Daniel Coffeen

Daniel is an independent writer, reader, teacher, and philosopher. Follow him on Twitter here.

Anonymity Freaks Me Out

The first and only time I voted was in the 1988 presidential election. I clearly remember walking in that little private wank booth and looking at this strange paper on which I was to mark my selection for this or that candidate. I remember feeling so small, so irrelevant, the process so dehumanizing.

Some Things I've Learned From Booze

For 30 years, give or take, booze has been a great teacher and me, I’ve been its less than reluctant pupil (although I’ve not always been open to its pedagogy). Here are some things I’ve learned over the years.

What’s Your Time?

Large rocks budge, a tiny bit, over centuries. To us, they just sit there, enduring. But slowly, they are eroding and moving.  I wonder if, to them, time flies.

Enjoy Yourself, Parts 4-6: A Response to Doug Lain

No doubt, there are plenty of pleasures to be had today. But is it possible to enjoy yourself, to live through yourself rather than through the ubiquitous corporate Hollywood haze of images, desires, and emotions? Is this a question even worth asking?

Words

I never cease to be amazed by the magic of words — these contrived scrawls, these guttural mutterings that somehow conjure, entice, explain, seduce, confound, convey, reveal.

Moods

I want to say that Buddhism tries to establish such a mood of moods but the result is no mood fluctuation at all — to the enlightened Buddhist, all is a steady hum.  No manic highs, no manic lows: just a state of perpetual contentment.  Which, I have to say, sounds pretty good. Sometimes.  Sometimes it just sounds creepy and nihilistic, a kind of avoidance of the flux of life.

A Good Conversation

A conversation is different than a discussion. A discussion is everyone talking about something — “Jane Eyre” or the latest Spoon LP or whether balding men really ought to shave the whole thing or not.

Passionate Indifference

The best of nature shows and nature commentators speak with passionate indifference. Nature, after all, is neither kind nor brutal: it just is.  There is such intense drama — the large cat taking down a gazelle, hungry polar bears bearing the burden of an infinite winter, flora fighting for survival. And yet nature is absolutely, mercilessly, indifferent.  We can hear this in the voice of the great nature documentaries we know so well thanks to PBS.

The Society Of Individuals

I love this phrase — it’s what I named my would-be think tank when I was 22: The Society of Individuals. Twenty years later and I still cling to, and seek to elucidate, what such a society might be.

The Intimacies Of The Urban

In Species of Spaces, Georges Perec has a great thing on apartments: you’re eating your dinner and right on the other side of the wall is someone else’s bathroom. Or mere feet from where you sleep, a stranger is sleeping, as well, your two heads almost touching.  If you think about it too much, it will freak you out.

A Relationship with the Infinite

When I was a kid, I was overwhelmed by the concept of infinity.  I’d lie in bed at night, in the dark, and try to picture the infinity of space, each limit in my mind giving way giving way giving way until I achieved a kind of vertigo and my skinny little body would tremble as if in orgasm, a conceptual tantra.  It was exquisite.

Marriage, Infinity, And The Everyday

Now refract that relationship through the infinite. Are you going to remain angry over such things forever? Well, no. The everyday banality of this or that complaint compared to the infinite is nothing. And so rather than leaving, you stay. You overcome that complaint.

Becoming Inhuman

But if you look at movies and TV, we certainly privilege one network over others: the network we call civilization. That is, other people. I, for one, used to be quite taken with the human condition — with character studies and portraits, with human history, with how people operate.

Drugs As Pedagogy, Or Fostering A Relationship With The Cosmos

Thanks to a couple of great teachers, I learned some things in high school. All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, I learned to write expository arguments. I learned the pleasure of reversal — flipping assumptions upside down. I read The Communist Manifesto.

On Punctuation

But writing can tend towards the deadpan. Which is one reason I like punctuation so much — it’s the emphatic and the gestural within language. Of course, punctuation is not the only means of emphasis and gesture. Word choice, rhythm, syntax: these are quite literally what make prose pop and move. Still, the keen use of punctuation can make the deadpan sing.

The Experience of Making Sense

One way to think about this thinking is to think about the experience of things making sense. I love this phrase, “making sense,” because we use it to mean we understand a given idea when the phrase suggests we just created the idea: we made the sense rather than recognized it.

The Experience Of An Idea

I was sitting outside enjoying an espresso when I found myself thinking a thought I’ve had before: all this — all this humanity with its fears and loves and desires; all this pavement and blue jeans and tequila and American Idol: all this is the great swirl of stuff continuous with the gyrations of the cosmos at every level — from solar flares and asteroid fields and black holes to viruses and cells and strands of DNA.

On Watching Films: Identification & Confrontation

The film no doubt entails a certain narrative trajectory, a recording of action through real space rather than a purely cinematic event at the site — as it were — of the screen. And, in some sense, we identify with Keitel, even if he’s grotesque and morally questionable at best.