I held out for the new iMac and now it’s here! (Unfortunately, Belle’s cute little white Macbook just up and died. Poor thing was only 16 months old. Motherboard dead. Battery toast, too. Repair cost: roughly the same as replacement cost. Sigh.)
From the category archives:
Intellects vast and warm and sympathetic
My 4-year old iMac is on it’s last legs. The DVD drive no longer works and, although everything else is fine and functional, it’s just plain slow. I have the money, so what’s the problem?
It’s this: everyone was hoping for a new iMac to be announced at Macworld, but no dice. It’s been a long time since a new iMac appeared and it seems certain we’ll have something exciting by June at the latest. But I don’t really want to wait. I’m morally certain I could CAUSE something new and exciting to be announced and rapidly rolled out, by the simple act of buying one of the old ones. I doubt very much it would take more than a week. This would, of course, be intensely annoying to me. But everyone else would be very happy. They could buy whatever the happy shiny new thing turns out to be. (At the very least, they could buy the old thing that I just bought for significantly less than I paid.) So: should I let the knowledge that I will be bringing joy to millions of other mac users, in the form of a hot new iMac, tip the scales in favor of buying the old one right now? Should I buy altruistically, in effect? Bonus question: if I knew that by throwing a fat man off a bridge in front of an oncoming trolley I could make Apple release a new iMac, would it be ok to do it? So long as I didn’t get caught?
What do you think the odds are that Apple will 1) drop their prices or 2) roll out a new iMac in the next couple months?
“John Crowley”:http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/ has a lovely essay on Thomas Disch in the new “Boston Review”:http://www.bostonreview.net. The essay isn’t on the WWW yet (I’ll link to it when/if it does appear), but I wanted to quote this bit about Disch’s _334_ as soon as I read it:
… why did he need the scaffoldings of futurist fiction? We might guess that if he were beginning a writing career now, with dozens of writers taking up and inventing personal worlds in irrealistic modes and nobody minding, he wouldn’t need science fiction. But I think that he was always haunted – and vivified – by the awful and the apocalyptic. In creating the world of _334_, he had the grand sweep of decline and fall, featuring numberless populations and quick-time disasters, that would allow him to admit a competing tendency to generosity and humility in dealing with individual hurt and longing. Posit a future that is cruel enough to be convincingly the future of this bad present – a hard shell for the tender snail of self – and you can bring out from it what matters most to you: the shortened version of things in the world.
When I wrote an “irritated piece”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/12/16/they-bellow-til-were-deaf/ in response to Benjamin Kunkel’s “silly essay”:http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1308 last month, I mentioned _334_ as a counter-example to Kunkel’s claims. But Crowley’s summation of Disch (perhaps because it isn’t a polemic or counter-polemic, instead being a sympathetic analysis of a particular aesthetic) says what I was trying to say far better. There isn’t any necessary reason why a particular set of literary tropes and themes _have_ to overwhelm character in dystopian or apocalyptic novels. Instead, as _334_ exemplifies, you can use the tensions between dystopia and the everyday lives of people as a source of art. Which is what _334_ does so well, and why it is a minor masterpiece.
Many CT readers will be familiar with the work of Tom Geoghegan. We’ve often talked about his book, _Which Side Are You On_ which is a simply wonderful piece of political writing – brilliant, complicated, beautifully written, arguing with itself the whole way through. Now, he’s running for the Democratic nomination in Rahm Emanuel’s old district. I’m usually a bit chary when intellectuals run for office – they (we1) are usually not very good at all at dealing with the day-to-day grind and compromise of politics. But Geoghegan, as “James Fallows says”:http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/01/tom_geoghegan_for_congress.php is different.
The remarkable thing is that in Geoghegan’s case writing has been a sideline. Day by day for several decades he has been a lawyer in a small Chicago law firm representing steel workers, truckers, nurses, and other employees whose travails are the reality covered by abstractions like “the polarization of America” and “the disappearing middle class.” Geoghegan’s skills as a writer and an intellectual are assets but in themselves might not recommend him for a Congressional job. His consistent and canny record of organizing, representing, and defending people who are the natural Democratic (and American) base is the relevant point. The people of Chicago would have to look elsewhere for Blago-style ethics entertainment. Tom Geoghegan is honest and almost ascetic. Because it’s an important part of his makeup, I mention too that he is a serious, Jesuit-trained Catholic.
This is a purely personal endorsement; as a general rule, we don’t take collective positions on issues or people at CT. But I can’t imagine anyone more likely to contribute more to American political life than Geoghegan. I’ve contributed money to his campaign – if you want to do so too, you can do it easily “here”:http://www.actblue.com/entity/fundraisers/21621. There’s a Facebook group “here”:http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=51249306795 (with a good bio attached).
1 In case it’s not clear, the term ‘intellectual’ here doesn’t refer either positively or negatively to intellectual worth, but to social position.
Obituary “here”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/books/02westlake.html?_r=1&hp. I’m very sorry to hear this – he was one of my favourite writers, both under his own name and his Richard Stark pseudonym. A few of his Dortmunder novels were perfect, in the same way that P.G. Wodehouse’s best Jeeves and Blandings novels were perfect – beautifully made confections of style, wit and adept plotting.
Update: This “post”:http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=11124 from Jo Walton puts it much better than I could.
He was a writer that writers like. I have often been in a conversation with writers about writing and someone will bring up Westlake and everyone else will nod and agree. Westlake’s books have wonderful characters, complicated evolving plots, they’re tightly paced and incredibly readable. When he’s funny, he’s genuinely funny with humour arising unforced out of situations. Characters are always themselves, they act the way you know they would act. They’re acutely observed and like like people. Yet his plots are clockwork masterpieces—he winds them up and off they go, not just ticking away but producing wonderful pyrotechnics. He could be gentle and he could be as hard as steel. I’ve often recommended that beginning writers study his books if they want to see how to do these things right. They’re hard to study though, because they suck you right in. There’s a quality of writing there isn’t really a word for except “unputdownable” and Westlake had it in spades.
If you haven’t read him before, I’d suggest starting with What’s the Worst That Could Happen, because that’s where I started. It’s the story of how the thief Dortmunder has his ring stolen, and how he tries to get it back, pulling off more and more complicated heists on the same person, who thoroughly deserves it. The series actually starts with The Hot Rock where Dortmunder and his friends steal the same jewel over and over. He has one more Dortmunder novel coming out in July, Get Real, so that’s something to look forward to.
On X-Mas I gave good ol’ PZ a visit. He had up a quote from Rick Warren:
I believed that evolution and the account of the Bible about creation could exist along side of each other very well. I just didn’t see what the big argument was all about. I had some friends who had been studying the Bible much longer than I had who saw it differently…Eventually, I came to the conclusion, through my study of the Bible and science, that the two positions of evolution and creation just could not fit together. There are some real problems with the idea that God created through evolution… My prayer is that you will have this same experience!
The Bible’s picture is that dinosaurs and man lived together on the earth, an earth that was filled with vegetation and beauty…man and dinosaurs lived at the same time…From the very beginning of creation, God gave man dominion over all that was made, even over the dinosaurs.
After that, I decided to give my X-Mas presents the attention they richly deserved. The adverb that describes the way my mother-in-law shopped for me is ‘awesomely’. [click to continue…]
I know, I know: it’s been two days since my last Haeckel post. Well, worry no longer! My X-Mas cards got a link from the University of Chicago Press! They just put out a new biography of Haeckel that is, I gather, more of a general intellectual history of the reception of evolutionary theory in the second half of the 19th Century, doubling as an attempt to burnish a somewhat tarnished reputation: The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought
All well and good, you agree: but surely there is more to life than German X-Mas jellyfish imagery? Yes, indeed! ASIFA has posted a wonderful series of Einar Norelius illustrations from a 1929 Bland Tomtar Och Troll (a Swedish x-mas annual of fairy and folktales). For example, here’s some sort of Aquatomten admiring a bunch of jellyfish. (Or maybe the guy’s just drowning.)
You see: there’s also Swedish X-Mas jellyfish imagery. So I added another card image to my flickr set, to add variety. (Not my best work, admittedly. But I only have so much 100-year old Swedish holiday card stock in my ephemera file.)
Ezra Klein has a “suggestion”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=10&year=2008&base_name=why_you_should_buy_the_iron_ca
Tim Fernholz analyzes the controversy and concludes, “no one knows who Khalidi is outside of the media and high information voters, and an even smaller universe of people cares. The attacks by McCain are reprehensible…but ultimately this is not an election about small stuff. This is a big stuff election.” If you want a one-line summary of why John McCain’s Distract-O-Tron 3000 strategy has failed to connect, you can’t do much better than that. Meanwhile, Khalidi is, as everyone keeps telling you, a well-respected and incisive scholar of the Middle East in general, and the Palestinian struggle for nationhood in particular. …
Presumably, this experience has not been a pleasant one for Khalidi. But it would be nice if some good emerged from it in the form of broader familiarity with his important works. So next time you hear Hannity explain how Rashid Khalidi urinates on a Haggadah during full moons, head over to Amazon and pick up a copy of The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Its an important book on its own terms, and its purchase is a worthy counter-statement to this type of anti-Arab fearmongering.
Background “here”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/241253.php, for those who haven’t been following; it’s worth noting that even Martin bloody Peretz “is defending Khalidi”:http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_spine/archive/2008/10/30/excuse-me.aspx. I’ve already bought my copy. Those who want to do likewise at Amazon and, with a bit of luck and solidarity, see his sales ranking increase, can “do so here”:http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Cage-Palestinian-Struggle-Statehood/dp/0807003093/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225470898&sr=8-1 (nb that I am using my own standard Amazon ID here, but if someone can nominate a worthwhile organization with an Amazon ID which is really likely to _annoy_ Sean Hannity, Michael Goldfarb etc, let me know, and I will amend accordingly). Those who prefer to shop at a union-friendly store like Powells can find it “here”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Khalidi%20Iron%20Cage. It doesn’t take much in the way of prophetic insight to predict that we are going to be seeing _a lot more_ of this kind of innuendo from disgusting slime-purveyors like Daniel Pipes if Obama wins – one of the lessons of the Clinton years is that when the nastier elements of the right are losing elections, they start trying to turn the culture war back up to 11. It would be nice to get a head start on the pushback.
While we are on the subject: I just found out one of my old grad school buddies – no, not the same one as devised the moral sense test – is selling Star Wars-themed Obama t-shirts. Proceeds go to the candidate. (It’s the sort of T-shirt that feeds hand-wringing about how liberals think Obama is ‘the One’. But they were going to do that anyway, so feel free.)
Also, I was going to make a one-line response yesterday to this K-Lo post. Something along the lines of: good idea, now I don’t have to do it. But then it occurred to me: that means I don’t have to do it. But today the results are too rich. [click to continue…]
Now I know what it’s like to be blonde. Today I wore my moveon.org / Obama t-shirt around the 5th arrondissement of Paris. The reaction was extraordinary. Talk about turning heads. I hesitate to blog about this because for many Americans, the excitement Obama inspires in the rest of the world is a disqualification for the US presidency. But honestly, it would do your heart good to experience first hand the joy and enthusiasm and just plain old-fashioned hope people express when Obama is mentioned.
After too many years of Americans being unpopular abroad, now everyone wants to talk to them and wish them well. My first suitor was a Moroccan builder who flagged me down in the street. He wanted to know if I was American and could vote for Obama. I’m not, so we both fervently shared our hopes about the US election.
Later, in a bookstore, a young woman working there wished me the cheeriest hello I’ve ever received in a Parisian shop. I told her I’m not American and don’t have a vote there, but figured wearing a shirt was one way to say what I think. She said she wished you could get them in France. She asked what date the election was, and talked excitedly about how wonderful it is to see so many Americans walking around the 5th wearing ‘hope’ buttons.
I know there are many in the US who think the support of ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ is something you can do without. But much of what animated the French in opposition to Bush is their almost fan-boy type love for what they see as truly American; an open-hearted curiosity about the rest of the world, and the sometimes naïve desire to make it a better place. Often in France, you get the sense of an old, old culture made weary and cynical by its long experience. Today, on a beautiful autumn day in Paris, America’s hope made an old city feel young again.
My friend Eric Schwitzgebel (philosophy prof. at UC Irvine, but once upon a time we played quite a bit of poker, once a week) craves responses to an online survey he devised with Fiery Cushman (a psychologist at Harvard). It’s ‘the moral sense test‘. I gather it is intended to investigate whether respondents with academic philosophical training respond differently to a suite of moral dilemmas (you know, the usual sort of potted philosophy cases) than do others (you know, the man on the street, mere mortals, Joe the Plumber).
I realize that trollycar-style ethical theory is regarded by many with a certain degree of skepticism – nay, it is the tipmost taper on the candelabrum of ‘not very punk rock’. Please feel free to use the comment box to express such sentiments, as your intellectual conscience and spleen dictate. But it strikes me as rather a good idea to investigate the sociology of philosophy, as it were, by checking to see to what degree academic philosophers’ ‘intuitions’ are, indeed, shared by non-philosophers. So I’m John Holbo and I approve this experiment.
UPDATE: Since we are discussing the survey in comments, you might want to take it before reading comments, if you are going to take it at all.
Scott is probably too self-deprecating to point to this excellently “funny and devastating review”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/mclemee of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s latest effusion, but I’m not him, and hence have no compunctions. It’s impossible to pick out a favorite bit so I won’t.
Hello again, crooked timber of humanity! I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long. It feels like I’m always saying that, but then, that’s what happens when you move to the once-every-Jovian-year posting schedule.
I wrote a short piece on Howard Gardner for the TES this summer. They’ve been running a series on thinkers who have influenced education. I’m not sure why they asked me to do Gardner, but I was glad to oblige (I also volunteered, at my wife’s suggestion, to do Wendy Kopp: coming soon). It was a slightly odd experience, for two reasons. I’ve quite recently gotten to know Gardner, not very well, but well enough to make it a bit awkward if I had a negative assessment of his work (I don’t, far from it). The other is that, whereas I imagine the TES editors assumed that, as an education professor, I would have come across Gardner’s work in the course of my professional life, that’s not true. In fact my dad told me to read his stuff, starting when I was in grad school. My dad is Gardner’s #1 promoter in the UK, so at least I got to know his work the same way many of the TES’s readers did. Here’s the piece (I disavow any responsibility for titles, by the way).
Via Teresa. I have to say that I was skeptical for the first fifty seconds or so, what with the new-agey soundtrack and the apparently solo globetrotting, but what comes after is just absurdly sweet in a nerd-brings-the-world-together sort of a way. Enjoy.