We've recorded some new stuff. Here's "Empty Midnight."
Friday, August 29, 2008
vacationtime
Purpose of trip: (1) To attend the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. (2) To catch up with my friend Nancy from North Carolina, whom I hadn't seen in around 6 years, and who hadn't met Lauren. (3) To see the Redwoods and the California and Oregon coasts.
Duration of trip: 4 days, as follows:
Day 1: Drive 360 miles from Turlock to Ashland, through the Central Valley and the Mt. Shasta region.
Day 2: Morning in Blue Moon Bed and Breakfast; wandering cute-cum-touristy downtown Ashland; A Midsummer Night's Dream at 1:30; move to Super 8 near freeway; return to downtown Ashland; Othello at 8; return to Super 8 for much needed cooling-off period.
Day 3: Drive 180 miles to Bullard Beach State Park, near Bandon, Oregon; meet up with Nancy; walk on beach; lunch in Bandon; wander cute-cum-fishy downtown Bandon; drive 130 miles down Oregon coast, with stops for gawking and road construction, to Crescent City, CA Travelodge.
Day 4: Drive 460 miles, down US 101 through Redwoods, dodging road construction until reaching Calpella, then on CA 20 past Clear Lake and over the pass into the Central Valley at Williams (pausing for road construction), then on I 5, suddenly realizing that Sacramento traffic would be in high dudgeon upon arrival and choosing a side-trip to Sacramento's Ikea store (stopping, then crawling, then stopping, then crawling, from 4:49 until 5:45, over a distance of 6 miles, due to an accident that occurred shortly after 4 pm, before reaching the appropriate exit), then on down I 5 to Stockton, then CA 99 (the Crankster Freeway), pausing for road construction, to Turlock, arriving home at 9 pm.
Assessment and evaluation:
(1) Drive to Ashland.
Duration of trip: 4 days, as follows:
Day 1: Drive 360 miles from Turlock to Ashland, through the Central Valley and the Mt. Shasta region.
Day 2: Morning in Blue Moon Bed and Breakfast; wandering cute-cum-touristy downtown Ashland; A Midsummer Night's Dream at 1:30; move to Super 8 near freeway; return to downtown Ashland; Othello at 8; return to Super 8 for much needed cooling-off period.
Day 3: Drive 180 miles to Bullard Beach State Park, near Bandon, Oregon; meet up with Nancy; walk on beach; lunch in Bandon; wander cute-cum-fishy downtown Bandon; drive 130 miles down Oregon coast, with stops for gawking and road construction, to Crescent City, CA Travelodge.
Day 4: Drive 460 miles, down US 101 through Redwoods, dodging road construction until reaching Calpella, then on CA 20 past Clear Lake and over the pass into the Central Valley at Williams (pausing for road construction), then on I 5, suddenly realizing that Sacramento traffic would be in high dudgeon upon arrival and choosing a side-trip to Sacramento's Ikea store (stopping, then crawling, then stopping, then crawling, from 4:49 until 5:45, over a distance of 6 miles, due to an accident that occurred shortly after 4 pm, before reaching the appropriate exit), then on down I 5 to Stockton, then CA 99 (the Crankster Freeway), pausing for road construction, to Turlock, arriving home at 9 pm.
Assessment and evaluation:
(1) Drive to Ashland.
Pretty.
(2a) Ashland.
Pretty. Cute. Food. Blue Moon B&B was pin-neat, which worked. We suffered the Great August Kitten Access Scare. The next morning, after breakfast, the Great August Kitten Access Scare was resolved, just before we entered a cd shop.
(2b) A Midsummer Night's Dream. Pretty. Hilarious. They did the faeries as 80s "club kids," you know, fairies - which was completely goofy but somehow managed to be sexy. Actually, the entire production was archly ridiculous but also tremendously oversexed, which some of us like, a lot. They had musical numbers, there was a guitar solo by Bottom in the closing, just nutsy stuff left and right - the players were done as hippies, and they came out in a VW microbus.
(2c) Moving, dinner. Eh. We went to a pub that looked like just the thing (Guinness on tap, pub fare), but the food was unimpressive or odd. After running back and forth to the parked car twice in mishaps, Othello. It wasn't pretty. They played in totally straight, with costumes that could have been 19th century or 16th, weirdly. Iago was sometimes hard to hear, in the very back row of the bottom bowl of the theater. They played Iago as driven by irrational but uncontrollable envy and pride - a real seven-deadlies approach, which was good. I don't like the idea of a psychotic Iago or a jealous Iago very much, and although there is plenty of racism in the play, I don't like the idea of racist Iago either. We left at 11:15, got back to the fabulous Super 8 by 11:30, and by then, what with the Great August Kitten Access Scare, all that Shakespeare, and having finished our day with Othello, coming home with few wits intact, we needed serious downtime.
(3a) Driving to Bullard. Pretty. Oregon road signs are sometimes hard to read, very small, or misdirecting. Plus the directions I'd obtained from Google didn't direct us to the right place. But we managed. I was tired and a bit snippy.
(3b) Meeting Nancy, walking on the beach, eating lunch in Bandon. Nancy is the kind of person that is immediately comfortable to be around. She'd had a lot of trouble getting out of Charlotte for her vacation, but made it at last. It was wonderful to see her again. The beach was nice too. We probably walked a couple miles, and Lauren got to dip her toes in the ocean, which is vital to her well-being. We had lunch at a bait-and-tackle shop that sold fresh fried fish in various formats, and the ubiquitous clam chowder.
(3c) Oregon coast.
Pretty. Rocks, water, fantastic views. We hit Crescent City by 6, got into the motel room, walked to the Safeway to buy non-fried, non-meat, non-restaurant, non-pub foodstuffs, which was perfect for dinner. Long period of decompression.
(4) Redwoods.
Pretty. I made the mistake of not taking an immediate side-trip to get into the woods, but as it turned out, that's for the best, since unbeknownst to us at 9 am when we left, we'd be in for a 12-hour day of driving. So instead of pretty hiking, we had pretty driving. And it was, very very. By the time we got to Laytonville (a tiny rural burg we suspect of being owned by Willie Nelson, since we saw half a dozen guys there who looked like Willie Nelson, and they had a biodiesel fueling station and what was probably a head shop), it was 98 degrees. The rest of the drive was very hot, over 100 all the way around Clear Lake
and down into the Central Valley.
Conclusions:
(1) We're going to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival again.
(2) We're going to tour the Redwoods in more depth some time.
(3) We need to get to the coast oftener.
Friday, August 22, 2008
interface u
With the new academic year fast approaching (all too fast approaching, but that's another story), I've been working on getting classes together, with the usual combined feeling of hope and anxiety, punctuated by bursts of rage when Blackboard does something stupid. Among the times of the year, this is one of them.
Blackboard, for those who don't have the pleasure, is a proprietary web-based course software package. Schools and colleges pay the Blackboard people (and a few others who offer similar packages) thousands and thousands of dollars for the licenses to run these, and spend thousands more on servers to run them. There are some extremely avid users of Blackboard among faculty I know - and by some, I mean, let's see... 2.
I use Blackboard, but I don't like it. I use it mainly to avoid having students pay a publishing company $100 or more apiece for a textbook that doesn't work well for my course.
Some people use Blackboard to "deliver" entire courses. I loathe this expression, and I don't even know what it's supposed to mean, unless a course is a ready-made package of material, and in that case, I don't think I know what "teaching" means, other than to be a delivery-system for information.
(What really surprises me is that some faculty seem to feel just fine about that model of teaching, and don't seem to recognize the implication of it that is glaringly obvious to me: ultimately, there's no way I can compete with digital media as a delivery-system for information. I create way more noise, am far less efficient, and I demand a higher wage.)
This year, I've decided to use Blackboard to "deliver" quizzes to my Professional Ethics students, as a way for them to gauge that they've understood a couple key points in the reading, and also as a bit of a prod to keep them up to date on the reading. I thought it was a good idea. Sometimes that kind of prodding is just what a student needs to keep from procrastinating too much. There are a lot of students like that.
But this requires that I use Blackboard's test creator function, which is the computer interface equivalent of tooth extraction via renal catheter. So when I think of my colleagues who enthuse about Blackboard, and who use it to "deliver" courses, which presumably these faculty have designed through Blackboard's various routines, I gotta wonder.
And is it just as wondrous an experience for students? Do major insurers cover this procedure?
Anyway, today I took a break from all that, and we walked around at Knight's Ferry instead.
Blackboard, for those who don't have the pleasure, is a proprietary web-based course software package. Schools and colleges pay the Blackboard people (and a few others who offer similar packages) thousands and thousands of dollars for the licenses to run these, and spend thousands more on servers to run them. There are some extremely avid users of Blackboard among faculty I know - and by some, I mean, let's see... 2.
I use Blackboard, but I don't like it. I use it mainly to avoid having students pay a publishing company $100 or more apiece for a textbook that doesn't work well for my course.
Some people use Blackboard to "deliver" entire courses. I loathe this expression, and I don't even know what it's supposed to mean, unless a course is a ready-made package of material, and in that case, I don't think I know what "teaching" means, other than to be a delivery-system for information.
(What really surprises me is that some faculty seem to feel just fine about that model of teaching, and don't seem to recognize the implication of it that is glaringly obvious to me: ultimately, there's no way I can compete with digital media as a delivery-system for information. I create way more noise, am far less efficient, and I demand a higher wage.)
This year, I've decided to use Blackboard to "deliver" quizzes to my Professional Ethics students, as a way for them to gauge that they've understood a couple key points in the reading, and also as a bit of a prod to keep them up to date on the reading. I thought it was a good idea. Sometimes that kind of prodding is just what a student needs to keep from procrastinating too much. There are a lot of students like that.
But this requires that I use Blackboard's test creator function, which is the computer interface equivalent of tooth extraction via renal catheter. So when I think of my colleagues who enthuse about Blackboard, and who use it to "deliver" courses, which presumably these faculty have designed through Blackboard's various routines, I gotta wonder.
And is it just as wondrous an experience for students? Do major insurers cover this procedure?
Anyway, today I took a break from all that, and we walked around at Knight's Ferry instead.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
California, here we come!
I found out about a year ago that California's corporate law has some interesting features, for instance, that if a California non-profit corporation does something amiss, like failing to file taxes for several years, the State can suspend, or even revoke, that corporation's Articles of Incorporation. This effectively forces the corporation to re-charter itself under a new name, and if the State, which has no resources to dedicate to the task, somehow discovers the ruse, why, that corporation is subject to the ultimate penalty - you guessed it, not being permitted to contract.
So I wasn't that surprised when I read that two unaccredited colleges are moving to California from Idaho, to open doors along with possibly dozens more, since California now has no regulatory agency to oversee businesses operating as colleges.
[You know what's coming, don't you?]
So, we're pleased to announce that, as of August 20, Doc Nagel, Inc. U. has re-opened in California. And unlike Breyer State University and Canyon College, Doc Nagel, Inc. U. is accredited, just not by the usual agency. Plus, Doc Nagel, Inc. U. is the only entirely on-line college that offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in fields from A to Z, with no coursework, no exams, no needless paperwork, and all for no tuition or fees!
So I wasn't that surprised when I read that two unaccredited colleges are moving to California from Idaho, to open doors along with possibly dozens more, since California now has no regulatory agency to oversee businesses operating as colleges.
[You know what's coming, don't you?]
So, we're pleased to announce that, as of August 20, Doc Nagel, Inc. U. has re-opened in California. And unlike Breyer State University and Canyon College, Doc Nagel, Inc. U. is accredited, just not by the usual agency. Plus, Doc Nagel, Inc. U. is the only entirely on-line college that offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in fields from A to Z, with no coursework, no exams, no needless paperwork, and all for no tuition or fees!
Sunday, August 17, 2008
birthday dinner
So, we threw the big birthday dinner party yesterday, starting around 3, and ending around midnightish. Ten courses is a lot.
My favorite item was the shrimp with saffron mousseline.
Outrageous. The mousseline is a sort of hollandaise, with whipped cream added. I added saffron to the lemon juice reduction that is central to hollandaise, also to the egg yolks, also to the butter, and also to the cream. I added a little sugar, because saffron suggests this. Completely, completely insane preparation. Utterly ludicrous dish. Ridiculously flamboyant. I was giddy about it, giggling the whole time I was whipping butter into the sauce. I mean, who makes saffron mousseline? Who would have ever eaten it? See? amuse gueule! Tee-hee-hee-hee!
The other amuse was melon, mozzarella, and prosciutto en brochette.
I made a sauce for these from balsamic vinegar reduced to 1/4 volume, with a bit of sugar, Kirschwasser, and a plum in it (then strained out). Madness. It was tart and sweet and tasty and loved the holy heck out of the melon, mozzarella and prosciutto.
The last dish we took a picture of was the first entrée, tilapia with a basil-spinach-lemon-butter sauce.
Hah! I read a recipe for fish cooked "chartreuse," which means braised in tomato, carrot, onion, and spinach (for the color, hence the name), and made something really entirely unlike that, thinking "Hey, green sauce on fish. Cool." It was, in fact: the fish was served cold, along with all the first several courses, since it was 100 degrees at 3 pm. So, complete menu:
AMUSES:
shrimp with saffron mousseline
melon, prosciutto, and mozzarella skewers
HORS-D'OUEVRE
toasts with Provençal tapenade
SOUP
Portuguese consommé (cold, slightly spicy, tomato-infused consommé)
FIRST ENTRÉE
tilapia with chef’s chartreuse sauce
SALAD
SECOND ENTRÉE
ratatouille (cooked by roasting rather than stewing)
basil and rosemary sorbet
MAIN COURSE
herb-encrusted rack of lamb, with vegetables
DESSERT
fruits and cheeses
Everybody seemed to have different favorites. Everyone marveled at the sorbet, which was in fact pretty nifty, if I do say so myself. The ratatouille was perfect. The lamb was gorgeous. But nothing beats the satisfaction of the saffron mousseline.
My favorite item was the shrimp with saffron mousseline.
Outrageous. The mousseline is a sort of hollandaise, with whipped cream added. I added saffron to the lemon juice reduction that is central to hollandaise, also to the egg yolks, also to the butter, and also to the cream. I added a little sugar, because saffron suggests this. Completely, completely insane preparation. Utterly ludicrous dish. Ridiculously flamboyant. I was giddy about it, giggling the whole time I was whipping butter into the sauce. I mean, who makes saffron mousseline? Who would have ever eaten it? See? amuse gueule! Tee-hee-hee-hee!
The other amuse was melon, mozzarella, and prosciutto en brochette.
I made a sauce for these from balsamic vinegar reduced to 1/4 volume, with a bit of sugar, Kirschwasser, and a plum in it (then strained out). Madness. It was tart and sweet and tasty and loved the holy heck out of the melon, mozzarella and prosciutto.
The last dish we took a picture of was the first entrée, tilapia with a basil-spinach-lemon-butter sauce.
Hah! I read a recipe for fish cooked "chartreuse," which means braised in tomato, carrot, onion, and spinach (for the color, hence the name), and made something really entirely unlike that, thinking "Hey, green sauce on fish. Cool." It was, in fact: the fish was served cold, along with all the first several courses, since it was 100 degrees at 3 pm. So, complete menu:
AMUSES:
shrimp with saffron mousseline
melon, prosciutto, and mozzarella skewers
HORS-D'OUEVRE
toasts with Provençal tapenade
SOUP
Portuguese consommé (cold, slightly spicy, tomato-infused consommé)
FIRST ENTRÉE
tilapia with chef’s chartreuse sauce
SALAD
SECOND ENTRÉE
ratatouille (cooked by roasting rather than stewing)
basil and rosemary sorbet
MAIN COURSE
herb-encrusted rack of lamb, with vegetables
DESSERT
fruits and cheeses
Everybody seemed to have different favorites. Everyone marveled at the sorbet, which was in fact pretty nifty, if I do say so myself. The ratatouille was perfect. The lamb was gorgeous. But nothing beats the satisfaction of the saffron mousseline.
Friday, August 15, 2008
happy birthday...
... to Napoleon Bonaparte, 239 years old today!
, and to Julia Child, who woulda been 94
, and to India, independent in 1947
, and to the Congo, independent in 1960
, and many many more! Turns out it's also Oscar Peterson's, Sir Walter Scott's and Thomas de Quincey's birthday (I didn't know that until this morning), Rose Marie's as well, and also the anniversary of the opening of the Panama Canal. Also: Debra Messing (who was also born in 1968, but I don't think she's 26 like I am), Ben Affleck (meh), Flyers goalie Marty Biron. It's also the day Catholics observe the Assumption of Mary.
Us, we're going to Modesto. Ah, Modesto. Nothing more to be said, really.
Except this: Among these people whose birthday I share, Napoleon and Ben Affleck are not allowed in the house. Neither, also, are India or the Congo, or the Panama Canal. It's not that big an apartment. The Assumption takes up far more room than you'd probably expect.
, and to Julia Child, who woulda been 94
, and to India, independent in 1947
, and to the Congo, independent in 1960
, and many many more! Turns out it's also Oscar Peterson's, Sir Walter Scott's and Thomas de Quincey's birthday (I didn't know that until this morning), Rose Marie's as well, and also the anniversary of the opening of the Panama Canal. Also: Debra Messing (who was also born in 1968, but I don't think she's 26 like I am), Ben Affleck (meh), Flyers goalie Marty Biron. It's also the day Catholics observe the Assumption of Mary.
Us, we're going to Modesto. Ah, Modesto. Nothing more to be said, really.
Except this: Among these people whose birthday I share, Napoleon and Ben Affleck are not allowed in the house. Neither, also, are India or the Congo, or the Panama Canal. It's not that big an apartment. The Assumption takes up far more room than you'd probably expect.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
tax tip!
Looking to save on your income taxes this year - and next year, and next, and next?
Incorporate! Two-thirds of large corporations in the US avoid high corporate income taxes (among the highest among affluent societies) by simply not paying them! Think of the savings!
Why, if a couple earning $65,000 in joint wages were instead to file as a major corporation, their federal tax burden could be reduced from $8800 to $0 - almost 100% savings!
Incorporate! Two-thirds of large corporations in the US avoid high corporate income taxes (among the highest among affluent societies) by simply not paying them! Think of the savings!
Why, if a couple earning $65,000 in joint wages were instead to file as a major corporation, their federal tax burden could be reduced from $8800 to $0 - almost 100% savings!
coming soon: birthday dinner
I don't want to tip my hand much about the plans for my birthday bash on Saturday. (My birthday is actually on Friday, but the orgy bacchanal dinner bacchanal will be on Saturday.) I want most things to surprise my eaters...
however, I can say the following.
Ten courses.
2 amuses gueules, one involving shrimp.
hors-d'ouevre to be named later
soup course: consommé à la portugaise (which means it's gots tomatoez innit)
a cold entrée
a salad festooned with flowers
a warm entrée
a sorbet
fancy main course with fancies
fruit and cheese
The precise nature of the dishes I intend to keep as secret as I can. One of the amuses will be quite amusing indeed, if I can pull off the preparation. And I can, because I am the philosopher-chef! I am saucier than thou!
however, I can say the following.
Ten courses.
2 amuses gueules, one involving shrimp.
hors-d'ouevre to be named later
soup course: consommé à la portugaise (which means it's gots tomatoez innit)
a cold entrée
a salad festooned with flowers
a warm entrée
a sorbet
fancy main course with fancies
fruit and cheese
The precise nature of the dishes I intend to keep as secret as I can. One of the amuses will be quite amusing indeed, if I can pull off the preparation. And I can, because I am the philosopher-chef! I am saucier than thou!
Thursday, July 31, 2008
jokes
Brought to you by random coincidence,
Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things
22. Jokes. I just love 'em.
Apparently, the world's oldest joke is a Sumerian fart joke, which I don't find particularly funny.
I just saw this this morning, which is timely, because last night my loveliest Lauren was regaling self, Christina and Guerin (on the occasion of X-ina's birthday) with jokes. She's a really good joke teller, and, when pressed, can dredge up absolute oodles of 'em. My friend Imj can also tell a joke like nobody's business, and, without any instigation at all, will launch gag barrages at innocent bystanders.
I cannot tell jokes. I have no head for them. I can write satire, but mainly I can interject what Imj described once as "cognitive dissonance." Still, I'm evidently funnier than the ancient Sumerians.
21. Multiple-course dinners. I just love 'em.
Speaking of birthdays, I'm planning a gigantic dinner party for mine, coming up in a couple weeks. At present, I'm sure of only one of the amuses gueules and nearly certain about an entrée.
I started taking cooking seriously years ago, to give myself something to make the world seem right when nothing else did. I've put together a handful of huge food orgies, including a 9 course dinner, that I'm going to try to surpass, at least in tastiness, this time. It takes hours and hours to eat that amount, so you really have to prepare people ahead of time and be realistic about the size of each course. We're starting at around 3, but I figure the main course won't be until 9.
But man, it's fun cooking that much stuff, matching dishes, giving the meal a real sense of direction.
Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things
22. Jokes. I just love 'em.
Apparently, the world's oldest joke is a Sumerian fart joke, which I don't find particularly funny.
I just saw this this morning, which is timely, because last night my loveliest Lauren was regaling self, Christina and Guerin (on the occasion of X-ina's birthday) with jokes. She's a really good joke teller, and, when pressed, can dredge up absolute oodles of 'em. My friend Imj can also tell a joke like nobody's business, and, without any instigation at all, will launch gag barrages at innocent bystanders.
I cannot tell jokes. I have no head for them. I can write satire, but mainly I can interject what Imj described once as "cognitive dissonance." Still, I'm evidently funnier than the ancient Sumerians.
21. Multiple-course dinners. I just love 'em.
Speaking of birthdays, I'm planning a gigantic dinner party for mine, coming up in a couple weeks. At present, I'm sure of only one of the amuses gueules and nearly certain about an entrée.
I started taking cooking seriously years ago, to give myself something to make the world seem right when nothing else did. I've put together a handful of huge food orgies, including a 9 course dinner, that I'm going to try to surpass, at least in tastiness, this time. It takes hours and hours to eat that amount, so you really have to prepare people ahead of time and be realistic about the size of each course. We're starting at around 3, but I figure the main course won't be until 9.
But man, it's fun cooking that much stuff, matching dishes, giving the meal a real sense of direction.
Monday, July 28, 2008
and now, incivility
With any luck, Emerson was actually right about something when he wrote that "foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." After having written about civility (to be precise, calls for civility, that is, demands for certain critical ideas to remain unspoken, as though criticism was always uncivil), today I have a question sparked by two recent news stories about radio asswipe Michael Savage.
(Obviously, I'm not interested in being civil toward him.)
The stories both concern protestors calling for Savage to be fired or his show pulled off the air because of some hateful, badly misinformed, deliberately and idiotically outrageous statement of his. Most recently, he claimed autism is over-diagnosed and the real problem many of these kids have is the lack of an abusive father. (Really, I am not making it up. Savage's concept of fatherly guidance is to tell his kids to not be morons.)
The punchline is, the program is losing individual advertisers, but not losing revenue. He's very popular. The market, in short, has spoken, and what it is saying is: There's a whole hell of a lot of people in the US who really love being lied to, very loudly, by abusive shitheads.
Therein lies my question. Is this what people want in radio entertainment? Where is the fun in it? I'm tempted, but resist, imputing that the pleasure is in having someone express one's hateful, asinine urges, a sort of Two Minutes' Hate by proxy.
My other question is how I can get in on this kind of action, because for Savage and Limbaugh and Imus and O'Reilly (and a bunch o' others) it's quite lucrative. I'm qualified, too: I can yell, I have irrational hatreds (mostly of the Philadelphia Flyers, but we can build on that), I could even write my own material. I think I have the vocabulary down, too: "moron," "destroying America," "nutcases," "whiners."
I'll work cheap, too, to start. I'll take $100,000 a year, and be happy with it! That's a big savings over a lot of the professional screamers out there.
(Obviously, I'm not interested in being civil toward him.)
The stories both concern protestors calling for Savage to be fired or his show pulled off the air because of some hateful, badly misinformed, deliberately and idiotically outrageous statement of his. Most recently, he claimed autism is over-diagnosed and the real problem many of these kids have is the lack of an abusive father. (Really, I am not making it up. Savage's concept of fatherly guidance is to tell his kids to not be morons.)
The punchline is, the program is losing individual advertisers, but not losing revenue. He's very popular. The market, in short, has spoken, and what it is saying is: There's a whole hell of a lot of people in the US who really love being lied to, very loudly, by abusive shitheads.
Therein lies my question. Is this what people want in radio entertainment? Where is the fun in it? I'm tempted, but resist, imputing that the pleasure is in having someone express one's hateful, asinine urges, a sort of Two Minutes' Hate by proxy.
My other question is how I can get in on this kind of action, because for Savage and Limbaugh and Imus and O'Reilly (and a bunch o' others) it's quite lucrative. I'm qualified, too: I can yell, I have irrational hatreds (mostly of the Philadelphia Flyers, but we can build on that), I could even write my own material. I think I have the vocabulary down, too: "moron," "destroying America," "nutcases," "whiners."
I'll work cheap, too, to start. I'll take $100,000 a year, and be happy with it! That's a big savings over a lot of the professional screamers out there.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
silence!
I'm still more vaguely annoyed than analytically critical of the fact that Dauenhauer comprehends silence sub specie human signification and expression. I have to keep in mind that my annoyance has to do with the overly-rationalistic and cognitivist slant I infer or impute to this approach. First of all, I could be wrong. Secondly, it may not matter that much. Third, I may have to admit that the phenomenon he's describing and naming as silence simply isn't what I have in mind.
One sense of silence I find myself desperately resisting is the notion of silence as either refraining from entering discourse, or of being prohibited from entering discourse - where discourse is mainly political. For instance, in Art & Fear his bizarre screed on 20th and 21st century art, Paul Virilio tells us that:
Assuming for the moment that this isn't insane raving*, Virilio's point seems to me to be that silence has been stripped of its signification and power, stripped down to meek acquiescence. This seems to have happened as a result of the cultural, aesthetic, and perceptual domination of audio-visual media. In order to be heard, it seems, one must also be seen, and vice-versa. To appear to exist in the era of multimedia, one (something, someone) must be in multimedia.
Now, this last bit doesn't seem all that outrageous. Baudrillard says much the same thing (and while we're at it, cf. the character "Mike Teavee" in various incarnations of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). So the first question is how this has had the alleged effect on silence Virilio claims. And the second question is, what kind of a phenomenon is silence, such that this could happen to it?
That's where he loses me. At the level of mass media, I guess I can admit that silence has lost authority, power, cultural meaning, the capacity to mean. If you like.
I spend a lot of time with people, or more specifically, person: my loveliest Lauren. A lot of that time is silent, in more of the sense Dauenhauer gives it. Does that silence have only the character described by Virilio? I suppose that's for us to determine, isn't it? (Not that I think we individually command our own expressions' meanings, but simply that, in this case, we can express silence toward one another or with one another more meaningfully than Virilio's analysis of mass media and art seems to offer.)
So, if I don't want silence to be reduced to the realm of human expression, and if I don't think silence can be overdetermined by media culture, and if silence manifestly isn't the absence of sound (something that not even the most profoundly deaf experiences, since sound is also vibration), then what the heck is it?
There's a grossly semantic level to this. I can stipulate what I want to name silence and go about my business. But phenomenologically, if I aim to say what the phenomenon of experiencing silence means or is, I can't rely on stipulation. I have to evoke that experience as such - but as such a what?
*Virilio's text is written like that. I think it was the text of a couple lectures, so I can't be sure he wasn't actually yelling at the audience. In any case, that's how it felt to read it. I kept asking myself why he was yelling at me. Meanwhile: SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!
One sense of silence I find myself desperately resisting is the notion of silence as either refraining from entering discourse, or of being prohibited from entering discourse - where discourse is mainly political. For instance, in Art & Fear his bizarre screed on 20th and 21st century art, Paul Virilio tells us that:
Nowadays, everything that remains silent is deemed to consent, to accept without a word of protest the background noise of audio-visual immoderation -- that is, of the 'optically correct'. But what happens as a result to the SILENCE OF THE VISIBLE under the reign of the AUDIO-VISIBLE epitomized by television, wildly overrated as television is? How can we apply the terms of Paul Valéry's aphorism in considering the question, not of the silence of art so dear to André Malraux, but of the DEAFNESS of the contemporary arts in the era of multimedia? (p. 71)
Assuming for the moment that this isn't insane raving*, Virilio's point seems to me to be that silence has been stripped of its signification and power, stripped down to meek acquiescence. This seems to have happened as a result of the cultural, aesthetic, and perceptual domination of audio-visual media. In order to be heard, it seems, one must also be seen, and vice-versa. To appear to exist in the era of multimedia, one (something, someone) must be in multimedia.
Now, this last bit doesn't seem all that outrageous. Baudrillard says much the same thing (and while we're at it, cf. the character "Mike Teavee" in various incarnations of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). So the first question is how this has had the alleged effect on silence Virilio claims. And the second question is, what kind of a phenomenon is silence, such that this could happen to it?
That's where he loses me. At the level of mass media, I guess I can admit that silence has lost authority, power, cultural meaning, the capacity to mean. If you like.
I spend a lot of time with people, or more specifically, person: my loveliest Lauren. A lot of that time is silent, in more of the sense Dauenhauer gives it. Does that silence have only the character described by Virilio? I suppose that's for us to determine, isn't it? (Not that I think we individually command our own expressions' meanings, but simply that, in this case, we can express silence toward one another or with one another more meaningfully than Virilio's analysis of mass media and art seems to offer.)
So, if I don't want silence to be reduced to the realm of human expression, and if I don't think silence can be overdetermined by media culture, and if silence manifestly isn't the absence of sound (something that not even the most profoundly deaf experiences, since sound is also vibration), then what the heck is it?
There's a grossly semantic level to this. I can stipulate what I want to name silence and go about my business. But phenomenologically, if I aim to say what the phenomenon of experiencing silence means or is, I can't rely on stipulation. I have to evoke that experience as such - but as such a what?
*Virilio's text is written like that. I think it was the text of a couple lectures, so I can't be sure he wasn't actually yelling at the audience. In any case, that's how it felt to read it. I kept asking myself why he was yelling at me. Meanwhile: SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
quarterly results
Given recent troubling economic newz, I thought it would be a good idea to present Doc Nagel, Inc.'s quarterlies. This is important information for investors, because, obviously, if a corporation is profitable, stockholders' wealth increases, and if a corporation isn't profitable, the corporation lays off workers. The people who take the big risks in a market economy have to know whether they're going to be richer, or whether other people are going to be destitute. Without that information, it would be very difficult for extremely wealthy people to continue to balance their stock portfolios in order to make damned sure that they continue to be extremely wealthy. They would be more or less at the mercy of economic forces that they could not control, and which would determine their chances for a livelihood or a decent standard of living. Terrible to contemplate.
Anyway.
Doc Nagel, Inc.'s diversified industries remain fundamentally sound. Doc Nagel, Inc. U continues to offer on-line fake degrees in fields ranging from A to Z. Okay, so no one has matriculated at Doc Nagel, Inc., U in months and months, but considering the degrees are absolutely free!, we're not losing any money there. The political satire department has, as all our shareholders know, been closed since 2003, when the satire bubble burst. We are exploring options for starting that operation up again, with a more cautious approach to the market. And no more free massages and lattes. The outrageous perks of the satire boom are a thing of the past. Quit whining. Finally, we look forward to a strong third quarter from our music department. We can't say why.
I realize this looks more like a projection than a report of earnings. One might think I was evading the issue.
So I am proud to announce that we anticipate no layoffs for the coming quarter. Effective immediately, there will be temporary long-term across-the-board productivity-center personnel permanent-position scale-backs, from which we hope to attain a 40% reduction in costs associated with compensation packages. Because the scale-backs are temporary and long-term, we can anticipate no serious reduction in productivity, since the remaining productivity-center personnel will absorb tasks. As a result, we are now able to project a fiscal-year balance.
Printed, bound copies of our complete quarterly report and fiscal year projections are available from our finance department at the address below.
Finance Department
c/o Complaints Department
ATTN: Arthur
Doc Nagel, Inc.
Turlock, CA 95380
Anyway.
Doc Nagel, Inc.'s diversified industries remain fundamentally sound. Doc Nagel, Inc. U continues to offer on-line fake degrees in fields ranging from A to Z. Okay, so no one has matriculated at Doc Nagel, Inc., U in months and months, but considering the degrees are absolutely free!, we're not losing any money there. The political satire department has, as all our shareholders know, been closed since 2003, when the satire bubble burst. We are exploring options for starting that operation up again, with a more cautious approach to the market. And no more free massages and lattes. The outrageous perks of the satire boom are a thing of the past. Quit whining. Finally, we look forward to a strong third quarter from our music department. We can't say why.
I realize this looks more like a projection than a report of earnings. One might think I was evading the issue.
So I am proud to announce that we anticipate no layoffs for the coming quarter. Effective immediately, there will be temporary long-term across-the-board productivity-center personnel permanent-position scale-backs, from which we hope to attain a 40% reduction in costs associated with compensation packages. Because the scale-backs are temporary and long-term, we can anticipate no serious reduction in productivity, since the remaining productivity-center personnel will absorb tasks. As a result, we are now able to project a fiscal-year balance.
Printed, bound copies of our complete quarterly report and fiscal year projections are available from our finance department at the address below.
Finance Department
c/o Complaints Department
ATTN: Arthur
Doc Nagel, Inc.
Turlock, CA 95380
Friday, July 18, 2008
the animal world, the human world, and the philosopher's fallacy
This is starting to look like a theme.
Today I spent some time with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, tracking down the role of silence in his account of speech and expression. In this chapter, he performs his usual trick of interpreting as the imposition of a dualism two competing accounts of a human phenomenon (meaningful speech in this case). He presents on one hand, what he boils down to the mechanistic, causal account of speech as an objective phenomenon (neurological, biological, behavioristic), and on the other hand, a purely subjective phenomenon (a meaningful and internal process of the thinking soul). Then he shows that the phenomenon itself, the lived experience of our meaningfully speaking to one another, is accounted for by neither, and hence that speech, like all other human phenomena, is "ambiguous."
Along the way, Merleau-Ponty also addresses the human world as such as a world of meaningful interactions and conduct, rather than a world of causal relations or of thoughts, and expresses this ambiguous situation as follows:
Speech is one of the ways in which human being transcends the given, the mechanical, the determined, but speech is also conditioned by the given, the mechanical, and the determined. In short, you can't speak unless you've got the brain, mouth, teeth, larynx, diaphragm, but you also can't speak unless you've got something to speak about, something to express. In this way, he says, we both transcend but do not elude "the simplicity of animal life."
In my opinion, Merleau-Ponty is not one of the worst offenders among philosophers who dismiss or ignore the animal world, or the animal in the human. But he is clearly stating that all human phenomena, to be human, cannot be reducible to the animal. That means animal life hasn't the expressive or transcendent character human life has.
The key significance of this distinction, and of the phenomenon of speech, is that
First off, I think he's dead wrong about the impossibility of painting about painting. There are some obvious cases in modern art, but in a deeper way, isn't all painting also an essay on the possibility of painting, and in that sense a painting about painting? (That is, if it's the capacity for self-reflection and being-for-itself that he's concerned about - and he is, he says so - then painting seems clearly to engage in that project, thank you very much.) He's also wrong about "every philosopher" hoping to exhaust the expressive power of speech by uttering some final truth. No doubt many do, but it's a strained reading of many, and couldn't be more incorrect regarding, say, Nietzsche.
That said, there's two big chocolate chips of truth in this cookie:
(1) The obvious self-reflectiveness of speech, unique among human expressive activity, is how it is that Reason is accorded its privilege. This is tautologous, it seems to me, but not emptily so. Reason is here defined, or at least delimited, by its expression in speech; that is, Reason is here understood as rational speech. So this notion could be re-stated: Because we speak about the world and our experience of it, and because we speak in particularly structured ways, those structured ways of speaking are our constant template for speaking sensibly. (All kinds of Kant stuff happening here that I won't go into for the moment, except to say that the content of this tautology is different for Merleau-Ponty than it is for Kant.)
The phenomenon of Reason has to be explained in terms of Reason being a product of speech, not (only?) a presupposition or precondition. Hence, we can't understand Reason or speech without going back to their origin in expressivity - the meaningfully lived interrelations of self-others-world.
(2) Speech, if it projects us in the direction of truth, leads us into the temptation to consider truth as a final attainment one of us might someday reach. Our utterances never reach truth in that sense, and the principle of that pursuit may itself be absurd. This is because our utterances are always conditioned by the beings that we are: neither purely animal nor purely rational, neither biological beings nor spiritual beings. Consequently, our speech, like all our expressions, says more than it should say, more than it is at liberty to say, and less than it wants to say, less than it apparently says.
Now if this is how it is for us as animals of words - animals of expressions, of lived interrelations of self-others-world - then why in principle would it not be so for animals of other expressions? I think that implicit in this account of the human phenomenon of speech is a blurring or erasing of the line demarcating the human from the non-human realms of lived experience. There simply seems to be no distinction fast enough to separate forms of expression absolutely, unless we slip back into relying on the rationalistic, dualistic notion of consciousness as mental stuff.
I'm going to go talk to my cats now.
Today I spent some time with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, tracking down the role of silence in his account of speech and expression. In this chapter, he performs his usual trick of interpreting as the imposition of a dualism two competing accounts of a human phenomenon (meaningful speech in this case). He presents on one hand, what he boils down to the mechanistic, causal account of speech as an objective phenomenon (neurological, biological, behavioristic), and on the other hand, a purely subjective phenomenon (a meaningful and internal process of the thinking soul). Then he shows that the phenomenon itself, the lived experience of our meaningfully speaking to one another, is accounted for by neither, and hence that speech, like all other human phenomena, is "ambiguous."
Along the way, Merleau-Ponty also addresses the human world as such as a world of meaningful interactions and conduct, rather than a world of causal relations or of thoughts, and expresses this ambiguous situation as follows:
Everything is both manufactured and natural in man, as it were, in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behavior which does not owe something to purely biological being - and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life, and cause forms of vital behavior to deviate from their pre-ordained direction, through a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man. (p 189)
Speech is one of the ways in which human being transcends the given, the mechanical, the determined, but speech is also conditioned by the given, the mechanical, and the determined. In short, you can't speak unless you've got the brain, mouth, teeth, larynx, diaphragm, but you also can't speak unless you've got something to speak about, something to express. In this way, he says, we both transcend but do not elude "the simplicity of animal life."
In my opinion, Merleau-Ponty is not one of the worst offenders among philosophers who dismiss or ignore the animal world, or the animal in the human. But he is clearly stating that all human phenomena, to be human, cannot be reducible to the animal. That means animal life hasn't the expressive or transcendent character human life has.
The key significance of this distinction, and of the phenomenon of speech, is that
speech implants the idea of truth in us as the presumptive limit of its effort... Even if this is pushing the principle beyond its limits and reducing things to the absurd, even if a linguistic meaning can never be delivered of its inherence in some word or other, the fact remains that the expressive process in the case of speech can be indefinitely reiterated, that it is possible to speak about speech whereas it is impossible to paint about painting, and finally that every philosopher has dreamed of a form of discourse which would supersede all others, whereas the painter or the musician does not hope to exhaust all possible painting or music. Thus there is a privileged position accorded to Reason. But if we want to understand it clearly, we must begin by putting thought back among the phenomena of expression. (p 190)
First off, I think he's dead wrong about the impossibility of painting about painting. There are some obvious cases in modern art, but in a deeper way, isn't all painting also an essay on the possibility of painting, and in that sense a painting about painting? (That is, if it's the capacity for self-reflection and being-for-itself that he's concerned about - and he is, he says so - then painting seems clearly to engage in that project, thank you very much.) He's also wrong about "every philosopher" hoping to exhaust the expressive power of speech by uttering some final truth. No doubt many do, but it's a strained reading of many, and couldn't be more incorrect regarding, say, Nietzsche.
That said, there's two big chocolate chips of truth in this cookie:
(1) The obvious self-reflectiveness of speech, unique among human expressive activity, is how it is that Reason is accorded its privilege. This is tautologous, it seems to me, but not emptily so. Reason is here defined, or at least delimited, by its expression in speech; that is, Reason is here understood as rational speech. So this notion could be re-stated: Because we speak about the world and our experience of it, and because we speak in particularly structured ways, those structured ways of speaking are our constant template for speaking sensibly. (All kinds of Kant stuff happening here that I won't go into for the moment, except to say that the content of this tautology is different for Merleau-Ponty than it is for Kant.)
The phenomenon of Reason has to be explained in terms of Reason being a product of speech, not (only?) a presupposition or precondition. Hence, we can't understand Reason or speech without going back to their origin in expressivity - the meaningfully lived interrelations of self-others-world.
(2) Speech, if it projects us in the direction of truth, leads us into the temptation to consider truth as a final attainment one of us might someday reach. Our utterances never reach truth in that sense, and the principle of that pursuit may itself be absurd. This is because our utterances are always conditioned by the beings that we are: neither purely animal nor purely rational, neither biological beings nor spiritual beings. Consequently, our speech, like all our expressions, says more than it should say, more than it is at liberty to say, and less than it wants to say, less than it apparently says.
Now if this is how it is for us as animals of words - animals of expressions, of lived interrelations of self-others-world - then why in principle would it not be so for animals of other expressions? I think that implicit in this account of the human phenomenon of speech is a blurring or erasing of the line demarcating the human from the non-human realms of lived experience. There simply seems to be no distinction fast enough to separate forms of expression absolutely, unless we slip back into relying on the rationalistic, dualistic notion of consciousness as mental stuff.
I'm going to go talk to my cats now.
academia is full of academics
I teach philosophy for a living, but it's more serious than that. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy. I read philosophical books. Philosophy is entangled in my life in all kinds of ways.
I'm also involved in this thing called academia, which is best described as an institution. In this institution are a whole bunch of academics. What are academics? For purposes of this entry, they are people who spend oodles of time interpreting the world as if it belonged to their own academic discipline, or to some academic discipline. They also spend oodles of time talking and writing about academia, and for some reason I read some of this stuff, for instance, the Chronicle of Higher Education's multi-authored blog called "Brainstorm." For the most part, I'm not sure why I read this. If you take a look at it, you'll ask the same question, I bet.
In addition to academics, academia is populated by other people whom academics think of as being "students," or "staff," or "librarians," or "adjuncts" (that is, other faculty who have no job security, few or no benefits, little or no autonomy over their labor, etc.). Academics develop presumptive characterizations of the lives, attitudes, behaviors, and motivations of these people on the basis of their being identified as one of these types. Students, for instance, are or should be people whose primary interest and central life pursuit is study.
I know, I know, it's hilarious. It gets funnier, though, because as a result of these presumptions, academics are continually stunned to find, for instance, that college students don't read much for pleasure. What next? Will surveys reveal that students aren't actually riveted to their seats by faculty lectures? Or that students don't regard faculty as brilliant sages? Maybe students even drink to excess from time to time!
Is there an explanation for this?
Obviously, I don't buy the neo-con bullshit that labels academics as "elites." Academics have no real power, and no real wealth. They couldn't drive a political agenda if all the reins of power were handed to them. They don't even have the ability to generate acolytes. The germ of truth in this otherwise slanderous stereotype is that academics behave with fairly astounding, and blinding, self-importance. Sometimes it's truly obnoxious, but for the most part it's expressed in mundane ways the Brainstorm column makes painfully evident: constant amazement that the world doesn't correspond to the well-reasoned conceptualization developed by highly trained minds.
I'm also involved in this thing called academia, which is best described as an institution. In this institution are a whole bunch of academics. What are academics? For purposes of this entry, they are people who spend oodles of time interpreting the world as if it belonged to their own academic discipline, or to some academic discipline. They also spend oodles of time talking and writing about academia, and for some reason I read some of this stuff, for instance, the Chronicle of Higher Education's multi-authored blog called "Brainstorm." For the most part, I'm not sure why I read this. If you take a look at it, you'll ask the same question, I bet.
In addition to academics, academia is populated by other people whom academics think of as being "students," or "staff," or "librarians," or "adjuncts" (that is, other faculty who have no job security, few or no benefits, little or no autonomy over their labor, etc.). Academics develop presumptive characterizations of the lives, attitudes, behaviors, and motivations of these people on the basis of their being identified as one of these types. Students, for instance, are or should be people whose primary interest and central life pursuit is study.
I know, I know, it's hilarious. It gets funnier, though, because as a result of these presumptions, academics are continually stunned to find, for instance, that college students don't read much for pleasure. What next? Will surveys reveal that students aren't actually riveted to their seats by faculty lectures? Or that students don't regard faculty as brilliant sages? Maybe students even drink to excess from time to time!
Is there an explanation for this?
Obviously, I don't buy the neo-con bullshit that labels academics as "elites." Academics have no real power, and no real wealth. They couldn't drive a political agenda if all the reins of power were handed to them. They don't even have the ability to generate acolytes. The germ of truth in this otherwise slanderous stereotype is that academics behave with fairly astounding, and blinding, self-importance. Sometimes it's truly obnoxious, but for the most part it's expressed in mundane ways the Brainstorm column makes painfully evident: constant amazement that the world doesn't correspond to the well-reasoned conceptualization developed by highly trained minds.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
good economic news!
really! kinda! if you turn it sorta this way...
At long last, Federal Reserve Bank chairman Ben Bernanke has something positive to say about the financial and economic situation: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac won't go belly-up. We can all breathe a collective sigh of relief, now that the housing mortgage market is safe.
Or, no, wait. What happened is that the Federal Reserve Bank, which is not part of the Federal Government, but sets fiscal policy for the entire country, has gotten a promise of more bailout money (that is, tax dollars from you and me) to shore up the very troubled $5 trillion in mortgage holdings owned by Fannie and Freddie - which in turn are independent corporations established by the government to guarantee home loans.
It's like the FDIC, which insures bank deposits in case of bank failings. If FDIC doesn't have sufficient funds to guarantee that magical $100,000 per depositer in a failed bank, the federal government will pretty much have to pony up the needed scratch, because, if they don't, the whole system could collapse (in principle; I'm not suggesting that this is imminent, because, as Phil Gramm has noted, we wouldn't want to become a nation of whiners. That's just like us ungrateful peasants. Housing market collapses, jobs evaporating, inflation booming, energy costs soaring, and we complain about the government not stepping in sooner. What do we expect, anyway? The government has been telling us all along that there's no danger of recession and that the fundamentals of our economy are all strong. Now that they aren't, we have the nerve to start whining. "Waaah! I don't have a job! Waaah! They foreclosed on my over-priced only-chance house and now I live in a tin can! Waaah! Waaah!" Suck it up, America! Go back to work, or, if you don't have a job, go get one. If there isn't one, go back to school to get re-trained. If you can't afford college, get a student loan. Borrow your way out of debt and bankruptcy. It's the American way!).
Saying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aren't going to fail anytime soon is like saying the defense department is reasonably assured that they'll get funded next year.
Still, it's the first piece of good economic news we've had in a while, so let's celebrate. I'm thinking of taking out a loan, myself, as nothing more than an expression of my economic and political self-determination. Wooo!
Or, no, wait. What happened is that the Federal Reserve Bank, which is not part of the Federal Government, but sets fiscal policy for the entire country, has gotten a promise of more bailout money (that is, tax dollars from you and me) to shore up the very troubled $5 trillion in mortgage holdings owned by Fannie and Freddie - which in turn are independent corporations established by the government to guarantee home loans.
It's like the FDIC, which insures bank deposits in case of bank failings. If FDIC doesn't have sufficient funds to guarantee that magical $100,000 per depositer in a failed bank, the federal government will pretty much have to pony up the needed scratch, because, if they don't, the whole system could collapse (in principle; I'm not suggesting that this is imminent, because, as Phil Gramm has noted, we wouldn't want to become a nation of whiners. That's just like us ungrateful peasants. Housing market collapses, jobs evaporating, inflation booming, energy costs soaring, and we complain about the government not stepping in sooner. What do we expect, anyway? The government has been telling us all along that there's no danger of recession and that the fundamentals of our economy are all strong. Now that they aren't, we have the nerve to start whining. "Waaah! I don't have a job! Waaah! They foreclosed on my over-priced only-chance house and now I live in a tin can! Waaah! Waaah!" Suck it up, America! Go back to work, or, if you don't have a job, go get one. If there isn't one, go back to school to get re-trained. If you can't afford college, get a student loan. Borrow your way out of debt and bankruptcy. It's the American way!).
Saying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aren't going to fail anytime soon is like saying the defense department is reasonably assured that they'll get funded next year.
Still, it's the first piece of good economic news we've had in a while, so let's celebrate. I'm thinking of taking out a loan, myself, as nothing more than an expression of my economic and political self-determination. Wooo!
Monday, July 14, 2008
thinking out loud
I'm working on a project on silence, for a paper for the Society for Phenomenology and Human Sciences. I've finished working through a book by Bernard Dauenhauer called Silence, which was helpful. I have some fundamental differences of opinion with Dauenhauer about the meaning of silence. But I'm also noticing, reading along, a more fundamental difference, that is very hard to come to terms with.
Phenomenology is a philosophical approach that attempts to describe and analyze lived experience and its meaning, tracing from that up towards the constitution of objectivity, reality, theory, and even truth. I like to think of phenomenology as the attempt to account for how it is that there is meaning, a world, others, objects, reality, theory, or truth for us. It avoids the positivist presumption that there just is reality out there, and all we try to do is match our concepts to it - naive realism.
But phenomenology, no less than any other philosophical approach, is deeply, tacitly, committed to a philosophical notion of rationality and experience. It's a slippery problem, but I don't think it's impossible to do something about it, even though it seems endemic to the "discipline" of philosophy.
The problem is what I am tempted to call the philosopher's fallacy, namely, the assumption that experience at all levels is fundamentally about, fundamentally for, and fundamentally directed toward the cognitive, theoretical achievement of rational sense of the world. One reason I think this is a fallacy is that philosophical writing from Plato onward has always made a point of distinguishing the philosopher's pursuit of truth from the ordinary person's vague, derivative, or distorted picture of reality. (In many cases, this is expressed frankly in terms of the philosopher's superiority to ordinary people.) Only rarely does a philosopher mention that the ordinary person's picture of reality suffices for the ordinary person. Alfred Schutz notes that, especially in the modern world, the ordinary person's picture of reality contains completely unreflected contradictions, and that these contradictions themselves aren't a problem.
So, going back to phenomenology, it shouldn't be taken for granted that experience really does have this cognitive trajectory. Plus, if philosophers would spend some time being honest about their daily lives, they might notice how little of their own time is spent in pursuit of truth, and how much of it is spent undergoing summer heat or immersed in CRT radiation. I might even argue that most of what we experience isn't about or for anything remotely cognitive in that rationalistic sense. I eat potato chips because they're salty, crunchy, oily, and go well with peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, not for the sake of the truth.
Another way to look at this that I've been thinking about is that the philosopher's fallacy reduces our being to our cognitive being, and takes us out of the animal world we also live in. Now, perhaps we can't directly enough communicate with the non-human world to be able to philosophize with bats, cats, or even dolphins and chimpanzees (some of us would prefer bonobos, but they're probably not into philosophy). But does that give good reason to conclude that non-humans don't experience the world as meaningful, too? Or that our experience and its meaningfulness is so very different from theirs, that we we need concepts like reality and truth to describe it?
This last point has come to mind because Dauenhauer analyzes silence from a totally anthropocentric stance. Silence is, he says, an "active human performance." That puts the entire description and analysis under the categories of the signifying, the symbolic, the human-cognitive, the meaning-as-truth-pursuing. If pressed, I suppose I'd grant that Alexander and Arthur (5 month old kittens) don't have conversations, and so don't enact silence as anticipatory of someone else's utterance. I might even grant that kittens don't utter. But can they, do they, enact silence as anticipatory and (as Dauenhauer later calls it, in reference to Merleau-Ponty) interrogatory ways, standing silent before the world? Perhaps they don't then speak of the world, at least, not in ways that correspond to human speaking. But can they, do they act meaningfully in the world?
More to the point, for what I'm trying to write: Can human silence not be less than cognitively directed toward that sense-making, rational thinking? Even if it can't be outside of the realm of the meaningful, and can't be entirely disconnected from utterance (as Dauenhauer's account has it, and I think he's right, at least about human silence), must it be interrogative in its end?
Or, to quote Satchel Paige (apparently): Sometimes I sits and thinks, and other times I just sits.
Phenomenology is a philosophical approach that attempts to describe and analyze lived experience and its meaning, tracing from that up towards the constitution of objectivity, reality, theory, and even truth. I like to think of phenomenology as the attempt to account for how it is that there is meaning, a world, others, objects, reality, theory, or truth for us. It avoids the positivist presumption that there just is reality out there, and all we try to do is match our concepts to it - naive realism.
But phenomenology, no less than any other philosophical approach, is deeply, tacitly, committed to a philosophical notion of rationality and experience. It's a slippery problem, but I don't think it's impossible to do something about it, even though it seems endemic to the "discipline" of philosophy.
The problem is what I am tempted to call the philosopher's fallacy, namely, the assumption that experience at all levels is fundamentally about, fundamentally for, and fundamentally directed toward the cognitive, theoretical achievement of rational sense of the world. One reason I think this is a fallacy is that philosophical writing from Plato onward has always made a point of distinguishing the philosopher's pursuit of truth from the ordinary person's vague, derivative, or distorted picture of reality. (In many cases, this is expressed frankly in terms of the philosopher's superiority to ordinary people.) Only rarely does a philosopher mention that the ordinary person's picture of reality suffices for the ordinary person. Alfred Schutz notes that, especially in the modern world, the ordinary person's picture of reality contains completely unreflected contradictions, and that these contradictions themselves aren't a problem.
So, going back to phenomenology, it shouldn't be taken for granted that experience really does have this cognitive trajectory. Plus, if philosophers would spend some time being honest about their daily lives, they might notice how little of their own time is spent in pursuit of truth, and how much of it is spent undergoing summer heat or immersed in CRT radiation. I might even argue that most of what we experience isn't about or for anything remotely cognitive in that rationalistic sense. I eat potato chips because they're salty, crunchy, oily, and go well with peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, not for the sake of the truth.
Another way to look at this that I've been thinking about is that the philosopher's fallacy reduces our being to our cognitive being, and takes us out of the animal world we also live in. Now, perhaps we can't directly enough communicate with the non-human world to be able to philosophize with bats, cats, or even dolphins and chimpanzees (some of us would prefer bonobos, but they're probably not into philosophy). But does that give good reason to conclude that non-humans don't experience the world as meaningful, too? Or that our experience and its meaningfulness is so very different from theirs, that we we need concepts like reality and truth to describe it?
This last point has come to mind because Dauenhauer analyzes silence from a totally anthropocentric stance. Silence is, he says, an "active human performance." That puts the entire description and analysis under the categories of the signifying, the symbolic, the human-cognitive, the meaning-as-truth-pursuing. If pressed, I suppose I'd grant that Alexander and Arthur (5 month old kittens) don't have conversations, and so don't enact silence as anticipatory of someone else's utterance. I might even grant that kittens don't utter. But can they, do they, enact silence as anticipatory and (as Dauenhauer later calls it, in reference to Merleau-Ponty) interrogatory ways, standing silent before the world? Perhaps they don't then speak of the world, at least, not in ways that correspond to human speaking. But can they, do they act meaningfully in the world?
More to the point, for what I'm trying to write: Can human silence not be less than cognitively directed toward that sense-making, rational thinking? Even if it can't be outside of the realm of the meaningful, and can't be entirely disconnected from utterance (as Dauenhauer's account has it, and I think he's right, at least about human silence), must it be interrogative in its end?
Or, to quote Satchel Paige (apparently): Sometimes I sits and thinks, and other times I just sits.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
civility in public dialogue
Civility is the last refuge of a scoundrel.*
Lately I've been leafing through the Association for the Study of Higher Education's Reader on university and college management. It's recommended by Marc Bousquet, author of How The University Works, his trenchant, decidedly one-sided, and in my view almost entirely accurate analysis of the day-to-day economic and social relations of production in US higher education. Bousquet recommends reading the ASHE tome (it's 600 pages) to see how administrators have learned to think about higher education institutions.
One major theme is an eerily Hobbesian notion of higher education as a wild state of nature, an anarchical tumult in need of leadership, direction, and control. That basic ideological move puts the reader in the position of interpreting everything that takes place on a college campus as the result of a manager's having worked out some method for reining in the wild impulses of the folks roaming freely across the campus (faculty and students) and turning them toward some productive purpose. So, anything that appears to that reader as contrary to that reader's chosen purpose, that reader's direction and control, appears as an outbreak of anarchy and wildness.
One way this manifests itself in the everyday life of the institution has been bugging the shit out of me for a couple years now: calls for "civility." It never fails that faculty statements of dissent - even when they are logically and dispassionately composed - are met with replies from administrators calling for more civil discourse. (I will leave aside for now the actual content of administrator's responses, which in my opinion most often tend to be disingenuous when they aren't completely evasive or dismissive.) It's annoying when administrators complain that faculty are being shrill or disruptive, but I'm most appalled at the accusations that faculty are being overly argumentative or confrontational. Academic discourse is argumentative and confrontational. That's what academic conferences are all about. It's not the most socially pleasant behavior, I confess, but it's part of how we're all trained to act.
In any event, the call for civility is clearly a thin veil for a quite different discursive agenda. On one level, it's a scolding to the naughty boys and girls in the faculty who backtalk. On another, it's another form of evasion. It's also a revoltingly passive-aggressive act, a dismissal of the issue on the basis of an alleged objection to the tone of voice. Most importantly (and this is something I don't think all my colleagues quite dig), the demand for civility is an imposed restriction on discourse, with a broad, ambiguous meaning and power-effect. It attempts to restrict not only what one says, how one says it, in what forum and in what context, but also who speaks, when, how often. The demand is to meet the criterion of civility called for by the one demanding it - a criterion always left unstated (this is the key to the ambiguity of the power of the demand). It attempts to determine the speakable and the unspeakable, the (legit) speaker and one spoken to (and of). All of which is why it's the most popular item in the catalogue from Althusser-Foucault Power Tools.
I should point out I'm not referring to any particular incident of the last couple years. This is a trend, in political dialogue as well as in university governance (how many times have we heard politicos calling for more "civility" in Congress - as though how politely they address one another is as important as whether they're voting to spend federal money on continuing a hopeless military campaign, for instance). It's akin to the way appeals to the value of "free speech" are used to push a political agenda - but that's another story, I suppose.
*Apologies to Johnson.
Lately I've been leafing through the Association for the Study of Higher Education's Reader on university and college management. It's recommended by Marc Bousquet, author of How The University Works, his trenchant, decidedly one-sided, and in my view almost entirely accurate analysis of the day-to-day economic and social relations of production in US higher education. Bousquet recommends reading the ASHE tome (it's 600 pages) to see how administrators have learned to think about higher education institutions.
One major theme is an eerily Hobbesian notion of higher education as a wild state of nature, an anarchical tumult in need of leadership, direction, and control. That basic ideological move puts the reader in the position of interpreting everything that takes place on a college campus as the result of a manager's having worked out some method for reining in the wild impulses of the folks roaming freely across the campus (faculty and students) and turning them toward some productive purpose. So, anything that appears to that reader as contrary to that reader's chosen purpose, that reader's direction and control, appears as an outbreak of anarchy and wildness.
One way this manifests itself in the everyday life of the institution has been bugging the shit out of me for a couple years now: calls for "civility." It never fails that faculty statements of dissent - even when they are logically and dispassionately composed - are met with replies from administrators calling for more civil discourse. (I will leave aside for now the actual content of administrator's responses, which in my opinion most often tend to be disingenuous when they aren't completely evasive or dismissive.) It's annoying when administrators complain that faculty are being shrill or disruptive, but I'm most appalled at the accusations that faculty are being overly argumentative or confrontational. Academic discourse is argumentative and confrontational. That's what academic conferences are all about. It's not the most socially pleasant behavior, I confess, but it's part of how we're all trained to act.
In any event, the call for civility is clearly a thin veil for a quite different discursive agenda. On one level, it's a scolding to the naughty boys and girls in the faculty who backtalk. On another, it's another form of evasion. It's also a revoltingly passive-aggressive act, a dismissal of the issue on the basis of an alleged objection to the tone of voice. Most importantly (and this is something I don't think all my colleagues quite dig), the demand for civility is an imposed restriction on discourse, with a broad, ambiguous meaning and power-effect. It attempts to restrict not only what one says, how one says it, in what forum and in what context, but also who speaks, when, how often. The demand is to meet the criterion of civility called for by the one demanding it - a criterion always left unstated (this is the key to the ambiguity of the power of the demand). It attempts to determine the speakable and the unspeakable, the (legit) speaker and one spoken to (and of). All of which is why it's the most popular item in the catalogue from Althusser-Foucault Power Tools.
I should point out I'm not referring to any particular incident of the last couple years. This is a trend, in political dialogue as well as in university governance (how many times have we heard politicos calling for more "civility" in Congress - as though how politely they address one another is as important as whether they're voting to spend federal money on continuing a hopeless military campaign, for instance). It's akin to the way appeals to the value of "free speech" are used to push a political agenda - but that's another story, I suppose.
*Apologies to Johnson.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
cat tower project
Well, we built a floor-to-ceiling cat scratching post and climbing tower. It was much less than half the cost of buying one, including buying tools. I took about 10 hours for the two of us, totally inexperienced, to build it, and that includes doing all the cutting, carpeting, and so on. Not bad. Here's a photo journal of the construction process:
stuff to build it
They played on the tower for about an hour last night and a little this morning, before it got hideously hot. Siesta time now.
stuff to build it
box construction
nailing the box together [the box is ridiculously overbuilt, with supports in the four corners and around the hole in the top, where the 8-foot 4x4 post goes]
carpeted interior, two doorways for kitty egress/exit/ambush
carpeting exterior of box
Alexander helping out
Arthur helping out
what would we do without their carpeting supervision?
or without Arthur's quality control?
luckily, it passed
They played on the tower for about an hour last night and a little this morning, before it got hideously hot. Siesta time now.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
fifth of July
Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of Lauren and I cohabiting. We celebrate three anniversaries, in fact, but to me, the fifth of July is most important.
July 5, 2004 wasn't the best day of our lives together. I had spent the previous week moving my effects out of a household that had been broken for longer than I care to think about, and myself out of a relationship that had been broken at least as long. Lauren arrived late that afternoon with a carload of her stuff, moving out of another unhappy relationship. We were both terribly excited, which masked some of the overwhelming stress and uncertainty. It was a tough way to start a life together, but we made it, and created a beautiful, delighting life.
In retrospect, that says a lot about how we love one another and why suddenly it's been four years together. We've had a tremendously happy time together, most of the time. But also a lot of terrible times, a lot of sad and distressful times. This isn't earth-shattering. Everybody goes through difficulty. The beauty and delight abide, always.
What keeps coming to mind for me lately is that no matter how stressed, paranoid, upset, angry, confused, or certain of doom I have been, of all the people in the world, Lauren always gives me hope and joy. The hope and joy she gives make it possible for life to be open, free, meaningful, and make it possible for me to fight the good fights I have to, and to smile. That hope and joy, and grasping hold of that hope and joy, of the possibility for happiness, is what the fifth of July represents to me.
July 5, 2004 wasn't the best day of our lives together. I had spent the previous week moving my effects out of a household that had been broken for longer than I care to think about, and myself out of a relationship that had been broken at least as long. Lauren arrived late that afternoon with a carload of her stuff, moving out of another unhappy relationship. We were both terribly excited, which masked some of the overwhelming stress and uncertainty. It was a tough way to start a life together, but we made it, and created a beautiful, delighting life.
In retrospect, that says a lot about how we love one another and why suddenly it's been four years together. We've had a tremendously happy time together, most of the time. But also a lot of terrible times, a lot of sad and distressful times. This isn't earth-shattering. Everybody goes through difficulty. The beauty and delight abide, always.
What keeps coming to mind for me lately is that no matter how stressed, paranoid, upset, angry, confused, or certain of doom I have been, of all the people in the world, Lauren always gives me hope and joy. The hope and joy she gives make it possible for life to be open, free, meaningful, and make it possible for me to fight the good fights I have to, and to smile. That hope and joy, and grasping hold of that hope and joy, of the possibility for happiness, is what the fifth of July represents to me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)