My Head May Explode From the Sheer Awesomeness of This

John Lewis -- former head of SNCC, participant in the Freedom Rides, and, for the past twenty-five years, a member of Congress (from Georgia) -- is one of the few people I can think of in American life that I would unhesitatingly and unabashedly label a hero.

For those of you who don't know, he was at the center of the Civil Rights Movement in its key years in the early 1960's -- a participant at the lunch counter sit-ins in the early 60's, a freedom rider, head of SNCC, a speaker at the 1963 March on Washington where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech (and where Lewis's speech was deemed to radical for the other organizers and speakers and he -- reluctantly, when asked by A. Philip Randolph -- revised it (you can read the original draft here)), and the lead walker at the climactic confrontation of the Movement, the walk over Pettus Bridge, which directly led to the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. A man of matchless wisdom and courage, my admiration for him is really hard to express.

And he's writing a comic book.

No, really: he just signed a contract with Top Shelf to (co) write a graphic novel based on his experiences in the Civil Rights Movement, tentatively titled March.

Can I pre-order it yet?

Now, I will admit that my confidence that it will be good is very low. Lewis is a fine writer of prose, but writing prose is a very different task than writing comics -- and most writers of prose who try to make the transition do a poor job of it. Writing a comics script is as different from writing prose as writing a play or a film script is: it requires a real understanding of the medium. If you just think that you've written books, you can write a graphic novel, well, you're wrong. It's not just like writing a book with pictures.*

Nor am I encouraged by the fact that Lewis's co-author, Andrew Aydin, is a member of his staff -- that is, someone who is primarily engaged in politics. Presumably Lewis can tell his own story, after all; what he needs for this project is someone who can help him tell it in the medium of comics.

Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Lewis is a long-time comics reader. Or maybe he's thought about the nature of the medium. But, y'know, he's been busy doing other things -- like, say, being a brilliant activist and politician. So I'm worried that he isn't and hasn't. I'm somewhat more hopeful that Aydin might be knowledgeable about comics; maybe he'll bring a good handle on the medium to the table. But, I fear, that he's been hired much as a politician might hire someone to co-write their prose memoirs, i.e. someone to help with the work, but without any particular sense of the medium.

To make this work, they'll need a really good -- and confident and self-assertive -- artist. And Chris Staros, the editor & publisher of Top Shelf, had better be on his game.

(Incidentally, they are, apparently, still in the process of settling on an artist. If you're a comics artist, I recommend dropping everything and seeing if you can nab it. It'll be the job of a lifetime.)

And even if it doesn't work, y'know what? I'm there. I'm reading it. Because even if it isn't a fabulous artistic production, I'm sure it will be very interesting, and have some insights into a key period of history.

And besides, John Lewis -- John !!@#$%ing Lewis -- is writing a !@#$% graphic novel. It's had to get more awesome than that. In this matter, quality is would be just a bonus.

___________________________
* Actually, I suspect that, done properly, writing a book with pictures isn't just like writing a book without them, either. But it's closer.

Descartes's Robot; plus: Thomas Aquinas vs. Robot -- to the death!!!

The early prehistory of robots -- and inflatable sex dolls! From Stephen Graukroger, Descartes: an Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995), p. 1:

Since the eighteenth century, there has been in circulation a curious story about Descartes. It is said that in later life he was always accompanied in his travels by a mechanical life-sized female doll which, we are told by one source, he himself had constructed 'to show that animals are only machines and have no souls'. He had named the doll after his illegitimate daughter, Francine, and some versions of events have it that she was so lifelike that the two were indistinguishable. Descartes and the doll were evidently inseparable, and he is said to have slept with her encased in a trunk at his side. Once, during a crossing over the Holland Sea some time in the early 1640s, while Descartes was sleeping, the captain of the ship, suspicious about the contents of the trunk, stole into the cabin and opened it. To his horror, he discovered the mechanical monstrosity, dragged her from the trunk and across the decks, and finally managed to throw her into the water. We are not told whether she put up a struggle.

Those who prefer that their great tales not be ruined by truth will want to stop there. Those who think that fiction survives a dusting of dull fact will want to read the next paragraph as well (pp. 1-2):

The story had a wide currency in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at one stage being taken as a theme for a novel by Anatole France. It exists in a number of versions, some of them explicitly fictional, some purporting to be factual, and the detail varies quite considerably from version to version. So far as I can tell, the story originates no early than the eighteenth century, and it received most attention in an era preoccupied with the theories of La Mettrie, the French Enlightenment philosophe who, in his infamous L'Homme Machine (1747), had extended the idea of animals being automata -- developed by Descartes in his L'Homme -- to human beings, offering a materialist account of the mind, and suggesting that Descartes himself had held such a view, but that judicious self-censorship had prevented him making the theory public. There is, in fact, absolutely no evidence that any version of the story is true. Its origins are rather obscure, but by the second half of the eighteenth century it was a propaganda weapon in the fight against La Mettrie's materialism, Descartes himself being seen as the ultimate instigator of this pernicious doctrine. Given this context, the story has all the elements of propaganda, including that favorite propaganda weapon, sexual innuendo, and I have little doubt that it originated as a tool of the eighteenth-century struggle against materialism.

And those with the spirit of a Sub-Sub Librarian, such as myself, will want to read the first footnote, so for your convenience I reproduce it here (from p. 418 of Graukroger):

I first came across this story in print in a recent book on the history of robotics, where it is presented as fact, although no references are given. Investigation showed the story to have had a wide currency between the late eighteenth century and the early decades of this century. For the different versions of the story and their sources see Leonora G. Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man Machine, rev. edn. (New York, 1968), 202-3, and the accompanying notes on p. 236. Descartes is not the first philosopher reputed to have constructed a mechanical companion. Albertus Magnus was said to have had a robot that could move and greet visitors with the salutation Salve! ('How are you!'). Thomas Aquinas, his pupil at the time, is reported to have attacked and broken the gregarious android when he came across it unexpectedly in the night. The story is reported, with references I have not followed up, in G. A. Lindeboom, Descartes and medicine (Amsterdam, 1979), 62.

How like a scholar to hide the Aquinas vs. Robot death match in a footnote like that. It should go in the preview, man: how else do you expect to get buts in the seats eating popcorn?

I'm disappointed that the footnote doesn't mention which of Anatole France's novels is on "the theme" of Descartes's robot (a quick googling indicates that none of his works seem to have been explicitly about Descartes by name). Does anyone happen to know?  [Update: A commentator comes through!  The novel in question is La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque (1893), translated as At the Sign of the Reine Pedauque (1922, available online at the link).  Thanks to B. McCarthy; see his comments below for more on this, as well as the Rosenfield book discussed below.]

Incidentally (more Sub-Subness here) the author of From Beast-Machine to Man Machine seems to have been Leonora C. Rosenfield, not G. as reported by Mr. Graukroger. A quick google indicates that seems to have published as Leonora Cohen Rosenfield (although Amazon, for no discernable reason, lists her as Leonora Davidson Rosenfield). Obviously, given the Cohen -> G. mistake, to say nothing of the obvious omission of the story of the golem from the aforequoted list of "philosophical robot" stories, the only possible interpretation is that Mr. Graukroger is a raving antisemite. These things don't happen by accident, you know.

At any rate, since neither google books nor amazon has a "look inside" feature for Rosenfield's work, my researches must stop here for the moment. Alas. If anyone has a copy of From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine handy, however, please leave any interesting tidbits in the comments.

I Wish I Wasn't Too Cynical To Believe This

Nothing new, no time-saving devices, -- simply old time-glorified methods of delving for Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the good of living. The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is to-day laid before the freedmen's sons by Atlanta University. And this course of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will ever have one goal, -- not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.

-- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter 5

Same As It Ever Was

I'm interrupted every moment by students come to fight about their marks.

-- William James
(Quoted in Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought, p. 35)

The Onion Continues to Live Up To Its Tag Line, "America's Finest News Source"

The newspaper that brought you the single story that told you everything you really needed to know about the Bush administration before it happened now brings you the essential political story of the current moment. The headline and the first paragraph:

Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed For Earth

In a strong rebuke of President Obama and his domestic agenda, all 242 House Republicans voted Wednesday to repeal the Asteroid Destruction and American Preservation Act, which was signed into law last year to destroy the immense asteroid currently hurtling toward Earth.

I found the story via Ezra Klein (in turn via Gerry), but Ezra leaves out some of the best bits of humor, which are in some of the details. It has the miserable cowardice and smallness of the Democrats pegged, for instance:

In support of their position, Democrats have pointed to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that show repealing the law could result in a loss of up to $14 trillion in the nation's GDP.

[...]

"...While I recognize that intelligent minds may disagree on this issue, I believe we have an obligation to prevent our citizens from having their flesh seared off in a global firestorm that transforms our planet into a broiling molten wasteland," Obama added.

They've also got the news media pegged too:

"If efforts to destroy the asteroid are successfully overturned, then there will be major ramifications for both Obama and his Republican opposition, as well as the American populace at large," political scientist Alan Abramowitz said on Face The Nation Sunday. "This could have a huge impact come 2012."

Oh, and in case anyone thinks this is satire: I guess technically it is, but only slightly. Really it's just euphemism. To decode it, just read "environmental destruction due to global warming" for "immense asteroid". Then it stops being funny -- but doesn't, alas, stop being true.

Some People Are Really Just Overly Talented

Headline in the NY Times earlier this week: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated. (via) Some details:

Nabokov spent much of the 1940s dissecting a confusing group of species called Polyommatus blues. He developed forward-thinking ways to classify the butterflies based on differences in their genitalia. He argued that what were thought to be closely related species were actually only distantly related. At the end of a 1945 paper on the group, he mused on how they had evolved. He speculated that they originated in Asia, moved over the Bering Strait, and moved south all the way to Chile [...]

Dr. [Naomi] Pierce, who became a Harvard biology professor and curator of lepidoptera in 1990, began looking closely at Nabokov’s work while preparing an exhibit to celebrate his 100th birthday in 1999. She was captivated by his idea of butterflies coming from Asia. “It was an amazing, bold hypothesis,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, we could test this.’" [...]

Dr. Pierce and her colleagues concluded that five waves of butterflies came from Asia to the New World — just as Nabokov had speculated. “By God, he got every one right,” Dr. Pierce said. “I couldn’t get over it — I was blown away.”

-- Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, January 25, 2011

This is just breathtakingly cool. Now, I've loved his fiction for years (I first read Pnin in high school, then took a course called "Nabokov" back in college), so I'm wildly biased. Still... breathtakingly cool.

Someone needs to update this book.

Publish and Perish, or, The Strange Customs of Foreign Peoples

Oxford had a long tradition of not publishing during one's lifetime, indeed it was regarded as slightly vulgar to publish. People who did publish a lot, like A. J. Ayer, were regarded as remiss for having published too much too soon. As far as having a career and making a reputation were concerned, the attitude in Oxford was that the only opinions that really matter are the opinions of people in Oxford, and perhaps a few in Cambridge and London, and they will know about one's work anyway. One does not need to publish. What one does not want is a lot of graduate students somewhere, picking over one's half-backed publish texts and -- horror of horrors -- finding mistakes.

- John Searle, "J. L. Austin", in A Companion to Analytic Philosophy, ed. Aloysius Martinich & Dzvid Sosa (Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), p. 227

William James Contra the Ph.D. Degree

...is not our growing tendency to appoint no instructors who are not also doctors [i.e. holders of a Ph.D.] an instance of pure sham? Will any one pretend for a moment that the doctor's degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be successful as a teacher? Notoriously his moral, social, and personal characteristics may utterly disqualify him for success in the class-room; and of these characteristics his doctor's examination is unable to take any account whatever. Certain bare human beings will always be better candidates for a given place than all the doctor-applicants on hand; and to exclude the former by a rigid rule, and in the end to have to sift the latter by private inquiry into their personal peculiarities among those who know them, just as if they were not doctors at all, is to stultify one's own procedure..... The truth is that the Doctor-Monopoly in teaching, which is becoming so rooted an American custom, can show no serious grounds whatsoever for itself in reason. As it actually prevails and grows in vogue among us, it is due to childish motives exclusively. In reality it is but a sham, a bauble, a dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges.

-- William James, "The Ph.D. Octopus" (1903)

...not really against the Ph.D. entirely, but against their monopoly in teaching and the general importance placed on them.

Two Languagehat Links, One Temporary

Two links, both via the blog Languagehat:

1) Through February 5, the OED online is having a free trial; log in using "trynewoed" as both the name & the password. (Hint: it's three three-letter words written with no spaces.)

2) A blog called Quote Investigator which specializes in tracking down the provenance of obscure, multiply-attributed or otherwise troublesome quotes -- a practice that I've occasionally engaged in myself, but it's fun to see someone focus on it.

Exchanges You Don't Expect To See In Interviews With Distinguished Elderly Philosophers

The late Dr. Marjorie Grene -- a distinguished (if fairly obscure to non-philosophers) American philosopher, one of the (if not the) founders of the sub-field of the philosophy of biology, the first woman to be featured in the Library of Living Philosophers (which had previously featured notables such as John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, Sartre and Quine) -- in an interview with Believer magazine:

Believer: You know, I forgot to ask about philosopher of science Imre Lakatos—
Grene: I didn’t kill him!!

...I kinda couldn't get over that one. Shades of Kinbote (so to speak).

The entire interview is kind of a hoot, although nothing is quite up to that. Still, a few more of my favorite tidbits. The magazine on what it took to get an interview with her:

After convincing her that the Believer was not religiously affiliated—which required three verbal assurances, two hyperlinks, and finally a hard copy of the Ice Cube issue—we met in her office...

And then, three bits of a series in which the interviewer starts asking about her opinion of various philosophical and scientific writers (a series in which the Lakatos question occurred). First, Michael Ruse:

Believer: Before we started, you said something about Michael Ruse. What’s wrong with him?
Grene:: What’s wrong with him? He’s totally uninteresting.

And on Richard Rorty:

Believer: ...about Richard Rorty. You’re friends with him, though you don’t agree with his philosophy?
Grene:: We are friends, but you can’t agree with his philosophy. It doesn’t exist! He’s a wit! He should’ve lived in the eighteenth century. He just makes clever remarks that don’t mean anything.

And on Darwin:

Believer: Do you like Darwin?
Grene:: Like him? What a stupid question. How can anybody say that? How can anybody not like him? What do you mean?

...the bit about the 'stupid question' was hardly the only such comment, and made me feel a bit sorry for the interviewer.

Anyway, it's all sort of fun, although I must admit you don't get much sense of her actual, y'know, philosophy (although you do get a sense of what she wrote about, at least).

Oh, and Lakatos? Here's the complete exchange:

Believer: You know, I forgot to ask about philosopher of science Imre Lakatos—
Grene: I didn’t kill him!!
Believer: Why does everyone say you had a part in it?
Grene: Because once he helped me out of a taxi in London and he hit his head on the door. And I didn’t kill him! He died soon, and I don’t know if it was the head bump. But it wasn’t because of me! [Laughing heartily]
Believer: OK, we won’t get into that.

...for which you can hardly blame the poor interviewer, I think.

Arizona Massacre Quotes and Links

This post by Conor Friedersdorf (via) is fabulous, and I hope he'll forgive me if I quote the lion's share of it:

...I’d argue that tone is overemphasized in these conversations about political discourse, while substance is mostly ignored.

What if we took the opposite approach? I don’t think that Sarah Palin bears any responsibility for the shooting in Arizona, or that her rhetoric is the most egregious you’ll find on the right. I don’t have any problem with her poster putting various Congressional districts in cross-hairs. It’s a commonly used visual metaphor, for better or worse, and the substance being communicated is basically that the GOP wants to take back or “target” certain seats. The “tone” is arguably extreme, but what’s being said, the ultimate message, is perfectly acceptable: beat these people at the polls.

In contrast, Palin’s remarks about death panels communicated an untruth: the notion that Barack Obama’s health care reform effort sought to empower a panel of bureaucrats who’d sit in judgment about whether an old person’s life would be saved or not. That is the sort of thing we ought to find objectionable, even if the substance is communicated in the most dry language imaginable, because were it true, radicalism would be an appropriate response. “They’re going to start killing old people? We’ve got to stop this!”

[...]

Since Barack Obama took office, prominent voices on the right have called him an ally of Islamist radicals in their Grand Jihad against America, a radical Kenyan anti-colonialist, a man who pals around with terrorists and used a financial crisis to deliberately weaken America, an usurper who was born abroad and isn’t even eligible to be president, a guy who has somehow made it so that it’s okay for black kids to beat up white kids on buses, etc. I haven’t even touched on the conspiracy theories of Glenn Beck. The birthers excepted, the people making these chargers are celebrated by movement conservatives – they’re given book deals, awards, and speaking engagements.

If all of these charges were true, a radicalized citizenry would be an appropriate response. But even the conservatives who defend Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, D’Souza, McCarthy, and so many others don’t behave as if they believe all the nonsense they assert. The strongest case against these people isn’t that their rhetoric inspires political violence. It’s that they frequently utter indefensible nonsense. The problem isn’t their tone. It’s that the substance of what they’re saying is so blinkered that it isn’t even taken seriously by their ideological allies (even if they’re too cowardly, mercenary or team driven to admit as much).

They’re in a tough spot these days partly because it’s impossible for them to mount the defense of their rhetoric that is true: “I am a frivolous person, and I don’t choose my words based on their meaning. Rather, I behave like the worst caricature of a politician. If you think my rhetoric logically implies that people should behave violently, you’re mistaken – neither my audience nor my peers in the conservative movement are engaged in a logical enterprise, and it’s unfair of you to imply that people take what I say so seriously that I can be blamed for a real world event. Don’t you see that this is all a big game? This is how politics works. Stop pretending you’re not in on the joke.”

Yow. In fairness, I should note that (I believe) Conor is a conservative (just a sane one), so I suspect he'd draw different conclusions from this than I. But sticking to just what he said: word.

But ultimately, I think that in Conor's post is the reason that Ezra Klein's thoughtful self-reflection about his own rhetoric is unwarranted: the substance matters, and not just the rhetoric. Still, while I think he errs (fundamentally) in applying the thought to his own rhetoric, this point is still well expressed:

Many of us have known people who, after watching a loved one die of an awful disease, have begun taking better care of their own health. It's not that they were at risk of whatever killed their relative. But the awful experience focused attention on how they were living their own life. That's how I view the situation we're now in. Did the talk of "Second Amendment remedies" and "armed and dangerous" resistance lead anyone to pick up a gun and start shooting? It didn't. But seeing what an unbalanced person might do if convinced of the need for a violent remedy has been sobering.

Other things I read on the massacre that said things that struck me:

* James Fallows on political assassinations

* Mark Kleiman on the role the end of a gun-control provision played in the scale of the horrors in Arizona. (In the NYT, Gail Collins made a similar point.)

* Digby on where the line between just heated rhetoric and beyond-the-pale extremism should be drawn.

* Steve Benen on the fact that a Republican Senator felt a need to hide behind anonymity when making an anodyne point about some right-wing rhetoric going too far.

Poem of the Day: Donald Justice's "Men at Forty"

Men At Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

-- Donald Justice

I turn forty in March, a fact that has not escaped my attention over the past... well, year really. So this poem has recurred to me recently. I learned about from Hugo Schwyzer, who quotes it frequently,

Syllabus for The History of American Thought Since 1865, Spring 2011

Starting a week and a half from now, I'm teaching (for the first time) an upper-level course on U.S. intellectual history, entitled The History of American Thought Since 1865. (That is, it's the first time I've taught it; it has been offered for many years by a senior member of the HWS history department who also teaches -- most recently this past fall -- the companion course, The History of American Thought To 1865. (I should say that it's his course title; I'd prefer one with "intellectual history" rather than "American thought" as the key term -- perhaps since the latter can be read to imply a unity that I don't think exists, but possibly just because it sounds old fashioned.) I thought I'd tell you about it.

First I should say that this is not, in fact, the complete syllabus for the course -- I don't see any particular reason that anyone save my students would be interested in my grading policies or my office hours. But since I've been interested when other academic bloggers have posted their syllabi, and since, in putting together this course, I benefited from looking at the online syllabi of instructors at other institutions who were generous enough to share them with the world, I thought I would pay it forward and give the interesting parts of the syllabus, namely, the required readings and some indications of the nature of the assignments.

One thing I'd note is that there is (I believe) a wider range in what is taught as the basic material for U. S. Intellectual History than for any other sub-field of history -- not only in books taught, but in subjects covered. Its comparable, I think, to courses like "Introduction to Philosophy" or "The U.S. Novel Since 1945", where you wouldn't be surprised to see entirely nonintersecting topic lists appear on multiple syllabi: there's simply too many different ways to approach the material. Thus, despite my filling the shoes of a senior (and, IMHO, quite fabulous) scholar, I am teaching the course quite differently than he does -- and, indeed, quite differently than did any of those whose syllabi I've seen, online or elsewhere. Perhaps doing so is cheeky, but I think that even those of us who are but Sub-Sub Academics (as Melville might have put it) have to approach a topic as we ourselves see it -- something which is shaped by, but not copied from, our elders & betters. At any rate, you should know that this is my particular take on this material; if you look at any other online syllabi, you'll see very different ones.

So. The term has fourteen weeks of classes (not counting the week of spring break that interrupts it). It starts and ends mid-week, so there are thirteen full weeks, plus two partial bookends. I will be assigning a book (or significant chunk of one) every week -- an unusually heavy load in this time, I'll admit. We'll have one discussion a week, on the readings; the other two weekly classes will be devoted to lecture, when I will attempt to put into context what we do read, and to talk a little about the thousands of equally important books that didn't make my list of 13.

Here are the thirteen reading assignments:

1. William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe Each Other (1883)
2. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
3. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907) and "The Will to Believe" (1896)
4. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916) (select chapters only)
5. Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Women and Economics (1898)
6. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922)
7. T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land" (1922), plus a few critical articles on it
8. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952)
9. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, (1953) (select chapters only)
10. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
11. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
12. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, (1989) (select chapters only)
13. Noam Chomsky, Language and Problems of Knowledge: the Managua Lectures (1987)
    

Where available (#1-8), I have linked to complete online texts; otherwise the links go to Google Books (if they offer a preview) or elsewhere (if not).

Precisely which chapters of the Dewey, the Kirk and the Rorty will be assigned is something I'm still mulling over. (I might even assign all of the Rorty -- it's hard, but it's not that long.) From the Kirk I'll assign the American chapters (he does the U.S. and Britain) -- but I might cut down on those further. Dewey I just need to cut down for length -- but I'm not sure how I'm going to do it yet. (That's one of the things I need to do between now and the first day of class.)

As for why I'm assigning a few articles to accompany "The Waste Land", although I don't for the others: it's just a very different sort of text. The other twelve writers, however complex they may be, are each trying to make an argument; Eliot writes a poem. Thus its connection to the course material will be more obscure. Also, it's a difficult poem to read for the first time. So I'm going to assign a few articles to (hopefully) help the students through these stumbling blocks.

To anyone who wants to say: "this is insanely ambitious": I know, and I agree. Let's move on.

The assignments will be threefold. The students will write a one-page reaction paper every week, making an observation and asking a question about the book; I'll have a few students read these aloud each week to serve as a jumping off point for our discussion. (These papers are largely intended to make sure students both do and think about the reading.)

There will be a final paper of 10-12 pages, due on the last day of class. As a concession to the "this is already insanely ambitious" point, I've decided not to make this a research paper; it will be a paper on some selection of the books for the course, tracing some intellectual issue (race, gender, democracy, class, the nature of scientific knowledge, the role of the state in society, etc, etc) through a number of the works. (Thus, if an ordinary upper-level course requires a lot of reading, plus a fair amount of reading for a final paper, this will hopefully balance out by just making the students write about the course material.)

And, finally, there will be a final exam, based largely (but not entirely) on the lectures, to make sure that portion of the instruction is tested and evaluated in some way (i.e. to make sure they come, listen and try to remember what I say). I'm going to pass out sheets each lecture with key terms (people, books, names of ideas, etc.) to help with this, since there isn't otherwise a textbook.

I'll have one student enrolled in the course for graduate credit. In addition to the books listed above, she'll read an additional three books -- secondary rather than primary sources -- and write two-page response papers on them; we'll also meet to discuss those books separately. The first of those books is Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, which is one of the most engaging and accessible of the secondary sources on this material; the other two I'll pick in consultation with her, to match her interests. Her final paper will be 15-20 pages, rather than 10-12, and will have to work at least one of the additional readings in in a significant way.

And that's my course. Putting this together -- and preparing the lectures -- has taken an insane amount of my time over the past few months, in particular in the weeks since last semester ended. Various other projects that I care deeply -- in certain cases, much more deeply -- about have been put on the back burner, if not all the way in the fridge. But it's been a fun course to prepare. If the students have half as much fun taking it as I have had putting it together, they'll love it. And if they do a tenth as much work, they'll ace it. Let's hope they all do. (Nothing would make me happier than to give everyone an A.)

Comments are welcome, bearing in mind that it's too late to make more than minor modifications for this spring (e.g. the bookstore has already ordered all the books). So even if you argue, convincingly, that I should throw this out and start again, I won't be able to.

Update, Spring 2012: I am teaching the class again with just about the same syllabus. I added a fourteenth book (as you can see I was already thinking of last year if you read the comments) -- Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (between Baldwin and Rorty, for week 12, knocking Rorty and Chomsky to 13 and 14 respectively). And in a few cases I'm shorting the readings somewhat -- not out of a concern for length particularly, and certainly not to balance adding the Gilligan (it doesn't), but because a slight shortening of some particularly difficult readings seemed in order; so I'm omitting a chapter from James's Pragmatism (chapter 4), one from Chomsky's lectures (chapter 4) and saying that students needn't read the (second-edition) postscript to Kuhn, only the text as originally published in 1962. Otherwise the syllabus is essentially unchanged.

The Hidden Dumbing-Down Threat

Everyone's been abuzz about the new edition of Huckleberry Finn that will rewrite Twain, replacing the n-word with "slave" in every single instance. (A lack of respect for the history, the literary integrity of the work, a need to honestly confront America's racist past -- you can write most of the dialogue yourself.) But hidden in that NY Times story about the fracas is the following:

“I’m not offended by anything in ‘Huck Finn,’ ” said Elizabeth Absher, an English teacher at South Mountain High School in Arizona. “I am a big fan of Mark Twain, and I hear a lot worse in the hallway in front of my class.”

Ms. Absher teaches Twain short stories and makes “Huck Finn” available but does not teach it because it is too long — not because of the language.

“I think authors’ language should be left alone,” she said. “If it’s too offensive, it doesn’t belong in school, but if it expresses the way people felt about race or slavery in the context of their time, that’s something I’d talk about in teaching it.”

I'm sorry -- what? She would teach about slavery and the context of the time... except that Huckleberry Finn is too long?

Ok -- the heck with all the dead birds dropping out of the sky. That, Noble Readers, is a sign of the fucking apocalypse.

Not Resigned to the Inevitable

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

There is, I would claim, something almost indescribably profound about this lack of resignation to that which is most inevitable. It connects, I think, to the spirit of fighting without hope that (as the best Tolkien critic I know of, Tom Shippey, persuasively argues) is so central to the worldview of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings -- the "spirit of the north" as he called it,* which he identified as a determination to fight for what is right even in the face of hopelessness -- with a belief in the idea that even ultimate defeat does not imply that a cause was wrong -- with a refusal to despair even when all hope is, in fact, lost. (Tolkien himself, as a Christian, thought there was an ultimate hope of course -- blunting the spirit that he himself saw in the pagan writers he admired, that of fighting in the face of genuine, inevitable defeat.) And what is more hopeless than the fight against death?

Hopeless: genuinely, eternally hopeless. And yet, and yet: I am not resigned. As a poetic contemporary of Millay's put it: rage, rage against the dying of the light.

_________________
* If memory serves. I don't have my copy of Shippey's work right now, and neither Google Books nor Amazon will let me search inside for the precise phrase. But it's something in that vein.

A Final Quote for 2010

The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us. It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into... a mere musical note or phrase suggestive of his singularity.

-- William James, 1903

So it is cited for an epigraph to Bruce Kuklick's seminal work The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860 - 1930 (1977). But tracking down the original source for this blog posting, I found it slightly but significantly different. The phrase omitted by the ellipsis ("the phantom of an attitude, into") does not seem to materially change the thought -- presumably it was omitted simply because it was felt that the repetition of the phrase "the phantom of an attitude" was an aesthetic gaff. On the other hand that final period (after "singularity") which Kuklick puts in, James does not: and it seems to me that the full paragraph is actually far more upbeat than how Kuklick, somewhat misleadingly, quotes it. Here is the full paragraph from James -- which is the opening paragraph from his "Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord":

The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us. It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into the phantom of an attitude, into a mere musical note or phrase suggestive of his singularity — happy are those whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgement.

As Kuklick elides it, the paragraph is wholly dark; but James (thinking, of course, of Emerson) adds a possibility of hope -- that one might possess a "singularity" which would enable one to "be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgement." And James returns to this uplifting interpretation; he closes by recurring again to his opening metaphor:

I spoke of how shrunken the wraith, how thin the echo, of men is after they are departed? Emerson's wraith comes to me now as if it were but the very voice of this victorious argument. His words to this effect are certain to be quoted and extracted more and more as time goes on, and to take their place among the Scriptures of humanity. "'Gainst death and all oblivious enmity, shall you pace forth," beloved Master. As long as our English language lasts men's hearts will be cheered and their souls strengthened and liberated by the noble and musical pages with which you have enriched it.

Again, James's text seems to me quite different in spirit than that which one gleans from Kuklick's epigraphal quoting of him.

As a temperamentally pessimistic fellow, I must admit I prefer the Kuklick version to James's original. But I think it's a bit surprising that he would, without any acknowledgement of doing so, edit the paragraph in so substance-altering a fashion.

Happy new year to one and all.

Zeynep Tufekci on Wikileaks, the "Tax on DIssent" and the Internet as Privatized Public Space

Via the same Zunguzungu link roundup I got yesterday's quote from, here is Zeynep Tufekci on the lesson of L'affaire Wikileaks:

...the main lessons of the Wikileaks affair: the increasing control of (relatively) unaccountable corporations and states over the key components of the Internet, and their increased willingness to use this control in politicized ways to impose a "dissent tax" on content they find objectionable. Ability to disseminate one's ideas on the Internet is now a sine qua non of inclusion in the global public sphere. However, the Internet is not a true public sphere; it is a public sphere erected on private property, what I have dubbed a "quasi-public sphere," where the property owners can sideline and constrain dissent....

During these past weeks, rather than a nerd takeover, I saw the crumbling of the facade of a flat, equal, open Internet and the revelation of an Internet which has corporate power occupying its key crossroads, ever-so-sensitive to any whiff of displeasure by the state. I saw an Internet in danger of becoming merely an interactive version of the television in terms of effective freedom of speech. Remember, the Internet did not create freedom of speech; in theory, we always had freedom of speech--it's just that it often went along with the freedom to be ignored. People had no access to the infrastructure to be heard. Until the Internet, the right to be heard was in most cases reserved to the governments, deep pockets, and corporate media. Before the Internet, trees fell in lonely forests.

The Wikileaks furor shows us that these institutions of power are slowly and surely taking control of the key junctures of the Internet. As a mere "quasi-public sphere," the Internet is somewhat akin to shopping malls, which seem like public spaces but in which the rights of citizens are restricted, as they are in fact private. If you think the freedom of the Internet could never be taken back, I implore you to read the history of radio. Technologies that start out as peer-to-peer and citizen-driven can be and have been taken over by corporate and state power.

And then, via one of the links in the very excerpt reprinted above, here is Zeynep Tufekci with more about the internet as a public sphere on private property, and the limits that entails:

The answer cannot be: well, people who are unhappy shouldn’t use those services. Presence on the Internet is effectively a requirement for fully and effectively participating in the 21st century as a citizen, as a consumer, as an informed person and as a social being. Further, many such services are natural monopolies: Google, Ebay, Facebook, Amazon, all benefit greatly from network externalities which means that the more people on the service, the more useful it is for everyone. This makes it very hard for a market leader to be challenged. (Wikipedia is also such a natural monopoly but it is not corporate controlled).

Facebook or Google are optional in the sense that electricity, telephone, modern medicine are optional. Don’t like the medical establishment? Don’t use antibiotics! Don’t like how deregulated electricity markets are run? Well, don’t use electricity! Hey, solar panels are available. Telling people to opt-out of major streams of sociality, information and markets on the Internet makes almost as much sense. While I’ll readily concede the urgency of antibiotics differs from the urgency of social interaction, sociality is a fundamental part of being. It is not optional. It is not a coincidence that solitary confinement is the most severe legal punishment –short of the death penalty—that is legally imposed on people.

The next argument is: well, use an alternative service! That too is as valid as telling people to use a different cable company or an electric utility if they don’t like the current one. In most markets, there is only one or two such utilities, and for good reason. The investment in laying cables and connecting doors is large enough that most markets cannot support multiple, truly alternative services. Similarly, especially in the lives of young people, Facebook acts like a phone directory used to and opting out of Facebook during college would significantly constrain social options for many. Facebook has become de facto social commons, especially in college but now has spread to other cohorts. It takes effort to maintain a profile and people are unlikely to duplicate that effort in multiple services the same way multiple electric companies don’t put down parallel cables to each neighbor to compete with each other. Google is such an environment for searching and for many people who do not have an institutionally-supplied email account they can freely use for personal matters, Gmail makes a lot of sense.

Both articles flesh out the ideas these excerpts are from; click through if the quoted bits interest you.

A Fabulous Paragraph from a Bruce Sterling Essay Mostly About Something Else Entirely

As a novelist, I never think of Monica Lewinsky, that once-everyday young woman, without a sense of dread at the freakish, occult fate that overtook her. Imagine what it must be like, to wake up being her, to face the inevitability of being That Woman. Monica, too, transgressed in apparent safety and then she had the utter foolishness to brag to a lethal enemy, a trusted confidante who ran a tape machine and who brought her a mediated circus of hells. The titillation of that massive, shattering scandal has faded now. But think of the quotidian daily horror of being Monica Lewinsky, and that should take a bite from the soul.

-- Bruce Sterling

...the rest of the essay is fascinating too, and filled with equally quotable bits; its about L'affaire Wikileaks. Check it out. (Via, who adds their own thoughts too, as well as other links.)

On Grading: From Ursula K. LeGuin's Novel The Dispossesed

I read The Dispossessed in high school, and loved it, but I don't think I've read it since. (And that, by now, is a very very long time.) But Gerry Canavan reminded me of this moment of the novel, in which Shevek, (the protagonist, who is a physicist), who is from an Anarchist society, goes to a US-style university and encounters the grading system:

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions, but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing.

Well, of course, Shevek said, troubled. If you do not want to do the work, you should not do it.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

Michael Widner adds a few thoughts here.

Happy Birthday, Joseph Saperstein Frug!

...but if you're reading this, stop: you're still too young to read the internet!!

(I don't care if Ima did say that 2 was old enough. But, by the by, I'm fairly sure she didn't.)

(Photo by John Henry Stassen)

(Disclaimer: the above photo is from Thanksgiving, back when he was still 1 and not all old and stuff as he now, at 2, clearly is...)

Quote of the Day

While we can continue to abhor the system of human bondage that flourished in the Old South, there is much we can learn from a more dispassionate examination of the arguments used to defend it. We have sought to distance the slaveholders and their creed, to define them as very unlike ourselves. Yet their processes of rationalization and self-justification were not so very different from our own, or from those of any civilization of human actors. The persistence of modern racism is but one forceful reminder of the ways that human beings always view the world in terms of inherited systems of belief and explanation that only partially reflect the reality they are meant to describe. By understanding how others have fashioned and maintained their systems of meaning, we shall be better equipped to evaluate, criticize and perhaps even change our own.

-- Drew Gilpin Faust

...from the amazing blog of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who continues to write what I think is some of the best popular history being written today in any medium.

A Few Sentences On the Notion of Smaller Government

Progressives think government is too big and therefore want to reduce secrecy and prevent the president from imprisoning and assassinating American citizens without due process; Tea Partiers think government is too big and therefore want to prevent universal health care. Progressives think the national deficit and debt are out of control and therefore want to shrink the military; Tea Partiers think the national deficit and debt are out of control and therefore want to eliminate social security.

-- Barry Eisler

...which is why I don't take limited government rhetoric the least bit seriously: it's simply too empty a phrase, meaning too many different things to too many different people. Like the (probably even sillier) rhetoric of "states' rights", its value or lack thereof is entirely in the specific case, not in the abstract virtue. Better to simply talk about what you're talking about, and not prattle on about almost entirely empty forms.

The Purple Cow and Its Parodies

Saying nursery rhymes to my son recently I happened to quote the famous poem by... well, I had to look up his name: it's Galett Burgess. And as is so common I omitted the first two lines of this six-line poem -- it's usually, but erroneously, treated as a four-line poem. Anyway, here it is, in its majestic entirety:

The Purple Cow

Reflections on a Mythic Beast,
Who's Quite Remarkable, at Least.

I never Saw a Purple Cow;
I never Hope to See One;
But I can Tell you, Anyhow,
I'd rather See than Be One.

-- Gelett Burgess

And Wikipedia (bless it) has an image of its original appearance:

...which, you'll note, also leaves off the opening two lines (which definitely are in some versions, e.g. here); so I suppose there's a reason for the common, truncated form of the quotation.

But I've always liked even better the sequel that Burgess wrote -- twenty years after, if the title is to believed. Wikipedia claims that the sequel is "almost as well-known as the original"; in my experience that's not true, although I think it ought to be true: one of several motivations for this little post on the topic. Anyway, the sequel goes like this:

Cinq Ans Apres

(Confession: and a Portrait, Too,
Upon a Background that I Rue!)

Ah, yes! I wrote the "Purple Cow"--
I'm Sorry, now, I Wrote it!
But I can Tell you, Anyhow,
I'll Kill you if you Quote it!

-- Gelett Burgess

It's a good thing I'll never meet the late Mr. Burgess, as he'd have killed me many dozens of times over.

Burgess's poem has inspired numerous parodies -- Wikipedia quotes several, although I'm certain there's more. (For none of the parodies do they quote opening lines to parallel the opening lines of "The Purple Cow"; whether this is an omission by the quoter or the author I don't know.) This is one of the most famous (and justly so), after Burgess's own sequel:

I've never seen a purple cow.
My eyes with tears are full.
I've never seen a purple cow,
And I'm a purple bull.

-- Anonymous

(If Martin Gardner couldn't find an author for that one, I suspect it can't be found.)

That one I'd seen before -- in the Gardner collection, I think. This one, however, is new to me -- and, I think, almost as funny:

I never was a vitamin;
I never hope to be one;
but I can tell you anyhow;
I'd rather C than B₁!

-- Tom Montgomery

And I also like:

I've never seen a purple cow.
I never hope to see one.
But from the milk we're getting now,
There certainly must be one!

-- Ye Old Prolific Author Anonymous

Oddly, I don't particularly care for the ones by famous writers that are quoted either by Wikipedia (Ogden Nash) nor by Gardner (O. Henry). Not as good as the unknowns and anonymouses, in this case.

And, of course, with all that Purple Cowy Goodness sloshing around in my brain, it was perhaps only a matter of time until I got into the game. So I herewith present a World! Exclusive! Premiere! of Yet Another Parody of "The Purple Cow", by yours truly:

The Purple Postmodernist

Reflections, in a meta way,
On how I'm saying what I now say.

I never pastiched "A Purple Cow",
I'd never hoped to do it;
But reading what I'm writing now
I'm very nearly through it.

-- Stephen Saperstein Frug

And I wish to note for the record that, even an hour before I wrote this, the claim in the antepenultimate line was perfectly true.

Searle on (Foucault on) Derrida

John Searle, in an interview with Reason Magazine*:

With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.

Foucault was often lumped with Derrida. That's very unfair to Foucault. He was a different caliber of thinker altogether.

I'm not entirely sure how reliable or accurate this is, but I thought it was interesting, and kinda funny.

For a direct attack by Searle on Derrida, see this review by Searle of Culler's On Deconstruction here. (That link goes to a reprint; the original publication is behind a paywall.) This is presumably the article mentioned in the above quote, since Searle does, in fact, quote Foucault on this point within it. Here's a bit of it that I found interesting (at least in part because it is consonant with other reactions to skepticism I've read and found interesting):

I believe that Derrida's work, at least those portions I have read, is not just a series of muddles and gimmicks. There is in fact a large issue being addressed and a large mistake being made. The philosophical tradition that goes from Descartes to Husserl, and indeed a large part of the philosophical tradition that goes back to Plato, involves a search for foundations: metaphysically certain foundations of knowledge, foundations of language and meaning, foundations of mathematics, foundations of morality, etc.... Now, in the twentieth century, mostly under the influence of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, we have come to believe that this general search for these sorts of foundations is misguided. There aren't in the way classical metaphysicians supposed any foundations for ethics or knowledge.... Derrida correctly sees that there aren't any such foundations, but he then makes the mistake that marks him as a classical metaphysician. The real mistake of the classical metaphysician was not the belief that there were metaphysical foundations, but rather the belief that somehow or other such foundations were necessary, the belief that unless there are foundations something is lost or threatened or undermined or put in question. It is this belief that Derrida shares with the tradition he seeks to deconstruct. Derrida sees that the Husserlian project of a transcendental grounding for science, language, and common sense is a failure. But what he fails to see is that this doesn't threaten science, language, or common sense in the least. As Wittgenstein says, it leaves everything exactly as it is.

All this via a fruitless search for an online copy of Searle's "Reply to Derrida: Reiterating the Differences". Say what you will about Derrida, I really wish that Searle had given him permission to reprint that piece in his book Limited, Inc.

Update: Thanks to commentator Francis Jervis for providing this link to an online copy of Searle's Reply to Derrida."

______________________
* Why Reason Magazine, you ask? I dunno. But later in the interview Searle does discuss an article he wrote claiming that Hayek's Road to Serfdom as one of "the book of the century".) He says of Hayek:

It would be interesting for somebody to analyze in a more scholarly vein to what extent he was right: that there wasn't any halfway point of democratic socialism, that it would naturally collapse into various forms of oppression, that however well-intentioned the setting up of the socialist bureaucracy was, it would be bound to have calamitous effects.

Possibly such a survey might start out by studying the various democratic socialist countries of Europe, which tend to be roughly as free, prosperous, stable and happy as the U.S. Which means, unless I'm missing something (and of course maybe I am) that the answer to "what extent he was right" was not at all. (On this point, see also this actual economist.)

Quotes About Harry Mathews's Cigarettes (1987)

Cigarettes.... [I]dentified by the author as his only "purely Oulipian novel." Its method of composition has not be revealed beyond a statement that it is based on a "permutation of situations".

-- Oulipo Compendium, ed. Harry Mathews & Alistair Brotchie, rev. ed., p. 126

∞

During this time, I decided to write an Oulipian novel. And I created this abstract scheme of permutations of situations in which A meets B, B meets C, and so forth. There’s no point in looking for it now because no one will ever figure it out, including me....

-- Harry Mathews

∞

MATHEWS: I’d never been able to write about the world I grew up in, but Cigarettes allowed me to do it, with Saratoga Springs standing in for the Hamptons.

INTERVIEWER: Could you have done it without the method?

MATHEWS: No, I don’t think so. That’s the way I tell the truth. Oddly, the one novel I wrote using an Oulipian structure is the most conventional.

-- Ibid.

∞

In the Oulipo, there are two schools of thought. People like Calvino and Perec said that the author should acknowledge the methods he’s been using. And the other clan, which included Raymond Queneau and myself, thinks it’s much better not to let on, because this will keep the reader straining to find out.

-- Harry Mathews in Ibid.

∞

NTERVIEWER: Cigarettes... Why that title?
MATHEWS: The question, “Why is the book called Cigarettes?” is a question that should be asked.

-- Harry Mathews Interviewed by Lynn Tillman

Update: And now a quote from Cigarettes about writing -- one that seems, on its face, as if it is also about the writing of Cigarettes itself (as well as its ostensible subject within the novel) -- therefore, a quote that also seems to me to fit appropriately under the title of this blogpost:

Morris was showing him what writing could do. He advanced the notion that creation begins by annihilating typical forms and procedures, especially the illusory "naturalness" of sequence and coherence. Morris did more than state this, he demonstrated it. He made of his essay a minefield that blew itself up as you crossed it. You found yourself again and again on ground not of your choosing, propelled from semantics into psychoanalysis into epistemology into politics. These displacement seemed, rather than willful, grounded in some hidden and persuasive law that had as its purpose to keep bringing the reader back fresh to the subject.

-- Harry Mathews, Cigarettes, p, 135

(Derik Badman thought of applying this quote to Mathews own writing years before I did; but he gave only the first two sentences of the above, so I thought it was worth my quoting it at somewhat greater length.)

Update 2: And for completeness's sake, from Mathews's essay "Translation and the Oulipo", a comment reiterating the above in slightly different wording (via):

I had a similar experience with my novel Cigarettes. My "object of desire" was telling the story of a passionate friendship between two middle-aged women. That was all I knew. I had concocted an elaborate formal scheme in which abstract situations were permutated according to a set pattern. This outline suggested nothing in particular, and for a time it remained utterly empty and bewildering. It then began filling up with situations and characters that seem to come from nowhere; most of them belonged to the world I had grown up in. I had never been able to face writing about it before, even though I'd wanted to make it my subject from the moment I turned to fiction. It now reinvented itself in an unexpected and fitting guise that I could never have discovered otherwise.

For Perec and me, writing under constraint proved to be not a limitation but a liberation. Our unreasonable home grounds were what had at last enabled us to come home.

Poem of the Day: Warning to Children

Warning to Children

Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel -
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
he lives - he then unties the string.

-- Robert Graves

Quote of the Day

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

-- Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (h/t)

Alphabetical Africa Errata: an Updated List

My previous post on Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa contained an introduction to the book and its unique constraint, a few remarks on what I thought of it, a table of all the errata I'd either seen elsewhere or found myself, and a list of possible corrections for them.

Now Johnathan Arnold, in a comment on that post has vastly expanded the list to the point where I am putting it up here in a separate post.

A reminder of Alphabetical Africa's constraint: The first half of the book consists of 26 chapters, labeled A through Z. The first chapter contains only words beginning with A; the second contains words beginning with A and B; the third words beginning with A, B and C; and so on up until Z, in which any word may appear. The second half of the book, also 26 chapters long, reverses the process. The chapters are labeled Z through A; Z uses any words; Y uses any words save those beginning with Z; X uses any words save those beginning with Y or Z, and so on back through the final chapter, A, which again uses only words beginning with A. (Again, there's more, including a few example passages, in the earlier post.)

That's the idea, anyway. But it turns out there are at least 40 50 and counting (!) departures from that schema. Here is a complete list of all the ones I know of, from all the various sources I've seen:

Chapter/Page	Error	Phrase
A1, p. 2	premature I	Alex and Allen alone, arrive in Abidjan...
D1, p. 9	premature H	...because Chester cannot hear Dogon birds chirp:
D1, p. 9	premature O	biu, biu, biu, or Dogon dogs bark:
D1, p. 9	premature O	bow, bow, bow, or antelopes:
G1, p. 15	premature I	Are Germans convincing in Africa?
H1, p. 18	premature O	...a bridge or an airport...
H1, p. 18	premature O	...a book, or a husky German...
H1, p. 18	premature O	...doors. One hundred and fifty...
H1, p. 19	premature L	...he chatters a lot...
I1, p. 21	premature U	I used to draw Alva.
J1, p. 26	premature L	...as long as he could.
K1, p. 27	premature N	...he could design a new colony...
L1, p. 30	premature O	...finds a lot of lakes...
L1, p. 31	premature S	...being a compulsive liar she lies about him
M1, p. 32	premature T	He appeared to have been a middle-aged man.
M1, p. 32	premature T	He had gone to a hotel.
N1, p. 34	premature O	I am afraid of loving her...
N1, p. 35	premature S	...everything, even all sounds, heavy, dark...
N1, p. 35	premature O	Each moment is a kind of impermanent...
N1, p. 35	premature O	...my favorite map of another African country...
O1, p. 38	premature P	...I promise her.
P1, p. 39	premature T [arguable]	...part-time only...
P1, p. 40	premature S	"...not invented anything I've seen or done."
Q1, p. 42	premature T	I am convinced that people...
R1, p. 46	premature T [arguable]	After a bit of rough-and-tumble...
V1, p. 58	premature W	...from the eastern and western edges...
W1, p. 59	premature Y	...had we been here a hundred years ago...
V2, p. 87	belated W	The children are at school when the mailman arrives...
V2, p. 88	belated W	...preferably at a time when her children...
U2, p. 91	belated W	...one rapid sweep with a pen...
U2, p. 92	belated W	...laughing men with unpronounceable names...
T2, p. 93	belated W	When Boyd discovered this...
T2, p. 94	belated W	...they meet men who are transplanting Africa.
T2, p. 95	belated W	...have come to terms with African emotions.
T2, p. 97	belated W	He walks as far as the gates of the consulate.
S2, p. 99	belated T	...Miti Safu Safu is a line of trees....
P2, p. 112	belated Q	"An hour later drums mysteriously become quiet..."
N2, p. 117	belated O	...both ends of caravan...
K2, p. 123	belated L	Like everything else...
k2, p. 123	belated L	...it conceals all hope for life by...
J2, p. 126	belated L	...as I dig a large hole...
J2, p. 127	belated L	Alex and Allen left for Africa...
F2, p. 138	belated I	...boosted an innovative design...
E2, p. 140	belated H	...Alva, her deletions are...
E2, p. 140	belated H	...accepts her corrections.
E2, p. 140	belated F	...book buyers for Emperor...
C2, p. 146	belated I	After considering all alternatives, I capture a couple crocodiles.
C2, p. 147	belated I	After I cross a...
C2, p. 147	belated D	...bag containing Alva's description.
B2, p. 148	belated C	...afraid ants can't be beaten.

Phew! That's a lot. I must admit that somewhere between 20 and 40 errors my feelings about them slip from "everyone makes mistakes" to "that's sloppy work". Assuming that they're not deliberate (and I don't think they are, based on both internet rumor about Abish's reaction to one being pointed out, and my judgment of how they seem (although obviously I could be wrong about this)), then I have to say that this mars the book in a substantial way.

In the earlier post I came up with patches for the eighteen or so I'd seen then... but another 24 takes the wind out of my sails. If anyone has patches for these, feel free to leave 'em in comments. And please do leave any further errors you see -- I will add them to the above chart once I see them.

Update (07/10/2011): Three more added from comments. Update (02/07/2012): And five more, plus a correction. Thanks! Keep 'em coming, everyone!

Links of the Day

Charlie Stross: we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion! (via)

Paul Krugman: dude, that all happened, like, back in the 60's, man. Catch up.

(Note: these are not SF stories they're talking about. This is nonfiction about politics.)

Quote of the Day

Sir, this doctrine of a white man's Government is as atrocious as the infamous sentiment that damned the late Chief Justice [i.e Roger Taney] to everlasting fame; and, I fear, to everlasting fire.

-- Thaddeus Stevens, December 18, 1865 [via]

What Krugman Said, Times Three

What Krugman said:

After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?

On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.

So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of.

Amen.

Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,” although he might as well have....

It’s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama’s measure — that they’re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it’s also hard to escape the impression that they’re right.

The real question is what Mr. Obama and his inner circle are thinking. Do they really believe, after all this time, that gestures of appeasement to the G.O.P. will elicit a good-faith response?

Word.

What’s even more puzzling is the apparent indifference of the Obama team to the effect of such gestures on their supporters. One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.

So say we all.

Quote of the Day

Obama has another two or three weeks to prove he's not an idiot.

-- Kevin Drum (via)

(The context, btw, is Obama's relentless willingness to negotiate with Lucy about whether she'll pull the football away the Republicans, despite the latter's blindingly obvious bad faith. (Remember, however: they think they're doing well.))

In general Drum's on a roll today. Even better than the above-linked post is this post about the hopelessness of our tottering empire (via):

The strongest country in the world — my country — is allowing its economy to decay before our collective eyes even though we know how to stop it. But we're not going to. We're just going to let it happen.... We need: a big stimulus now aimed at infrastructure development. A credible plan to close the long-term deficit that acknowledges the need for tax increases to be part of the solution. A serious and sustained effort at reining in healthcare costs and broadening access. A collective decision to cut out the culture war nonsense and figure out how to improve our educational system with no more than modest spending increases. Real financial reform, not the weak tea of Dodd-Frank. Less spending on empire building and much, much more spending on real sustainable energy development and engineering.

But we're not going to do this stuff. As near as I can tell, we're not even going to do one single thing on this list. We're not even going to try. In fact, they're all so far from being realistically achievable that it's sort of foolish to even waste breath writing about them.

Word.

2 Quotes and 2 Links on WIkileaks

I'm posting these without necessarily agreeing with anything: I just thought they were interesting. Consider it a wikileaks dump link-and-quote dump.

I have a hard time getting worked up about it- a government that views none of my personal correspondence as confidential really can’t bitch when this sort of thing happens.

- Juan Cole (via)

The latest WikiLeaks dump is to American foreign policy what the Starr Report was to presidential politics—fun, in a voyeuristic sort of way, revealing, but not about important things, and ultimately, more trouble than it is worth.

-- Peter Beinart (via)

The links:

There have been a bunch of bullet-point lists of the most interesting revelations in the latest Wikileask dump. As you'd expect, there's lots of overlap, but not total. I thought this was the most interesting one.

But the truth is that the most interesting thing I've read on the Wikileaks document dump, by an order of magnitude at least, is this analysis on what precisely Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is trying to accomplish, and his broader theories behind that (via). Whatever you think of Assange and his actions, it seems worthwhile to actually grapple with what he thinks he's trying to do. Much of the other analysis I've seen simply doesn't. (Thus, repeated claims by lots of people that this will drive a lot of diplomacy from written cables to purely spoken communication seems like it could be a step towards Assange's goal, if I'm reading that right.) Highly recommended.

Update: Ok, two more quotes:

Where it is doing the right thing, a great power should be robust against embarrassment.

-- Simon Jenkins (via)

In future the only secrets will be spoken ones. Whether that is a good thing should be a topic for public debate.

-- Ibid.

...and now my post title is untrue. Nuts .

An Onion Headline Begging To Be Written

French President Sarkozy Outraged At Being Called "Thin-Skinned" in Wikileaks Cables.