Lena

I’m a huge Roderick fan who’s gotten a lot of mileage out of his 3 courses over the years. The more I learn about philosophy, the more they disclose hidden gems to me every time I go back an listen. If you haven’t heard of it before thepartiallyexaminedlife.com is an awesome philosophy podcast that’s completely free and discusses a lot of the same philosophers the Roderick lectures on in a conversational mode that’s both informative and entertaining. You can join the “Not School” discussion/study portion of their site for just five bucks, where I’m trying to organize a Rick Roderick discussion group to go through this course over the next couple months. I’m not affiliated with them other than being a participant in the discussion groups but I’d recommend checking it out. I’d love it if we could get a few more folks interested in the continental stuff aboard.

So succinct and so in line with what I feel to be right. Fascinating. Totally fascinating. I’m not very scholarly and I struggle with some of the concepts but Mr. Roderick is so interesting that I cold listen to him all day. And I am doing so. Thank you thank you for this amazing website.

Matt

-Ben

Dear Chris and friends,

I wanted to provide an update about my first trip to Texas in the making of the documentary about Rick Roderick. I stayed for 7 days, traveling from Dallas to Tuscola (Rick’s home town), then on to Austin. I traveled alone, bundling a small HD camera and tripod into a very small car with wheels that seemed toy-like.

In Tuscola, a town of 700 in west Texas just south of Abilene, I met with several friends of Rick from his childhood. I’m sure you can imagine the stories of this young, precocious, insecure and a bit tortured kid who eventually fought his way out of a town that he considered with both fondness and dread. Besides the interviews, I filmed a lot of “B-roll”, the parks where Rick played baseball, the weekend hangouts, his playgrounds and hunting grounds, and the bridge where in his junior year he had a tragic car wreck that killed a young friend. I visited his home, what used to be a two room shack that is now a three room Taxidermy shop on the main street.

I also spent some time on the campus of Hardon-Simmons, the Baptist college in Abilene that Rick attended for one year after high school. As you might imagine, in 1967 any Baptist college and Rick Roderick were never going to get along. He was thrown out after one year for publishing an underground newsletter criticizing, among other things, the college opposition to inter-racial dating. It’s a great story, and I was able to track down two of the students Rick went to bat for while rustling administration feathers.

My “script” for the trip was an autobiography that Rick had written during the final year of his life, a period covering his early childhood to his being thrown out of Hardon-Simmons. It’s a stunning and eloquent piece of writing, honest and tender at its core, with an authorial voice that you have heard in his lectures. I do hope the family decides to publish it one day, or that it ends up as a movie of some sort. It’s that good, and I will use selections in the documentary, since it’s the closest I can come to letting Rick tell his own story of how a philosopher is made through conflict with the world around him and the struggle inside.

I drove from Tuscola to Austin after spending three or four days wandering around Rick’s home town. Needless to say, the change in both geological and ideological scenery from the former town to the latter was dramatic. As I drove the five hours to Austin, I did as I always do when in the South, and turned on religious radio. Having driven across the country about 8 times in my life, I always enjoyed making my own way along back roads when going the southern route, creating my specially designed tours as I went. Religious radio always teaches me something I don’t know, and the Tuscola to Austin trip was no different. Since I haven’t tuned in for a few years, before Obama was in office, I found the temperament of these stations, and the people who phone into them, almost apocalyptic. It’s obvious that there are many people across the U.S. that truly believe their country is now in Satan’s hands, or is soon to be. The rhetoric is wild, angry, fearful, with a twisted sense that if Obama wins again the world as they have known it pre-Obama is forever lost and gone.

Of added interest to this scene is that Rick, as reported in his autobiography, also loved to listen to evangelical preachers, and studied their oratory, how they won an audience over with well-spun homilies and crafty rhetoric that inevitably broke the world into its Manichean parts.

Austin, of course, is a den of liberal iniquity surrounded, today at least, by what seems like a howling lynch mob, where Sean Hannity and Oliver North are hold key leadership positions. I had the opportunity to interview most of the family, and several friends who knew Rick from his first Austin days until his death there in 2002. I came home with about twelve hours of footage. Just a start, really. I’ll have to return to Texas, travel to North Carolina and Chicago (home of one of Rick’s friends at Hardon-Simmons who I tracked down through the autobiography), and on to a few other places.

But first I’ll set up a Kickstarter site to raise money to finish. We’ll see how that goes. A big, but I hope not insurmountable problem, is that the Teaching Company refuses to license footage from their lectures. I don’t have a clear idea about the reasons for this policy. I’ll have to figure out a way to use “Fair Use” law to incorporate Rick’s lectures into the film. If any of you are fair use lawyers, or know of one, do let me know.

Thanks much for tuning in. The journey to finish this project will be long, but a real treat for me as I try to figure out the story of this fascinating and contradictory man.

All best,
kerry candaele
venice, ca
310 430 1954
kcandaele@gmail.com

i am a professor now and i have tried my best to emulate Rick’s lecture approach (i have a long way to go, he was BRILLIANT)

RIP rick and best of luck with your project Kerry