From the monthly archives:
Anne Applebaum on ‘the literary divide’ between highbrow and pop culture (via A&L Daily). Does this sound right to you?
Popular culture now hates high culture so much that it campaigns aggressively against it. High culture now fears popular culture so much that it insulates itself deliberately from it.
Surely wrong on both counts. Chat amongst yourselves.
Bootsie Barker Bites is close to the perfect childrens’ story book. It has action, conflict, sparse narration, believable characters, and a satisfying resolution. The pictures, admittedly, are outstanding, but not better than the text. I read it with a posh English accent for the mothers, and a drab south London drawl for the kids, but my wife reads it with American accents all round, and it works as well both ways.
Bootsie Barker, Ballerina, by contrast, is close to unreadable. Forgettable story-line, dragging prose, no characterisation. It doesn’t matter how you read it — its better not to.
I’m very hard put to think of another case where outstanding writing is followed up so disappointingly. Candidates?
Niall Ferguson in the Daily Telegraph “gives a history lesson”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;$sessionid$PHGJESUENTCP1QFIQMFCFGGAVCBQYIV0?xml=/opinion/2004/04/10/do1003.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/04/10/ixportal.html :
bq. … in 1917 a British general … occupied Baghdad and proclaimed: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” … What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles the events of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised. It began in May, just after the announcement that Iraq would henceforth be a League of Nations “mandate” under British trusteeship. … Anti-British demonstrations began in Baghdad mosques, spread to the Shi’ite holy centre of Karbala, swept on through Rumaytha and Samawa – where British forces were besieged – and reached as far as Kirkuk. Contrary to British expectations, Sunnis, Shi’ites and even Kurds acted together. Stories abounded of mutilated British bodies. By August the situation was so desperate that the British commander appealed to London for poison gas bombs or shells (though these turned out not to be available). By the time order had been restored in December – with a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village-burning expeditions – British forces had sustained over 2,000 casualties and the financial cost of the operation was being denounced in Parliament.
Suppose you’ve been given a sizeable pot of money to fund an annual lecture. Leaving the question of topics aside, who do you invite? Who are the best speakers in academia today? Is there someone you’ve heard speak who you think is underrated–as an academic, or as a public speaker? Now imagine you had to publish the speaker’s talk. Does that change things for you? Or is your top choice still the same?
Brothers and sisters I have none, but that man’s father is my father’s son
Most people can solve this familiar puzzle if they think about it for a while, but only slightly more complex versions have them floundering. Yet the problem described isn’t much more difficult than naming the day after the day after yesterday, which (I think) most people can do instantly. The fact that such a simple problem can be posed as a puzzle is just one piece of evidence that people (at least people in modern/Western societies) have trouble learning about and reasoning about kinship relations.
Last weekend when I realized the NCAA Final Four championships were being played on the first night of Passover, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Elijah would be interested in watching basketball.
I see now that others are pondering similarly important questions with respect to this week’s holidays. The Head Heeb wonders what would be a good Jewish substitute for the Easter Bunny. I think my vote would be to let it be so we don’t add to the ways in which these holidays can be commercialized. But if I want to play along, I’ll say I think we should have little personified matzah. They could have facial features and arms and legs. It would resemble SpongeBob SquarePants. I think it could be cute.
The “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60804-2004Apr8.html reports on the interesting – but problematic – approach of Virginia to prosecuting spammers. Authorities in Virginia have arrested three suspected spammers from North Carolina. Their basis for asserting jurisdiction: that the spammers ‘went through’ servers in Virginia in order to disseminate spam.
bq. Although all of the suspects are from North Carolina, Cantrell said, “they went through a server in Virginia, and as long as they go through Virginia then we can prosecute them under our Virginia statutes.” Northern Virginia is a major hub for Internet traffic, and because of that Virginia has an opportunity to snag many more “spammers,” Cantrell said.
It’s not clear from the newspaper article how close the spammers’ relationship is with the server in Virginia – whether this is a server that they themselves used intentionally, or merely a server that their mail passed through en route to its final destination. But it certainly sounds as though Virginian authorities are asserting a general right to prosecute spammers (and jail them for up to twenty years), on the basis that their emails pass through Virginia at some point in their travels. Since roughly “50% of world Internet traffic”:http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsArticle.jsp?type=internetNews&locale=en_US&storyID=4778933 passes through Virginia, that’s a very far-reaching jurisdictional claim indeed. Of course, it’s nice to see spammers getting walloped with serious penalties (although 20 years of jail time would be a bit much). But it’s not at all clear to me that Virginia state authorities should appoint themselves arbiters of the world’s Internet traffic, with extraterritorial reach. If nothing else, it’s likely to lead to competing claims for jurisdiction from other authorities, in the US and elsewhere, and an incredible mess for individuals and firms trying to determine their legal liabilities. As Michael Geist “observes”:http://www.law.berkeley.edu/journals/btlj/articles/vol16/geist/geist.pdf, jurisdiction on the Internet is murky enough as it is. It looks as though it’s about to get a whole lot murkier.
As part of a series about philosophers and places, BBC Radio 3 will be broadcasting a programme this Sunday (21.30 GMT, so internet listeners should adjust for location) in which Jonathan Ree discusses “Rousseau in Staffordshire”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/playlists/sundayfeat.shtml . I’m rather hoping that this will clear up a little dispute I had with “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html . Chris emailed me soon after “my Rousseau book”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415201993/junius-21/026-9436596-5494024 came out to tell me that I was mistaken in writing that Rousseau had lived in _Derbyshire_ . Chris wrote, correctly, that the village of Wootton near where Rousseau stayed, is in Staffordshire and that, since the county line there is set by the River Dove, Wootton was almost certainly in Staffordshire in the 18th century too. We both set to consulting out various works of reference, only to reach a stalemate. So for, for example, this “1776 account of Hume’s life”:http://www.student.liu.se/~bjoch509/philosophers/intros/hum-intro.html has Derbyshire, as does Rousseau himself in correspondence, but other reputable sources insist on Staffordshire. I’m sure you’re all intruigued by this antiquarian mystery! I shall be listening with attention.
(And see “The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_04_01_archive.html#108150415084287134 for a map of the area).
This is turning into a trend. In the past few weeks we’ve seen new group blogs started by philosophy graduate students at Syracuse (“Orange Philosophy”:http://www.orangephilosophy.blogspot.com/), Rochester (“What is the Name of This Blog?”:http://urphilosophy.blogspot.com/) and now Brown (“Fake Barn Country”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/).
Von at Obsidian Wings has an interesting point about Rice’s testimony.
It seemed that the Democrats were more partisan in their questioning than the Republicans. That is, the Democrats on the panel aggressively challenged Rice (as you might expect). The Republicans, however, didn’t defend — or help — Rice nearly as much as I had expected. Indeed, some of them even launched mild attacks on Rice (Kerry’s comment about “swatting flies,” for example, seemed to resonate).
What to conclude? Well, if you take a dim view of human nature (as I do), you don’t conclude that the Republicans were behaving honorably and in a nonpartisan manner. (Though perhaps they were.) You conclude that there may be something in the classified documents that casts doubt on Rice’s defense.
We may know more when the PDB is released. (And it will be released.)
I recently bought the DVDs of the first three series of The West Wing, which make for far too compulsive viewing. Watching it, the same thought occured to me as has occured to many others: namely, how much better “President Josiah Bartlet”:http://westwing.bewarne.com/pres.html is than any recent real-life incumbent. But it isn’t just Bartlet, 24’s “President David Palmer”:http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,274%7C87105%7C1%7C,00.html would also get my vote (if I had one) over most post-war Presidents. Fictional Presidents seem to incarnate the ideal virtues of the office. Not so fictional British Prime Ministers, who seem to be either Machiavellian (“Francis Urquhart”:http://www.tvheaven.ca/fu.htm ) or ineffectual (“Jim Hacker”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/articles/y/yesprimeminister_1299003453.shtml ). Perhaps only “Harry Perkins”:http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/tv/100/list/prog.php3?id=66 comes close to matching an ideal in the way that Bartlet and Palmer do. I’m not sure what this says about our different political and televisual/cinematic cultures and I’m sure there are more examples of fictional leaders to play with. Suggestions?
A little bit of CT synergy. In his “post about bad explanation in Evolutionary Psychology”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001642.html, Daniel says in passing that “Part of the issue here is that any form of psychology makes a poor sociology.” A commenter asks that someone say more about that. Well, Brian’s post on, _inter alia_, “women in philosophy”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001648.html, provides a good example. There’s a lot of anecdotal and formally–collected evidence that women in Philosophy can have a hard time of it. There appear to be fewer of them in graduate programs and especially faculty positions than we would expect. Why?
I’m sure all the Cool Kids have heard this already, but I only just found out about “Skeewiff’s”:http://skeewiff.com/main.html remix of the Soggy Bottom Boys’ “Man of Constant Sorrow”:http://skeewiff.free.fr/Skeewiffwhereartthou.mp3. That’s a 7.3MB download, but it’s well worth it. It is, at the very least, the best freely available song I’ve heard in a long time. And electronic remixes of bluegrass songs seems like such an obvious idea, I’m surprised it hasn’t been done before. (Or, perhaps more to the point, I’m surprised it hasn’t been brought to _my_ attention before.)
As “Sappho’s Breathing”:http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/archives/000381.html notes, Carlin Romano wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about “two recent collections of autobiographical memoirs by philosophers”:http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i31/31b01301.htm. There’s some interesting, and important points, to be made, so naturally I’d like to start with a cheap joke. Here’s a sample of what we’re likely to see if more philosophers turn their hand to autobiography.
bq. The facility of my pen (I write everything by hand!) has enabled me to produce a system of philosophical thought that is more many-sided, complex, and far-reaching than has been the case with any other living American philosopher. (Nicholas Rescher)
I’d be jealous of Rescher’s philosophical achievement if I wasn’t wittier, more charming, better looking and generally just a more excellent human being than any other living philosopher. “No, really.”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000063.html
“Julian Sanchez”:http://www.reason.com/links/links040504.shtml notes that some of the outrage at Kos is a bit rich, considering it comes from the likes of the LGF crowd. Charles Johnson and friends seem never to have met an Arab they didn’t want to string up. Now Johnson seems to be on a rampage, egging his commenters on to spew filth at “Kathryn Cramer’s”:http://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/archives/000492.html and “Nathan Newman’s”:http://www.nathannewman.org/log/archives/001636.shtml#001636 blogs. Their tactics include posting Kathryn’s address and telephone number, making death threats, and threatening her children. This isn’t just trollishness – it’s an attempt to intimidate and to silence. Not a proud moment for the blogosphere. Via “Rivka”:http://respectfulofotters.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_respectfulofotters_archive.html#108127482205377604.
fn1. Title borrowed from one of Nathan’s commentators.