“John Holbo”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html cuts David Frum down to size. Go read.
From the monthly archives:
November 2003
“Larry Solum”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/ has everything you might want to know about the conference being held at Fordham, starting “here”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_lsolum_archive.html#106389652088157908. Solum’s converage includes a nice introduction to the basic terms of the Rawls literature. Wish I could be at the conference myself. Maybe Fordham is planning a symposium publication? It’d be nice to read what many of the panelists have to say.
bq. UPDATE: Solum is giving terrific coverage of the conference. Go “here”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_lsolum_archive.html#106822753149133955 and scroll up.
bq. UPDATE II: Solum has “completed”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_lsolum_archive.html#106832603845533110 his remarkable coverage of the Rawls conference. Weighing in at more than twelve thousand words in two days, I think it’s the most impressive blogging performance I’ve seen since the early war coverage. And for those of us who couldn’t be at the conference, we couldn’t have asked for a better, or more knowledgeable, correspondent. Kudos, and many thanks, to Solum.
Yahia Said’s “account at OpenDemocracy”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-95-1573.jsp of his return to Iraq is worth a look.
Austentatious is having a poll to establish everyone’s favorite Jane Austen novel. Mysteriously, the seventh option is “Other,” which is currently ahead of Sense and Sensibility and Emma. Perhaps the Janeites have finally gotten hold of a complete copy of Sanditon. Or perhaps someone is making a case for Lady Susan, The Watsons or her History of England.
On the topic of lost masterworks, let me recommend The Eyre Affair and its sequels Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde, for your next plane ride. Looking at the covers, I find myself wondering why the graphic design of books published in the U.S. tends to be so much poorer than that of U.K. editions.
Kieran has previously reported on all the fun one can have browsing the stacks in Firestone Library at Princeton. The library used to require that patrons sign their name when borrowing a book and Kieran managed to find the signatures of some famous people on the cards that had been left in some books. The system wasn’t so great about privacy, but it sure allows for an interesting glimpse into a book’s life.
An update on Dianne Abbott: her choice was the topic of this week’s The Moral Maze which you can hear on the web till next Tuesday. Worth a listen, even if you’re not particularly interested in the topic, for an insight into the workings (or otherwise) of the journalistic mind.
A few weeks ago I had a conversation with someone who was in a position to know the reality of what is happening inside Iraq. He painted a gloomy picture of poor preparation (or rather no preparation) for the period after the military defeat of the Iraqi army, of Iraqi attitudes ranging from entrepreneurial friendliness to outright hostility, and of a US army which may be good at warfighting but is utterly incompetent when it comes to peacekeeping. Max Hasting, veteran military correspondent and a man of decidely conservative political views has “a piece in the Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2003-11-08&id=3697 which essentially corroborates this picture. Hastings reports that the British military are very angry indeed with the Bush administration.
Peter Briffa, “leaping to the defence”:http://publicinterest.blogspot.com/2003_11_02_publicinterest_archive.html#106785076132375360 ^1^ of soon-to-be-anointed Tory leader, Michael Howard, offers us a revisionist interpretation of Jeremy Paxman’s infamous “skewering”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/video/newsnight/howard.ram of Howard in a television interview. Paxman asked Howard fourteen times whether or not he’d instructed Derek Lewis, the head of the prison service to suspend the governor of Parkhurst prison; Howard refused fourteen times to give a straight answer. For Briffa, this is evidence of Howard’s basic honesty.
Richard Wollheim has died. There’s an “obituary in the Guardian”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,11617,1078109,00.html from Arthur Danto, and Chris Brooke has “a relevant excerpt”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2003_11_01_archive.html#106804985419728983 from Jerry Cohen’s “Future of a Disillusion”. Norman Geras has a “post on Wollheim’s paradox of democracy”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_11_02_normangeras_archive.html#106804463992397189 . I have pleasant memories of Richard Wollheim from my time at UCL where I went to read for the M.Phil in philosophy in 1981. He chaired the research seminars there and I remember him mainly as a benign presence who asked penetrating clarificatory questions in a very plummy voice. A sad loss.
Bert Jansch is the interviewee on this week’s My Life on CD. I’m a big fan of Jansch, and this interview is fantastic because he is vitually monosyllabic — poor Tracey Macloed works for every word she gets out of him. Reminds me of the great Wogan interview with James Bolam in which Bolam sat in complete silence, apparently dumbstruck by the situation (and Wogan, masterfully, filled in all the gaps).
Why is it that people with ‘real’ illnesses like heart disease, cancer or ‘flu can receive unqualified sympathy and support, while those suffering from an equally organic illness like depression are so often told to ‘just snap out of it’?
A couple of follow-ups to things I’ve blogged recently: Tim Lambert has assembled “a chart of where various bloggers are”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/surveys/compass.html?seemore=y on the “Political Compass”:http://politicalcompass.org/ test. Three Timberites are listed so far. The two dimensions of the test seem to resolve to one in practice, with most people on a diagonal running from left-libertarian (hooray!) to right-authoritarian (boo!). In unrelated news, there’s an “op-ed at PLANETIZEN by Robert Steuteville”:http://www.planetizen.com/oped/item.php?id=110 on the new urbanism and crime issue (link via “City Comforts”:http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/ ).
Josh Parsons has found a hangover cure hidden in Zeno’s writings. It’s a rather clever variant on the “drink more suffer later” cure. If anyone actually tries it I’d be interested to see the results. As a rule taking medical advice from a philosopher is about as wise as getting involved in a land war in Asia, so I have my doubts about this ‘cure’, but I’d be very happy if it was to work.
Not much blogging for me at the moment; three courses to teach, together with sundry administrative and other responsibilities mean that I don’t have much free time. In the meantime, let me recommend:
“Cosma Shalizi”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/archives/000130.html on “Our Geopolitical Situation, Dispassionately Assessed.”
“Norman Geras”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_11_02_normangeras_archive.html#106781211321628977 on Emmylou Harris. I’m a _Wrecking Ball_ man myself, which probably marks me out as a hopeless Emmylou lightweight.
And finally, “Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/003967.html#003967 has suffered a catastrophic disk crash, and is contemplating the horrors and expenses of professional data recovery. She’s politely soliciting donations – sounds like a good cause to me.