YOU GOT ME: Since the Phillies won the World Series, a song from a Philadelphia-based group seems appropriate, and who better than the Roots? It's hard to believe now, most of their built-up goodwill having long since been squandered on ill-conceived projects, but around 1999, The Roots were poised to take over hip-hop. And what wasn't there to like? A hip-hop group who played their own instruments, and clearly had musical ability to spare (Do You Want More?!?!, their second album, borrows liberally from the jazz tradition). The apex of their career was "You Got Me", with its Erykah Badu-sung hook; it was the third re-write of the same basic song about love, fame and trust (the first two being "Silent Treatment" and "The Hypnotic"). But where the first two erred by containing too much narrative (and that presented in a confusing manner), "You Got Me" is minimal: the situation presented in the first verse, the complications in the second, and the considerations to weigh in the third. I like the video because, well, it's a cool concept, but it colors a reading of the song too much: the greatness of the track is that it doesn't tell you whether it ends well or badly. Black Thought has the angel on one shoulder, the devil on the other, and the words of his girlfriend ringing in his ears. Does he believe her? It's happy or sad, depending on how you want to hear it.

Relatedly, this is a great deconstruction of the average hip-hop video, though it does indulge in the clichés as it mocks them.

YES, BUT: I don't get this:

Let me offer what is evidently a radical argument — identifying the candidate that best approximates your ideological beliefs is not sufficient reason to cast a presidential vote on his behalf. Yes, a conservative is naturally going to weigh a candidate’s adherence to conservatism very heavily, but not as an end in itself. The ultimate goal is to choose the candidate whose election most benefits the country, not the candidate whose beliefs most closely reflect your own. (Joe wasn’t necessarily suggesting otherwise, but I’ve seen very little anywhere in the conservative blogosphere to suggest that very many people are inclined to agree with me.)

This is either obvious or pointless. Obvious: you wouldn't vote for anyone who was crazy, even if they were conservative (on the assumption that being crazy, etc, is compatible with conservatism). Pointless: why on earth would you be a conservative if you didn't believe that conservatism would actually benefit the country most?

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: Exactly as moving as the "stand up, your father's passing" scene from To Kill a Mockingbird, and for exactly the same reason:

They come out of the Court, the white on one side, the black on the other, according to the custom. But the young white man breaks the custom, and he and Msimangu help the old and broken man, one on each side of him. It is not often that such a custom is broken. It is only when there is a deep experience that such a custom is broken. The young man's brow is set, and he looks fiercely before him. That is partly because it is a deep experience, and partly because of the custom that is being broken. For such a thing is not lightly done.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: From This Is Spinal Tap:

Marty DiBergi: Do you feel that playing rock 'n' roll music keeps you a child? That is, keeps you in a state of arrested development?
Derek Smalls: No. No. No. I feel it's like, it's more like going, going to a, a national park or something. And there's, you know, they preserve the moose. And that's, that's my childhood up there on stage. That moose, you know.
Marty DiBergi: So when you're playing you feel like a preserved moose on stage?
Derek Smalls: Yeah.

CHANGE I CAN'T QUITE BELIEVE IT: As an advocate of the Politics of Despair, I was disappointed that this wasn't funnier.

TRANSLATION: Having received now multiple invitations to election night parties (all from good friends whose invitations I will feel bad declining), the following phrase always comes up. I thought it'd be helpful to provide a translation:

"the most important election of our lifetimes" = "I think my side will finally win"

My memory is long enough to recall that people said this in 1992, 2000 and 2004 as well.

QUOTE: From the drive back from Raleigh last week, on seeing a sign at a church for "Holyween":

Colleague: Do they know that's sort of what it means already?

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: From Either/Or, "The Rotation of Crops":

People with experience maintain that proceeding from a basic principle is supposed to be very reasonable; I yield to them and proceed from the basic principle that all people are boring. Or is there anyone who would be boring enough to contradict me in this regard?...

Idleness, we are accustomed to say, is the root of all evil. To prevent this evil, work is recommended. But it is just as easy to see from the dreaded occasion as from the recommended remedy that this whole view is of very plebian extraction. Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is a truly divine life, if one is not bored. To be sure, idleness may be the occasion of losing one's property etc., but the noble nature does not fear such things but does indeed fear being bored...

Boredom is the demonic pantheism. It becomes evil itself if one continues in it as such; as soon as it is annulled, however, it is the true pantheism. But it is annulled only by amusing oneself--ergo, one ought to amuse oneself. To say that it is annulled by working betrays a certain lack of clarity, for idleness can certainly be cancelled by work, since this is its opposite, but boredom cannot, as is seen in the fact that the busiest workers of all, those whirring insects with their bustling buzzing, are the most boring of all, and if they are not bored, it is because they do not know what boredom is--but then the boredom is not annulled.

CONGRATULATIONS! To Dara, officially a lawyer sometime on Monday. Well done, and well deserved!

IT TAKES A LOT TO LAUGH, IT TAKES A TRAIN TO CRY:

It's fall. It really became fall for me last weekend, the first I encountered where it got very cold. I've written below about how the music I listen to changes as the seasons change, and perhaps not surprisingly, Highway 61 Revisited has gotten a lot of play recently. Nick Hornby once astutely noted that, for the average music fan, one can own a lot of Bob Dylan without especially liking him. At best, I qualify as a lukewarm fan, which means I own: Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Nashville Skyline, and The Basement Tapes on cd, Blood on the Tracks and Bringing It All Back Home on vinyl, and assorted important tracks from the crucial 1965-1968 period on mp3.

Highway 61 Revisited was the first I bought, in 10th grade, on the recommendation of both the guitar magazines and the music magazines I bought back then. The first thought I had about it was that it unmistakably sounded of fall, so it tends to resurface at this time of year: I started out liking "Like a Rolling Stone" (as everyone must), then moved onto "Tombstone Blues" and "Highway 61 Revisited." Both of those require very little investment, so it's not surprising I liked them early and do not think very much of them now. Then "Ballad of a Thin Man," which has a few very great lines, but is perhaps a little overwrought. Last year's great breakthrough was "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," which has one of the great all-time opening lines: "When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Eastertime too/ When your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through..." It has tragedy, but it fits with the music in the proper way. ("From a Buick 6" has one of those great lines, too: "she don't make me nervous, she don't talk too much/ she walks like Bo Diddley and she don't need no crutch." I have no idea what that means, but I've always liked it). And "Desolation Row" for a long time was the 11-minute song at the end of the album I would always skip, and now is the last thing I heard before I arrived during my last trip up north, so I think very well of it, even if it's still too long. Also, it mentions T.S. Eliot.

Then there's this, perfectly laconic:



"The wintertime is coming, the windows are filled with frost..."

NITPICKING IV: At Michigan, we had what one might call the Iron Law of Party Starting Times: unless one knew the host and were specifically invited to come early, all parties began at 11:00. Insane, yes, but a perfectly sensible informal institution that solved the problem everyone would otherwise have about when to show up.

Yesterday, I attended a party which the evite said was to begin at 7:00. I arrived at 8:00, figuring this would make me acceptably late (one should never show such poor form as to arrive on time when the event is informal), and was instead the third person there. On arriving, I was informed that the time had been changed on the evite to 9:00 (and this, my friends, is why one should never use evite, since the time in fact had not been changed), which meant no one else showed up before 10:00. When I left a little after 11:00, it was to the sound and thorough disapproval of my friends.

What I think really grates for me is the informality of the starting time: one arrives on time (or close) for weddings, dinner parties, dinners, and pre-arranged meetings with friends, and doing so is a measure of consideration and interest for the other person: I enjoy your company, and so want to spend as much time as possible with you (and recognize that your time isn't infinite and want to extend the same courtesy). Nothing against my friends from last night, who followed the social convention; I just find there to be something good in the extra measure of formality (most of the time).

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: In a lull for the weekend: I'll be back to the dissertation, new paper topics for my class, etc on Monday, but have spent the intervening time with college football and this, from Cry, the Beloved Country:

And he told them all about these places, of the great hills and valleys of that far country. And the love of them must have filled his voice, for they were all silent and listened to him. He told them too of the sickness of the land, and how the grass had disappeared, and of the dongas that ran from hill to valley, and valley to hill; how it was a land of old men and women, and mothers and children; how the maize grew barely to the height of a man; how the tribe was broken, and the house broken, and the man broken; how when they went away, many never came back, many never wrote anymore.

LINK: It's not quite Ask an Absinthe Drinker, but having Morrissey pick college football games is an interesting conceit.

IT'S FELLOWSHIP DAY! So everyone is very stressed out: there's a scrum of us in the department who are fighting each other for the same grad school fellowships. I just had this exchange at one of the printers:

Nick [sees colleague carrying off a ream of paper to another printer]: What are you up to?
Colleague: You know what I'm up to.

Fun!

SOMEONE ALERT JACOB LEVY: The medical virtues of coffee are many, as the regular coffee drinker well knows. It also serves important social functions:

That's the implication of a new study by researchers who wanted to see if there was any connection between physical and emotional heat... they found that people who held a cup of hot coffee for 10 to 25 seconds warmed to a perfect stranger. Holding a cup of iced coffee had the opposite effect.

If you want to make a good impression, advised study author Lawrence E. Williams, a University of Colorado at Boulder assistant professor of marketing, a fresh cup of coffee "may bias the situation in your favor."

The study, to be published today in the journal Science, is the latest to show how physical properties such as distance or temperature can unconsciously influence emotional reactions. In a previous experiment, for example, people who were asked to plot remote points on a graph expressed distant feelings about relatives afterward.

Of course, when one looks at the actual numbers coming out of the study, they're less impressive (iced coffee is an abomination, of course, and as much like regular coffee as decaf is*). However, I'm not a scientist, so I won't allow that to get in the way of claiming yet one more benefit to coffee consumption. Is there anything it can't do?


*that is, both are "coffee" for people who don't like the essential properties of coffee

(h/t First Things

I RESEMBLE THAT REMARK: From the season premiere of 30 Rock:

JACK: We might not be the best people
LIZ: But we're not the worst
JACK and LIZ: Graduate students are the worst.

LINK: As Megan McArdle helpfully reminds us, being poor is not exactly great, so maybe we should be wary of conservatives who think an economic contraction would be a moral good. See also Matt Frost, properly cynical:

Hoping that austerity will force us into solving our social problems seems incongruous with what I know of Kotkin and his work, and it’s a lousy mistake for anyone to make. A world of fewer jobs and higher prices will mean longer commutes, a frayed social contract, and tired grandparents. If we arrange our families and our living spaces poorly when affluence gives us choices, we are unlikely to suddenly flourish when those decisions are forced upon us. Hard times won’t compel Americans into becoming their better selves, and if we are heading into some bleak days, it’s best that we all understand that in advance.

I'D LIKE TO THINK THE LAWSUITS HAVE MADE THAT MORE DIFFICULT or LET SOME THINGS REMAIN SACRED:

Poulos on the new Guns 'n' Roses, concluding thus:

Not much left now but that Smiths reunion.

MY WINDING WHEEL: I have a history of getting these things wrong, and misidentifying songs that are in fact depressing as optimistic or romantic, but all the same, I like this one.

There's not a long history behind my relationship to this song (new things do enter in sometimes; and it's in the process of acquiring its own meanings to me). When I'm in Chicago, I am generally driving without my cds, and have gotten into the habit of buying and burning something from itunes to take with me: so Rabbit Songs will always be (in part) August of 2007, and In the Clear is right around my sister's wedding. Heartbreaker (whence this song) was July of this year, and it's stuck with me since.

POKING THE BEAR: The Divinity School sent me yet another email on the book they claim I haven't returned, telling me that they will give me the fine ($125) they have already given me if I don't. My reply:

Dear xxxxxxxx,

We have had past correspondence on this matter. I do not have the book. I returned it a week after it was recalled, which was as soon as I realized it was needed back, since I received no first notice concerning its recall. The book has been lost by someone within the library system (I returned the book to Perkins). In any event, I do not have the book--I have already returned it--and so cannot return it again. If there is something more I can do to establish that I do not have the book (I have looked at the stacks but do not have access to any of the backstage library areas, thus the library could have the book even if I can't find it on the shelf) please let me know

Nick

This is exactly the same thing I've said in the seven previous emails on this topic. I will use foul language if they ask me about it again.

FOR NO REASON IN PARTICULAR: I have a new favorite weather.com description of the current weather: I like "plentiful sunshine" better than "showers in the vicinity" as a slightly-too-specific description of what it's like outside.

ON THE JOYS OF TEACHING: I don't have many distinct memories from the period I was studying for my prelims, but one in particular sticks out, an evening spent reading the Republic. More than anything, I remember the sense of futility I had in reading it. I was re-reading because I needed to get the relevant parts (this was Bk. VIII in particular) in my head, but there was nothing new in it for me: it was the dozenth or so time I'd read through. Successive readings often add a lot to one's comprehension--the difference between a first and a second reading is vast, and that's still true even at a fourth or fifth--but one does eventually suffer diminishing marginal returns. I wouldn't, I concluded, be able to get anything new out of it until I taught it.

To my surprise as delight, that's turned out to be the case: on Monday, I taught Aristotle's Politics, one of the books in the political theory canon that had always eluded me (the only time I ever had half-success with it was when I read it backwards). In teaching it, or in the process of preparing, I finally put it together. The same has happened with today's reading on Rawls: I will head off shortly to teach it, and goodness knows there's a reasonable chance the class will go badly (especially when starting out, I think one is always walking on that edge), but all the parts of the theory seem clear to me and I can explain why each of them go in the order that they do. In this way, I think I can better defend Rawls' theory than I could before (not that I have interest in defending it apart from pedagogical purposes); and it's also the case that I have a better grasp on why the objections that are often raised go right to the heart of the theory (I have more of an appreciation for Michael Sandel and the communitarian cause).

There's a lot about teaching that can be stressful--I'm handing back papers today--but it's nice to be reminded of the things that are quite good about it, too.

LINK: I like Michael Walzer, as I assume most political theorists do--certainly as I assume all the political theorists working on just war do (he is the cuddly edge of political philosophy in that way), though I will say that the more I work on him, the more I come to believe that his clever-seeming difference-splitting opinions actually do not split any differences at all: they just attempt to take both sides of any argument. But his innovations and contributions are real.

With that as background, his article "Ten Foreign Policy Changes if Obama Is Elected President" is disappointing: it's peppered with the language of assertion, for example:

2) A new position on global warming and the Kyoto Protocols, maybe with Al Gore leading the charge.

That would be it. No supporting argumentation; no reference to the problems Kyoto had when Clinton tried to pass it; no reference to the difficulties others states who signed the treaty have had meeting their targets.

Most of the provisions are heavily qualified--"I think" or a close variation is used frequently. And sometimes (often, actually, in such a short piece) the changes appear to be non-existent:

3) An indication that we might be willing to join the International Criminal Court, though still with reservations to protect American soldiers from what are called “political” prosecutions. I don’t think that Obama will take on the Pentagon for the sake of membership in the ICC. Remember Clinton also would have joined except for opposition from the military establishment.

So, Obama might be willing to think about joining the ICC (Bush is not), and then only in a very qualified way (if soldiers can't be prosecuted, U.S. membership is functionally worthless), but won't be willing to go through the political fight necessary to get the U.S. to join. In other words, the likely outcome of an Obama administration is what we have right now. This is also, to understate, a very generous interpretation of Clinton's position on the ICC when he was president.

It's not clear to me that this is really about Obama at all, rather, it's an assertion that Michael Walzer would be happier with foreign policy if Obama were president, which is fine, but the article is not as objective as he wants to make it out to be.

LINK: This parody of the movie W is the best thing I've seen this week, and likely to remain so.

LINK: The Elegant Variation has a nice quote from Martin Amis on his writing.

COFFEE ANECDOTES:

* File under 'things that are poor:' My church had a congregational meeting tonight that began with a 'dessert potluck.' I am never made happy by this, in part because I feel guilty taking food other people have made and not bringing my own (not an option this time because of schedule constraints, but my baking in general leaves much to be desired), and in part because my church only gives the time the potluck portion starts, and not the actual meeting, which is vexing for those of us trying to calculate the latest possible time to show up without being late. Having some work left to do this evening, I was pleasantly surprised when I walked in to see the large dispensers for coffee set out (though I remember last time they were all decaf except for one regular). I was rather less happy to be surprised when they were all marked "hot cider." Seasonally appropriate, but really, coffee should always be available.

* I attended a wedding this weekend at which there were two (samovars?) of coffee. One was labeled 'coffee;' the other was labeled 'decaf.' I approved: one of those is not coffee.

LINK: Every time I vow I will not address the postmodern conservative question again, they pull me back in. Helen, on identity and postmodernism:

As James points out, this anxious realization that there are lots and lots of eminently respectable traditions that completely contradict each other, while familiar to most people as the sneaking suspicion lurking behind various macro-level cultural clashes, also plays out on the smaller stage of the individual mind. For instance, I belong to a lot of traditions: I’m a Southerner, but also an Ivy League intellectual (like Burke, I’m a usurper!); I’m a woman and a Catholic and a conservative. My identities contradict each other all the time, and so do yours. The solution to this dilemma is the holy grail of postmodern conservatism, and I’m not sure I have one.

As I stressed to my students when we read Hobbes on civil law, there's an enormous difference between a tension and a contradiction. To contradict would be to have it be the case that one of those identities was not merely a difficult fit, but actually on some level a logical impossibility, to try and hold A and ~A at the same time. The only one on the list of Helen's identities that gives me a prima facie reason to think there might be a possibility of contradiction is 'Ivy League intellectual,' though I suppose I should point out William F. Buckley managed to navigate those waters. Tension, by contrast, is everywhere, but that's a regular feature of identity, and doesn't (necessarily) imply anything about their incompatibility.

The solution to the dilemma Helen poses is to recognize that a person is not reducible to any one of their identities, or even perhaps the summation of them all. 'Southerner' is a description of part of what it means to be Helen, it does its work at the important moments, and recedes when something else needs to take a central place. I think there's a recognizable precedent for this: there's hardly a more thrilling moment in Christian writing than the part of Thomas' Commentary on 1st Corinthians 15 where he says "my soul is not me." It's thrilling because it's a confirmation of the bodily resurrection, an assurance that somehow, the body has a purpose and a part of us, as does the soul, and we are reducible to neither. Helen is a woman and a Catholic and a conservative, where the conjunction does real work: she is all three together. Postmodernism, to the extent it wants to separate and examine these identities on their own, leads us astray, since you're looking for something (Helen-the-Catholic and nothing else) that doesn't exist.

ASK/PANIC: I will take a break from grading.

The Smiths are one of those bands for me: in the period (roughly from 8th grade to 11th grade) when my musical allegiances were up for grabs, they staked a claim. Other bands in this category: R.E.M. (first and foremost), The Rolling Stones, Patti Smith Group (I listened to Oasis, but they have fallen off since; I listened to Sleater-Kinney, but didn't really appreciate them until recently). These bands being early and formative, they get forgiven a number of faults. In order: the three bad records they made after Bill Berry left the band; pretty much everything they've done since 1981; and songs like "Citizen Ship," where the earnestness of the politics outweighs the musical merit, and not in a good way.

The Smiths are a perfect band to like when you are in the 15-17 age range, encountering the possibility of love and dealing with your own feelings of alienation (I'd suspect the correlation between liking The Smiths and attending grad school is very, very high). "How Soon Is Now?" "What Difference Does It Make?" or "The Boy With the Thorn in His Side" are all songs for you (whoever the 'you' is), because they are--to some extent--about you. Perhaps it's better to say they give a language to articulate a new set of feelings at the moment that language is most needed.

I am not 15-to-17 anymore, and am fast approaching the point where the high end of that range was a decade ago. I am tied to them at this point, so jettisoning is not an option (but please do not ask when the last time I listened to Strangeways Here We Come was). How does one best approach them?

Well, Johnny Marr (their guitar player) was a man of enormous musical gifts, and it shows in the strength of their songs, especially the epic ones (e.g. "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out"). But I think their great strength is as a pop band that focused on the slightly absurd:

Thus "Panic", ending with the chorus of children.

Thus also "Ask", containing one of my favorite lyrics: "spending warm summer days indoors/writing frightening verse to a bucktoothed girl in Luxembourg."

WELL: It needs revision and some more yet added to it (such as a conclusion), but I'm pretty sure I have a full draft of a chapter now. Woo!

LINK FOR THE DAY: The person I know most likely to enjoy this has probably already seen it, but The Atlantic this month has a short travel essay on Anne of Green Gables and Prince Edward Island, as well as a slideshow/podcast on the same topic.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: From Irving Howe, "New Styles in Leftism":

The "new leftist" appears, at times, as a figure embodying a style of speech, dress, work, and culture. Often, especially if white, the son of the middle class--and sometimes the son of middle-class parents nursing radical memories--he asserts his rebellion against the deceit and hollowness of American society. Very good; there is plenty to rebel against. But in the course of his rebellion he tends to reject not merely the middle-class ethos but a good many other things he too hastily associates with it: the intellectual heritage of the West, the tradition of liberalism at its most serious, the commitment to democracy as an indispensable part of civilized life. He tends to make style into the very substance of his revolt, and while he may, on one side of himself, engage in valuable activities in behalf of civil rights, student freedom, and so on, he nevertheless tacitly accepts the "givenness" of American society, has little hope or expectation of changing it, and thereby, in effect, settles for a mode of personal differentiation.

In the essay, Howe highlights several features of what we now call the New Left that he finds problematic, two of which he touches on here. First, there is a tendency to overvalue the present or recent past, at the expense of a longer, deeper tradition of things. Whatever one thinks about the merits of liberalism, it is a tradition in which we are bound up, and have been for a long time, the Enlightenment (whatever one thinks of it as) yet longer, and the priority of the individual longer still. One omits these, or glosses over them quickly, at the risk of not properly understanding the current political moment or, indeed, our past. Political theory as it is usually taught commits the sin of assuming nothing interesting happens between Aristotle and Machiavelli--or, if there is anything interesting, it can be summarized in fifty pages of Augustine and twenty pages of Thomas. It is just as much of a mutilation to take the position that the last 500 years have been a more-or-less tragic mistake, or that there is something fundamentally new in politics which the old sources are incapable of addressing. The New Left rejected what it saw as the flawed compromises of 1930s radicals, and in so doing learned none of the lessons their experience could bring, and lost interest in the liberalism that had preceded the 30s: thus they are in some way unable to articulate their project.

He also comments at greater length elsewhere in the essay on the flight from politics to style: the old liberalism believed that one makes change working through electoral politics in particular, as well as union and other local organizing. The new leftism, for him, is highlighted by an impatience, or imperfect commitment, to politics as carried out in this manner. But, of course, how can you have a politics that doesn't ground itself in actual politics?

LINK: Okay, this definition of postmodern conservatism I know what to do with:

If at the heart of this moral realism we find a peculiar brand of Thomism, then the recovery of Thomism, however specifically articulated, might be at the heart of a postmodern conservatism. If at the heart of any postmodern conservatism is the excavation of the Christian categories that modernity claimed to repudiate but instead subsumed, then American postmodern conservatism (and yes, the nomenclature is becoming unwieldy) might be central to any rethinking of conservatism itself. [italics mine]

In this case, "postmodern" functions as a historical marker rather than a specific body of thought. I'm not sure what the call to return to Thomism would mean if we were also to read the postmoderns. Rather, this seems like a call for limited deconstruction: let's see the past for what it is, and preserve (or re-vivify) what we can. Two points:

1. As I remember After Virtue, MacIntyre claims to be doing something along these lines. Does he fit in the definition of postmodern conservatism?

2. Charles Taylor claims (in The Sources of the Self, and I think also in A Secular Age) that, having made the transition into modernity, there is no going back--not in the same form, anyway. Having eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, one has to leave the garden. Certain things--not entirely bad--come as a consequence of this, even if the loss is real and not to be underestimated. Obviously, I'm not as hostile to Locke--and not entirely sure how our founding can be described as an 'American Thomism'--but the success of this project depends, as a historical matter, on bringing the philosophy to which we should return as close to the present day as possible.

NITPICKING III: It drives me batty that MPSA calls them 'submittals.' Just a little rage, but every time. They're 'submissions!' The word you want is 'submissions!'

LINK: For those who consider the global plebiscite a legitimate means of determining the relative legality/political reality of actions in global politics, n.b.: despite Serbia referring the question of Kosovo's independence to the ICJ, 50 states now recognize its independence (including Macedonia and Montenegro), while only two recognize the independence of Georgia's breakaway republics. Turns out even the people who should be most concerned about Serbian interference are not all that worried.

LINK: You may have heard of this week's Normblog profile (not me). Question for Helen, though: I happened to catch The Night of the Hunter on TV a few weeks ago (the wonders of cable!), and, uh... really? Favorite movie ever? Robert Mitchum is legitimately creepy, and certainly terrifying in his way (and quite possibly makes the movie on his own), but the undercurrent of sadism, well. Perhaps it's best to say that there's a line Hitchcock comes up to many times in his film career, and part of the tension in his movies is how close he gets to the line without going over (I haven't seen the ones where he crosses the line, as I recall), but this seems to step over the line and not really even have noticed the line in the first place. The talking heads before this movie commented that Charles Laughton was disappointed with how poorly the movie did at the box office, and so never made another. I might have to side with the viewing public on this one.

One of the major political science conventions has a deadline for proposals in the very near future (read: tomorrow). I have several abstracts consisting of portions of my dissertation that I trot out, depending on which section I think I will need to write in six months. Normally these range from 250 words or so up to maybe 500 (I recall that APT is rather high). For this conference, it's 1250 characters. Spaces included. Right now I am at 207 words, or 1,314 characters, and at the point of comprehensibility. If the regular approach doesn't work, I could submit my proposal as a series of haiku, e.g.:

I would like to write
A paper on human rights
And Hugo Grotius

FAR, FAR AWAY:



This is the first song within the country (or alt-country) music tradition that I ever liked entirely on its own merits. My grandfather loves Hank Williams, and I have memories of going to visit Patsy Cline's gravesite as a child--these were never options for me (though I love them both). The traditional family trip took us down to Northern Virginia over the summer to see relatives, which included many happy evenings sitting on the back porch, catching fireflies, and waiting to hear (and if I was lucky, see) the trains go by on the tracks behind their yard. It was inevitable that country music would eventually get to me.

I first heard the song my senior year of high school. My sister had taken my copy of Oasis' Be Here Now, so I was looking to even things out. I had read something or other about Wilco in one of the many music magazines I was then reading, and since she hadn't taken the cd with her to college, I imagined she wouldn't mind my borrowing it (she, in fact, never mentioned it). The packaging also helped, a double-cd gatefold-style cover (just like a record album!), and the minimalist but suggestive cover:



For a guy who listened to either punk or britpop at the time, this was clearly something different. The album as a whole was appealing, but this song in particular: wistful and serious at the same time, the desire to see someone that just comes out sometimes, and the song is more and less artful ways of saying it (country mouse that I am, it took me a very long time to realize that "kiss and ride on the CTA" did not likely mean what I first thought it did).

The video is very good for a homemade youtube production. Even the Medieval Times footage is appropriate, since I drive past it every time I go to my sister's house.

N.B. This is one of my favorite songs to play on guitar.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, DAVID HUME: I have my issues with postmodern conservatism, about which more at some point in the future (whenever I'm done with this chapter). It's worth commenting on two features of this criticism of the pomocons. A sample:

This acknowledgment of the missing foundation for the foundational (or the inability to deny the same-- no difference) is, I think, at the heart of postmodern conservatism. No one likes an outsider to try and define their beliefs, and I won't do the pomocons the violence of saying I know what they think. But it seems to me that this frank admission that one believes in the old ways because one chooses to is near the heart of their mission. The first problem is that, as she comes close to saying, Karras's way requires (in that studied way!) the rejection of the studied approach to political philosophy. And if the pomocons are anything, they are studied...

How can you have the foundational without the foundation? Where can the bedrock come from, if you acknowledge that you've chosen your preference for it? How can traditionalism survive, when you know that mere human subjectivity is the source of tradition? Conservatism has tradtionally been suspicious, even hateful, of postmodern skepticism towards meta-narratives. I think many of the pomocons believe that they can have the destabilizing nature of postmodernism and yet still knowingly choose the stability of classical forms, traditional mores. But the old school conservatives abhor the postmodern for a reason. They know the limits of willed obediance to the past, they recognize the fragility of any conservatism of choice.

1. To speak as though they were a unified group, the pomocons (and this criticism) often appear to stumble over what I'd call the ontology/epistemology distinction. Pomocons recognize that foundationalism as an epistemological project is difficult, if not impossible (can anyone offer an account of their beliefs all the way down?). This becomes, so far as I can tell, the reason to turn first to postmodernity, and sometimes also to irony--one recognizes that all positions have this feature, and abandons the hope of foundations, or accepts a coherence theory of truth, or emphasizes the importance of deliberation and rhetoric.

The alternative is to see the problems of foundationalism as an epistemological issue only. I can't justify my beliefs all the way down. I do not believe anything about the truth of my beliefs follows from that. As a historical matter, this is first articulated by Locke (well, in the modern era--Augustine covers this in several of his works), who recognizes the limitations of reason but still encourages individuals to reach whatever level of certainty they can. Its most persuasive version is Hume's (and here I follow David Miller): I can construct no argument from properly basic principles to demonstrate the sun will rise in the morning, but that is a different question than a. whether the sun actually will rise tomorrow (the difference between what's true and what I can know, when knowledge means something like 'justified true belief') and b. whether 'the sun will rise tomorrow' is a belief I am justified using in practical reasoning. In the face of postmodern discourse, one can assert its basic correctness, or one can argue nevertheless for truth. Freddie is right to say a conservative ought to act on the basis of truth.

2. However, there is a distinction of which conservatism is particularly aware--that some things are permanent and unchanging, and others are local and particular. As a moral realist and a Christian, I think that certain facts about the world are true quite apart from whether anyone believes them to be so. Then again, much of the world just is socially constructed: this is what it means to have traditions, and communities, and institutions that are greater than any particular member. One has loyalty to tradition and community because they function as better guardians of what is true and good than the judgments of an individual, and because if there is a real moral order to the world, what endures does so because it reflects that moral order. Conservatives also, however, remember what is true about human nature, and the ability of great injustices to persist for much longer than they should--and so must first have a loyalty to the permanent things of which the the traditions and communities are a reflection. Thus we can recognize that our choices are choices--see our world as it actually is--without thereby undermining the strength of our commitments.

There is perhaps (always) more to say, but that'll do for now.

LINK: Over at Terry Teachout's place, CAAF writes a little on a new book covering the Elizabeth Bishop-Robert Lowell correspondence.

NO DOUBT OUR INSULARITY IS HOLDING US BACK: Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to some guy you've never heard of. From his NYT profile, he at least sounds interesting.

DISAPPEARANCE OF THE CHARACTER:

Let me offer a potential explanation of this feature of popular music without making reference back to race:

Country singers do this sort of thing all the time, of course. Throughout his career, Johnny Cash would pray to Jesus in one track and murder his woman in the next, and hardly anyone batted an eye. But in the world of black music, shuttling between sacred and secular as Williams has done is a lot less common. For African-American audiences living in a segregated America, the gospel/pop line was about more than just faith. It was about loyalty to your people — about whether you were going to stay true to your oppressed community, or kowtow to the those who were, often quite literally, trying to kill you.

Hardly anyone batted an eye not because the sacred/secular distinction meant something else in country music culture, but because they recognized that his darker songs are not, generally speaking, about him--he's inventing or singing from the perspective of a character. Sam Cooke gets himself into trouble because it's Sam Cooke singing non-religious songs, not Same Cooke singing from the perspective of someone who is not especially religious. There's a certain songwriting approach that keeps up this distinction--Patti Smith would be another example, as would Bruce Springsteen--but almost all hip-hop and r&b music erases it (the only exception that comes to mind is O.D.B., who is sometimes O.D.B. and sometimes just a guy who's playing a guy named O.D.B.; many MCs will distinguish between their stage names and their actual names, but it's never clear what level this distinction is supposed to work on; people like Biggie Smalls and Tupac trade on verisimilitude; and, of course, if you're singing a song someone else wrote, maintaining the character/real me distinction is even more difficult).

LINK: This post by Poulos on the virtues of postmodern conservatism reminds me that I have it in mind to write a defense of non-postmodern conservatism, otherwise known as "modern conservatism:" John Locke isn't really that bad! You don't need deconstruction, you just need David Hume! Conservatism can engage meaningfully with liberalism! We don't need to be glib or ironic as default positions! etc etc (obviously, the generous use of emphatic punctuation marks will be an important feature, as will the gloriously extended sentence. Modern conservatives believe in the em-dash and the semi-colon.)

"And tell me when the spaceship lands/ 'cos all this has to start to mean something..."

This came onto the ipod this morning, and so onto the blog it goes. There are many things to like about Pulp: the heavy use of irony; that they made an excellent album about getting old; the fact that their lead singer; Jarvis Cocker, as a tall, skinny, pasty white man, somehow managed to be a sex symbol for several years in the late 90s. Possibly my favorite is the line included in every set of liner notes: "N.B. Please do not read the lyrics whilst listening to the recordings" (for the record, I never have).

In particular, I enjoy the critique of rave culture, and the rambling accented monologue (apparently, when he gave interviews, Cocker was fond of adopting different accents to give particular answers).

LINK: One of my standing rules is that, given any particular controversy, I presume that I'm on Helen's side and not the people she's arguing against. It's not perfect, but functional as a rule of thumb. Nevertheless, I have to disagree with the thrust of this post on loyalty. Point one:

I’ll preface my explanation with a comparison. The phrase "imperfect analogy" is too generous for this one, but I’ll run with it for the moment on the assumption that everyone understands that there are important ways in which it doesn’t work. So, with that in mind: one question I remember getting asked a lot when I lived with Protestants was, "Helen, what would you do if the Pope told you to [pick your favorite ridiculous thought experiment]?" The cheap answer (the one I gave to anyone who was clearly asking the question for the sake of snark) is, "Yes, bad loyalty is bad, but I’d prefer to risk bad loyalty than live in a world with no loyalty, i.e. a world where all relationships are (ugh!) contractual." In this case, though, I’ll make a more aggressive response: a backdrop of implicit loyalty makes good-faith argument easier.

Conor, Larison, and Sullivan all seem to prefer negotiations in which both sides understand that either of them could walk away from the table at any time. My experience with that attitude is that it inevitably infuses the negotiation with mutual suspicion, craven bargaining, and unapologetic self-interest.

I think one could easily say that it's just the case that negotiations have this character, whether one finds it to be desirable or not. One might still think those loyalties and attachments are good, or useful, but one should be honest about what that means. In Helen's example, loyalty to the Pope is more important than producing the 'correct' answer to [ridiculous thought experiment]. That's a perfectly defensible hierarchy of values, but there is a sense in which you've chosen that hierarchy and not some other, and I think it's healthy to recognize that.

Now, of course, there's a difference between being legitimately alienated or disenchanted by politics (I find it harder to be motivated this year than 2004, for a variety of reasons), and using that disenchantment as a threat, with the promise that, should the party fail to comply with one's desired policies, one will sit out. That is to say, there is legitimate critique, and illegitimate, and it's a useful skill to be able to separate the two. It is also not entirely clear that conservative--or leftist--critics of their respective parties engage in enough self-examination with respect to their motives. (But then, as Plato likes to remind us, very few people ever do that properly)

Point two:

The moral here is that some people think that keeping any and all disagreement on the table deepens friendship; I think that’s true for most kinds of disagreement (my friends are the ones I trust to slap me in the face when I need it, for instance), but in cases like my friend’s hypothetical, it cheapens it. Friendship, like loyalty, entails responsibilities, and you need to know what you’re getting into when you start calling yourself a friend. Or a conservative.

Surely, though, there exists some modus vivendi option between supporting a friend's political convictions no matter what, and choosing to not be friends with them because of those convictions. Friendships run on lots of different dimensions, and not all of them map onto politics.

A FIRST THOUGHT ON JUSTICE: The old Law and Justice course is moving on to the "justice" section beginning tomorrow. Our first reading is Republic I. The problem is always where to begin: there's a lot going on in the dialogue, and since we won't be reading all of it (but will be reading more Plato), it's important that they learn how to read and understand the text. Much must be bracketed (I will not, tragically, begin with a fiften-minute exposition of the importance of the word 'down' and its place throughout the work).

Reading through the work this time, I focused more particularly on the account Cephalus gives of his own life, and his late recognition of the importance of justice. The standard philosophical account usually says philosophy is an activity best left to the old, who have had the requisite life experience, and there's something to that--though I also have sympathy with Peter Euben's view that Cephalus, by giving up eros, has removed one of the driving forces of philosophy--at any rate, I'm not sure someone with no sympathy for what it's like to be young ought to do the leading. The debate, though, puts me in mind of two things I've read or re-read recently.

First, from F. Scott Fitzgerald, "What I Think and Feel at 25":

Well, now I'm twenty-five and I'm not callow any longer--at least not so that I can notice it when I look in an ordinary mirror. Instead, I'm vulnerable. I'm vulnerable in every way...

I used to have about ten square feet of skin vulnerable to chills and fevers. Now I have about twenty. I have not personally enlarged--the twenty feet includes the skin of my family--but I might as well have, because if a chill or fever strikes any bit of that twenty feet of skin I begin to shiver.

Second, Michael Oakeshott, "On Being Conservative":

Everybody's young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what we can make of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires. The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands--unless it be a cricket bat...

For most there is what Conrad called the 'shadow line' which, when we pass it, discloses a solid world of things, each with its fixed shape, each with its own point of balance, each with its price; a world of fact, not poetic image, in which what we have spent on one thing we cannot spend on another; a world inhabited by others besides ourselves who cannot be reduced to mere reflections of our own emotions.

There's a lot to say about each (I find Oakeshott compelling in the last quoted part, since this maps onto what I have frequently, but unsuccessfully, tried to say about the transition to adulthood), but I'll let it suffice to make this observation: the difference between old and young in Oakeshott, and the difference between callow and not-callow in Fitzgerald, comes from the presence of others. Once I have someone other than me to worry about, the world becomes more complicated.

Perhaps, then, one can follow the specific arguments about justice in Book I as a series of attempts to defend egoism: to think about justice in terms of its consequences to me (Cephalus), its consequences to me and my friends (Polemarchus, but never mind if we have a hard time specifying who the friends are or what we might owe them), or its consequences to me and my social group (Thrasymachus, on the assumption that it's not best to be a tyrant and only have to look after your own interests). Fitzgerald, Oakeshott, and Socrates when he rebuilds the polity in Book II, begin from the fact of people around you, whom you cannot wish away and to whom you owe certain responsibilities.

Hmm. It's enough to make me rethink communitarianism.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: From Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (for everything I like about Greene, it's hard to find an especially quotable moment that is not also depressing, sometimes staggeringly so):

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who--when he has been seriously noted at all--has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, 'Speak to him: he hasn't seen you yet.'

This is yet another example of my favored writers-writing-about-writing style (see also the beginning of The Sea, The Sea), but what I notice this time is the 'then': "if I had believed then in a God..." I hadn't seen it before, but it raises a question of when the narrator is retelling the story, and whether the end is even particularly the end for the narrator, or whether this is a half-reconstructed memory of a period of intense feeling in his life--something like the end of The Heart of the Matter, had that character decided differently.

INTRODUCTION:

There are several things that remind me of my first semester at Duke: listening to A Better Version of Me many times on the drive down; the long evening driving around north Durham, listening to Aimee Mann's "I've Had It," when I most seriously considered dropping out of grad school; and all of Bryter Layter, which is the sound of many bright, sunny days walking around my neighborhood. The exception is the first song on the album, "Introduction" (he's not much of one for titles; not-great cover on youtube here; uploading an mp3 is apparently impossible).

I've only ever been to New York City once in my life: grow up in the Midwest, and you are more likely to focus on Chicago, or if you're especially exotic, Los Angeles. The visit to NYC was a long and hectic day that began coming up through Penn Station and ended by running over the Brooklyn Bridge to watch classical music on a barge,* and included a lengthy stop at the Met. None of these things are particularly close when you're on foot, I think. "Introduction" is the song I had in my head that day, and it's inevitable that whenever I hear it, I remember everything that happened. It's the sort of experience for which the phrase "impressionistic blur" was invented, but one moment stands out: sitting on a bench in Central Park, eating one of those shaved-ice things, and talking with someone in particular. I've never entirely understood how songs get fixed to times or places, despite the number of times it's happened in my life, but the memory is clearer for the song, and the song is something more than a 90-second introduction to the album because of the memory.

Since I was unable to produce the actual song in this case, here's another good Nick Drake song, with one of my favorite lyrics: "If songs were lines in the conversation/ The situation would be fine."


*technically I suppose it ended by running to catch the last train back to Princeton, but running was involved either way

LINK: I have a lot of love for my alma mater, its occasional crazinesses aside, and since it's hard to get back to Ann Arbor (I haven't been in... 3 years now?), that love is most often expressed through an unhealthy devotion to Michigan football. I'm comfortable with this as a part of who I am. I do not, for example, bring up the topic unless asked, though I did have two long-ish conversations with alumni friends this past week on the Wisconsin game. Another part of this love is the firm conviction that the Michigan football blogosphere is the best college football has to offer: I've learned how to correctly use phrases like "flows along the line of scrimmage" or "keep contain" from mgoblog, and I have at least one of Wolverine Liberation Army's Soviet propaganda images posted to my desk in the office. And then there's Johnny from Ron Bellamy's Underachieving All-Stars, who writes things like this:

In the second quarter Morgan Trent fumbled a kickoff on Michigan’s 27 yard line, after the defense had just been on the field for almost eight minutes the previous drive. I saw Terrance walk onto the field immediately after, in front of everyone else, swinging his arms dramatically as if to say “Is this the best you’ve got?” He was obviously frustrated with the offense’s incompetence, as we’d find out after the game, but in this moment he almost craved the chance to keep playing. He was undaunted, undeterred; the voice on a cold night telling you everything’s going to be alright, even if deep inside the voice doesn’t believe so itself. You tell me sports are insignificant, and I’ll tell you how I watched them turn a boy into a man before my own eyes.

If I were inclined to be critical of his style, I'm certain I could--but this comes much closer to the exhilaration that games like last Saturday's bring (the only game better was the 2003 Ohio State game): it overwhelms you at a certain level and you can only respondyes.

LINK: I substantively agree with Alex Massie, especially on this:

With any luck, between them, Baden-Powell Palin-Biden will do enough to discredit the office of the Vice-Presidency itself, returning it to the obscurity for which it was once justly famous.

I made an argument along these lines to my advisor, and was told it was 'too clever by half.' Either of them would do fine as a Vice President (well, the role is less likely to become unimportant if Biden is elected, but I don't think the country will be run into the ground--or, rather, I don't think it'd be primarily his fault). The vituperation directed at Palin seems out of proportion to her flaws, such as they are; some of it is justified (Ross Douthat handles this ably, though he sounds unconvinced by his own argument), and some of it is not wanting this woman to succeed right now.

LINK: If you want my opinion on electoral politics in America, this is a good place to start.

NITPICKING II: Unfortunately, this being campaign season, we get lots of political ads. I try to ignore them, for sanity's sake. I made the mistake of listening to one recently. It's about how terrible of a person Libby Dole is. One line in particular struck me: the ad says she "voted to increase the federal deficit five times." Maybe I'm unclear on this, but I think it's usually referred to as "voting for a budget." What's she supposed to do instead?

LINK: Carrie Brownstein on changing your music to fit the seasons. A sample:

In fall and winter, the music must elevate. It doesn't have to cause elation the way it does in the summer months; it merely has to give lift to my head on dreary mornings. I also seem to prefer a tune analogous to the weather -- an enhancer rather than a contrast...

I make this shift (the cds in my car changed just before my last road trip), and I agree with the general point. The heat in North Carolina gets so oppressive by August that it's difficult to listen to anything that is not loud or fast--there's no room for subtlety. Fall is many of my favorite albums--Bryter Layter, Unhalfbricking (and I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight), Billy Breathes (yes yes, I know, but I listened to it a lot my senior year of high school), Songs from Northern Britain, etc etc.

And, since it's October 1st, this; I like the idea of a song that attaches itself to a particular time of the year, something that gets lost once you cross a certain point. Also, it's a great song, if not one that's ever been applicable to my life--I doubt I could make a living out of playing pool.

At some point, I'll post something about The Smiths, and Morrissey's ability to write lines that sound good but are pretty clearly wrong. The one I have in mind is from "Panic": "Burn down the disco/ hang the blessed DJ/ because the music that they constantly play/ it says nothing to me about my life." As I said, "Maggie May" has never really applied to my life; but then, I've never murdered a pawnbroker, and I liked Crime and Punishment. Sometimes you just like things because they're good.