Jon Cogburn's Blog

The next step in crossing the (Analytic-)Continental Divide?

much of this material is relevant to their on-going concerns), (3) (more complicated, because there are important countere

via www.newappsblog.com

For full post, click on the newappsblog link above.

Recently fired LSU Systems President John Lombardi's fable

Some background. The annual value of targeted tax rebates and cuts in the gret state of Louisiana are now over 7 and a half billion dollars, around a third of the actual state budget, an amount that dwarfs higher education spending. These rebates are often political giveaways that make absolutely no sense, such as Walmart getting one and a half cent per dollar rebate on sales tax remittances.

via www.newappsblog.com

click newappsblog link for full story.

First part of fantastic Critchley piece on Philip K. Dick

HERE (if you get the paywall just reset your browser history).

via www.newappsblog.com

click newappsblog link above for full post.

this is why American philosophers should be conversant in other languages

[Note: The following is speculative and not meant to be part of anybody's culture wars. In particular, nothing pejorative about SPEP is intended. If it reads that way, then please point that out in the comments so I can have a chance to explain myself better. Likewise, if your sociological impressions differ from mine, I'd be interested. In particular, when pointing out similarities between European and Analytic philosophical styles, I don't point out that SPEP type continental philosophy and European philosophy are similar in that both take the history of philosophy much more seriously. But I don't think this effects my main point about the distorting nature of getting philosophy primarily through book translations, as opposed to articles, discussions, and presentations in the original language..]

via www.newappsblog.com

click newappsblog link above for full post.

From Graduate School to Welfare

Thoroughly depressing story at the Chronicle HERE. Some stats:

via www.newappsblog.com

Click on the newappsblog link for the full story.

How Paul's Boutique became illegal

Nice Slate story HERE on how excessive copyright enforcement killed a whole genre of art.

via www.newappsblog.com

Click on newappsblog link for full story and cool video.

I am not sleeping until I get to Brooklyn and beyond

via www.newappsblog.com

Follow the newappsblog link for some nice discussion about MCA.

Annals of stupidity #3,526

The photo at right shows the arm of a man who tattooed Leviticus 18:22, which is the only clear place in the Bible where homosexuality is unambiguously condemned (along, and with equal force, with touching the pig skin, seeing a naked woman menstruating, wearing more than one kind of cloth at at time, etc. etc. etc.)

via www.newappsblog.com

Click newappsblog link above for full post.

Spiros will be merciless, but that's O.K.

Open Court is advertising Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy now (edited by Mark Silcox and myself), and the ad copy is very good. We're  hoping we can have some sort of presentation at next year's Gen Con, which would be the second most nerdiest (and hence, second most awesome) thing I've ever done. Anyhow, the ad copy and table of contents is below. We manged to assemble a really first rate group of people who engage in philosophy, game design, and media theory (some of the authors do all three) and as a result I think this is one of the best of this kind of book.  

via www.newappsblog.com

Click the newappsblog link for full post.

My God it stinks to be contingent faculty

Having been non-tenure track for two years after getting my Ph.D, I actually began to perspire about half way through reading THIS ARTICLE.  The author presents ten ways to get yourself fired if you are contingent faculty. Of course some of them contradict each other, but these contradictions just accurately represent the messed up situation.

via www.newappsblog.com

Click newappsblog link for full post.

One more on Hedwig in Korea (Whig in a Box, Angry Inch)

Again, this is weird from an American perspective in al sorts of ways, e.g.: (1) Hedwig getting such an enthusiastic reaction on a popular television show, (2) that two distinct theatrical runs of the show have been so overwhelmingly successful in their own rights that the crowd responds ecstatically to both actors singing together on a song that would probalby be censored from American network television.

I suspect that the political situation in Korea gave the play a resonance that it might not have for even the most sympathetic American viewer. But, again, it just is the case that South Korea is cool in all sorts of way (cf. barbecue). Hedwig in Korea is all over youtube, but unfortunately none of the wikipedians have become obsessed with this yet..

Yet another way that South Korea is cooler than us

This is interesting in all sorts of ways. (1) The guitarist realizes that he is way out of tune when he hits the very  first chord, and desperately plays so as to undermine this throughout (it ends up working beautifully!), (2) the amount of time with the wig at the outset is much longer than with American performances, (3) the way the background singer re-emerges at the end is amazing, (4) obviously, the beautiful combination of Korean and English lganguages, (5) the pictures in the background when the singer sings " Here's to Patti // And Tina // And Yoko // Aretha // And Nona // And Nico // And me," (6) etc.

Surprisingly, Korean barbecue is actually also vastly better than American barbecue.

Some things are worth celebrating

Spent all evening with some people from my church who have done an incredible amount of (often overwhelmingly frustrating) work trying to fundamentally change the social contract with respect to public transportation in Baton Rouge.

via www.newappsblog.com

Please follow the newappsblog link for full story

O.K. For what it's worth, putting one's own (badly recorded*) weird songs together with putatively open source cartoons and on the interwebs actually can have some payout.

There's a non-trivial chance that I might have a non-trivial involvement in a live run of Hedwig and the Angry Inch down here in Louisiana next year, directed by one of my favorite directors, but I can't say anything more about this at the moment.

Even if this comes to nothing (and it might, or my involvement might just be helping with vetting other musicians who do the actual work), just mastering and memorizing the songs this Summer in preparation for the possibility will be a whole truckload of awesome sauce. I mean, I like Hedwig as much as South Koreans, and I love South Korea all the more for Hedwig's reception there. But South Louisiana may not be so different from South Korea.

[Notes:

*My ear for melody is really quite good, but hearing loss and tinitus makes me not so good at hearing actual and potential timbre. Stuff that works live doesn't work on recordings. When an audiophile friend of mine showed me how Jack White actually put bass guitar in his studio albums (just to get the timbre perfect), even though their live shows sounded fantastic without bass guitar, I realized I had no hope here. My ears are just too messed up to spontaneously hear the difference. I'm not complaining though. My friend can help me hear things with respect to other people's music, and this is a humongous blessing with respect to my love of RAWK.]

Very nice Gutting NY Times piece on the Sermon on the Mount

Man it's so nice to have Gary Gutting's gentle meditations in the Stone.

via www.newappsblog.com

click newapps link above for full post.

O.K. maybe a couple of other religious songs

Many, many, many people claim to be "spiritual but not religious." 

This always mystified me, because I am almost compulsively the opposite, religious but acutely anti-spiritual (and I won't belabor this here other than to point out that this is an ethical issue for me, and not out of any misguided scientism).

Anyhow, as with any stance, one becomes in consequence a characteristic sort of mark, gullible with respect to various things relavent to the stance.

In THIS POST I claim to have discovered the only overtly religious songs I've ever written. But my wife Emily took umbrage, citing four other songs. But I don't think she's correct.

Exhibit A,Santa Sangre, which I've posted at right (the timbre's horrible for the first thirty seconds; hang on to the beginning of the second verse and you'll see that it actually gets much more bearable). The title means "Holy Blood," but it's really just about the movie of the same name. Anyone who has seen the movie can associate the lyrics with the relevant scenes (I actually have a video from the movie, but can't post it because of copyright; weirdly, youtube is not sure if what I did post is really open source, thus the advertisements which do not benefit me at all, but rather profit the group who claims that they might have a copyright on some of the posted visuals; it's actualy an honor that somebody thinks that they might make money off of this).

Exhibit B, The Zoo. This song mentions God, but most people would consider it irreligious, as the narrator claims in the opening verse that "God is a little retarded kid." But I actually had intended to write a song about Kafka's "The Hunger Artist" and this is what fell out. I think it becomes clear as the song progresses.

Exhibit C, song titled  Sheep, twice contains the lyrics "said Lazarus to Jesus // No one will believe us // and I want to be dead." This is frankly the most nihilistic thing I've ever written in any medium. . . Weirdly though, the muse gave me the lyrics and melody in graduate school when Emily and I were walking back to the department from a restaurant called "Burritos as Big as Your Head." And it was almost exactly after realizing that I was hopelessly in love that I came up with it. But Emily did not think I was a weirdo when I shared it with her, and the rest is history. All this being said, contra Emily, I still don't think it's a religious song. The nihilistic schtick is just a common gen ex trope and isn't really about anything theological per se.

Exhibit D, song titled Babylon. This is the most minimalist melody I've written thus far. I think there are only three notes in the whole thing! But it does have the rather portentious lyrics "You're not the Whore of Babylon // I am not the Christ // But they stuck you on a tree // and they treated me real nice." But this was actually about an ex-girlfriend, not really about anything religious, and in any case, the whole thing veers dangerously close to U2 type anti-rock suckitude (for a much better, vastly more punk rock song about dead love that never actually go produced, check out THIS ONE; it's objectively better than any of the ones linked to here).

One weird thing that I've just noticed. None of the recordings of any of these songs have any distortion in the guitar. Someday (all my music friends with kids only start playing again at the point when their youngest enters first grade) I'm going to write a song with religious tropes that has distortion (as do most of my songs).  I can't think of any good religious songs with distorted guitar off-hand. . . maybe something from Hedwig and the Angry Inch? I don't know; this is worth exploring.

The Jim Carroll Band - People who Died

Certain songs work both in and at the limit (in the sense of Batterman's work on emergence) of some human emotional trope. But this is exceedingly rare.

This song does not work for some people because it's just very hard to succeed at the gambit where melody, rhythm, and timbre are inappropriate to the subject matter. Sometimes this trope paradoxically captures the subject matter better, or might even be the only way to capture it, but when it does not work it's a catastrophic aesthetic failure.

Re: the subject matter- It's just an actuarial fact; anybody who lives long enough could actually write just as freaked out a song about all of the people they cherish and have have lost. When you get to a certain age you can count the people you know who have passed on in awful circumstances. But in fact you don't count them up because part of getting along in the world is suppressing exactly this.

Jim Carroll's own passion somehow gave him the ability to write a great rock song that does not forget this horror, that is, if the central gambit actually works.

The only overtly religious song I've ever written

As a general rule, any song containing the word "world" sucks. This is the exception that proves that.

Anyhow, for some reason, reading about the Battle of Midway provoked this song.

Given that I learned to play guitar in a charismatic church, and in fact provided background music for all sorts of purported violations of the laws of nature (healings, prophecies, speaking in tongues, etc.), it actually surprises me that I haven't written more things like this. . .

As usual, my ability to get a decent timbre in the recording is completely undermined by high frequency hearing loss and Van Gogh level tinnitus in my right ear. I mean, I can still hear underlying melodies, but that's about it. But, as usual with me and Emily's stuff, if (big if) you can get past the timbre it's actually an O.K. tune.

One final note: People are often weirdly embarrassed for you when you share creative eructations. I actually think most readers of this blog have experienced this with respect to some media, e.g. songs, poems, paintings, theatrical reinterpretations, novels, Dungeons and Dragons modules, ideas for philosophy books, uncharitably read articles, etc. etc. etc.

And that's fine. I have no problem with that. For all that Jack Kerouac sang the canonical hymn to all of us who never succumbed to the execrable Generation X sneer from nowhere, it is still just a fact that being on the receiving end of somebody else's attempted and not obviously successful creativity is weirdly and almost constitutiviey inappropriately intimate. As a result, repulsion is in no way an irrational reaction.

But here is the main irony. The phenomenology of creative activity is so passive that the humiliation from people who find our endeavors embarrassing never really registers. This is true for me and I think all of my wonderful weird friends who sustain me with analogous crap that goes far over and above the coffee spoon tasks that house and feed them (Neal Hebert, Mark Silcox, Graham Harman, Chris Bateman, Emily love of my life, Levi Bryant, Derrick Huff, Eric Ward, etc. etc. etc. . . .).

I mean, Kant was wrong about all that stuff about determining one's own teleology. Kerouac's weirdos are just not responsible for very much. If you don't like what we're up to, file your complaint with the muse. 

Lee Braver's A brief history of continental realism

Forthcoming in Continental Philosophy Review (at my work computer I could access the PDF HERE and an HTML version HERE).

via www.newappsblog.com

For full post click neappsblog link above.

Reed Elsevier responds to criticism

On April 8th, in the discussion under THIS NEWAPPS POST showcasing a broad range of criticism against ALEC, Gordon Hull called our attention to the fact that Reed Elsevier actually maintained a board seat on ALEC.

via www.newappsblog.com

click on newapps link for full post

(stuff after the jump NSFW) Howard Stern shows how parenthood really can make you a better person

One of the most destructive shibboleths of our era has been the claim that a right winger is simply a lefty who had been mugged. 

But I am more and more confident that the story for post Baby Boomers will be completely different. Given the policies of the parties that purport to represent left and right at this point in American history, increasingly left wingers are parents who have had children.

A stupendous, possibly canonical, recent example of this is Howard Stern's meditations on his own children, and how this has led him to much greater empathy.

[Full Disclosure: as a three-year employee in a Kmart receiving bay in my late teens and early twenties, I have a pretty good barometer of what Howard Stern used to say; I mean all the receiving rats listened to him through these boom boxes while we desperately moved merchandise back and forth in something like the Cool Hand Luke thing where you move the swamp to one side then back to the other].

The other Baby Boomer shibboleth was that if you are young and not left wing, you have no heart, and if you are older and right wing you have no brain. Again, given what the two parties represent today (both culturally and economically), this is no longer true.

That is, if you don't end up agreeing with Stern after reading THIS ROLLING STONE ARTICLE (One Town's War on Gay Teens) you have neither heart not brain. You can listen to Stern on this article, and an unexpectedly moving defense of Rosie O Donnell (whom he used to make fun of mercilessly) and Ellen Degeneres, after the jump. [If gratuitous use of the f word is too off-putting, please just read the Rolling Stone article and don't follow the jump.]

The reason I include the Stern soliloquy is that it's very existentence is extraordinarily good evidence of an advance in the moral zeitgeist, and this really is something where there are at least glimpses of the sunny side. For example, I feel slightly better about being a human being and more optimistic that other seemingly intractable cases of depraved sadism (cf. ALEC)  might actually not be so intractable after all.

NDPR review of Paul Livingston's The Politics of Logic

Review by Levi Bryant HERE.

via www.newappsblog.com

click on newappsblog link for post.

blog hiatus

I'll be off-line until Saturday.

This is the first time I've attended the Pacific Division of the American Society for Aesthetics (program HERE). I'm commenting on a paper by Robert Stecker, which is a little bit intimidating, but pretty cool nonetheless.

The other cool thing is that the conference is being held at the Asilomar Conference Center, which was designed by Julia Morgan the same architect who designed the Hearst Castle. I'm as excited about staying in one of Morgan's buildings as I am about the conference.

list of companies that contribute to ALEC

These two pernicious pieces of legislation, written by and for the American Legislative Exchange Council, are headed to Governor Jindal's desk as I write this.

via www.newappsblog.com

click on newappsblog link for list to full story.

Advice to Christian Philosophers

[Note: I posted the following last Easter and thought I'd repost it today. It holds up pretty well; if I'd better followed the advice myself I'd have had a much better year. My only regret in rereading it is that there is far too much griping about Christian organizations that (paradoxically and disastrously) bar people who don't self-identify as Christians.

via www.newappsblog.com

Click on newappsblog link for full story.

Matthew Vines on the Bible and Homosexuality

Oh man this is great stuff. For a transcript go HERE. The guy's like 21 and he can speak with this much wisdom. It's amazing.

via www.newappsblog.com

Click on the newappsblog link for the full story.

Another round of Anti-Chomsky, from a different perspective

TLS review of James Hurford's The Origins of Grammar HERE.  The anti-Chomskyan uptake is here:

via www.newappsblog.com

Click newappsblog link for full post.

link to Graham Harman's review of Tristan Garcia's Forme et objet, and a few brief reflections on Continental Philosophy's Young Turks

Really nice overview of the book  HERE. The review is notable for a number of reasons:

via www.newappsblog.com

Click on newappsblog link for full post.

the story of my life. . . and yours.

My letter gets published in the Baton Rouge Advocate

The letter with all the reader comments is HERE.

via www.newappsblog.com

Click newapps link above for the full story