Jon Cogburn's Blog

Blog Hiatus and final thoughts about sabbatical

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.

Prick your finger

It is done.

I like the book quite a bit. If nobody else does, then that's O.K. I've had worse.

Emily's award winning story

My wife's short story "Million Dollar Pie," was one of the three winners of a local fiction contest. It was blind-review judged by MFA students from LSU and beat out stories by people with MFAs.

In the on-line spiel after the story, Emily writes:

I started writing the first draft of ‘Million Dollar Pie’ many years ago after a friend (no connection to the characters in the story) flipped his canoe into the notoriously filthy Olentangy River near the Ohio State University (during rewriting the story migrated to New Orleans and the river became Lake Pontchartrain). I think I initially wanted to use the image to craft a story using the tired cliché of water baptism as the beginning of new life. But as I wrote (and rewrote), it became clear that even after Frank realizes that he needs to start anew, he is not any better off. He still won’t be a successful academic, his wife will not come back, and his new temp job is just as horrible as the old one.

Like Frank, I have a lot of education that doesn’t help me earn very much money. My most recent attempt to do so was as an adjunct teaching philosophy at LSU and Baton Rouge Community College. Unlike Frank, I also play bass guitar in a local swamp punk band, write fiction, and take care of my eight-month old son, husband, two cats, and dog.

Anyhow, Joe Bob says check it out.

The world shutters as the worm gets his wings.

Sorry so few posts. I'm trying to get as much book rewriting done prior to getting an endoscopy (matrixy camera on the end of a worm guided through the nose and into the stomach), biopsy, and having my esophagus expanded with a balloon this Friday, and then (if that goes well) getting my polypy gall bladder out after that.

The hardest part of rewriting is taking stuff out. Part of why Mark and I are good co-writers is that we're merciless with each other in this regard and we trust the other person's intuitions enough to not turn everything into a battle.

This one is hard though, because I spent about a month doing nothing but writing an appendix that traces the key logical developments that led to the digital computer and the Computational Representational Understanding of Mind. And like my poor gall bladder, the appendix must be excised (it is out of place in a book that will hopefully have a broader appeal). The sad task these last few days has been seeing how much (how little) of the appendix needs to be cut and pasted into the body of the text itself.

Even though the gall bladder is physically a part of me, I have a lot more identification with the poor appendix. There's no polyps on it; it just doesn't fit with the rest of the book. . .

Dinners I've suffered through

One of the many self-destructive things I've done in my life was read a significant chunk of Henry Miller in high school. You might expect that this bad influence would be primarily in terms of giving me stupid 1920's tough guy attitudes about sex. No. That didn't happen. Nor did it make my prose style any more affected and incoherent than it already was. The real damage was when I read the part about how Miller managed to eat in Paris even though he had zero money. What he did was contrive to be such a great conversationalist that each of his carefully cultivated friends could be counted on to buy him one meal a week. This actually worked for him for a couple of years I think.

Somehow that entered my psyche and as a result I had a period where I endeavored to eat dinner with my three best friends' families as much as possible. Luckily, this was in the late 1980's, after the television had completely ravaged American culture (and before the Internet, video games, professional wrestling, and non-hair rock rock restored our Republic to her former glory). As a result all three of my best friends' families tended to eat dinner on trays in front of the television while watching shows like "Family Ties" or maybe spinoffs from the "Cosby Show."

In each case I did manage to wrangle invitations to actual sit-at-the-table dinners, but it was always a disaster. I blame Henry Miller.

In the first, my friend's father read the newspaper the entire time, and it freaked me out. I was trying to have entertaining conversation like Henry Miller (obviously, since this was 1980's Alabama and not 1920's Paris the conversation was without reference to either writing or all the body parts and various movements and fluids apparently endlessly discussed by artists in Miller's coterie). But the voice of my friend's Dad kept emanating behind the paper with cryptic comments about what he was reading, usually of the "Damn Democrats. . . always up to something" variety. And we'd all have to quiet down and eat after he said that, even though nothing else was forthcoming. It was agonizing.

My second friend was slightly better. The Dad was not behind a newspaper, but after he said the prayer nobody talked the whole time. We just ate the hideously bland 1980's middle-class American fare (flavorless soup, microwaved vegetables, a roll, and some kind of meat with no sauce) in silence. I couldn't do the Henry Miller trick of making entertaining conversation in those circumstances, and I didn't want to. But then, fifteen minutes into the meal, my friend's Dad looked up at the ceiling and ponderously intoned, "Mother. You've outdone yourself." He called his wife "Mother." And I wanted to say, "No she hasn't. Look at this tasteless garbage we're eating. If Julia Child was dead she'd rise up out of the grave as a super-zombie and come do a Hannibal Lecter number on all of our brains for eating this crap. And you know what, our brains would taste a lot better than this." But of course I didn't. Instead, I looked at the calender on their refridgerator, and saw that each month had a different Georgia O Keefe flower painting. And my then teenaged brain (thoroughly warped as it was by an unbearable combination of adolescent pulchritude, school, and television) had a rare moment of clarity. I realized that nobody in my friend's family saw O Keefe's phallic and vulvic (is that a word? is there an antonym for phallic?) images as remotely sexual. The were just pretty flowers. As much as I loved my friend, I could not eat there any more.

My third best friend invited me to dinner after a day we'd spent watching Woody Allen movies in his house. We were on the last one while his Mom was cooking. It was "Love and Death," Allen's fantastic early send-up of 19th century Russian novels. I was in the bathroom during the scene where Allen's character has hung himself (he gets better) and starts to think of all the things he is going to miss. He gives all sorts of characteristic romantic reasons (e.g. the beauty of the tundra, discussing philosophy into the late hours of the morning, etc.), but in the middle of this, one of the things he lists is "oral sex." It's very funny. Unfortunately my friend's mom (a devout evangelical) heard those words coming out of her T.V. set and literally started screaming as if someone was assaulting her. As soon as I could extricate myself from the bathroom (and its suffocating presence of "pot pourri" spray, plug in air-freshener, and bowl of dried flowers) my friend and I ran out of the house to the nearest Burger King. Not only did I not get a free meal, but I never got my tape of "Love and Death" back.

So ended my career as a Milleresque con man, like so many things in my life virtuous only due to the manifest incompetence with which I play the part.

Gary Gygax passes away

Well, I'm very sad. NY-Times explanation of his importance here.

Two of the chapters in Mark and my book on video games (the revised version will hopefully be called Philosophy and Video Games as opposed to the previous Philosophy Through Video Games) deeply involve Dungeons and Dragons. The personal identity chapter discusses the way D & D players talk about their characters in first person, and the artificial intelligence chapter attempts to explain some of the reasons why people still play tabletop D & D when there are computer versions with cool graphics now (this explanation involves understanding why artificial intelligence is so disappointingly crappy).

The philosophy professors of my generation owe Gygax more than we could possibly repay. . . . Using his D & D system (most role playing games are some variant of it), we compulsivley created worlds and stories with our friends. Most of us devoted a great deal of thought to this process, and then later when we took our first philosophy classes we realized that through D & D we had already been thinking of all of the issues covered.

The man deserved several Nobel Prizes (again, if you doubt this, see the argument in the Times article) and should be honored by the American Philosophical Association as well as the Modern Languages Association. But the world's true visionaries often fall through cracks like that. By all accounts he was a generous man satisfied with just having been able to give the world so much. If there are gods, then he is ascended now.

It ain't easy to get to heaven when you're going down

I've been enjoying the fruits of the beatnik era again (I'm almost done with the "original scroll" version of On the Road, and am going to read the "visions of cody" version next), and I discovered something really weird. Almost all of the travelling Kerouac chronicled in Road was done after completing successive drafts of his first novel (The Town and the City, which is supposedly supbar Thomas Wolfe, I haven't read it yet).

I was always too much of a coward to have adventures like Kerouac and gang, and am now too happily ensconced in middle class life in any case (something Kerouac always wanted but never really attained), but after Mark Silcox and I finished the ready-for-referees draft of Philosophy Through Video Games a couple of days ago, I understand why Kerouac kept taking off.

Maybe this is like a much less severe version post-partum depression. I don't know. You feel pretty empty. It's certainly like a much more severe version of something that happens to me at the end of every semester.

I always get out of these funks with aplomb. Once you realize what is happening you can modulate your behavior so as to be less grumpy and snarky, and then once the behavior changes the affect changes as well.

This isn't me. I am not mechanical.

Yesterday, Silcox and I Fed-Exed Philosophy Through  Video Games to Routledge's New York offices. It should get there this morning.

This has probably been the hardest sustained bout of work that I've ever done, including candidacy exams, finishing the dissertation, and when I was teaching four classes a semester on a year to year contract. Of course it was not nearly as emotionally fraught as those times. It's fun to write with Mark, and my economic livelihood does not rest on this book.

We tried as hard as we could, given the timeline, to make the book accessible and rigorous. At this point the Routledge editors decide whether to send it out for another round of refereeing. If they do, then when they get the reports back they'll decide what we should change.

I'm not worried about this. From our experience thus far with the Routledge editors, I know that if they want us to change it, then it will be better for those changes.

The sad thing is that I want to be lazy for a few weeks, playing a new computer game. But the only two new games I want to play right now are Spore and Fallout 3, neither of which is going to be released for months.

I tried World of Warcraft for research while writing the book, and I just didn't get it. It felt like rehashed Diablo II to me. After playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, I just couldn't go back. Well, the brilliance of World of Warcraft is clearly the multi-player aspect, which I don't really care about personally. I guess I play video games in part to get away from people. If I wanted to do an RPG with people I'd play tabletop D & D. But my non-work related people-time is happily filled up with non-gaming stuff involving wife, child, and friends.

ameneusis

My wife's writing is really freaking hilarious. 

Her annotated list of all the fun statues in Edmond, OK can be found here. The commentary is under each picture, and the "next" button is in the upper right hand of the screen.  Read through them all!  They get funnier and funnier.

Her writing website is here, with some funny samples from her first novel on it.  The book she's working on now is a detective novel with the main character being a dissolute ex-food critic for the local newspaper.  Pretty cool. The average published novelist in the United States doesn't get published until they are on their sixth novel. So you just have to march forward.

Emily also took this totally boss picture of me discussing the finer points of fighting cocks with my (dad's) excellent Uncle Rupert on his small farm.  One of my uncle's birds came in second in the world championship in the Philippines recently, and another one was the only one that defeated the first place bird.  Peta has been pretty rough on Rupert.  Their web page about the Cogburn Rooster farm is here.  Unfortunately, they promise to have pictures, but the link is dead. The jerks.

If Emily or me ever make enough money we'll buy a chunk of rural land and let one of the little guys (the roosters, not my relatives) lord over the whole place.  It would be a really nice place to grow some food, make wine, cook, play music, and write.

My brother Chris, pictured left with Rupert's farm dogs, has some rural land with his girlfriend Lauri in Texas and it's pretty cool.  My brother is really gifted with machinery and has an awesomely cool 1953 red tractor that he uses areound the property.  I'm a klutz, but he still let me drive the tractor during a day of beer drinking and brush hauling.  Unfortunately, while hauling said brush in a huge cart thing attached to the tractor, this led to pretty extreme damage to his fence at one point ("No.  You're doing fine Jon.  Just back up, turn a little bit, and try again."), but Chris is pretty used to me being Gilligan to his Professor. 

Chris and Lauri's next door neighbor is actually the brother of the pro-wrestler The Undertaker.  Some cool facts- The Undertaker's brother raises goats and at this point I've petted the Undertaker's brother's goats on three separate occasions (eat your cold, cold heart out Neal Hebert!), (b) The Undertaker is such a nice man outside of the ring that he bought my brother a little stuffed animal of a dog with the name "Brody" (the name of my brother's dog) on its tag.  He said he saw it in a truck stop and couldn't pass it up.

My great-grandfather's name is Thomas.  Uncle Rupert's beloved brother's name was Thomas (T.C), and so is his son.  My dad's name is Thomas.  Our baby's name is Thomas.  Sorry Peta, the circle ain't gonna be broken.

Thomas Beck Cogburn

Here's a pic of Thomas from a week ago.  My mom sewed the totally boss getup with the lace and everything. 

Surprise, surprise but parenthood is a busy vocation.  I'll get some more up to date pictures soon and do a longer blog about his birth later (check out Lucy's semi-pseudonymous blog, linked to the left of this, for fun details). 

I hope that I can avoid sounding like a drunk actress accepting a major award (well, can anyone every truly avoid this?) when I say I love you guys (and yes, I realize hormones are involved here, but that didn't stop the actress now did it?).

And don't let my newfound Christian sense of oneness with humanity lead you to expect any funny (because-it's-true-!) Cosbyesque meditations on the tribulations and triumphs of fatherhood.  It's never going to happen.  Not only would this blog self-destruct in under four seconds, but the guitar on my Angus Young tattoo would spontaneously incinerate and start shooting sparks and stuff all the time in protest.  And what kind of father would I be then?