The duck days of summer

I mean "dog" days (what a strange locution). In any case, the DD edition of the PCarn is here. Number 50! Let's have a big ... oh, forget it, it's too hot.

Christmas in July

Hark the herald angels sing,
'Glory to the new-born DuckRabbit'.

Hark The Herald Angels Sing
from the Christmas Song Generator.

Get your own song :

So if the Son has two aspects all to Himself, then does that leave only one for the other two Guys, or does that make six total, or what? (Theology is so hard!)

HT: Asphalt Eden

Edward Yang RIP

I missed this; film director Edward Yang died on June 29. He was best known for Yi Yi [N.B.: the original DVD release is supposed to be subpar; go for the Criterion reissue instead]. I've also seen A Confucian Confusion (at the NYFF) and A Brighter Summer Day, neither of which, alas, seem to be on DVD. All three films are brilliant. Yang was only 59.

imdb's bio page here. Another blogger's eloquent remembrance here.

PC #49: Vacation edition

Not too many revelers at this Carnival (must be too hot), but check it out all the same.

What the heck?

HT: Pharyngula, who's rated G for some reason.

Why cats make a huge mess (like they need a reason)

Over at Crooked Timber the other day, I opined (uncontroversially enough) that Rorty’s preference for novels over philosophy as a vehicle for moral progress shows his belief in the priority (in this sense) of imagination over deduction or even cognition. I then revealed that a book I was reviewing had as its epigraph Albert Einstein’s dictum that “In order for something to be so, we first have to think it.” I like this quote. First it provokes, with its apparent flirtation with idealism, offending our everyday intution (i.e. the one that makes realism seem obviously true and idealism wacky) that things can indeed be a certain way, even though no-one has ever thought it. Then we see a more congenial reading, more in line with Rorty’s attitude: we cannot work effectively toward a future we have not imagined. No imagination means complacent capitulation to the status quo. Or perhaps (more in line with this case, as we shall see), it says that we cannot see something to be the case unless we first think it, i.e., as a hypothesis (very plausible, if a bit boring). Finally (maybe, if we’ve been thinking about this stuff already) we take another look at the “idealistic” reading. Is it really “idealistic” to suggest that objectivity cannot in principle outstrip our conceptual capacities? In other words, is Kantian “transcendental idealism” really idealism?

Naturally realists will say it is. And if you were determined to spin it that way I suppose you could; but then “idealism” wouldn’t be so bad (i.e. if realism were the only alternative, it looks like a wash). I’m with Putnam here: the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world. Or at least that’s as good a slogan as you’re going to get. But let’s leave that business for another time.

Anyway, that’s the epigraph. Let us turn, at long last, to the book itself. I say “at long last” because in a post some time ago describing my haul from a local library’s semiannual book sale, I mentioned that I would put off until later my account of a particularly remarkable book. Here, finally, is that account.

Our book is entitled Why Cats Paint: A theory of feline aesthetics, by Heather Busch and Burton Silver. As you can see above, the cover photograph looks for all the world like a cat making a purposeful, indeed determined, stroke across a painted wall with his paw, in the manner of [insert name of your favorite action painter here], and the unfinished mural is striking, a colorful and dynamic assemblage of streaks and smudges. The photo credit, on the back inside flap, reads:

Front: MAX, Birdies (detail), 1991. Acrylic paste on painted wall. 86 x 130 cm. Private collection.

Flipping through the book reveals many similar photographs of cats at work, or of the finished products themselves, some of which, like Birdies, are quite eye-catching. Are these cats really "painting"? One's first reaction cannot but be: no way (we know the titles how, for instance…?). But when John McEnroe exclaims "You cannot be serious!" he knows full well that they are: that's why he's upset about it. But this – is this a parody? A hoax? A sincere but deluded claim? (A startling discovery?) At first it's not clear.

The publication info page, across from the table of contents, contains two interesting tidbits: at the top, the aforementioned Einstein quotation, and at the bottom, an official-looking notice that "Why Cats Paint is a recognized international experiment in inter-species morphic resonance and is designed to test the hypothesis of formative causation. I.E.# 644-38837-59." Curiouser and curiouser.

The book is divided into four chapters. "An Historical Perspective" tells the story of cat painting (again, that's painting by cats) throughout history, from ancient Egypt (presumably real mummified cats are shown with their possibly not-so-real papyri) through medieval times (a somewhat less authentic-looking illustration of a cat at an easel, c. 950 A.D.), up to the modern era (a poster advertising in idiomatically purple prose ("Spellbinding Displays of Artistry Hitherto Unknown") an 1880's appearance by Mrs. Broadmore's Amazing Painting Cat).

Chapter 2 discusses "Theories of Feline Marking Behavior," suggesting a biological basis for this activity in territorial marking, and revealing soberly that there remains some controversy over whether and to what extent we can regard cat painting as having anything like an aesthetic or expressive motivation. A biologist is quoted as demurring, seeing this behavior as "no more than obsessive-compulsive play activity resulting in randomized marks of no meaning whatever." But it seems there are other views.

Chapter 3 introduces us to "Twelve Major Artists" and their painting styles, which range from Pepper's traditional portraiture to Charlie's "Peripheral Realism" to Rusty's "Psychometric Impressionism." Naturally, streaks and smudges dominate, as in some forms of human painting, rendering some of the paintings rather dull, but some of them are quite attractive. In this section the authors acknowledge the difficulty of interpreting cat painting, but claim, at least with respect to Misty's "Formal Expansionism," as manifested by 1993's A Little Lavish Leaping, that "[t]he power of this sort of cat art lies in its very incomprehensibility which enables it to provoke and intrigue." Hmmm.

Chapter 4 adds another dimension to the story of feline creativity, discussing "Other Forms of Artistic Expression," including "appropriated" household objects (usually clawed furniture), litter box patterns, and installations (wool, dead mice). Here the joke (for that is of course what it is) gets a little thin. The cited review of Radar's 1994 Infra-mice gives it the old art-school try ("Their tiny bodies, wet and dishevelled, merge together as if swept along by some powerful force, yet only their heads join—a union of spiritual intent, a brief harmony of vision that is made all the more painfully real by the wide gulf that opens between their bodies and long flowing tails"), but the accompanying photo shows all too clearly, alas, just a pair of dead mice. No one could possibly believe otherwise.

What I found particularly interesting about this, philosophically speaking, was not the cleverness of the joke (which is only moderate, given its somewhat tired genre, that of pretentious-art-criticism/my-kid (or whatever)-could-do-that spoofery) or the difficulty (which after all was not great) of determining that that’s what it was. Rather it was the very idea of what to consider in deciding between such wildly competing interpretations. After all, Davidson’s radical interpretation thought experiment of course assumes sincere and cooperative informants, not elaborate hoaxters. Equally obviously, however, the principle of charity notwithstanding, such a possibility is an intelligible one. Once you consider this possibility, however, not only the correct interpretation of your observations up for grabs, but also the content of these observations themselves. At first I thought that this context added a particularly Davidsonian wrinkle to this unoriginal (e.g. Hansonian) observation – but eventually I decided it was more like your garden-variety “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” increase in level of doxastic circumspection.

Still, the phenomenon is an interesting one. At first, we see the pictures of cats “painting” and simply doubt that that’s the right way to think of it. The resulting marks do resemble abstract painting; but who knows what the cats are actually doing? They’re probably just using the wall as a scratching post (and are presumably declawed). Maybe they're "marking their territory"; or maybe they're just trying to get the paint off their paws. Or maybe they are fascinated by the marks they're making, and they're even dipping their paws in the paint for that very purpose (as B & S imply that they're doing).

Or maybe they're not doing it at all. Again, once the idea of a hoax or parody is considered, much of what we had been taking for granted (for the moment anyway) is now in doubt. Now the interpretive possibilities multiply: and my “Davidsonian” point again here is that "interpretive" activity must include determination of fact as well as of meaning. (Actually, that is a good point, even if this example doesn’t actually make it any better than the original thought experiment did; still, some people still aren’t getting it….)

That is, what's really happening here? By which I mean not: what's the real explanation for this behavior? but instead: what IS this "behavior"? In some of the photos it certainly seems that the cats are themselves making the marks. But of course there are many kinds and degrees of photographic trickery. Even if they are making the marks – which in itself seems plausible – maybe the owners/handlers (whether the authors or others) dip their cats' paws in paint in order to encourage it (though when the artist, e.g. Misty, decides to extend the work “off canvas,” rendering the work more of an installation than a detachable (sellable?) piece of art, that may not be such a good idea).

For the record, as you may know, there is indeed an ongoing research program in "formative causation,” as instigated by Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life for example (here is the Amazon link to prove it; see also here). Of course maybe he's kidding. But then we would have to ask (given his own straightfaced prose): do the authors know this? In any case many defenders of "homeopathic medicine" (or do we even need those quotation marks? What difference does it make?) look to this hypothesis as providing a theoretical basis for their practices. They at least don't think he's kidding (nor do I, as it happens). In any case, when we have multiple layers of possible hoaxing, or even bizarre error, our interpretive possibilities can get out of control in a hurry.

Anyway, here's how I myself in fact decided once and for all that it was not meant seriously (i.e., even as a hoax). After continuing to flip through the book looking at the pictures (it is a coffee-table book, after all), I finally found conclusive evidence in the back of the book, in the "selected bibliography." I seriously doubt there's really a periodical called New Cat Art, or a book called More Paw Less Claw: Helping Your Cat Develop a Better Technique (let alone Paws for Thought: The Magic & Meaning of Litter Tray Relief Patterns) but not all of them are so obviously phony. Understanding Art Writing, for example, is probably real – and maybe The Cat's Mind, or even The Language of the Tail. Hard to say. After all, that the thesis is wildly implausible doesn’t mean it’s a joke. But here's the kicker:

Mutt, R. Decorative Retromingency. Urinary embellishment as a major problem in the curation of feline art. Journal of Non-Primate Art, Vol. XV, 1991.

At first this isn't any more questionable than More Paw Less Claw. But of course "R. Mutt" is the signature on Fountain, Marcel Duchamp's infamous inverted urinal, to which this is a sly if unmistakeable reference – through the idea of "urinary embellishment" as well as to the issue of the artistic interpretation of found objects more generally. (There are other intentional giveaways: on p. 75, Bootsie's opus Cocking for Cockatoos (1993) is listed as being part of London's "Scraatchi Collection" – alluding to the actual Saatchi collection.)

For more on this purr-fectly fascinating subject, check out the Museum of Non-Primate Art.

Rorty links

More stuff on Rorty continues to pour in.

Here are a few from the Continental Philosophy blog, including (generally positive) remarks from Habermas and (generally dismissive) remarks from Roger Scruton.

Here is more comment from Crooked Timber, with a few links of its own.

Here's a good summary of Rorty's path (and a comment on his most famous book).

Some more personal blog reflections here and here.

Here's a 1995 interview.

Here's a brief respectful note on Rorty's passing (with a link to something with a bit more bite to it).

Iceman Submenu is dead

Today's New York Times has a muted and respectful obituary for Richard Rorty. While including a couple of scathing remarks from Daniel Dennett and Simon Blackburn (both of whom have actually, in some places anyway, been much more receptive than many in philosophy were to Rorty's ideas), it seems unlikely to produce the howls of outrage that greeted their treatment of Derrida (that "abstruse theorist"), last year was it?

Right next to Rorty's obituary was another, that of Senegalese film director Ousmane Sembene, whose films include Xala (1975) and Faat Kiné (2000). The obituary quotes someone claiming Sembene to be the most important African director ever. That may be; but what I particularly like about him is the way spellcheckers mangle his name (i.e., in suggesting improvements to what you actually typed). You know, the way when you type "Heidegger" it suggests that maybe you meant "headgear."

Richard Rorty, RIP

Via Crooked Timber (also Leiter Reports), I have just learned of the passing of Richard Rorty.

As I've mentioned several times on this blog, Rorty was a major influence on me, solidifying my inchoate but deep-seated anti-Cartesianism and turning me on to Davidson, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche (i.e., as possible allies in this context). As I read these other philosophers and my own views developed, I ultimately became dissatisfied with Rorty's particular approach toward (what I continue to see as in some way) our joint project. He even comes in for some pretty harsh treatment in my dissertation (esp. ch. 3 – yow!). But if it weren't for him I can't imagine where I'd be, philosophically speaking. Probably just another clueless epistemologist or something.

I met him once, when he gave a talk. I'd seen him a couple of times before but never spoken to him), but we didn't talk then. I later emailed him, on the urging of my advisor, asking him for an as yet unpublished paper, which he supplied immediately, with a few others to boot. He wrote that he admired the "audacity" of my thesis, but thought that the difference between Davidson and McDowell was too "abyssal" for them (i.e., their positions) ever to be reconciled. (I think he never got what McDowell was up to, seeing him as simply another outraged realist; but I also think Rorty's reading of Davidson makes that inevitable – one of its problems by my lights.) I never sent him my dissertation (not that I regret not doing so or anything).

As some commenters on the CT thread, myself included, have opined, Rorty was blatantly disrespected by a large segment of the philosophical community. Even now, many commentators seem to regard his willingness to challenge "common sense" as an excuse not to read him at all charitably (or even, in some cases, at all). Maybe Rorty does, ultimately, fall into relativism or instrumentalism. (That is, after all, my own verdict.) But it takes some careful engagement to show this; and I would argue that rejecting Rorty's position simply to defend "common sense" realism amounts at best merely to salvaging an unenlightening draw. And that's at best. Some purported refutations (I won't name names, not this time) are simply shameful – there's no other word.

My own advisor was a student of Davidson and a personal friend of Rorty's, so it is not surprising that he was (as I am now – and yes, the two facts are causally related), a sympathetic critic; but he did warn me not to write a dissertation on Rorty "if you want a job." As I've mentioned, I partly ignored this warning – partly from obstinacy, but also because to explain my views without engaging Rorty's would be impossible. Our differences notwithstanding – and perhaps this will motivate me to make them clearer – Rorty still strikes me as in some ways the most important pioneer of the second half of the last century. Would that more than a handful of us had had the courage to follow him where he himself was unable to go. If that makes any sense.

Here's a fitting quotation from the man himself, writing on his hero Davidson:

As befits a reviewer [i.e., of Davidson's fourth volume of papers, Problems of Rationality] who is also a fervent disciple, I have used the space at my disposal to expound Davidson's views rather than to criticize them. I think that most of his critics have failed to grasp the audacity of his outlook—to realize that he is calling for what he once referred to as a "sea-change" in philosophical thinking. That change would make much of contemporary philosophical discussion seem as absurd as scholastic philosophy seemed to Hobbes and Descartes.

Davidson had no taste for polemics, and he was too courteous ever to adopt a merely dismissive tone toward colleagues with whom he disagreed. But his ideas were as radically subversive of the traditional problematic of post-Cartesian philosophy as were Wittgenstein's.

Many who have no use for Wittgenstein have none for Davidson, and for the same reason: to adopt the views of either would be to dissolve problems which they have spent the best years of their lives trying to solve.

Wittgenstein is no longer much read in graduate philosophy programs, and perhaps Davidson too will cease to be assigned. But if these five volumes of essays do suffer the neglect presently being suffered by Philosophical Investigations, they will remain, like time bombs, on the library shelves. They will be detonated sooner or later.

With any luck (and subject to the by now familiar caveats), the same may be said of Rorty's work as well.

A less than perfect storm

As ever, I have a bunch of half-written posts I want to get to, but let me get this one out of the way first. As I think I mentioned when we were all listing the SF and fantasy books we'd read, I think that (along with Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, my favorite book as a tween) Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) is the definitive treatment of Mars colonization, and required reading for anyone even thinking about such a thing. I also liked his more recent The Years of Rice and Salt, an involving marriage of alternative history (Black Death wipes out Europe completely) and reincarnation (enabling us to follow our characters through many lives lived in this alternative world, not to mention interludes in the Bardo).

But I cannot endorse his most recent venture, a trilogy about climate change in the near future. I read the first volume, Forty Signs of Rain, but I plan to skip Fifty Degrees Below and the recently released Sixty Days and Counting. One of the strengths of KSR's work is his ability to weave together the personal concerns of his characters with the bigger historical picture (as well as, of course, the geeky techno stuff). Here, though, it doesn't work. One character, Charlie, is the climate change expert for a U. S. Senator trying to pass meaningful environmental legislation. Charlie is married to Anna, an administrator at the National Science Foundation. The couple has recently had their second child, and a great deal of Charlie's scenes relate his travails as a Mr. Mom juggling job and child care responsibilities. For instance, this particular toddler seems to be quite a handful! Two words about this: Bo. Ring.

Equally tiresome is the stuff about the politics of climate change in Washington. Apparently, well-meaning legislation is difficult to enact, due to the opposition of corporate and other special interests, not to mention bureaucratic red tape. Who knew?

And we get even more of this when we look over the shoulder of our other main character, a scientist who works for Anna at NSF. Frank is (hold onto your hats) driven by a love for pure science, yet worldly-wise about (you guessed it) the politics and bureaucratic red tape, not to mention the commercial profit-motive, contaminating the search for truth. He's been impressed by the potential of a particular young researcher associated with a start-up with which Frank is also associated, and we are to be struck by the ambiguity of Frank's own motives in his handling of the researcher's NSF grant application: he supports the project, of course, but stands to profit immensely if the grant is denied and the research delayed until Frank can rejoin the company and get the researcher under exclusive contract. A promising moral dilemma in theory, but the treatment here is uncharacteristically dull.

Frank has also, per SF convention, messed up the main relationship(s) in his life to date, and we are treated to many of his cynical ruminations on the biology of human mating (significance of hip-to-thigh ratio, the inconvenient obsolescence of traits evolved for life on the savannah a million years ago, etc., etc.). Plus he's a sportsman, a climber in fact, and in one decidedly bizarre set piece, we follow the technical blow-by-blow of his unsuccessful attempt to retrieve an overly vitriolic letter of resignation from the director's office, which attempt involves breaking into the building and climbing down into the atrium from the roof in the middle of the night.

Here's what one reviewer said at Amazon (from a comment on the third book (which apparently mainly features Frank rather than Charlie), but relevant to Forty Signs as well):

What Robinson really wants to talk about is why primitivism is the best way of life, why outdoorsy people are the only completely realized humans, why rock climbing is so interesting, and why Californians should be infinitely more snobby about their state than New Yorkers could ever be about New York. These themes interrupt Sixty Days so frequently, and at such length, that they essentially hijack whatever the book was trying to be.

I would like Robinson to go back to his word processor and give Sixty Days a fair shot, dispensing with the kayaking, backpacking, rock climbing, and feral life. That book would be more like a novel -- but unsatisfying, I suspect, to Robinson. And thus we are left with this question: if Kim Stanley Robinson's main priority is to preach primitivism and impress upon us the virtues of the California landscape and outdoor sports, does he really want to be in the business of writing novels, or is there a better way to communicate this?

How about the natural disaster angle? In this first book, at least, not much actual climate change occurs – there's a big storm and flood in DC, and the Arctic ice is breaking up, affecting the ocean currents – but nothing really exciting. I suppose this is part of KSR's point, that it won't go down like The Day After Tomorrow, but it doesn't exactly make for interesting reading. There is a suggestion, in a subplot involving Tibetan exiles, of possible future paranormal activity (this is a science fiction book, after all), but I'm afraid I'm not going to stick around to find out.

If you're interested in a better (quasi-SF) book about the politics of science, check out Carter Scholz's Radiance.

Oops, I did it again

What I have done again is not (presumably) break your heart, but instead neglect to post, in particular such that consecutive posts direct you to the latest Philosophers' Carnival. I do try not to do this, but, like many of us, I've been busy. New stuff on the way, I promise. In the meantime, you know what to do.

Confer, I say!

As I mentioned a while back, the 2nd Online Philosophy Conference is scheduled for (checks watch) right now. Actually it began yesterday. Mostly analytic (not that that's a bad thing ...), but/and there's a paper on Wittgenstein by Meredith Williams. Go confer!

Reminder HT: Leiter

UPDATE: New Philosophers' Carnival too!

No sale

So I went to another library sale, but this time I didn't buy anything. That's because by the time I got there they were giving the books away for free (they were just going to trash anything left over). So I took some things off their hands, as requested.

Starting off, we have a tasty item:

F. Brobeck – Cooking With Curry (1952)

This one comes from the library of my local alma mater. I'm not sure why they took so long to get rid of it (actually, maybe they didn't). Most of the recipes call for "curry powder" rather than, you know, Indian spices; and the section on vegetable dishes is called "Poor Man's Dinners – Vegetable Curries: Eight Menus for Lent" (because, you know, one only eats vegetables if one is giving up meat – for Lent, no less). Check out this epigraph, by Aleister Crowley (!): "Curries [...] sting like serpents, stimulate like strychnine; they are subtle, sensual like Chinese courtesans, sublime and sacred, inscrutably inspiring and intelligently illuminating, like Cambodian carvings." Yes, but I don't want to eat Cambodian carvings. And you might want to have that alliteration looked at, just to be on the safe side.

As at the other library sales, the religion section was particularly fruitful:

Jaroslav Pelikan, ed. – The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought (1990)

This Book of the Month Club release, a collection of snippets from everyone under the sun, is remarkably ecumenical: it even begins with a section called "The Unbeliever".

R. Greeley, ed. – Ingersoll: Immortal Infidel (1977)

For example, this guy. The back cover has him with hands on hips, looking stubborn. Nothing's getting past this doughty defender of the non-faith!

James Hitchcock – What is Secular Humanism? (1982)

The subtitle of this Servant Books release is "Why Humanism Became Secular, and How It Is Changing Our World." The cover illustration shows a shirtless guy, eyes blunked out like silent scream star Lulu Arfin' Nanny, either reaching futilely for the sun with his left hand, or playing volleyball with a grapefruit.

Catechism of the Catholic Church

This one is lauded on the front cover as "The International Bestseller" (I imagine it would be) and "A sure norm for teaching the Faith – Pope John Paul II" (and he would know!). 825 pages, plus a 15-page table of contents.

Nyanatiloka – Buddhist Dictionary

Another country heard from. For those of us who can't tell our Vibhajja-Vada ("Analytical or Discriminating Doctrine") from our Vibhava-Tanha ("Craving for Non-existence"). The preface to the first edition ends, as many prefaces do, with the place and date of writing, which is here: "Central Internment Camp," Dehra-Dun, India, 28-8-1946. Not sure I like the sound of that.

F. Smith, ed. – Pure-Land Zen Zen Pure-Land: Letters from Patriarch Yin Kuang

I've never heard of Pure Land, but the preface asserts that it is "by far the most widespread form of Buddhism in East Asia." It also explains that "[i]f you are suffering and if you realistically discover that you have only average motivation, then Pure Land is for you. Pure Land is about suffering and the liberation from suffering." Well, that part sure sounds like Buddhism anyway. Yin Kuang: (1861-1940).

The next three are also vaguely religion-related:

Stanley Fish – Surprised By Sin (2nd ed., 1997)

I was sinfully surprised to see this at the book sale. Most, or at least some, people who know Fish as a pomo lit-crit enfant terrible (and it's not clear that he's even that) don't know that a) he's a Milton scholar who b) made a big splash in that little pond with this book. One blurb says that the preface to this edition is "not only an apologia but also a brilliant critical manifesto in its own right." I did try to read Paradise Lost a couple of years ago, but I only got up to the middle of book 2 (it's longer than I thought). I liked it though, so maybe I'll give it another go.

Wolfram von Eschenbach – Parzival (Penguin edition 1980, first written, um, A.D. 1200 or so).

As a Wagner fan, I couldn't pass up a book about one Wagner character written by another Wagner character (a real person, obviously). It's billed as "a re-creation – and completion – of the story of the Holy Grail which [the story, I think they mean] was left unfinished by its initiator, Chrétien de Troyes." I wonder if there's anything about Grail-shaped beacons.

Emmanuel Carrère – The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception (2000)

I mentioned this a while back, in the context of Laurent Cantet's free adaptation (Time Out; more faithful treatment here). "The Adversary" is a traditional name for Satan, and there is much rumination here on evil and redemption. So not a book about religion, exactly, but there it is.

I usually don't get fiction at these things (that's what libraries are for, so you can take the book back when you're done), but I did spare these few from the dumpster:

The Pelican Shakespeare – The Sonnets

I have a complete Shakespeare, but I'm not lugging that one around just for the Sonnets. An inscription reads: "Dear H____, Sometimes reading this book may be hard. Just read it over & over & let your emotions tell you the meaning. Don't Worry, I only have read and understood only few of them myself. Love J___." Isn't that sweet?

E. Mitchell/R. Schulte – Continental Short Stories: The Modern Tradition

This collection has stories by Sartre, Kafka, Borges, Camus, Pirandello, Lagerkvist, Böll, Babel, and a few others.

Earl Miner – An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry (1968)

The back cover says that the poetry in question dates from A.D. 550 – 1350, but then goes on to say that this book is "at once a condensation, a re-organization, and an extension (to A.D. 1500), of Japanese Court Poetry (1961) by the author and Robert H. Brower, the standard treatment of the subject in English." So, a 150-year bonus.

Edith Wharton – Ethan Frome (first pub. 1911)

This is a slim paperback, very portable. From the back cover [Alfred Kazin]: "In its spare, chilling creation of rural isolation, hardscrabble poverty and wintry landscape, Ethan Frome overwhelms the reader as a drama of irresistible necessity."

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – Welcome to the Monkey House (1970)

I couldn't resist this given his recent death. Plus I haven't read this one. It's a collection of shorter things going back to 1950.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some reading to do....

Another book sale

This one must have set me back, oh, five bucks at least (hee hee!). Read and marvel.

1. Baird & Kaufmann, ed. – Philosophic Classics, Volume II: Medieval Philosophy

I used vol. I of this series when I taught ancient philosophy. It's primary sources with limited commentary, which is both good and bad. Vol. II has many short snippets from the usual suspects as well as some more obscure but still important names (Origen, Pseudo-Dionysus, Nicholas Cusanus). Interestingly, right after I bought this (the fourth edition) I got another copy in the mail! The publisher, thinking I might be teaching the course again (not likely), and thinking that we might use vol. II as well (they usually do, actually), sent me the fifth edition. The only difference I can see is that they dropped the New Testament readings at the beginning in favor of Machiavelli and Montaigne at the end, I imagine because the former are fairly easily available elsewhere and the latter are not. Oops, they spelled it "Montiagne." Better bring out a sixth edition!

2. Bohannan and Glazer, ed. – High Points in Anthropology (1973)

They're not kidding; I don't know much about anthropology and I've heard of two-thirds of these people: Boas, Kroeber, Sapir, Whorf, Kardiner, Durkheim, Malinowski, Levi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins. Hot stuff.

3. Gary Witherspoon – Language and Art in the Navajo Universe (1977)

This book is mostly about categorization and concepts in the Navajo language, so it's very relevant to my interest in interpretation/hermeneutics. Foreword by Clifford Geertz. Cool 70's cover, like the preceding book.

4. Joseph Fletcher – Situation Ethics: The New Morality (1st pub. 1966)

I used to think that when right-wingers complained about "situational ethics" they just meant "moral relativism" – you know, the outrageous doctrine that there are no "moral absolutes." But then I learned that there actually is a doctrine by that name, which I take to be some sort of contextualism (or maybe it is relativism – who knows). This book, which seems to have started it all off, is decidedly theological in orientation: it's part of the Westminster John Knox Press Library of Theological Ethics series, and six of the ten chapter titles begin with the word "love" (so, not exactly Gilbert Harman). I may rue the lack of philosophical, um, dare I say "rigor"? Here are the first sentences of the first chapter: "There are at bottom only three alternative routes or approaches to follow in making moral decisions. They are: (1) the legalistic; (2) the antinomian, the opposite extreme—i.e. a lawless or unprincipled approach; and (3) the situational." Phew – stack the deck like that and of course you win; but your victory will be hollow if that's all you've got (was there really no virtue ethics before MacIntyre?). It looks pretty clearly written and jargon-free, though, so that's good.

5, 6. R. G. Collingwood – The Idea of History (first pub. 1946) and The Principles of Art (first pub. 1938)

When I saw these I was pretty sure I already had one of them, and even that I had gotten it at a previous book sale in that very locale. Turns out I have both of them. If only that made me twice as likely to read them. Mark my words, philosophy of history is going to get very hot someday (maybe even Collingwood himself). Then I'll sell my extra copy of The Idea of History and retire to the Bahamas. With the other one.

7. Edith Kern, ed. – Sartre: A Collection of Critical Essays (1962)

This series ("Twentieth Century Views") is more literary than philosophical in focus (there's a Camus one too, I know, but I forget what others), but there's a section in this book on philosophy too. Includes essays by René Girard, Fredric Jameson, Edmund Wilson, and Hazel Barnes.

8. Jacob Burckhardt – The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Volume II (original German edition 1860-something)

As you may know, Burckhardt was the inspiration for the character of Herr Naphtha in The Magic Mountain. At the time I read the book I was more of a Herr Settembrini man, but I imagine I would feel differently now. This book is much shorter than The Magic Mountain. My guess is I can skip vol. 1 and still pick up the plot quickly enough. Should I ever get to it, that is.

9. Max Weber – The Sociology of Religion (first pub. 1922)

There isn't a philosophy section at the book sale, so a lot of the good stuff ends up in the religion section (along with stuff like Embraced by the Light and whatnot). I once again passed over a collection of Aristotle (even though it probably has something Ackrill doesn't). I did get a bunch of other things though. This looks pretty heavy-duty. It is, apparently, a selection from a vast systemization of his work that Weber left unfinished at his death. As the editor tells us, "this great work has been rent into segments and even now, after the appearance of the present volume, some sections of the huge treatise [Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft] will remain untranslated." Talcott Parsons likes it, according to the blurb on the back (he would, though).

10. R. K. Narayan, tr. – The Ramayana (this Penguin edition 1972)

I used to get this mixed up with the Mahabharata, but finally I read a much abridged version of the latter. When I did I found out that on the day before the climactic battle, Lord Krishna sits the great warrior Arjuna down and says to him: "Well, Arjuna, [the entire Bhagavad-Gita]." (Oh, now you tell me!) Now if I read this I'll get them mixed up again (because it will no longer be the one I haven't read). This too is an abridged version (167pp.).

11. R. C. Zaehner – Hinduism (2nd ed. first pub. 1966)

Short basic intro, probably owned (if the pink highlighting is any clue) by the same person as the previous book. Looks good.

12. William James – The Will to Believe and other essays in popular philosophy and Human Immortality

A Dover Edition designed for years of use! The former book contains the famous title essay and nine others I have never heard of. It is dedicated to "My Old Friend, Charles Sanders Peirce" – who as we know was not particularly pleased by James's use of the term "pragmatism," which motivated him to rename his own doctrine "pragmaticism" – a name "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers" (heh heh). The latter book is a single lecture, an Ingersoll Lecture in fact, and thus required to address the title subject. James uses the preface to the second edition to address a particular objection to the "'transmission-theory' of cerebral action" defended in the text: "If our finite personality here below, the objectors say, be due to the transmission through the brain of portions of a preëxisting larger consciousness, all that can remain after the brain expires is the larger consciousness itself as such, with which we should thenceforth be perforce reconfounded, the only means of our existence in finite personal form having ceased. But this, the critics continue, is the pantheistic idea of immortality, survival, namely, in the soul of the world; not the Christian idea of immortality, which means survival in strictly personal form." I do not reveal Prof. James's response to this objection (that would be telling).

13. Trevor Leggett, ed. and tr. – A First Zen Reader (1960)

Mr Leggett, the cover text informs us, "is an Englishman who has lived in Japan both before and after World War II. He holds the grades of sixth dan (a senior teacher's rank) in judo and of fifth dan in Japanese chess." The selections range from the 10th century to the (then) present, two-thirds of the text being taken up by a 20th-century commentary on Hakuin's 18th-century "Song of Meditation." Yow.

14. Eric Weisbard and Craig Marks, ed. – SPIN Alternative Record Guide (1995)

I love record guides with rankings, as most of the fun is agreeing and disagreeing. This is clearly a collaborative effort, given the not simply eclectic but seemingly self-contradictory aesthetic manifested herein. I think I'll leave the details for another post (and no, I haven't forgotten about the other, other post I owe from the last book sale, or was it the one before that).

I really have no comment on this one

Although I do wonder what the caption is on that illustration (warning: weird).

Chiaroscuro

John Protevi is a philosopher employed by a French department, as well as one of the many wiseacres who used to congregate at Michael Bérubé's place. Since the GNF Event (don't ask), many such have been seen wandering aimlessly around the blogosphere, evoking pity and fear in Aristotelian proportion; but Prof. Protevi has channelled his, well, whatever emotion was evoked in him by the Event, into a blog of his own, where he recently posted his own contribution (spurred by Leiter, as was the one here) to the discussion about analytic and continental philosophy. Check it out, and tell your stories there! (I see that John McCumber has posted in the comments.)

Meanwhile, at butterflies and wheels, Ophelia directs us to another post relevant to our discussion, this one by philosopher Stephen Law. (I keep wanting to write "Olivia" instead of "Ophelia"; anyone know why?) Prof. Law there interviews Nigel Warburton, another philosopher whose blog I enjoy (when it doesn't crash my browser), asking him about clarity in philosophical writing and the virtues of same.

Much of what Prof. Warburton says is as expected: yay clarity, boo obscurity. And of course this is an easy case to make. Clear writing is writing we understand, and we naturally project our success back onto the writing. It, or its author, succeeded in communicating something to us, where obscure writing failed; and success is necessarily better than failure. So naturally (as Prof. Warburton puts it) "obscurity can never be a virtue in Philosophy."

However, clear philosophical writing cannot simply be equated with successful philosophy; for one virtue of clear (or "transparent") writing is that it gives unclear thought (or downright charlatanry) no place to hide. Some clearly written philosophy can thereby be seen clearly to fail (that is, seen clearly to present invalid arguments, albeit clearly stated ones). Of course even this can be "successful" philosophy if, however unwittingly, it clearly exposes a philosophical error we had not previously seen to be one, or not that one anyway. (This is why I have no objection to Warburton's examples of clear writers, such as Peter Singer and Thomas Nagel; indeed, Nagel is a favorite of mine for that very reason.) Conversely, some profound philosophers (*cough* Kant *cough*) were poor writers struggling with deep and difficult topics. The point is simply that while obscurity may be a necessary evil in this case, given the writer's ability, it cannot be a virtue.

So the importance of clear writing, according to Prof. Warburton, is this: if (or: to the extent that) you can't understand what someone is saying, it is (to that extent) impossible to evaluate it, to judge whether or not it is true. Warburton generously allows that "not all continental philosophers fall into this category [i.e., that of "charlatan"]," excepting Kierkegaard and ("in places") Sartre. But one anonymous commenter thinks that Prof. Warburton is "only rehearsing the rather tired analytic vs continental divide"; that "most analytic philosophy [...] is one dimensional and the clarity reveals nothing"; indeed, "because they are so clear, they tell you nothing." This is what raises Ophelia's ire – in fact she hopes it's a joke, it's so ridiculous.

Also ridiculous, she feels knows for a fact, is our commenter's complementary assertion that "that is what is good about [post-Hegelian continental philosophy], after really wrestling with the language and the mode of expression, we feel that we are in fact thinking more deeply about the issues of philosophy" – to which she replies by underlining the distinction between such a "feeling" and being, well, non-deluded (having this feeling means "we've been conned"); and Prof. Warburton adds that this "is part of the seductive power of pseudo-profundity: it gives you the illusion of great depth."

Not too enlightening was that contretemps. But another commenter (also anonymous, but clearly a different one) makes what looks like a similar point to that of his/her anonymous comrade, albeit more judiciously:

While analytic philosophy is going to proceed with the demand for argumentation from premise to conclusion, much continental thought moves along the lines of engaging in qualitative description to explore a given line of inquiry. The goal would seem to be to develop the subject, rather than reduce it to a final conclusion. [...] No responsible thinker would push for intentional confusion. At the same time, there is such a thing as too much specificity. More so, there is definitely such a thing as too much deduction. A lesson the analytic school of philosophy still needs very badly to learn: moving only within the loop of premise to conclusion, the relevant qualities of the issues are often lost, and the real clarifying force of language is forfeited.

This is much better, but I'm not sure that this is quite what I would say. First, it doesn't seem that the issue concerns specificity exactly. We might, for instance just as well say that there is such a thing (and that this is an indulgence to which analytic philosophers are characteristically susceptible) as too much generality. But that just means that I don't particularly want to say either of these things: the point is symmetrical. Every specific claim is a generality at the next lower level, and every general claim is (obviously) the specific claim that it is. If there's a problem here (i.e. with analytic philosophy), it concerns something a bit different than specificity or generality.

Of course our commenter means not so much that the writer's claim is specific or general, but that its written expression is "specific" in the sense that it has to mean a specific thing. Still, it seems the same point applies. Everything (including meanings) is the specific thing that it is and not something else; and whatever makes every instance of that thing an instance of that thing and not of something else is itself a generality as well. I'm quibbling, but all I mean is that I think we can do better in getting at this issue than speaking of specificity. (For context, I should actually restore the part of the comment that I elided above, to wit: "[Heidegger] made a point about clarity in one of his lectures. He said that metaphysical concepts had to remain slightly ambiguous to be useful. While this seems intellectually offensive at first glance, I eventually saw a basic strategy within it which I believe is characteristic of continental thought; the intention of defining broader abstractions which render many issues clear in one shot. After all, that is essentially the advantage of abstract thinking, is it not?").

Nor would I accuse analytics of being deduction-happy. Of course they (we) pay attention to the deductive consequences of what they say; and if anything follows directly from what we think we know, then by all means let's find out what that is. (That, after all, is how we decide what exactly those things are -- that is, how they are individuated.) But I don't think it's fair to imply that analytic philosophers proceed simply by trying to squeeze the maximum amount of deductive juice out of this or that set of foundational assumptions. They're perfectly capable of speculation, conceptual innovation, and even ontological profligacy (i.e. the opposite of parsimony).

Still, our commenter is clearly (no pun intended; or was it?) onto something. Phenomenologists, for example, explicitly claim to be describing rather than deducing. (At the same time, a description is a claim of some sort: things appear thus, where this need not mean things appear to be thus whether they are or not, which it will take a peek behind the veil to determine). Wittgenstein is similarly categorical: "We must [i.e., in philosophy] do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place [...] The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known" (PI §109; see also §124). Of course we have to be careful in swooping down on §109 out of the blue like this (note for example the vexed questions of what "explanation" and "problem-solving" amount to here), but then see also §126ff, e.g.: "Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything."

Clearly [!] we have only begun to unpack this issue, and I have to go to bed now, so we'll have to come back to this. But I did find it interesting that Prof. Law himself brings up Wittgenstein in this context, in order to use him as a counterexample to the general claim that "analytic philosophy is going to proceed with the demand for argumentation from premise to conclusion" -- making the question now the sense in which and the extent to which one can helpfully describe Wittgenstein as an analytic philosopher (which of course in at least some sense he clearly is, qua student of Russell and father (however involuntarily) of logical empiricism). This (that is, my interest in seeing this move by Prof. Law) is because as far as your typical analytic philosopher is concerned (very much including Leiter, for example), Wittgenstein – his concern for "clarity" (in the very particular sense he uses it in the relevant sections of the Investigations) notwithstanding – is the very poster child for Gnomic Obscurantism Syndrome. So I do find this move somewhat disingenuous: he's an analytic philosopher when we defend same against single-minded obsession with deductive argument; but at other times it seems he might as well be (*gasp*) Heidegger.

Worth the wait

At the beginning of last September I enjoined us all to, as I put it then, anticipate the following April (= wait til next year). And here we are. What a difference (um, lessee ...) eight months makes! According to mlb.com, the Red Sox, who at 16-8 have the best record in baseball, will have their biggest lead in the standings at the end of April in team history. They've taken five of six from the Yankees; closer Jonathan Papelbon has yet to give up a single run in April in his career; starter Jon Lester (coming back from non-Hodgkins lymphoma) is doing well in rehab, about to return; and Manny has only just begun to hit. Not only that, their $100,000,000 man Dice-K, while performing perfectly acceptably so far, is only the second most exciting Japanese pitcher on the team (all hail Hideki Okajima!).

Of course I've just gone and jinxed it. If there's anything about this team it's the ability to put together a string of inexplicable losses sometime in July or August. But you wouldn't want them to just run away with it, would you?

Deep space

New Philosophers' Carnival, at The Space of Reasons. Thanks Avery!

They're at it again

... over at Leiter Reports, with the analytic/continental thing. The impetus this time was a statement on the U. of Michigan Philosophy Dept. webpage explaining to students that (as the statement puts it):

Philosophers disagree profoundly about what the best way to do philosophy is.

That's true enough, and philosophy students should indeed be aware of this if they're not already. The rest of the statement gives the UM department view of what this difference is. It's pretty much the same as the standard line we've heard before from Leiter et al (Leiter calls it "one of the more sensible things I've seen written about this topic"), and I was going to let it go, but in the comments to my last post Colin asks nicely what my view is, so let me try to say a few things.

First go read the statement if you haven't (it's reposted whole at the Leiter link, plus comments). As it points out, Michigan is an analytic department, so it's not surprising that the statement reads like a press release from the winner of an election, newly magnaminous in victory, and professing hope that winners and losers can heal the breach and work together in the future (on the winner's terms, naturally):

The much-discussed ‘analytic/continental’ divide was an artifact of the conviction, held by many English and American philosophers into the 60’s and 70’s, that analysis was the only way of doing philosophy. As this conviction becomes less widely held, and as analytic philosophers expand their areas of interest, the distinction is becoming less and less significant -- with the result that even predominantly analytic departments like Michigan generally offer courses covering all the major ‘continental’ figures.

See, we're overcoming our old closed-mindedness about that other stuff; we even teach it! But as we know if we've seen this before, when "analytic" philosophers give up the notion that "analysis [is] the only way of doing philosophy", what this means is that they no longer believe that what they do is characterized by a particular philosophical method of "analysis." Instead, what they do is characterized more generally as "valuing clarity and precision in formulating philosophical positions, and scrutinizing arguments carefully" -- or, as Leiter tends to put it, simply philosophy done well. The only thing preventing others from overcoming that artificial divide and doing philosophy well themselves, then, is their apparent preference for gnomic obscurity, or perhaps simple charlatanry (like ... well, you know, the usual suspects). And now that we know this, we can go ahead and teach "continental" philosophers ourselves (at least those, like all of those listed -- Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Foucault -- who are safely dead); but properly now, i.e. formulating their positions clearly and precisely, and scrutinizing them carefully (instead of, I don't know, "interpreting" them like a holy text or something).

So you have to read between the lines of this purposely bland statement to see what's going on. But "continental" philosophy is not the only kind of philosophy condescended to here. Pragmatism is certainly not "continental" philosophy; so it is either relegated to the history books, on the one hand, or folded in with analytic philosophy on the other (after all, officially anyway, the only good pragmatists are scientific realists). Or check out the threefold division of earlier analytic philosophers: some looked for "definitive resolutions" to philosophical problems, some merely for making them clear; but others -- well, "still others [believed] it would show these questions to be ill-formed ‘pseudo-problems.’" Ah yes, cousin Ludwig – rather a black sheep, I'm afraid; but nobody really reads him anymore, so not to worry. Anyway, that just shows what a big tent we "analytics" have; no rigid orthodoxies here!

As should surprise no one, then, the statement is predictably self-serving baloney. But as Colin mentioned in his comment, I myself come from an analytic background. What then should we "analytics" say about other methods/practices/traditions? Well, that's a hard question to answer. I'll have to put most of it off; but let me say a few things. First, for all my abuse of it, the statement is quite right that "analytic philosophy" no longer names a particular method, or even a bunch of people who all read each other's work. Instead it names a bunch of people who were trained by, or who were trained by people who were trained by, an earlier bunch of people who either shared a method or simply read each other's work. Some of these people have very different attitudes toward other kinds of philosophy than, say, Carnap did. So the "analytic/continental split" is indeed "becoming less and less significant" in that sense.

So while Rorty may have been right a quarter-century ago to complain that analytic departments were those in which the answer to the question of "who is going to teach Hegel and Nietzsche?" was "no one" or "the German department" (or "the English/comp lit department"), this is less so nowadays, even in smaller departments. And in non-pedagogical contexts we see much more interaction: McDowell reaches out to Hegel and Gadamer; Habermas is big on Putnam and Brandom (himself a big Hegel fan); Andrew Bowie aligns Davidson with Schelling and Schleiermacher; Jeff Malpas merges Davidson with Heidegger and Gadamer; the Cavellians are all over Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Emerson, and the Romantics; and of course the interest of cognitive scientists in phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty is old news.

All this is to the good (not like I agree with – or even understand – all of these people, of course). But I would have to agree with Leiter that the overwhelming majority, as well as the trend, in "analytic philosophy" (now understood, again, as the various heirs of a once much more unified "tradition"), continues to regard not only most continental figures, but also the collaborators I mentioned, as inimical or irrelevant to a naturalist program they regard as central to it (if perhaps not constitutive of it as a method would be) -- that is, unless they can be read as naturalists themselves (as Leiter does Nietzsche, as a sort of proto-Quine).

Indeed, one commenter on Leiter's post suggests that a more relevant "split" might be between realists and anti-realists, or between naturalists and their opponents. And while the former seems inadequate (leaving out as it does, well, the rest of us), the latter may indeed be as important as Leiter suggests; but it works better, I think, when we see it as a split within "analytic philosophy" (again broadly construed). On the one side, in the ascendant, we have not only overt naturalism like Leiter's, but any other sort of incorrigibly Cartesian or dualistic view, however manifested: residual metaphysical realism (whether in metaphysical, epistemological, or semantic contexts), resurgent a priori metaphysics, hard-core empiricism, whatever. This of course is most of "analytic philosophy," and I find myself more and more thinking about letting them have the term. On the other side, scattered and demoralized, we have (neo-)pragmatists, (certain) Wittgensteinians, (some) phenomenologists, and others, which I suggest can be grouped in an unfortunately but unavoidably loose and fractious coalition which some have called "post-analytic". The term invites misunderstanding and is somewhat pretentious, but it does at least have the virtue of reflecting both a shared "analytic" background (if such there be) and a somewhat tentative search for new directions, including, possibly, a move toward other, non-analytic areas.

But I'm not wedded to it (the term). I just think that we need something like that to capture my sense that someone like Kit Fine (or James Pryor, or Jason Stanley, etc., etc.) and I, while both "philosophers," aren't even practitioners of the same discipline, let alone members of the same "school"; yet at the same time our differences might very well be traceable back to a wrong turn (or a failure to turn) that one or the other of us (or his main influences) made in the past, such that we can each see ourselves as having the same (ultimate) forebears -- or even to specific doctrines on which we disagree.

So "continental" philosophy need not even enter into it, in this sense. For all I've just said, I still find it much easier to read Pryor and Williamson than, say, Badiou or Zizek. In other words, there's a difference between reading texts such as the latter, which, due to their alien provenance, are painfully opaque, and reading texts which are painfully wrong-headed (even if thereby equally confusing). This means that even while seeing most analytic philosophy as stuck in the mud, "post-analytics" (that still looks funny) should be seen not as crossing over a DMZ to the other side, as much as looking wistfully out the window of a house divided.

So that's my rant. Beat that, Colin ... if you can.

Truly random nine (power failure edition)

I have two reasons for not posting recently: first, I've been wading through (and occasionally contributing to) a monumental thread at the Valve about Derrida and idealism, which was interesting but (surprise!) inconclusive. Secondly, thanks to the recent nor'easter, we had a) a flooded basement, which had to be dealt with, and b) a power failure. But from these lemons we (eventually) make the bloggy lemonade, yes?

One night after considerable basement-to-lawn water-relocation activity, I fired up the computer, only to be greeted soon after by the sudden onset of near-total darkness (thank you, PSE & G). I say near-total, because my laptop was still on, having switched to battery power. But my aged titanium PowerBook (which must be all of three or four years old) no longer charges very well, and only ever says it has a half-hour of power left (which actually means it's on the verge of shutting down). Besides, the modem went out too.

So I turned it off and instead of fumbling around for some lights, I went to bed. But I was wide awake, so I located my battery-powered discman and headphones, the plan being to listen to something to lull me to sleep. But of course there was no light, so I couldn't just pop in, say, Trances & Drones or anything by Alio Die. So I picked something at random from the many piles of discs within arm's reach. Here is the result of that search for your amusement. The first disc I selected turned out to be:

1. Kettel – Through Friendly Waters (Sending Orbs)

Kettel is a Dutch person/ensemble (I think person), and this is Sending Orbs 001, from a couple of years ago. I've only listened to it a couple of times, but after a few minutes I identified it correctly, which was harder than you might think, as quite a bit of contemporary ambient sounds somewhat like this. There was something about the sequencers though which sounded familiar. After a couple of tracks I found it too busy for my present purposes, so I moved on, to

2. Sogar – Basal (12k)

This too I recognized pretty quickly (although I did get a hint from the slimline case). Here also we have a common style (minimal/pointillist DSP stuff, like virtually everything else on that label), so it wasn't obvious. I like this disc, but I didn't want to hear it just then. Next:

3. Sandoz – Digital Lifeforms (Touch)

Some people swear by the amazingly prolific Richard H. Kirk (ex-Cabaret Voltaire, if you remember them), and I have a number of his discs under various monikers, but I don't. Swear by him, that is. This one is from 1993, and it has some good tracks on it, but like his other discs it's very beaty and not what I was looking for. I failed to identify it, by the way. I listened to most of track 1, not liking its plodding drumbeats at all and wondering what mistake I had made, that this disc takes up space in my collection (but as I said, some later tracks are good). I forget the exact order of the next few discs I chose. One of them was

4. Daniel Menche – Beautiful Blood (Alien8)

Menche is one of the premier American noise artists, and I have several of his discs. This one is billed as being a bit more ambient/listenable than the others, which I suppose it is, compared to, say, legions in the walls, but after several portentous low piano notes at the beginning of track 1, a tremendous burst of static reveals what sort of disc this is. Track two is indeed more drony, and might have worked, but I had not pegged this as either Menche or this particular disc, so I didn't try it.

5. Alp – at home with alp

This one begins with several minutes of rumbling, and I impatiently took it to be one of those avant-garde discs that sounds better on the page than in the ear; and indeed it turns out to have a semi-trendy conceptual-art-ish component, in that all the sounds are derived (as the disc's title suggests) from objects found in the home (track 1: disk drive, kettle, washing machine). I ejected it quickly; but like the Menche disc, if on a smaller scale, this is a fine semi-noisy effort. In fact I think I'll listen to it all later. This is the first Alp disc; his second, out and about with alp, uses found recordings from outside, and has some lovely ambient tracks.

6. Greg Davis – somnia (Kranky)

Here we have a promising title (but of course I couldn't see it). And in fact for heavily DSPed computer music it's very drifty and ambient (as we might expect given the label, home of Stars of the Lid and suchlike). On the other hand, for drifty ambient it has more of a harsh digital edge than one would really want if one is indeed hoping to drift off to sleep. Maybe I'll listen to this one too.

7. Shostakovich – String Quartets 3, 8, & 13 (Fitzwilliam String Quartet)

This was not what I wanted either. Of course I could have gotten a light and located something non-random (looking now, I see several candidates at or near the top of the various piles: not only Alio Die, but Jeff Greinke, Oöphoi, Thomas Köner, Synthetika, shuttle358, etc.). But I was determined to stick it out. Of course this is a great disc too. I recognized it immediately, although I knew it was #3 not because I know it that well, but because it's the only opening work on any single-disc Shostakovich quartet collection I own (I've got two cycles) -- oh wait, I might have a 7, 13, 14 somewhere. You might think #3 was an early work, but DSch didn't start writing quartets right away (good move), and #3 turns out to be a middle-period work from 1946, about the same time as the Ninth Symphony, and totally rocks. Which is not what I wanted to do.

8. Robert Wyatt – shleep (thirsty ear)

Okay, now I know someone's mocking me. The front painting (by Alfreda Benge, Robert's wife) even shows Robert asleep on the back of a gigantic bird. But the music, great as it is (all-star cast, including Evan Parker, Phil Manzanera, Brian Eno, Paul Weller, and Philip Catherine), is not sleepy at all. The opening track, "Heaps of Sheeps," about trying to get to sleep, has been running through my head ever since. Here's a lyrical excerpt:

Still not sleeping,
I tried counting sheep.
One by one,
they leapt across the fence
constructed for them.
Right to left,
across the fence I had constructed.
Having jumped,
they refused further direction.

Each sheep, where it landed,
refusing to exit, remained.
(Creating a vast writhing heap
growing fast on the left).
Try as I might,
I could not stop them entering
once again.
Try as they might,
not one could leave the stage.

As it says on the back of the disc (tweaking Hamlet, no doubt): "fat chance to dream".

But then:

9. various artists – Infraction Sampler 1: Fall/Winter 2005-2006

A short but glorious bath of frayed string chords greets my ear. Here, finally, we have some seriously ambient material, from a fine microlabel dedicated to same. (Check website here.) I did have some trouble IDing this disc though. A CDR was generously included with one of my orders as compensation for having waited so long for a pre-order, and as I have most of the tracks on the discs themselves, I hadn't listened to this one that much. I should have gotten the Ultra Milkmaids/Aidan Baker track (track 3), but it just hadn't occurred to me that this disc might be an anthology, and I was still puzzled about track 2 (an unreleased track by Mifune), which was a very nice guitar/echo piece in a sort of muted Günter Schickert mode. At one point I did indeed start thinking Andrew Liles-y thoughts (track 5), but I knew the whole disc couldn't be him, and I still hadn't put two and two together. If I had stuck it out through track 10 (a track from a forthcoming reissue of Tetsu Inoue's classic World Receiver, which everyone should snap up immediately when it arrives), I would have understood; but I was indeed starting to fall asleep by track 7 or so, so I quit.

But I have learned my lesson: I have placed the Matthias Grassow/Klaus Wiese disc mercurius (Arya) where I can locate it even in the dark.

UPDATE: The World Receiver reissue, I see, has been out for some time. Go get it!