has purpose from “there” (a label and mode of description that could be translated by reference {wait: you want to hear something funny [cf...
