A Very Bloggy February

As it happened, this February was a heavy-blog month for me -- the second-heaviest ever, beaten only by September, 2008. And I like what I've been posting better than those older posts, too.* I don't know why this has been -- I've been busy as hell, and actually working fairly focusedly, so it's not primarily procrastination (although that's some of it, obviously). Of course a lot of them have been just quotes -- but not all, and some have been quotes with so much commentary as to approach bona fide blog posts. Some of them have been inspired by my work (that's a new tag, for the class I'm currently teaching; and I've only put it on the most directly related ones).

But mostly, I dunno.

I doubt it will keep up. But as I predicted early on, this blog has an ebb-and-flow pattern, and this particular month was high tide.

So I thought I'd organize the more substantial ones by categories, so you can look through and catch any you might have missed.

Posts on Pragmatism:

• Characterizing Pragmatism
• The Fifth Beatle of Pragmatism

These were directly from my class. ("Pragmatism" by the way, is the philosophical movement, not the political tendency.) The first of them is my personal favorite of the posts this month.

Literary Curiosities and Links:

• 11/02/2011; or, Two Translations of Two Paragraphs of Le Grand Palindrome de Georges Perec
• "I judged vast encyclopedias and books of natural history by the splendor of their tigers."
• The Marvelous Mirthful Madness of Stephen Harry Keeler
• An Ode to My Hometown...'s Namesake

There are all, in a sense, just quotes, but they're fun quotes, assembled from multiple & often obscure sources, so I think they add some value.

Things That From a Long Way Off Look Like Flies:

• Descartes's Robot; plus: Thomas Aquinas vs. Robot -- to the death!!! (Mostly quotes, but including some very fun & peculiar rumors about some fascinating people)
• My Head May Explode From the Sheer Awesomeness of This (That John Lewis is writing a graphic novel; why I think it's unlikely to be good; why I don't care and will buy it anyway)
• Stray Thoughts on William Graham Sumner's What Social Classes Owe Each Other (A review of a now-obscure 128-year-old book; another post arising from my class on intellectual history)
• Yoram Hoazony, Israel and the Conflict of Paradigms (A political post, but in an overly-intellectualized, name-dropping sort of way)
• Using Dr. Seuss to Illustrate Points in Historical Texts (still another from teaching, this time from the survey class I'm doing)

Finally, I also reposted an old post I've always liked (Is This Man Worth Two Presidents?), now that I've figure out how to include title text, making the footnotes visible if you just hover your mouse over them; it's about presidential coinage, and the 22nd and 24th presidents of the United States.

...and, amazingly (at least to me) that's less than half of the posts I put up (not even counting this one). The others are simpler, mostly quotes and the like, but I still think they're all fun (maybe a few years from now they'll look less interesting, but at the moment I think they hold up). So go ahead: scroll through the archives, and have a look.

See you in March!

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* Nothing wrong with them, really; they're just mostly real-time reactions to the financial meltdown and the McCain-Obama campaign, which are less interesting in retrospect. There are some that I posted from that month that I still like, though; here are a few:

• Some Religious Ideas Are Subject to Scientific Investigation
• What We Have to Fear
• Stephen Frug Muses Upon Illeism

...and "Button Wearers for Obama", which is political, but mostly about the surface kitsch of campaigning, and thus more fun 2+ years down the pike. But if you're curious about my most bloggy month ever, I'd suggest checking out those rather than scrolling randomly through the archive.