Thanks Joe…

… for continuing to visit my blog, even after everyone else has abandoned me and my grand project. =)
Also, I just finished Blood Meridian, you all should read it too.

Online videos of philosophical lectures

A brood comb has put together a list of philosophy lectures found on google video. Primarily philosophy of the mind. Interviews, lectures, talks etc. by people like Searle, Dennett, Putnam et al.

I'm watching Thomas Metzinger's talk on "the self-model of subjectivity", from his book Being No One.

One Last Updike Post

UPDATE: One last review of Terrorist, this time by James Wood.  While a bit long, he gives the novel the critical spanking it deserves. (I'm starting to take Wood's critiques as the standard by which all other reviewers are to be judged.)

My review of Updike's Terrorist has been out for a while, for the one or two of my friends who haven't yet seen it, le voila.

It is, of course, always a bad idea to include in the same blog entry a much better and longer review of the same book, but in the interest of critical integrity, here is the New York Review of Books' take.

If only the novelist had spent more time dreaming himself into the paranoid and angry world of Qutb and his followers, and given Ahmad Mulloy sufficient intellectual and emotional wherewithal to justify his adherence to the crooked path of righteous violence, Terrorist might have stood among Updike's best work. As it is, it conducts an energetic, entertaining, but disappointingly unconsummated flirtation with its important subject.

I'm sticking with "a really unfortunate stinker". The book is reviewed because it was written by John Updike, otherwise, it would have already been consigned to the remainder tables.

Can Humanists talk to Postmodernists?

I just stumbled across this wonderful little essay on how postmodernists, by eschewing logical categories such as identity and non-contradiction, are ultimately impossible to talk to.

The short answer to the short question posed by my short title (bereft of postcolonial discourse since it has no colon) is no. Humanists cannot talk to postmodernists.

Obviously written by someone who is squarely in the "humanist" camp, it tends to oversimplify some of the most interesting claims that Nietzsche/Heidegger/Derrida et al have made about our access to reality and language. I imagine this type of criticism (call it logical inconsistency) has been levelled before, but I found it worthwhile nonetheless.

Barbara Epstein has died

Barbara Epstein, co-founder and editor of the New York Review of Books has died.

Strangely enough, there was an article in this weekend's Le Monde about the founders of the journal. At the end, the two founders talk about what will become of the NYRB after they are gone:

Même en approuvant son optimisme, il reste une question à poser à Bob Silvers. La New York Review of Books peut-elle exister sans ceux qui la contrôlent depuis près d’un demi-siècle et en ont fait “leur” journal? “Apres nous, la New York Review of Books sera différente, mais elle sera toujours là”, affirme Bob Silvers. Mais pour lui comme pour Barbara Epstein, “après nous” s’entend comme “dans très longtemps”.

(Even if one agrees with his optimism, the question must be asked of Bob Silvers. Can the New York Review of Books continue to exist with those who have directed it for nearly a half-century and who have made it "their" journal? "After us, the New York Review of Books will be different, but it will always be there", Bob Silvers affirms. But for him, as well as for Barbara Epstein, "after us" is meant to be understood as "in a very long time".)

Unfortunately, that time has arrived; let's hope that Silver is right and we'll all be reading the nyrb in another fifty years.

Are Jews smarter than Gentiles?

Do Ashkenazi Jews have a genetic advantage when it comes to intelligence?

The Utah researchers Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending proposed that Ashkenazi Jews have a genetic advantage in intelligence, and that the advantage arose from natural selection for success in middleman occupations (moneylending, selling, and estate management) during the first millennium of their existence in northern Europe, from about 800 C.E. to 1600 C.E.

Ulysses and Ugly Family Members

The New Yorker has a great little piece on James Joyce's grandson. Another particularly nasty example of a family member with the sole rights to an author's writings who attempts to manipulate scholarship by controlling access to original documents.

Interestingly enough, this cantankerous and opinionated megalomaniac seems, in some strange way, to be all together Joycean. ("Academics", he declares, are like “rats and lice—they should be exterminated!”) I couldn't help but be amused by the old bastard, even after reading that he has been systematically destroying letters in his family estate in order to thwart would-be biographers from unearthing unhappy family secrets.

There is something ever so evil about destroying unpublished letters. Someone look if there is a special circle in hell for such people.

Suicides at Guantanamo

In a stupefying example of bureaucratic doublespeak, US officials have deemed the simultaneous suicides of three inmates at Guantánamo bay as an act of "asymmetrical warfare".

"They are smart, they are creative, they are committed," Admiral Harris said. "They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

Though suicide attempts and hunger strikes have been ongoing since 2003, these are the first successful suicides at the facility. Apparently, lawyers for the prisoners had been warning of possible attempts for quite sometime.

Officials at the prison have begun reading to prisoners relevant passages from the Koran condemning suicide. However, suicides are no longer really considered to be suicides, but acts of "manipulative, self-injurious behavior:

In late 2003, military officials at Guantánamo began to re-classify many of the suicide attempts as "manipulative, self-injurious behavior" that was intended to bring pressure for better conditions or for release.

NPR and PBS on the block (again)

Public broadcasting in the US is set to take another giant budget hit, if something isn't done soon.

WASHINGTON — House Republicans yesterday revived their efforts to slash funding for public broadcasting, as a key committee approved a $115 million reduction in the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that could force the elimination of some popular PBS and NPR programs.

I suppose the Republicans have to do something to shore up the national debt, but this seems to be a drastically silly way to go about it, considering the general popularity of the threatened programs: do they really want to be taking on Big Bird during an election campaign that could put Democrats back into the majority? Didn't they already fail to do it once already? Do we have to keep fighting this fight? <br>

See also: freepress.net, though I'm sure there are a million indy media sites that are up in arms already.

Not all MFA programs are a joke

My brother just sent me a list of pulitzer prize winners who have either attended, or taught at, the Iowa Writers Workshop.There is a reason that we refer to Iowa City as the Athens of the Midwest (to hell with Madison and Ann Arbor).