TO THE POOR SOUL WHO CAME TO MY BLOG VIA THE GOOGLE SEARCH 'HOW TO FIX HETEROSKEDASTICITY':

Sorry, friend. I'm not sure I understood how to do it even when I was taking statistics.

DISPATCHES FROM PAPER-WRITING: (or: I am so not getting to sleep until 5:00am tonight)

A number of my friends and colleagues are now putting together their dissertation prospectuses. As I defended in May, I have semi-accidentally become the person who is turned to occasionally for advice. When frustration is expressed to me that they're not sure what they're doing, or how to frame their question, or what order to put their chapters in,* I generally remind them that this is not surprising: "None of us has ever written a book before, so it's not really strange that we don't already know how to do it."

This is the biggest frustration in this phase of grad school: I no longer write term papers, I write conference papers. Thus I have to adopt the methodological and argumentative rules of political theory--a considerably harder task when it's your professional reputation on the line--or, more correctly, when you're attempting to create any kind of professional reputation whatsoever--rather than just a grade. As easy as it was when I was a whippersnap to criticize someone else's faulty method or reading, doing it well is a difficult task. Everything is cultivating the right habits and practices--but you don't know which are the right ones until after you've succeeded or failed.**

One day, I know this will not matter: writing papers and books will be old hat, and I will wonder how it was that I could ever not just sit down and do it.*** But for now, it's read, and try to put together the argument, and get mad because the parts don't fit. And read more, and try and put the argument together another way. And read more, and finally just start writing to have something--anything--even half-formed notes to myself about what I want to eventually write. And read. And write. And read. And write.

And then sometimes, you chase your pots of tea with pots of coffee and keep this up for several hours, and all of a sudden the pieces all start fitting together, and it's clear how you frame your argument, and move from one section to the next, and you can see it and talk about it in a way that might not confuse anyone you tried to explain it to. We call these 'good days.'


* 'or, or, or, or,' as Jim Skillen of the Center for Public Justice said on Friday evening, a pretty good verbal tic I may have to borrow
** I learned more about how to frame a paper attending panels at McGill than I did from several years of reading political theory. There's nothing so useful as the 'oh, that's good, I should do that' moment, especially when your response to your own paper is 'this isn't quite right, but I'm not entirely sure why.' Mature poets steal, after all.
*** In my more reasonable moments, I don't expect this will be the case--if research was easy, we'd all be putting out books every year. But a fair amount of my experience is idiosyncratic to youth. Or so I hope.

My words must go elsewhere this evening*. I leave you with this:



*Exception: you're dead to me, A-Rod

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: I occasionally permit myself to think of something besides my dissertation, and to not feel guilty for reading something other than Grotius (there's a very boring novel to be written, if it hasn't been already, on the inner life of one who's dissertating). Last night was one of those evenings (I read Blaming in one go--once again, the right book at the right point of life--and entirely justifying the purchase of the Atlantic Monthly containing a write-up on Taylor), and today I indulged as well. Ah, Dante (from Paradiso XVII):

"Therefore my dear lady [Beatrice] said to me: 'Display
the flame of your desire, that it may
be seen well-stamped with your internal seal,
not that we need to know what you'd reveal,
but that you learn the way that would disclose
your thirst, and you be quenched by what we pour"

Desire and self-knowledge, but, most importatly, the superfluity of the exchange from Beatrice's perspective. They don't need to know--they already do. But Dante has to learn how to ask, how to make sense of his own experience in order to formulate the question correctly, and be able to understand what it means to get an answer.

He is preparing to ask about the intimations he has already received in the Commedia concerning his own fate. Cacciaguida's oracle is soon to come. But, of course, all these events have already passed in Dante the author's own life--his exile, his continual disappointment in those he believes can oppose the Popes and restore order to Italy. Freccero, playing off the interaction of Dante as author and Dante as character, writes:

"The essential thing about an oracular utterance is that it contains the truth without revealing it; only in retrospect, after the fact, can its truth be appreciated... The coming of Christ changed all of this, for Christians, by providing a point of closure, and ending of time within time, an Archimedean place to stand, from which the truth in life and in world history could be judged... This mode of structuring history according to the Christ event forms the basis of Dantesque revelation in the poem: to tell the story of one's own life in retrospect with confidence in the truth and the completeness of the story is somehow to be outside of, or beyond, one's own life. It is to undergo a kind of death and resurrection, the process of conversion, a recapitulation of the Christ event in the history of the individual soul."

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING:

"Another thing about the English, Martha noted; they close up; they suddenly want to go home, or want you to. She thought they must be the fastest givers-up in the world, remembered wars, but dismissed the sort of tenacity as coming from having had no choice."

-Elizabeth Taylor (the 20th cen. British novelist), Blaming

LINK: Jacob Levy had an interesting post a while back, on the lack of good conservative commentary on higher education, that I've been turning around in my mind ever since. As a conservative who's deeply invested in higher education, I doubt whether there can be any distinctively 'conservative' commentary that doesn't lend itself to the excesses Levy identifies, or others of a similar kind.

I bring this up because I ran across a post of Rod Dreher's on higher education and student debt. Dreher's post is fine, for the most part: the kid being profiled is mad he has to get a job once he's done with college. I don't have a problem with criticizing someone who takes on debt and feels insulted that he needs to pay it off eventually, and this kid sounds particularly annoying.

Rod describes his experience:

"The truth is, it would have been very easy for me to end up like Ken. My dad kept it from happening. I wanted to go to Georgetown for my undergraduate education, but my father said he would not permit me to assume so much debt for an undergraduate degree. I thought he was unfair, blinkered, ill-informed, you name it ... but he left me no choice other than to apply to LSU and hope for a scholarship. I did get a scholarship, and thanks to that, and to some help from my folks, I graduated debt-free. I wanted to get degrees in political science and philosophy (which I ended up minoring in), but realized early on that they would qualify me only for graduate school or law school, neither of which I was interested in. So I found a major that would enable me to put my interest in both to some practical use."

And again, no real problem here: maybe Georgetown would have been horrendously expensive, and Dreher, utilizing his journalistic talents, has done quite well for himself. He didn't want to have to go to grad school, and so didn't put himself in the position where those would've been his options (I will gently suggest that a degree in government from Georgetown might have given him more career options that the ones he lists, however, with no disrespect meant to LSU as an institution).

But this leads to a very odd comments section, where a few people express the belief that a liberal arts education may just be a waste of time. E.g.:

"Spoken like a true acamdemic, teaching 4 days a week, showing up late, leaving early, lots of vacation and sabbaticals, getting serious coin.Unless you go teach at a place like NYU, where the professors farm out the actual class work to grduate students, many of whom barely speak English.

Practically and pointedly, this is exactly this kind of advice that lead to problems this knave now has.Colleges for too long have lived in a dream world. And with the prices they charge, such advice amounts to criminal fraud. If you're going to keep making college ridiculously expensive, you ought to at least get students pointed in the right direction for their future.

And be honest with them. Nobody gets paid in thank notes and atta boys. You have to earn a living. Telling people a liberal arts degree is wonderful is simply not being honest. I would rather my sons join the military, go civil service or apprentice at a good union job like electrician or plumber than waste money on a liberal arts degree."

Now, I'm by no means convinced this is a majority position, and many of the other commenters point out that there's nothing wrong with philosophy or what-have-you. But it's been my experience that the idea of incurring debt to be educated at the best place you get accepted meets a surprising amount of resistance in the broader conservative world.

Conservative commentary from within the academy will look something like any other critique from within. I would guess that Levy and I probably differ on a number of questions of politics, but might have the same general concerns about the academy: isn't the tenure system completely arbitrary sometimes? Don't departmental politics and hiring ruin the careers of a lot of good, young scholars? Why can't we retain a strong place for the humanities instead of emphasizing pre-professional degrees?. I am fairly confident this is true, because you're committing not just to having a job, but making that job a pretty central part of your identity. So something distinctively conservative would have to come from outside. But if you have to begin that discussion by justifying liberal arts education, or that institutions like, say, Princeton, or Georgetown, or Duke contribute something to higher education that is unique, valuable, and hard to replace, it will be very difficult to generate much worthwhile commentary.

LINK: Alex Massie covers the virtues of non-policy debate. I am 100% on board:

"Mind you, the American approach has, I think, infested proper debating too. The days of the amateur are long gone. In the good old days - by which I mean the period up to and including 1997 - a fellow could turn up and rely on little more than whatever he held in his cranium supplemented by a cursory glance at that day's newspaper. If you were really keen you might consult an old copy of The Economist found tucked beneath one of the Conversation Room sofas. Preparation was for people who, frankly, weren't very good at debating..."

The people who would devote large amounts of time to debate preparation always confused me. American debate (as I experienced it in high school) was about spectacle: wear your fanciest suit, carry a couple of tubs on rollers (like airport carry-ons) which are filled with your 'evidence,' and absolutely, absolutely talk as fast as humanly possible*--the judge can't mark you down if he doesn't know what you're saying, right?

By way of contrast, I was granted a dispensation my senior year, which made me the only person on the team not required to do any research (a wise decision on the part of my debate coach, as I wouldn't have done research even if she had made me). I refused to follow the conventional argumentative style--if the burden of proof falls on the Affs, why should I bother constructing my own argument when I can just point out the flaws in theirs? My particular shtick was to enter the room with all my materials in a mess, and spend the time before the debate began as though I was frantically looking for something and I just couldn't find it. Went 7-1 that year. Good times.



*I have a distinct memory of going to the state-level debate finals my sophomore year of high school, and having to surpress the desire to bust out laughing everytime someone opened their mouth.

MUST WORK IN: At some point in my writing, from A.O. Scott:

"...the perfect-storm mother of all clichés..."

LINK: Via a friend, I came across a good post at Patum Peperium on Joan of Arc*, of interest to me mostly because it covers some of the history of Dijon. I have no specific memory of the Eglise St. Michel, which is surprising, since I spent four days hoofing it around the city center.

Then again, I was in Dijon to soak up the work of Claus Sluter, which must be seen to be believed.** The Well of Moses may look like just another piece of vaguely Baroque sculpture, but it proceeds the Baroque by 200 years or so. European painting had already begun to make the leap into truly representational art (I would be a poor Dantean if I didn't recognize the advances of Cimabue and Giotto), of course, but this is something else entirely--not a representation of the thing, but an attempt at the thing itself.


*No saints, please, we're Protestant

**sadly, there's no good detail I can find of the mourners at the bottom of Philip the Bold's tomb--the time involved to make all of those must have been incredible

QUESTION:

I'd like to make fun of Michigan State after reading that two of their staters were arraigned for felony robbery, but I have no idea if this is the sort of thing that gets regularly overlooked in college football (i.e., I know there have been some disciplinary issues with Michigan in the past year or so, but I don't remember if any of them ever got this far). Anyone? Chris?

RAINY DAY WOMEN #12 & 35:

Pleasantly gloomy and cool (it's almost like it's fall...), but no rain so far today. This is slightly less encouraging. Now people, no longer quite so convinced it'll only rain once every six weeks, are more concerned about the summer (and the smart ones are making plans to be elsewhere).

I REALIZED THAT WITH KID A: Peter Suderman reviews the new Radiohead:

"In other words, Radiohead has managed to make the world’s best elevator muzak album, at once brilliant and slightly boring."

Fact.

LINK: Via Uncle Grambo (2004 much?), a new Verve track.

CROOKED RAIN, CROOKED RAIN: It's rained on and off all day today, and will hopefully continue. The ten-day forcast is encouraging. We're not, by any means, out of the woods--biblical deluge still desired--but some hope doesn't appear entirely insane at the moment.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: Plugging away at the paper, I came across the following in Grotius (De jure belli I.4.VII, Tuck's edition):

"I can easily apprehend that, the more considerable a Thing is which runs the Risk of perishing, the more Equity requires that the Words of the Law be restrained, to authorise the Care of preserving such a Thing. But I dare not condemn indifferently all private Persons, or a small Part of the People, who finding themselves reduced to the last extremity, have made use of the only Remedy left them, in such a Manner as they have not neglected in the mean Time to take care, as far as they were able, of the publick Good."

There's some interesting and complicated jurisprudence going on here and elsewhere in Grotius--and the question of how law ought to affect political action. The words of the law have to be interpreted with other background considerations, which may trump a strict interpretation. But elsewhere he suggests that exceptions don't qualify as exceptions to a general rule (e.g. I.4.IV). The quick move would say Grotius simply contradicts himself, but if I've learned anything in my Grotius study, it's that if it appears to be a contradiction, you're not reading carefully enough.

It's a bit afield from my current project, but I think it's be interesting to try and situate Grotius in the later 17th century's debate between common law and positivist legal approaches in England (and elsewhere). Coke, Hale, Grotius and Hobbes (and lots of others, too, but as Tuck establishes, Grotius is important for a lot of intellectual trends in England at that time) are all attempting the same general task, and one that's never really been resolved to satisfaction. And trying to bring some clarity to the understanding of international law would also be helpful, as the continuing debate over humanitarian intervention shows.

PRAY FOR RAIN: No, really. Durham has, depending on who you believe, somewhere between 70-90 days of water left. Some people say it's closer to six months, which is possible. It's rained twice, I think, since the beginning of September. It needs to rain a lot, and soon--because if there's not a crisis this winter, there'll be one this summer.

I don't, as a general rule, do the disaster-fetishization thing: I'm not so worried about global warming or peak oil, real though those phenomena may be; my understanding of the probabilistic outcomes for each is 'it's complicated.' I'll hold off another month on making an analogy to The Plague. It looks like it might rain three days this week, and the temperature is finally supposed to drop. But five minutes thinking about the logistics of the very near future: not pleasant.

WELL YES: Decided to take a day off (this resolution should last for another hour or so), and am currently flipping between Vertigo and the Oklahoma-Iowa State game--a good distillation of my personality. Unrelatedly, Fire Joe Morgan does their thing on Joe Torre:

"And let's take a step back. Again, we're all sad. Torre is leaving. Stand-up guy. Might be a bad decision for the club. But we're talking about a situation where you're feeling misty-eyed for a guy who's turning down a five million dollar base salary because it is a fucking insult to him. Five million dollars. And he's not hitting 97-mph Josh Beckett fastballs or spearing Curtis Granderson laser beams. He's not doing something that only a select few hundred human beings have the physical and mental capacity to do. He's choosing what order to write down names in a lineup (sometimes poorly). He's deciding when to put a relief pitcher in a game (often incorrectly).

Managing is easier than playing."

LINK:

I had a brief exchange a few days ago on facebook with one of my Red Sox-loving friends about the importance of schadenfreude for sports fandom.

So I have to say that this is pretty well done.

HOME IS WHERE THE, ER, SOMETHING IS:

I've been following the ongoing debate about whether the loss of a tie to the place of one's birth is a bad thing, beginning with Patrick Deneen's observation that conservatives interested in politics tend to abandon their communities for D.C., where the power is, through Rod Dreher once, and Rod again.

Now, my conservatism and experience in academia has taught me to be sceptical of most any historical claim, especially when the claim is that we're facing something we haven't seen before. So when Rod says, in the latter post:

"...there have always been with us people who have left their small towns for the big city, or moved to other small towns to make their living, of necessity. But it's my sense that only after the Second World War, and the prosperity and dynamism that arose from it, did the loyalty to place that was once part of one's character begin to be supplanted by loyalty to one's desires. Again, I don't think this is always a bad thing, but I think we should realize that it is a very new thing in human culture, and that we haven't really begun to understand the cultural and political ramifications of this rootlessness."

...the counterpoints come immediately to mind. French 18th century literature is overrun by this plot (off the top of my head: Lost Illusions, Pere Goriot, The Red and the Black, Sentimental Education). And then there's Tocqueville, who, in the Ancien Regime, points to the expansion of Paris as another underlying cause of the French Revolution; similar stories can be told about the rise of London or Manchester, or any number of other industrial centers.

Well, then maybe the claim is that the post-World War II experience represented something fundamentally new in American experience? The history appears difficult on both ends: the early part of last century featured, again, the rise of cities due to immigration and industrialization, in addition to a substantial south-to-north migration (which is why there was a road called the Dixie Highway about an hour south of where I grew up in the middle of Michigan). And it would be difficult (though not impossible) to reconcile the early American expansionist self-conception with a rootedness to place (though one could easily demographically establish that those who did go west were the exception, not the rule).

Allow me to put on my Rawls hat for a moment. I am also with Matt Frost on the following:

"Settling down, though, is a good thing in and of itself. Any genuine conservative should foster an ethos of rooted affinity for home, community, and other settled arrangements. The arbitrary primacy of birthplace, however, is crunchy cant, and those of us who want to see more local, voluntary efforts at creating the Good Life ought to privilege deliberate and reasoned choices of hometown over sticking with one’s childhood home."

Which is to say: there are a lot of perfectly good reasons to love the place you were born and raised (assuming they are the same place). But all places are not equally good, and some times and locations will be implicated in practices no one should find worthy of reverence or emulation. The trick requires developing the judgment to see those distinctions.

(Incidentally, I think Deneen is right, in his post, that the defining feature of Washington is the desire to accumulate power, and that this is just as true for 'conservatives' as 'liberals.' But again, not surprising--Lucien in Lost Illusions rejects his intellectual-revolutionary friends precisely because he thinks they're never going to get anything done. Part of the Hamiltonian project is just to realize that there are always ambitious people out there who pose a threat, and to design a constitutional structure that can negate that ambition as much as possible. I'm not fond of the way policy moves these days, but I'm also not convinced that there is any alternative political structure which 1. can survive in its intended form for long, given the realities of ambition and 2. produce demonstrably better outcomes enough of the time. I'm prepared to be wrong about that one, though)

YOUR (NOT QUITE WEEKLY) MICHIGAN FOOTBALL UPDATE:

Brian says what needs to be said.

Also, watching the game with the alumni association people (try to survive the cognitive dissonance: faux Irish pub(in name only)/sportsbar/Big 10 bar in Morrisville, NC) was, quite possibly, the most fun I've had with a Michigan game since the Ohio State in 2003. Also, hot wings, nachos, and ridiculous amounts of domestic beer is a recipe for a sublime afternoon--how I ever had pizza for dinner that night I'll never be able to guess. I will definitely be going back.

OVERHEARD IN THE LIBRARY CAFE: Someone just used the phrase "temporal arbitrage" in context. Academia is awesome.

Incidentally, I'm batting 1-for-3 on students showing up to their meetings this afternoon. Two more to go!

UPDATE: 2-for-4!

QUOTE: Today's pearl of wisdom comes via Alex Massie, in the course of praising Silent Cal:

"If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you."

So very true. I have long been of the opinion Keirkegaard got it right in 'The Rotation of Crops' from Either/Or. Many people believe the way you deal with problems is by solving them; I can only find this entirely bewildering. Almost no problem is as bad as it seems when it first appears, and there is a real art to pausing just long enough to contemplate options (including the option of doing nothing). Most people don't think in terms of probabilities--a problem is not 'how bad things will be if worse comes to worse,' it's that times the chance the worse actually will come to worse. My math is a little fuzzy, but I'm fairly confident that means things are never quite so bad as they appear.

Closely related to this is a piece of advice I find myself giving to friends worried about what the future holds (with respect to jobs, funding, internships/fellowships): if things do go badly, there will be plenty of time to worry about it then--no need to get ahead of yourself.

FALL MIX, MK. I: Because I have to do something with my day besides tracking down every single use of 'rebellion' in Hugo Grotius' main works. Some things I've been listening to lately:

What, You Mean 83° on October 16th Isn't Normal?

1. "Glad Girls" -Guided By Voices
2. "Ain't That Enough" -Teenage Fanclub
3. "Last Post on the Bugle" -The Libertines
4. "Navy Nurse" -Fiery Furnaces
5. "Merry Happy" -Kate Nash
6. "Web" -Mew
7. "Excape" -Foreign Born
8. "When Jokers Attack" -The Brian Jonestown Massacre
9. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" -Cat Power
10. "Start Together" -Sleater-Kinney
11. "letter Never seNt" -R.E.M.
12. "Too Much Too Soon" -South
13. "Drink to Moving On" -Grand National
14. "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" -Rheostatics & Bourbon Tabernacle Choir
15. "Night Like a River" -Hem
16. "Hesitating Beauty" -Wilco
17. "Shady Lane/J Vs. S" -Pavement
18. "Music When the Lights Go Out" -The Libertines
19. "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" -Bob Dylan
20. "Find Our Way" -The Apples in Stereo

JOHNNY CASH, REVISITED: Whims being what they are, I listened to The Essential Johnny Cash on the way to school today; more specifically, the first disc, focusing on Cash's early career. As usual, I skipped about 70% of the tracks because, to be totally honest, they're not that good. "Orange Blossom Special" is a great song; "Ballad of a Teenage Queen" is not; "All Over Again" is respectable, but nothing special. The only period of his career represented that doesn't have notable mis-steps is the first set of collaborations with June Carter (not surprisingly). The highs are remarkable, but interspersed with so many songs of mediocre quality ("Ghost Riders in the Sky," anyone?), it has to affect one's final judgment a little.

This leads me to wonder: Cash appears to record without a lot of quality control over his career. Is there anyone else who has the same flaw? The potential candidates all seem to emerge from the 1950s:

Elvis: The gold standard of wasted talent, between the movies and the unfortunate 70s persona. But also has two periods of unmistakable genius, the first with Scotty Moore and Sun Records in the 50s, and the second after the '68 Comeback Special (oh, "Suspicious Minds," how I love you).

Chuck Berry (and a host of others: Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Little Richard): All had periods of initial creativity followed by long careers of writing no new material, or else music that is derivative of their previous efforts.

Other possibilities? U2? (Bold and daring in the 90s; now content to release variations on the exact same album) Anyone else?

I CAN SAFELY ANSWER THAT QUESTION 'NO': From a mailing the Alumni Association recently sent:

"Ever wonder what happened to your old roommate?"

YOUR (NOT QUITE WEEKLY) MICHIGAN FOOTBALL UPDATE:

The last two weeks haven't been pretty to watch (and by 'watch,' I mean 'listened to an internet radio feed of,' thank you Big 10 Network*), but given everything else that's gone on the last two weeks, I can safely say that winning ugly is a lot better than losing.

Also, I now want LSU to play Ohio State in the National Championship game, so Les Miles can establish that he totally owns the Buckeyes before he comes to Michigan.

Also also:

Becky: by the time that game ended me and Dan and Justin were all jumping up and down and yelling for Stanford
Me: heh
Me: I was too shocked to know what to think
Becky: it helped that the announcers called it "the biggest upset in college football this year"
Me: yeah
Me: which is obviously completely false
Me: but it's nice that they said it


*Next week will see a trip to lovely Morrisville, NC to watch at a bar with the Alumni Association. Woot.

A NOTE ON POLITICAL THEORY: Like most who first stumble into political theory, Iong assumed all the research part of my job really required was the reading of texts. Now, I haven't become a textualist apostate, but I've noticed that one of the common operating assumptions we have is generally wrong: the universal availability of texts. We have, near to hand (or in libraries), say, all of Augustine's works, or the complete works of Kant in German and English, with all the relevant commentaries. This makes for better interpretation of texts generally--more knowledge is always better--but there are some exceptions.

To wit, last week one of my friends asked me about a line from Rousseau:

Hobbes prétend que l'homme est naturellement intrépide, et ne cherche qu'à attaquer, et combattre. Un philosophe illustre pense au contraire, et Cumberland et Pufendorff l'assurent aussi, que rien n'est si timide que l'homme dans l'état de nature, et qu'il est toujours tremblant, et prêt à fuir au moindre bruit qui le frappe, au moindre mouvement qu'il aperçoit.

Specifically, whether the 'philosophe illustre' was Grotius. My initial response was no, because sociability, not timidity, is the foundational social fact (I also quibbled that there's no state of nature as such in De jure belli ac pacis).

On further reflection, I suspect I was wrong* (sorry, James), for a reason I began to elaborate at the time: 18th century French interpretations of Grotius are heavily influenced by the translations and scholarly work of the Pufendorfian Jean Barbeyrac. So far as I can tell, every edition of Grotius in French up through the revolution was either Barbeyrac's, or a slight variant on it. He is sometimes considered (by me, for instance) to be a very biased interpreter of texts--he reads Pufendorf and Hobbes back into Grotius**. Thus it may be that Rousseau's understanding of Grotius' text has been altered in a way that makes the actual text fit awkwardly with this interpretation, and Rousseau's move will look odd to the modern reader who knows that interpretation isn't correct.

This comes up as an issue quite frequently in Grotius scholarship--he's never been read very cleanly because almost every time he gets taken up, it's by people who have an interest in making the text perform certain roles, regardless of what it says. My general thought is that there are two projects here: one (my dissertation) attempting to do a decent textual analysis, the other trying to understand how we end up with a model that tends to become Grotius-v-Vattel, to the impoverishment of numerous innovations in international legal theory. I try to keep them separate, but things like the Rousseau passage above remind me they're not always so far apart as my analytic distinctions would like them to be.


*mostly because I have no idea who elese Rousseau might be referring to.

**indeed, I suspect Rousseau's dismissal of Hobbes and Grotius as variations on the same thing (in the Social Contract) is largely due to the influence of Barbeyrac.

OTHERS MAY DISAGREE: But I find the phrase, "well, in theory..." to be one of the more thrilling in the English language. Nothing better signals that we've left the realm of empirical thought and, well, that's where all the good stuff happens.

I DIDN'T PLAN THIS, BUT: On my ipod this afternoon, consecutively:

"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" -Cat Power
"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" -The Rolling Stones

The Cat Power version is better--it captures the despondency of the lyrics more effectively, the gender inversion puts an emphasis on the consecutive verse-pictures Jagger draws, and the total absence of the song title in the track is haunting: you wait for it, but it never comes.

That said, Cat Power's version is parasitic on the Rolling Stones'. Without a set of expectations about what the song ought to sound like, you can never have a sense those expectations have been violated. It may not be a lesser accomplishment because of that (I don't really believe rock and roll is art*), but the cover song as a genre is a great reminder of the distance between two versions of exactly the same thing.


*which is not to say it doesn't have redeeming aesthetic or emotional features, or to give it lesser status. Not worse; just different.