Saturday, August 15, 2009

Welcome to My Blog

The title of this blog was inspired by a passage in law professor Joseph Vining's weird and wonderful book "From Newton's Sleep" in which he offers a series of "amplifications" or what I will call riffs on the law and how it "reaches deeply into the way we know ourselves and other persons." As a reminder to the reader, an epiphenomenon is, among other things, a "mental state regarded as a byproduct of brain activity."

The passage is IV.8, in which Vining has an epiphenomenalist say, "Mind is nothing but the glitter on the water." Then, criticizing this as "an image of smallness and insignificance," he says that, "[i]f the word [glitter] could speak, it would speak of jewels, Christmas trees, the lights at parties, winking lights, smiling lights. In that one word is a radiance at war with sadness."

I want this blog to be a radiance at war with the sadness that so often arises in the mundane life of a creative lawyer confined by the strictures of a traditional legal job. I am seeking to create the glitter on the surface of my otherwise stifling workaday existence as a lawyer. This blog will be a chronicle of that journey. Think of it then as the epiphenomena of the mind of Lloyd.

I realize that may be excessively cryptic but it will have to do for the moment.