Copa América

Biden and Trump are debating, but I’m watching Bolivia vs. Uruguay.

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Uruguay and Argentina are the cream of this tournament and should reach the final. I’d say that apart from them, only the Colombians have much of a chance (but I’d be speculating, since I missed their opening game).

By “much of a chance,” I mean about three percent.

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Among the also-rans, several teams have had matches spoiled by red cards: Ecuador, Peru, and the USA.

I’m a modest person … I don’t like to gloat … but Ecuador’s red card was the least stupid of the three.

A Panamanian also was red-carded; but his punishment came late in the game, and it was for a proper, honest-to-goodness patada.

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Happy birthday to my dear friend, Grace, the Salvationist.

Today also is the fifth anniversary of my dissertation defense. (I just pulled that volume off the shelf. For a double-spaced work, the typesetting really is aquittable.)

It must also be the fifth anniversary of my last meeting with Dick Miller and Nick Sturgeon. 🥺

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R.I.P. Kinky Friedman, the Jewish Texan who wrote hilarious murder mysteries, set in Manhattan, in which he cast himself and his friends as detectives. (This description barely scratches Friedman’s surface.) I learned about him during the first lecture of my first college U.S. history class. I have no idea why he was mentioned, beyond the obvious fact that he was too important to omit.

More dead philosophers

Two lovely parties this weekend: one, yesterday, for the seventieth wedding anniversary of Dorothy & Gene, from church; and another, today, for the first birthday of my niece, Penelope.

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Two more philosophers have died: Daniel Dennett and Charles Parsons.

There have been several remarks along these lines: Dennett was one of the greatest recent philosophers. I don’t agree, but he was a wonderfully lively writer. He was … opinionated. This is from the first page I looked at, in the preface of the new (2015) edition of Elbow Room:

The varieties of free will worth wanting, the varieties that underwrite moral and artistic responsibility, are not only not threatened by advances in (neuro-)science; they are distinguished, explained, and justified in detail [in the book]. There are other readily definable varieties of free will that are incompatible with what we now know about how human beings control their behavior, such as “libertarian freedom” or “agent causation.” They don’t, and can’t, exist, but although some philosophers still take them seriously, they are of only historical interest, like mermaids and leprechauns.

Now that’s confidence. (Is there much historical interest in leprechauns?)

I don’t know if Parsons was unconfident, but he was no Dennett; lecturing, he’d pause mid-sentence for minutes … then carry on. (Brilliantly, it’s said.)

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Robert Adams advised the dissertation of one of my dissertation examiners (Derk). My recent browsing of Adams’s work inspired me to find out more about my other examiners’ advisers. Nick’s was the formidable Gilbert Harman; I don’t plan to write about him tonight. Dick’s adviser was Rogers Albritton. Now here was a unicorn – a philosopher so great, he barely published; whose few publications read like spillage from a sloshing cauldron of rich, still-brewing philosophy soup ( fanesca, perhaps); whose notebooks have been mined for posthumous publication. (Cf. two interesting obituaries, here and here.)

By the way, there will be a memorial conference for Dick this Saturday. I wish I could attend: to honor and learn more about Dick, and to see my Salvationist friend, Yvonne, Frank’s widow, whose health is failing.

Some projects for the back burner; body-text fonts, pt. 23: Linotype Palatino

Another winter with a too-full garage. Not a terrible thing so far – the snow hasn’t been heavy, the car has been all right outside – but we really ought to clear the space once the weather warms. Ditto for other parts of the house.

We need haircuts.

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Anyone want to buy me the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Friendship (ed. Diane Jeske, 2021)? It’s only $178 on Amazon; that’s a markdown of 34%. Having ruminated on this topic for eight years or so – roughly, the period of my marriage – I’ve come up with my own “theory” of friendship and am hankering to turn it into a publication, but my grasp of the recent literature is infirm.

(My grasp of the older literature, too. And, arguably, of the phenomenon itself.)

(The examples that motivate my “theory” involve people throwing darts and drinking beer together, not so much improving each other’s characters or visiting each other’s sickbeds. I guess this is a masculinist “theory.”)

(I may also need a copy of Bartlett’s or some other reservoir of folk wisdom.)

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In April there’ll be a memorial conference for my PhD adviser, Dick. Much as I’d like to attend, I can hardly think that far ahead right now. My last big trip was just in October. Before that, I hadn’t traveled farther than two hours since 2019 (when I last saw Dick).

Coincidentally, I’ve been dreaming that I still have to defend my dissertation. It’s always a relief to wake up and realize that I finished. That was the mother of all back-burner projects.

Philosophers talk about how personal projects give our lives meaning, and maybe they do, but they also give us lots to worry about.

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This month’s body-text font, Linotype Palatino, is known by all and loved and hated in equal measure. It isn’t Hermann Zapf’s original Palatino design; it’s the font on everyone’s computer. I love it in movie titles. I like it in some books. I kinda hate when people create their own documents with it; they usually don’t put enough space between the lines.

It often appears in textbooks.

This amusing passage opens Warren Hollister’s Roots of the Western Tradition. (Had he actually been reading E. O. Wilson, or was he just helping himself to a metaphor fashionable during his time?) Later editions only get crankier. Mine, the sixth, says: “In our own time, the pace has become so swift that some dull-witted people” (my emphasis) “see no point in studying history at all.” Such language is not now indulged.

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Look at this frog.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 70: Citizen X

This 1995 HBO production is much, much better than the average made-for-cable movie of that period. I’ve seen it ten or fifteen times. It’s rewatchable because of the acting. I cherish each facial expression, every vocal intonation and contortion – even though the (Western) actors speak with Russian accents of varying thickness.

It’s based on the case of a notorious serial killer. It takes some historical liberties, one of which I’ll mention at the end of this review. How discrediting this is, I’m not sure. I can’t check all the facts, but I ought at least to read the book upon which the movie is based. Citizen X is superficially (and, therefore, deceptively) realistic; it’s hardly Amadeus, which a viewer can enjoy in good conscience as a kind of fable, realizing that much has been embellished.

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Rostov Oblast, early 1980s. A body is discovered in a field.

Search the woods, Burakov, the forensic specialist (Stephen Rea), tells one of his police underlings. That’s where this person was killed.

It’s almost five o’clock, the underling complains.

I don’t care what time it is. Search the woods.

That night, as Burakov is concluding his post-mortem, seven more bodies are wheeled into the lab.

Have a nice evening, says the underling.

And that is the basic pattern of the movie: Burakov works hard to catch the killer while others drag their feet.

It’s clear that we have a serial killer on our hands, Burakov reports to a committee of local Communist Party leaders. The most prolific in Soviet history.

The response is not encouraging. Serial killing is a decadent Western phenomenon.

No wonder nothing ever gets done, Burakov confides to his immediate superior: the smirking, urbane, politically astute Colonel Fetisov (Donald Sutherland). Fetisov is on the side of the angels. But he is not a conventionally nice man. He has just been mocking Burakov’s death-odor in front of the committee – Next time, a little less diligence, a little more hygiene – scoring cheap points against his detective in public. But he means to aid him, behind the scenes, in the long run.

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The killer (Jeffrey DeMunn) is an anxious little man. He recruits his victims in train stations. Most are young. He lures them into the forest and stabs them to achieve sexual gratification.

The camera lingers on him after his killings.

No glib psychopath he. We see him on the prowl, awkward with potential victims, avoiding police, receiving tongue-lashings from his boss and his wife. Always wretched. Always bracing himself for the hammer-blow. He exudes as much dread in daily life as he does in his execution scene. It’s a haunting performance.

(The movie says little about his background, which is as harrowing as anything else in the story.)

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But the heart of the movie is the interplay between Burakov and Fetisov. Burakov is passionate and direct; Fetisov, ironical and cunning. Fetisov, especially, utters some delicious lines.

Burakov: He finds his victims on the trains!

Fetisov: I have never ridden the trains, but they do sometimes impede my limousine.

(Dick, my PhD adviser, used to talk like this; he, too, was on the side of the angels.)

Each man, in his own way, works for the good.

Toward the end of the movie, Burakov and Fetisov recruit a psychiatrist – Max Von Sydow, in a small but winsome role – who, congratulating them on an investigative success, delivers this line: May I say that together, you make a wonderful person.

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Now, the inaccuracies. The investigation spans twelve years. The characters don’t age. Burakov has young children; they stay young. This might be an oversight, or it might be a deliberate artistic choice. Not aging, Burakov’s children subtly bring to mind the children who’ve been killed, who’ll never grow up, who haunt Burakov’s dreams.

The more serious inaccuracy – the fabrication – is Burakov’s recurring conflict with the committee of Communist Party leaders, and especially with an ogrish, blockheaded bully played by Joss Ackland (in another entertaining performance) who seethes from the end of the table whenever Burakov reports on the investigation.

I’ve read that there was no such conflict in real life. (Again, I’d have to check the book to make sure.) Bureaucratic idiocies did exist in the Soviet Union, but they may not have been so influential in this case.

The fabrication adds drama to the story, and it makes Burakov’s heroism more poignant; it also establishes why Fetisov must operate as he does. Arguably, the fabrication is artistically necessary. The story isn’t much of a procedural. The haphazardness of the policing (not Burakov’s, but the force’s) deprives this crime story of the usual pleasure that comes from watching an investigation logically unfold. Instead, the movie is driven by its personalities; and these are compelling because of what they must overcome.

I won’t decide whether the inaccuracy is fatal to the movie. I simply don’t know enough. But it remains true that the movie is absorbing to watch, with characters who are movingly played.

R.I.P. Dick, pt. 2; body-text fonts, pt. 16: Calisto; a Father’s Day joke

The Cornell Chronicle has published the best overview so far of Dick’s life and career. I especially like what it says about Dick’s contribution to the philosophy of science, and I like the reminiscences of Cornell PhDs Koltonski and Jezzi.

I also like the word “reminiscences.”

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The screenshot of this month’s body-text font has been chosen with Dick in mind. The passage is not a quotation from one of Dick’s books or articles. Rather, it showcases his patience. It’s the most self-indulgent footnote in the dissertation I wrote for him, which I set in Calisto.

Dick’s comment: What is tackling?

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Happy Father’s Day.

R.I.P. Dick

Dick, my adviser at Cornell, has died.

An obituary.

Cornell’s memorial notice, with reminiscences.

Brian Leiter’s notice, with a few more reminiscences in the comments.

Dick wrote on a wide range of topics. I’ll just mention some of the political ones.

He became known, early on, for his work on Marx.

His final views on economic justice can be glimpsed in:

this online profile …

this Washington Post opinion piece (he was always listening for wisdom from libertarians, utilitarians, and other sirens, but wasn’t seduced by those philosophies) …

and the 2019 article “Social Democracy and Free Enterprise” (listed with other writings here).

When I was at Cornell, Dick was writing Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power and conducting seminars on war, foreign aid and trade, global warming, and the rise of China.

His research into the last topic is another good example of how he would listen to lots of people as he formulated his views. He studied the Chinese language and got to know Chinese scholars and non-scholars. He even directed this documentary film about a provincial migrant to Beijing.

He also learned to cook delicious Chinese meals, which Karin & I enjoyed during our stay in his house. That was four years ago. I intended, later, to travel to Ithaca for a conference planned in his honor. The pandemic struck; the conference was put on hold. As far as I know, it was never rescheduled.

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I arrived at Cornell in 2005 expecting to focus on metaphysics or something comparably Laputan. Alas, I had a miserable first semester. In Dick’s political philosophy class, too, I was making a fool of myself; but at least I was learning. (Note: It’s not always good when your remarks cause the other graduate students to snigger into their sleeves.) Nevertheless, Dick treated my ideas with greater seriousness than anyone else ever had. I started to treat them more seriously, too.

The next semester, I was surprised when, at a departmental function, Dick impishly asked under whom I wished to write my dissertation. It took me another year to choose him. I wonder if he’d have been so nice about it if he’d known that the project would take more than a decade to complete. He retired the day after I defended the thing.

I used to bump into him at the Cornell Cinema, where he’d make some wry comment. Once, we both happened to come out of Scorsese’s The Departed. Boom, boom, boom, was all he said. His light reading was Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot. He hated lewdness. And greed. But he was willing to give people the benefit of the doubt when they decided that nice clothes and gourmet cooking really would significantly improve their lives. He was committed to stamping out poverty and injustice, but he was no ascetic. He wanted people to be empowered to discover their own meaningful projects and direct their own lives.

He was a good man. I’m still absorbing the lessons he taught me. Above all, I’m grateful for his kindness.

He was an atheist. He used to tell how his wife, who had lost her religious belief, would visit the nuns who had schooled her. They’d ask how her prayer life was going. He liked that about the nuns. I hope non-Catholics won’t mind if I pray for his soul. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.

Our trip to the east, pt. 3

What I’d forgotten about Ithaca is that you’re always climbing. The hills are steep; worse, the buildings tend to have lots of stairs. Ithacans are used to this. Karin & I are not.

Yesterday, at Karin’s prompting, we climbed up one of the gorges – just after having breakfasted more than was good for us. Of course, we left the car at the bottom of the gorge, so that when we reached the top we had no choice but to climb right back down again.

We were pretty well ruined after that. No matter: we dragged ourselves around to my other old haunts.

Karin told me the baby kicked and kicked, as if to say, What ARE you doing.

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Today, I defended my dissertation. It received a result of “pass.”

Everyone was very kind. I was put at ease when Derk, the first committee member to arrive, told me what a lovely dissertation I’d written.

The hero of the occasion was my old teacher, Nick, who agreed to serve on my committee despite having retired seven years earlier. He’s physically infirm. And yet he played a crucial role during the defense, asking sharp questions and providing encouragement.

It was poignant to learn of the intention of my adviser, Dick, to retire at the end of this month. As I’ve been completing my degree, he’s been wrapping up his career.

Karin also was present at the defense – as was my son.