Jon Cogburn's Blog

strange time to be alive

I've had e-mail correspondence now with two of my three favorite living philosophers.

This is amazing and difficult in equal measure, a little bit like talking with a mountain.

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.]

Ash Wednesday

One of my friends once tried to give up sobriety for Lent. It was actually pretty hard.

This year I have given up being indignant.

I don't know if that's any more in the proper spirit than my friend's sacrifice, but one does what one must.

feh

So much to do today, phone calls to return, e-mails, a lecture to prepare, but my psyche is in full-on Bartleby mode.

I think Black Flag has a couple of songs about this, but the real Bartleby have preferred not to embed a youtube video.

the most depressing thing about philosophical finitude

is that to make any progress in a philosophical project you have to bracket huge swaths of philosophy: issues, arguments, thinkers, epochs, etc. Say that you are working on inferring causality from mathematical equations in physics. To even address that issue you might have to just assume that Hume's skeptical problems about modality have been solved.

But the stuff one person brackets might be absolutely central to another person.

It would be very nice if we were all humble about this, but that's often not the case. Some weird facet of human psychology makes it the case that people want to be condescendingly dismissive towards the thinkers and issues that they are bracketing so as to get on with their own work.

I don't quite get why this is the case, though it's something I've both had to fight against in my own soul, and been victim to.

One of my best papers is probably the one with Jason Megill on the Lucas/Penrose argument, but it took us five years to get it published (in Minds and Machines, which is great). The paper is clear enough to place in a generalist journals, and we really do present a version of the Lucas/Penrose argument that does not fall prey to any of the extant criticisms. But after weird rejection after weird rejection, it just became clear to me that the phil. mind reviewers for a lot of generalist journals had an overwhelming psychic investment in the debate being closed.

Maybe that's arrogant. . . in any case it's not a big deal because Megill and I have published plenty, and Minds and Machines is a great place to end up in anyhow.

I think it's much harder with respect to how the lack of humility can damage friendships. I don't know how many times I've heard someone who has either not read a thinker I'm excited about (e.g. Robert Brandom, Graham Priest, Graham Harman, Crispin Wright), or who maybe read a little bit in graduate school, say something completely dismissive like, "well X is just deeply confused." In these contexts it's always when the issue is one that the person has to bracket to do their own work.

Which is fine as far as it goes. But still depressing.

I just wish we could be a little more humble about these kinds of judgments. Why can't we just admit that we're finite and we have to make bets about what is going to be most useful for our own work? Can't we do this without denigrating people who make different bets?

No. Humans are just too depraved.

[P.S. This train of thought motivated by an interesting and I think very difficult discussion at Leiter Reports HERE. The discussion caused my thoughts, but I'm not sure that my thoughts are that relevant to it. I don't take the above to be inconsistent with what anyone wrote, so I posted them on my own space.]

first day back at LSU after the break

I went in to school today to do transfer advising. This involves helping students get LSU credit for courses they took elsewhere. The trick is to try to make sure they get as much credit for classes that count towards General Education Credit. For example, the student may have taken a class that is a combination of practical and theoretical philosophy, but our practical philosophy class would only fulfill the "elective" component of their degree audit, whereas our theoretical ethics class fulfills one of their "humanities" GEC parts of the cafeteria tray. So in a case like that you try to get the student the GEC credit.

It sounds tedious, but it's actually really rewarding. You meet all these students who are really psyched to be coming to LSU and if you do your job well and look at their official degree audits you get to help them quite a bit as far as being on track to graduate in their major. It's three to five minutes of your time and you are meeting somebody cool and at their best and also making their day.

It's also the kind of thing that requires practical wisdom of the sort a computer is probably never going to master. There are just so many finely grained distinctions concerning how one class translates into another (this example actually illustrates Lance and Hawthorne's (correct!) take on Quinean indeterminacy really well, but I won't go into that).

This kind of thing changes alot when you have kids of your own. . . When I see these parents and their kids getting tours of the campus I sometimes get a little choked up now in a way I didn't used to. It's quite a fine thing actually, deeply rooted in love.

One of the hardest things about having pretensions to creativity. . .

is the feeling of constantly throwing a party at which no one shows up.

This is a harsh thing in reality. It happened once to my wife and a friend when they were in college. They put on a party for the University of Minnesota Philosophy Club at my wife's family's lake cottage and no one came.

It sucked!

My first publication was with Roy Cook in Analysis. I remember celebrating with Emily when I got the actual journal. We went to the now closed Baton Rouge Macaroni Grill where one of my smartest students was a bartender, and he kept slipping us these free concoctions he'd made up.

I was really excited, but my excitement was very much like Steve Martin in THIS VIDEO (taking out the sniper part).

In addition to having a philosophy MA, Emily has a masters in Library Science, and her research skills are unearthly. As a result of this, she was able to get statistics on how likely it is your published work is to get cited. The mean (not median!) citation rate for an article is 1.5. So on average (mean) an article will be cited one and a half times. But it gets more complicated. First, 75% of these citations are the author citing the article herself in a later article. And what accounts for the remaining .5 citations are a few articles that are cited hundreds of times (Emily couldn't get median citation rates, which would have been vastly more depressing).

And if you write novels it's even worse. Among fiction writers the common lore is that your first two to three hundred thousand words are practice. And if you get to that point there's no guarantee of anything (Moby Dick was categorized under non-fiction for whales for years). And music is even worse than that.

But there's this whole Wittgensteinian thing where creative works have to be in principle public. And it is a result of this (and the statistics above) that the overwhelmingly majority of creative activity really is like getting one's lake cottage ready for a party that nobody shows up to.

If you have any religious, or just Hegelian for that matter, affectations, then all of this is vastly easier psychically. When you create something beautiful or express something that illustrates a new understanding then you are part of the universe creating and thinking itself. What could be cooler than that? This is perverse in a hyper Brandomian way, but it is exactly how I understand (at least for myself and people like me) the first of Jesus' two commands, the one involving honoring God.

Finally, one of the great things about Role Playing Games such as Dungeons and Dragons is that they provide mechanisms for collaborative story-telling. They give you a way to be creative and social at  the same time.

Feh. As the brothers Meat would say, who needs action when you got words?

meditation on Bingo

Bingo fascinates me because it involves no skill whatsoever, but somehow feels like it involves skill to people who play it.

How many other things in life are like this?

Certainly the following: Monopoly, Parcheesee, slot machines. But these are all as artificial as Bingo.

In real life even marginally successful people systematically under-rate how lucky they are, both in terms of random events and in terms of genetic and environmental gifts. I mean Rauls' thought experiment is correct, and somewhere in the universe there is a morally decent society that lives up to it. . . but the chance that humans will seems dim to me. Too much Monopoly. Too many slot machines. And that damned farmer with his dog.

I'm sure that we commit the gambler's fallacy when not even gambling or playing a boring game? There must be some Kahneman/Taversky type research on this somewhere.

yet another hierarchy of failure

My basic view is that almost everyone is a failure at most things, and those who aren't are still slaves to entropy, always just on the edge of falling down.

In these regards, it's sometimes hard to be an anthropologist about your own culture. I probably don't have many insightful things to say about all of the multifaceted ways to fail at being a philosophy professor. However, I've been to just enough (and not too many) "writer's conferences"* to have a sharp eye for the various ways in which writers fail. Here's the hierarchy from top to bottom.

1. Authored multiple best sellers- Almost certainly writes in a genre such as romance, urban fantasy, or police procedurals. Surprisingly, more likely than not to still have a day job s/he hates, just to handle the health insurance! If lucky, this is at a university. If doesn't have a day job, then still spends about twenty hours a week on "the business end" of writing.
2. Authored one best seller- Will it be repeated? Probably not.
3. Self published and built enough of a "platform" to move around 40,000 units. This has only happened a handful of times. . . The sharks circle and this person will find themselves elsewhere on this list in the next few years. 
4. Authored book(s) with good distribution, but last one not a best seller, so major press has passed on exercising option, back at the conference still pitching manuscripts with all the other mopes. Platform may or may not help. One person I met had three good novels published by three different presses and was still standing in line to do five minute pitches. It made me sad.
5. Unpublished but won one of the contests supported by the conference. The agents and editors might be effusive in praise. But while they say things like, "this is quite possibly the next Confederacy of Dunces," their behavior will in no way be that of someone who really believes that. I mean, no matter what your list focuses on, you would still publish the next Confederacy of Dunces. You just would. The problem is, the industry is very small, and if it's even remotely possible the author might be a best seller some day, people will be very, very nice on the surface. But the corollary of this is that the overwhelming majority of people who win these contests still never get anything published.
6. Unpublished but with no platform whastoever. You are a mope. Enjoy the buffet, alcohol, and life affirming talks.
7. Self published, but didn't move appreciably more than 10,000 units. You are lower than the mope. The stench of failure on you is nearly suffocating, and your inability to realize this embarasses everyone else.
8. Effing crazy person, almost always paranoid in subtley frightening ways. I don't know how agents do their job, listening to pitches by people like this all day.
9. Memoir writers. A cut below that boring guy at work who won't shut up about that "really weird dream" he had last night. And nobody cares about the fact that your memoir is "Eat, Pray, Love meets X." And the contest to see who has the most effed up childhood is unseemly at this point. And stop titling books "The So and So's Daughter." It's horrible.

I won't divulge where I am in this hierarchy, other than to note that nothing I've written has yet been a best seller. On the flip side though, I don't write memoirs. That's worth something at least.

[Notes:

*writer's conference = hundreds of people drinking themselves silly in between (a) futile attempts to pitch manuscripts to a handful of agents and (b) new agey talks that fail to fortify the alcohol's wondrous despair blocking power.]

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. . .

The gypsies have no homes; the Doors had no bass

Nice Onion story about uncoolness HERE.

There's something liberating about realizing that one is so uncool that there is not even a possibility of achieving post-cool ironic coolness.

This awareness is somewhat related to the liberation that most people who attend big state schools achieve. I remember the moment when I was walking around on U.T.'s West Mall and realized that nobody walking around me cared about what I was up to.

Contrast this with high school, where you feel like you are always being watched. This is in part just adolescence, but also the shark tank aspect of American high schools.

I feel sorry for kids in fraternities and sororities. They end up stunted in various ways precisely because the whole "Greek" system is too much a continuation of the high school hegemony of cool.

Professor or Hobo?

HERE. I scored eight out of ten. Beat that!

I've actually been mistaken as an indigent person in Baton Rouge on multiple occasions. But I think in my case it's more because walking and riding bicycles are associated with poverty in the American South. I mean, I don't have a big beard, and my personal hygiene is generally beyond reproach.

The first two times were both on Thanksgiving days. I was walking around downtown Baton Rouge and people just assumed I was looking for the free Thanksgiving meal for poor people. On one occasion this led to a minor altercation with a police officer who kept insisting that I get back in line. The third time was when I happened to ride my bicycle near a Pancake prayer breakfast for homeless people underneath the Mississippi River Bridge. The pancake cookers really meant well. . . The fourth time was after Hurricane Katrina. Again, I was riding my bicycle. Some nice young aid worker from the North stopped me and kept trying to give me toothbrushes and stuff. He just didn't believe that I was a college professor. Maybe if I did have a big beard I would have been able to convince him. . .

[Just Breaking Update: Graham Harman only gets five out of ten right, which means I am currently in the lead by three professor/hobos.]

youtube recursivity

Youtube has started doing this thing where they automatically set up a page of all the youtube videos to which you linked. I'm actually getting hits from the one for me now.

Another cool thing about it is that it somehow collates similar sources, and I can't for the life of me figure out how the algorithm works. These are five suggested by youtube:

• Larval Subjects .
• Feminist Philosophers
• An und für sich
• New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science
• Crooked Timber

I'm friends with the author of the first, some of the authors of the second, and all of the authors for the fourth. But how could youtube know that? The only one to which I link or have been linked a lot is the fourth.

 

Tonight I found out that I exist

In graduate school my dear friend Roy Cook used to say that to be was to be the value of a footnote.

I (and my other dear friend Mark Silcox) actually exist now!!! Check out footnote 7 in the awesome Wikipedia article on Mona Sax.

And here is a video of me reacting to the good news.

Why I took some posts down off of Newapps

[IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please go HERE to read the full text of the petitition titled "SPEP Members Against the Advocacy Committee Resolution, and if you are a member of SPEP please consider signing your name. Also go HERE where I encourage people to join SPEP (and become eligible to sign the aforementioned petition).]

I decided to take the following three posts down from NewAPPS. There is a consensus that they might work to undermine the kind of rapprochement between analytic and continental philosophy that the Newapps bloggers are trying to establish. Also, they infuriated more than one dear friend for whom I have a lot of respect and love. Finally, there's a weird dynamic that when one posts about controversial issues in a group blog, then people tend to perceive the posts to somehow be reflective of the group itself. This certainly is not the case with the three posts I've moved here, and I'm moving them in part to forestall any such confusion.

If I was writing them today I'd change a couple of things about them, but would not change the very things that have gotten me the most angry e-mail from people I don't know.

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.

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.

observation

When I'm writing a new paper or working through something new I tend to have a lot more incidental ideas (philosophical and otherwise) that wind up in the blog.

When I'm revising papers my blogging lessens in quality and quantity. I produce pedestrian observations such as this one.