I’d been meaning to write a brief end-of-year post about books I’ve read recently. I’ll do it now and pledge (like Henry and John) that any Amazon Associates fees I get if any of you are moved to buy any of them (or anything else after clicking on the links) will go to tsunami disaster relief. Full post below the fold.

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My buy generously post below was unclear. (I was assuming folks understand how Amazon Associates works. Silly assumption.) You don’t have to buy the very items I linked. You can click any link and then search around and buy anything. I just tossed out a basket of big ticket bestsellers because direct link %’s are a little higher. Buy anything from Amazon through me and at least 5.75% of what you pay goes to me, which I (informally, not in any legally problematic way) pledge to give to disaster relief. My point wasn’t that the time is perfect to buy glitzy DVD’s – sorry if that seemed crass. I meant: buy something. I’ve stuck a convenient Amazon searchbox under the fold. Go ahead and use it.

Once again, I encourage other bloggers with Amazon Associates to follow suit. (I see Henry has already done so. Good!) The quarter is ending. Shake that little jar of change you were planning to spend on silly stuff. Give for something serious. Henry has pledged to keep up the giving through next quarter. I am happy to do the same. The logic of this is very sound. By doing this we are in effect giving immediately and agreeing to carry a little bit of debt for a short time, since the money is needed now. It would be very nice if many bloggers did this, announced it, then folks made a point of buying the stuff they were going to buy from Amazon anyway through them. (Of course this is informal, so the bloggers could just pocket the money. But if the blogger is someone you personally trust not to be such a bastard as to steal petty cash from disaster victims, the level of broken pledges should be low.)

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I’ve just discovered a “quite disgusting exercise in partisan pointscoring”:http://wizbangblog.com/archives/004640.php by Wizbang via our Technorati links, suggesting that because we (and other left blogs) haven’t had several posts each about the tsunami and its aftermath, liberals don’t care as much as conservatives about their fellow human beings. I’m not going to return the favour by claiming that this post shows us this or that about conservatives, because it doesn’t tell us anything whatsoever about conservatives as a collectivity. It does, however, speak volumes about the person who wrote this sorry excuse for a post.

NB – further attempts to play partisan football in the comments section will be deleted.

Like John, I’m going to be donating whatever’s in my Amazon Associates account already, plus whatever commission comes in from people buying over the next quarter (up to March 31). I’ll make the first payment, like John, after the weekend, to the American Red Cross, and will donate whatever comes in after that to a combination of the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontieres, and a charity dealing with long term reconstruction (suggestions gratefully received). I’d been thinking anyway of doing a round-up of books that I’d liked this year – a highly varied list of reading suggestions below. As John says, donate what you can directly – but if you want some holiday reading (and to give a little money to charity while you’re at it) use the links below.

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Jerry Orbach, star of Law & Order for many seasons, died last night of prostate cancer. Just last week NBC rebroadcast his last episode in the series. Even though he had left the show, he was taking part in the production of the new upcoming spinoff “Law & Order: Trial by Jury”, which will start airing in 2005 with Orbach performing in three episodes.

I’m suffering from jags of survivor guilt. I really can’t bear to read the news. As Belle and I posted at our other blog, we were planning a Phuket/Koh Phi Phi Thai X-Mas junket for our whole extended family. But it fell through when the stateside folks decided they couldn’t hack the weirdness and distance and expense. So I am plagued by images of what it would have been like with Belle on the beach, 3-year old daughter to the left of me, 8-month old daughter to the right.  Also, we’ve been to Phuket and Phi Phi several times and can’t help thinking about all the nice folks who were always so nice to us. I’m sure many of them are dead and many of the rest have had their livelihood destroyed, at least for the time being.

So Belle and I are donating the humble proceeds from our Amazon Associates Account for the quarter. So far that comes to almost exactly $100. A nice round number to pony up for starters. Given that I have resolved to donate x, where x = my commissions, you might consider buying some Amazon products through my Associates account. Hint, hint. Just look under the fold. I’m not an incorporated charity or anything, so don’t come demanding financial statements. But most of us are gonna buy some Amazon gear this year, am I right? So buy it now and – as it so happens – I’ll fire off a check to a reputable charity come the 1st of January [make that January 3, after the weekend]. The bigger the better. (I haven’t decided which charity is best, if that makes a difference to you.) Then I’ll fire off another check two weeks after that to equal whatever amount rolls in late. Then I’ll decide what to do. So if you click to buy after two weeks into the New Year, I’m not promising I’ll still be in the sending checks to charities business. But I’m not intending to turn a profit here, I do solemnly swear. And if you don’t trust me, don’t click. Easy. (I hereby disavow legal obligation to you, is what I’m saying. You’re buying from Amazon. I’m just stating a personal plan.)

I hereby encourage other bloggers – those of you who have hopeful little Amazon begging bowls put out – to follow suit. Pledge your proceeds for the quarter, joe blogger, even if it’s only a few bucks. Say so, so your readers can sweeten the pot. We’re big on chat, we bloggers. But chat isn’t exactly what certain folks need at the moment. [UPDATE: I probably wasn’t clear about this. You can buy any old thing from Amazon using any of the links below and I’ll get a commission. Once you are there, just buy what you want. It’s just there are extra % points if you buy the very thing on the button. Sorry for confusion.]

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Not only is it “MLA Season”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003045.html, it’s also time for the meetings of the “American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division”:http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/divisions/eastern/. The APA meetings are scheduled at this time of the year because, as is well known, philosophers hate Christmas — even if a good number of its senior wranglers do their best to look like Santa. So here I am in Boston. This year I even have a professional excuse to be here, because I’m doing some work on the relationship between specialization and status amongst philosophy departments.

Unlike most academic associations, the APA doesn’t have a proper national meeting, just regional ones. But the Eastern APA is the biggest, partly because there’s a high concentration of philosophers on the East Coast,[1] but mostly because the job market happens at it. Like the MLA, Philosophy departments interview their shortlist of 10 to 15 candidates at the meetings, with a view to whittling them down to three or four for campus visits. Personally, I don’t believe this stage adds any useful information to the recruitment process, unless you are interested in whether a candidate can sit comfortably in a cramped hotel suite.

I nearly got an interview at the APA myself a few years ago, when I accidentally sat at the wrong table in an empty conference room, put my feet up and started reading some book or other. After about half an hour some people started filing in to the room, but I wasn’t paying attention. Then two guys (one with a Santa beard-in-training) sat down at my table. “Mr Robertson? We’re from East Jesus State University,”[2] said one of them, “Shall we begin?” I should have said yes, but of course instead I was a coward and mumbled something about not being Mr Robertson. Pity: I’ve become quite good at bluffing my way amongst philosophers, and I might have gotten a fly-out.

fn1. Every single Mets fan, for instance.

fn2. Not its real name.

And now for something completely different. As I was going over the Cork and Kerry mountains, only this morning in fact, The Langer Song came on the radio. So I finally got a chance to hear it, just 6 months after it was Number 1.

What is a langer? See here for essential information and the alarming news that the word langer is now in the Collins dictionary (surely the beginning of the end). Better still CT’s resident Cork sociologist, Kieran, has been there and done all that last June.

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Susan Sontag is dead from leukaemia; the New York Times has an “obituary here”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/books/28cnd-sont.html?ex=1261976400&en=f88d1db2e18c3c3b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland.

Judge Richard Posner has been guest-blogging over at Brian Leiter’s site. In his first post, he expresses a not-quite-completely general moral skepticism:

much or even most morality seems based, rather, on instinct, emotion, custom, history, politics, or ideology, rather than on widely shared social goals….Are there really compelling reasons for these unarguable tenets of the current American moral code? One can give reasons for them, but would they be anything more than rationalizations? They have causes, that history, sociology, or psychology might elucidate, but causes are not reasons.

One might think that this is a prelude to a sweeping condemnation of the American moral code – most of it is based on instinct, emotion, custom, etc. and should be replaced by a code that is better grounded. But this is not what Posner is up to. His target is not a specific code that he thinks is not up to snuff, but rather a certain way of thinking about morality itself.

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Tis the season. Open season! On the MLA! I see the NY Times has taken the first potshot. And so I give MLA bashing its first comment box! I must say, I don’t even think we need Chun to tell us this effort is not very impressive. (Scott McLemee‘s "Provokies" were much funnier. I think perhaps he was wise to get out of this business while the getting was good.)

Tragic hipness, multicultural agendizing and an almost abject embrace of low/popular culture converge in titles like " ‘Dude! Your Dress Is So Cute!’ Patterns of Semantic Widening in ‘Dude,’ " an entire session dedicated to papers on Mel Gibson’s "Passion of the Christ," "Urban Expressionism: Theater, Ritual, and the Hip-Hop Generation’s Black Arts Movement," "Utopia in the Borderlands; or, Long Live El Vez the King" (El Vez is a Latino Elvis impersonator), and "A Pynch in Time: The Postmodernity of Prenational Philadelphia in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon and Mark Knopfler’s ‘Sailing to Philadelphia’ " (Mr. Knopfler is a rocker best known for wanting his MTV). The clunkiness of all this suggests that eggheads are still nerds, but it that some of them are terribly self-conscious about it now.

The trouble is that the author is so sure it’s all nonsense that he is lazily lumping the patently silly and the just possibly serious. (No, really, when the target is this big you should really try for a clean hit.) What is necessarily wrong with having a panel discussion of "The Passion of Christ"? What is specifically ‘clunky’ about it? (Unless, as seems grammatically possible, the panel is actually called ‘Dude! Your Dress Is So Cute!’ But I sort of suspect that’s not the case.) Also, calling English profs ‘eggheads’? Who calls anyone an ‘egghead’? (Sounds like Foghorn chuckling about widdah Hen’s genius kid.)

I have ever so much more to say but I’ll just declare this an open thread. I welcome reports from actual attendees of the conference. Be more informative and entertaining than the NY Times, if you please. (OK, here’s a specific question for discussion. If it’s alright for bloggers to give their posts very silly titles – which I mostly do – could the MLA solve all its problems, cross that fine line between stupid and clever, just by turning all the conference papers into blog posts?)

I’ve just been watching the news of the terrible disaster unfolding in the Indian Ocean region. Thousands upon thousands dead, and reports still coming in. One expert on the BBC just spoke about the displacement of millions of cubic kilometres of water. How powerful, unpredictable and savage nature can be. An awful day.

I wanted to wish a Merry Christmas to all our readers. As per my last post, I have been slacking off shamefully around here. I plead excessive holiday activity of the sort which precludes sitting in front of the computer. Like, um, all of it. Nonetheless I want to emulate the Corner yet further by asking you all to do the work. OK, it’s a “bleg”, fine, I said it (God, as if the word “blog” isn’t bad enough. I don’t know why we don’t just change the word “post” to “smegma” and have done with it.) I am going to Sri Lanka for a week in January and I wondered if we had any readers there or expats who want to give me advice. Anyone? Marvellous tales from the Isle of Serendib?

UPDATE: As John has noted in the comments, this request has taken on a rather different and most unserendipitous cast in light of the tragedy in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. My deepest sympathy to all those affected. It looks as if I won’t be going to Sri Lanka on the 10th of January, but I plan to go another time soon; I am just changing the dates of my ticket. They can surely use the money. And so, any wisdom is still appreciated.

Since it’s the season for spreading good news stories, here’s a “delightful story about Pedro Martínez”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/23/sports/baseball/23pedro.html?ex=1261544400&en=734c78e5d89f0103&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland and the resources he’s put back into his home town of Manoguayabo. It’s easy to feel jealous (or worse) towards sports stars for all the money they earn, but these feelings are hard to maintain when the star does so much good with the money.

For years Pedro has been my favourite player on my favourite (non-Australian) sporting team, and it was rather sad when he left so he could get more money from the New York Mets. But it’s hard to feel bad about Pedro getting the extra $13 million or so the Mets were offering when so much of it will be returned to Manoguayabo.