Harry

Because all the Uk bloggers have linked to it, I tried out the webcameron. Cameron’s introduction is very nice. He might want to read this paper by Erik Wright: it’ll provide some nice theoretical underpinnings. Oh, and everyone else might want to look at the draft manuscript for Wright’s book, Envisioning Real Utopias. (I don’t mean to suggest that Cameron won’t want to read the whole book, I’m just helpfully pointing him to the central ideas, so he can decide whether its worth his while to read the whole thing, presuming that he’s busier than the rest of us).

If I have any regrets (apart from not having played enough cricket) among the biggest must be indolently passing up the opportunity to wander down the Iffley Road to watch Jake Thackray play in a pub sometime in the mid-1980’s. I still can’t imagine what I was thinking; the cover price was something like 2 quid, and it didn’t even require staying out late (something I was slightyl less averse to in those days anyway). Now the chance is gone forever. But a while ago Jake In a Box (UK) arrived. All four EMI albums, plus reams of extras (Live Performance (UK) is, I’m told, on its way). I’ve been playing it ever since.
(NB: bob mcmanus should be sure to read on)

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I see that Adam Swift is giving an interesting-looking paper on “Parents’ Rights and the Value of the Family” at the UCL political theory seminar next month. All right, I’m being coy, we co-authored it, but since I never directly post anything on my own non-existent web page, I wanted to encourage people who might be interested to read it.

Oliver Clement Brighouse Mothersname was born this morning (Wednesday) at about 8.40 central time, by C-section. At 8lbs he has the smallest birthweight of our children, much to his oldest sister’s joy. Both he and his mother are doing well.

He’ll have two adoring sisters and parents who want him (even if they had a hard time figuring out a name). My greatest wishes for him are that he gives and receives a great deal of love, happiness and laughter in his life, and that he has the self confidence that enables him to find his own way while treating others kindly. A life-long enjoyment of Round The Horne, Bob Newhart and a facility with Unwinese would be big bonuses. His sisters will work on those.

I had a close encounter with the Reaper this summer. I don’t know exactly how close, but closer than I’d like. He was waiting on a winding hill road in south east Ohio, keeping an appointment with an 18 year old kid who was driving too fast and on the wrong side of the road. Seeing me coming the other way in my Camry he thought he spotted a twofer, and got greedy. What was the chance that I’d be a middle aged man who drives like an old granny but has reactions honed by spending my teenage (pre-helmet) years standing at silly mid-off (because I was too fat to be put anywhere else)? I slammed on the brakes, remembered that I’d just doubled my life insurance, hoped my daughter would be fine, thought about what a nice life I’ve had, and waited.

There’s such a thing as overreaching and the reaper departed wicket-less, succeeding only in causing a few injuries, a fair amount of pain, and making a mockery of this old post. The upshot is along with the adoring sisters and the perfect mother, Oliver Clement gets to have a father. And a minivan. (But not, regrettably for him, the name Reginald).

I get to see him and his sisters grow up. They are materially comfortable, and no gifts you might offer to him will make us better parents, which is what they need. But if you did feel like celebrating our delight in his birth, you could do what I did tonight: pour yourself a glass of fresh grapefruit juice, listen to The Goons with your kids, and make a small, medium-sized, or, best of all, large donation to Oxfam (UK, Aus, elsewhere).

Describing an argument with her mum, Laura puts into words the problem I had with David Brooks’s column on Sunday. The column does little more than articulate the conclusions of Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain; the conclusions basically being that there are significant sex-related differences between boys’ and girls’ brains. But, as Laura says:

After I read this article, I thought “and?” And what’s the point, Davie? So, boys and girls are different, But what does that mean. I mean this isn’t a science column; it’s a political and social column on an opinion page, but he never spits it out. Mom and I were fighting over the Brooks’ unstated point.

Mom: Brooks is just saying, “ha” to the feminists who kept telling me over and over in the 70s that you kids were different, because we were messing with them. If only we were more nurturing to Chris, he would like dolls. And I told them they were crazy.

Me: Brooks is also saying something else, Mom. If we’re all just slaves to genetics as Brooks says, then women have to be the moms and dad have to go to the office or war or the soccer field. I think that’s what he’s really saying there, but he’s too chickenshit to get it out.

I don’t know whether to side with Laura or her mum. But that’s the point. Unlike most of you, but I suspect like Laura, I have a real soft spot for Brooks. But in an op ed, shouldn’t you forward an op?

BBC obit here.

Most of my students write in Word, as (like Daniel) I do. I’m not crazy about it, and used WordPerfect for years, before collaboration with other people who write in Word made me fall in line. But Word does have one feature that I love: the grammar and style warning constituted by the little green underlining of any string of words that Word doesn’t like. I find that eliminating the green lines almost always (19 times out of 20) improves the way that the text reads. It is especially valuable to me because my grammar has never been brilliant (though it is better than my spolling, and much better than my typinf). It is not perfect; some strings that it underlines are the best way of putting things, and many strings it doesn’t underline are not.

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This one’s for John.

Update: The bizarrest bit of the story is at the end:

A Devon and Cornwall Police spokeswoman said: “This isn’t just a petty issue. This has been ongoing for two or three years.”

I’ve taken up both of Chris’s recent suggestions of non-genre fiction reading, and am glad of it. I suspect I liked On Beauty (a good deal in the UK) less than he did, but I still enjoyed it a good deal (like him I’ll avoid spoilers, and ask commenters to do the same, but warn potential readers that I don’t police comments very well). Discussion on his thread focused on Smith’s ear for dialogue. The book is set in a liberal arts college in or around Boston, but almost all the characters are displaced in some way, and part of what is going on is that most of the characters are putting on a face with most of their interlocutors. So whereas some of the dialogue does sound inauthentic, it reflects the in-authenticity of the characters in the situation. And I love some of the little details – a throwaway sentence about how hard the main male character (a British émigré) finds it to take American bills seriously is exactly right – after 20 years here I am still absurdly pleased to get hold of a 20 pound note, and in my head its worth way more than one of those absurd $50 bills. Two other things to add. First is that, like all campus novels, it makes university life and university politics sound so much more interesting than they really are. Maybe I’m oblivious to this, as well as everything else, but I just never get to hear about these great rivalries and affairs that people have with each other and with their students, or attend the meetings in which people are more than mildly irritated with each other. (This is a complaint about campus novels, not about university life, I hasten to add – I’d hate it if it were the way it is portrayed – or perhaps it is like that and I just wander around with my blinkers on). Second, although Chris says it is loosely based on Howard’s End, I was put constantly in mind of The History Man, whom Howard (the central character) resembles in more than name – and in ways that cannot be accidental. BTW if, like my colleague who has read every other academic novel around, you have somehow missed Bradbury, The History Man is peerless.

The Company You Keep (UK) is, as Chris says, brilliant, and I liked it more than On Beauty.

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I have the privilege of telling you about our new permanent additions to the roster. You’ll remember that Ingrid Robeyns joined as a guest for a week last month — well, now she’s back, and permanently. Ingrid is a Belgian economist and political theorist working in the Netherlands, and you can find out more about her (and perhaps a bit more about what to expect) at her personal website. Scott McLemee is a journalist of longstanding, formerly at the Chronicle for Higher Education but more recently at Inside Higher Education, and a Texan, of which he is evidently very proud. I’ve known of Scott (though we’ve never met) since the late 1980’s, and suspect that I am one of the earliest admirers of his work, many of his early articles having been published in journals and magazines which I used to sell, and of which I was one of very few readers! I’ve actually met Ingrid several times, and know her pretty well, so for me she won’t just be a virtual presence. 

Welcome aboard both of you, its great to have you on the team!

Loudon Wainwright III is 60 today. I just thought I’d remind the world, because I’m sure he won’t. Belle, you’d better send an e-card or something. He’s the performer I have seen live more than any other, and, as George Cole might say, I have all his albums.

And Al Stewart is 61!

David Velleman has a riveting paper on his website called Family History (via an independently interesting post about the influence of genes on identity formation). The paper is an extended argument for the wrongness of having a child by an anonymous donor (including by an anonymous surrogate mothers). The argument goes something like this (sorry David, I’m trying to be terse): children have an extremely powerful interest in knowing who their genetic forebears were, because that knowledge plays a vital role in their identity formation (not, interestingly, because it plays the more mundane role of giving you information about your probabilities with respect to health prospects, etc). People who deliberately have children via anonymous donors thus deliberately have children for whom a vital interest cannot be met. So they do a wrong. He does not explicitly call for the prohibition of anonymous donation of various kinds (and rightly not; establishing that some behaviour is wrong falls short of establishing that it is appropriate to prohibit it), and it is not clear what the public policy consequences are of his argument. He dispatches various objections rather well – you should read the whole thing. But I’m interested here in the central premise – that having acquaintance with one’s biological forbears plays a vital role in identity formation and maintenance.

What evidence does Velleman marshall for this claim? It seems to me that he has 2 main reasons for believing it.

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Can anyone point me to a really good article, by someone philosophically sophisticated, which argues against gay marriage? I’d like to teach the topic in a class, and have some good pro-gay marriage resources, but am a bit stumped for anti-gay marriage stuff. I want something that does not rest on religious foundations, or at least doesn’t explicitly do so. If you have a sense of my sensibilities try to recommend something you think I’ll actually like. Oh, and I do have a good paper by my colleague Claudia Card which opposes gay marriage from an anti-marriage perspective, so that side of things is covered.

So, it’s the 25th anniversary of Scott’s high school graduation. That reminds me that it is mine too (though I’d call it leaving school, no graduation having been involved), indicating, contrary to my impression over these many years, that we’re the same age (I thought he was a little younger, making him all the more impresive, somehow). He spent his last two years of high school thus:

In particular, there was no love lost between me and the principal, a crusty old cracker named Theo “Cotton” Miles. I thought he was an idiot — an estimate there has been no occasion to revise — and tended to shake my head every time I passed his office. To judge by later hostilities, he may have noticed this.

It got really bad sometime during my junior year, around spring 1980, when I was walking around with Socialist Workers Party literature as well as running for student council president on some approximation of a “student power” platform, influenced by old radical paperbacks.

During the school assembly where the candidates gave their speeches, my appeal got a very enthusiastic and rowdy response, particularly from the black kids who gave it a standing ovation. Rumor had it that I actually won, but Theo wouldn’t stand for it.

My last two years of secondary school were spent battling the British associates of the American SWP inside the peace movement (a central combatant being, I now know, a housemate of Chris Bertram’s at the time — one of several ways in which our paths have crossed over the years). And I liked both my secondary schools a good deal, despite not fitting in very well at the school where I spent my final two years. The head was not fantastic by any means (unlike his successor, whom I missed), but the teachers were mostly serious, smart, and caring. Most of them, I thought, really wanted to teach in a comprehensive school, which that school was in name only, so the smattering of middle class kids like me got a lot of good attention. But at least one of my best A-Level teachers, I later discovered, was adored by many of his pupils who left at 16 for his efforts to find them suitable employment at a time when that was not especially easy. (And this, I’ll add, after having pleaded with them to stay on for A-levels, instead of leaving for marriage and a steady income). I have many happy memories of that school, and few unpleasant ones, despite not having been especially cheery at the time. I feel intense gratitude to the teachers I had, especially (if you are reading) Mr, King, Mr Matthews, Colin Ross-Smith, and, at my previous school, Mr Thomas and Mrs Flint.

Anyway, the real point is this. Scott doesn’t dare to ask for himself, but could someone get him a copy of this book about his hated high school principal. He obviously wants it, but can’t bring himself to pay for it (understandably). Meanwhile, I’ll try to find my old copies of Permanent Revolution for him (explanation at the bottom of his page, entries for July 2, 5 and 7).