A long-awaited stroll; a latitude, hydrological divides, and other fancies

Snow: mostly melted. Temperatures: in the fifties (F); sixties tomorrow. I take Abel and Daniel strolling. Daniel jumps in all the puddles. He soaks the insides of his boots. I don’t know what he’ll wear if we go out again very soon.

Abel, in the stroller, leans forward, his head as near to the ground as he can get it, as if he were peering into tidal pools.

I halt to check if he’s all right; Daniel races ahead.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Fun fact I just learned: Canada’s lowest latitude passes through South Bend just a few blocks north of Toad Hall.

(Toad Hall is our house.)

I could pinpoint the location, stroll there, and hop back and forth over the line. “Now I’m south of all of Canada. Now I’m north of a little of Canada.”

I suppose the urge is due to having grown up near the equator.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I could do this with the nearby drainage divide, too. “Now I’m daining into the Great Lakes. Now I’m draining into the Gulf of Mexico, I mean the Gulf of America.”

It seems a less arbitrary line since it has a basis in physical rather than political reality – until I remember that the Great Lakes drain into the St. Lawrence River and thence into the Atlantic, which encompasses the Gulf of Mexico (I mean, America). So that, ultimately, the distinction between these drainage basins is artificial.

Of course there’s a physical difference between draining one way and draining the other, but if you mark all such differences you end up with insignificant, postage stamp-sized drainage basins.

Artifice – human purposiveness – seems inescapable if much geography is to be done at all.

I remember checking out geography Ph.D. programs when I was very young. There was the respectable but daunting meteorology specialization; all else seemed postmodern free-for-all. A bitter disappointment to someone who’d vaguely entertained the thought that his vocation might consist of memorizing picturesque but unimpeachable facts, e.g. that Czechoslovakia’s capital is Prague.

R.I.P. “Minnie”

… a.k.a. Cinnamon Sprinkle, a.k.a. Cinnamon Sparkle: Cornell’s beloved miniature horse, who arrived on campus the year I moved away. (See, also, this earlier piece.)

Now that’s the kind of alumni reporting I’d like more of.

Had I known Minnie was at Cornell, I would have taken Karin to see her when we traveled to campus for my PhD defense.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Happy New Year. Today, the USA attacked Venezuela and captured its head of state.

All day long, I worried about geopolitics, not least about soccer.

What will FIFA do about the World Cup? It would be consistent to ban the USA, since Russia is banned for attacking Ukraine.

If only.

What will CONMEBOL do about the Copa América? The USA is a hosting candidate but has just attacked a CONMEBOL member.

I went on Facebook to see what my “friends” are saying about the attack.

The Ecuadorian church leaders are silent. I don’t object to that. Not everything needs to be discussed.

Other Ecuadorians are making jokes about Venezuelans. Many Venezuelan refugees live in Ecuador. The jokes hint that now is the time for Venezuelans to return en masse.

(A Venezuelan says goodbye to her Ecuadorian sugar daddy.)

My U.S. “friends” who used to live in Ecuador are debating whether the coup is a canny U.S. foreign policy move; whether it’s good for Venezuela; whether Venezuelans, in preponderant numbers, support it; whether Maduro was entitled to rule; and whether “individualism” is better than “collectivism.”

I’ve seen none of these “friends,” none of them, say anything like this:

The geopolitical order is an order of sovereign states. An order of sovereign states forbids particular states from unilaterally attacking other states and deposing their leaders, even bad leaders.

It’s amazing how this simple norm, so dear to Latin Americans – including Venezuelans (even, I daresay, opponents of Maduro) – appears not to figure in ex-missionaries’ thinking.

What were they doing in Ecuador, all those years?

Not reading the room, it would seem.

R.I.P. Dr. Root, acquisitions librarian

His obituary is here.

I knew him best as the director of Bethel’s library, in which capacity he employed me as his student assistant. I also took a course from him, on Russian history.

He was very kind to students, as the following examples will show.

(i) He got back in touch with me in 2018 and urged me to finish writing my long-overdue dissertation. He was hardly the first person to urge this. But his intervention did the trick. He asked to read what I’d written so far, and he commented on a number of sections.

After this jump-start, I wrote regularly. I completed the Ph.D. the next summer.

(ii) A college acquaintance told me, long after the fact, that he and other young bucks once rashly denounced the quality of Bethel’s library holdings, in a letter posted on the “Wittenburg Door.”

(The “Wittenburg Door” was a cafeteria bulletin board. It was the college’s most picturesque – and cringeworthy – public forum.)

Dr. Root invited the young bucks to his office. He treated their concerns seriously and graciously, solicited advice, and ordered books they asked for. Little did they know, the library’s resources were severely constrained. Dr. Root didn’t complain of this to students; even I, his assistant, learned it from other sources.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In his dress and in his politics, Dr. Root was a 1970s conservative. He hung a large portrait of Nixon over his student workers’ desk. Bold! But he didn’t do it to taunt the libs; that wasn’t his way. He genuinely admired Nixon’s statesmanship.

He grieved – privately, to me, at least – that the Republican Party, which he staunchly supported, had turned Trumpist.

He venerated missionaries. One of his pet projects was the indexing of Jim Elliot’s journals. I worked on this, occasionally, when there was nothing else to do; it was a relief when Jim and Betty finally tied the knot and Jim got courtship off his mind.

Dr. Root spent his life in midwestern towns and cities and shared his midwestern pleasures with his student workers. The end-of-term banquets were especially generous: I still savor the memory of one of them, an Amish dinner in the countryside. The summer workers were treated to daily donuts and the occasional lakeside outing; we’d observe a surprisingly lively Dr. Root playing volleyball and croquet. I was amused, too, when he’d return with stories of his holidays. Sometimes, he’d go abroad; usually, he’d stay in a friend’s Manhattan penthouse. For a few days each year, he’d change into a wild baseball- and theatre-goer, sushi eater, and book buyer. Book buying was his job, of course, but he relished the hunt.

It occurs to me that my time helping him to buy books for the library was what made me the habitual bargain hunter I am today.

Then again, he may have chosen me as his student worker because he already perceived that tendency. One day, he invited me into a back office to take what I wanted from the surplus of donated books. He must have liked the gusto with which I went about choosing, because that was when he offered me my job – much of which would consist of filling out forms from bargain book catalogs.

There’s a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall in which the ne’er-do-well Captain Grimes is offered his dream job of traveling from pub to pub to sample and rate the beer. (He has to turn it down for personal reasons, of course.) Something comparable, involving low-budget book buying, might have been my ideal job – the realization of my “true self.” Dr. Root did that job. Lucky man! I’m glad I was able to do it with him for a time.

Body-text fonts, pt. 30: Utopia

The editors of the distinguished journal Philosophy & Public Affairs have resigned en masse – apparently, to escape the clutches of the publisher, Wiley – and have founded a new open-access journal. There is some understandable consternation about the Rawlsian overtones of the new journal’s title (see this blog post’s comments). I think it would be catchier, not to say less sanctimonious, to simply call the new publication “Footnotes to Rawls.” For a long period, the old journal was, in effect, a Rawls-commentary venue. Some readers found this dull; my rejoinder is, Not as dull as whatever it is the journal has been publishing lately.

But that’s neither here nor there. My concern about the switch to open-access publishing is about whether the new typesetting will suck. Since the 1990s, the old journal has been, typographically as well as thematically, outstandingly unadventurous, “safe as houses.” This despite the typeface’s name: Utopia.

I used to hate how the typeface looked. Now I don’t.

Reading articles from PPA’s Rawlsian heydey feels like slipping into a warm bath. Tonight I look back, fondly, at a specimen from 2004 (a response to Singer, not Rawls, as it happens):

My enthusiasm for this prose has grown over the years. (It probably helps that I knew the author.) Here is the exact price of the designer label sweater. Here is the exact price of the department-store brand sweater. Here is the difference. Now here are some goods that these savings could buy. The author’s boredom with the scenario is palpable. That’s as it should be. The scenario is over-discussed in the literature. But, paradoxically, the boredom verges on amusement. The designer label sweater is “stunning,” and it’s on sale for just $49.95 (what an irresistible find).

To apply all the requisite shades of beige, one needs a big block of text and a bland typeface – but not a cheap-looking one. Utopia is just right.

Erewhon and Heuristica are free Utopia “clones.”

Copa América

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

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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. 🥺

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 75: Clockwatchers

Four office temps, clockwise from top-left: Paula (Lisa Kudrow), Jane (Alanna Ubach), Margaret (Parker Posey), and Iris (Toni Collette, in her wallflower mode).

Here’s the office manager: Barbara (Debra Jo Rupp).

And for kicks: Art, the weirdo in charge of the supplies.

The standouts are Margaret and Barbara. Margaret is the most spirited of the temps. She’s the quickest to criticize the company. Her clothing mocks the “business casual” style.

Barbara is evil. She’s a stock character – think of Prof. Umbridge, of the Harry Potter series. But don’t we all know someone like this, so sugary, so cruel? The niche fills itself.

There’s no glory in landing a mid-level job in this corporation. Look at Barbara; look at Art (I haven’t even mentioned the loathsome Bob Balaban character). Who in his or her right mind would aspire to that? This only makes the temps’ plight more poignant. They long for permanent employment. They’ve clocked in and out, for years, for this or that company. Some have worked diligently; others, not so much. It has made no difference either way. For them, “tenure” is beyond reach, as if by unspoken decree: These four shall not be gathered in. Permanency, at least at the level just above temp-hood, is for the Arts and Barbaras of this world: mediocrities’ mediocrities. If you’re female and dowdy (Iris), desperate (Paula), old-fashioned (Jane), or clever (Margaret), that elevator is closed. If you’re incapable of titanic complacency, the elevator is closed.

The four temps may not be happy with this state of affairs, but at least their common plight makes them friends.

Their comradery is tested when another young woman joins the company to do permanent secretarial work.

The temps are baffled. This new worker (Helen FitzGerald) is evidently dowdy, desperate, and old-fashioned (her cleverness is impossible to gauge; she barely speaks). How did she get the job?

A spate of thieving begins in the office. The higher-ups suspect the temps. They ask who else would be poor enough to resort to stealing, as if money were the sole incentive.

The temps suspect the new worker. Then, as the mystery drags on and this new uncertainty compounds their chronic anxiety, they suspect each other.

I’ve seen it written that Clockwatchers, unlike most movies, is about what work is actually like. That must be qualified. It’s less about what goes on at work than about temporary employment as a state of mind. The “work” in this movie is stylized. The workplace is overly sterile. The walls are too bare. The muzak is Les Baxter – only the blandest Les Baxter (no Ritual of the Savage). The workers swivel in their chairs a little too demonstratively, stare a little too hard at the clock, abuse the office supplies a little too grimly. (White-Out becomes nail polish; markers are used to induce chemical highs.) That’s no knock against the movie, which doesn’t aspire to realism on the physical level.

What isn’t stylized, what’s brutally accurate, is what the limbo between non-work and permanent work feels like. The longing for security, for inclusion, is warping. Is it more warping than the low-level insiders’ determination to keep the outsiders out? Perhaps not. But this movie is about the outsiders, not the insiders. It’s about those who don’t just watch the hours. They also watch the clock measuring one’s prospects of attaining the lowest level of “success.”

The same thing happens in universities. There are permanent faculty, who, ideally, form some sort of community; permanent staff; and temporary workers: adjuncts and tutors, who are pretty well out in the cold.

I was a university temp for seven years. (I don’t count the previous seven years of graduate study, which was genuine apprenticeship. The grad school timeline is more definite, and its occupants are treated as honorary community members.) I enjoyed good relations with my fellow temps, especially in the last three or four years. Actually, no, I enjoyed good relations with the writing tutors. There was another group tutors whose misbehavior, like the petty thievery in the movie, became a consuming distraction. I didn’t blame them so much as certain higher-ups who seemed wilfully oblivious.

But enough about me; that time of my life is over. The point is, the movie resonates.

Library “storytime”; Ninja Turtles; Chaplin; Fargo; a philosophy teacher

I took Samuel and Daniel to “storytime” at the local library branch. It was our third session. Thirteen or fourteen children attended: the largest number in two years, the librarian told us.

Strangely, there was just one little girl, and she was the first I’d seen at any of these gatherings. 🤷

Afterward, a few parents hung around while their children read, played, colored, or used the library’s electronic tablets.

One friendly little boy showed me a book about the Ninja Turtles. “What are their names?” he asked. I pointed to each in turn: “Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello.”

He went to his mother. “That grandpa knows who the Ninja Turtles are.”

“Well, lots of people do,” she explained.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin was unavailable for supper, so I put on Chaplin’s Gold Rush (the 1920s version, not the 1940s re-edit). Samuel and Daniel liked it pretty well, especially when the very hungry gold prospectors eat Chaplin’s shoe for their Thanksgiving dinner.

One prospector, who is a little too hungry, imagines that Chaplin is man-sized dinner-fowl. The boys were astounded. “Not a chicken! Not a chicken!” Daniel kept saying.

The wary Chaplin takes the hungry prospector’s rifle outside and buries it in the snow, kicking a few drifts over it like a chicken scratching the dirt. The prospector comes out with an axe and chases him around the cabin. I got déjà vu. This is Fargo, I thought. Chaplin is Steve Buscemi; the other prospector is Peter Stormare; Buscemi buries something in the snow; a person runs out of a cabin, face covered, hands behind her … like a headless chicken. All for a little money.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Re: the philosopher Charles Parsons (decd.). His student, Peter Ludlow, has written an amazing remembrance. I’d quote my favorite passages, but they would amount to almost the whole essay.

Read it.

R.I.P. Robert M. Adams (the philosopher, not the English prof)

He was my favorite living philosopher of religion. He also wrote about ethics, metaphysics, and the early modern philosophers. The one talk I heard him give at Cornell took issue with Rawls on political disagreement; rereading the article it became, I’m sure it was this work that inspired me to hew certain paths in my dissertation.

I’ve taught two of his essays –

“Saints”;

“Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief ”

– as well as one of his briefs for the divine command theory of morality (which of them, I’d have to check; on this topic, see the first part of “Moral Arguments,” above).

He looked and sounded like a grump, but his former students were devoted to him. Some trekked in from out of state for that talk at Cornell.

See too these remembrances on Leiter’s blog, especially Leiter’s, Zimmerman’s, Brennan’s, and Buras’s.

Notice that Zimmerman regards as a kindness Adams’s evisceration of his ideas on free will. It’s stunning that in 1991 Zimmerman interviewed to work at UCLA having written little more than a four-page proposal for his dissertation. A different era!

Buras reports an experience rather like mine, of not-fully-conscious absorption of Adamsian thinking. I’ve actually never read “Flavors, Colors, and God.” Maybe I should do so tonight, along with David Lewis’s reply. Ah, for the days when so many important papers were short.

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Look at this frog.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 68: The addiction

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is a PhD candidate at a Lower Manhattan institution called the University of New York. She studies philosophy, but in this movie the discipline arguably stands for all of the humanities and social sciences. The discipline doesn’t seem very rigorous. Professors and students recite quotations to each other and solemnly contemplate photos of atrocities (the massacre at My Lai, the Nazi death camps). They talk about evil and determinism and free will. These are important topics, but I failed to detect much cogency in the discussions.

And yet this is an “ideas” movie. The main idea is downright traditional. It comes from theology, and it’s voiced by a vampire (Annabella Sciorra).

R.C. Sproul said we’re not sinners because we sin, but we sin because we are sinners. In more accessible terms, we’re not evil because of the evil we do, but we do evil because we are evil. Yeah. Now, what choices do such people have? It’s not like we have any options.

I never thought I’d hear R.C. Sproul invoked in a vampire movie, but what do you know, the director is Abel Ferrara, who is old-school and eclectic; he grew up Catholic and, despite having converted to Buddhism, appears to still trouble himself over original sin and heaven and hell. He also has used heroin and known people who were destroyed by that drug. In this movie, sinfulness is likened to bloodlust, which is likened to a craving for heroin.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The vampire pulls Kathleen into a dark alley and gives her a choice. Tell me to go away, the vampire says. Tell me like you mean it.

Kathleen just says, Please.

The vampire bites her.

Has the vampire passed the craving on to Kathleen, or did Kathleen already have it? Arguably, what the vampire passes on is awareness of the craving, not the craving itself.

In the rest of the movie, Kathleen goes around biting people. She presents them with the same choice that she was presented with. When a person isn’t prepared to tell her to go away, she turns him or her into a vampire; she gives the person an education.

The person already has the craving, deep down.

One of her university classmates, as yet unbitten, reads philosophy while eating a hamburger. Kathleen is repulsed. The two activities shouldn’t be paired. The point of philosophizing is to enable one to resist one’s cravings. Philosophizing turns out to be a pitifully ineffective pursuit.

Kathleen becomes disenchanted with her studies.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Kathleen apprentices herself to a guru, an older vampire played by Christopher Walken (of course) who claims to have learned to “manage” his bloodlust.

You know how long I’ve been fasting? Forty years. The last time I shot up, I had a dozen and a half in one night. They fall like flies before the hunger, don’t they? You can never get enough, can you? But you learn to control it. You learn, like the Tibetans, to survive on a little.

It’s hot air. Before long, the creep is belittling Kathleen and sucking out her blood, leaving her more despairing and famished than ever.

Of course Christopher Walken would be the movie’s closest thing to Satan.

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Everyone was guilty of what happened at My Lai, Kathleen initially argues (this is in an early scene, before she is bitten). The man who was punished for the atrocity was a scapegoat. Everyone should be forced to come to terms with the guilt.

She means that the guilt is collective – everyone contributed to some injustice that brought about the My Lai atrocity. After she is bitten, a more horrific truth is made evident to her: atrocities are committed because of an evil already in the perpetrator, an evil that lives in each person, that can only be curbed by death to the self, perhaps only by literal death. But death isn’t a choice for vampires, who are addicted, agonizingly, to sucking up life, to prolonging deathlessness.

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I checked out a library book by two local philosophers: The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. It’s a self-help book. Here is how philosophy can help you to live well.

It’s an easy book to read, but I’ve had it for weeks and now I’m out of renewals. I’m having trouble building up sufficient enthusiasm to get through it. Something about the book feels too pat.

Not having read much of it, I don’t want to criticize it; but after I saw The Addiction, I looked up terms like original sin, sin, and salvation in the index. Nada.

Odd, because I know that at least one of the co-authors is a Christian.

Here’s what I think Ferrara would say about this book.

Go ahead. Use philosophy. Question. Make a life-plan. Cultivate good dispositions in yourself.

You’ll still be addicted to sin.

The cravings will still rack you. You’ll still give in to them.

You still won’t be able to withstand the light. You’ll still flinch away from mirrors.

C.S. Lewis writes about an addict in The Great Divorce. The addict is powerless to rid himself of his addiction, which is like a fiendish companion that perches upon his shoulder. An angel offers to help the addict. Shall I kill it? he asks. The addict needs his addiction killed, not managed, not held in check by virtues methodically cultivated. And if the addiction is inseparable from the addict’s life, the addict needs to die. But that needn’t be the end. Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Some ex-residences

Forgive me for raking up old history, some of which I’ve surely blogged about before, but I have little else to discuss tonight. I must be getting on in years because I’m keen to list buildings I’ve lived in that have been torn down.

(1, 2) Mission houses, Las Palmas, Esmeraldas, Ecuador.

My boyhood home was the eastern house. As a baby, I briefly lived in the western house.

(3) Cottage on the property of Lakeview Church, Zion, Illinois.

My family lived in Zion from 1990 to 1991 (my third-grade year).

(4) Missionary Church Dorm, Quito, Ecuador.

My home during boarding-school years.

If I were asked to choose one former residence to live in forever, this would be it. My own Hogwarts.

It was torn down a few weeks ago.

(5) The Music Machine, River Park, South Bend, Indiana.

I lived in the tiny apartment above the office of the Music Machine, a DJ-ing business. I moved in when I married Karin. Less than a year later, the city forced us out and built a fire station on the land.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I used Google Maps to try to find the house in Seattle’s U-District in which I rented a room for four months, in 2004 and 2005.

Ultimately, I can’t be sure of the address. It was a grungy building surrounded by gaudy fraternity houses. I leeched wireless Internet from one of those fraternities; the network was called “Sex Gods.” So, if I’m ever back in that neighborhood, I’ll know how to pinpoint my old location.

I did find this lovely 2013 article in the University of Washington’s student newspaper about my landlady, who rented to ex-cons, sex offenders, and others who needed a break. I was in neither of the first two categories, but she rented to me after she called my friends and they confirmed that I didn’t drink alcohol. (And it was good that she rented to me, because it was about the only room in Seattle I could have afforded.)

I lent her my mom’s parents’ missionary memoirs, and she read them.

That year and the next, when I moved back and forth across the continent, alone, to pursue fruitless but necessary studies, the Lord put me in touch with some remarkable people.

R.I.P. Harry Frankfurt; July’s poem

The outstanding philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt has died. He’s one of just a few philosophers of my lifetime whom I would unreservedly recommend to the general reader.

Here are his two most important books – collections of short- and medium-length essays. “Jewel-like,” these pieces often are said to be.

• The Importance of What We Care About (which includes his most famous work, “On Bullshit”; my favorite piece in this collection is “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”)
• Necessity, Volition, and Love (my favorite chapter of which is “Equality and Self-Respect”)

I spent a lot of time reading and discussing these books during my fifth semester of grad school.

See also this book about Frankfurt. But read the two other books first!

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This month’s poem is “The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

To Christ our Lord

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

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.

An ambitious plan

Robert Paul Wolff made a list of twenty-five philosophical books for grad students to read. Since I’m something of an eternal first-year grad student, I intend to get through all of these books – including those I’ve already read – and twenty-five more because, as Wolff acknowledges, the list includes too little from the Middle Ages and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; besides, I want to tackle a few “non-essentials” like Butler’s Analogy of Religion (recently reissued).

Having begun with Plato’s shorter dialogs, I’m now breezing through Robin Waterfield’s Oxford World’s Classics translation of the Republic. Why isn’t this version assigned more often? It’s cheap, it’s helpfully annotated, and it’s got the smoothest and most propulsive prose of any English Republic I’ve looked at. Yet I don’t remember my grad school teachers or classmates reading it. (I do see that one teacher has endorsed Waterfield’s new translation of Marcus Aurelius.)

Two quirks of this Republic. (1) As a reviewer points out, Waterfield writes “morality” instead of “justice” for dikaiosyne, as well as “type” instead of “form” or “idea” for idea/eidos. I am not put off. I can juggle a few conspicuous word changes. These don’t feel as strange as when my beloved Good News Translation of the Bible says “Covenant Box” instead of “Ark” or “Sudanese” instead of “Ethiopian.” (2) Traditionally, the Republic is divided rather arbitrarily into ten “books”; Waterfield divides it thematically into fourteen “chapters.” For an amateur reader, this change is welcome. For a long time now, my aim has been to read at least one philosophical article or chapter each day. It’s harder than you’d think. So, the shorter the chapters are, the better.

I wonder if the general neglect of Waterfield is due to ignoble prejudices. He is self-employed. He has written shameless potboilers – for children. At this stage of my life, these things only endear an author to me.

Two R.I.P.s; October’s reading; my children

Two deaths: (1) the wonderful actor Robbie Coltrane; and, in May, (2) the legal, political, and moral philosopher Joseph Raz, whose important but tough-going oeuvre is now helpfully summarized at pp. 148–155 of this year’s Balliol College Annual Record. (Hat tip: Leiter. Included in the piece: an explanation of how the name “Raz” came to be.) I spent most of one semester of graduate school slogging through The Morality of Freedom. It would’ve been nice to have had this memorial essay to start off with.

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I’d intended, this horror season, to try out The Monk by Matthew Lewis; instead, I’m reading Dracula. I’d put it off for a long time. Now, I can report that, unlike Dorian Gray and Jekyll and Hyde, it’s pretty gripping. There’s genuine horror when Count Dracula is on the scene; there’s a lot of (vaguely troubling) hilarity when he’s absent. Karin was the impetus for this reading. She and her friend Nora have been keeping up with the Daily Dracula, a schedule based upon the dates of the letters and diary entries that make up the novel. Karin and Nora began reading in May and have been advancing at a snail’s pace; I’ll finish reading before they will. The story concludes in November.

I learned this amusing tidbit about Stoker:

In August 1894, at the end of a month-long stay to research his embryonic novel, Bram Stoker wrote in the visitors’ book at the Kilmarnock Arms on the Aberdeenshire coast that he had been “delighted with everything and everybody” and hoped to return soon. …

The feeling was not entirely mutual. Stoker, a genial Irishman usually known for his cheeriness, was experimenting with what would become known as “method acting” to get under the skin of his new character, one Count Dracula. … The author’s links with the London theatre inspired Stoker to try inhabiting his character in a different way.

According to his wife, Florence, everyone – including the hotel staff, and the locals – was frightened of him. He “seemed to get obsessed by the spirit of the thing,” she later said. He “would sit for hours, like a great bat, perched on the rocks of the shore, or wander alone up and down the sand hills thinking it all out.”

I got Karin to agree to watch Herzog’s Nosferatu when we have finished reading Dracula. I saw it many years ago. From what I can recall of it, it’s pretty faithful to the book.

I also am going to read The Island of Doctor Moreau.

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“Hi, there!” – Daniel’s first words? He seemed to repeat them to me immediately after I said them to him. (I don’t count Da, da, da, da, da – typical infantile babble.)

He crawls now, and he can pull himself up onto his feet and stand against the furniture. He also tries to steal Samuel’s food, although he has trouble eating it with his two teeth. Samuel also has trouble eating his food, due to his intense stubbornness.

Exotica

Bless Spotify, it helps me to find relics I never would have sought out on my own. It leads me from one style of old music to another style of old music.

These last weeks, I’ve been subjecting the household to heavy doses of mid-century exotica.

Yesterday’s find was Yma Sumac’s “Chuncho.” It caught my attention when I was several hours into Ritual of the Savage Album Radio.

This music is best listened to very, very late at night.

Much cover art in this genre is, shall we say, insensitive, in the manner of the Peter Pan song “What Makes the Red Man Red?”; but the music is without words. How un-PC is it to listen?

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“Where are you going for your holiday?” asked one of my grad school professors one summer.

“I’m going home, to Ecuador,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said. “I heard that you were from somewhere, er, exotic.”

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The review of this book stirs up other memories. Sixteen years ago, I took the author’s seminar on the topic (ancient epistemology). I read some of these chapters, along with related primary and secondary sources.

The sessions were grueling for this Greekless first-year student. Much time was spent staring at Greek words on the board and sometimes listening to, sometimes tuning out discussions of how to translate these words. (The classicists surely benefited more than did the philosophers who were taking the course to satisfy their distribution requirement.)

The procedure was necessary for covering the topic, and it was salutory for me to see it covered in this way. But I wish the professor had begun with a bald statement of her distinctive (“well-known”) interpretive approach and its problems, roughly what the review’s first paragraphs provide.

Graduate study is hard. There are ways to make it easier.

Or maybe the professor did give a bald statement of her approach, and I just don’t remember it or it went over my head. That’s certainly possible.

I remember our director of graduate studies – an epistemologist – telling me that the course would be easy because “it’s all just epistemology.” Yes, it’s all just epistemology, but that’s little comfort when it’s so complicated to maintain that ancient and 21st-century writers are trying to answer the same questions.

A visit to Mexico; Easter; body-text fonts, pt. 2: Trump Mediaeval

Samuel asked to do an Easter egg hunt. We never taught him this custom. He must have learned it from the TV.

Karin bought the candy and plastic eggs. Her dad and his girlfriend Carol had Samuel over on Saturday to do the hunt. They kept him until Easter morning.

At home, it was very quiet, very peaceful.

Karin & I took Daniel out to a Mexican restaurant that we hadn’t tried. The other diners all knew each other. They also knew the prices, which weren’t written on the menu. I felt sorry to have to ask what the food cost, but it was good that I did: some of the meals weren’t cheap.

We watched a mariachi concert on the huge TV. The singer rode around the arena upon a dancing horse.

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The next day, quite a few people were in church for the Easter service. Three were baptized in a kiddie pool. Then we went to the city of Goshen so that Daniel could meet that branch of Karin’s family. Samuel was a great hit with his second cousins, girls aged eight to fifteen.

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And now, this month’s font, which is Trump Mediaeval.

(Samuel has the qualities of Matilda and the others in the Wormwood family. He is a great reader of books, but he also watches plenty of TV.)

I considered typesetting my dissertation with this font because (a) I was writing about political philosophy, and (b) at the time, Trump was the POTUS. But I chose a different font instead.

An Ithacan

I enjoyed reading this interview of the philosopher John Doris, who grew up in Ithaca, earned his B.A. at Cornell, and returned to work there not long ago (he previously worked at UC Santa Cruz and Washington University in St. Louis). I’ve known just a few Cornellians who grew up in Ithaca, but that hasn’t stopped me from forming an idea of the “native” worldview. Doris’s outlook matches it pretty neatly. Nature: yay! Science: yay! Religion: it’s OK, especially if it encourages personal decency, but it’s not really “for me.” Quasi-mystical ritual: now, this is crucial (Doris’s ritual is martial arts). Psychotherapy: crucial. Society: lots to be hopeful about (those frightening WMDs, though!). Leisure time: best spent hiking on nature trails. Or cooking.

When I lived in Ithaca, my nerves were always strung tight. Now I realize that compared to other meritocratic hubs, Cornell is an oasis of calm. And, I daresay, of goodness.

(This comes across in Doris’s interview when he compares his undergraduate years with his Ph.D. studies at the University of Michigan.)

My own early life was not so different from Doris’s. I had a lot of time to read what I wanted, in a subculture that was spatially removed from the mainstream. And I played sports and was surrounded by lovely scenery.

Mishawaka’s springtime weather has been delightful, and I can’t help but think of Quito. Yesterday, watching Samuel play with twigs on the lawn, I remembered how I used to do the same upon comfortable grass, on a campus where, eventually, I would go to school.

That place, also, was vast and quiet and walled in.

“But can he do the job?”

Were I to become a full-time member of a philosophy department with at least some undergraduates under my care, I’d try to establish a one- or two-credit “professional development” seminar to make sure that those considering grad school could make an informed choice.

Yes, it would have to be a course. A couple of informal sessions wouldn’t suffice. The content ought to be repeated several times, in readings, lectures, and class discussions – and with a megaphone. (Even then, there’d be a real danger that the undergraduates wouldn’t listen carefully enough.)

I’d probably assign this book by the philosopher Jason Brennan. It gives lots of useful, blunt, goal-oriented advice. It tells which parts of one’s soul one would have to sell to get an academic job after grad school. (The part that loves to teach, for instance.) Here is an interview in which Brennan mentions some of the book’s highlights.

Another book, by an ex-professor of anthropology, Karen Kelsky, is also worth looking at, but it’s a brutal downer and not always helpful. One senses that Kelsky is writing with cruel glee, grinding people down with minutae about what to do and not do. Then again, who am I to say? I’m on the outside looking in. Perhaps those tiny details do matter in the job market. My impression, though, is that many of them do not matter. For example, I’ve looked at lots of CVs of successful, recent job seekers, and plenty of them run afoul of Kelsky’s very detailed rules for how to write a CV. But then, maybe that level of detail is dictated by her audience. Maybe a lot of job seekers are desperate enough to want to be told where to dot their i’s and cross their t’s.

What I’d definitely assign is this short address by the philosopher David McNaughton. Brennan and Kelsky assume that the goal is to get the job. McNaughton considers the more important question (raised repeatedly by Dan Hedaya in Joe Versus the Volcano):

I KNOW HE CAN GET THE JOB, BUT CAN HE DO THE JOB?

Or, rather, can the job seeker do the job well; that is, can the careerist philosopher write anything worth reading? On McNaughton’s view, professionalization is stunting, and the profession weeds out lots of potentially valuable contributors.

McNaughton is very down on how academic philosophy is done. Brennan thinks it’s much more workable. Who is more trustworthy? I’ve read around in several of Brennan’s books; I like him, though I tend to disagree with him; but he often sounds like he’s on an ideological mission. I’ve read around in several of McNaughton’s books, too, and encountered moments of disinterested curiosity, and even profundity; and when McNaughton isn’t being profound, he’s at least rubbing shoulders with and expounding authors who are profound. Besides, I’ve always been inclined to agree more with McNaughton’s professional priorities, anyway.

This isn’t to say that I agree with everything McNaughton says. He disparages Michael Dummett’s prose style, and I actually quite enjoy reading Dummett.