Have a very redhead New Year!

Posted at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Peter Suber‛s Very Brief Introduction to Open Access. Useful in many situations, I think.

Posted at 2:14 PM | Permalink

If you happen to be a copyright history geek, Patterson‛s Copyright in Historical Perspective is absolutely it for an overview of events from the 1484 Statute to the mid-nineteenth century. I‛m still working my way through it, but am mightily impressed. I suspect that if one read it back-to-back with Mark Rose‛s Authors and Owners one would have a fairly good handle on the invention and development of formal copyright and authorship. (Or I hope so, because that‛s more or less what I‛ve done, in addition to various articles.)

One thing you don‛t usually see addressed in IP history texts is the oral-aural distribution of knowledge in preliterate societies and the eventual shift to containment of knowledge in medieval scripts, which began to shift information flows. I‛ve done a little reading on this for my current history project, but need to know so much more. This is the reason for my sudden interest in book history (and Ong and Havelock), and I hope to read more on that this summer.

Posted at 10:20 AM | Permalink

In my holiday haze, I neglected to mention that George has linked a number of 2005 History of the Book events.

Posted at 5:09 PM | Permalink

I took the camera with me this morning in an effort to pay attention to things on my walk. I like the blueness of the photographs, since that‛s exactly how the light looks at that time of morning. The photographs themselves seem very Photo 101 to me, but I had fun. If you like, you can see them over here.

Posted at 2:52 PM | Permalink

I‛m in the usual end-of-the-year reflective mood, and I‛m also procrastinating on a history of copyright project. What better way to feed both of those things than 40 Questions About 2004?

What did you do in 2004 that you‛d never done before?
Moved away from my hometown, learned to live in a new city and in a new academic community, traveled solely for business rather than pleasure all year.
Did you keep your New Year‛s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don‛t believe in New Year‛s resolutions, and so didn‛t make any. I did make progress with the general, ongoing goals of personal and professional growth.
Did anyone close to you give birth?
No, but a new colleague did.
Did anyone close to you die?
An old friend of mine died after a decade-long struggle with AIDS. Although we were once very close, we lost touch several years ago and I only found out after my mother read the obit. I had to fly to Michigan on the day of his funeral. I still wear a sweater he gave me (it‛s one of my Writing Sweaters) and think of him often.
What countries did you visit?
No countries this year. I did go to Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, and Michigan. Also back and forth between Arkansas and Minnesota six times.
What would you like to have in 2005 that you lacked in 2004?
Stability. 2004 was a very transitional year.
What date from 2004 will remain etched upon your memory?
July 23.
What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Finishing and defending my thesis, getting accepted to programs. Learning to be a better person.
What was your biggest failure?
Learning to be a better person. Other than that, there were just challenges, not failures.
Did you suffer illness or injury?
No, except for a touch of RSI.
What was the best thing you bought?
My PowerBook G4. No question.
Whose behavior merited celebration?
My family, who dealt so well with my decision to move away. Mister Boyfriend, for many reasons.
Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Half the voting public. The current administration.
Where did most of your money go?
Moving, food and shelter.
What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Starting a new life.
What song/album will always remind you of 2004?
Gun Club‛s Fire of Love and The Vines‛ Winning Days.
Compared to this time last year, are you?

• Happier or sadder Happier, definitely.
• Thinner or fatter? Thinner (barely) and, more importantly, in better shape.
• Richer or poorer? Monetarily poorer. Otherwise, richer

(The Annie Lennox cover rather than Paul Simon original, although I‛m not sure that makes me any cooler.)

Posted at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sometimes you read something that, while it doesn‛t say anything new, says something better than the stuff you‛ve read before. I‛ve been thinking a lot about oppositional copyfight discourse lately, and then I ran across this quote from John Blossom several days ago in Open Access News:

Copyright can be the starting point of a dialogue rather than an impermeable barrier, a concept promoted by the Creative Commons approach to content licensing. When copyright becomes viewed as a right to discuss a relationship on one‛s own terms rather than a demand to avoid relationships, copyrighted content will find its way into more useful venues more quickly - with monetization to follow....Copyright is a tool born of the industrial age that is struggling to find its place in a post-industrial era. Copyrighting has allowed intellectual property to flourish for centuries, but as the factors supporting the flourishing of intellectual property shift so must our approach to copyright management. It‛s a useful tool that has not outgrown its usefulness, but one whose core value is shifting rapidly in an era of open access to content.

Posted at 10:18 AM | Permalink

Mister Boyfriend blogged about the advent of microphotography a couple of days ago, and I was struck by an H.G. Wells quote he included. Wells is commenting on the possibilities of building a commons through microfiche, but it also sounds like the utopian dreams we have for the internet (and a bit of it‛s reality).

It . . . . was the beginning of a world brain . . . . a sort of cerebrum for humanity . . . . which will constitute a memory and also a perception of current reality for the entire human race. . . . . In these days of destruction, violence, and general insecurity, it is comforting to think that the brain of man-kind, the race brain, can exist in numerous identical replicas throughout the world. . . .

Also: The American Anthropometric Society and Walt Whitman's Brain

Posted at 9:15 AM | Permalink

Apparently I‛m going to the Profgrrrl School of Baking during this break. I‛m eating warm cranberry upside down cake, which is quite delightful, and contemplating cranberries in general. (Nothing cosmic - just their proliferation in my kitchen over the past month or so.) I made the recipe pretty much as suggested, except I managed to pulverize the ginger while grating and so just mixed it into the batter. Yum. I‛ll make it again sometime, probably with a drizzle of honey on the brown sugar-cranberry mix. Maybe more ginger. I also think it would also be good as cranberry-pineapple cake.

I find that I like filing recipes here on the blog. It keeps them all in one place, and it feels good to pass them and ideas about them along. And I think people actually use them, judging from the number of recent searches for cranberry mouse.

Posted at 4:58 PM | Permalink

I
It is 1995, and I am in the middle of two weeks of orientation training at UPS, along with Martha the Mormon from Minnesota. We become friends fairly quickly as the other group members drop out or are let go, and by Christmas are rather close. One day at lunch, she tells me that she misses living in a place that has seasons. Indignant, I inform her that people come from all over the country to see Ozark falls and Arkansas indeed has four very definite seasons.
She fixes me with her Withering Gaze. "No," she says. "It doesn‛t."
I have no idea what she is talking about. Damn Yankee.

II
As a child, I was highly disgruntled about our weather, which never matched the weather on all the holiday specials I watched on TV. While the Peanuts Gang watched for the Great Pumpkin under bare trees and gusty wind, we sweltered in our costumes. The worst costume was a store-bought plastic costume, which would be stuck to your skin before you rang the first doorbell. If you had a mask, you pulled it up during the trudge between houses to get some air on your skin.
Charlie Brown had snow come Christmas, and so did Frosty and Crystal and the Snow Miser and everybody in the Nutcracker. Even Rudolph had snow on his Shiny New Year. We did not have snow. (Twenty-four of my 27 Arkansas Christmases were brown.) When it did come, it was measured in inches, not feet, and we scraped up every bit of snow in the yard to make a skinny snowman with pine needles stuck all through him. Ice didn‛t grow on lakes and ponds; it fell out of the sky to glaze roads and power lines, and it usually came in January or February.
I wanted weather that matched the weather on TV. Proper weather. It rarely came, and eventually I forgot about it.

III
During all the decisions about Ph.D. programs and where to live, I gave little thought to the weather. Each place we applied had cold winters, and I paid attention to my mentor‛s advice to discount weather as a factor in the decisions. You will only be there a few years. It is a means to an end.
So we moved to Minnesota in late July, and suddenly I was in an apartment where open windows replaced central air. And, astonishingly, it was enough. I went for walks at high noon with no fear of heat stroke. During 10 p.m. trips to the grocery store, I watched everyone else in their cardigans.
Then fall came. I was drunk on the fall, the crispness and the colors. I stared out the window during bus rides and walked every day just to look. And on one of those walks or drives, I remembered Martha and Peanuts. Charles Schultz grew up and started his career here. Of course he used this weather and these houses, which I and a million other children internalized.

IV
The ice grew on the lake throughout November. I went out again today after a few weeks absence from my walks, and there were people on the ice! In the middle of the lake! Ice fishing! Riding bikes and towing children across the ice! I walked out to the end of a dock and stood for a bit, staring into the whiteness. There was once ice on the river at home. A man walked out on it perhaps five feet from the shore, and they put a picture of it in the state newspaper the next day.
I do not step out on the ice. All evidence to the contrary, I cannot believe it will hold me.

V
I am not drunk on winter. I am mesmerized by it. The ice, the snow, particularly the cold. I go out and meet it, as Becky says. Last Thursday was my first subzero day, and I was surprised by the clearness of the air, the way it changed sound and the way I heard my own voice. I felt sturdy and strong, and everything was full of possibilities. There is no depression below zero. Every nerve sits up and takes notice, and everything is somehow more, which suits an intense personality like mine. I plan to stay right here and enjoy it.

Posted at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday I made my first ham, and it turned out quite well if I do say so myself. (Good thing, too - an eight pound ham leaves a lot of leftovers for two people.) I used this recipe minus the cloves and cherries to suit household tastes. I also made scalloped potatoes and brussels sprouts, and altogether it was quite enough.

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Happy Holidays!

Posted at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It had reached the daytime high of 1° yesterday when we went out to run some errands, and I discovered something: I really like this weather.

Posted at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

They say up here that it‛s bad form to talk about the weather much, because it‛s not as if winter is a personal experience. Everyone is cold. But right now I can‛t help it because people, it‛s going to be -33° tomorrow with wind chill. The forecasted high is -1°, as in a subzero high. I am from a place where the the little children hope like hell it‛ll get cold enough to snow, so I‛m not quite sure what to do with this.

Stay inside, that‛s one thing.

Posted at 6:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Like Derek says, I was looking for a jus‛ right tree. Shockingly, it turned out that the right tree was a fake tree. I‛ve never had a fake tree before, but none of the tree lots had what I was looking for. Finally I stopped by Michael‛s, and they had it right up front - a 3 foot fake spruce for $9.99 with lights wired into it. (Tres chic, eh?) I brought it home and hung all my Walgreen‛s ornaments on it* and have been enjoying it ever since. Grad students live a Charlie Brown Christmas, man.

*I left all my really cool, personal ornaments at my parents‛ house since I didn‛t expect to have an interest in this sort of thing this year.

Posted at 2:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Christmas isn't Christmas to me without repeating playing of John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together. I remember watching it several times per year on a homemade VHS when I was a kid, and when I found the CD years ago I snapped it up. I just finished ripping it to my iTunes. Too bad the special hasn‛t been released on DVD, or I‛d be watching it right now.

Posted at 10:00 AM | Permalink

I just made a batch of the cranberry scones Profgrrrl blogged a few weeks ago. I‛ve never made scones before. Lots of cakes and cookies and pie/cobblers/galettes, but no scones. And now I want to know where scones have been all my life, because they're incredibly easy to make and quite wonderful to eat. Sweet but not too sweet, sort of like an excuse to eat shortbread out of hand. These scones very much remind me of the shortbread my grandmother used to make to go with the first tiny, tart strawberries in May.

*I think that for my own tastes, I'll increase the cranberries and orange peel slightly next time.

Posted at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

These are so the slippers for me.

Posted at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Now that we‛ve decided for sure that we‛re staying in Minnesota for the holidays, I‛ve developed tree lust. It‛s been a few years since I‛ve experienced that. This afternoon, I‛m going to send my paper in and then go tree shopping. What I want (and what we have room for) is a little tabletop sort of tree, maybe a rosemary tree. I sort of looked for one on Friday evening, but everyone was either out or never had them in the first place. Maybe better luck today.

Posted at 9:34 AM | Permalink

That paper is about as done as it‛s gonna get. I‛ll proof it again tomorrow and then send it in.

I‛m 50 pages into "One L." It's fabulous.

In other news, I want to know where the snow is. I lived in Arkansas for 27 years and had perhaps two white Christmases. Now I live in Minnesota and there‛s not a snowflake to be seen at the moment. It‛s forecasted for tonight and the next few days, but that‛s been the case all this week. And, irony of ironies, I see that Arkansas may have a white Christmas. If I moved all the way up here and am not going home for the holidays and endure another brown Christmas, I‛m going to be horribly upset. Especially if it snows there.

Posted at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

After I turn the Evil Ethics Paper in tomorrow, I'm going to take two weeks off. OK, and fiddle around with a history of copyright project, but mostly time off. Time off means "wallow in media and cook":
Read: One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law; Pentimento, the only of one Lillian Hellman's autobiographical books I haven't read; Full Cry because I love Rita Mae Brown; and The Secret Lives of Alexandra David-Neel, because wood s lot did a bit on her a couple of years ago and I've been curious ever since.
Also the approximately foot-tall stack of magazines that have piled up since August.
Watch: Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, Legally Blonde 2, Shark Tale, A Sesame Street Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street. Cold Mountain, which we somehow managed to not see. Maybe Dash and Lilly, if I can find a cheap copy of it. (Sam Shepard! Judy Davis! Directed by Kathy Bates!) Also random stupid TV. Perhaps there will be a MadTV marathon. Mister Boyfriend lives in hope of a Kurt Russell marathon, which doesn't sound half-bad.
Cook: Soup. Cornbread. Ham, if I find one I can afford. Potato-y things. Brussels sprouts. Scones?

It doesn't help that Mister Boyfriend finished the semester yesterday and has commenced the wallowing. All I have to do is finish this paper. Right now.

Update: It is indeed Kurt Russell Month on the Encore Channel, and I found a copy of Dash and Lilly on half.com for $5.88.

Posted at 1:48 PM | Permalink

You will be sucked dry by a leech. I'd stay away
from swimming holes, and stick to good old
cement. Even if it does hurt like hell when
your toe scrapes the bottom.


What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?

Which would be better than being slowly sucked dry by an Ethics paper.

Posted at 11:45 AM | Permalink

Awhile back, there was the bit about the blogger who posted a set of suggestions to authors, among which was the notion that they should relinquish all rights to their works fairly quickly because it was greedy of them to profit from their work. And then a bunch of authors hauled off and told him exactly how difficult it is to write a book and how little profit comes from it.

Or something to that effect.

Does anyone else remember this and who was involved with it? It would be a lovely anecdote for my paper, and no amount of googling is helping me find this thing.

Posted at 7:13 PM | Permalink

This blog started out as an anonymous, genderless record of an independent study. Since then, I‛ve pretty much completely lost my anonymity - it seems like more people list me by my full name on their blogrolls than list me as Areté. During the redesign, a little "Krista" got added to the paratext below each entry. (It didn‛t appear there before except on archive pages.) I‛m quite fine with this, and intend to make my site full-identity (is that a phrase?) early next year when I finally get my act together with my professional site.

What this means, of course, is the construction of an About page, or something like it. Here's the opinion poll part: Do you people prefer to find identity information on sidebars or on separate pages? And why do you prefer what you prefer?

Posted at 6:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I‛ve been considering anarchism and utilitarianism as separate systems, since they represent larger oppositional ethical systems: deontology and consequentialism. However, the more I think about it the more I keep coming back to their root logic. Don‛t both stem from the claim of creating the greater good for as many people as possible? Things diverge from there, since they certainly don't seem to agree on tactics or economics or beneficence.

William Godwin proposed a utilitarian anarchism, and I haven‛t had time to read up on that yet. Perhaps I‛ll get around to that in the next few weeks.

Posted at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I‛ve worked past some of my initial uninformed assessments of utilitarianism, but I‛m still stuck on one point: that utilitarianism leads to imperialism. Perhaps I‛m being simple here. If I am, please argue me out of this.

So here‛s my problem with utilitarianism: the premise is to act in such as way that one promotes the greater good for the largest number of people, right? On the surface, this sounds like a pretty good way to live life. But who gets to decide what the greater good is? What are the qualifications? Did it work then the British decided what the greater good was for India? Did it work when the Southern states decided that slavery was in the best interests of everyone concerned? Is it working right now this minute as the Bush adminstration decides what's good for us? For the Middle East? For the rest of the world?

The problem with utilitarianism is that it presumes that somebody, somewhere, knows best and is qualified and equipped to put that decision into motion. "What‛s best" very often turns out to mean "what creates the most strategic economic advantage." And when we talk about economic advantages, aren‛t we always ultimately talking about what‛s good for us as opposed to what‛s good for all of us?

Posted at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

All my life, I‛ve had vivid dreams. Every night. Always in color. And usually with good recall - there are some dreams I had as a child that I still remember now. Somewhere in my teenage years, I developed into a lucid dreamer. There have been points in my life when the dreams were so consistently interesting that I made a point of sleeping 10 hours a night just to see what would happen in them. (Yes, I‛m aware of how odd that seems.)

One of the more interesting things that‛s happened in the past ten years is the gradual unfolding of a coherent city, one sort of like Little Rock but very much not. I can remember the whole grid when I‛m awake, the buildings (some of which have undergone renovation), the people I met in different sections, things that happened in particular parts years ago. Blocks have been razed and rebuilt, and some are condemned but the residents are in litigation with the city government. The city has grown and changed around me, but I am always in my early 20‛s when I‛m there. I also don‛t drive there, but walk or often run. When I‛m running, I‛m very fast and very good, and aware of how much I‛m enjoying it*.

So I‛m accustomed to my dreams, even invested in them. They‛ve always been something I can count on. This semester has been rather alarming, then. During the first two weeks, I had the most stereotypical stress dreams I‛ve ever had. Teeth falling out, that sort of thing. And then I quit dreaming completely, which has never happened to me before. No dreams for weeks and weeks, until the week before last. Then it was only a flicker here and there. I woke up knowing I had dreamed, but not remembering what.

Now that I‛m in the throes of writing final essays, I would expect to either return to the previous stress dreams or to none at all. Instead, my dreams are actually dealing with the stress for me. The other night, I sat on a beach watching the sunset and then watching the night, listening to the waves for hours. I was entirely alone, and thinking gently and coherently about one of my research areas and about nothing at all. Last night, I drove through a rainy drippy Ozark valley in an open motorized carriage, along a lane with overhanging trees. The water had washed the air and left sparkling beads on every surface. There was that particular wind that comes to Arkansas in late March. I woke up completely happy and refreshed.

So apparently I'm stressed enough to need to Go To My Special Place, like a bad Saturday Night Live skit. This is not something that‛s happened before. Still, I‛m so thrilled to be dreaming again. And curious about what will happen next.

* This last bit is comical to those who know me, because the last time I ran anywhere was in 7th grade PE. There's a Howlin‛ Wolf line that applies to me: "I was built for comfort, baby. I ain‛t built for speed."

Posted at 4:57 PM | Permalink

Is anybody else having this problem when you leave comments here?

... Why does your comments feature never remember me (though I asked for it every time), and why does it set my debugging software in motion every time I type in a letter? I had to type this comment in Notepad and paste it in.

Posted at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I asked a newly pseudonymous blog-friend for a reading list on the History of the Book, and he obliged me. And then he blogged it so I can link it in my blog-files! If you happen to be knowledgeable about this area, both of us would like to hear your thoughts.

Posted at 9:04 AM | Permalink

The World Database of Happiness: a continuous register of scientific research on subjective appreciation of life. (Erasmus University, Rotterdam)

Posted at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the fall semester of 2000, I met Michelle and my friend G.* in a required undergraduate Expository Writing course. We bonded over readings and group work and sentence-level analysis, and I have remained close to both of them ever since. The thing about that semester is that all of us were just beginning to figure out what we wanted. Michelle was just coming back to school after several years of child-raising, G. was trying to figure out if she wanted to be a writer instead of a nurse-researcher, and I was wondering if I really wanted to keep pursuing a career in Business Development.

Now, exactly four years later, Michelle has just finished her master‛s and is about to start teaching literature, G. has published a number of essays and stories and is up for a Pushcart, and I‛ve finished three degrees and my first semester of Ph.D. work (nearly).

It hadn‛t occurred to me how much progress we‛d each made until I was talking about it with G. a few weeks ago. Everything has changed, and nothing has changed. We‛re all the same in the fundamental ways - bitchy and determined, in love with our families and husbands and partners, in love with words. But we have come so far from counting syllables in that little dim room and wondering if we might dare to try at all. Now, we are certain.

*They are quite different from each other, not least in their varying desires for anonymity.

Posted at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

These past few days, I feel all good about myself if I manage to write 1,000 coherent words. Most days, on most topics, I can do much more. On this Law paper and this Ethics paper, I'm happy with the 1,000 words.

And then I read Ayelet Waldman, whose new blog I adore, who has had four children while writing nine novels and buying a house, all in the past ten years.

Perhaps I'm a bit too lenient with myself.

Posted at 9:45 AM | Permalink

Christmas is coming, and it seems very important to the toymakers that parents know that all girls want is to be pretty, shopping, dieting princesses. It makes me grateful that despite the conflicting ideals I was given, when I was growing up little girls were at least left alone to establish our own playground rules of etiquette, only allowed inside our own homes to simulate sex acts between Barbie and Ken on rainy days, and I really don't think we did that badly.

Will you be my friend if I show you my outrageous nakedness?

Why, yes. Would you like some dirty underpants to put on?

Certainly. And may I suggest an acorn hat for your dogshit sculpture?

Oh, you're too kind.

Yep. Not bad at all.

If you don't read One Good Thing already, you really should.

Posted at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Dream Anatomy, an online exhibition of anatomical prints sponsored by the National Library of Medicine. (via Scribblingwoman.)

The Birth of Printing: Gutenberg to Gates (By the Springfield Library, with commentary and hi-res scans)

Update: Also the history of Chinese bookbinding by the British Library.

And The Silk Road: the development of the book and the invention of printing, also by the British Library.

Posted at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hey, kids! If you redesign your website (or someone else does), your traffic will triple in a week!

OK, not really.

Usually, things putter along here at between 35-60 hits a day. Not too big, not too little. Then this week (hereafter known as Fluke Week) Mistress Arete-Minerva got linked by all the other folks who did superheroes. Plus, the redesign was linked by the Blogmoxie Portfolio and Joelle, who also linked me to thank me for the coffee I sent her. The girl throws a lot of traffic.

Thus endeth the biggest spike I've had in the past two years. Nice while it lasted. Maybe the next one will be because of something I wrote rather than something I did, eh? (Don't answer that.)

Posted at 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Research Methods is officially complete. The presentation was on Tuesday and got a good response, and we just turned in our final project, a grant proposal for blog research. I shall celebrate with Christmas tea.

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Posted at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ton's announced that the next BlogWalk will be in Chicago. After reading about all the European BlogWalks, I'm mightily intrigued.

Posted at 10:58 AM | Permalink

Jeff Jarvis and Ernie the Attorney call for the creation of a legal defense fund for bloggers:

In this case, I think there is a very specific need: Jason and Robert before him needed to tell the lawyers calling him to "call my lawyer."

Of course, bloggers can't afford lawyers of their own. But we know from Robert's case there there are a good number of good souls with legal degrees out there who are willing and eager to help.

I suggest that what we need now is a means of organizing them so a blogger who's getting harassed by big corporate or government attorneys can call for help. In some cases, the lawyers may say that the blogger did something wrong. But in most cases, the lawyer can breath fire back at the corporate dragons and skip the harassment stage and get right to the civilized discussion and agreement stage.

Posted at 8:53 AM | Permalink

Utilitiarianism.com
Intro to Utilitiarianism (USD) provides a good overview of different schools of Utilitarian thought
Wikipedia entry on Utilitarianism, which nicely differentiates act utlitarianism and rule utilitarianism
Classical Utilitarianism

John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill Links

Jeremy Bentham
Bentham Links
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

William Godwin, progenitor of utilitarian anarchy
Wikipedia entry on Godwin
Godwin: An Intellectual History (Anarchy Archives)
Anarchist Utilitarianism: A Resource on Godwin

G.E. Moore
Philosopher's Magazine Online: G.E. Moore
Wikipedia entry on G.E. Moore and Principia Ethica

Posted at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If it's well into December, it must be time for Titus Andronicus and cherry pie. Ah, traditions.

Posted at 12:52 PM | Permalink

This is my final response for Ethics class, which ends next week. I respond to a question about Christopher Tindale‛s chapter entitled "... And Rhetoric as Argument" from Rhetorical Argumentation: Principles of Theory and Practice and Van Eemeren and Grootendorst‛s essay "From Analysis to Presentation: A Pragma-dialectical Approach to Writing Argumentative Texts." Tindale argues that rhetorical figures ("devices that use words to make some striking effects on an audience") are arguments unto themselves rather than mere facilitators of arguments; VE & G focus on establishing a pragma-dialectical approach to revision. My fellow grad student Zoë Nyssa is using both articles in a rhetorical analysis of the controversy surrounding wild rice research at UMN.

Van Eemeren and Grootendorst state that "Generally, the comprehensibility and acceptability of argumentative texts can be diminished in four ways: first, by redundancy; second, by implicitness; third, by disarrangement; and fourth, by lack of clarity." Does Tindale agree? Could a case be made a la Tindale that, for example, redundancy is actually rhetoric functioning as argument?

Van Eemeren and Grootendorst are adamant in their negative assessment of these four elements. Indeed, their transformational approach is designed to expressly discourage these elements presence. Tindale's chapter seems quite at odds with most of these assessments, although I do not believe that he would reject all of them.

Before beginning, though, it's important to note a fundamental difference in these two essays. VE & G are considering arrangement within the macro structure of an entire argument (their example is a letter). Tindale is examining micro elements mostly by themselves or in small sections of a larger piece (his longest example is two paragraphs from a much longer essay). They're both looking at how elements of argumentation work, but not necessarily in the same way. To employ the architecture metaphor: Tindale is looking at whether or not a window is also a door, and concludes that one can in fact go in and out the window. Meanwhile, VE&G want to build a system for revising the architect's plans. Both ultimately investigate how to build the most functional structure, but they're going about it in very different ways and with rather different immediate goals. [Was my metaphor also an argument? I hope so.]

Having noted that, I will consider each "diminishing" element put forth by VE & G, contrasting it with relevant elements from Tindale.

VE & G Claim #1: Redundancy is bad and can be cured through the analytic transformation of deletion, which consists of "leaving out all elements which are not immediately relevant to resolving the difference of opinion, such as repetitions, digressions, asides, clarifications, and anecdotes" (2)

Tindale notes that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca pay particular attention to repetition and amplification as effective rhetorical figures (68). Later, he discusses Fahnestock's contention that arguments are tidal, "ebbing and surging, now at a 'lower' point of restatement or elaboration and now at a 'higher' point of succinct and epitomizing summation" (70). (Note the use of the term 'restatement'.) Restatement is also essential to the figures amplification, incrementum, and gradation (71-72). Gradatio in particular relies on overlapping terms to build the verbal and visual force of an argument and is particularly effective in causal reasoning.
Fahnestock also describes the rhetorical effect of ploche (repeating a word or its variation) and polyptoton (repeating a word in different grammatical cases) (72). Both are time-honored uses of repetition. All of these figures constitute effective forms of redundancy.

VE & G Claim #2: Implicitness is also to be avoided. It can be solved through addition, in which "elements are added which left implicit but which were immediately relevant to the resolution of the difference of opinion, such as unexpressed arguments, standpoints, or any other unexpressed elements" (2).

Tindale might counter with a discussion of allusion, the figure in which "something is evoked without being expressly named" in order to create intimacy between speaker and audience. He argues that "... ways to establish such connections that make audiences more inclined to accept premises are essential. Allusion also has ethotic import insofar as such connections increase the audience's appreciation of the arguer" (68-69). One cannot discount the effect of communion created through the mutually understood yet unspoken element.

VE & G Claim #3: Disarrangement is not to be tolerated, and is solvable through permutation. Permutation "amounts to a (re)arrangement of elements � The various steps are clearly distinguished, overlapping steps are separated, and anticipatory or retrogradatory steps are reordered" (2).

Tindale might agree with this claim, and might further substantiate it through Grices Cooperative Principle, which suggests that some standards of order must exist in order to achieve communication. Two figures which rely on arrangement are antimetabole, the reversal of pairs (60, 70-71), and antithesis, which sets contrasting or opposing terms in parallel or balanced coda or phrases (70). Gradation is also dependent on specific, connected arrangement of terms that build upon each other.

VE & G Claim #4: Lack of clarity is a cardinal sin and must be remedied by substitution. One replaces unclear formulations with "formulations which indivate the function unequivocally" and in a parallel fashion (2).

If we observe this rule, then we necessarily eliminate the use of allegory, irony, praeteriotio, onomatopoeia, and apostrophe. Tindale notes Reboul's claim that "double meaning has argumentative value" (64) and further suggests that double meanings "foster commonality" between the speaker and audience. (Don't in -jokes give all of us an inclusive feeling when we understand them?)

Praeteritio and apostrophe are two figures that derive their effectiveness largely from ostensible lack of clarity. Praeteritio is "the claim that the speaker will not repeat things ... followed by the mention of what will not be repeated, effectively doing the very thing that he claims not to do" (60). Apostrophe involves addressing an audience other than the actual one before you - ancestors, in Tindale's example, or the perhaps the gods. Both are traditional and are situationally effective as long as the Cooperative Principle is observed.

So it seems that Tindale might reject three out of these four claims. However, I feels it's once again important to point out that these authors are not examining the same exact elements of argument, and therefore their arguments cannot necessarily be construed as refuting each other. What I have done here is compared micro to macro, strategies for parts of arguments to strategies for entire arguments. They are not necessarily as exclusionary as my comparison suggests. For instance, Tindale recounts the tale of Socrates' refusal to employ the ad misericordium argument, which had the rhetorical effect of parading his family before the court without ever physically doing so. This classic example of praeteritio has the double effect of maintaining Socrates' sense of integrity while also garnering sympathy (and running the risk of alienating jurors who employed ad misericordium in their own trials.) It's a crafty rhetorical move that clarifies several things at once rather than creating confusion. Clearly, praeteritio is not oppositional to clarity in this instance, and I don't think any of the authors would claim it is within the context of Socrates' larger argument.

Posted at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.

Each character resides on a translucent, hinged panel. When the panel is lifted the character�s skeletal structure is revealed giving each a certain validity and glimpse into its origins. Each panel is hand-drawn with archival ink and covered with an acrylic/acetate transparency.

(via Life In the Present and onepotmeal)

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Since today appears to be Filter Day here, I'm linking a couple of mommyblogs for two friends of mine. One is studying mother's blogs for her dissertation, and one is a mommy who blogs (but not a mommyblogger so far.) Somehow neither of them read Dooce, who's gone from being the reigning drunken hilarious LA snarkfest to the reigning Poobah of All Mommybloggers. And I recently found Bad Mother via mamamusings and immediately attached it firmly to my blogroll.

I don't know why I love mommyblogs so much when I have to date manifested no maternal urges whatsoever myself. Perhaps it's because they offer a glance into a world so completely unlike my own or any that I've ever experienced as an only child. I recently held the non-mommyblogger's lovely newborn for nigh half an hour and felt no twinges whatsoever. I was fascinated by her amazingly perfect teeny tiny swirly ears, though. Plus, it's already obvious that she's totally smart. When she started to whimper after being passed to me, I told her, "It's okay, honey. I'm a rhetorician," and she settled right down.

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Progressive Teachers notes the proposed NCTE resolution against holding conferences in states with anti-queer marriage laws on the their books.

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The 2014 Museum of Media History is a flash movie made by a couple of Poynter alums that presents a rather dystopian vision of the 2014 media environment spawned by the corporate ascendancy of Google and Amazon.

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Tagging a couple of older things here so I won't lose them:

Collin on "Mecology Revisited"
Knowledge Management: Social Network Analysis (I'm not sure where this one came from, but I suspect I nabbed it from Ton Zijlstra.)
Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: A Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights (Statement of Bruce Lehman. Pointed out to me by John Logie.)

Update: Also Johndan Johnson-Eilola's After Hypertext.

Posted at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm generally not all that wow'd by most cafepress merchandise, but Psymonetta's combined a couple of the Tenniel Alice In Wonderland illustrations with vintage wallpaper backgrounds and come up with items that I must have. The clocks, bags and coasters are rather striking.

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I made this out of sheer curiosity, since it seems so counterintuitive to pour a bunch of boiling water over a mixture before it goes into the oven. It works well, just as promised. I don‛t like dates, so I substituted dried mission figs. It was okay, but the seeds in the figs slightly skew the texture. I‛m thinking apricots next time. Or the quite obvious raisins.

for the cake:
scant 1/3 cup dark brown sugar, packed
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons self-rising flour
½ cup whole milk
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
¼ cup unsalted butter, melted
¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons chopped, rolled dates

for the sauce:
¾ cup dark brown sugar packed
approx. 2 tablespoons unsalted butter in little blobs
2 ¼ cups boiling water

Preheat the oven to 375 °F and butter a 1 ½ -quart capacity baking dish.

Combine the sugar with the flour in a large bowl. Pour the milk into a measuring cup, beat in the egg, vanilla and melted butter and then pour this mixture over the sugar and flour, stirring - just with a wooden spoon - to combine. Fold in the dates then scrape into the prepared baking dish. Don‛t worry if it doesn‛t look very full: it will do by the time it cooks.

Sprinkle over the sugar for the sauce and dot with butter. Pour over the boiling water (yes really!) and transfer to the oven. Set the timer for 45 minutes, though you might find the dessert needs 5 or 10 minutes more. The top of the dessert should be springy and spongy when it‛s cooked; underneath, the butter, dark brown sugar and boiling water will have turned into a rich, sticky sauce. Serve with vanilla ice cream, creme fraiche, or heavy or light cream as you wish.
Serves 6 � 8 .

Lawson, Nigella. Nigella Bites. New York: Hyperion, 2002. 216.

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When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-C.S. Lewis

I am therefore justified in my purchase of this. With stickers! And also this, which is entirely Mister Boyfriend's fault because he convinced me to watch the first season of Wonder Woman during dinnertimes this semester.

(quote via Dervala)

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Mistress Areté-Minerva explicates ethical issues and dissects copyright law with surgical precision! She laughs in the face of grant proposals! Her most marked superpower is the absence of any need for sleep and she writes for days fueled only by ramen, broccoli, and diet coke!

And she always appears in tasteful old-school black and white, just like her text.

(HeroMachine via the ever-ferocious Ms. Lauren.)

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If his portfolio is any indication Petty loved redheads, especially if they were talking on the phone. There are several more of these to come.

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Another thing I've meant to comment on since summer is Lauren's posts about the Vatican's stance on women's issues. I kept thinking I'd have time to write a decent post on it, but that hasn't happened in four months. I do, however, have time to point out Deborah Halter's The Papal No: A Comprehensive Guide to the Vatican's Rejection of Women's Ordination. It deals with many of the questions Lauren raised. Halter is a Religious Studies lecturer at Loyola New Orleans and a past chair of the Women's Ordination Conference. She's also my godmother.

Now back to the grant proposal. All that's left is the methodologies and budget sections, and then I can ship it to my collaborator.

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While I was on hiatus last summer, Cristina Haganu-Bresch and I got into a discussion about the nature of the Redhead Project. Around that time, she posted a visual analysis of a Lazar photo that would also work as an analytical model for most pinups. I always meant to link it when I started blogging again, and now I have.

Aside: Cristina‛s started her own Psych Ads Project now, cataloguing ads for psychopharmaceuticals she‛s come across in her research. Most intriguing.

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I‛ve written before about my lifelong interest in cooking, and about how food is life. What I haven‛t written about is the fact that I‛ve had the kitchen equivalent of writer‛s block (cook‛s block?) for nearly two years. I spent my late teens and the first half of my twenties cooking up wonderful things, plating beautiful food, gleefully accepting compliments and encouragement to return to the restaurant business. I became arrogant enough about it - and it became sacred enough to me - that I made a point of only cooking for people I loved or was quite close to. Then I quit my job, started my masters, and met Mister Boyfriend, who quickly became someone who I wanted to cook things for. It was a combination of wanting to give a gift and having a few tricks up my sleeve, since I was very accustomed to wooing through cooking.

And then I lost my mojo. Completely. It started with the dumpling pixie. Things began to turn out ... okay. Wonderful things like pork loin stuffed with breadcrumbs, portabellas and bleu cheese came out ... not bad. Spaghetti sauce was edible. A triple-chocolate cheesecake was pretty good. And then things became dismal. I remember making an apple pie from scratch that was carefully spiced and spiked with applejack that, when cut into, barely even tasted like apple. Roasted chicken came out of the oven with a slightly greenish tint. After six months of this I quit doing any real cooking. When it was my turn in the kitchen we had frozen pizza or Stouffer‛s lasagna or ramen. And lots of sandwiches. I was devastated to have suddenly lost something that constituted such a large part of my identity.

It‛s interesting to look back on this and realize that it pretty much coincided with a change in my writing. Writing was something that I previously churned out fairly painlessly. I even looked forward to writing a thesis. But as the cooking mojo dried up, so did my writing mojo. Writing the eighty pages of that thesis was one of the most painful things I ever did. I like most of my past work even when it seems juvenile to me, but I can hardly bear to look at the bound copies of my thesis now. (Part of the problem with my writing also had to do with lack of challenges during my final year of masters coursework. Boredom has never worked well for me.)

When we moved to Minnesota this summer, I quit cooking completely. Cereal in the morning was as far as it went. Luckily for me Mister Boyfriend is a good cook in his own right, and he sliced and diced his way through our daily meals. He kept it up after school started. After we got into the routine of the semester, I realized that I was home all day on Thursdays while he was at school for nearly twelve hours. It seemed only right that I should take some sort of a swipe at dinner preparation. So I made things like baked chicken breasts and baked potatoes and steamed broccoli. Then I made some pork chops. Then, in October, a pot of chili. Some cornbread. A pot of greens. When my former professor came, we went to a bookstore closeout and I bought three new cookbooks. I made soup. I made some other soup that my grandma used to make. Then pumpkin muffins. Then pumpkin bread. Then Thanksgiving dinner. Last Sunday night I plated up pan-cooked lemon and garlic chicken with sautéed mushrooms, porcini risotto, and brussels sprouts. Followed it with the tangerine pudding. Yesterday it snowed again, and that meant navy bean and sausage soup with cornbread and Nigella Lawson‛s Easy Sticky-Toffee Dessert.

And correspondingly, my intellectual work has picked up. Coursework is more challenging up here, and I‛m reading and writing a ton. You can certainly see the difference on my blog. I started thinking about the correlation between these things when Profgrrl said something about how it works for her:

Even cooking helps. It seems like the more creative outlets I have, the more energy flowing out, the more words I generate too. I don‛t know why, but I‛m not going to fuck with the system.

That somehow seems about right. I feel like I‛m on baby deer legs here, wondering if I can really cook and write again or if it‛ll all suddenly disappear once more without warning. Have I jinxed it by writing about it? Surely not. Because there‛s all this stuff I want to make, and all these papers I have to write.