waste

Loot

Whenever I go home there is always a stack of Free! Books! on my bed for me to take, mostly advances that my mom doesn't want; there is also a standing invitation to rummage through piles and see what interests me, since those things too might be available for the taking.  Thus I will be returning northwards with the following:

Ehrhard Bahr - Weimar on the Pacific; Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke; Steven Hall - The Raw Shark Texts (this, an advance, contains the author's myspace url on the back—classy); Harry Mathews - The Human Condition (short stories, divided into three sections, the second of which is titled something like Stories to be Read Aloud; it might perhaps be interesting to assemble persons and actually read them aloud); Mario Vargas Llosa - The Bad Girl; Russell Hoban - Linger Awhile; Max Frisch - I'm Not Stiller; Klas Östegren - Gentlemen; Elise Blackwell - Grub; John Cowper Powys - Porius, and Gerald Edelman - Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge.

Tomorrow I will see about liberating cookbooks.

Editors: still not writers

I saw it first with Nan Talese of Doubleday; now I see it again with Kate Medina, Executive Vice President and Executive Editorial Director of Random House.  I quote in its entirety her little note at the beginning of the advance of Amy Bloom's Away:

Dear Reader:

Amy Bloom's Away is the kind of novel you dream about, a wonderful and wonderfully written book you can't put down—and that you never want to end! Like Come to Me and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, Amy Bloom's two award-winning collections of short stories, Away startles and delights, through the power of Amy Bloom's irresistible writing and voice, and with its profound, funny, and moving portrait of the surprises of passion and love. Based on a real woman in history, Away takes us into the raunchy, desperate, fluid world of America in the 1920s, as Lillian's unforgettable story moves from New York's Lower East Side, across America, and on up into the Yukon. Please join us in discovering the remarkable pleasures of this book, Amy Bloom's Away.

All Best,

[signature]

Kate Medina

I appreciate that Kate Medina probably wants to use the author's name as frequently as possible so that Kate Medina's readers will remember it better, but Kate Medina should also be aware, I think, that the result sounds really weird and that anaphora is useful on occasion.  (And after all, we are holding the book in our hands; it's not as if it would be hard to determine the author's name.) The little comment set off with an em dash and ending with an exclamation point sounds totally artificial; the use of "startles" and "delights" without an object makes them sound as if they're to be taken in an iterative sense (even now the book is startling and delighting someone! It's in the habit!) and I suspect she only used them so as to avoid the adjectival, but much more natural, phrase "is startling and delightful"; the remainder of that sentence (from "through the power" on) is just godawful and horribly cliched.  A "portrait of the suprises of passion and love"?  Like, gag me with a spoon.  "Fluid", after the much more concrete "raunchy" and "desperate", sounds oddly sociological, and I don't really know what she means.  "A real woman in history" is just ridiculous. I also like how she tells us that the book concerns the "world of America", but the only two actual locations she can bring herself to mention are the London School of EconomicsLES and the Yukon; everything else is just, you know, America.  That broad blank expanse.  The repetition of the novelist's and the novel's names at the end of the sentence is just horribly stiff.  "Wonderful" evidently means something more than just "wonderfully written" (as it should; something can be well written but otherwise crap, for a suitably marshalled sense of writing well), but given that one precisification of the novel's wonderful nature is given, I am left curious about what else is wonderful about it.  Better just to leave it at "wonderful" simpliciter than to invite such confusions.

And so on, and, one imagines, so forth.  I reject you, Kate Medina, and all of your, Kate Medina's, embarrassing works.

Cool an’ glue an’ yummies

Respect, yo.

A recent discovery: mortise and tenon joints are so called because they hold until death.

In which I allow myself to overwrite

Yes: it's real.  And I have one.  Walking into Bittersweet for to purchase a brownie, I let my gaze pass over the right-hand wall, the one on which the milk chocolate bars are displayed (the dark bars, being more sinister, get the left).  As soon as I saw the audacious flume of bacon, depicted on the bar's box as if spilling uncontrollably forth from the bottom, and in its force widening its way as it went, with a slight curve to its course as if the cover captured a shock of auburn hair mid-flip and all without care, saw the bacon still glistening with the sheen of dripping grease, and the whole of the most variegated, seductive coloration, juxtaposed to a pleasingly asymmetrical near-rectangle of chocolate embossed with the chocolatier's pretentious name (it remains unclear to me why a Chicago-based operation has taken its name from a French mountain range, as this can only lead to mispronunciation, especially in a city with a street named after celebrated author GoEEthee), and the understated, descriptive title announcing the contents as "Mo's Bacon Bar", I could not prevent myself from making the purchase.

It is, in fact, not bad at all.  The bacon provides almost more a textural element than one of flavor; or at least, the flavor it is contributing is hard to separate out from that of the smoked salt.  If anything, it's too salty; saltier even than your average chocolate-covered pretzel.

Amour propre as volitional necessity

I am fairly certain that in at least two different places Frankfurt claims that we can't help caring what other people think about us (IN YOUR FACE Feynman's first wife!).  That doesn't, I suppose, amount to full-fledged amour propre, but then, I haven't read Rousseau since Classics of Social and Political Thought way back in 01-02, and I'd be lying if I said I read him all that closely—just closely enough, basically, to think that this general will stuff sounded kinda strange.  Girard on internal mediation might also be interesting in this light if one can actually muster the chutzpah to claim that his analysis (since he does seem to be on to a real phenomenon, at least) is anything like correct.

Of course we still have the question of what to do about that, if it is necessary. Arthur Lomb sounds like an interesting case.  Bad faith seems inevitable.

For the soul

I wonder if any critic has ever suggested using Uri Caine's music for local anaesthesia during otological surgery.

Total Nöosphere on Wild Bass

Neat!

It looks as though they're using it as part of the same sort of project for which I'm using xmmsalike, too.

The myth of Sisyphus

When discussing criteria of personhood, one should marshal one's vocabulary with care.

On the Usefulness of Final Ends, last few bits of §8: Can something to whom its own condition and activities do not matter in the slightest properly be regarded as a person at all? Perhaps nothing that is entirely indifferent to itself is really a person, regardless of how intelligent or emotional or in other respects similar to persons it may be..  First sentence and three words of §11: Suppose there is someone to whom nothing is important.  Such a person ….

But … I thought you said …

(I'm sure he says something about really utterly selfless devotion somewhere, maybe The Reasons of Love, and probably doesn't actually think that entities that strongly resemble persons, and perhaps even used to be persons, but for their being comatose, aren't really persons, but, damn, that's some kind of criterion.  I also think it's kind of funny that throughout Necessity, Volition, and Love, The Reasons of Love, and Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Right one sees the same arguments cropping up often in word-for-word identical form.  Maybe Scott McLemee's reference to Žižek in a discussion of Frankfurt was more right than he thought.  Or perhaps composition by copy and paste is just more common than I thought.)

Disappointing truth

I'm sure that when I encountered in one of my dad's dictionaries of quotations (Oxford? Bartlett's Familiar? I think the former) the line A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket, it was attributed to John Donne.  In fact it was uttered by a fellow "John Dennis" by name.  Perhaps the unfamiliar name, finding no foothold in my memory, fell out of view, and the quotation, rather than floating free, fell into the orbit of a more famous and well-known name in the orthographic and phonological vicinity (and that's how you mix metaphors!).  At any rate, a disappointment.  The quotation is, as one might guess, dear to me.

(Surely the prompt for the preceding.)

On drummers and being strait-laced

We're all familiar, I'm sure, with that well-worn joke: what's the difference between a drummer (sometimes some other variety of musician is substituted) and a large pizza?  A large pizza can feed a family of four.

But surely a full-grown drummer could also feed a family of four.  Even a relatively scrawny drummer should have a substantial amount of meat on his or her bones.

The vocal harmonies on Sodastream's "Cane and Rice" are very pleasing to me, and they should be to you, as well.

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

Says a Flaubert letter.

Says David Markson in The Last Novel (v. good, not really a novel, was to have been the subject of a post until I lent it to someone else who then left the state and shortly will leave the country, you can see how this impairs me, I'm sure).

A rhythmic possibility

"Edna St. Vincent Millay" has, as one pronounces it, the precise stress structure of "Byron and Shelley and Keats".  One could venture a second line, "Was frolicsome, witty, and gay", though one doesn't know if that is actually true, and in any case, one finds one's inspiration and perspiration both foundering at the prospect of proceeding in the proper wise, perhaps because one knows vanishingly little about the authoress.  At any rate, one commends this curious fact to the attention of those interested in developing it further.

Yes, and

Who was it who said that wit is being able to connect any two things by means of a third? Schlegel? Lichtenberg? I think each has said something like that.

Today at dinner, entertaining an honored guest, Craig (pron. "Cregg") and I discussed, in a single stream, Mary, the pirate queen of Ireland, the fact that Hadrian's Wall was so deeply secured into the earth that it actually caused Scotland to drift free of England about 150 meters, leading the Scots to develop uncanny skills at sea (and also to plague the surrounding waters, and explaining the both the (re)United Kingdom's name and naval prowess), until rejoined by Arthur's knights, using joinery techniques now discussed on This Old House, a show rife with Masonic symbolism (the host's name too), and ballistic techniques often thought to have been rediscovered only in Renaissance Italy (and creating, before the mastery of those techniques, the lochs of Scotland; incidentally, there are many links between the Loch Ness monster, the Knights Templar, those little foam animal things you can expand in your sink, and the Library of Alexandria), but which were actually brought into Italy from England, along with the account of the splitting and rejoining itself, of which Macbeth is an allegory, that play also having been used by Welsh nationalists to combat Scottish home rule (it involves the curse, which actually doesn't doom productions, but instead causes earthquakes throughout Scotland), as well as the fact that gravity used to work in the other direction (this was actually extremely significant and received much exegetical attention), tauroctony, the identity of Jesus, Odin, and Isaac Newton, around whom gravity still did flow in the other direction (the apple hit his head because it had fallen to the ground from the tree, and then Newton hung himself upside down from the tree, following which the apple fell up into his head, granting him wisdom), bees (I can't remember what role bees played), the lucky fall (this actually has to do with gravity and our power of flight), the relative merits of sexual reproduction and spontaneous generation, and lots of other things I'm forgetting about.  Craig, perhaps, can fill us in in comments.  I admit that towards the end I started steamrolling Craig, commanding him to hold his peace while a scholar discoursed.  After all, he is but a lowly clerk.

This is my 501st post.  The URL for this page is, uh, intriguing, to say the least.

Squid update

It may indeed be significantly cheaper to buy them whole and clean them oneself, but it is not worth it. Not that cleaning them is particularly difficult; it's just that it's kind of gross.  And one must clean many a squid in order to get enough to form a nontrivial part of a meal.

The process can be broken down into about four steps, the order of which isn't too important so long as the first listed does indeed come first and the last last.  First, you pull the body-and-tentacles component out of the hood, hopefully getting the stiff cartilage thing that gives the hood a bit of structural integrity along with it, but if not no matter.  Then, you cut the head, eyes, ink sac, etc away from the beak and tentacles right above the beak, and squeeze the beak out.  Third, you get everything still inside the hood out of the hood by hook or by crook.  Finally, you remove the spotty outer membraneous layer from the hood.

The first two steps are really easy and not even gross.  The third can be kind of disgusting, since the innards are extremely unpalatable in color and texture*.  It's the fourth, though, that really takes it.  That shit is hard to get off efficiently; it sticks to your fingers; it's slimy; and all sorts of other bad things.  Eventually I figured out that if you take the side fins off the membrane generally comes along with it in one or two pieces, but not always, and before that, yuck.

On the brighter side, it turns out that cobblers are extremely easy to make and totally delicious, and that, shockingly, I like blueberries.  For years I've thought otherwise.  Over a decade.  It's really quite a blow to my practical identity, especially coming so close to my imam biyaldi-related revelations concerning eggplant.

*Actually it just occurred to me that it doesn't entirely disresemble semen visually.  Well, let it never be said that I find semen particularly palatable (visually).

Appomattox

I saw two different chamber operas by Philip Glass when I was in Chicago, both at Court Theater, In the Penal Colony and The Sound of a Voice (with Min Xiao-Fen on pipa), and liked both of them a good deal.  This, however, just doesn't seem promising.

An argument I don't understand

As Lichtenberg says: "there are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking."  (Others realize the same end by looking up quotations for the original wording: Es gibt wirklich sehr viele Menschen, die bloß lesen, damit sie nicht denken dürfen; G82.)  I myself just can't get enough of Millgram.  Here's a short paper of his (jstor link) containing the following argument:

Suppose that an ambitious and subject-irrelevant theory of belief T is true, and suppose, for purposes of illustration, that T identifies particular beliefs with specified brain states. We can imagine that T is embodied in a belief oracle: an appliance that sits on my kitchen table and answers questions about my beliefs. One morning, I am sitting in my kitchen, groggy and hung over, and my niece comes up to me and asks me whether there is life on Mars. I have an opinion about this, but it would be too much of an effort just now to collect my wits and figure out what it is. Fortunately, I have prepared myself for occasions like this. I turn to the belief oracle and ask whether I believe there is life on Mars. It scans my brain and tells me that I do. I now turn back to my niece and tell her that there is, indeed, life on Mars. (This is licensed by the coassertability constraint.) My niece goes back to her game of space invaders, and I am struck by the thought that warrant is conserved when I move from one member of a Moore's pair to the other: I have asserted that there is life on Mars on the basis of facts about my brain-facts that (I agree) are irrelevant to the question of whether there is life on Mars. (One would not appeal to the brain states of a Weekly World News reader to determine whether there is life on Mars, and nothing in the story has ruled out my being a Weekly World News reader.)

It cannot be legitimate to make assertions on the basis of facts that are acknowledged to be irrelevant.

What I don't understand is this: given that he's groggy, hung over, etc, why should we assume that he does have the relevant brain state?  The fact that, if he sobered up, etc, he would believe certain things about Mars (or, since I'm skeptical about nonoccurrent beliefs generally, would at least be able to frame an answer to the question about Mars once it's put to him), doesn't seem to be much warrant for the assumption that, while he's still drunk, he is also in this brain state.  Why shouldn't the machine scan his brain and say "As best as can be determined you don't have an opinion"?  This seems like such an obvious response that I am forced to believe that I have badly misunderstood something.

The unknown masterpiece

Elijah Millgram wrote an interesting essay for a volume on Nozick (called Robert Nozick) about philosophical persona-construction as an alternative to philosophical theory-construction, titled "How to Make Something of Yourself" (say what else you will about him, the guy at least has decent titles—the last thing I read of his was "On Being Bored out of Your Mind"), in which he identifies various members of the tradition, including Socrates, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Montaigne, "probably, the later Wittgenstein", maybe Foucault and Nehamas (he has his doubts), and Stanley Cavell (p 175).  He claims that Nozick's The Examined Life "is an exercise in this genre as well" though doesn't say whether he takes Nozick to belong tout court.  He also says that Oscar Wilde is not a representative (178), a claim which he qualifies by noting Wilde's "criterion for being a successful work of art, which invokes the secondary qualities it makes perceptually available" (I take it this is taken from the dialogue "The Critic as Artist"), but says "the characterization stands … he himself was neither philosophically trained nor interested in philosophical questions" (195n14).

I'm not so sure about the reasoning here (about the classification I'll keep to myself).  Nozick frames EL as something of a portrait which is part of his own life (ie not a representation at a particular stage), and notes that the material of portraiture used to create the persona will be "made up of theoretical pieces" (Millgram quotes this on 179), leading Millgram to pose the question of why it is that so often exercises in philosophical persona construction take the form of an orientation toward theories, as if they were philosophically primary.  He considers Nehamas' answer to the question, that if one weren't oriented to theorizing, one simply wouldn't count as a philosophical persona, and convicts it on two grounds: first, it's merely taxonomical (I'm not sure why this is supposed to be a strike against it, but that's how he presents it); second, it makes theory primary and personae derivative, when, at least in ancient times, it was the other way 'round, and, furthermore, this makes the point of the persona obscure.  So Millgram's counterproposal: the reason theorizing (in some form) so often shows up in such personae is that "the activity of theorizing is a component of the well-lived life" (180, italics in original), and, of course, since we are dealing with personae meant to display lives of some such sort, theorizing is going to play a role in them.

But look at what Millgram considers when talking of orientation towards theory: it takes the form of an explicit orientation.  His examples are Socrates demanding theories of others, or in unnamed but more common cases, treatments of earlier theories (179). But there's also an orientation towards theory which is: "no theorizing!" To abandon philosophy to be a rural schoolteacher, or an auto mechanic, or to have philosophical ideas and a familiarity with the somewhat recent philosophy of one's time (as Wilde certainly did, training though he may have lacked; IIRC there are references at least as far back as to Kant in some of his dialogues, though I may, after all, recall incorrectly) but to show no particular concern with working a consistent theory into one's own life, would not be to construct a philosophical persona.

I actually agree with that, I think, at least as far as the schoolteacher (though this case is complicated) and auto mechanic examples go; as I said I'm not so sure about Wilde.  But I don't at all agree with Millgram as to why. I also don't think that someone who left the worldly world to join a monastery, even if to contemplate the true order of the world, or whatever, would have a philosophical persona.  But this is because philosophy, despite the name, isn't, at least as it's practiced nowadays, actually about the love of truth.  Contemplating the eternal won't suffice. Love of truth, yes, but love of truth-spreading much more.  Hence argument, the theoretical tradition: a good way to convince others, and to sharpen your own grasp.  Hence, if you've got a persona, it had better be notorious.

(This is why the schoolteacher case isn't so clear, and why it surprised me, initially, to see only the later Wittgenstein on Millgram's list.  Wittgenstein already had quite a lot of notoriety and fame as a philosopher when he went off to teach preteens, and as far as I understand things it was a philosophically motivated decision.  "Schoolteacher" isn't much of a persona, but to abandon philosophy for humbler work (after teaching, he worked as a gardener's assistant), especially considered in light of what is I suppose an unsophisticaed reading of some of the comments about the self in the Tractatus, seems a rather philosophical decision itself, and if he could have kept it up, he could have shown something thereby.  Along possibly related lines consider GCL, "Ist denn etwa die Lage so selten in der einem Philosophie das Philosophieren versagt?" (J1234, quoted in German and not English because if I go through the trouble of finding the damn thing, you can be damn sure I'm going to quote it). That demand on being public—because, as Millgram notes, you're supposed to be interested in convincing others, logically (hopefully!) or psychologically (less admirable!), and you can only do that if, you know, the other is aware of you—will in Lichtenbergian cases kind of bite you on the ass, if you've got the truth-spreading conception of philosophy: philosophy denies philosophy to you, but philosophy does so, so you'd better make a big deal about how you're leaving philosophy philosophically, but then you've undermined yourself … oy veh.)

It's not seeing that demand on actually being publicly available that leads Millgram to make some kind of odd claims.  He makes the following claim: "that the most visible philosophers of the personal tradition are, almost uniformly, very hard to take … many of the mare positively—to use an ordinary but vivid word—creepy" (p 181, italics in original). I won't comment on that except to say that it seems kind of churlish to say that when Cavell is still alive (and is he creepier than, say, Kripke?) after singling him out as a "well-known contemporary representative" (175).  It's the explanation for this claim that seems to get things a little backwards.  First: "it is natural, when going into the business of fabricating a persona, to be ambitious about it … Especially when one identifies oneself with one's persona, one wants to do one's very best" (184). But if you've got an elaborate persona, you've got two problems.  First, it'll be hard to keep up. (That seems nonobvious to me. You might take to it like a sheep to slaughter, no?) Second, it'll be hard to keep to the plan. (Same question, I guess.) But one can solve both those problems by one and the same means: make the persona psychologically compelling—fascinating is Millgram's apt word (apt because. I think many people don't know this).  Then, you yourself will also be compelled, and you'll attract a bunch of sycophants who'll keep you on the straight and narrow.

This doesn't, according to Millgram, happen to every exponent of the persona-creating tradition; in particular, it doesn't happen to Nozick, and the reason is that in The Examined Life he affirms so few positions that he can wander around and consistency isn't a big worry.  (Millgram suggests that something similar's up with Montaigne.)  One result of this is that it isn't actually fascinating or compelling at all, though.  Even when it does happen, though, I would be very surprised if it has the etiology Millgram describes.  Take the bit I quoted from him about "going into the business of fabricating a persona".  A mite uncharitable: but perhaps some of the philosophers in the tradition do decide to create personae "ambitiously".  It seems more likely that some people decide to create outsize personae as such, but philosophers have certain beliefs that lead them to have outsize personae, or at least to feel constrained to certain narrow possibilities (as in, eg, Beyond Good and Evil 213 or Gay Science 290), without having "gone into the business", as if they could have just as well wound up with quite humdrum personae but for their untamed lust for, what, eccentricity?

But the reason for the persona to be compelling is not that that way, the person personating will be motivated to keep it up, or to attract followers to keep that person in line; it's that, if you think that philosophy is about communicating something, you're going to have to make yourself bright and colorful enough to attract notice.  Nozick says (Millgram quotes on 179) that the personae's "lives play a crucial role in convincing us of what they say … If we accept their views upon their authority … that authority is derived only from what they are and show in their lives". And at the end of his essay (192–3) Millgram considers various ways showing a life might be compelling logically, and not just fascinating. If the ability to do that kind of thing is your criterion for even being philosophical, then you'll only count as adequate philosophical personae those that attract a certain amount of attention.  There are various reasons you might attract attention: you could already be famous as a philosopher, like Wittgenstein or Nozick himself.  You could gain fame as a writer, as Montaigne did, even if during one's own life one was not primarily known as a writer.  (Lichtenberg might be another example of this, all the more interesting in that the waste books were always private and only published posthumously—he clearly wasn't developing what personality comes through there in order to compel by any means, no one ever being intended to read them.) Or, you could just have a really notable, unusual persona in life.  But if you had an outwardly ordinary persona, or even just an outwardly not extremely distinctive persona, you would be disbarred beforehand from being part of the philosophical persona tradition—so of course when you take a count of the tradition, you'll find a larger than usual number of fascinating gurus with no-account epigones.  You'll also find that many of them have, in some way, explicitly to do with theories and theorizing.

If, though, you have a conception of philosophy on which convincing others or spreading the truth is less central, or if you allow that an engagement with theory or philosophy itself can take the form of disengaging and still be properly philosophical, then it's possible that there's any number of philosophical personae out there of which one simply knows or suspects nothing, because it would be the mark of that kind of persona that it doesn't necessarily seek to make itself philosophically notorious, or engage in actual courses of theoretical (or, for that matter, written) disputation.

On Rorty

Did he, perhaps, move away from mainstream analytic philosophy because "eliminative materialism" sounds as if it as something to do with shitting?

A brief list

1. Galen Strawson's "Against Narrativity" is interesting, but I'm not totally sure he's right that Alasdair MacIntyre is either a normative or a psychological narrativist.

2. However, this bit from After Virtue strikes me as odd: "We have then arrived at a provisional conclusion about the good life for man: the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessay for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is" (p 219). I suppose the "what more and what else" is a bit of a saving addition, because, supposing, as seems plausible, that one can't seek for what one has, I'm not sure what someone convinced by that sentence would have left to do.

3. The work to which Michael Bratman's essay "Planning and Temptation" responds contains (at least if Bratman's summary is accurate) an astonishingly obtuse analysis of how one's preferences change in situations involving akrasia (& would seem to be one that could benefit from looking at the Protagoras).

4. Remember when I was interested in aesthetics and art criticism & history and shit like that? Turns out it's still interesting.  Wonder what happened there.

5. Might it be possible to write a distributed web browser, so as to enable a user with, say, an account on a computer whose IP belongs to a university with access to, say, jstor to make requests from that computer even when running the browser (or rather, interacting with the browser, since "the browser" would be running in both places) from someplace else? (I've been reading about Erlang.)

6. Harry Frankfurt:

One of the best recent moral philosophers, the late Bernard Williams, suggests that it is a person's ambitions and plans—what he calls the person's projects—that provide the motive force [that] propels [the person] into the future, and gives him a reason for living … It seems to me that what Williams says perstains just to people who are seriously depressed. The individuals he describes have no natural vitality. Their lives are inert, lacking any inherent momentum or flow … Surely Williams has it backwards. Our interest in living does not commonly depend on our having projects that we desire to pursue. It's the other way around: we are interested in having worthwhile projects because we do intend to go on living , and we would prefer not to be bored. (Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right, pp 36–7; the bracketed replacements are Frankfurts, the ellipses mine.)

Surely Williams has it right. Being bored because one had absolutely no projects at all (cares, whatever you want to call them) wouldn't be the boredom of waiting impatiently for something necessary to fulfill a project one had, but couldn't proceed with; it would be the boredom of an utter vacuum of meaning—not waiting for something, just … interminable waiting.  (Here's a fun little pic that I think I first found at pas au-delà.)  The volitional necessity of caring about one's own life is pretty flimsy; I doubt it could provide much in the way of meaning or motivation.  (And wouldn't that make one seriously depressed?)

Overheard on Caltrain

A pure heart—yes, quite an excellent thing, my friend, indeed, a pure heart is very excellent, but to stop there would be a mistake, a co-loss-al-mis-take! A pure heart is an excellent thing, but can we deny that there are many other excellent things, for instance, a clean shirt; a clean shirt is also an excellent thing! There can be no denying it; a pure heart and a clean shirt, these two go together like peas in a pod, at least insofar as excellence is considered! You look surprised, but just last Saturday I saw an old classmate who is now a collegiate secretary, and who has very bright prospects, and if you don't mind my saying so, an even brighter shirt! Marvellously clean! You know there are great things in store for a man like that, and so who can deny that a clean shirt is as excellent as a pure heart, perhaps even more excellent!

If I were John Hollenbeck, I would title a Claudia Quintet tune Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.  A tune so titled could fit with their sound quite well.