Rules for blogging

“Is this your ‘fall gothic’ blog look?” Karin asks.

Nah, I just compulsively reformat and revise, as regular readers know.

The most significant change is that the section-separating diamonds (♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦) are now tomato-colored, not orange. This would be tricky to implement globally rather than one entry at a time. So I haven’t done it all yet.

Some of my rules for blogging:

• Get the formatting right
• Corollary: learn the necessary HTML
• Get the prose right
• Revise style unstintingly
• Revise substance sparingly
• Post ten times per month (this constrains revision)
• Tell the truth
• Use free fonts
• Don’t try to make money
• Don’t track pageviews (I do see what countries my readers and reader-bots come from, but I can’t distinguish between them)
• Allow comments from human beings, not bots (right now, I’m failing to allow comments at all)
• Don’t worry about who reads (exception: Madame)
• Don’t worry if your wife doesn’t always read
• Don’t worry if people who once read don’t now
• Don’t worry if your content is utterly trivial
• You have almost nothing to say
• This blog is for exercise
• Just follow your very long nose; then retrace and clean up
• Write more like a Briton than like a gringo
• Corollary: some convolution is acceptable
• But emulate your stylist-heroes (e.g., Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh)
• If, in overall conception, you must emulate someone, let it be Pepys
• Read more Pepys so you know what you’re talking about
• The Shorter Pepys should suffice
• But it might not

I’ve posted some 1,300 entries here since 2013, and before that I posted on Xanga for almost ten years, so I can speak with some authority.

Internet round-up: the Psmiths on class; Harper’s on Oklahoma universities; Leiter on ChatGPT

My favorite Substackers have reviewed Paul Fussell’s Class and applied its principles to today’s political landscape (and other things).

I get the vibe they’d read Class before.

If you haven’t read Class, you really ought to.

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From Harper’s’s “Weekly Review”:

Lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced a bill mandating that every state college erect a statue of [Charlie] Kirk in a “highly visible and easily accessible” plaza that bears the activist’s name.

The bill is here.

Just one more example of politicians trying to control what colleges say.

Kirk may have debated on campuses, but he wasn’t a faculty member or even a degree earner. And his work wasn’t scholarly. It didn’t try to adhere to the standards of any guild of experts.

I’d hope that no professional academic would wish to flaunt him as a symbol of what colleges and universities do.

Then again, a lot of schools are happy to put up statues of their football players. The state doesn’t even have to enforce that.

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Brian Leiter posts about how a colleague of his got a chatbot to write an “alarmingly competent” philosophical essay.

“How much trouble are we [academic philosophers] in?” Leiter asks.

I’ve never seen any undergraduate writing with the chatbot’s precise style, but (*shudder*) I’ve seen lots of PhD- and journal-level prose just like it.

So, yes, we philosophers – or, at least, those who aspire to a livelihood based on the production and evaluation of scholarship – are in big, big trouble. Because, with just a little input, robots can do those tasks now (or, if not now, soon). Not superlatively well, but well enough to impress the profession’s gatekeepers.

Worse: readers of philosophy are in trouble, and have been for some time, because so much scholarship makes the grade even though it sounds like it rolled off a conveyor belt. The prose is undistinguished, and stock “-isms” (contractualism! particularism!) are opposed or combined almost mechanically.

Body-text fonts, pt. 43: Spectral

Last week: Paraguay 0, Ecuador 0.

Tonight: Ecuador 1, Argentina 0.

We concluded South America’s World Cup qualification tournament with:

• qualification
• a victory over the World Cup champions
• a final position as runners-up (trailing only the aforementioned champions)
• a total of five goals conceded in eighteen games – the joint-lowest total in the tournament’s history
• a streak of five “clean sheets” (games with no goals conceded)
• a streak of eleven undefeated games

I think it was after the goalless draw in Uruguay, with eight games to play, that I predicted we wouldn’t lose again.

The bad news is that tonight, Moisés Caicedo received two yellow cards and was ejected. The second yellow card was extremely doubtful. The referee, who’d been obliged to eject an Argentinian, seemed to be trying to even up the numbers.

I’m sure we’ll appeal to CONMEBOL. Let’s pray that no suspension is enforced.

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Having recovered from injury and illness, I mowed the shin-high backyard grass. It was slow going, but painless … until, some hours afterward, my hip and ankle began to trouble me.

Then, today, I threw out my back.

Either I get sidelined due to a foot puncture – or sinusitus – and suffer; or I recover, then mow, then suffer.

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The font Spectral is common on the internet, especially on Substack (which only allows, what, four fonts?).

Too small? Click here; read the “Thunder Gun Express” of Substack posts. It’s just a very long summary of Niccolao Mannuci’s very long travelogue and history of Mughal India – the “Thunder Gun Express” of books.

Which I only learned about yesterday. It’s the awesomest book I’ve heard of. I’m not kidding.

Even if the Bible were turned into a wild AI-generated movie, it wouldn’t be as spectacular as this book.

But I doubt I’ll ever read the book, so thank goodness for the Substack post.

Mansfield Park

This novel is more savage than its predecessors. Its matrons and widows are at least as pharisaical as those of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; its young gentlemen, at least as dissolute. In addition, the family’s fortune depends on volatile West Indian holdings. Will the slaves generate enough income to make up for the profligacy of the eldest son? And what will befall poor little Fanny Price, the household’s live-in cousin?

I don’t know how this story will turn out. For once, I’m in suspense.

The movie didn’t appear until 1999. I won’t be reviewing it for my “1996” series – at least, not for many years. (Recall that I’ve been casting a wider net, reviewing material that appeared from 1995 to 1997.)

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I’m nine or so books behind my hoped-for reading pace. So, recently, I read two celebrated mini-books: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, about Ireland’s Magdalene laundries; and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, about Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Donald Trump.

You could argue that they’re basically the same book. To use jargon from my old job as a tutor in IUSB’s first-year writing program: the second book is a “theory” text, and the first is an “example” text; and a student who read both books could write a paper making plenty of connections between them (one connection per body paragraph, of course).

(I wonder how teachers of first-year English at IU are coping with A.I. Not too badly, I expect. The in-house rules for papers are so detailed and peculiar, the bots probably still haven’t learned how to follow them.)

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This is Disney’s best song.

Abel has been standing up next to the furniture.

Here love dies

This is the abstract of an article in the most recent issue of the premier journal for the philosophy of religion:

THE AI ENSOULMENT HYPOTHESIS

According to the AI ensoulment hypothesis, some future AI systems will be endowed with immaterial souls. I argue that we should have at least a middling credence in the AI ensoulment hypothesis, conditional on our eventual creation of AGI and the truth of substance dualism in the human case. I offer two arguments. The first relies on an analogy between aliens and AI. The second rests on the conjecture that ensoulment occurs whenever a physical system is “fit to possess” a soul, where very roughly this amounts to being physically structured in such a way that the system can meaningfully cooperate with the operations of the soul.

This inquiry appeals to me not one whit. It might initiate a nice little debate in Faith and Philosophy, though.

Funny thing is, were this in a journal for cognitive or technological studies, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, or general philosophy, the inquiry still wouldn’t appeal to me, but I wouldn’t be annoyed.

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These are the first two paragraphs of Brideshead Revisited:

When I reached “C” company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the gray mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

Here love had died between me and the army.

Here love dies between me and the journal Faith and Philosophy.

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P.S. On the plus side, this book review appears in the same issue.

Closing credits

What happened in 2023? It’s a blur. I get through a day at a time. I barely look ahead or behind.

Mostly, I chase after children who live only in the moment. They are rather wicked. (As I compose this, one of them is removing his diaper and peeing on the floor.) My wife kindly looks after them a few hours every third evening so I can record my thoughts on this blog; a week later, I’ll’ve forgotten what I’ve written.

I steal moments to do a little reading. A book or two later, I’ll’ve forgotten what I’ve read.

Someone at a party asked which books I liked best this year. I said Shakespeare, Harry Potter, and Narnia; I had trouble remembering anything not in a series. I had to check my list of “completed” books after I got home.

My life is turning into a series of disconnected events. I’m becoming the hero of Borges’s “Funes, the Memorious,” only without the memories.

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Before I forget, I wish to complain that the previously serviceable app Grammarly has quietly gotten much too big for its britches. Yesterday, I was typing in a document, and Grammarly sneakily auto-corrected “resistible” to “irresistible,” which is THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I MEANT. This illustrates a larger point, that 2023 was the year when a lot of ordinary people started noticing (or reading online) that AI had “jumped the shark.”

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“You need to go to therapy, Sweetie,” says Karin. “This is the bleakest entry ever. ‘I remember nothing, and the robots are coming.’”

She is too young to understand.

Now that I think about it, it would be amusing to pay a stranger to listen to me read my blog entries out loud.

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Allegedly I groan a lot, even when I’m sitting still.

Do I groan, or purr? Jasper snuggles next to me as I type this, and our noises sound alike.

Jasper is middle-aged now; Ziva is almost middle-aged. They’ve both mellowed out. They hardly fight each other anymore.

I look forward to my sons’ attainment of this happiness.

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Every year, I read the book of Zechariah; and afterward, I am sorry to say, I forget about it until the next year.

It ends like this.

[14:16 ff. (NIV):] Then the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, and to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. If any of the peoples of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, they will have no rain. If the Egyptian people do not go up and take part, they will have no rain. The LORD will bring on them the plague he inflicts on the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. This will be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles.

On that day HOLY TO THE LORD will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, and the cooking pots in the LORD’s house will be like the sacred bowls in front of the altar. Every pot in Jerusalem and Judah will be holy to the LORD Almighty, and all who come to sacrifice will take some of the pots and cook in them. And on that day there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the LORD Almighty.

So when you worry about war in Israel, or anywhere, think about that.