Jon Cogburn's Blog

brush with fame

I went to high school with Octavia Spencer, at "Jefferson Davis High School"* in Montgomery Alabama. I doubt she'd recognize me today, but we did have some close friends in common.

In my experience, it's not that uncommon that people from states who were on the right side in the Civil War can't quite understand how those of us in the crap states can possibly love (and yes be thankful to) these places.

You can see it here when Spencer thanks the state of Alabama at around the seventeen to twenty second point. A sizable portion of the audience laughs as if she'd just made a joke.

But she wasn't making a joke.**

Let me just say that there are worse places to live than Alabama.***

Pakistan is objectively pretty awful in all sorts of ways. But only complete idiots would get mad at Pakistan or begrudge the fact that, for example, many of the authors at 3quarksdaily clearly love Pakistan and all sorts of great things about it (and through this love they are able to provide some of the most insightful criticism of the past, present, and future horrors anywhere on the web).

If I had a quarter for every time a colleague from a nicer state laughingly called Louisiana or Alabama a "third world country" I'd have at least a twenty dollar bill. But the thing is, none of these people would talk about actual third world countries in such dehumanizing ways. . .****

I don't get it.

Oh well, I'm going to go back to being happy for Octavia. I'm almost certain (memory is almost precarious as justice*****) that I remember seeing Octavia perform actual magic in a "Jefferson Davis High School Drama Club" production of a really odd play based on Frank Zappa's song about Valley Girls.****** It was pretty difficult for my less dramatically talented friends acting with her in these things, because Octavia had this wonderful supernatural power to make people laugh. The biggest part of getting the play down was for the other actors and actresses to stay in role and not crack up. And during practices they'd improvise and by improvising without cracking up get themselves emotionally controlled enough to actually perform the play with someone of Octavia's talents.

I think this is one of the many things she was thanking Alabama for. . .

But, I must say, sometimes it would end up in more emotion than that scene in the Guenter Grass novel where all the post-War Germans are in a cellar bar, cutting up onions because that's the only way they can cry as the little frozen-in-time kid beats on the drum in the hope that they can weep without the onions. The weird practices and runthroughs of plays with Octavia were beautiful. . .

and I'm not a bad person for loving Alabama or Germany******* or the Dominican Republic and I hope that mandarins won't laugh at me (thinking they laugh with me) if I ever find myself in the position to thank the state of any of them.

[Notes:

*The middle school in the fantastic Danny MacBride vehicle, East Bound and Down, is called "Jefferson Davis Middle School." By using the evil name, MacBride is subtly mocking, with justification, my alma mater. Cue that one Ramones movie! Now! Dammit.

**Sorry. I'm actually getting close here to doing that weird Southern Man thing where you start talking about how wonderful your mother is, and it just gets more maudlin and more maudlin until finally a weeping Billy Bob Thornton throws a chair across the room and then everybody is hugging him and singing "You are my Sunshine" and the music and his waning tears make things seem alright in the universe for a brief time.

***I helped build a church and medical clinic in the Dominican Republic for a couple of weeks at the age of seventeen. It was surreal, and in some sense my theory of the world has never caught up to those experiences. Let me count some of them.

1. Outhouses!
2. So much of the time without power or running water in that heat and darkness.
3. Eating chickens you'd actually befriended over the last few days after seeing their necks broken by the old woman, and being grateful for the protein but also really fricking sad, hoping beyond all hope that that Native American thing where you thank the spirit of the dead bear works with chickens too.
4. A night so dark you can't see your feet as you try and negotiate a hill.
5. Waking up with a humongous poisonous spider on your mosquito net, and the guard (who spends thirty minutes every morning coughing up bits of his lungs into a dirty metal sink while the water isn't working) just casually going to work with his machete on the spider. You have to flip it off the net, bat it to the floor, then smash it, then casually dice it into little pieces.
6. Little stores with banana leaf roofs that sell rotten fruit and the flies. Does anyone actually purchase fly-ridden rotten fruit? They must for the stores to stay in business.
7. How overwhelmingly depressing are all aspects of prostitution (the "discos" of that era Dominican Republic).
8. Vaguely sinister spray painted stencils of animals for political parties on doors.
9. Realizing at the age of seventeen that you don't really lilke the Jesus in the Gospel of John and wondering if you can still be a Christian.
10. Evidence of voodoo, and what Dominicans think about it.
11. Dominican pride at not being as bad as Haiti.
12. A one armed preacher holding the Bible in his one hand gesticulating wildly, preaching in Spanish in a new, full, church of people in Sunday clothes. This isn't so different from Alabama after all.
13. Possibly the worst. The man in the bed in his shack, dying from an infection in his leg that would not have happened had people had shoes and boiled water before the fact or antibiotics after the fact.
14. Little barefoot kids in shorts, some with oozing eyes and dust caked into the ooze on their face.
15. How people without proper nutrition go from looking like little kids to almost immediately looking hunched over from middle age.
16. Finding oneself at a hotel eating goat (no Native American prayers) from a buffet, and Baby Doc Duvalier and his cortege are just pigging out on the same goat the next table over. They'd fled Haiti and were holed up in the same Dominican hotel. The evil was palpable.
17. All the missionaries from Central America who'd also fled to the Dominican Republic, but fleeing from evil rather than from justice. . . this in the late 80s, crushed, absolutely crushed, destroyed by Reagen era foreign policy combined with American companies that raped and killed both people and land. . .

The point is, the Dominican Republic objectively did at least in the 1980s suck a lot worse than Alabama in all sorts of ways. But I loved the people there. We played music together and without giving in to Orientalism, I could see beauty and nobility manifest everywhere and love the people who were working to make the place better. If I was a competent writer, I would provide a list of at least seventeen things that illuminate this aspect as much as that above. But I'm not , and this is not uncommon.

Many of us have madeleines that are objectively much more interesting than Proust's. But of course we're not Proust, so any attempt to present it would be pathetic. . . This in itself is not pathetic though, and I think maybe Proust shows as much?

****See previous footnote.

*****"A fickle thing! One law for the common man, another for the king."

******The most irritating drunk I knew in graduate school would never shut the eff up about the musical genius of Frank Zappa. Dude. Give it a rest already! Octavia Spencer won the Oscar!

*******Lived in a small farming village in the Rheinland Phalz in eighth and ninth grade. My dad was stationed there. I won't go on about it. Octavia Spencer won an Oscar.]

Final set of notes for Adult Sunday School Class

I just finished my lecture notes for the Adult Sunday School Class I've been teaching these past few months on Marcus and Borg's The Meaning of Jesus.

If anyone's interested they are on-line at projectbraintrust.com/cogburn/sundayschool/themeaningofjesus.doc . The most disappointing thing about the class was to discover just how much of a dishonest sophist is N.T. Wright. I hated to discover this, because I was a big fan of his book Simply Christian. Here's a quote from my final lecture:

Back to the good, the bad, and the ugly of Wright.

The good comes when we get a glimpse of Wright’s a priori apologetics and practical wisdom concerning things like the role of worship and liturgy. Many of his insights into the essence of Christianity are deep and valuable.

The bad comes with the blinders he wears that no respectable historian would.

1. Most of Wright’s historical claims are inconsistent with the scholarly consensus that Mark is the earliest Gospel and that Matthew and Luke incorporated and changed material in Mark (along with the Q sayings, which are much less altered, and other sources).
2. Wright acts as if the gap of over thirty years between the earliest gospel source and the death of Jesus (with the destruction of Palestine taking place in the meantime) would not significantly change the oral stories told about Jesus; he even tries to argue for this in a completely unconvincing way, unconvincing both because it is inconsistent with Markan priority, because it is inconsistent with common sense, and because there is no evidence that oral religious traditions work this way.
3. Wright does not taking into account Hellenistic influences on sources that were written in Greek (!), following well known Greek literary conventions (esp. John and Acts),  primarily about one figure from a highly Hellenized area (Galilee) and mostly by another figure whose ministry was to the Hellenistic world.
4. Wright does not take seriously the scholarly consensus on the dating of the Gospels. These books were all written at the very earliest after a war where up to a million Jews were killed. Our earliest extant versions of any fragments of any of them are from the 200s.

Wright continually writes as he has great historical knowledge about what life was like for normal Palestinian Jews in the first century C.E. and tries to interpret the Gospels as if they faithfully record accounts of people living in that milieu. Independent of the weirdness of making such a claim about the Gospel authors, I have absolutely zero confidence that he is correctly characterizing life in first century Palestine. He is just way too postmodernly cavalier with historical research concerning the Bible.

The ugly comes with what he does with the bad. Borg is too polite to point any of this out, but we must.

1. Wright’s vision of Jesus as primarily a “Jewish prophet” leads him to articulate views shockingly close (if not identical) to traditional Christian anti-semitism, where Jewish people deserve what they get because they haven’t accepted Jesus (Wright says as much about the Roman-Jewish war and the destruction of the temple).

1. Wright’s doesn’t seem to be aware of the extent to which the denigration of Hellenistic sources as well as his closeness to inerrancy is also part and parcel of a very ugly strain of know-nothing anti-Roman Catholicism, one that cripples us by preventing us from learning both from the collective wisdom of the Magisterium and from conclusions by groups such as the Jesus Seminar.
2. Wright’s poor historical standards lead to overall bad argumentative standards, committing the strawman fallacy multiple times in his disagreements with Borg. For example, Borg’s serious argument about whether the pre-Easter Jesus knew that he was the messiah concerns how Matthew and Luke edit the original meaning of passages in Mark. But Wright just continually latches onto Borg’s claim about the psychology of people who claim to be messiahs (disingenuously calling it “the standard objection” on page 210).
3. When Wright goes on about “the Enlightenment” and “post-modernism” he really is working above his pay grade, and his conclusions are dangerously anti-science in a way that no Christian needs to be. It is no accident that such fideist denigration of reason is both again of a piece with anti-Roman Catholicism and such to justify simply ignoring centuries of research into the historical basis of the Bible.

Again, I think that much of Wright’s theology, especially when he is doing apologetics, survives this. And we have been lucky to get enough glimpses into that while wading through the dreck. It might have been better to read his wonderful book Simply Christian alongside Borg’s chapters.

Oops. I just realized that the video at right is pretty remarkably inappropriate. Ha! But I can't help it. Before I was a Christian I got in the habit of posting it to my blog whenever I achieved some closure on a given step of a literary project, such as finishing a draft or a rewrite ("prick your finger, it is done"). I see no reason to stop. And the song rocks my socks.

Actually, now that I think about it, given what the song means in the context of Marilyn Manson's great trilogy of albums, maybe it's not so inappropriate (if this is puzzling, please meditate on the fact that Jonny Cash didn't really shoot anybody in Reno).

Anyhow, these lecture notes come in at 44,332 words. If nothing else doing these courses (this is my third in as many years) has been good practice for getting me to type up more lecture notes for upper level university courses, which I'm trying for the first time with my course on Harman (those notes are at www.projectbraintrust.com/cogburn/currentcourses/4952sp12/4952sp12syllabus.doc ). I'm a little behind on those, but finishing the Sunday School class will give me more time to devote to them.

possibly the first time I've been actually proud of being an analytic philosopher

Tremendous article HERE about high school students learning philosophy in Brazil. I realize that reporters can get a lot of this stuff wrong, but even if the thing is only half correct, then the picture of the influence of some French thought on dominant strains of academic philosophy in Brazil seems absolutely vile to me.

The influence:

According to the narrative I hear time and again, philosophy started in Brazil in the 1930s, when French scholars founded the philosophy department at the University of São Paulo. They put an end to the “dilettante period” characterized by the oratory of lawyers and the scholasticism of priests that had dominated Brazilian philosophy until then. Among the French scholars were Martial Guéroult and Victor Goldschmidt, who taught that doing philosophy is no longer possible, only history of philosophy: reconstructing systems of thought through a painstaking analysis of their immanent structure. Since then, studying the history of Western philosophy has been the paradigm of serious philosophy in Brazil.

O.K. Let's be honest. Bad SPEP philosophy tends towards just this kind of prison. You learn the classics with at least more depth than the average analytic dude, then when you put on your first pair of big boy pants you write hagiography about Parisian 68er or maybe one of their students. And in the United States at least, the next level of Hell (going from big boy pants to a ruined version of Bradbury's vanilla white suit) is when you get enough institutional pull to graduate from hagiographic exposition to actually yourself aping the style (English language translations) of Heidegger and the worst writers among the aforementioned Soixante Huitards (cf. Michael Marder for sad evidence that, for all our once vaunted ability to see through the outright cons foisted upon us by the Boomers, many gen ex SPEPers did not see through this one). . . good work if you can get it I guess, though see Jesus on what happens when you win the world.* 

But, according to the article at least, some prominent Brazilian academic continental philosophers** with political connections have been using this very kind of fetishism to do everything possible to undermine the ability of Brazilian students to learn and do philosophy!

the second most aggressively stupid thing to which I've ever been subject

Disney's old Johnny Appleseed cartoon has to be the most aggressively stupid* movie I've ever watched. The narrator's awe shucks phony ruralish speech patterns (e.g. constant gratuitous insertion of "a," dropping of final gs (we're goin a fishin), and misconjugated verbs) are as grating as anything ever recorded, more grating than Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" or that one PiL album, vastly more grating than either of those, even more grating than the Dukes of Hazard voiceover which was surely modelled on Disney's own 1950s faux populism married to conservative apologetics.

The early Disney cartoons were really quite subversive in their own ways. Think Chip and Dale versus Donald Duck or all of those wonderful old Goofy satires on how-to videos. Or even the full movies such as "The Three Mousketeers." But man the era of McCarthy was not kind to that company.

They did all manner of subliterate patriotic fiction posing as history. The Johnny Appleseed one is really bible thumpy too, which should be bizarre (Christian patriotism? have any of these people read the Gospel of Luke?) but is of course all too common.

[Notes:

*There is nothing morally wrong about stupidity per se, it's aggressive stupidity that is the problem, stupidity that either tries to make other people stupider than we already are or that turns stupidity into a virtue or that comes out of character flaws such as laziness and high self-esteem.]

Yet Another Reason to Learn French [Atelier de métaphysique et d'ontologie contemporaines]

In 2006 I actually made some progress towards learning French. For a while I was good enough to read political stories in Newspapers and not to do too horribly with hotel staff and restaurants.

But after my kids were born I had to cut out a number of things (don't regret it for a second!). But now that Thomas is 4 and Audrey is 2 they are a little bit more self-sustaining, and I can actually work on stuff while watching them. So I realized for this year's resolution I could commit to something that would take advantage of the new time.

For the last few weeks I've been unclear what this would be, but today it was immediately clear after I discovered THIS AWESOME WEB SITE, which is organized by a research group at École Normale Supérieure.

It's a weird de ja vu because from what I can get of the publications and presentations, something similar to my own increasing intersection of analytic (check out the papers on David Lewis at the Atelier) and continental philosophy. Not only that, but in addition it is clear that some of the participants see this intersection, like me, as leading of necessity to a serious study of Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology. Man I will learn a lot from these people as I get much further up to speed on the language.

I'm completely hyped about this, and I really do think (without sacrificing writing) that within a year and a half I can get my French good enough to read the materials on the web site. Anyhow that's my New Years Resolution.

In any case, if you read French, then Joe Bob says to check it out! If you don't, it's yet another strong argument for learning the language.

[Footnote: This New Years Resolution actually ties to my children too. There's a decent chance that we will get them in to a public French Language immersion school (one of the best reasons to live in Louisiana), which will be an issue for Thomas next year. It will be awesome to do this with them. Since kids learn languages so quickly, it is very much to my and their advantage to get even more of a head start this year.]

Critcheley, Lepore, et. al. on Dummett

Moving collection of memorials at the Stone HERE (if the very porous paywall blocks you, then just reset your cookies by hitting "clear history" under your browser tools).

In some sense I'm Dummett's philosophical grandson, having studied under Neil Tennant and dissertated on Dummett and his philosophical sons such as Tennant and Crispin Wright.

Some of my friends thought it was weird that I never attempted to meet or communicate with Dummett, but almost always when I meet people who have such an influence on me (usually musicians, but in philosophy it includes Putnam) it's very much like the Chris Farley interview to right, e.g. "Remember when you wrote The Logical Basis of Metaphysics? That was awesome."

It was and is.

[Update: Brian Leiter (HERE) showcases this lovely remembrance by Jason Stanley:

My first job, in 1995, was as a stipendiary lecturer in Oxford, a position in the Oxford academic hierarchy just a bit lower than assistant janitor. Dummett was nevertheless extremely generous with his time. Some people kiss up and kick down; Dummett was someone who kicked up and kissed down.]

Washington Post Covers the APA

Story HERE. Focus is almost entirely on a session with three Ph.Ds who are successful bloggers. That part is nice. However, the article is actually pretty misleading on the non-academic career possibilities that the BA in philosophy yields.

In our department we (and by "we" I mean James Rocha and Jeff Roland) are putting together a Powerpoint thingy on why philosophy is a good BA that we will show to the students in our intro classes and also make available on the interwebs.

Another thing not covered in the story is just how much more fun it is to watch your four and two year olds' ecstasies over sightings of Mickey Mouse and company than is the Eastern APA smoker.

Though it did suck to, for a second year in a row, miss the author meets critics sections of Lance and Kukla's monumentally excellent Yo! and Lo!: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons. Last year the reason involved inclement weather, this year Mickey Mouse. I wonder what it'll be next time.

incommunicado

I will be in international waters for the next week, so expect neither posts nor return e-mails for a bit.

unintentional wisdom from children

My four year old Thomas has been learning to salute the flag at Mother's Day Out. So this morning he very proudly told me, "I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of a miracle."

He also consistently refers to his sister's Audrey's Barbie doll as a "barbeque doll."

And the other day he kept saying over and over again, "Honor God and love Jesus," prior to stealing toys from Audrey. The history of the world right there. . .

Erdos Number Ten

THIS is cool. Here's the Mathematical Reviews path for me:

Jon Cogburn	coauthored with	Roy T. Cook	MR1748923 (2001c:03019)
Roy T. Cook	coauthored with	Stewart Shapiro	MR1638775
Stewart Shapiro	coauthored with	Timothy G. McCarthy	MR0912646 (89b:03064)
Timothy G. McCarthy	coauthored with	Kit Fine	MR0765994 (86c:03007)
Kit Fine	coauthored with	Gerhard Schurz	MR1462362 (98f:03016)
Gerhard Schurz	coauthored with	Hannes Leitgeb	MR2169548
Hannes Leitgeb	coauthored with	Philip David Welch	MR1976934 (2004c:03026)
Philip David Welch	coauthored with	Benedikt Löwe	MR1950032 (2003j:03010)
Benedikt Löwe	coauthored with	Andreas R. Blass	MR2310342 (2007m:03095)
Andreas R. Blass	coauthored with	Paul Erdős1	MR1149902 (92j:05178)

So everyone who has published with me has a minimum Erdos number of ELEVEN (insert Spinal Tap joke).

light posting

Posting is so light because I've been hit with my annual Fall-in-Louisiana sinus infection. This one's pretty bad. Today the laryngitis is so extreme that I can't teach. I think probably because we don't really get winters here the whole state ends up being like a petri dish. I'll take the sinus infection for the sunlightyear-round  though. . .

A couple of weird insights from being assistant chair: (1) Department chairs have to keep up with a mind-boggling amount of things at all times. I'm actually a little ashamed that I just had no idea how much work they do until I started helping one. (2) I'm humbled by the seriousness and decency that academics bring to the practice of writing letters for other academics' promotions and performance evaluations. This is something that people get no return on, but from what I can see, many extraordinarily busy people still put a tremendous amount of effort into it, and also overwhelmingly do so in a properly charitable spirit. This makes me feel better about being an academic, and a human being for that matter.

Eloise Richards

Emily's grandma passed away today. She was 94 and outlived her husband and one grand-daughter. We went to DeMoines last week and I'm incredibly thankful she got to spend a few days meeting her new great grand-daughter before letting go.

This may sound crazy, but I think one of the biggest gifts someone can give you is to teach you how to die.

Neither Emily's grandmother nor grandfather had any anger at all. There was just love.

I won't quote the line from the Iggy Pop song about being (assistant) chair

Well, as of today I'm Assistant Chair for the LSU Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and Director of Philosophy.

As far as I can tell, it's mostly stuff like scheduling classes, helping students, and running meetings. This last one will take some work. When you aren't running the meeting you can be more opinionated I think. But when you are running the meeting you are working for everybody, even people you might disagree with about something. So for a lot of things you should not be a strong advocate once you get in such a position (I think something like this is why chairs don't get votes during hires). I'm confident I can get this down.

More generally I think it's a mistake to think that administrative roles involve deciding what constitutes excellence and then pushing that through. Rather, your job is to help create an atmosphere conducive to basic competence (and pride therein!). When that happens excellence arises all on its own in ways you never would have predicted. This is the Taoist theory of governance. Maybe it doesn't apply to being assistant chair. We'll see.

Oh well, heck I might as well include the Iggy Pop song with the great line. [Note: it really doesn't describe me at all. One of the great gifts of literacy is that once you hit a certain threshold of reading you never really get bored. There's a really beautiful bit in Angela's Ashes about this when Frank has to leave the old man to whom he reads. But the board/bored pun is just too good to pass up. And this performance is a high point in the Western Cultural Canon. So here it is.]

trip

Friday through Monday we'll be in DeMoines, Iowa (a really lovely city) visiting Emily's grandmother, so blogging will be nonexistent.

I'm a little nervous about flying with a two year old and seven month old, but mostly just happy that Emily's grandmother will get to meet her great grand-daughter. In October we're going to go to San Antonio to see my grandmother.

Some help would be appreciated

Given the possibility of financial exigency at my home institution, I'm putting things together in case I need to go on the market this year. Thus far I've LaTexed my C.V. and come up with a Research Statement, which tries to explain how my various projects hang together. Any advice about either would be greatly appreciated. I've already had lots of help about the C.V. so probably the research thing needs more help at this point.

Thanks for taking a look.

actual moderate weather

A non-trivial number of people in my yoga class have had their air conditioners break this summer. It's not because it's been so hot during the days, but rather because things haven't cooled off enough at night (for some days it didn't get cooler than 85 degrees at night). So the poor air conditioners never got a break, which they apparently need.

Anyhow, it's actually cool enough to have open windows today. What a blessing in August in Louisiana.

I realize that from an actuarial standpoint heat is much more dangerous than cold, but still if I had my druthers I'd pick hot summers over cold winters.

I remember my first winter in Ohio in graduate school, which was the coldest winter in the previous 20 years. With the wind chill it got down to negative 49 degrees Fahrenheit. I just had no concept that things could get that cold. Even if you bundled into four layers you would walk about ten feet and your heart would start beating fast just with the effort of dealing with perambulating with all that the cold air entering your lungs. I had a beard at the time and within five minutes of being outside ice cycles from frozen condensed breath would form on it.

During the worst of it day I went outside to wait for a friend to pick me up after I'd just washed my hair. It was crazy. Within a minute my hair turned into this helmet of ice. Even having lived in Germany for two years, I had absolutely no idea that that was even possible.

aging and writing routines

Man it feels good to be writing again after this Summer's dry spell. I'm down to the wire to get this paper on Brandom in to the APA by September first. The paper's pretty cool. I look at the debate around his substitutional account of singular terms. The bigger project is to show that he needs the objects involved in practical inferences of the sort Heidegger talks about. The second part of this will be taking on his account of sense and reference dependencies and the third following up on McDowell to construct a Chinese Room argument for Brandom. All of these problems are soluble if you follow Graham Harman in various ways.

The next step is to look at Brandom's actual arguments against the Heideggerian approach. Hopefully I'll have something intelligent to say about that after my course this semester.

The only hard part is making the paper I'm writing now short enough (3,000 words) for the APA. That's a fine problem to deal with though.

The dry spell in writing was the result of combined interaction of: (1) needing a break, (2) illness inducing anxiety about financial doom at LSU (you'd be surprised how many of my colleagues have developed weird skin rashes this Summer; we'd initially thought it might be environmental, but research revealed that anxiety is one of the major triggers), (3) having a new baby in addition to my toddler.

The third one is really an ongoing thing with adulthood. Many of us develop a set of work habits in graduate school that aren't really sustainable into later middle age. For most of graduate school I would get up around 11:00 or noon, teach in the afternoon, write at school from about eight or nine PM until around four in the morning, punctuated with frequent caffeine and cigarette breaks. Then I would walk home, drink two glasses of jug burgundy and then go to sleep (if you were to add a bowl full of amphetamines to the mix and throw in the rest of the bottle of jug burgundy, you'd get the terrible work habits that gave rise to Sartre's borderline unintelligible Critique of Dialectical Reason).

Every step away from this pattern has caused a few months of disruption to writing. Quitting smoking, quitting caffeine, and then quitting drinking (I don't think there's anything morally wrong with these things; I'm just happier and healthier not doing them) all forced changes on the writing rituals that took a few months to get used to. And I can't work until four in the morning any more. My body stopped being able to sustain that at some point in my mid thirties. If I'm still up at four any more it's entirely the result of an evil bout of insomnia usually the result of not having gone to yoga class that week.

But now the change is having children. When you have kids and play an active part in raising them, you just don't get as much sustained time to just write. And the time you are writing might be interrupted by the need to change a diaper, intervene in some altercation, read Doctor Seuss, or play cars with a toddler very serious about playing cars with his Dad.

The trick here really is to be the tortoise; slow and steady gets it done.  Instead of reading tons and writing on napkins for a month and then writing everything in a huge burst over a couple of days, it's much better to organize the reading so that you can write a page a day. Of course I'm not at a place where I do this every day of the year, but perhaps I'll get there.

turn of the key

Wow, what started as a great day (lunch with John Protevi!) sure turned into a festival of crap.

The janitor somehow messed up the lock to my office while locking the door after checking for trash/recycling. I was so caught up in reading that I didn't notice until 5:45, when I was trying to leave my office for a much needed bathroom break. I was trapped. At that point in the day everyone had already left the building except for some students here for orientation who had been doing weird and frankly disturbingly hearty LSU football game cheers all afternoon. I couldn't bring myself to scream at them that I was trapped. They were all so excited about being at college and sports and stuff and I would have just felt like a complete ass-hat for exposing them to what fools their professors were going to be.

Plus, being locked in your office with screaming hoards of spirit filled kids on the other side of the hallway (all the while with a full bladder) is not very much for anybody, never mind for a claustrophobic whose collected neuroses rival Woody Allen on a bad day.

Luckily, Emily came to campus with the infantry and between the four of us we managed to pry open the vent thing on the door and slip my key through. It was pretty cool, like one of the more outlandish Brady Bunch episodes. And, as we had hypothesized, the lock worked from the other side. And even better, by the time I escaped my office all of the kids singing LSU football game cheers had gone back to their dorms or wherever such people congregate after singing football songs all day.

Man I would be completely lost without my wife. As of last Sunday we've been married for ten years.

cool bit by Emily in 225

A couple of paragraphs on Alexander McCall Smith HERE. Freelance articles are forthcoming (in other publications). Short story contests are being won. Books are nesting in agents' in boxes.

Slate interview with Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia)

I went to graduate school with Larry. He's a pretty singular personality. While finishing his dissertation he taught himself fiddle and started jamming every week with the Columbus bluegrass and Irish fiddle scene. In a short time he got good enough to teach lessons. He also ran a web page on Y2K related stuff that ended up getting cited in several books. And he and Ty Lightner (of Yvonne Craig fan site fame; one of the first such sites on the internet, one that he started half as a lark, but that ended up getting him face time with much of the cast of the original Batman; Ty is now a computer programmer and one of the top Netflix reviewers in the world) and I used to go to the great performances put on as part of the choreography MFA degree at OSU sometimes once a week.

His dissertation was on epistemic circularity. It's really interesting how that work played a role in the way Wikipedia was initially set up and then with Larry leaving it. Here are some of the many money quotes (whole interview HERE):

Yeah, I can imagine that the social dynamics get pretty ugly. But my understanding is that you left Wikipedia over deeper philosophical schisms.

I had lots of deep philosophical schisms with Wikipedia in the end, although also some agreements.  The first problem was what we were just talking about: reigning in all the bad actors, doing something to reduce the number of trolls and the amount of time we spent dealing with them.

The other problem was that there needed to be some sort of mechanism—it didn't have to be anything like editorships or review before publishing or anything like that—but some sort of low-key role for experts in the system.

Why did you feel so strongly about involving experts?

Because of the complete disregard for expert opinion among a group of amateurs working on a subject, and in particular because of their tendency to openly express contempt for experts. There was this attitude that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very fact that they had published on the subject—that because they had published, they were therefore biased. That frustrated me very much, to see that happening over and over again: experts essentially being driven away by people who didn't have any respect for those who make it their lives' work to know things.

Where do you think that contempt for expertise comes from? It's seems odd to be committed to a project that's all about sharing knowledge, yet dismiss those who've worked so hard to acquire it.

There's a whole worldview that's shared by many programmers—although not all of them, of course—and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as "epistemic egalitarianism." They're greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a claim] itself, not its source.

Things to do if you want to live longer

Nice Daily Beast article HERE. They didn't mention anything about driving, which as the number one killer of people in their teens and twenties, has one of the biggest impact on death rates. Anyhow, here are the things they do list, with the percentage effect on your chance of being dead within 20 years.

There's some interesting philosophy here. Given how literally toxic getting laid off is (you are 15-20% more likely to die within twenty years if you are laid off), shouldn't this be reflected in criminal proceedings against people whose criminal behavior results in lots of other people losing jobs?

Also, lots of these things effect men and women differently. For example, being Mormon is much better for male mortality rates than for women. Should this inform feminist critiques of Mormonism? More strikingly is the effect of marrying a spouse more than 7 years younger than you (which decreases mortality for men and increases it for women).

Also, it is really important not to confuse correlations with causation. For example, a lot of the sleep data is probably the result of the fact that people who sleep too much are likely to be sleeping off hangovers. So there is a common cause for sleeping too much and increased mortality, rather than sleeping too much causing increased mortality. I strongly suspect the optimist/pessimist thing is the same thing. If a large enough percentage of the pessimists and optimists are being rational, then whatever is causing the pessimism and optimism is whatever is causing decreased and increased mortality rates. This being said, I'm going to express all of the following as if they were causal, because it's more fun that way.

1. Don't get laid off: +15-20%.
2. Get and stay married: +20%.
3. If you are a married woman, not marrying someone over seven years younger than you: +20%; if you are a married man, marrying someone over seven years younger than you: +11%.
4. Do not  more than 8.5 hours a night: +15% (but sleeping less than 4 hours is horrible too).
5. If you are a woman, have a waste less than 35 inches; if you are a man have one less than 40 inches: +25%.
6. Be an optimist: +55%.
7. Sit less than 8 hours a day: +18%.
8. Go to church regularly and do the social stuff involved: +25%.
9. Be a Mormon- men: +6.7%, women: +3.2%.
10. Be rich: +15%.
11. Drink two glasses of red wine a day (and no more): +25%.
12. Don't watch television: -8% for every hour a day consumed.
13. Live in Hawaii (life expectancy 81.3 versus Louisiana with 74.2).
14. Be a woman (outlive men by 5.1 years)
15. Be literate: +50%.

Maximum RAWK and Roll

Mark and I got interviewed by the completely awesome website Grinding To Valhalla, and its HERE.

This is like the coolest thing ever, because Randolph Carter has also interviewed so many writers that I cherish (e.g. Robin Hobb, Brian Ruckley. . .) Their interviews are on the website too.

We also got to push the D&D and Philosophy anthology that we are going to pitch within the next two weeks.

last Sunday school class in series

Tomorrow is the last adult Sunday school class in the Clint Mitchell and my series on Biblical authority and interpretation at University Presbyterian Church. I added one last handout on the Presbyterian guidelines (with two pretty serious criticisms of those guidelines, which I now think are in need of further Reforming). Anyhow, the whole thing is HERE.

It's 54 single spaced pages. I think if Pastor Mitchell and I do this kind of thing again in the next few years, we'll have enough MS for the beginning of a book project.

I like it quite a lot actually. I like philosophy with a lot of practical friction that nonetheless brings you right to the heart of fundamental and abstract matters. The video game stuff and computability theory does that. The D& D stuff and Priestian problems of expressing the inexpressible does that too. From these handouts, I think it's becoming clear that issue of biblical authority is becoming another instance of that for me.

thoughts about Alabama Philosophical Society conference

(1) The contingent of people associated with Ohio State was really large: Adam Podlaskowski, Eric Carter, Andrew Choi, William Melanson, me, David Merli, Joshua Smith, and Nick Jones. 

(2) Mark Silcox was not there this year, which was a pretty major bummer. When he was at Auburn we used to go to this conference every year and it was a good chance for me and Emily to hang out with him and Heidi.

(3) The sheer ugliness of public architecture in the United States is overwhelming, and even more so when you contrast it to the natural beauty of the ocean. The generic thing in places like Orange Beach, Alabama and Destin, Florida is to have concentric layers from the ocean: beach, condos, pedestrian unfriendly highway, and then strip malls. The hideous strip malls are like a hundred yards from the beach, but you still have to combat traffic in your car to get to them. I wish the whole Seaside thing had caught on. . .

(4) This was my first philosophy conference as a non-drinker. It made taking in more papers during the day easier but socializing at night harder. I'm not really sure why. Maybe professors holding court about various things are just more tolerable when your mind is lubricated? Maybe the sugar in the alcohol just gives you an extra burst of energy after a tiring day of thinking.

(5) At least I am not a vegetarian. A big part of the socialization in these things is eating meals together. Actually a big part of socialization for human beings is eating meals together. [I don't mean to be criticizing other people's lifestyle choices here; I'm just noting that being able to enjoy the good seafood with other philosophy professors was a good-making feature of the conference.]

(6) Presenting a co-written paper is always weird. This time Jeff Roland read the paper and then ended up answering almost all the questions.

(7) I didn't like the format of 25 minutes for the paper, 15 minutes for questions/discussion. Several of the papers were good enough to where that was not enough time for questions/discussion. But I guess the fact that the discussions were that good is a good thing.

(8) Thomas no longer thinks that the beach is metaphysically unacceptable. The last few times we visited my folks in Naples, Florida he'd sometimes stare down at the sand with a kind of horror, as if the Earth's solidity was degenerating. He's much more confident with it now.

weekend blogging hiatus

This weekend I'm going to be presenting a paper with Jeff Roland at the Alabama Philosophical Society meeting (schedule HERE). I used to do this conference every year when Mark Silcox was at Auburn. This year OSU is well represented with David Merli and Bill Melanson giving papers.

I'll turn 39 during the trip and Thomas will turn 2 right after the trip. With Thomas being born 2 days after my birthday I don't really need any birthday presents any more. And Audrey is due to be born around Christmas so I'll have that covered for the rest of my life too.

musings on Queen

I just discovered my colleague James Rocha's fantastic interpretation of Bohemian Rhapsody (possibly the best rock song, and hence possibly the best song, ever) that he posted last year on his blog. It's HERE. And here's the original video for the song.

My older brother Chris turned me on to Queen and the Beatles when we were kids in the early seventies. He had the red and blue Apple greatest hits Beatles albums and a whole mess of Queen 45s. He, my sister, and me used to have long discussions about whether Strawberry Fields Forever or Penny Lane was a better song (Strawberry Fields was ultimately proclaimed better by a unanimous vote; and I'm pretty sure we'd all vote the same today). Bohemian Rhapsody sort of hovered over everything though.

Most of my friends' older brothers ended up in the Kiss Army. We stuck with Queen and the Beatles, and expanded into Elton John and Cat Stevens (both the influence of our Dad). And though I'm jealous of my friend Neal Hebert's good standing in said Army, I still think we ultimately got the better deal. Here's another 45 we wore out with repeated playing.

I remember being incredibly impressed by the fact that Freddy Mercury had the cajones to admit to not liking Jaws or Star Wars. It was scandalous, but also my first intimation of real freedom.

in transit

Well, we're almost completely moved in to the new house, which is pretty fantastic. I can bicycle safely to campus, yoga, church, and a local cafe and park. Across the street in one direction is a Catholic school so architecturally pleasing that you will want to convert. Our immediate neighbors in all directions are elderly. I actually have a back yard and an office (not unlike that of Ward Cleaver's) for the first time in my life. And if you think that doesn't excite me, then you don't know Cogburn men.

Yes we're going to a party party

I'm thirty eight years young!

my uncle makes Yahoo news' front page

Yahoo news linked to this story involving one of my mom's brothers on their main page.

My uncle Jimmy designed the retro-rockets on the Apollo lander and has (if I remember right) well over two hundred patents to his name. I always loved visiting him in Houston as a kid in part because he's gregarious and friendly but also because he was always building weird inventions (like a plane in his back yard or a system to recycle energy from his refrigerator) or improving household goods in various ways (I remember when he visited us in Germany him excitedly doing things to our new Macintosh's dot matrix printer).

It's a really good thing as a kid to have role models in part successful because of the kind of passionate eccentricity that involves curiousity, hard work, and creativity. It vastly expands one's sense of what is possible in life. Given the hegemony of brain-dead coolness (and the attendant lazy sarcasm) in popular culture, if you pursue anything with passion that is at all creative, you will feel like a freak sometimes. Much of what you do will be seen as useless to other people, and maybe start seeming useless to you. From my Uncle Jimmy, me and my brother and sister all saw a constant refutation of that mindset. Decades before that brief pre-Bush excitement-about-computers period in the 1990's, all of us kids had some idea that smartness and the weirdness that goes with it were what was really worthwhile. That one's own discoveries and creations have intrinsic worth. This has been a moral compass through the Scylla of hipster ironic detachment on the one hand and the Charibdis of unoriginal macho energy on the other (the two of which are cancerously fused in the kind of right wing talk radio sarcasm that reached its apotheosis at the RNC last week).

The last time I visited (years ago) Uncle Jimmy while he was still at NASA he was building something very much like the Predator drones used by the military now. I also remember (and I was a kid so I might be garbling this) him being furious about the decision to use solid rocket boosters in the shuttle program. This was long before the first shuttle exploded.

The web site for his new company is here. I know the news story is about an explosion, but don't count Jim Akkerman out. He's one of the few people I've met who possesses a Harvey Friedmanesque level of genuis, and he remains responsible for a non-negligable chunk of what human beings have successfully done in space thus-far.

High Voltage

Day number six without power. Over seventy percent of the parish is still down, but our neighborhood is supposed to be back on line within seven days.

This has been a not very fun adventure, but obviously it could have been much worse for us. Our house is intact. We had running water throughout and we've managed to get ice every day. And LSU is back on-line.

Here's a song in honor of electricity.