[MariaBeautys]

Day of Intellectual is celebrated April 21st, between two totalitarian holidays

April 20th - Hitler's birthday
April 21st - Day of Intellectual (Day of Alternative Consciousness)
April 22nd - Lenin's birthday

The motto of the holiday is Practice random geniality!

The holiday is celebrated by having
- interdisciplinary discussions
- collective improvisations
- brainstorming
- word and thought creation
- alternative types of activity in all cultural areas

The day is celebrated since 1998. It was suggested by Mikhail Epstein (Wikipedia article)

The day is an occasion to discuss such topics as
- Intellect and public mentality
- Intellectual as a bearer of universal consciousness
- Emergence and fate of intellectual communities
- Intellectuals: masters of the universe or service staff?

Some links (in Russian)
http://2004.novayagazeta.ru/nomer/20...n27n-s36.shtml
http://exlibris.ng.ru/fakty/2004-08-05/2_holiday.html

[tigoCeree]

Then i guess everyday is Day of Intellectual for me

[DenisLevvin]

What to do? April 21 is also:


ASTRONOMY DAY
http://www.123greetings.com/events/astronomy_day/




HOTDOG DAY
http://www.123greetings.com/events/hot_dog_day_april/




COW CHIP DAY
http://www.123greetings.com/events/cow_chip_day/

[Hoijdxvh]

Day of Intellectual is celebrated April 21st, between two totalitarian holidays

April 20th - Hitler's birthday
April 21st - Day of Intellectual (Day of Alternative Consciousness)
April 22nd - Lenin's birthday

( Lenin + Hitler ) / 2 = Intellect?

[Zjohkrbi]

Lenin + Hitler
------------- = Intellect?

You're looking too deeply, Weberr; April 21st is Mikhail Epstein's birthday! When all is said and pondered, Epstein is as vain as any other human being:

From http://old.russ.ru/antolog/intelnet/..._Intelnet.html :

Mikhail Epstein. WHO I AM AND WHY I DECIDED TO START INTELNET

I was born in Moscow, in the very middle of the twentieth century, in 1950. My birthday, April 21, falls one day after Hitler's and one day before Lenin's. Thus I always felt compelled to follow the "happy" medium between two ominous extremes. . .

[Aniplinipsync]

Rapunzel
It's look like you well know Epstein's work and very like him.

[freddyujnf]

I think I would appreciate him more if I could read Russian. His works must be very difficult to translate. (That is, translate well.)

[lymnCymment]

Sorry, I'm not good translator... as you can see.
But I can try to explain difficult moments what you will have, when translate.

[nobodyhere]

I think I would appreciate him more if I could read Russian. His works must be very difficult to translate. (That is, translate well.)

Great post ........... "intelnet" That word has a nice ring to it.


Excerpt - http://old.russ.ru/antolog/intelnet/Index.html

"From this comes my fascination with the possibilities of transcultural and interdisciplinary communication opened by cyberspace. Now, retroactively, I can interpret our attempts at collective improvisations in the Club of Essayists (Moscow, 1982-1987) as a search for cyberspace within the more traditional space of a room and a roundtable. We grappled with the theoretical problems and practical implementation of collective thinking, interdisciplinary research and other euristic models. Our members represented both academic and non-academic professions.

Thus the idea of the Intelnet, of an interdisciplinary community of creative minds, though in essence as old as the world, or at least as Plato's Academia, comes from my experience in the Moscow intellectual milieu of the 1980s. I shared this experience of what we called "co-thinking" (Russian somyslie ) with such wonderful friends and colleagues as Olga Vainshtein (philologist, literary scholar), Vladimir Aristov (mathematician and poet), Boris Tseitlin (physicist and literary critic), Lyudmila Polshakova (philologist), Maria Umnova (philologist), Iosif Bakshtein (sociologist, art critic), Ilya Kabakov (artist, essayist), Ludmila Morgulis (mathematician), Vitaly Kovalev (philosopher), Igor Iakovenko (cultural scholar), Sergei Bushelev (chemist), Aleksei Mikheev (linguist) and others. Almost all of them still live in Moscow."

[MYMcvBgl]

As Infoshare pointed out, Mikhail Epstein wrote:
. . . I shared this experience of what we called "co-thinking" (Russian somyslie ) with such wonderful friends and colleagues as I think that "co-thinking" is the key to the intellectual activity that Epstein extolls, but I do not understand precisely what "co-thinking" means. This is because when I do an online search of "co-thinking", each source has a different definition.

When I look up the Russian word "somyslie" in an online search, all of the definitions (have so far) come out in Russian language. When I use online Russian-English dictionaries, I (so far have) come up with a message like "no translation found."
__________________

I found what might be an indirect definition of the "co-thinking" to which Epstein is refering. He and others wrote an English article entitled, "Why the University is Not a Strip Mall of Knowledge: An manifesto for humanistic education." Here is a passage I plucked out:

. . . Education is an improvisational activity, a social event of co-thinking, where each participant is as unknown to others as he is unpredictable to himself. The sharing and reproducing of knowledge is only a preparatory step to the event of co-thinking.

I would suggest that knowledge relates to thinking as mass relates to energy. Education is not just the transference of the mass of knowledge from one head to another or to many heads. It is the process of unloosing, of splitting this mass in order to produce the energy of new associations, linkages, configurations... Source:http://www.emory.edu/ACAD_EXCHANGE/2...ar/epstein.htm

This ^^^ is only an educated guess on my part. That is why I am asking members who can translate Russian the following:

Is there any source (in English!) that describes exactly what Mikhail Epstein's "somyslie" entails? Thank you in advance.

[SarkisPioute]

You leave me no choice but to spend today sitting on cow chips and eating hot dogs while reading horoscopes with my buddies.

[mincbiori]

You leave me no choice but to spend today sitting on cow chips and eating hot dogs while reading horoscopes with my buddies.

I am glad you posted links about M.Epstein, i enjoyed reading the material. This is a good topic for a meet-up, but perhaps too esoteric for an on-line discussion: for me anyway.

Thanks again for the news/links about M.Epstein and the "intelnet".