I will do a little travel-blogging since it may be of interest to some of my readers. Today we visited (after driving past yesterday) The Plaza in Kansas City:



It was really quite lovely: designed to look like Seville, Spain ("Sevilla," as my European/European-savvy friends here say), it made for a very nice afternoon and evening with good friends.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING! I am traveling all day tomorrow, and felt like I shouldn't end with the below, and so will leave this up top.

LINK: The ICC does its best to assure that I will never want to visit.

NITPICKING:

* Everyone loves an anecdote, right? Employed well, it gives clarity to concepts under discussion and helps bridge the gap between theoretical considerations and practice. Also, people love stories (well, most people), and a well-told anecdote can have a quite satisfying narrative arc. When they go badly, they're poorly-sourced 'friend-of-a-friend' stories that stoke fear (if you're lucky, with a racial tinge) that make the teller and the credulous listeners seem, well, ridiculous.

* I would disagree with Ivan Kenneally here, except I don't know where to begin. Quite literally, since the claims are sometimes quite broad ("...in fact, Locke specifically undermines any conception of nature that would inspire reverence for the evidence it gives us of God’s providence") and not sourced. So I could say, for example, that there's in fact an important religious/spiritual (dare I say Christian) element, that Locke does not consider nature to only furnish worthless materials, that he in fact considers both individuals and social obligations, etc, but without knowing exactly which passages furnish Kenneally's interpretation, it's hard to even begin disagreeing. I will say, generally, that the postmodern conservative movement is quite generous with interpretive charity unless the figure in question belongs to anything that might be considered 'modern,' and this lack of consistency is troubling to me. But then, I am allied with the modern (and support Taylor over MacIntyre, insomuch as the two can be opposed), so that's exactly the sort of thing I'd say.

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: From Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless:"

This is understandable: as long as appearance is not confronted with reality, it does not seem to be appearance. As long as living a lie is not confronted with living the truth, the perspective needed to expose its mendacity is lacking. As soon as the alternative appears, however, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all-inclusiveness. And at the same time, it is utterly unimportant how large a space this alternative occupies: its power does not consist in its physical attributes but in the light it casts on those pillars of the system and on its unstable foundations. After all, the greengrocer was a threat to the system not because of any physical or actual power he had, but because his action went beyond itself, because it illuminated its surroundings and, of course, because of the incalculable consequences of that illumination... if the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else.

[much skipped]

...You do not become a "dissident" just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of the state.

When I first read this essay for my exams, I wasn't very sympathetic to Havel, who was, I thought, too difficult on the greengrocer who puts up the sign in question, the one who is legitimately concerned about his family and their future: why look down on him for valuing the people who are closest to him? Re-reading for class, I find Havel's position more compelling: accepting the system as its given is to do, first, an act of violence to oneself, to require a separation of public and private, to accept oppression and domination as typical parts of the human condition. But it's also to do violence to those people who the less-bold greengrocer wants to help: one passes exactly this style of life onto them--they get university, but one where certain options are foreclosed, one gets certainty as long as the right things are said and done at the right times. What kind of life is that? And that first action, the refusal to put up the party-slogan sign, is an act of, if you will, straightening what is crooked, and is therefore natural and well-to-hand as an option: it can be real and authentic in a way other possibilities cannot be. That's also, I think, the force of the second passage: one acts in a perfectly natural and normal way, and one is made an enemy, rather than making oneself an enemy, because the system is established in such a way that, from the perspective of those who have power, it doesn't matter which of the two it actually is. One can see this in the way the Russian Revolution unwinds (I finished Darkness at Noon again today): it doesn't matter, from Stalin's perspective, whether or not Trotsky, Zinoviev, or anyone else actually opposed him or the revolution (and it particularly doesn't matter whether their criticisms, such as they had, were accurate or could have been helpful) did so purposefully, or accidentally, or from good intentions or bad: all merged into one.

SWAN SWAN H/ALL I HAVE TO DO IS DREAM: It's difficult, I think, to say much of anything about R.E.M. Rather, it's difficult for me to say anything about them: they are so completely formative of my ideas of what is cool that I lack the ability to see them any other way. Ironist and sincere; taking up politics and pushing it away (Michael Stipe has, or had, the gift of writing political songs so obscure that you wouldn't know it to listen to them (see "The Flowers of Guatemala"). If there must be political songs, they should be of this kind); emphasizing the value of the local and particular, especially the southern, though, as Marcus Gray's It Crawled From the South notes, none of the members of the band were actually born in the south (so one can appropriate or identify with traditions regardless of whether one was raised in them, though on the condition, I think, that one never quite forgets that one has chosen to do this). Thus this:



Which is bizarrely anachronistic: four guys playing acoustic instruments in a place that looks like it might've come from the post-Civil War era Stipe is evoking (and, nota bene, playing live: this is back when Michael Stipe didn't believe in lip-syncing, and so it's that rarest of things: a video of a performance).

Also, from the same movie, this, just because it's a great song.

LINK: I've been reading Norm Geras for a long time. As I've mentioned in the past, The Contract of Mutual Indifference played a large part in both my becoming a political theorist at all, and in becoming the kind of theorist that I am. His work is generous and broad-minded, even while he maintains his political commitments. All of this to say today's reflection on the limits of Karl Marx is yet another example of all these exemplary tendencies.

One of the great virtues of philosophers, in my experience, is their recognition of the value of consistency: if they come to an argument which their political commitments would lead them to adopt, but their philosophical commitments suggest another position is better, they recognize the priority of their philosophical commitments and re-orient their politics. This is, of course, a very modern* approach to one's beliefs, but I think it has great virtue.


*One might also want to say 'and liberal,' but this position is available to those of a conservative disposition, depending on their definition of tradition.

LINK: Carrie Brownstein writes about Wii Music.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: From the Michigan football blogosphere overlord:

Chronologically, the novel ended with the character that was a thinly disguised me (all fictional characters you write in your twenties are thinly disguised versions of people you know, and one of them is always you)...

and:

I have an imaginary speech by Rich Rodriguez or John Beilein in my head. In it, he says that everything everyone in the room came to Michigan for has been torn asunder. He says that everything that they were told before they signed a piece of paper is worthless. He says…

Nothing you were told about this place has come true. You came here and found a different coaching staff and a different team. A plainly deficient team. No one recognizes you. You run out in the same uniforms but what you do is unrecognizable to these people. This… what we have here is broken. The things we do do not work. The culture we have is dysfunctional. This program is a heap of ash.

You did not sign up for this. And you have every power and inclination to leave. Some of you will. Fine. No one will blame you. It's cold and people scorn you and there are so many of them.

Some of you will stay. And you will go insane. You will work, and you will work, and we will build something here from nothing. Because, make no mistake, this is nothing. You will build something out of this. If you're a senior next year and you teach some freshman something, you will build something. If you're a freshman and you refuse to quit on your stupid decision, you will build something.

What you build will be yours. Few in the great history of his university have had that opportunity. Everything came based on what came before. They were part of a great chain, now broken.

Those of you who stay will forge a new one, starting today. When we are done we will fix the last link to the broken chain, and break the first link, and tell those who come after us to live up to it.

IT BEGINS: I received my first bit of class-reunion email today. Yes, I did graduate from high school in 2000. All I can assume is that if 20 months (give or take) is appropriate lead-in time for a presidential election, 18 months or so should be just about right for a 10-year reunion.

LINK: I am grading and therefore no fun. I did find this, however, which I pass along for your amusement:

ON RORTY AND STALIN: I have been toying with the idea, developing ever-so-slowly, of suggesting Stalin as the perfect instantiation of Rorty's belief in redescription: a man so capable of changing the language and environment people function in that to even bring up the possibility of previous or future redescriptions is its own crime. Reading Trotsky's oppositional writings, one is struck by the constant return to the language of modern epistemology: one speaks of facts, looks to documents and the historical record to support one's assertions, etc. He is emphatic that was Stalin does is best described as lying--hence The Stalin School of Falsification.

I wonder if postmodernism isn't a kind of luxury, available to those for whom the basic terms of politics have already been settled (or appear settled). Perhaps it's the case that I reject it as a viable political move because I look to politics in places where irony is not an option, where to employ it would lead to disastrous consequences.* (And, of course, there's always the thought that ironic politics is not unlike pacifism: it gains some of the traction it has precisely because there are always enough people who aren't willing to see things that way--it is parasitic on those who reject it).

Also, a general question about the postmodern approach, which it seems to me has some plausibility (at least) in the realm of political discourse: how ought one handle legislative, bureaucratic decision-making, etc? Can one be ironic in the face of that?


*Rorty can make this move because he believes in some progress throughout history: I'd think conservatives would be wary of this position.

LINK: "Noted Post-Marxist Sociologist, Philosopher, and Cultural Critic Slavoj Zizek Welcomes You to the Gym"

ONE, TWO, THREE: Things I've read in the last day or so:

i. From Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, which I am re-reading to discuss in class tomorrow:

In reality, such Christians (even omitting men like Marina) perpetuate one of the greatest lies of all centuries. They renounce their faith but are ashamed to admit it. The contradiction between Christianity and Stalinist philosophy cannot be overcome. Christianity is based on a concept of individual merit and guilt; the New Faith, on historical merit and guilt. The Christian who rejects individual merit and guilt denies the work of Jesus, and the God he calls upon slowly transforms himself in History. If he admits that only individual merit and guilt exist, now can he gaze indifferently at the suffering of people whose only sin was that they blocked the path of "historical processes"? To lull his conscience he resorts to the thesis that a reactionary cannot be a good man.

ii. From Kierkegaard (as Anti-Climacus), The Sickness Unto Death:

And finitude's despair is just so. A man in this kind of despair can very well live on in temporality; indeed he can do so all the more easily, be to all appearances a human being, praised by others, honoured and esteemed, occupied with all the goals of temporal life. Yes, what we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one may so express it, pawn themselves to the world. They use their abilities, amass wealth, carry out worldly enterprises, make prudent calculations, etc., and perhaps are mentioned in history, but they are not themselves. In a spiritual sense they have no self, no self for whose sake they could venture everything, no self for God--however selfish they are otherwise.

iii. I have my doubts as to whether this one belongs, but I think it does. There's a question in Gatsby as to whether Nick has any judgments of his own, and this is the passage where it becomes clear he does, and he's had those judgments all along. It's the moment when he announces his individuality, that he is not of the group to which he has attached himself (not surprisingly, he realizes it in action, first, and his urge to pull away from Jordan, though he knows not quite why initially). It also seems to matter that he both criticizes and withholds judgment: there is the thing said and the thing left unsaid, from a motive of charity, perhaps. From The Great Gatsby:

We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around.
"They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch of them put together."
I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end...

LINK: John Holbo points to a excellent free sampler album being offered by Amazon (it may just be today, so act soon). One can never have too many funky-sounding things.

NYC: New York has its romance (or so I'm told--I don't see it). Re-reading Gatsby, specifically this part:

I began to like New York, the racr, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Aenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or dsapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Made me think of this. Interpol was big my senior year, and so, for reasons I believe I learned from T.S. Eliot (like nothing when it's new--wait until enough time has passed that you can judge it with perspective), I never bothered with them until this year. There's a great quality to their first album--it's all atmospherics, made out of pieces that build slowly but retain their balance (unlike, say, the Arcade Fire, who build slowly to bombast, every single time). The lyrics are mostly forgettable--or at least I try to forget them--but the meter of each line is notable: where most bands keep the lyric length tied to the musical phrase, Interpol occasionally stretch out out their phrases.

THE INTERNET IS A CRAZY PLACE: I am now facebook friends with the bar where I play trivia.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: From Trotsky's The Permanent Revolution:

Stalin's Problems of Leninism constitutes a codification of this ideological garbage, an official manual of narrow-mindedness, an anthology of enumerated banalities (I am doing my best to find the most moderate designations possible). Leninism by Zinoviev is... Zinovievist Leninism, and nothing more or less. Zinoviev acts almost on Luther's principle. But whereas Luther said, 'Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise.' Zinoviev says, 'Here I stand... but I can do otherwise, too.' To occupy oneself in either case with these theoretical products of epigonism is equally unbearable, with this difference: that in reading Zinoviev's Leninism one experiences the sensation of choking on loose cotton-wool, while Stalin's Problems evokes the sensation of finely-chopped bristles. These two books are, each in its own way, the image and crown of the epoch of ideological reaction.

NOT QUITE AN ALL-TIME BEST: Typo in a student paper, but close:

People cannot 'do evil that goof might come of it.'

The best, in case you were curious:

Procreation has been defined as fornification for the purpose of begotting a child.

QUERY: For the epistemologically inclined, from Poulos:

And Christopher Lasch has irrefutably demonstrated...

How does one irrefutably demonstrate anything in the postmodern world? On any correspondence theory, it would make sense: one has described the world as it is, or at least committed no mistakes in the description, and thus cannot be refuted. Also, it makes sense on a foundationalist approach: having set the moorings correctly, the argument cannot be shaken. But surely, on a postmodern view, we could just describe things another way? Or deconstruct the conditions under which Lasch is capable of making his claims appear tractable in the first place?

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: From Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, which I am preparing to teach starting Wednesday:

The old disease, thought Rubashov. Revolutionaries should not think through other people's minds.
Or, perhaps they should? Or even ought to?
How can one change the world if one identifies oneself with everybody?
How else can one change it?
He who understands and forgives--where would he find a motive to act?
Where would he not?
They will shoot me, thought Rubashov. My motives will be of no interest to them.

I read this first a couple years ago (when the parallel to the Crito which we will explore in class first occurred to me) and not again since--so I have been pleased to see there is as much to it as I remember. I am even worried that 50 pages a class might present more material than we can manage in a class session.

It's further my intention to pair each reading with some supplementary material. The first class will be a quick version of Russian history, starting with (as one must) Russia's failure in the Russo-Japanese War; then quickly through the 1905 revolution; then 1917, and the difference between left, right, and center Bolshevism; then Kronstadt and the Ban on Faction at the 10th Party Congress in 1921; then the succession fight after Lenin's death; the Kirov assassination, and then the Show Trials and the Great Terror. The second class will include the chapter on Ketman from Milosz' The Captive Mind. The third will deal with Havel's "The Power of the Powerless," the fourth some of Adam Michnik's writings. And we will cap the class off with Arendt from Eichmann in Jerusalem and Kafka from The Trial. I am looking forward to this.

YOUR PERIODIC MICHIGAN FOOTBALL UPDATE: Not given for quite some time because there was nothing worth talking about. Indeed, I dropped all but two of my Michigan football blogs because the bad news--peaking after the Penn State game--got to be a little too depressing. But we can enjoy, pleasantly, the surprise of a win, and against a putatively good team, at that.

Also, given my appreciation for schadenfreude in sports, I have enjoyed reading the threads re: Penn State and Notre Dame.

(Apologies, if needed, to Stearns, who I think reads my blog periodically. Nothing against Penn State, I promise. Well, a little something against Penn State. I must rely on something until next year.)

YOU MAKE LOVING FUN: It came up on the ipod a few days ago, and Rumors has been on my turntable since then, so here it is. For those unfamiliar with the story behind Rumors, you can find it (and a good discussion of the album's musical merits) in this old Stylus article. Rumors, so the joke in Wayne's World went, was practically issued to you if you lived in the suburbs during the 70s. And no surprise: as of Stylus' article (two years ago), it'd sold over 19 million copies, enough to make it one of the top-five selling albums of all time.

It used to be the case that if one followed indie music culture, one believed that the quality of a particular group or musician was inversely proportional to their popularity. I went many years, even at their 90s peak, without running into another person who listened to R.E.M. (by which I mean, knew something other than what was on the radio, though not many people knew what was on the radio, either). What was true for R.E.M. was true in spades for Patti Smith, Television, Wire, Sleater-Kinney: the uncomprehending stares I would get when I mentioned these bands were a sign that they were mine, in the way certain books were mine because I was the only one I'd met who had read them (The Brothers Karamazov) or chose to like them (The Great Gatsby, almost universally disliked by my American Literature class). The music that was popular in the late 90s--Britney, 'Nsync, Limp Bizkit--was either bad, or required a different definition of 'good' (so "I Want It That Way" is a great song--but not in the way "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" is a great song, and I am snob enough to say that the latter is better). So score one for the thesis that quality and popularity are mutually incompatible. The Fleetwood Mac of the mid-to-late 70s are the refutation of that thesis: a group that became popular precisely because they were good. The only comparable I can think of is "Hey Ya!"

"You Make Loving Fun" is a great song for some tricky technical reasons--the song's tone is established by the opening minor chord and blues rhythm, and Christine McVie coming in on an odd note (it's either the minor third or the flatted fifth; I'm too lazy to figure out which); adds one chord in the chorus and shifts the beat; and then drops the minor chord entirely for the outtro. Combine it with the lyrics, and you can almost see the singer working her way out of an emotional funk: not quite convinced of it at the beginning, speaking the words before they're fully believed, and then emerging in the end to some happiness and joy.

SPARKS FLY: And it's kind of awesome:

I suppose I could find a thing or three to agree with in Kmiec's longer list of ideas for how the party he abandoned could win back his vote. But frankly, I don't see the point. I understand that the pro-life position on abortion does not command majority support in the United States and that people of good will can disagree on the subject. And I have no doubt that the Republican Party can profit from greater dialogue between its pro-life and pro-choice constituents—and do a better job, as well, of addressing itself to both pro-lifers and pro-choicers who aren't already inside its tent. But I can't begin to fathom why the GOP should consider taking any advice whatsoever from a "pro-lifer" who has spent the past year serving as an increasingly embarrassing shill for the opposition party's objectively pro-abortion nominee.

SPEECHLESS: My panel for Midwest this year: "Kant You Always Get What You Want?"

RAINING ON YOUR PARADE or WOMEN ARE PEOPLE, TOO: I've seen a few times today the line that Obama's election proves 'anyone can be president.'

Yes, America has finally demonstrated that any man with at least one Ivy League degree can be president.

LINK: The results from the kids' mock election I helped with.

LINK: Don't worry, we're still kind of racist:

It’s truly amazing … historic, really … that we’ve managed to elect the first African-American president. But as a black man, Obama is going to be held to a higher standard during his first term, his first year, and his first 100 days than any other president in the history of this country. Don’t even think about a holding your plane on a runway so you can get an expensive haircut, Mr. President-elect. Don’t think you can get away with the mistakes that Clinton and Bush made during their first months in office. There are going to be a very outspoken few who will be waiting to pounce on his first mistake. And they will be loud. And they will bare their fangs every chance they get. It’s going to be a brutal first few months, days and weeks that are going to really test this man’s mettle.

SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE: We begin with the end of Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism:

But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only "message" which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man's freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est--"that a beginning be made, man was created" said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.

As someone who occasionally claims the label 'political scientist,' I long ago learned to be cynical about politics--and not merely cynical, but to see cynicism as the correct outcome of political observation. Voting is a technically futile exercise; the most important policies are made by bureaucrats whose power will never be noticed or limited; politicians only care about being re-elected, but are happy to sell you whatever snake oil necessary to do so (hence our good friends, Hope and Change); and one might worry about the politicians, but one should more more about the citizens and voters, most of whom couldn't explain key political distinctions to save their lives. Michigan taught me well that way.

As a conservative, this is a bad night: I have severely curtailed my tv and internet wanderings, but I know nothing good will come out of this election. My only real hope is that unified government produces the kind of massive policy breakthroughs it did in the 1992-1994 period: that is to say, none at all (or, more correctly, only those that are acceptable to the moderate end of my politics). However, I have been well aware this would be the outcome for some time, and have more than emotionally disconnected myself from the result. I also, for the record, think my fellow conservatives who believe this to be good for the Republican Party are, to be polite, not of sound mind. Liberals did not improve their electoral fortunes by going off and hammering out a New Unified Theory of Liberalism: they found better candidates and won elections. Not surprisingly, winning some elections begat the expectation of winning more: unity comes in politics with the desire to be on the bandwagon, not because the principles of all parties involved have finally been hashed out.

As an academic, my default modes are to irony and sarcasm, both marks of world-weary experience: I sometimes have difficulty taking the earnest person seriously--though I should note that my disagreement with the Postmodern Conservative movement comes in part from a dislike of how in love they are with their own irony or affectation. I sometimes wonder if there's anything at the core of it, or whether it's the political equivalent of a ball of cotton candy.

It happens that a friend of mine was coordinating a kids vote at one of the local precincts. Since I like this friend, I agreed to help out, and got to direct several kids on the voting process (while their sometimes very proud parents looked on). We were the first thing people saw when they came in, so I had to direct most of the people who came in to the actual polling station in the school's gym. One man in particular stood out: he came towards my table, and I pointed him to the gym. He got to the door, looked in, then came back to me looking anxious. "This is my first time voting," he told me. "What am I supposed to do?" I said he should go to the first table inside the gym and they would help him with everything; reassured, he went off to vote.

He was not, if I had to guess, very much older than me. He'd never voted before, and it was clear that he took it seriously, because he wanted to do it well. I've seen this before, and experienced it myself, in the way certain people approach a new church for the first time: where do I go? What do I do? What will they expect of me? And he wondered, no doubt, because it seemed like everyone else already knew: I was certainly blasé when I voted a few weeks ago--just another routine activity in a day full of them. Now all the facts I know are still true: his vote won't matter any more than mine does (we probably cancelled each other out), and policies will be adopted and laws passed regardless of whether they help either of us. If I were a responsible social scientist, I should have informed him of these things, the better to let the scales fall from his eyes.

I have always found the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism to be odd: Arendt has finished discussing totalitarianism as a form of government, and says, now that it has come into the world, it is and will remain always a threat. We can know something of the conditions under which a good form of government will lapse into a bad, and must be on the watch for that. But she ends, in her way, by prophesying the end of totalitarianism: no system of control can ever be total: man is born free, and can never be permanently chained: men begin things, and in that beginning is at least part of what is (or can be) good about them. And so: to make a beginning is good. What does it mean for that man who voted for the first time? I don't know, but I can hope it will mean a number of things. That beginning is good (good for him, good for the people in his community) whether my theories of democracy say so or not, and I think that's very important for the cynical observer of politics to remember.

LINK: I love this sort of thing. A Catholic friend of mine had a friend of his--a priest he had known back when he lived in Minnesota--die several years ago. My friend was very sad--the priest had been a big part of his transition to the US, traveled with him to Europe, and many other things--and would tell me, when he talked, many of the happy stories he remembered from the many years of their friendship, his kindnesses, and more. I thought at the time--perhaps I said--this will certainly be a part of the day of judgment, that when Jesus spoke of feeding the hungry and taking care of the sick, they were the general categories of which particular stories--like the ones my friend told--will be shared. There's a lot of joy in that, and hope. Anyway, I liked it, so you should read it.

LINK: Zadie Smith's "Two Paths for the Novel" in the new NYRB is well worth your time. I have a fondness for reviews that make me want to go out and buy the book discussed (most make me want to close the browser window): she makes fair and trenchant criticisms of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, a book I very much enjoyed reading over the summer (and says good things about it, too--whatever one thinks of the tradition it is a part of, it is very clearly a high point of that tradition), and makes Tom McCarthy's Remainder sound very appealing, despite not being the kind of novel I generally enjoy. I will report back when I finish the latter

READING FOR THE DAY: While I am off helping kids to vote in Durham's mock election, I'd like to point you all to Nozick's Tale of the Slave. Lest we forget exactly what it is we're doing.

WHILE PREPARING FOR CLASS: Re-reading (or: re-re-re-re-re-reading) Walzer's "Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands," I noticed in particular his three-part typology of responses to the problem of Dirty Hands: neoclassical, Protestant, and Catholic. There's nothing particularly wrong with that, though his examples are certainly chosen to emphasize their points of difference--one could choose examples who were closer together in their views. What struck me as odd this time was his choices: Machiavelli (about whom I have no complaints as an example), Weber and Camus. Weber, of course, may only barely qualify as Protestant (I think he's not, but don't know his personal biography well enough), and is in any case responsible for a number of the incorrect Protestant stereotypes that float around; Camus is definitely not Catholic. Why create a three-part typology and then use two people who are not good examples of the type? No idea.