Friday, August 08, 2008
(9:09 AM) | Anthony Paul Smith:
Friday Afternoon Confessional: Sleep is for closers.
I confess that the bank and I have made up. They have, after a month and a week, finally given me the money the deposited into someone else's account. I confess I feel bad for Anthony Smith of Phoenix who the bank inexplicably gave my money to. I confess that the bank depositing my money into the account of Phoenix's Anthony Smith really ruined my shit. I confess to near-crippling bouts of anxiety caused in part by the bank cock-up. I confess that I've taken to a rather strange set of sleeping habits for the past few months. I confess that staying up all night in the red light district of Nottingham while watching all five seasons of The Wire at once is making me paranoid. I confess to having an understanding now of the hookers lines of territory and being freaked out by this one pimp in a track suit who looks like he's got the devil in him. I confess to having ill-will towards those who wear track suits.Wednesday, August 06, 2008
(4:28 PM) | it:
Wednesday Sex: A Question
To all Weblog readers:
What do men resent about women (if anything)?
Answers in the comments, please.
(12:12 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Prolegomena to Any Future Dissertation
I am planning to start writing chapter 2 of my dissertation soon. Once I am finished with it, I plan to rearticulate chapters 1 and 2 into a tripartite argument, though I am currently unclear as to whether that will require the use of three chapters or a single long chapter in three parts.At that point, the project will be fully laid out and broadly situated in terms of the contemporary field, and the sensible thing to do would be to proceed to actually do what I say I am going to do. Yet isn't there another, equally attractive option here? Couldn't I continue to expand the argument of "chapters 1 and 2" to the point where they were effectively an entire dissertation, then write a concluding chapter pointing toward my original dissertation topic as a promising avenue for future research?
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
(7:20 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Dogs watch TV now
A previously mentioned local TV station is in the habit of showing commercials in which they introduce a dog, tell the neighborhood that the dog lives in, and then claim that the dog likes a particular show that the station shows. Sometimes they have the owners make these outlandish claims, and sometimes they just have a voiceover.If it is true that these dogs watch TV and have preferences, then one thing is clear: dogs have shitty taste in TV shows. Seriously, who watches Becker?
(12:31 AM) | Ben Wolfson:
Tuesday Hatred: Presumption.
Adam asked me several hours ago, am I feeling hateful? I am. But I was not present to receive his question—so even characterizing his asking me as taking place at a more or less distinct period might be inept—and now he's gone. So I can only assume that he was asking me, or preparing to ask me, to preside over this Tuesday's Hatred. The Monday-Tuesday transition in Chicago already having come and gone, with no Hatred yet being posted, I decided to quick quick quick write one up and post it. One might call this presumptuous—hence the title. See how that works? This used to be a regular gig of mine, you know. I know what I'm doing.I hate the way people went about solving this puzzle. Once you get a list with no correct answers, it's easy, people! Let's introduce some names and notation. Call the list with no correct answers "Wrong". Makes sense! And say that, for any list, L[i] denotes the ith element of that list, and L[i/e] denotes the list L with the ith element replaced by the element denoted by e (so the thing before the slash is an index, and the thing after the slash is a potential list element—here, a song). Then, once you've got Wrong established, you just toss out a bunch of other potential lists. If any of them has even one right answer (call this list with at least one right answer "R"), your next eight guesses are Wrong[i/R[i]] for 0 <= i < 8, assuming zero-indexed lists (as god intended). This will quickly allow you to suss out which answers in R were right. You can then build on this in short order. GOD!
I hate this shit, and also that my reaction to it is, you know, what else is new? Maybe I can change things through graduate study—oh wait, except I hate that too, or maybe would if I were actively engaged in it in any but a nominal way. If I were going to invoke nautical metaphors for my hateful situation, they would probably include "listless" and "in the doldrums" but not much else, because, let's face it, I don't know much about the nautical life. I'm pretty ok with that, though.
I hate bad improv. I hate that the much of the first act at the concert I attended on Sunday consisted of bad improv. I hate that I accidentally took the wrong CD from the merch table after the concert: I wanted Trignition (Vinny Golia, Bertram Turetzky, Barre Phillips), but took Triangulation (Vinny Golia, Bertram Turetzky, George Lewis). I hate that there seems to be no remedy for this. I don't even like Triangulation very much; plus I already own it. I hate that Achewood runs so irregularly and that Chris Onstad seems to have decided to devote so many energies to this paid update text message bull flop. I hate that at an earlier concert (Some Ensemble of Lisa Mezzacappa; Aaron Novik's Catastrophe Practice) some attractive chick was totally, like, looking in my direction, even at me, like, you know, totally eyeing me, man, I wasn't making it up this time, fer shure, but I resolutely persisted in the stoneslessness required not to even attempt to converse with her. I hate that variations on the preceding can probably be found in every previous hatred of mine: can't I at least not repeat myself in writing, even if I do so in life? No. I can't.
At times I hate Stanley Cavell's writing style. Is that ok? Can I say that, you know, in public? It doesn't seem poetic or profound or anything to me, but rather self-absorbed. I guess that's no surprise to anyone. I also hate Jeff Malpas' book about Davidson, which seems calculated to shed no light on anything, but rather to teach the student that, whenever a problem seems about to crop up, one can simply mumble something about holism or indeterminacy or whatever and TA_DA! problem solved, just as common sense would mostly have it! I'm also prepared to say that I absolutely loathe, really detest, Word and Object, and I haven't so much as opened it. I'm pretty sure that if I were to open it, I would not be able to stop myself from hurling it across the room soon thereafter. Even if I didn't read any of it: just opening it would be sufficient.
I harbor a certain attitude towards the job that Oxford University Press did in editing Mark Wilson's Wandering Significance, which was really transcendently (in the sense of being inexhaustibly) shitty—the editing job, that is, not the book—there are many nonsentences or ungrammatical sentences, typoes, and misuses of words per chapter, misattributions (e.g. authorship of Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman to Gleick, who wrote Genius), simple mathematical thinkos of the sort that a copyeditor with a modicum of domain-specific knowledge ought to have been able to catch, and so on and so forth. I can only assume that actually no one edited it at all.
I hate campylobacter.
Monday, August 04, 2008
(3:04 PM) | Dominic:
The Body's Grace
If you haven't read this, you should. I'm both surprised and unsurprised at how close it is to what I would have wanted to say.(11:57 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Monday Mad Men Blogging
It really is as good as people say!Saturday, August 02, 2008
(9:16 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
AAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!!!!!!
Obama is haughty now!Yes, he's a proud man -- but then, you'd expect that since he's fucking running for president! And maybe he comes off a little superior, but that's because he actually is superior to his opponent, whose greatest achievements in life are having been shot down in Vietnam and unceremonially ditching his first wife for a wealthy heiress.
I should probably stop following the news until some time in late October. At that point, McCain will probably be trick-or-treating in black face handing out campaign literature, just having a good old time.
(11:20 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Not knowing what to do
I have spent close to a half hour sitting on the couch sipping on a cup of coffee -- essentially, doing nothing. I don't know what to do.This morning, I finished my usual morning tasks early (go through my feeds on Google Reader, do vocab exercises on Super Memory, read a couple pages of German), leaving a gap before lunch. The problem is deeper than that, though. I don't know what to do after lunch, either.
I could clean the apartment, having only cleaned the bathroom yesterday, but I don't want to inconvenience my roommate by mopping the floors while he's home. I could do other non-mopping tasks (dusting, the small amount of vacuuming we have), but they would only take a trivial amount of time.
I could do some review in preparation for writing my second, "easy" dissertation chapter, but I've hit a roadblock there -- some stuff I was going to consult from Ritschl's Doctrine of Justification is from volume 1, and I only have volume 3. I don't even know if it's really necessary to use the Ritschl stuff, since my main concern is Aulen. Still, it's a roadblock.
I could read some Nancy for my AAR presentation. I could also read Laclau's Populist Reason, seeing as how I've agreed to do something for a panel thereupon that may or may not come together as an additional event at the AAR. I could also finish a book that I've been nursing for about three weeks, or at least make some progress.
I could even take advantage of the fact that all extant episodes of Mad Men are available "On Demand" currently, or watch one of my Netflix.
I could also write a blog post with some kind of content to it, but I feel drained of all content unrelated to my dissertation and have decided not to blog directly about my dissertation. I'm not especially overflowing with dissertation-related material at the moment either, in any case.
Instead of doing all that, though, I apparently chose to express my inaction actively, by writing a blog post listing everything I could be doing, but am not in fact doing.
Friday, August 01, 2008
(12:00 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional: The Bible doesn't mention us
I confess that I routinely go far too long without getting a haircut. It is such a world-historical event that everyone notices, even bartenders and clerks at Walgreens. I confess that every time, I think to myself, "Maybe I should go closer to once a month rather than once per quarter," but I never follow through.I confess that I am similarly negligent about shaving, which I only do if I have a date or, failing that, if the itchiness becomes distracting.
I confess that I really don't want to clean the bathroom.
I confess that I could easily turn around and rewrite the chapter draft I finished yesterday. Moving forward is probably the best strategy for now.
I confess that I can imagine what it would be like to be a sports fan and it seems like it would be a fun thing, but the time commitment deters me.
I confess that I often marvel at the persistence of internet trolls. Think what a different place the world would be if we all had such sociopathic fervor!
Thursday, July 31, 2008
(9:53 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
On the old saw, "I'd hate to see how you treat your students"
Academics often hear this complaint from online correspondents who feel their opinions are not being sufficiently respected. The correspondent is thankfully able to handle the abuse with aplomb; the same cannot be expected of vulnerable undergraduates. (The sinister undertone: the academic should likely be barred from teaching.)What the correspondent is missing here is that a teaching situation is fundamentally different from a lively debate among peers. In the former situation, one expects ignorance, cliched opinions, faulty reasoning -- that's why the students need to be in class, after all. In the latter situation, no matter how often this expectation is frustrated, one also expects that voluntary participants in, say, a political debate will have some type of knowledge, some consciousness of what types of arguments are common and which are novel, etc.
Most often, of course, they do not. Instead, they simply wish to vent their political impulses in much the same way they would vent to a close friend about a fight with their spouse or significant other -- and indeed, they appear to have as much emotion invested in their ignorant, cliched opinions as they would in such a fight.
An academic in such a situation is in a double-bind. On the one hand, if they genuinely treat the person as a peer -- that is, if they subject their arguments to sharp criticism and demand facts -- they will be dismissed as moral monsters who like to torture 19-year-old business majors. On the other hand, if they treat the person like the ignoramus in need of instruction that they are, then the academic is a patronizing elitist: "You think you're so smart -- well, all you've got is three letters beyond your name! Up there in your ivory tower, you haven't gained the rich experience in 'real life' that I have attained in my work as an insurance adjuster and reader of right-wing blogs!"
In short, whatever the virtues of "book smarts," they will inevitably be shouted down by "street smarts."
