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.

A passion for exactitude

It’s time for a long quotation from the philosopher Michael Dummett. I mention him once or twice every ten years.

(I just realized that, as of December, I’ve been blogging for twenty years. I started on Xanga, and when that service became costly I switched to Blogger/​Blogspot. I may write a recapitulation soon.)

This is from pp. 3–5 of Voting Procedures (1984), one of Dummett’s excursions into what, for him, is “popular” philosophy.

In view of all this, one would expect that voting procedures and their operation would have been the subject of a considerable amount of intellectual enquiry. One would expect also that the results of such investigations would be well known both to political and social theorists and to all those concerned with practical affairs, and would be applied both by those who have frequently to take part in voting and, above all, by those concerned to devise voting procedures to be as fair and as satisfactory as possible. Of these two natural expectations, the first is indeed satisfied, but the second hardly at all. In the period since the end of the Second World War, a considerable body of theory concerning voting has been built up. This topic was pioneered by Professor Duncan Black, an economist, who published some articles about it in the late 1940s, and a book, The Theory of Committees and Elections, in 1958: an important contribution, not expressed specifically in terms of voting, was made by Professor Kenneth Arrow in his book Social Choice and Individual Values of 1951 [see note 1 below]. Since then, and especially in the last two decades, the theory initiated by Black and Arrow has been extensively developed, principally in articles published in learned journals. One of the most surprising features of all this is how recent this work is. Duncan Black devoted a section of his book to a historical survey. From this it emerged that almost the only serious work on the theory of voting that had previously been done was carried out in France just before and during the Revolution, by Borda, Condorcet, and Laplace; this work had subsequently been almost entirely forgotten, save by a few British mathematicians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who made insignificant contributions to it. A minor exception, not noticed by Black, is the unimpressive section devoted to the subject by the German philosopher Hermann Lotze in his Logik of 1874. The only exception mentioned by Black is the remarkable intervention by C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), contained in three pamphlets which he wrote in complete ignorance of the work of his predecessors, and which were directed at the voting procedure to be adopted by the governing body of Christ Church, Oxford, to which he belonged [see note 2 below].

[Note 1:] See the Bibliography for works by Arrow and Black. Arrow’s possibility theorem (more exactly called an impossibility theorem) is so fundamental to the subject that he is often credited with having been the modern initiator of it, especially since his basic notation has become standard. This is unfair to Black, who was the real twentieth-century pioneer of the theory of voting, as well as a diligent researcher into its earlier history; it may be due in part to the fact that, although Black’s original papers on the subject appeared in 1948–9, his book was not published until 1958, while Arrow’s celebrated monograph came out in 1951. Black was, in particular, the originator of the concept of single-peakedness (not used in the present book), with which Arrow is sometimes credited but which he in fact took over from Black. Single-peakedness is a condition which guarantees the existence of a top. For the case when some preference scales are weak, the condition was weakened by Farquharson and myself in our paper of 1961; alternative though analogous sufficient conditions were later given by Inada, Sen, and Pattanaik.

[Note 2:] See the Bibliography. It is a matter for the deepest regret that Dodgson never completed the book that he planned to write on the subject. Such were his lucidity of exposition and his mastery of the topic that it seems possible that, had he ever published it, the political history of Britain would have been significantly different.

I especially like Dummett’s asides on Dodgson (Carroll) and the also-ran, Lotze.

Once, eleven years ago, I mentioned Dummett by way of griping about George Saunders. Since then, I’ve read and enjoyed four full books by Saunders and zero by Dummett. It wouldn’t hurt to finish Dummett’s trenchant On Immigration and Refugees; completing one of his Frege books, much as I adore them (all too often uncomprehendingly, it must be admitted), is above my pay grade.

Hipsters

What I miss from Xanga are the xangazons: the thumbnail pictures of movies, books, and music. Like this one:

[not a thumbnail picture]

Currently:

the bird and the bee

The Bird and the Bee

“Fucking Boyfriend”

Or like this one:

Currently:

Interpreting the Masters, Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates

The Bird and the Bee

“Private Eyes”

Before you pounce:

Listening to hipster music doesn’t make me a hipster. I enjoy reading certain Japanese novels, but that doesn’t make me Japanese (not even in spirit). An outsider can wallow in foreign ditches.

One time, Sabby and I went to Chicago and the female Sabby pointed at some youths and was like, look at those hipsters, hee hee, and we giggled at them. And then she said, John-Paul, you’re a natural hipster. And I was like, that’s impossible; being a hipster requires too much artifice; naturalness precludes it. (That is, hipsters can’t be genuinely cool.)

And she was like, well, I have in mind your sweaters. I said, you mean the sweaters that I bought at Old Navy, that super-hip store. Hee hee, she giggled, no, I mean your hideous, old, second-hand sweaters, the ones hipsters would like. Oh, I said, you mean the sweaters I’ve been using regularly since the 1990s (it isn’t my fault that it took so long for fashion to catch up). Hee hee, she giggled (all red in the face).

If somebody wants to make an entire album of Hall and Oates tributes, I can enjoy those songs. It’s difficult even for hipsters to ruin that music, despite its having been recalled into fashionableness.

The “Boyfriend” song just sounds pretty.

I return to Bethel

Finally, my Xanga has been shut down.

I moved into Mary’s & Martin’s new house. My helpers were M&M, my uncle, my brother Stephen, and Sabby — heroes.

Right now, M&M’s basement contains approx. 30 boxes of my books. Their garden contains my treadmill, abandoned to the recyclers. So long, Timothy. …

I teach just one section at Bethel but often walk across campus to get to IUSB. What an innocent place, Bethel. There isn’t much feeling of urgency …

… except in the class that I teach. There the students sit up straight, eyes wide open.

Through the grapevine I hear:

The readings are difficult;

When he lectures he uses big words.

(And I thought I was so colloquial!)

Our first textbook is Hume’s Dialogues, which many of the students have been supplementing with SparkNotes (not what I recommended, but OK). The class discussions are satisfactory. The students make good points. I wonder which points are from SparkNotes.

Yet somewhere a screw has come loose. In previous years I would quickly learn all the students’ names; this semester, so far, I haven’t bothered to. I know the names of the most frequent talkers. That’s all.

Maybe the reason is that I have so many students (one section at Bethel, two at IU). Even a few students’ faces seem unfamiliar. I never used to have this problem.

Or maybe, during the last year, something happened that is now preventing me from caring like I used to.

Some advice concerning children

Xanga still hasn’t expelled me. Come on, Xanga! I’m weary of the suspense.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Some good news: the English Department at IU South Bend is hiring me to teach first-year composition. Unexpectedly, I’m even being offered two class sections. So after a year outside of the classroom I’ll be teaching more students than ever, and in a new discipline.

This job should make me a lot better at teaching writing. At Cornell I taught writing-intensive philosophy courses, but this course at IU is pretty much only about writing.

I’m excited.

Credit goes to my buddy Andrew for encouraging me to apply and for agreeing to be my faculty mentor.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

One more thing: it’s been fourteen days since I was last in the church nursery, watching the little kids during their mothers’ weekly prayer meeting. I miss those kids. It took about a month for them to decide that they could have fun with me, but as soon as they did, it was a hoot. The breakthrough came when I pretended to throw up. Everybody, if you want children to like you, just pretend to throw up.

I expect to use this tactic in my courses at IU.

R.I.P. “Chucho”

Ecuador is sad today because Christian Benítez has died, apparently of a heart attack brought on by appendicitis.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This could be my last entry posted onto Xanga. Please keep on reading and commenting at JUANPUEBLO 2 (Blogger).

I’ll miss Xanga — I’ve been writing on there for nearly ten years.

The end? pt. 2

If Xanga is shut down, or if I must pay to keep on using it, I’ll switch over to Blogger. I’ve created this site:

JUANPUEBLO 2

(How’s the layout? I’m trying to maintain some semblance to the old blog.)

Until further notice, please continue commenting on Xanga. Gradually I’ll upload a lot of my old entries to Blogger. Not that they do me any great credit; still, I think they’re worth preserving so that interested people can have a record of how, for better or worse, one life is being changed.

The end?

The end of Xanga? That would make me sad.

Stay tuned.

Rereading

I’ve been rereading my blog entries from 2003 and 2004 (what a twerp I was!) (but I certainly believed in myself) (my Xanga is nearly 10 years old !!!).

Who prompted this rereading? Some unknown persons who’ve been paging through my blog chronologically. Whoever you are, I’m flattered. But when you decide to quit reading, I won’t be offended.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve been rereading “Eliminating Material Proper Parts” (2005), the essay which secured my admittance to Cornell. I barely recognize myself. The author is a stranger. But he really does have a knack for philosophizing, and he’s hilarious; stylistically, he’s a parodist of Trenton Merricks (but with more flair, because he cuts more corners, because he doesn’t know not to). Argumentatively, he’s pretty bold (though only because of not knowing enough of the literature).

So it was naïve, reckless overreaching that produced the writing that charmed my admitters. And that is a tendency which I continue to see in myself.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

For the fourth time, I finished reading Youth by J.M. Coetzee. I recommended it to Stephen, but he didn’t like it as well as I did. Youth is wasted on the young.

More of the same

Who are these Californians who read my Xanga? Sometimes I wonder.

Kenny and I finished viewing Barry Lyndon — an act of masochism. One scene, especially painful, showed various 18th-century bigwigs and damsels playing cards by candlelight. The shots were beautifully composed, but there was little dialog or drama, and the scene dragged on for ten minutes; all the while, tedious chamber music blared.

When, at last, the scene was changed, the narrator said: “To make a long story short …”

This sort of joke was repeated for three hours.

:(  :(  :(

Still no regular Web access, though not for lack of trying. As far as we can tell, our modem is defective.

:(  :(  :(

Today I am inspired by Evelyn Waugh.

:(  :(  :(

Finally my holidays have ended. Yesterday, Cat and Kenny and I went to the beach, and afterward I hosted a dinner party. (I entertained my guests by talking about my books.) But today I put in six long hours tutoring at IUSB.