John Hanson's Statement of Teaching Philosophy

http://www.thepointmag.com/2011/philosophy/john-hansons-statement-of-teaching-philosophy

Had a dream I was playing volleyball naked with Flaubert.

robot

i taught her how to read. she started to make up stories. a story about crossing turkey and meeting some camels. then one about a man in a cloud that only screamed. then about the birds on lake winnipeg. terns, she called them.

Boat

I am driving a boat with three levels down a busy water thoroughfare. I am so high up as a drive I am constantly coming close to running over children. When I park the boat I am disturbed to learn that I am teetering on the edge of a cliff . A little boy who just learned to talk asks me why I bother to write things down. I began to explain to him, but he has already lost interest.

Joel

A man named Joel with a big white moustache is known to many as a Marxist. I sit at a cafeteria with long wooden benches crowded with people and I am explaining to a group of people how wonderful Joel is. Then Joel begins making homosexual advances toward me, suggesting that he will follow me home that night. I say no and he stands and leaves abruptly.

Test of Love 2

This is the test of love, a tall man says to me. He is white, with a thin moustache, but one of his arms is red, as though he just dipped it in paint. He pulls out a pencil and starts tapping it on the desk. After a while, the sound gets annoying. 1-2-3. 1-2-3. I hope he’ll get tired, but he doesn’t. His red arm seems to be made of metal. – And then what happens? I finally say. The moment I do, he hits me on crown of the head with the pencil, then goes back to hitting the desk, then hits me again. I realize he’s following a pattern. He’s hitting me on the head every third time. It doesn’t feel nice, and after about five times, I try to move my head out of the way. Not only do I fail, but this prompts him to hit me twice on the crown of the head, then back to the table, then back to my head twice more. There are other people in the room supposedly doing the same test. But I can’t see what they have discovered about this test. The nagging, incessant feeling of a pencil eraser knocking on the crown of my head is making any other thought impossible. – That’s it! I shout. Give me that fucking thing. I grab for it, and fail; I lunge at the man, but he moves with almost supernatural swiftness, his legs humming under him, and now the pencil is knocking on the crown of my head three times in a row, meaning incessantly: 1-2-3, 1-2-3.

George

I’m still trying to write Part 3 of George.

SILVERADO!

Monkeys are on cows running as fast as horses, shouting, “Hey, ho, Silverado,” and then, “Hey, ho, I’m going to your mother’s house and I’m going to get some pie and sausage pizza and if I don’t like the way the pie tastes or the sausage pizza I’m going to smash her teeth in,” and then, “Hey, ho, Silverado!”

WTF 2 @ suck my balls the unconscious dot com

I see a procession of beautiful cars: Porsche, Lexus, Mitsubishi, Honda (a nice Honda), Fiat, Mercedes, Lamborghini. They are shiny and new. There is no one but me. I am in a parking garage. The lights are low. I hear the sound of a child crying. I hear the cracking of crystal. I don’t understand this. It is vague and now I am flying over Turkey, and the ruins are spectacular, and my penis is a small, red lizard.

Gay Vacation

An old friend from high school is visiting me. My basement room to my house goes on and on. It turns corners, opens into new rooms, some with water damage, others just cluttered messes with the floor covered with clothes, Barbie dolls, strips of cardboard, insulation, broken bits of pottery. He and I are running through the house, carrying a mattress. We set it down on the floor next to a pile of rags with a smell like oven cleaner. I pull off his pants. – We’ve got to be quiet, I laugh. I stroke his penis. – Blow me, I say. – You’re a maniac, he laughs. – Yes, I say, pushing his face down and feeling a warm, cool, a warm, cool, something like bliss. I’m on a gay vacation: this is normal; this is normal. I’m fucking his face and the fumes are rising that will burn our lungs.

Roger's Dream (???)

Roger joined Alcoholics Anonymous. I ask him why, since he doesn’t drink. He tells me that he’s met a nice girl there, she’s a bit older and they have “juicy sex,” a formulation which makes me uncomfortable. (A hard thing to feel: ill in a dream.) – Do you ever dream? Roger then asks me. – What has that go to do with anything? – I dream, I dream, he says wistfully. I dreamed the other day that it would be nice to be a woman during an act of copulation. He is cut short by the arrival of a woman. She’s 55, with silvery hair, and smells faintly of oven cleaner. (A rare thing in a dream: to smell something.) – Get out! Get out! Roger shouts. I jump out of his Silverado truck. She smiles, then bows at me like we have just battled to the death and she has won, then gets into the front seat and the car drives away.