William S. Burroughs is one of the many reasons I'm a 24 hour a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year proud citizen of these United States. Well. . . not quite "proud," but rather something like that but consistent with the Bible's clear statement that "pride goes before a fall." I'm not being faceitous here.
A longish blog hiatus begins today.
On Tuesday we begin the trek back to Baton Rouge and the next two days are going to be spent largely doing moving out related stuff. Then on Saturday and Sunday I'll be moving stuff into and out of our house (mostly books to the office) and moving the band room with Chet, Chris, and Neal. Then we'll get the internets set up in our house and I'll be back in business.
Best parts of sabbatical-
(1) Having Thomas in the world and my life,
(2) Finishing book,
(3) Advances in Emily's writing (finishing her academic novel, rewriting a short story and getting it published, writing two children's stories and two detective stories, and starting a detective novel),
(4) Being in town with Mark and Heidi,
(5) Being professionally connected, for a year, to a department where good will, competence, shared literacy, and excitement about the humanities so resoundingly trump the personality differences and ideological conflicts,
(6) Losing my gall bladder, twenty pounds, and penchant for alcohol and processed sugar (and without becoming puritanically censorious in the process),
(7) Discovering Schopenhauer (and as a result beginning the arduous task of getting my German up to reading and speaking competency),
(8) Starting to do yoga,
(9) Starting to study the intersection of Hinduism and Christian philosophy,
(10) Knowing that Frankie and Chet were taking care of our house and cats in Baton Rouge.
(11) The city of Edmond, especially: the great health care, lack of traffic problems due to smart design that does not create bottlenecks, the traditional downtown, and the university walkable from nice neighborhoods,
(12) Getting to know my family in Broken Bow, Oklahoma,
(13) Emily starting to rock out on bass guitar.
(14) Staying in contact with Baton Rouge friends via telephone and blogs.
Worst parts of sabbatical-
(1) Almost (in retrospect, it is a blessing Thomas never got knocked over or bit) everything involved with having to put to sleep one of my dogs after he bit some people when he was panicking over minuscule things,
(2) Due to gall bladder problems and new baby, not hanging out with the people in Mark's department (especially Brendon and Eva and Jamie) as much as I would have liked,
(3) Fear: (a) Babies are fragile, (b) Even if you try your hardest, your book might still suck,
(4) Not resubmitting or submitting any papers during the whole year (this semester I'm going to go back to submitting all new ones to all three APAs, start submitting to the SEP, and also return to a mandated turn around time for resubmitting),
(5) Not seeing Baton Rouge friends,
(6) Not recording any of the new songs I've written.
I hate to say this, both because some kids look up to him and because he was my best friend, but in reality Superman was a maudlin, self-pitying, jerk. And everyone who ever had the misfortune to spend an evening drinking with him knows exactly what I'm talking about.
I know, I know. I should be nicer about how I put this.
Superman had a bad childhood. He never got to resolve a whole truckload of issues with his parents. He never felt validated by all the human beings surrounding him. And most corrosively, he couldn't make love to a human woman using his "superpowers" the way they did on his planet.
Actually this last point bears discussion, because it is so indicative. Superman claimed to have lost the desire for human women at some point in the 1990's. He claimed that he was so far evolutionarily advanced over them that it was like having sex with sea plankton. And later, when a whole plethora of gangsta rappers started to refer to each other as "dog," Superman was delighted. "That's just what humans are to me, dogs. Some of you are loyal and nice, some vicious, but you are all ultimately dumb, limited, boring, and only of interest to the emotionally stunted who can't form relationships with proper sapient beings." Like so much with Superman, I'm convinced that this was a thin rationale. In fact his prodigious alcohol intake had by that point rendered the whole question of making love to a human woman moot. And if you'd seen his bloated, waxy, sweaty, and frankly stinking self during those last few years you would have to agree with me.
How do you save a savior? Maybe the supersmart people from his destroyed home planet could have figured something out, but all I could do was offer therapeutic, new-age platitudes. "Why not take a break from saving the world and work a little bit on saving yourself?" "You know, it's be 'super' if you went to rehab." It would have been easier if he was uniformly abusive when I stooped to that, but instead he would always say things like, "Yeah, I'm going to try to quit smoking tomorrow and then get back to the journalism thing," or "Well, I've already cut down," or "Give me a break, my girlfriend just dumped me" (see previous paragraph). When I quoted Yoda to him about the difference between saying you are going to try to do something (and he always said that about not drinking and getting back into journalism) and actually just doing it then he would get kind of abusive.
But now he's dead.
A couple of more things. (1) Why did I stay friends with such a self centered moron for so long? Well you don't really pick your friends. You just gravitate to people with similar senses of humor that don't bore you. When you spend enough time with them you end up caring for them. (2) If alcohol didn't bring his superpowers down, then I think the world would be over now. There were plenty of times when he would get drunk and abusive, but in such a state you could knock him over with a feather (as many girlfriends discovered). I actually think in retrospect, that was part of the reason drinking was so addictive to him. . . but here I am getting all therapeutic again.
The truth is, Superman was pretty much an a-hole and waste of space. Ultimately, he squandered his powers because he didn't love anyone but himself. He never took responsibility for any actions. He treated service personnel with horrifying, supercilious, condescension. Though in the abstract he had all the proper liberal attitudes about things, in the particular he really didn't care about the wellbeing of any individual person. He was selfish even as a friend. You were expected to help him with all sorts of things (and most of the help involved listening to him endlessly whine about his lot), but he would never help you with anything. . . . But he was my friend and I can't help but be consumed with guilt.
It is done.
I like the book quite a bit. If nobody else does, then that's O.K. I've had worse.
Emily and I have to be out of Oklahoma on the 24th and Mark and I have to finalize the finished rewrite of the book well before that (if Emily and I are going to be able to get everything done in time). Plus, Thomas has his first illness (the doctor said it doesn't seem to be anything serious, albeit it is sleep depriving for everyone involved) and I've got allergy induced crud as well.
So the blog is on hiatus until the book is in the mail and on its way to Routledge, at which point I'll upload video of Silcox and I slaughtering a fatted calf.
It's past time to draw the moral, which I take to be that a plethora of claims to the contrary notwithstanding, you can't escape Quine's web just by opting for a metaphysical notion of necessity. Not, anyhow, if the latter is grounded in intuitions about what possible worlds there are. That's because some story is needed about what makes such intuitions true (or false) and, as far as I can see, the only candidates are facts about concepts. It's 'water' being a material kind concept that vindicates the intuition that water is necessarily H2O. Well, but if Quine is right and there aren't any such facts about concepts, then there is nothing to vindicate modal intuitions. Accordingly, if the methodology of analytic philosophy lacked a rationale pre-Kripke, it continues to do so.
. . . .During the 1980s, students and professors of literary theory fervently imbibed the classic texts of "French theory" — what came to be known on this side of the Atlantic as "poststructuralism." (Tellingly, this appellation, an American coinage, does not exist in France.) Among disciples — often the best and the brightest among newly minted comp-lit Ph.D.'s — the tone was ardent and the expectations salvific.
. . . .Although traces of French theory remain, the messianic fervor of its halcyon days seems spent. It has settled in to become merely one critical paradigm among others
. . . .Rejecting the tyranny of reason, or "logocentrism," Derrida's writing reveled in the joys of linguistic slippage, textual fissures, and uninhibited play. By the same token, his dazzling displays of interpretive bravado (I once witnessed a laborious, two-hour public exegesis of an eight-line poem by the French bard Francis Ponge) seemed merely to foster a new breed of textual formalism. How might one turn Derrida's impenetrable writing into a viable critical program? In truth, it was impossible. By declaring early on that "there is nothing outside the text," Derrida did little to stanch the metastasizing credibility gap. "Unreadability" was one of deconstruction's signature traits. But when Derrida's disciples tried their hand at deconstructive criticism, often the results were decidedly mixed — watercolor pastiches of a venerable Dutch master. What was good for the master wasn't necessarily good for the students.
. . . .Perhaps the major question that arises from Cusset's book concerns French theory's strikingly different receptions in North America and France. In America, French theory flourished during the 1980s, but during the same decade in France, it was summarily buried. By the early 1980s in France, scholarly citations of Derrida's work had dwindled to a trickle. A 1980 poll on French intellectuals listed Claude Lévi-Strauss and Raymond Aron as the top two vote getters. Among the 36 intellectuals receiving votes, Derrida's name was nowhere to be found.
. . . .Derrida once proclaimed that "deconstruction is America," thereby acknowledging the curious fact that while French theory had caught on in North America, in his native France it remained peculiarly without echo. By appropriating the precepts of French theory, we Americans undermined its residual claims to theoretical and political radicalism — and thereby succeeded in domesticating it. In the end, it became grist for the mill of liberal pluralism.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “a second-class intellect but a first-rate temperament.” Bush’s endless malapropisms have made his intellect the object of ridicule. But his mind was not the problem. It’s a better mind than his “nukelar” trashing of language suggests.
Bush’s chip-on-the-shoulder temperament is another matter. He has proved mean, vindictive, surly, controlling and impatient, as befits his guns-at-the-ready gait. Apologizing for tough-guy rhetoric now, as he has, is no remedy. There’s nothing worse than a control-freak chief executive with no interest in details like the disbanding of the Iraqi Army or the strength of New Orleans levees.
