waste

Further dispatches from the world of chocolate and bacon

I got the Zotter coffee/plum/bacon bar, and by far the most prominent flavor and scent is that of cardamom (which it also contains so at least it's not mysterious).  There are some recognizable plummy bits, at least texturewise, and a coffee-y aftertaste, but overall this is kind of a disappointment, not just because it lacks the advertised bacon, but in itself, as well.  It's certainly not as good as the baconless "Spicy Chicken Ensemble" bar.  (Previously. More on the Vosges bacon bar.)

Songs for Ché

AALY Trio + Ken Vandermark; Ellery Eskelin with Andrea Parkins & Jim Black; Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra; Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Quintet and his New Jazz Orchestra (playing a medley with Song for Ché sandwiched between Te Recuerdo Amanda and Reducing Agent); Ornette Coleman; Masayuki Takayanagi; Robert Wyatt.

Three ways of spilling ink

1. In the manner of a slapstick routine
2. Unwittingly
3. Deliberately and maliciously

Ain't it always the way

You come up with a clever title for a paper, and someone's already taken it, and thirteen years prior, to boot.

Some day my station will be changed

I just received a mass email, to his friends and family, from a friend of mine from high school, who was raised Lutheran but had a conversion experience at some point either in Canada or in southern Europe and joined the Orthodox Church, going so far as to join a monastery, announcing that he had lately become tonsured a monk—I didn't even register the full extent of what that meant (thinking, based on the picture of him and his father, who had come up to the monastery for the occasion, that perhaps its chief significance lay in his now being able to wear a funny-looking hat) until I noticed that the email was signed, not "Br. $name", as his emails had been in the past, but rather "Fr. $name".

Progress in life!

Also, the email was written in English, German, Finnish, and what turns out to be Icelandic.  FUN FACT: "frændfólki" is Icelandic for "friends" (in what I take to be the dative case), and "pabba" (possibly also dative) is father.  The only real surprise here is that it isn't in more languages, though.  (It is also interesting to see what differences exist between the versions; in all of them but the English he explains what "rosophore" means, and the opening sentence gets (omitting the Finnish) progressively lengthier: "I thank you all for your prayers"; "Ich danke Euch allen für Eure Gebete meinethalber"; "Ég þakka ykkur öllum fyrir að hafa beðið til Guðs fyrir mig"—something like "I thank you all for having prayed to God for me"? Interesting that, on the wiktionary page, the example for the verb meaning "pray" also explicitly includes the "to god" part; I also wonder what the relation of "biðja" is to "bieten", "bitten", and "beten".  The simple past, "bað", is closest to "bat", and "bade" in English; the OED's etymology for "bid" links it in various meanings to both "bitten" and "bieten" (surviving, I guess, in making a bid at auction), and also mentions ON "biðja" in senses pertaining to both asking and praying; apparently "bid" itself used to mean "pray": "I bidde god I neuere mot haue Ioye" isn't a command but a pressing request. Of course, none of that explains the histories of the three different German verbs, but then, it is an English dictionary.)

Slightly foxy; very fine

There seems to be an incongruity between the purchase price of the topmost item and the fee for shipping. This suggests an ingenious plan: purchase the shipping on the book, but not the book itself.

Lovelyville, next door to Terribletown

I have started, for the third time, Or, having read Either something like three years ago, having picked them up, in two volumes (which is only reasonable), something like a little more than three years ago, having seen them at Myopic Books in the out of print edition recommended (in, I understand, somewhat strong terms) when Conant and Lear (or Lear alone? but I don't think so) taught a class on them, which I didn't take for logistical reasons, though it would have been better had I.  This would be the edition that had different translators for each volume, David Swenson for Either and Walter Lowrie for Or.  I can't judge the translation, obviously, but the Lowrie Or has at least two things to recommend it of which I doubt the Hong and Hong translation with which Princeton UP has replaced it can boast.  First, footnote thirteen, which reads in its entirety "As a cloud upon Semele, as rain upon Danae".  (Oddly I had remembered it as "As a cloud upon Semele; as a rain upon Danae", which is, I think, superior, but the way it actually runs is not to be sneezed at.)  Unfortunately one cannot be certain whether to credit Lowrie for the note, or the reviser, Howard Johnson, or the Danish editors of Kierkegaard's Samlede Værker. There is, however, little doubt but that Lowrie can be credited for the Translator's Preface under which, after all, his name stands, and which is thoroughly delightful. First, in both the Preface and the Introduction Lowrie refers to Kierkegaard solely by "S.K.". Second, he is rather less enthusiastic about the material than one is accustomed to hearing about from translators (in both the Preface and the Introduction we are told, in the exact same words, that Either/Or "is undoubtedly a work of genius", but qualifications are quick to come; for instance, Lowrie begs us remember that "if in some instances the translation appears stupid or even incomprehensible, the original is no better. Inasmuch as I have been regarded by supercilious critics as an undiscriminating eulogist of S.K., I am not sorry to have an opportunity of saying this here"). Finally, the third paragraph of the admittedly short Preface begins thus:

This is all I need to say by way of a preface. But I confess to a special liking for prefaces—at least for writing them.

Follows a page and a half encompassing the practice of preface-writing and their relation to, for instance, jacket blurbs, a typology of prefaces, and, coming at the end, the observation that "[i]ndeed there is no end to the prefaces which might appropriately accompany every book. Since I am only a translator it would not be seemly for me to try out this experiment here", even though in the very next sentence he acknowledges that the it's the Introduction, and not the Preface, that's really specific to the book we're holding.

(Enough of this fiddle-faddle! What of the text itself? Early in his first letter, Judge William writes of novels and plays dealing with marriage that "by these prodigious efforts very little has been accomplished for the glorification of marriage, and I doubt very much if by the reading of such works any man has been made capable of performing the task he set himself or has felt oriented in life" (pp 17–8).  One wonders exactly how the good Judge—who "may have been a prosy person", Lowrie suggests in his introduction, "as moralists commonly are"—expects to get anyone oriented, or to glorify marriage, by dint of his rather stultifying letter, or even why A would read it through to the end.  Who gets oriented in life by the argumentative force of philosophical arguments?  This may, of course, be an ironical point of S.K.'s, but one will still be led to wonder about the character—what does he think he's up to, anyway?)

An actual exchange

After telling a joke which actually is funny (the one which, in its most skeletal form, involves the request "close the window, it's cold outside" and, when the action's completed, the rejoinder "so now it's warm outside?"*), and being met with lack of amusement:

"You just didn't find it funny."
"Yes, but I also think it isn't funny."

*I tried to explain: you see, the punchline makes us see that the earlier request can also be interpreted as if it were analogous to such requests as "turn the lights on, it's dark in here", in which the action recommended is supposed to make the state adduced as a reason for the action no longer obtain! Somehow this wasn't convincing.

An idle thought

I absolutely refuse even to look up the names of all the relevant articles, let alone reread those I haven't read in a while (and it's possible I haven't ever read one of them, though I'm not sure about that, but that very lack of surety is probably good enough for jazz). Elijah Millgram wrote an article for a collection devoted to Iris Murdoch, part of which article was a criticism of Velleman's "Love as a Moral Emotion", which purports to be Murdochian in spirit, in part for (something like) abstracting from the particularity of the individual.  Here is my idle thought: is it perhaps the case that the concept of lovin' that Velleman uses in Persons in Prospect, since it is supposed to have as a fitting target only particular individuals in their particularity, is more in line with the Murdochian view as Millgram understands it, and to that extent not in line with the view in "Love as  Moral Emotion"?

Beats me, for obvious reasons.

What was post-rock (not from the point of view of Hegel)?

After having argued repeatedly with Phil Ford of Dial "M" for Musicology about post-rock, and having been unable to come up with a convincing musical account of what distinguishes it from other sorts of ambitious indieish endeavors (as against Ford's more historical spin on the term), instead lamely suggesting, well, you know, it's a family resemblance concept, maaaaan, I offered to put my money where my mouth was and create a mix of the stuff—after all, that's how you learn, and teach, family resemblance concepts. So I have done just that.  A fallout of the general lengthiness of post-rock: eleven tracks total one hour and forty minutes, and it's 160 megs.  There is a tracklist below, from which Tortoise is conspicuously absent. Part of the reason for that is simply that I don't have a whole lot of Tortoise, just the albums TNT and Millions Now Living Will Never Die. But part of it is just that it seems increasingly as if McEntire was right all along to deny that Tortoise was a post-rock band (while Mogwai was wrong to say the same of themselves).  What, for instance, is all that tropicalia doing all over TNT?  I have also included a track by Isis, in an attempt to show how the term post-metal makes sense w/r/t post-rock.  Also absent are some of the really dreadfully sucky exponents of the style (eg This is the Process of a Still Life).

Tthe Talk Talk track is much softer than all the others.

There are some ogg files in the mix, so iTunes users will want to do this dance.

Practical reason is demanding

Quo' Velleman, once in the main text and once in a footnote:

Practical reason thus encourages me to identify kinds of joke, recognizable by family resemblance if not by description, that constitute what is amusing for me.

Yet I am also under rational pressure to identify kinds of jokes that regularly tend to amuse me by themselves [sc. as opposed by dint of my being drunk, nervous, high, or the like], so that I can comprehend my responses to jokes more generally, without reference to the circumstances.

Really?  Rational pressure? I actually am interested in thinking about what sorts of jokes regularly tend to amuse me, at least in a de re sort of way about some of them.  Mostly puns and shaggy dog stories. But that's because I find them interesting, not because I care particularly much about finding out about my responses to them as such, and I'm pretty sure this is a dispensable feature of my character, and not a response to a rational pressure or the dictates of practical reason.

Prudery can be deceptive

None but a fool would think that sheep are so called because they are sheepish; plainly, sheepish people are so called because they are (supposedly) like sheep. But what about rams? Are they so called because they ram things, or is, rather, ramming things so called because it's the sort of thing rams do? Or perhaps there is actually no etymological or conceptual relation between the words at all? The OED is inconclusive.  There is a second sense of the verb "ram", though, which it defines somewhat curiously: "to leap (the ewe)". One can well imagine someone reading this and not quite catching the drift.  Fortunately the illustrative sentences are rather more straightfoward: "A Ram, Rutteth or Rammeth the Ewe", and "hey will not be ridden, tupp'd, and ramm'd".

They are using the ninth meaning of "leap": "Of certain beasts: To spring upon (the female) in copulation". I would not think this numbers among the best practices of a dictionary.