John Holbo

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.

Click a link, feed a Farber. He’s a nice man and could use your help.

You should read Scribblingwoman more. Also, Jonathan Goodwin. Here’s a thing, courtesy of the former. [Specifically, tomorrow I want to visit Miriam’s blog and find more edifying ‘recent comments’ are available than those left by that hopeless ‘online casino’ character. Not that I blame Miriam. She just deserves better.]

Matthew Yglesias has a pair of interesting posts up (1, 2), responding to David Brooks’ latest. Basically I agree, but let me make one critical point about where Matt ends up.

I described the liberal as having a two-stage view about end of life issues. First, comes something like the "life as continuum" view Brooks attributes to us. Second, comes a principle of free choice – I think that I should make my own decision on this, but that my view should not control others, though I may try to persuade others that my view is correct (non-relativism). The problem here is that I think a lot of liberals don’t recognize that the second principle really does depend on something akin to the first. If you hold views about the sanctity of life and the doing/allowing distinction that lead you to the conclusion that failing to keep alive someone who could be kept alive is the equivalent to murder, then adopting a principle of free choice at the second level makes no sense. An absolutist view on the first question requires an absolutist view on the second question.

I think the last sentence is not actually true, due to ambiguity in ‘absolutist’. It can mean either: cleaving to a black-white view of a matter (that other folks say they see in shades of grey.) Or it can mean: insisting that views besides one’s own are beyond the pale of moral reasonableness and tolerability. Let’s thumbnail the first absolutism: denying the continuum; the second: denying pluralism. These may sound as though they come to the same, and they probably have a tendency to run together; but in fact they are distinct. [click to continue…]

Interesting discussion at the Loom (via Panda’s Thumb):

So here is a fascinating scenario to consider: a small-brained African
hominid species expands out of Africa by 2 million years ago, bringing
with it stone tools. It spreads thousands of miles across Asia,
reaching Indonesia and then getting swept to Flores. It may not have
undergone any significant dwarfing, since they were already small. This
would change the way we think about all hominids. Being big-brained and
big-bodied could no longer be considered essential requirements for
spreading out of Africa. And one would have to wonder why early
lineages of hominids became extinct in Africa when one branch managed
to get to Flores.

I figure the most scientific explanation is that one day a wizard showed up at the door. The road goes ever on and all that.

I’m rereading Louis Hartz’ 1955 classic, The Liberal Tradition in America, one of the first academic books that fired my brain when I got to college. (David Greenstone taught me. I should read his Lincoln book out of filial piety.)

Here’s a bit on Hartz by Arthur Schlesinger: "The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible "mixed
economy," thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between
capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied
by both capitalists and socialists." Interesting shifts in usage since that was written. For a Democrat to stump for a ‘mixed’ economy today would be ballot box poison. But all Schlesinger is saying is: the New Deal. Which folks like.

Hartz’ basic thesis is packed into his Tocqueville epigraph: "The great advantage of the Americans is, that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution; and that they are born equal, instead of becoming so."

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I’m reading Ronin Ro’s Tales To Astonish, about "Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and the American comic book revolution." So far I’m not finding it clearly written. Of Jack "Jacob Kurtzberg" Kirby’s early days:

It was a difficult time to be a twelve-year old boy. Everywhere, kids were forming gangs. Kids on Suffolk Street became the Suffolk Street Gang and fought the Norfolk Street Gang. Then they fought Irish and black gangs. Some of his peers started running with the well-dressed mobsters hanging around the neighborhood. If he couldn’t become an actor, Jacob figured, he’d do this, too, or become a crooked politician, like the ones he saw holding conferences and spending money in neighborhood restaurants.

But thoughts of the future had to wait. For now, he had to maintain his reputation and look out for his brother, David. Their mother wanted David to wear nice clothes, but velvet pants, a lace collar, and shoulder-length curly blond hair (at the height of the Depression) had made the kid a perpetual target. Five years his junior and over six feet tall, David was stocky and tough, but no match for the street-hardened gangsters stepping up to confront him. David did what he could when the gangs attacked, but sometimes Jacob would leave school, see his brother under a pile of opponents, and leap at them with both fists swinging.

Lessee: David, aged 7, over six feet tall, stocky, dressed in … Can you even BE stocky if you are over six feet tall? I’m getting a Little Lord Fauntleroy Smash! vibe off this. Gangs of New York era tyke, Bruce Banner, after inheriting a fortune and being exposed to gamma radiation, is taken by "Dearest", to live with … It’s the sort of thing only Kirby could dream and draw. [If Mary Pickford is unavailable, I think ‘Dearest’ could be a sort of ‘Motherbox’, like Orion has got.] The gangs, the kids, the bizarre monstrosity. Clearly Kirby grew up with it all.

Kirby dating Roz: "Her father worked in a factory as a seamstress on women’s dresses." Now this is not clearly wrong. See this definition. But I think ‘worked sewing womens’s dresses’ would avoid the problem.

On Jack Kirby’s war experience: "War was a series of events." That’s right up there with "And, inevitably, the years passed."

Still, I’m such a Kirby fan. I’m enjoying it despite the stylistic lapses.

My colleague, Mike Pelczar, passed this under my nose this afternoon. A letter in the latest APA Proceedings and Addresses volume:

Why are philosophers limited to one-at-a-time journal submissions? Law professors can submit articles to as many journals as they like. It seems to work. We can submit book manuscripts to multiple publishers …

[Stories about inordinately slow responses from journals.]

Why can’t the APA do something about this? My first suggestion is that the organization force the journals to allow multiple submissions. My second suggestion is that we organize a little civil disobedience. People are afraid of breaking the custom (surely it’s not more than that?) but if enough people did it, it would cease to exist.

Bonnie Steinbock
University at Albany/SUNY

This seems to me an eminently reasonable proposal. Discuss. I would be interested to hear how things work differently in law and other disciplines. Probably Eugene Volokh has written some big old thing addressing this very question. But I must have missed it.

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I’m rather proud of a piece I’ve written about a new anthology of essays, Wittgenstein Reads Weininger, for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. (A nice online journal that just does short reviews. They just underwent a redesign. Now smoothly searchable.) I think I did a pretty solid job of covering this modest quadrant of scholarly specialization – this suburb of Wittgenstein’s Vienna, if you will; while also providing some clear views of the city; and some sense of the strange bird who roosts and rules there – this fierce Austrian double-eagle, gripping Frege and Russell in one sharp beak! Schopenhauer, Kraus … and Otto Weininger in the other! Who understands how such an ornithologico-philosophical thing could be? (As Wittgenstein once paraphrased Plato to one of his over-awed followers: ‘I study not these things – e.g. logic – but myself, to learn whether I am a Typhon-like monster, or a simpler sort of creature.’) And so I managed to turn a book review into a modestly original short essay. The editor very kindly let me ramble on twice as long as I was supposed to. But it’s still quite short [UPDATE: I think the word I was reaching for was ‘long’.] The Kraus quote I stuck on at the end is one of my favorites.

Thanks to everyone who bought through Amazon. With tsunami reconstruction funds cash-flush, I ended up donating another $250 (on top of the original $500+) to the Doctors Without Borders general emergency relief fund. Thanks in particular to whoever bought the expensive stuff lately. Although I regret to inform that Amazon capped the commission on the tasty G4 Powerbook at $25. I think you got a pretty good deal anyway. I hope you are happy with your sleek new machine. I’ll give again in a month and a half. Whatever accrues over the quarter.

Per my Amazon Associates fundraising efforts, I was going to send
another check for about $150 to the Singapore Red Cross. But they’ve
maxed out their fundraising. In general, tsunami
relief seem to be doing OK. So who should I give to, do you think?
Oxfam general fund?

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Scott McLemee ‘s new column at Inside Higher Ed. The ethics and aesthetics of kettle chopping. Plus this bit about our kind:

For every scholar wondering how to make blogging an institutionally accredited form of professional activity, there must be several entertaining the vague hopes that it never will.

I am the former sort. But let’s consider. The concern might be that blogging will drag down the tone of scholarship. But clearly Scott has in mind the reverse concern that scholarship will drag down the tone of blogging. It is clear enough how the dynamics of obligatory overproduction – among other common, cruel disfigurements – can produce hollow but noisome artifacts such as Scott laments:

And so the implicit content of many a conference paper is not, as one
might think, "Here is my research." Rather, it is: "Here am I,
qualified and capable, performing this role, which all of us here
share, and none of us want to question too closely. So let’s get it
over with, then go out for a drink afterwards."

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First, many thanks to all who have bought stuff through the Amazon
links. Tomorrow I’m sending another US$150 check to the Singapore Red Cross for Tsunami reconstruction efforts. Please feel free to continue helping by buying … if you were gonna buy anyway.

Andrew Sullivan gets letters. Boyo does he:

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Good deal at Amazon. 43 volumes of original Twilight Zone DVDs on sale for $4.99 each. I recommend volume 2. It’s got Shatner as the salesman who sees the gremlin on the plane wing. Plus a post-apocalypse Burgess Meredith bookworm. Plus "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street". Plus some other thing. Plus, on a more serious note, I’m still doing the thing where I advance my Amazon Associates proceeds to tsunami disaster relief, which is still needed. I’ve raised a little over $600 so far and am getting ready to cut another check. (The Singapore Red Cross wanted to raise S$1 million and they have raised S$48 million. I’m still hoping to hit US $1000 before the quarter ends.) If you haven’t just plain donated – say, to the American Red Cross – it’s still a very good time to do so. I’ll just stick another Amazon search box under the fold. If you were going to buy anyway, buy in a way that helps disaster victims. It makes sense.

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