more than 95 theses

May 21

“I recommend the Betting Books which All Souls [College, Oxford] has privately published now and then, and which enable one almost to sniff the cigar smoke and savour the port of many a pleasurable, if intellectually demanding, evening. The stakes are seldom high, but the subjects are all-embracing. … Asquith bets Malcolm 1s. that twice around Malcolm’s stomach is less than the combined perimeter of Malcolm’s stomach and head, and Steel-Maitland bets Edgeworth that with three exceptions no monument exists within a radius of five miles from the centre of Rome, built between 100 B.C. and A. D. 300, possessing an arch with a lateral thrust. Hardinge once unaccountably bets Doyle 1s. that Admiral Benbow was a black man, Curzon bets Talbot 1s. that the man who stuck a pen-knife through a roll in the Old Testament was not named Jehudi. There was once a bet to the effect that “Home, Sweet Home” was written by a divorced German Jew, and between the wars Corbett succeeded in proving that he could in fact hang upside down by the grip of his toes for 10 seconds on the common-room door.” — Jan Morris, Oxford

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The whole story has a tragicomic, Nathaniel Hawthorne meets “Curb Your Enthusiasm” feel. It’s easy to imagine [elizabeth] Warren originally checking a box more on a whim than out of any deep determination to self-identify as Cherokee. (She didn’t use the minority-applicant program when applying to Rutgers, where she attended law school, and she identified as “white” during an early teaching job at the University of Texas.) Then it’s easy to imagine her embarrassment when the diversity wars of the 1990s made that whimsical choice something from which she couldn’t dissociate herself without intense public awkwardness. Those wars faded, she no longer listed herself as a Native American, she thought the whole thing was behind her … until she went into politics, where no secret stays buried.

The appropriate response to such a tale is probably sympathy rather than scorn. What does deserve scorn, though, is the academic culture in which an extremely distant connection to a Cherokee ancestor ends up being touted by a law school as proof of its commitment to diversity…. The irony is that Warren herself probably did make Harvard more diverse, since she grew up the daughter of a janitor in Oklahoma — not a typical background, to put it mildly, for Ivy League students and faculty today. But under the academy’s cramped definitions, it was her grandfather’s Cherokee cheekbones, not her blue-collar roots, that led to her citation as a supposed trailblazer.

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She was not an unshockable blue-stocking;
If shades remain the characters they were,
No doubt she still considers you as shocking.
But tell Jane Austen, that is if you dare,
How much her novels are beloved down here.
She wrote them for posterity, she said;
‘Twas rash, but by posterity she’s read.

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle-class
Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.

Auden, “Letter to Lord Byron” (1937). I thought of this passage yesterday as I was re-reading Mansfield Park, which I take to be Austen’s greatest novel, one of the greatest novels ever written, and a terrifyingly blunt and unblinking revelation of the selfishness and cruelty that most ordinary people are capable of. I read this book and I wonder how many monsters there are in the world who simply lack the power to inflict the pain on others — especially on the weak — that they want to inflict.

(Also: apologies for my inability to get Tumblr to format the verse properly.)

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Dick was a consummate autodidact. He survived for less than one semester at college, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1949, taking and quitting Philosophy 10A in the space of a few weeks. Dick left the class in disgust at the ignorance and intolerance of his instructor when he asked his professor about the plausibility of Plato’s metaphysical theory of the forms — the truth of which was later proven for Dick by the experience of 2-3-74. Dick was evidently not trained as a philosopher or theologian — although I abhor that verb “trained,” which makes academics sound like domestic pets. Dick was an amateur philosopher or, to borrow a phrase from one of the editors of “Exegesis,” Erik Davis, he was that most splendid of things: a garage philosopher.

What Dick lacks in academic and scholarly rigor, he more than makes up for in powers of imagination and rich lateral, cumulative association. If he had known more, it might have led him to produce less interesting chains of ideas. In a later remark in “Exegesis,” Dick writes, “I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.” He interestingly goes on to add, “The core of my writing is not art but truth.” We seem to be facing an apparent paradox, where the concern with truth, the classical goal of the philosopher, is not judged to be in opposition to fiction, but itself a work a fiction. Dick saw his fiction writing as the creative attempt to describe what he discerned as the true reality. He adds, “I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.”

May 18

paleofuture:

Tripping Through the Cold War: Drug Warfare of the Retrofuture

“This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation. (That’s not all these apps do, but it’s one benefit of using them, and it indicates how pathetic much of our web design is when our visitors increasingly turn to third party applications simply to read our sites’ content. It also suggests that those who don’t design for readers might soon not be designing for anyone.)” — Web Design Manifesto 2012 – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

Well, that’s the coolest thing of the day. Don’t know why I had never noticed the very close resemblance between the iPhone and 2001’s monolith. Via Gruber.

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“Daytona 500” is the greatest hip-hop song ever—not merely my favorite, but “the greatest.”

This is true because I have declared it as such. One of the benefits of of my status as a black intellectual is the right to cocoon myself in an elite bastion, and make broad declarations about urban culture, at a safe distance from those best equipped to refute said declarations….

At any rate, I defy you to find a hip-hop song greater than “Daytona 500.” What constituites greater? Whatever suits my whim. I’m a black intellectual. I have pronounced it from the offices of The Atlantic, therefore it must be true.

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I acknowledge that I have used four-letter words familiarly all my life, and have put them into books with some sense that I was insisting on the proper freedom of the artist. I have applauded the extinction of those d——d emasculations of the Genteel Tradition and the intrusion into serious fiction of honest words with honest meanings and emphasis. I have wished, with D. H. Lawrence, for the courage to say shit before a lady, and have sometimes had my wish.

Words are not obscene: naming things is a legitimate verbal act. And “frank” does not mean “vulgar,” any more than “improper” means “dirty.” What vulgar does mean is “common”; what improper means is “unsuitable.” Under the right circumstances, any word is proper. But when any sort of word, especially a word hitherto taboo and therefore noticeable, is scattered across a page like chocolate chips through a tollhouse cookie, a real impropriety occurs. The sin is not the use of an “obscene” word; it is the use of a loaded word in the wrong place or in the wrong quantity. It is the sin of false emphasis, which is not a moral but a literary lapse, related to sentimentality. It is the sin of advertisers who so plaster a highway with neon signs that you can’t find the bar or liquor store you’re looking for. Like any excess, it quickly becomes comic …

Some acts, like some words, were never meant to be casual. That is why houses contain bedrooms and bathrooms. Profanity and so-called obscenities are literary resources, verbal ways of rendering strong emotion. They are not meant to occur every ten seconds, any more than—Norman Mailer to the contrary notwithstanding—orgasms are.

Wallace Stegner on Profanity - Magazine - The Atlantic. In the forty-seven years since Stegner published this piece — the whole of which is not online anywhere, as far as I can tell, which is a shame, because it’s a brilliantly funny and insightful essay — the situation have gotten far worse. Swearing is now a lost art. I should know: I grew up under the tutelage of a virtuoso. I’ve never heard anyone curse as rhythmically, poetically, and polysyllabically as my father did.

But the key to successful cursing is restraint: saving the most powerful words for the occasion when they are needed. As Stegner comments elsewhere in the essay, if you “say shit before a lady,” what do you say when your car breaks down at rush hour on the Santa Monica Freeway? Presumably, in those days, you would take that opportunity to drop the f-bomb, but to judge by my Twitter feed, many people now use that word fifty times a day, which leaves them with absolutely nothing in reserve when something genuinely bad happens. Not only is it not the f-bomb any more, it’s not even the f-sparkler. The word has been eviscerated. I am not speaking in moral terms here, just linguistic ones: the spread of cursing into more and more situations where it once would have been forbidden has been one more form of linguistic inflation, like calling everything that’s even mildly pleasant “awesome.” It betokens a lack of judgment, a failure of assessment, and it leaves us with limited or no linguistic resources in the hour of need. We need to clean up our language, if for no other reason than to have room to make it dirty when dirty is really called for.

“Andrew [Sullivan’s] writing is not and never has been much about making sense in this way. Andrew is a man of enormous feeling capable of reacting to public figures with ferocious hostility or flushed adoration. His reactions are often completely unhinged, wildly inapposite, and rarely stable over time. Andrew falls in and out of love like a bipolar fourteen year-old diarist. Yet he proceeds — and this is as maddening as it is riveting — as if he were not an overheated, fickle instrument, as if his vehement mutable passions about public persons made perfect sense, were the unimpeachable output of a judicious internal process of cool analysis sensitive only to the objective features of his subjects.” —

Does Andrew Sullivan’s Obamaphilia Make Sense? | The Moral Sciences Club | Big Think

Will Wilkinson.

(via mwfrost)

(via mwfrost)

Auden expresses himself on (then experimental) changes to the Book of Common Prayer; here, via the Paris Review

May 17

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It’s taken time for the magazine industry to catch up to the new iPad—only in the last few weeks have some of my favorite magazines, including the New Yorker, released apps that take advantage of the Retina display. But now that they have, the iPad has become transformative. The Retina display has brought iPad magazines up to par, as a reading experience, with their print counterparts. And when you consider the other advantages of iPad mags—you can have lots of them on hand, you can read them in the dark, you never lose your place—the electronic version wins the day.

In fact, since getting the new iPad, I’ve pretty much stopped reading on paper altogether. Now, other than greeting cards, I’ve got no use for the stuff. When I do page through print newspapers and magazines, I feel something novel—the sensation that I’m experiencing an inferior product.

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This day, his Majesty, Charles the Second came to London, after a sad and long exile and calamitous suffering both of the King and Church, being seventeen years. This was also his birthday, and with a triumph of above 20,000 horse and foot, brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewed with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestry, fountains running with wine; the Mayor, Aldermen, and all the Companies, in their liveries, chains of gold, and banners; Lords and Nobles, clad in cloth of silver, gold, and velvet; the windows and balconies, all set with ladies; trumpets, music, and myriads of people flocking, even so far as from Rochester, so as they were seven hours in passing the city, even from two in the afternoon till nine at night.

I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God.

academics and families

For the last couple of days I’ve been thinking about this post from my buddy Rod Deeher’s blog, quoting an essay claiming that academic life is a bad choice for someone who wants a family. There’s general agreement on that point in the comments. I think we need some distinctions here.

Being a contingent faculty member — an adjunct, working at multiple institutions for what amounts to less than minimum wage — is terrible for anyone who has to do it, but it takes an especially great toll on people with families. That is certain. I would also say that academic life, even in high-status and stable jobs, can interfere with family life if you’re a person who’s not good at disciplining your time: academic work is gaseous, in the sense that it inevitably expands to fill the available volume, and those who aren’t good at keeping it in reasonable-sized containers can find that it takes over their lives. I know academics who spend way too many nights and weekends away from their families, in their offices, prepping for class or working on conference papers.

But I would argue that this is not a problem intrinsic to academic life: it’s a problem for people who are lousy at time management. I decided long ago that the one absolutely key commitment one must make in order to survive as an academic is: During work time, work; during play time, play. It’s far too easy for academics — and most other knowledge workers as well — to allow work and play to blur together, so that, yeah, you’re writing that conference paper, but you’re also stopping every five minutes to check your email, tweet, IM with other friends who are similarly procrastinating, follow a rabbit-trail of links on the internet. It’s the habit of succumbing to these temptations that leads to evenings at the office when you ought to be having a glass of wine with your spouse or reading to your children.

But if you can be a good discipliner of your time, a tenure-track academic job (that increasingly rare thing) is great for family life, because you have so much freedom to structure your time. Even during term, there are only a few hours a week when you absolutely have to be in a given place, which means that you get to decide when and where to do your work. When our son Wesley was born, my wife Teri cut back from full-time work at World Relief, where she was the public information manager, to 25 hours a week. I asked my department chair if it would be possible for me to have all of my classes and office hours before 1pm, so I could get home in time for Teri to go to work, and he agreed. That was our schedule for several years, which means that from my son’s birth until he started school, I got to spend almost every afternoon with him. (Once a week or so I had to come in for meetings.) I put him down for his nap, I woke him up and watched Thomas the Tank engine videos with him as he sat on my lap, I took him and our dog Zoe to the park. On days when I had no classes we could take the train into Chicago and visit museums or hang out at the lakefront. I wouldn’t trade those days for anything in the universe. And it was made possible by the flexibility of an academic schedule — and, to some extent, by my own determination to discipline my time so that when I was with Wes I could be fully present and not have half my mind on work.

I have been blessed with an unusually good academic job that has had some unusual perks: we have an outstanding dining hall on Wheaton’s campus and the college subsidizes faculty meals, so we can eat cheaply and very, very well there when we want; the college has also made it possible for my family to come with me on several summer study tours of England. These opportunities have allowed Wes to hang out with cool college students all his life, and to see parts of the world that we would never have been able to visit on our own. As I say, that’s not the norm. But the greatest rewards have come from my having a job that has allowed me to put a priority on time with my family. That’s something that many academics have, and that more could have, if they were to be more intentional about how they use their time.

“The theory of machinery is that it saves time, but Stanford himself noted of such machinery that “if you could limit man’s wants it might be called ‘labor saving,’ but as there are no limits to his wants, the machinery really increases the power of production.” That is, the industrialized world wants more goods, not more time, and so the machinery doesn’t increase freedom and leisure, it increases production and consumption.” — From Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows (via viafrank)