As Adams (1990) suggests a college “student’s grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year”. I’ve been contemplating – but have yet to conduct rigorous data-collection to test this hypothesis – that perhaps the increasing importance of computers on university campuses may benefit the health of college students’ grandmothers. The number of crashes and other computer-related problems (“the dog ate my computer and my roommate’s computer, too”) seems to be surprisingly high when projects are due. Of course, it may just be that computers are crashing all the time, students never have online access, but it is only when assignments are due that we happen to hear about it. In any case, if all this means fewer deaths in college students’ families, that’s probably a nice side-effect of growing IT uses at universities.
From the monthly archives:
January 2005
This is by way of a followup to Chris’s comment on Nick Cohen’s article on the pointlessness of providing disaster relief to governments who don’t care about their citizens. I’ve never been a big fan of Sen’s dictum that “democracies don’t have famines” – I’ve always regarded it as being a slogan on a par with “no two countries which have a McDonalds have ever gone to war with each other”. I was originally just going to point out that the only African country which has managed to stay clear of famines entirely since independence is Kenya, which has not been a democracy and leave it at that, but I ended up looking up the original quote from Sen’s “Development as Freedom” and this ended up expanding somewhat into a more general piece on the subject of democracies and developmental states. I’m actually pretty sympathetic to Sen on most of the issues he writes about, and I hope readers will bear that in mind, because it is more or less impossible to resist making a few harsh remarks when you find out that the original quote, from page 16 of the paperback edition of Development as Freedom is, verbatim:
“It is not surprising that no famine has taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy – be it economically rich (as in Western Europe or North America) or relatively poor (as in postindependence India, or Botswana or Zimbabwe)”
Via Matt Cheney at the “Mumpsimus”:http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2005/01/recent-deaths.html, I learn that Guy Davenport “has died”:http://www.uky.edu/PR/News/050104_guy_davenport.htm. By coincidence, I’ve mentioned Davenport three times on this blog in the last week; he was one of the finest cultural and literary critics of our time. His essays cumulate into a long allusive conversation; digressive, enlightening, quietly humorous. You could warm your hands at them. He had a gift for finding the detail, the miniature axis on which the world turned for Kafka, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, for Picasso, for Louis Agassiz. From his essay, “On Reading” (collected in _The Hunter Gracchus_):
bq. Students often tell me that an author was ruined for them by a high-school English class; we all know what they mean. Shakespeare was almost closed to me by the world’s dullest teacher, and there are many writers whom I would probably enjoy reading except that they were recommended to me by suspect enthusiasts. I wish I knew how to rectify these aversions. I tell bright students, in conference, how I had to find certain authors on my own who were ruined for me by bad teachers or inept critics. Scott, Kipling, Wells will do to illustrate that only an idiot will take a critic’s word without seeing for oneself. I think I learned quite early that the judgments of my teachers were probably a report of their ignorance. In truth, my education was a systematic misleading. Ruskin was dismissed as a dull, preacherly old fart who wrote purple prose. In a decent society the teacher who led me to believe this would be tried, found guilty, and hanged by the thumbs while being pelted with old eggs and cabbage stalks.
On this count, as on many others, Davenport was gloriously, radiantly, exuberantly innocent. He inspired you to read new books, and re-read old ones differently. He’ll be sorely missed.
Zoë likes They Might Be Giants, "No!". Santa brought it. Amazing how many of the things Santa brought daddy likes, too. "The Edison Museum", for example:
The Edison Museum, not open to the public
Its haunted towers rise into the clouds above
Folks drive in from out of town
To gaze in amazement when they see it
Just outside the gate I look into the courtyard
Underneath the gathering thunderstorm
Through the iron bars, I see the Black Mariah
Revolving slowly in its platform
In the topmost tower, the lights burn dim
A coiling filament glowing within
The Edison Museum, once a bustling factory
Today is but a darkened cobweb covered hive of industry
The tallest, widest and most famous haunted mansion
in New Jersey!
Behind a wooden door, the voice of Thomas Alva
Recites a poem on a phonograph
Ghosts float up the stairs, like silent moving pictures
The loyal phantoms of his in house staff
A wondrous place it is, there can be no doubt
But no one ever goes in, and no one ever goes out
The Edison Museum, not open to the public
Its haunted towers rise into the clouds above it
The largest independently-owned and operated mausoleum.
As Henry James might have said, for actual implies possible (see p. 18): "It was an adventure, unmistakeably, … to be learning at last, in the maturity of one’s powers, what New Jersey might ‘connote’."
Not what ‘New Jersey’ might connote, mind you.
Consider this an open thread only for those in the maturity of their powers.
May I remind you, and this goes as well for those with lesser powers: there are disaster victims who need your help. Please consider donating generously. And – I am sorry to repeat myself – if you were going to buy something from Amazon anyway, please consider using the Search Box under the fold to do so. Costs you the same, and that way 5.75% goes to me and I give it to the Singapore Red Cross. Thank you, those of you who have helped already. (And, to our anonymous drunken monkey offerer of matching funds: they have been met. You may donate your 200 euros now. Thank you!)
The Adversary
Class Trip and The Moustache
The Arcade Fire, Funeral
Radio Birdman
Remote thermometer
I honestly can’t believe it.
Via American Coprophagia. In the midst of a heartfelt Congressional prayer service, Tom DeLay chose this reading, from Matthew 7: 21-27:
21. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.
22. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not drive out demons in your name? Did we not do mighty deeds in your name?’
23. Then I will declare to them solemnly, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you evildoers.’
24. Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.
25. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock.
26. And everyone who listens to these words of mine but does not act on them will be like a fool who built his house on sand.
27. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. And it collapsed and was completely ruined.” (my emphasis; I don’t think that DeLay emphasizes any particular passage)
Living in a narrow strip hemmed in by the sea and backwaters, only those who were able to climb atop strong houses could manage to survive the tsunami strike. Showing a spot where a house once stood, Susheelan said only an old man of a family of five survived the mortal blow of the sea. The man is now in a relief camp near the place where his kith and kin are buried.
You can watch the service yourself on C-SPAN (it’s the “109th Congressional Prayer Service”). Tom DeLay starts at 12:30. This was not an off-the-cuff joke or unfortunate phrase; these were his prepared remarks, in total.
How would we have reacted to a powerful Arab mullah who appeared on television, on September 20, 2001, to read a passage from the Koran about how the fools who reject Allah will be thrown from their towers? (I seriously doubt that such a passage exists, but you get my point.)
I had to take a break from blogging. I was tired of getting so angry. But when Tom DeLay is one of the most powerful men in the United States, what other response is appropriate?
The Washington Post finally gets around to “reviewing”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46025-2005Jan3.html Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World, but makes a blunder. The reviewer, Gregory Feeley, commends Stephenson for his anachronisms.
bq. Stephenson’s tongue-in-cheek verbal anachronisms can be witty, as when he manages circumstances so that a character can speak plausibly of a “Routine Upgrade” or name a private tavern the “Kit-Kat Clubb.”
But the “Kit-Kat Club”:http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/paganm/chap5.htm isn’t an anachronism; it was a real institution, and the epicenter of “Whig”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001721.html debate in the early eighteenth century. That said, Feeley shouldn’t be chastized too harshly for his mistake. It’s exactly this collision between present and past, so that you really can’t tell the one from the other, that makes for the fun in “System of the World.” And indeed, Stephenson’s depiction of the Kit-Kat as a sort of elevated girly-bar may not be entirely true to history. To “repeat myself”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001362.html
bq. Stephenson uses anachronisms to jar our sense of the seventeenth century as a fixed stage along the progression that has led ineluctably to the modern world. He wants to bring home to us how the past was, like the modern age, a ferment of possibilities. It could have developed in many different directions. In Quicksilver, the past and the present are related not because the one has led to the other, but because they are both the same thing at different stages; vortices of possibility.
The plot creaks, the characters are a little thin, and (as always) Stephenson isn’t very good at endings, but there’s still a zip and verve to the book. It’s ambitious, chaotic, and sometimes falls flat on its face but picks itself up again by virtue of its sheer exuberance. The combination of geek sensibility and economic history is difficult to resist.
Addendum: since I’m linking to the Amazon page for SotW in this review, I should say that I’ve earned approx $100 through the Amazon link in the last several days, which I have sent on to the Red Cross. Not as much as John (no terabyte drives alas, although I’m grateful to the person who bought several classic movies) . I’ve decided to make this into a permanent feature – all earnings from links from my posts will be donated to charity from here on in.
About 43 minutes into the end-of-year Mike Harding show, he plays Roaring Jelly’s ‘Valerie Wilkins’. Great, but not their best — BedBug, Babylon, and Christmas In Australia are all superior. I saw them once, and taped their last ever session (with Stuart Hall of all people) off Radio 2 sometime in the 80’s and STUPIDLY taped an episode of My Music over it several years later. My mother sold both my Roaring Jelly records which I never managed to put on tape, and anyway I now have no way to play vinyl. How does one lobby to get a CD of their work brought out?
Across the way on his other blog, “John Holbo”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2005/01/clueless_in_aca.html passes some acute judgements on the perplexed relationship between the traditional domain of humanities departments (classic texts), and the claim of literary ‘theory’ (or, more precisely, some theorists) to turn everything into text, explain it, and assert imperium thereover. It’s a problem shared by other disciplines with imperialist ambitions – economics too has disputes between those who see its domain as traditional market activities, and those who see it as a universal science of choice under constraints. Meanwhile, Richard Byrne at the “Chronicle”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=w2rfqk1jktszinbyhczflxxuei33y2gc documents how scholars at the MLA are considering abandoning the outer provinces; retreating from their grand ambitions, and linking teaching and scholarship more closely. Interestingly, this year’s President, Robert Scholes, seems to see the answer (if I’m understanding him rightly) as lying in a stronger assertion of disciplinary standards, returning to the ‘harder’ aspects of literature, and advocating what almost sound to be law-like propositions.
bq. “I can’t say just how long this will take,” he said. “But I do believe that this is happening. There is more interest in these things … grammar, rhetoric, and also logic. … There needs to be an overall recognition that what you say has to be reasonable. That it has to be answerable to certain disciplinary considerations. Within this discipline, you can only say x if y and z are in fact reasonable suppositions.”
Now I haven’t seen the speech, so I’m not exactly sure what he means by these statements. If this is just a call for higher standards and more consistent arguments that don’t do too much violence to to the text, of course I’m in favour. If it’s a call for something more than that – i.e. a more rigorous quasi-scientific literary theory, then I’m not at all convinced. If the desire of the humanities is to reconnect with the outside world, I imagine that they’d be better advised to follow the example of those critics who have maintained some general readership – Guy Davenport and Frank Kermode spring to mind, as (from an earlier era) does the poetry criticism of Randall Jarrell. As far as I can tell, quasi-scientific theories of literature (with a few exceptions, such as Propp’s work on folktales) have been a dead end. Trying to apply formal theories to literature (unless done in a playful, Oulipesque way) seems to me to be a very promising method for replacing one set of useless aridities with another. A renunciation of grand theorising, and a frank acknowledgement that criticism is an inherently subjective and partial enterprise seems to me to be a more fruitful direction (and, if I understand John Holbo rightly, what he too is advocating).
Update: attribution goof fixed.
I’m preparing to teach Nietzsche and am rereading Genealogy of Morals. Here’s a bit from §7 of the first essay.
One will have divined already how easily the priestly mode of valuation can branch off from the knightly-aristocratic and then develop into its opposite; this is particularly likely when the priestly caste and the warrior caste are in jealous opposition to one another and are unwilling to come to terms. The knightly-aristocratic value judgments presupposed a powerful physicality, a flourishing, abundant, even overflowing health, together with that which serves to preserve it: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games, and in general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity. The priestly-noble mode of valuation presupposes, as we have seen, other things: it is disadvantageous for it when it comes to war! As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies – but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when conpared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness. Human history would be altogether too stupid a thing without the spirit that the impotent have introduced into it.
A couple things struck me about this old familiar passage this time around. (But you tell me.)
NORML founder and longtime head Keith Stroup is stepping down in favor of younger leadership. Keep fighting the good fight, dude. The following quote is dry, but charming:
Meanwhile he’d begun smoking pot and marching in antiwar demonstrations, sometimes simultaneously.
No. Way.
I never knew they’d gotten this close:
In 1975, five states — Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine and Ohio — removed criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of the weed. In 1976, Jimmy Carter, who during his campaign had advocated decriminalizing pot, was elected president. In 1977, Stroup visited the White House to meet with Carter’s drug policy adviser, Peter Bourne. Soon NORML would be playing the White House in softball.
It seemed like high times for NORML. Publicly, Stroup predicted that pot would be legal in a couple of years. Privately, he and his NORML pals joked about forming an advocacy group for another drug they’d begun to enjoy — cocaine.
OK, coming clean here, I favor legalization of all drugs, so I’m not mocking him. And who knew that about Carter? A candidate who took the Peter Tosh line got elected in my country?!
Then Stroup got busted and stuff. In the words of the Beastie Boys, “Customs jailed me over an herb seed/Don’t rat on your boys, over some rat weed.” Wait, but why are government officials quoting The Big Lebowski?
Tom Riley, official spokesman for federal drug czar John Walters, agrees. “Keith and people like that have banged their heads against the wall for years saying ‘Legalize pot.’ But they’re farther behind now than they were 20 years ago.”
Riley says Stroup’s career reminds him of a line from the movie “The Big Lebowski”: “The ’60s are over, Lebowski. The bums lost. My condolences.”
We’ve appointed John Waters Drug Czar? Oh, Walters. But yeah, and that guy’s never toked up? Riiight. The Dude Abides. I mean, just say no. [Link to picture of Nancy Reagan in Mr. T’s lap.] Finally, I’d just like to echo the plaintive query of a thousand stoners: “how can you make a plant against the law?” “Workings of Democracy for $100? By passing a law.” “Dude, that packs meager.” It does, people. It packs meager. When I’m Drug Czarina, all this is going to change. (It’s like being Drug Czar, but way more tiaras.)
Belle and I just got back from a weekend on Bintan (A little getaway we had planned before all this happened.) It was a bit strange to be in a completely disaster-free corner of a disaster-stricken country. Tourists. If you didn’t turn on the news you wouldn’t have had a clue anything unusual was going on. It rained. I reread Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, about which I am meaning to post something. Belle has started sewing this quilt thingy. (You can ask her about it.) The Filipino band at the New Years party was pretty good. They played “Achy Breaky Heart”, etc. I am always amazed to see all the latest movies for sale right there in the lobby of the hotel. I do mean ‘latest’: “National Treasure” on DVD. “The Incredibles” was playing on the big screen TV in the hotel pub. Not a very good quality pirate version, but watchable.
After three days, my Amazon fundraiser has worked modestly. Tomorrow I’m writing a $250 check to the Singapore Red Cross. (That’s $100 from me, $150 from you, guestimating a bit. Special thanks to the proud owner of a new and expensive camera lens.) Please feel free to continue buying. If there is something you were going to buy anyway, it makes good sense to do so in a way that helps.
I have seen the Red Cross praised as exemplary and criticized as burdened with inefficient, overpaid bureaucrats. (No doubt there are good discussions going on out there about this very issue. I just haven’t been reading the blogs for a few days.) I figure the Singaporean branch is as likely as any to have useful local knowledge and connections. Not to mention we live here. Feel free to critique my choice of charities, as I haven’t signed the check yet.
UPDATE: 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. I had a busy day. By the time I actually wrote the check to the Singapore Red Cross tonight it was for S$850.00 (US $518.) I’m sort of hoping at this rate I can write another check that big by Feb 1. Give generously. Buy generously.
Nick Cohen has “a very good column in today’s Observer”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1382153,00.html about the way in which natural disasters play very differently depending on whether or not governments are genuinely responsive to their peoples via democratic institutions. There’s much to think about in what he writes. He rightly gives due credit to Amartya Sen for this key insight and excoriates Mao Zedong — who inexplicably still continues to be admired in some quarters — as the vicious Stalinist butcher that he was.
A happy new year to everyone! Time for those new year resolutions, then. Last year I resolved to learn German and, I’m astonished to say, made considerable progress. So my first resolution has to be to continue and get myself in a position where I can sustain a reasonably interesting conversation or read a short novel. Other than that, my main thoughts are of reading and writing. Thanks to reading Sebald I’ve got into my head the thought of working through Chateaubriand’s memoirs (we’ll see how that goes). And, of course, there’s the thought that every academic has, of writing more and better papers and getting them published in decent places. Before then, though, there’s that tax return to complete….