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High today, here: 22. Dewpoint then: 20. High dewpoint: 20.
High today in TO: 23. Dewpoint then: 20. High dewpoint: 21.
Low today on the balcony: 19.9. High: 23.4. Currently: 19.9.
High yesterday, here: 27. Dewpoint then: 18. High dewpoint: 19.
High yesterday in TO: 26. Dewpont then: 18. High dewpoint: 18.
Ominous winds blowing on the Rheostatics list. My first thought was, well, the good old days are long gone, anyway ... and my second thought was, no Fall Nationals this year; no more chances at the Starlight; no more free shows in odd places. Say it ain't so, Martin.
Last night's preemption was brought to you by Fight Club. My slight fears that it wouldn't hold up on second viewing proved unfounded. No doubt about it, it is good art. On second viewing, it was actually amusing as hell. On first viewing, it was annoying, until they got on the bus and duck flipped to rabbit and I saw it, not promoting fight club and sending up Ikea, but sending up fight club and sending up sending up Ikea. Though I can't quite shake the nagging worry that that's not what Palahniuk meant. But, you know, what shows that it's good art is that it's so deeply effective--it actually reaches into people and affects them--both ways. (It was slightly disturbing, watching it last night, feeling the effect, feeling like it was the same effect that I'd have felt if I took it straight. It had me wondering whether, despite myself, I was, somehow, un- or semi-consciously, taking it straight. But then it occurred to me that what fight club is supposed to do is also what art does: snap you out of your being caught up in representations and open you up to things themselves. (If it's good art, is it still postmodern?))
Last Friday, after Margaritas & Poker, and after the departure of The JacksonLesley, we watched Full Metal Jacket--probably, surprisingly, just the third time I've seen it. (The first time, I was mostly knocked over by the Ministry and FLA samples.) It'd never dawned on me before that when Joker says, at the end, "I am in a world of shit, but I am alive, and I am not afraid," the implication is that Gomer Pyle was afraid. I don't know what to make of that, but there it is. The character of Joker has become stronger, more unifying to the film, each time I've watched it.
Yesterday, finished Prado's book, which drove me further up the wall by hedging, in the last chapter, on some of the wildly implausible positions it attributes to Foucault, before coming back and re-asserting them flat out. At least I am now convinced that he's not joking. And he does actually get around to Hackingish stuff about social reality shaping itself to fit categories--which makes it all the odder, given the number of people he does quote, that Hacking is nowhere to be found. His favourite writer to quote on Foucault is probably Barry Allen (who not-so-coincidentally was my MA supervisor), which sent me off to Allen's Knowledge and Civilization to see if Allen really does take the kind of line on Foucault that Prado quotes him to support--and found that, actually, at least on the surface, he takes the opposite line: Foucault is basically a correspondentist on truth, or as close to a correspondentist as you can be while being a nominalist, which is to say, not a realist. But like I said before, the position Prado calls "realist" in Foucault is just the sort of realism that you'd have to be certifiably insane not to hold.
Prado also sent me off to Of Grammatology--something had to, sooner or later--to see just what the hell the context is of "il n'y a pas de hors-texte". It's actually in a section on methodology, on how he's reading Rousseau--though it is more than a methodological claim; behind writing, he says, we only find more writing ... which is, you know, the nagging problem with "disquotational" accounts of truth: "the cat is on the mat" is true if and only if the cat is on the mat--what you're left with are "disquoted", but they're still words. (The way out of this--if it needs a way out--is to stop thinking of words as separate sorts of things from the things that they're supposed to stand for: stop thinking of words as re-presenting, and think instead of words as presenting.) But the most interesting thing I found in my quick flipping around in of Of Grammatology is that Gayatri Spivak (the translator) thanks Catty, who certainly seems to be a cat.
Today, poking through some Meno commentaries. Dunno what to do about this.... When this Meno idea originally hit me, five or so years ago, I kicked it around for a while and then wrote it up and sent it off to a grad student conference, which rejected it mainly because it didn't hook up with the scholarship. So, fine, I went off to the scholarship and hooked it up, here and there, and got it accepted to CPA. Then, last summer, working it up toward something publishable, back to the scholarship again, hooking more of it up ... and now the first paragraph of the referee's report is about how it fails to hook up sufficiently with the scholarship.
Well. The thing is, no matter how much of the scholarship it does or doesn't hook up with, the basic point is still going to be the same: the account of colour and the definition of shape are different in kind--the account of colour fails to be a definition; the account of colour is, like the "theory of recollection", an account of how something comes to be rather than of what it is; Socrates says that the account of colour is inferior to the definition of shape; and, therefore, by analogy, Socrates ought to hold that the "theory of recollection" is inferior, as philosophy, to a definition of knowledge, and specifically to the definition of knowledge actually proposed later in the dialogue. So, you know, it seems like, surely, the thing to do now isn't to read a whole lot more and bulk the thing up further; the thing to do must be to pare it down as close to that basic point as possible. (The thesis is not that Plato's Socrates doesn't believe in the theory of recollection, full stop--which is the sub-thesis that the referee identified as the thesis. But the paper shouldn't give anyone the opportunity to make that mistake (which can be fatal; if the argument of the paper is "if the analogy holds, then no theory of recollection", then anyone who assumes the theory of recollection is just going to say, "but theory of recollection: therefore, analogy doesn't hold" ... if they even bother about the analogy at all); it ought to be agnostic on that point.)
It should, finally, be pointed out that all three outs made by the American League in the ninth inning last night, sandwiched around their two runs, were 1-3 comebackers to the mound. I wonder just how many times that's happened before, in any kind of baseball game, anywhere, ever.
High today in TO: 23. Dewpoint then: 20. High dewpoint: 21.
Low today on the balcony: 19.9. High: 23.4. Currently: 19.9.
High yesterday, here: 27. Dewpoint then: 18. High dewpoint: 19.
High yesterday in TO: 26. Dewpont then: 18. High dewpoint: 18.
Ominous winds blowing on the Rheostatics list. My first thought was, well, the good old days are long gone, anyway ... and my second thought was, no Fall Nationals this year; no more chances at the Starlight; no more free shows in odd places. Say it ain't so, Martin.
Last night's preemption was brought to you by Fight Club. My slight fears that it wouldn't hold up on second viewing proved unfounded. No doubt about it, it is good art. On second viewing, it was actually amusing as hell. On first viewing, it was annoying, until they got on the bus and duck flipped to rabbit and I saw it, not promoting fight club and sending up Ikea, but sending up fight club and sending up sending up Ikea. Though I can't quite shake the nagging worry that that's not what Palahniuk meant. But, you know, what shows that it's good art is that it's so deeply effective--it actually reaches into people and affects them--both ways. (It was slightly disturbing, watching it last night, feeling the effect, feeling like it was the same effect that I'd have felt if I took it straight. It had me wondering whether, despite myself, I was, somehow, un- or semi-consciously, taking it straight. But then it occurred to me that what fight club is supposed to do is also what art does: snap you out of your being caught up in representations and open you up to things themselves. (If it's good art, is it still postmodern?))
Last Friday, after Margaritas & Poker, and after the departure of The JacksonLesley, we watched Full Metal Jacket--probably, surprisingly, just the third time I've seen it. (The first time, I was mostly knocked over by the Ministry and FLA samples.) It'd never dawned on me before that when Joker says, at the end, "I am in a world of shit, but I am alive, and I am not afraid," the implication is that Gomer Pyle was afraid. I don't know what to make of that, but there it is. The character of Joker has become stronger, more unifying to the film, each time I've watched it.
Yesterday, finished Prado's book, which drove me further up the wall by hedging, in the last chapter, on some of the wildly implausible positions it attributes to Foucault, before coming back and re-asserting them flat out. At least I am now convinced that he's not joking. And he does actually get around to Hackingish stuff about social reality shaping itself to fit categories--which makes it all the odder, given the number of people he does quote, that Hacking is nowhere to be found. His favourite writer to quote on Foucault is probably Barry Allen (who not-so-coincidentally was my MA supervisor), which sent me off to Allen's Knowledge and Civilization to see if Allen really does take the kind of line on Foucault that Prado quotes him to support--and found that, actually, at least on the surface, he takes the opposite line: Foucault is basically a correspondentist on truth, or as close to a correspondentist as you can be while being a nominalist, which is to say, not a realist. But like I said before, the position Prado calls "realist" in Foucault is just the sort of realism that you'd have to be certifiably insane not to hold.
Prado also sent me off to Of Grammatology--something had to, sooner or later--to see just what the hell the context is of "il n'y a pas de hors-texte". It's actually in a section on methodology, on how he's reading Rousseau--though it is more than a methodological claim; behind writing, he says, we only find more writing ... which is, you know, the nagging problem with "disquotational" accounts of truth: "the cat is on the mat" is true if and only if the cat is on the mat--what you're left with are "disquoted", but they're still words. (The way out of this--if it needs a way out--is to stop thinking of words as separate sorts of things from the things that they're supposed to stand for: stop thinking of words as re-presenting, and think instead of words as presenting.) But the most interesting thing I found in my quick flipping around in of Of Grammatology is that Gayatri Spivak (the translator) thanks Catty, who certainly seems to be a cat.
Today, poking through some Meno commentaries. Dunno what to do about this.... When this Meno idea originally hit me, five or so years ago, I kicked it around for a while and then wrote it up and sent it off to a grad student conference, which rejected it mainly because it didn't hook up with the scholarship. So, fine, I went off to the scholarship and hooked it up, here and there, and got it accepted to CPA. Then, last summer, working it up toward something publishable, back to the scholarship again, hooking more of it up ... and now the first paragraph of the referee's report is about how it fails to hook up sufficiently with the scholarship.
Well. The thing is, no matter how much of the scholarship it does or doesn't hook up with, the basic point is still going to be the same: the account of colour and the definition of shape are different in kind--the account of colour fails to be a definition; the account of colour is, like the "theory of recollection", an account of how something comes to be rather than of what it is; Socrates says that the account of colour is inferior to the definition of shape; and, therefore, by analogy, Socrates ought to hold that the "theory of recollection" is inferior, as philosophy, to a definition of knowledge, and specifically to the definition of knowledge actually proposed later in the dialogue. So, you know, it seems like, surely, the thing to do now isn't to read a whole lot more and bulk the thing up further; the thing to do must be to pare it down as close to that basic point as possible. (The thesis is not that Plato's Socrates doesn't believe in the theory of recollection, full stop--which is the sub-thesis that the referee identified as the thesis. But the paper shouldn't give anyone the opportunity to make that mistake (which can be fatal; if the argument of the paper is "if the analogy holds, then no theory of recollection", then anyone who assumes the theory of recollection is just going to say, "but theory of recollection: therefore, analogy doesn't hold" ... if they even bother about the analogy at all); it ought to be agnostic on that point.)
It should, finally, be pointed out that all three outs made by the American League in the ninth inning last night, sandwiched around their two runs, were 1-3 comebackers to the mound. I wonder just how many times that's happened before, in any kind of baseball game, anywhere, ever.
