John & Belle Have A Blog

More Kid Pics (for the grandparents, mostly)

Under the fold ...

For Our Organism Is An Oligarchy

From Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §6:

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious mémoires; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown. Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he—) aim? Accordingly, I do not believe that a “drive for knowledge” is the father of philosophy; but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere employed knowledge (and mis-knowledge!) as a mere instrument. But anyone who considers the basic drives of man to see to what extent they may have been at play just here as inspiring spirits (or demons and kobolds—), will find that all of them have done philosophy at some time—and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master [Herrn] of all the other drives. For every drive is domineering [herrschsüchtig]: and as such it attempts to philosophize.— To be sure: among scholars who are really scientific men things may be different—“better,” if you like—, there you may really find something like a drive for knowledge, some small independent clockwork that, once well wound, works on vigorously without any essential participation from all the other drives of the scholar. The real “interests” of the scholar therefore lie usually somewhere else, in his family, say, or in making money, or in politics; indeed, it is almost a matter of total indifference whether his little machine is placed at this or that spot in science, and whether the “promising” young worker turns himself into a good philologist or an expert on fungi or a chemist:—it does not characterize him that he becomes this or that. In the philosopher conversely, there is nothing whatever that is impersonal; and above all his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is—that is, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relation to each other.

As F. H. Bradley says: Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what one believes on instinct.

In a part II of my dialogue (not included in the draft I linked in that previous post) S & P mull the advantages and disadvantages of defending 'theory' by aligning it with this Nietzschean vision of philosophy. Aristocracy becomes personal authenticity. Argufying for your personal sensibility turns out to be par for the philosophy course. Intellectual conscience turns out to be a shallow - at best, an instrumental virtue. (So theory's lack of it is no great loss.) Unsystematic systematicity - eclecticism - is a natural and predictable product of clashes between our inner drives. (Anything else would indicate your heart wasn't in it.) There is, additionally, nothing journalistically feuilletonistic about having one's philosophy be a chorus of howls from an inner oligarchy of daimons, kobolds and sundry spirits. (You can even rename them race, gender and class and impersonalize them socially and culturally.) The passage effectively affirms settling your moral conclusions in advance. Last but not least, you get to bash analytic philosophy as no true philosophy, just a sort of callow clattering with impersonal machines. Any takers for this line of defense? Perhaps the aptly named Me?

I think there is something seriously tempting about this line of defense for 'theory'. Because I think there is something right about what Nietzsche is saying. Even so, I don't think it's healthy to grip the Nietzschean nettle too tightly. What do you think? [Obviously it's no simple matter to work out how this passage relates to others in Nietzsche. Yes, I'm aware he is a complicated fellow - a veritable pandaimoniacal parliament.]

Pixies

So how does the hair look, you ask? Pictures under the fold. It's cooler and easier to wash, and luckily it will just grow back...actually this picture doesn't really capture the cuteness, I'll try again later.

Glass Bead Games and Feuilletons

"I passed through a euphoric dream of scientificity." Roland Barthes, bemusedly recollecting how he came to write The Fashion System. A similarly hubristic passage from Paul Ricoeur (from lectures in 1961-2; turned into a book, Freud & Philosophy: An Essay On Interpretation, in 1965.)

Today we are in search of a comprehensive philosophy of language to account for the mutliple functions of the human act of signifying and for their interrelationships. How can language be put to such diverse uses as mathematics and myth, physics and art? It is no accident that we ask ourselves this question today. We have at our disposal a symbolic logic, an exegetical science, an anthropology, and a psychoanalysis and, perhaps for the first time, we are able to encompass in a single question the problem of the unification of human discourses. The very progress of the aforementioned disparate disciplines has both revealed and intensified the dismemberment of that discourse. Today the unity of human language poses a problem.

Such is the broad horizon within which our investigation is set. The present study in no way pretends to offer the comprehensive philosophy of language we are waiting for. I doubt moreover that such a philosophy could be elaborated by any one man. A modern Leibniz with the ambition and capacity to achieve it would have to be an accomplished mathematician, a universal exegete, a critic versed in several of the arts, and a good psychoanalyst. While awaiting that philosopher of integral language, perhaps it is possible for us to explore some of the key connections between the disciplines concerned with language. The present essay is an attempt to contribute to that investigation.

Grand Unified Theory. Who can believe in anything of the sort today?

Bad Hair Day

Today was Zoë's first day of school. Yesterday was sort of her .5th day of school; I took her to the pre-school down the road to visit, and she was having so much fun she didn't want to go home. Today was the first official day, though. It all went well, no tears--even from me. From zero to five days a week (in the morning). Yesterday I left her happily lecturing the teacher about dinosaur names. Today had further excitement in the form of that classic childhood experience: the self-administered haircut. I came in after putting the baby to sleep, and the nominally napping Zoë was moping on her bed, surrounded by a big fluffy pile of hair. To cap things off there was a big puddle of pee on the ground. I just burst out laughing, because she looked so ridiculous with a mullet. I had to cut the rest of it off to even things out. Now she's going for a very, very young Mia Farrow look. Pretty cute, actually, although she spent 15 minutes crying theatrically in front of the mirror. I'll post photos. I tragically didn't get any of the mullet.

Pattern Languages

It's a matter of whether you're content to focus on everyday events or whether you want to try to encompass the entire universe. If you go back to the literature written in ancient Greece or Rome, or during the Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance, you'll see writers trying to write not just about everything that exists but about everything that could exist. As soon as you open yourself to that possibility, you're going to find yourself talking about things like intelligent robots and monsters with Gorgon heads, because it's becoming increasingly obvious that such things could indeed exist. But what fascinates me is that the ancient Greeks realized these possibilities some five hundred years before Christ, when they didn't have the insights into the biological and physical sciences we have today, when there was no such thing as, say, cybernetics. Read the story of Jason and the Argonauts - you discover that Crete was guarded by a robot. Somehow the Greeks were alert to these possibilities despite the very primitive technology they had, and they put these ideas into their stories. Today, it's the SF writers who are exploring these things.
- Gene Wolfe

... For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibily represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things bring them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.

Albertus Secundus
tract. de cristall. spirit.
ed. Clagor et. Collof. lib. I, cap. 28
(in Joseph Knecht's holograph translation

I recently reread Hesse's Glass Bead Game back to back with William Gibson's Pattern Recognition; they seem to me to be part of ... an overall pattern. Let's start with the fact that both can be classified as science fiction, but somewhat uncomfortably.  What makes the classification uncertain is the absence of the generically-familiar focus of technology.

Glueless in Academe

On the vanity of academic journal culture.

All that is profound accidentally glues a mask to its face.
- Nietzsche

Oddly enough, Gary Sauer-Thompson makes the same joke. [UPDATE: no, he's corrected the typo.]

 

Bluedar Update

Here is a quick snap of Zoë's sketch of Bluedar. It looks like he's got four arms, but the upper bits are actually overall straps.

Further distinguishing marks of this mysterious hero are now known. Bluedar is a kid, although he is 'as big as daddy' and 'very strong'. He has a younger sister who 'looks exactly like Zoë.' He has no hair, only likes blue, and only eats wood. It turns out he has beaver teeth and a beaver tail. He wears overalls, as previously reported, and big rubber boots in case it rains.

OK, now we really need some comic artist to go to work on this project. I want a Wolverine-style portrait of Bluedar, chewing on a stogey-like stick of wood, looking like no one's going to stop him from rebuilding that bridge. Knowing my daughter's visual influences, I'm guessing 'hairless with beaver teeth' means we want a cross between Martian Manhunter - but in blue - and Munchy, from PB & J Otter. Wardrobe by Fuzzy Lumpkins.

Oh, and Bluedar has another sister - a tiny little girl,'the size of Little Miss My in the Moomin books'. She is named Centimeter. She has no powers but is 'very tough'.

Please feel free to suggest a likely origin story for Bluedar in comments.

Bluedar!

Zoë reached a new developmental stage today. She invented her first superhero. His name is Bluedar! He is blue and wears overalls. He has the power to rebuild bridges that supervillains have destroyed AND (in a stunning plot twist) at first the Justice League of America think he destroyed the bridge - since they show up while he is rebuilding it, after the Joker got away. Now what we need is some comic artist out there to show us what Bluedar looks like. Zoë's own sketch is intriguing but impressionistic. But her blue lego bridge was quite impressive. 

Lifemanship & life.after.theory

Since this has come up in comments to my dialogue post, some quick Saturday night thoughts regarding arguments to the effect that 'theory' is aristocratic.

My Doctor Says I Need Marijuana to Get High

I certainly think that people dying of cancer should be provided with medical marijuana if they want it and it will help them out. I can't help but think, though, that if I smoked up in a terminal state like that I'd be thinking "holy shit! I'm eaten up with cancer! OMG, now it's, like, NOW, and I'm dying of cancer!!!" I don't see a lot of relaxation happening there. Still, de gustibus, and so on.

Alibi

Is it likely Divine Apollo
That I should have stolen your cattle?
A child of my age, a mere infant
And besides, I have been here all night in my crib.

Ezra Pound channeling Homer.

More Canggu

We're back from Bali! And the internet has re-opened! I highly recommend the place we stayed; only $95 for a little place with its own garden and plunge pool, one bedroom upstairs and a sitting area downstairs. No one was staying in the main villa, so we had the whole place all to ourself. The food was delicious, and I learned how to make Balinese long beans in coconut sauce. And I got the best massages of my life from a tiny woman with improbably strong hands. John's lucky I didn't leave him to get gay married to her, just for the foot massages. The girls came back all bitten up with mosquitoes and red with exczema, and Zoë looking thin, because I lack the patience to sit there shovelling food into her mouth for half an hour at each mealtime. The whole time I was like, Tena's going to yell at me when we get home. (She did, indeed, say "wah, what have you done to my baby!" and "Zoë, so pale and thin, lah! Then how?" They enjoyed it though, especially the swimming, and Zoë got a new kite at Tanah Lot temple. It is in the shape of a butterfly, with somewhat creepily realistic huge eyes and pipe-cleaner proboscis.

The temple just across the river from us was having its once-yearly celebration: two solid days and nights of gamelan, singing, dancing, cockfights, and pre-dawn processions. Mom and I amused ourselves by constructing critiques of Bali along Gameslifesmanship lines, i.e. picking something's best-known trait and then criticising it for lacking that trait (thus: D.H. Lawrence suffers from a lack of consciousness of the male and female in society...and so on.) Bali's real problem is it's failure to understand the connections between the spiritual and material worlds. That and the lack of exuberant ceremony. Wait, no.

We enjoyed ourselves much more than last time, when we went to Nusa Dua. We went to Ubud. We did so much shopping that we had to buy a new suitcase, in which we brought home, yes, a sink. For the bathroom: a circular basin tiled in gleaming mother-of-pearl. It was my symbolic first purchase for the house in Sri Lanka I'm going to have someday. I could use it to transform an old marble-topped desk into a sink and vanity. We also scoped out the most amazing place ever, called Villa Teresa. We had considered it before for a big family vacation. The pictures don't do it justice. In fact, they serve it ill. This place looks like something you'd read about in Vogue magazine. So attractively decorated, with water features and sculptures and puppets. Hot and cold running staff. Only $685 per night in the low season! Er, yeah, that's still a lot of money, but for 10 of us? Mom and I are now single-mindedly devoted to convincing the rest of the family to pony up for this. Guys, it's even nicer than that. No, nicer.

Satisfaction Pony & Etc.

We're nominated for another Koufax for Belle's classic pony post! Go vote!

Oh, and our two macs live! Logic board on the iBook replaced. The trouble with the iMac was semi-incompatible third party RAM, inducing kernel panic among other ill effects. One rotten non-Apple spoils the barrel. Interestingly, the non-Apple RAM came from Apple, i.e. the Apple Store provided and installed it. This is annoying and I intend to complain. 

Whatever did I do to keep from going mad without internet access? I watched all 24 hours of the first season of 24 on DVD. I have a little continuity question concealed under the fold, as it contains a plot-spoiler.

Precluding Untheoretic Prescript

A bit more theory stuff. Wayne Booth had an amusing piece in Critical Inquiry (winter 2004); a 'whither theory?' special issue. (Actually, a discussion of the future of CI, but that just turns into 'whither theory?') He submitted two 'letters', one by 'anon', one in his own name. Anon is frank and quite caustic The trouble with Critical Inquiry is that it publishes things that are badly written. Also, it publishes little that is either critical or inquiring. Concerning that last item in particular (italics in original):

Too many current essays seem to me to do no genuine inquiring. Many are only evangelical preaching (disguised with academic polysyllables); they read as if they had been rejected by editors in some field far outside “the humanities.” Even the essays devoted to some form of literary criticism too often commit the kind of a priori criticism that Ronald Crane once labeled “the high priori road”: the author is predetermined to find this or that evidence for this or that ideological conviction, and when the evidence is found, as the author always can claim, the critical task is over, with little attention to whether the “found” evidence is really there or only invented by the hypothesis.

Genuine inquiry requires that the author openly consider more than one hypothesis about the thesis or topic or question. Again and again I find myself annoyed by articles presenting a plausible case for this or that point, but with not a hint about rival hypotheses or sound argument about why they don’t hold up.

Then, in the second letter, signing his own name:

There are moments when I fear that the future of criticism, like the future of our world, is doom-ridden. But the very existence of Critical Inquiry, with its many successes out there in that “world,” refutes my absurd pessimism. Keep up the good work.

Your admirer,
Wayne Booth, calmly and sincerely forgiving you for turning down his brilliant essay defending various forms of hypocrisy, including the perhaps silly coinage “hypocrisy upward.”

The roots of this sort of ironic cynicism are the subject of my big, fat mock-Platonic dialogue, "The Advantages and Disadvantages of Theory for Life" (PDF). Long-time readers have been exposed to this material in various incarnations but more recent acquaintances - Jonathan, McGruff, Amardeep - will perhaps be interested. I welcome your critical comments in particular. The dialogue is largely about Eagleton, who I see has been batted back and forth in comments. (And thanks to Ray for providing me with the nice Hazlitt quote many months back. The associated visual image might serve as a melancholy emblem for the MLA.)

The linked version is shorter than a version presently under consideration for publication at Arion though still very long (17,000 words). The whole thing's been in limbo for more than a year. Well, we'll see whether it finds a happy home. If I ever get around to fundamentally rewriting it, I'll probably try to drain off some of the bile.

Oh, and apparently our iBook lives and I can go pick it up tomorrow. (Belle was despondent when she got back from Bali and said 'where's the computer? I haven't read Josh Marshall in a week.' And I had to tell her the internets got cancelled.)

Mactastrophe

On Thursday night our new iMac began behaving a bit strangely, by Friday it was very sick indeed and I spent over an hour on the phone with AppleCare. By Saturday - when I shlepped it way out to the apple service centre - it was clearly in need of major hardware repair. Screen doing this sort of jaggy thing, like a DVD freezing up. Bizarre pixilations. Screen turns strange colors. Plaid (I don't know how else to describe it.) Salmon, blue, different shade of blue, black. (Like my computer thought it was showing me fabric samples.) Frequent freezes. Kernel panic. Whiny fan. Yeek. But of course I had 95% of the really important stuff - like iPhoto - backed up to the iBook. On Saturday night, the iBook dies. Just dies. I'm typing along. Then, not with a bang, not with a whimper, just went quietly into that good night. Like it went to sleep peacefully and didn't wake up. Nothing. Dead. I hope this is actually a good sign. A problem with the power connection not with the guts of the thing. Sigh. What are the odds that we go from being a two mac household to a none mac household in less than 36 hours? So now I'm at school on a Sunday night, working on my school iMac. (I've got all my academic work backed up to this machine, so none of that is lost.) I'm checking against two external HD's I use for back-up and realize, sadly, I've been relying on the redundancy of our two home machines and gotten lazy. If we are very unlucky and both machines are dead, we're out a year's worth of iPhoto family photos - but some of those got burned to CD; some of them. Maybe I'll beg the iMac back from the mac guys before they start work of it. It isn't dead, merely very very ill. Perhaps I can nurse data out of it in between the fabric sample displays and the kernel panics.

So pardon the light postings the last 36 hours.

UPDATE: Found iPhoto backups through July 2004! Crucial Violet baby pics! Now we just have to hope the whole 2004 holiday season is still lurking somewhere.

Oh, oh, all the robots an tied-up ladies!

Scribbling woman approves of our China Miéville seminar and she's got the funny links. So she gets a link. (The ladies prove there are at least eight stories.) Not to mention the PK Dick covers.

After visiting the Victorian Robots site I googled to find what was up with Boilerplate and found this. I must say, the thought that hadn't crossed my mind was that it was all true. Do you think it's a hoax that significant numbers of people actually believe that a site that purports to document a robot that fought with Teddy Roosevelt's roughriders isn't a hoax? (If so, then I believe Rich about those students that showed up in intro to astro thinking the moon and stars were just 'lights in the sky'.)

I just watched Fight Club and The Chronicles of Riddick back to back. (Wife and kids are off enjoying the beach.) Oddly, the two films harmonize. The counterpoint between all the manliness and the drastically undermotivated Project Mayhem, in the one case; the drastically undermotivated armada of Necromongers bound for Underverse in the other. I think if Chuck Palahniuk had done a rewrite of Riddick, something interesting might have emerged.

Clueless in Academe, Part II

I've reread Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe [see part I] and come away strongly confirmed in my initial impression that Graff is preoccupied with a much narrower band of the academic spectrum than his title suggests. That's not a big deal, and Graff more or less admits it in comments. But let me illustrate this point by way of moving on to something related and a bit more consequential. I will be quite critical but let me first thank prof. Graff for showing up so unexpectedly the first time and having a nice little discussion with us. He will be an exceptionally good sport if he puts up with it a second time.

Graff narrates a bit of autobiography: "I had classmates who excelled at schoolwork and would later have been called nerds, but these without exception were science or mathematics whizzes, technical geniuses rather than masters of argument or cultural analysis" (p. 215). The implication is that science, math - in general technical disciplines, e.g. logic - aren't concerned with argument. 'Arguing' is what one does in the liberal arts, in places like English departments. I am sure Graff will say this was just a silly slip if he shows up in comments again. I quote it as symptomatic of the degree to which - while apparently discussing 'argument' - Graff is in fact focusing on something quite narrow: the crisis of what counts as an argument in literary studies. At other points similar confusions about scope lead to serious confusion.

The Intentional Fallacy?

A policy should not mean/But be?

This Arnold Kling TCS column seems peculiarly New Critical.

In the essay for Economists' Voice, Krugman makes even more aggressive accusations about the motives of supporters of privatization. My view is that these Type M arguments are of questionable value even in a newspaper column. I was shocked and somewhat dismayed to find them in an essay supposedly written for a peer-reviewed professional journal.

My view is that one ought to try to analyze Social Security proposals on their merits. It is important not to become so blinded by partisanship that one loses sight of the consequences of policy.

Kling's dichotomy between arguments about consequences and arguments about motives makes no sense unless we are willing to assume that motives never have consequences. Drawing out the absurdity from a different angle, policy-making is a negotiation process. Who thinks the way to be an effective negotiator is to pay no attention to what the other party wants? That, in fact, a negotiator who considers the other side's motives is, effectively, 'blinded'. I am sure Kling is not such a mooncalf as to believe this odd thing his column implies.

[I promised a follow-up to my Graff post below. It's still in the works. In the meantime, you should go read Daniel Green's thoughts in response to Amardeep. Oh, and check out Crooked Timber tonight. We have a little literary critical event in the works, of which we are rather proud.]

UPDATE: Henry scooped me by over a year, turns out.

Canggu

No blogging from me for a week, as I am going here, with the girls and my mom. Yay. John and I were discussing whether I should take the portable, and I was like, "if I spend one minute reading TPM when I could be boogie-boarding on Canggu beach, I would be a moron." I trust you all agree...

Koufax? Little old me?

Hey, I'm nominated for a Koufax for Best Writing! I am in very honorable company, I would say. I will be honored to be beaten to a pulp by James Wolcott, I figure. Since I have occasionally griped that literary studies is under-represented in blogging - which I think it is - it is probably fair to note that Michael Bérubé is another Best Writing nominee. (Even though mostly he blogs about politics and hockey, which is fine. Except for the hockey.) Feel free to vote Holbo so that Wolcott doesn't bury me too badly.

I'm voting for Yglesias, I think.

Late Nite MLA Notes

I finally got around to thinking about Richard Byrne's Chron piece on the MLA. (Henry posted about it at CT. And Scott "no permalinks" McLemee correctly notes it's a hell of a lot more interesting than that damn NYT piece.) This will relate to my Graff post below but mostly I'm just reading and taking quick notes:

Mr. Scholes's presidential speech, "The Humanities in a Post-Humanist World," was equally damning. Tracing divergent critiques of the humanities from Mr. Guillory, Mr. Eagleton, and the critic George Steiner, Mr. Scholes argued that they agreed on one point: The humanities' "renunciation of responsibility" has led to "a loss of authority and respect." He argued that the humanities should resist the temptation to label texts as "sacred" and return to an emphasis on promulgating methods of interrogating literature, which he called "the roots of our enterprise.

TypePad/MT bleg

I have a tech bleg; also a request for aesthetic judgment concerning page design.

Carla Hills

I am interested to see that my friend Lisa's mom, Carla Hills, is mentioned as a possible sucessor to Wolfensohn at the World Bank. That would be cool, because she is awesome. She's formidable; as a teenager I was scared of her. Well, maybe I'm still a little scared now. She did the negotiating for NAFTA as US Trade rep in the Bush I administration (though it was actually enacted under Clinton), and served as HUD Secretary under Ford.  She and her husband also helped found swanky law firm Munger, Tolles and Olson, where their amazingly cool son-in-law now works, much to their satisfaction (hi Kelly!). More pertinent to our teenage life was Roderick Hills' service on the board of Anheuser-Busch, something which led to a lot of fine malt beverage products coming our way in those dry, not yet legal drinking age days. Shit, I hope Carla doesn't read my blog. Forget I said that.

Phobias

Hilarious thread over at Obsidian Wings about phobias. I was interested to learn that so many other people can't stand to watch embarassment. As a kid I found sitcoms agonizing for this reason, and I still do. I also learned that Edward is afraid of whales, hilzoy is not afraid of skinned donkey heads, and Sebastian Holsclaw has had the flesh-eating bacteria. Me too, dude! No one seems to share my peculiar phobia of certain arrangements of forms that suggest pustules or bubbles (although the nightmare about the broccoli-like growth comes close). Sometimes poison ivy gets this awful bubbling redness on its leaves, as it it were poisoning itself. I can't look at it. Or into pots of still water which are about to boil, and have a regular arrangement of small bubbles across the interior, each silvery with its reflection of the ceiling. It's a real problem for me taking the bus anywhere in Malaysia, because I can't stand the way the fruiting bodies of palm oil palms look: all these sinister red gleaming berries emerging from a woody cone. Gives me the cold robbies just to think about it. There are lots of palm oil plantations in Malaysia. I have to look elsewhere and hope for rubber plantations. It's really tiring being crazy sometimes.

Mr. and Mrs. T Bloody Mary Mix

This is a visual aid to my CT post:

Clicketty-Clack

Ogged's post has got me thinking about trains. I got mad love for the train. I used to take it often between NYC and Savannah, and all the time between DC and NY. The latter is a more ho-hum experience, though still nice. You get to see the burnt out ass end of every town in New Jersey on the train. It's cool. Going down to Savannah on the Silver Star, though? That's class. When I was a kid we used to get the sleepers, back when Union Station in DC was, in what must have been the nadir of 70s civic mismanagement, entirely confined to the basement, and resembled a poorly maintained bus station in Bulgaria. Like, the run-down part of communist-era Bulgaria. But still, even when there were 6-hour delays and nothing to eat but dusty inedibles from the snack machine (SNACKS! it beckoned, in faded 50's space-age typography, the bare bulb having worn its way through the plastic) -- still, the train rocked. Tucked up tight in your bunk, like a book on a shelf, listening to the train sounds...when I was little I read some 30's girls' adventure book, in which the heroine's journey out West was rhythymically underlined, "clicketty-clack to  Uncle Jack, clicketty-clack to Uncle Jack." Later, I used to make special train mix tapes, including songs such as the Stones "Silver Train" (actually about that route!) and "Hey Porter". "When we hit Dixie would you/Tell the engineer/To ring his bell/And tell everybody that ain't asleep/To stand right up and yell." I used to make special train food, because the food in the snacks car sucks. The best: cold fried chicken, devilled eggs, ham sandwiches on homemade white bread. You can make a lot of friends on the train when you bust out the cold fried chicken. Riding this route made me realize to what extent black people who moved North during the great migration retain ties to their ancestral hometown of Yemassee or whatever. Riding down at the beginning of the summer you always got a crop of sullen teens being sent down south to have some sense beat into them by Gramma on her tobacco farm. They were damn polite on the way back in August.

Clueless In Academe, part I

UPDATE: Amardeep has a long post up in response. (Since I don't have time to write part II yet, go read what he has to say.)

I'm working up a little something (but never you mind about that.) I think it might do me good to work up to it via close readings of parts of Gerald Graff's Clueless In Academe. I just realized that chapter 1 is available online . That's convenient. Let's have a little seminar, shall we? I remember Timothy Burke said he quite liked Graff's book. I don't, but I don't hate it. I think a lot of it is right, but in a sort of 'I already knew that' way. Some of it seems absurdly wrong, but in a sort of diagnostically useful way. And the man makes a few good points. I think it will be useful to discuss, especially since there may be a momentarily generous collective mood to the effect that MLA bashing has gone about as far as it can go, and then some. Let us take advantage of this spot of sunshine.

A few groundrules.

1) Let's be civil, but no need to carry it to excess. (The occasional twinkle of sarcasm and superiority is fine. No need to forego necessities.) But:

2) Don't be excessively snarky in your attacks on literary studies. (Yes, I know, I know. But only Nixon could go to China. Perhaps this is my destiny.) So:

3) Don't be absurdly thin-skinned in your defenses of literary studies. (I am linking not to accuse the post in question but to say I agree, in case that isn't perfectly obvious.)

I've basically come around to the view that what whither literary studies? studies needs most is an unusually heavy dose of utter frankness. Everyone should say what they think everything is worth, how everything presently stands, honestly. No whistling past the graveyard. No hiding the pea under the other cup. No feigning excess shock and horror. No pretending you think your opponent hates and fears the truth, or else is locked into a shame-spiral with the truth. Even if it's fun to pretend that.

It sounds naive, I know, to suggest that if everyone would just be frank we might even budge an inch. I'm not suggesting we will all turn out to agree. But as it stands the attacks tend to tip over into broken record jeremiads of the cultural apocalypse. The defenses tend to hyperventilate into ludicrously uncritical puff pieces. Putting it another way, I do feel that there is presently a sort of 'who's going to give in first?' dynamic, where 'giving in' would mean: being reasonable. Critics of literary studies are used to having their prima facie reasonable criticisms ostentatiously ignored rather than seriously debated. Defenders are used to being abused and mocked. (Not that I am saying there has been equal wrong on both sides. Just that - looking forward - it would be better to cut it all round, no matter who started it. Declare a general amnesty for past culture war crimes.)

Oh, and 4) if you want to participate, please consider reading the Graff, so as to be able to discuss. (I do hope the effect of laying down these conditions is not the sound of crickets chirping in the comment box.)

Happy New Year!

Thanks, whoever ordered four spanking new LaCie terabyte drives! (I'm assuming one person bought all four. What do you need that space for, mystery reader?) Thanks also to the new owners of various moderately pricey DVD collections. Our little Amazon fundraiser has now raised US $338 + the $100 Belle and I donated. Plus guestimated stuff to ship. I hope we manage to hit $1000 by Feb 1. That would be a very handsome sum.

Give generously to the charity of your choice. When you are done: if you were going to buy anyway, consider buying through our handy Amazon search box. Help those in need. Tonight I was very proud to write out a check to the Singapore Red Cross for $S850.00 (US $518.)

Cute kid pics under the fold. Ours are happy and healthy. This New Year we are grateful for that blessing.