John & Belle Have A Blog

If You Love 40 Degrees And Rainy So Much, Why Don't You Marry It

Will Baude is crazy. He's smart, and funny, but he's clearly crazy. I know he's trying to be contrary (or "aintry", as we say in my family), but he has actually listed in his "things that your friends/peers are crazy about but you say 'eh...'" list, the following:

Sunshine. Friends of Crescat know I like my days 40 degrees and raining. Lately I have begun to be a bit more pluralist-- winter would not be complete without a few thick snowfalls, and I will tolerate some nice 60 degree rainy days in the summer. This year, for the first time, I have decided that sunshine is affirmatively nice. Nice, not thrilling, but nice.

40 degrees and raining? I'm sorry, but that is only the absolute worst fucking weather in the whole world. Warm and raining? You can dance around in the rain, pretending to be a stoned elf or whatever: good laughs. Crisp and cool, with a cobalt autumn sky, and the bare branches reaching up? Also nice. But 40 and raining, that's just the pits. You get wet, and then you are uncomfortably cold. I used to have to wait for this bus in this weather all winter in Washington D.C. You can't wear any nice clothes, or any cool shoes, and you have to either freeze or shlump around Pacific Northwest-style in Gore-Tex, looking like a great big puffy-ass nerd. Well, OK, you can rock some combat boots, but wet steel-toed boots aren't so great. Your toes get cold and white and shrivelled like albino prunes in there, plus they get to smelling funky at the end of the day. 40 and raining? It. Is. The. Worst.

I will grant that if you stipulate that you're inside by a fire, reading, or maybe watching a thrilling football game, there can be a certain pleasure in 40 degrees and raining. However, if we peer into the roots of this pleasure, we will see it derives from a hidden schadenfreude: the implicit contrast between you, toasty and warm, possibly even drinking cognac; and person x, suffering the pains inherent in the 40 degrees and raining day--this contrast is the engine of your pleasure, humming along like another little bilious fire. Compare this to the sweetly democratic joys of a sunny day! Will Baude is a weather elitist!

And not liking sunshine? I don't know, I almost think he's just jerking our chains here, but he seemed to be serious about the meta-desire to not like ketchup, so it's hard to say. I refer you to the song "Sunshine", by Ramp. "Folks get down in the sunshine/Folks turn brown in the sunshine." That's some of the world's finest rare groove right there. No one can argue with that. I feel chagrined, as I am fond of him, but there is nothing I can say to Mr. Baude but, "move to Seattle, you big hippie."

UPDATE: An over-zealous Typepad has cruelly denied Will Baude the ability to post comments, probably on account of his black, rain-lovin' heart. Here are his foiled entries:

1. I'm really not joking. Now that I have to carry my laptop to and from campus every day, I do have a new appreciation for dry days, but my bag is pretty waterproof so it's not that big of a deal.  It's just so much more energizing when the rain is nice and cold.

2. Carlos:  No wonder you don't like 40 and raining if you're wearing an overcoat!  Scorn outer shells, and let yourself get soaked to the bone.  That should refresh.

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

The ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct! This is great! (via Obsidian Wings.) Actually some bird-watchers near my dad's place in South Carolina saw one in the early 70's, on land owned by the local paper company (Union Bag). Word got around very quickly about what they had seen, and the paper company clear cut the whole area within a few days. No birds, no problem! Ah, capitalism. (Libertarians are free to chime in in comments and explain about how if the government didn't impose costs on landowners with its illegal, "takings"-clause-violatin' ways, this never would have happened. Damn you the gummint!)

Tunes

This is so very, very fucked up. Can Todd "I Heart Recently Passed Bankruptcy Legislation" Zywicki and I possibly have this much in common? Here is his list of then ten best songs by one-hit-wonder bands:

Here's my partial list, in no particular order (yeah, I know some of them are kind of corny):
1. "Dancin' in the Moonlight" by King Harvest
2. "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" by Looking Glass
3. "Stuck in the Middle with You" by Stealers Wheel
4. "Go All the Way" by The Raspberries
5. "Sunshine" by Jonathan Edwards
6. "Green-Eyed Lady" by Sugarloaf

Now, it's silly to even imply that "Stuck in the Middle With You" has lacked exposure, given the whole "Reservoir Dogs" thang that happened a ways back. But, "Brandy"? I fucking love that song. When I used to have a bar that I ruled with an iron fist, "Brandy" was my signature song, along with The Commodores' "Brick House" "Machine Gun", and Carlos Santana's "Everything's Coming Our Way." The bartender gave me special override power on the jukebox so I could up my songs to the front. Also, I love the Raspberries. My favorite is "Overnight Sensation", but still. Are Todd and I , like, s33krit soul twinz, or is he liking this music in a different way, or...C'mon, people; this is eating me up inside. We're talking about Todd Zywicki, alleged libertarian/corporate shill supreme!

 

Books

OK, so, we definitely don't have enough shelves. And, I left lit crit for last and now there's all this $%#@%^ Stanley Fish piled up on top of the graphic novels shelf, which doesn't seem like a long-term solution. (Though it might promote healthy reading habits in John. He's look at the forbiddingly cheerful blue spine of Is There A Text In This Class?, and then he'd notice all those issues of Alias down there, and then...) Also, I bought five books today: Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate; Naomi, by Junichiro Tanizaki; Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, by Gao Xingjian; R.K. Narayan's The Guide, and Miss Marple's Final Cases, by Agatha Christie. I've read the Golden Gate before. It seems like just yesterday I was thinking, why do I have all these damn Agatha Christie novels, when they aren't actually good? Maybe I have a problem. On the plus side, I got some really cheap, nice, blue-and-white Chinese porcelain jars to hold the books up where I left the empty spaces. You know, in case we ever get more books, later. Sometime.

The Young Spindrifteers

I'm reading that 40's Boy's Adventure book Belle picked up. The Phantom Shark, a Rick Blane electronic adventure, by John Blaine. So I figure google will have a few hits. Great phantom narwhal disporting! Is there nothing that doesn't have it's own fansite? Soon every object in the universe will have its own Cafe Press product line.

Chapter 1:

Rick Brant was aware that events frequently hang on small, obscure incidents, but he had no idea that a mental image of his sister Barby holding an envelope to the light, trying to see what was in it, would eventually lead to one of the most unusual adventures of his young life.

It began in Washington, D.C. Rick, Don Scott, Hartson Brant and Hobart Zircon, two of the Spindrift scientists, were preparing to return to Spindrift, the island laboratory and home of the Brandts off the New Jersey coast.

The Whispering Box Mystery had been solved, to the entire satisfaction of the scientists, the boys, and the United States government. The Spindrifters were tired. For weeks they had raced against time to create a counterweapon for the Whispering Box.

While they waited for final word that the case was closed, Rick read them a letter from Barby, his pretty blond sister.

Other nice sentences in the first couple pages:

Little Julius Weiss, the mathematics genius of the Spindrift group, leaned forward.

Rick was proud of his sister. In situations where most girls would be a burden, she could more than hold her own.

His name, he said in wonderfully bad English, was Henri. He pronounced it 'On-ree'.

Do you agree that French is just wonderfully bad English? If not, what is it exactly?

I'm having sort of indifferent luck with Barbie/Barby-based fiction these days. Maybe I should try to cut down.

Books

I've been on a spring cleaning binge recently. Ever since we moved from our other apartment 4 years ago our books have been "all scrongled up", as Zoë would say. So, today I took them all off the shelves and washed the shelves and went on an alphabetizing/categorizing binge. These things are often difficult. Pure alphabetization has some allure, but then there are many books about which you only know the topic, which are utterly lost under such a scheme. I settled for alphabetization within divisions which included: novels and poems; non-fiction; philosophy; literary criticism; texts in greek; texts in latin; translations; mysteries; science-fiction and fantasy; dictionaries and reference books; cookbooks; and travel books. This was as good as I could manage, but I faced some problems. Can it really be right that the novels of Iain Banks should be shelved utterly separately from those of Iain M. Banks? Especially as it seems I am now stipulating that The Bridge is not a work of fantasy? Also, I am looking at some Mervyn Peake here...um, OK, the fantasy shelf. I put Stanislaw Lem in the novel shelf, but maybe he should be in the science-fiction/fantasy shelf? Lewis Carroll? Umm. We have a separate children's shelf, but... Also, am I really about to stick some T.E. Lawrence in the non-fiction shelf? Aww, fuck. Let's just say things are much better organized than they were in the past. The truly funny thing happened when I went down to the auntie's shop with Zoë after a day of complaining about how many books we have. There were a few books for sale in a cardboard box for 50 cents. Awesome! I got Cold Comfort Farm (how can it be that the list of phrases unique to CCF (little green parlour, cletter the dishes, little mop, thorn twig, hired girl) does not include "I saw summat nasty in the woodshed"?), some crazy boys' novel from the 40's (an "electronic adventure!"), and a Perry Mason novel which I knew would absolutely suck, on account of they all do. The discordant nature of my purchases didn't strike me at all until I got home and John was like, yeah, we need more books. But...Just to make it all better I was listening to the Moore Brothers: "shelving books/that no one ever reads." Although, I was thinking instead "why have I read all these damn books?"

Pweminger!

Zoë's new favorite movie is Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper. (The author is 'Mattel'. For purposes of the Berne Convention.) It's not as bad as you might think. When Zoë and I play Barbie now, I have to be the villain - Preminger! (now why that name?) Preminger is the Evil Advisor to the Queen, Princess Barbie's mom. Zoë's critical assessment: Pweminger is nawt a vewy good adwisor. Being Preminger means imitating Martin Short's vocal talents. Zoë says I sound just like him. I think she was sort of impressed. I do not find it a very challenging role: a sort of pained, mincing malice as I am thwarted in my attempts to take over the kingdom, which in the end is saved from bankruptcy by conversion to a geode-based economy. (No, really.) Princess Barbie being a bit of a geology whiz. We don't usually get to economics before Zoë calls down the whole Justice League, with Super Zoë in command, on my poor head. I have one musical number, "How Can I Refuse?" My feelings exactly. Zoë didn't like Barbie - Fairytopia nearly as well. I'm holding out for the remake of the Lord Dunsany classic, Barbie As The King of Elftopia's Daughter. Maybe they can stretch it into a quadrilogy somehow.

It's Violet's Birthday!!!

Well, today was kinda hectic, as it was Violet's birthday (yay!), and I had to track down a vet in Singapore that would see birds, and the washing machine broke, and I had to cook food for 20 people for a party tomorrow. Violet was extra-cute and excited today, almost as if she knew it was her birthday. In addition to "mama", "pappa", and  "bub-bub" (that's nursing to you), she can also say "hi", "hello", "bye-bye" and "yeah." She says all these things in an inexpressibly cute and gentle way. She wakes up and sits up in bed, trying to rub her face off, and then looks around to see everyone. She beams with her goofy teeth and says "hiiii", really quietly.
On the Birdy-Birdy front, she actually has a fungal infection, which has been exacerbated by a bacterial infection as she scratched off her feathers. Soooo, I have to do the following two things twice a day: hold her still and daub anti-fungal cream on her painful raw areas (but not too much! She might eat it and die!). And, feed her a tiny amount of antibiotics. And it might take four weeks. Sigh. I guess these are the wages of pet-ownership, but damn, she ain't going to like this much. On the plus side. she's a a very tame bird and doesn't freak out as bad as she might.

Birdy-Birdy Is Sick

I'm feeling pretty pissed off at our local bird store. They sold us a canary which, as I explained to them, I was purchasing for my daughter's Christmas gift, and gave me the following instructions: put seven pages of newsprint down, and take one off each day, and clean the cage 1 x per week. Feed her seed and water every day, and give her a piece of fruit every day. Period. (They said "apple", but I had been varying it at my own discretion). She was a lovely bird, and a beautiful singer. I noticed that she was losing feathers under her chin last week, and decided to look online about what might be happening. I thought, OK, she's molting. All the sites I checked, though, wanted me to be feeding her extra protein, as well as grit and cuttlebone. And I was supposed to have been doing that all along. What? So I went back to the dudes at abc birdstore and they said, "oh, yeah, molting, here's some vitamins." Meanwhile she's getting worse and worse and I see her scratching her feathers off to a nub. A little more research yields the conclusion that she has mites, and that she needs to bathe; I put water in her cage but she's not interested. Not singing, listless; this is one sick bird. I asked John to stop by the bird store today and get us some mite spray and another cage to put her in while I disinfect the primary one, and they give him a whole long lecture about how he's a bad petowner and she's needed to be transferred to a bathing cage every week and the primary cage doused in Dettol and blah blah blah. Fucking bastards. I really don't understand. There I was, the willing customer; if they had told me she needed caviar to survive, I would have been like, OK, extra cage, caviar, what else? On top of that, I realize now that her nails are really too long and it's making it hard for her to be stable on the perch, and tiring her out even more. As John said: they run a bird store. If they don't care either about birds or about making money, then what are they up to? I just hope the poor thing doesn't die. Grrr.

God Has a Lot More in Common With Ludacris Than I Had Been Lead To Believe

Sadly No! puts the smack down on some Christian teen mag. It's teh funny:

In the end, you must ask yourself, Would piercing my belly button bring honor to God?

Probably not, but I doubt He really cares all that much. I mean, can you see God going down His checklist after you die and saying, "Well, you faithfully attended church every week, you were a loyal wife and mother for forty years, and you ran several local charities to help out the homeless. Buuuuuuut, you got a belly button ring when you were fifteen, so I have to send you to hell. Oh, and one more thing: YOOOOOOOOUZA HOOOOOOOOO!"

I also learned something else; did you know that fundamentalist Christians shouldn't braid their hair, or wear gold or pearls? Check it out:

"In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array."
Timothy 2:9

Actually, it seems like Orthodox Jews are on the hook, too. Do they really not ever wear gold? I guess the whole wig thing makes the braids moot.

 

The Economist

I suppose everyone knows, but I've shifted the bulk of my posting over the The Valve. I probably won't be posting here much in the near future.

OK, one thing. We used to have a subscription to the "Economist" so we got the print version and read it regularly. But that stopped so we stopped. Belle picked up a copy off the rack couple weeks ago. The April 2nd issue. Old news now, but I sat down to read it, like old times. It's so soothing. Every major story has either the 'there are dark clouds on the horizon but there's a silver lining' structure; or 'it looks like a golden age, but there are dark clouds of the horizon' structure. It's comforting to know that, however bad it gets, there will always only be those two major stories, although small items and book reviews may deviate. Plus always with the Scottish devolution. I wouldn't know a thing about it without the "Economist". OK, here's the thing. Isn't it silly the way in which the "Economist" incorporates into its articles not just conservative talking points but American right wing-nut talking-points that are totally at odds with the paper's reality-based philosophy and outlook?  From an article about radical Islam in the Netherlands: "What nobody knows is whether the new political right will succeed in persuading the Dutch - and indeed other Europeans - to embrace a new sort of politics which, like its American counterparts, puts strong emphasis on values and principles rather than expediency and compromise." The party of values? Surely no sane person - including sane Republicans - regards that as anything but a tattered banner left over from the lately concluded election. You don't use electoral slogans as premises in serious arguments. From an article about the filibuster 'go nuclear or no?' issue: "More generally, the American right's declared aim is to replace retiring "activist liberal" judges, such as those who sanction gay marriage, with those who interpret the constitution in a less cavalier way." You could interpret that generously, as an extended bit of implied indirect quotation, if it weren't for the scare quotes that open and then close before they get to the end of the scary bit. I suppose it's a sign of my steady leftward drift that I now read the "Economist" and frequently guffaw, whereas once I read the "Economist" and frequently disagreed.

What's Rocking iTunes?

Friday songlist:
1. Little Wing/Jimi Hendrix
2. Dream Lover/Santo and Johnny
3. Venerdi/Articolo 31
4. Blue Jean Blues/ZZ Top
5. Getting Down Into Somethin'/Bo Barack's Excursionists
6. Never You Mind/Maynard Ferguson
7. Sexy M.F./Prince
8. 1977/The Clash
9. On The Lake/Bent
10. Baltimore/The Tamlins

Corn and Mango Sauté

I realize that this is probably seasonally inappropriate for most of our readers, but maybe you can bookmark it for a later date if you don't live in Singapore or California...
6 ears fresh corn
2 T unsalted butter
100g thick-cut bacon, blanched (i.e., submerged in boiling water for a minute or so, then drained) and diced
8 shallots, minced
3 T maple syrup
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 T minced cilantro
1 large ripe mango, diced (use the imported mexican kind that is shaped like a flattened paisley and turns yellow when ripe, not the fat green-and-red kind)

1. In a large bowl, cut kernels from corn, then run flat side of the knife over the cobs to release remaining corn.
2. Melt butter in heavy saucepan, then fry blanched bacon till almost crisp. Add shallots and cook till softened.
4. Add corn and maple syrup; cook for 4 minutes over medium heat. Salt and pepper to taste.
5. Stir in diced mango and cilantro.
This goes very well with grilled foods. ("Do I really have to blanch the bacon", you ask? Yes.) This recipe is adapted from Perla Meyers' fine "Spur of the Moment Cooking"; I'll tell you more about it later.

Seven

Very funny. (via scribblingwoman.)

The Christian Turn In Theory

Adam Kotsko links to articles by Roland Boer in Cutural Logic and Paul Griffiths in First Things. Both are about the Christian turn in Theory. Eagleton is the main subject, but Griffiths adds Badiou and Zizek to the mix. Adam says he finds Boer "much more insightful".

The Griffiths article turns out to be coated with a thin slick of condescension, fore and aft. I ask Adam: do you have intellectual objections to the article, subtracting the 'but of course they want to be like us, only they never will' tone? I don't see that this faint assumption of spiritual superiority - milder than any performance Eagleton or Zizek has ever managed, if it comes to that - actually interferes with the exposition. Does Griffiths get anyone patently, embarrassingly wrong? His piece seems to me a reasonable, not uncharitable take on Zizek and Eagleton's relation to Christianity. (I don't know Badiou.) If there are gross errors, I want to know. I think both linked articles are solid and interesting, each in its way.

Adam might be saying just that the Boer piece, which is longer, digs deeper. I'd have to agree.

I find it interesting to hear that Eagleton apparently has difficulties with the basic outlines of Kierkegaard's take on the Abraham and Isaac story. Since this was the burden of my Phil & Lit critique of Zizek - namely, he has the dubious distinction of conflating Kierkegaard and utilitarianism - this is interesting to me. Boer writes of Eagleton's treatment: "a profound slippage has taken place in the focus on Abraham: he is not the sacrifice but the one who offers up a sacrifice, Isaac. However, Eagleton insists in taking Abraham as the centre of this story, the one who makes the impossible sacrifice." So in both cases - Zizek and Eagleton - there is a confused attempt to understand Kierkegaardian faith as a kind of rational altruism. That will not do.

Still more interesting is the stuff on the personality cult, which I agree with. I think everything wrong with Eagleton's style rotates around his bad habits in this area. He is a thinker who always thinks he knows the answer. It is just a question of finding a way of impressing it on others with sufficient force to make a difference. He is an activist, not an inquirer. Well, I won't go into it.

I don't understand Boer's conclusion at all. Any of it.

My preferred approach is to take up Adorno's strategy and seek the possibility of pushing the move from theology to politics to its dialectical extreme. In this respect, one can engage with theology only through such a move. Or, to gloss Marx, a fully materialist theology can emerge once the process from the criticism of heaven to the criticism of earth, from politics to theology has run its course. But all of this assumes the prior status of theology itself. So here I want to invoke the second way in which theology may become a conversation partner: rather than deal with the problem of how we are to negotiate the theological history of terms now used in political context, might it not be the case that the theological filling of these terms is but a temporary moment. What I mean here is that the terms themselves may in fact have a deeper, non-theological meaning. Theology then becomes a moment in their history, one that does not necessarily claim priority.

Will someone please explain to me what this says? I can make neither heads nor tails.

Death Solves All Problems

I thought that conservatives weren't actually serious about this whole destroy the nation's judiciary thing. I was wrong.

Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny" decided that [Supreme Court Justics Anthony] Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse.

Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said Kennedy's opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles "is a good ground of impeachment." To cheers and applause from those gathered at a downtown Marriott for a conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith," Schlafly said that Kennedy had not met the "good behavior" requirement for office and that "Congress ought to talk about impeachment."...

 
 

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem."...

Vieira, a constitutional lawyer who wrote "How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary," escalated the charges, saying a Politburo of "five people on the Supreme Court" has a "revolutionary agenda" rooted in foreign law and situational ethics. Vieira, his eyeglasses strapped to his head with black elastic, decried the "primordial illogic" of the courts.

Invoking Stalin, Vieira delivered the "no man, no problem" line twice for emphasis. "This is not a structural problem we have; this is a problem of personnel," he said. "We are in this mess because we have the wrong people as judges."

They aren't kidding, folks. And who better to invoke in the fight against Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries than old Iosef himself? Certainly, no one else has ever killed more of them...

Fuddy-Duddy Email

A curious note from the (print edition of) the Economist:

...many young South Koreans would be bemused by mobile devices with keyboards, such as the BlackBerry, which is popular with businesspeople in America for keeping up with their e-mail. The South Koreans already have handsets which can do this, but they do not think e-mail is particularly cool, and they do not like the spam that comes with it. They prefer to send text messages, which are more immediate and are certain to be delivered instantly. South Koreans in their teens and 20s increasingly look on e-mail as an old and formal means of communication, according to one study. "You would exchange e-mails with your bosses, but not your friends," says a young South Korean marketing assistant.

The reliability of the article is presumptively undercut by its later reference to The Matrix Reloaded as "a cult movie", but it's interesting nonetheless.

More kid photoblogging

Rated G, for grandparent. Contains incidental, mild physical comedy.

Skroothy-Toothoes

Violet (aka MeiMei) has the silliest-looking teeth right now. One on the top, and one on the bottom. The one on the top is like a huge retarded corn kernel pushing through her gums. I've been trying to get the perfect shot to show my mom, and today I suceeded. More cuteness below the fold.

Old Wives: Sometimes Totally Right

I learned something the other day that I really, really should have known already. You know how bread recipes say to let the dough rise in a warm, draft-free place? I had always figured it was so hot and steamy here in Singapore that I didn't need to worry too much about the draft thing, and anyway it's under a kitchen towel, right? Now would probably be the time to mention that as we are on the 19th floor, facing the straits, in a long apartment open at both ends for maximum airflow...well, it's pretty windy. Damn windy, even. When I made bread most recently, it was Sunday, so we had the air conditioner on in the whole apartment (you may not see the connection, but Tena's day off is Sunday, and we don't put the AC on when she's here because it makes her room airless. I bought her her own window unit and we're getting it installed next week. Anyway.) Since it was cool inside (for a change) I put the bread to rise out on Tena's balcony with the windows closed. It turns out that the whole "draft-free" thing is actually an important part of the equation. That bread rose like gangbusters. It doubled in size in like 45 minutes. It was light and fluffy and tasty. Live and learn, I guess. John's sardonic comment: "what, did you think someone was shilling for the draft-free council of America or something?" Is that really what you should say to someone who just made you homemade bread? Ah, well, if I didn't want someone to be making wisecracks at me all the time, I shouldn't have married John Holbo. That's just common sense!

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Follow-up to last night's post. I have said one thing that is peculiar about Zizek is how little he engages with liberalism, either as philosophical theory or (one might say) as actually existing liberalism. And when he does engage with liberalism, the things he says often seem to me straightforwardly mistaken (i.e. so wrong that they probably aren't even seriously intended. Just rhetorical flourishes.) Jodi Dean says no, he has serious things to say about liberalism. Here she links to a couple of her papers. But she has a post up that seems to me to show she isn't sufficiently familiar with philosophical debates about liberalism to be a good judge. She went to a talk and took this away as an argument against it:

The nutshell version is an is to ought problem: you can't get from the is of conflicting values to the ought of a duty to recognize and accomodate the conflict.

I can imagine how this point - commonly deployed in arguments about relativism - can move you in various potentially interesting directions. Admittedly, I wasn't at the talk. But Dean says that "even this crude version is compelling." Against liberalism? How so? 

Everything He Touches, Turns to Ass

Did you ever have that "must kill the president" feeing? I had that, today.

In a cost-cutting move prompted by President Bush's moon-Mars initiative, NASA could summarily put an end to Voyager, the legendary 28-year mission that has sent a spacecraft farther from Earth than any object ever made by humans.

The probable October shutdown of a program that currently costs $4.2 million a year has caused consternation among scientists who have shepherded the twin Voyager probes on flybys of four planets and an epic journey to the frontier of interstellar space.

$4.2 million??!! Why doesn't NASA just team up with BoingBoing and various Trek fans and raised the monty themselves? And how in god's name does a budget with billions of dollars of wiggle room for Iraq come up short when it comes to Voyager? FUCKING VOYAGER, people! Grr, growl, etc.

Zizek Again

Clive James writes a letter to the LRB, criticizing that Zizek passage we worried, terrier-like.

Telling us how ‘the “pure” liberal attitude’ of finding Fascism and Communism ‘both bad’ is ‘a priori false’, he leaves, to those of us who think that they were indeed both bad, the task of fighting off the imputation that we are either impure liberals or that liberalism is impure in itself. He should be encouraged to put away his inverted commas until he can use them responsibly. In his very next sentence he even uses them against himself: ‘It is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally “worse” than Communism.’ Unless ‘worse’ means worse, the sentence means nothing. If it means what it would mean without the inverted commas, then there is a simple answer: it isn’t necessary. Without the slightest bow to Ernst Nolte, you can take sides against both of the totalitarianisms put together. In fact you can’t be a liberal if you don’t.

There a bit more. You can read it.

Mark Kaplan's having none of it. Here's where he ends up:

For the Liberal both fascism and communism are equally distant from the only yardstick that matters, Liberal democracy. Because they are equally distant they must, logic goes, be the same, at least in the essentials. ‘Totalitarian’ is thus a way of giving name and consistency to this ‘sameness’. We are dealing with a kind of interpretive error in which the Identity between two things is merely a function of the device used for measuring them. Now since this is an error of method it is, indeed, a priori false, because any ‘empirical evidence’ will simply feed into and consolidate this error*.

But of course, none of this can be conceded. There is an insistence that Zizek should speak their language and make himself intelligible to them, but that they are under absolutely no obligation to extend any interpretive generosity to his language at all, but only question why, inexplicably, he has chosen that language.

[*I am neither agreeing nor disageeing here, merely trying to interpret, generously, Zizek's argument]

No matter who wins, we lose

This WSJ editorial is a piece of work. Is it really necessary to be wrong about all of culture and capitalism, just so you can be wrong about filesharing? I love the casual shinkick against judicial activism followed directly by unusually crude advocacy of it. Please deliver a distributed drubbing in comments, if inclined. (Link via A&L Daily.)

I'm going to watch "Alien vs. Predator" instead. I have a scholarly interest, I assure. I taught "Alien" last semester and read quite a bit about the - ahem (cough, cough) - Quadrilogy. What do you think: how bad is AVP? Is it worse than the WSJ editorial, for example? How can one decide a thing like that?

UPDATE: Wow, that AVP thing made no more sense than the WSJ thing.

Leek and Ham Pie

I've always shied away from pre-made pie crusts, on the grounds that it's not that hard to make one from scratch. But tonight I used one with great results (and both of my children were vomiting and having high fevers. So it must be really easy. Not to, like, put you off your feed or anything. Just forget I said anything).

Leek and Ham Pie

1 pkt frozen short crust, in a block
8-12 slender leeks, cut lengthwise and chopped, white and light green parts only
3 T olive oil
3/4 c heavy cream
2 eggs
100g thinly sliced ham, chopped
100 g Stilton or other blue cheese, chopped
salt and pepper

1. Defrost the pastry for 2 hours. Put leeks in a salad spinner with plenty of warm water; wash well, changing water several times.
2. Preheat oven to 175 C. Roll pastry out on a floured board. Put in a tart pan with removable base, prick all over. Fill pan with aluminum foil and pie weights or raw rice or dried beans. Bake 15 minutes and remove to rack. Remove foil and let cool.
3. Meanwhile, fry drained leeks in oil for 15 minutes or so, till well wilted down.
4. Mix heavy cream, eggs, ham, and cheese; mix well, and salt and pepper heavily. Add leeks. Pour into crust.
5. Bake 30-35 minutes, till well browned on top. Serve with mushrooms sauteed with garlic, parsely and tomato, and a green salad.

I saw another one just the other day, a special new blog

I know this doesn't sound healthy, but I've, I've ... started a blog: a literary studies group blog. It's called the Valve and it just got turned on. I've written a whopping great Holbonic inaugural post, a rewrite of themes I've hashed out before: blogging, academe, literary studies. (Some folks might say I'm repeating myself. I do hope I'm improving myself.)

I'm probably going to lighten up at J&B and Crooked Timber for a time and focus on this new project. Just so you know where to reach me. Please drop by and link to us and all that desirable stuff.