EXCITING DEVELOPMENT

Some months back a huge snit developed in Lutheran Surrealism's squawk box around the problem of terminology in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I teach Introduction to Philosophy at SUNY-Delhi and use a book called Looking at Philosophy by Donald Palmer. In the last edition of the book (3rd) Palmer used the terms analytical and synthetic to define two kinds of propositions which appear in Leibniz. I put out a call to philosophy friends who read this blague and they said, no, this wasn't the case, those terms commence in Kant. So I wrote to the publisher who was preparing the fourth edition with Palmer and there is a new footnote that appears on p. 225, and for which I am apparently thanked in the acknowledgements.

12. "Leibniz called his two propositions simply 'necessary' and 'contingent' judgments, but Immanuel Kant in 1781 gave them the name they now have. Propositions whose predicate is embedded in the subject and can be 'analyzed out' of the subject are analytic. (In the sentence 'A bachelor is male,' the subject 'bachelor' already contains the predicate 'male.') Propositions whose predicate is not embedded in the sentence are synthetic, originally meaning 'brought together.' (In the sentence, 'The cat is on the mat,' the subject 'cat' does not contain the predicate 'on the mat,' so the sentence brings together the subject and the predicate.)

Having just opened the book I naturally wanted to get right into this problem since it has confounded me ever since I started using the book several years back. Palmer was quite gracious in dealing with the problem and to my mind this smooths out one of the worst bumps in the road while I teach this course. Which is to say that this analytical-synthetic distinction is a real goof-up. Quine tackles it later on and erases the distinction altogether (I'm with Quine). But meanwhile it performs a very important operation in Kant, and in Leibniz, and in Hume, and presumably in a lot of other more minor philosophers.

Another change -- this time an omission -- is that the 3rd edition had a diagram on p. 135 that I really thought had little or no sense. I sometimes spent an entire classroom hour trying to figure out what a series of equations in St. Thomas' work must mean. There is a split between God's Will and Infinity which simply flabbergasted me, and all of my students as well. I complained to Palmer and Palmer dropped this diagram! In the new text there is a lengthy passage concerning telos in Aquinas, and how the scientific spirit in Roger Bacon and others was already beginning to undermine such gigantic and unwieldy concepts.

Palmer's book is a delight and has gotten better. I hope the changes in other places in this new edition haven't obscured its clarity and rigor and humorous sensibility. I wish I had a composition textbook which had this kind of brilliant simplicity. I don't. I also don't have a mythology textbook which is even one one-hundredth as good as this book by Palmer. ANYONE teaching introductory philosophy ought to check out Palmer's book. It's a pair of radiator pants whatever that means!

GLOUCESTER

Went to Gloucester
Parked on Main St. in front of Greek diner
Walked to Dogtown Books
Bob Ritchie explained the lay-out of the town
Went to Sawyer Free Library
Then down to enormous Unitarian Church
Up Church St. stopped at 1st Unitarian graveyard (1806)
Then along Prospect St. to Our Lady --
Catholic Church could have been in Portugal -- very small
Then on to his house
From which a squall obscured 10 lb. island

Gloucester Times had an article about a 1766 letter
The letter had been stolen
The editorial was AGAINST gay marriage
As proposed by activist judges
And said, put it to the vote
The strain of the Unitarians vs. the Catholics remains a constant

May 27, 2005

TODAY'S NO BRAINER (salad is extra)

The reason that third world countries are third world countries is because THEIR governments are corrupt.

SOCCER

Kicked the ball with Lola & Tristan
Tristan always insists on some incorrect interpretation of a rule
He then runs away crying when he is corrected

Lola does a good job saving the ball
She covers the post quite well
Consider yourself 'the cat' I said & she did

I kicked the ball too hard & it went off her face
She cried
Then she played even more

Tristan reappears & wants to play
He has no pants on!
When I explain he denies this rule

I can still drill the ball
Kick it & it sizzles through the grass
Just like 30 years ago

May 22, 2005

NB: The problem is that I can no longer run like I could 30 years ago. When I run I feel like a broken robot. Weird sensation, like I'm a sculpture by Tinguely about to auto-destruct.

SADDAM HUSSEIN

Did you read the article in the paper about Saddam Hussein, and how he doesn't like Fruit Loops and how he does like Raisin Bran? How he wipes all his utensils with baby wipes before eating, and also gives fatherly advice to young American soldiers to get a wife who is in the middle range in terms of looks and age?

And now after the discovery of this Downing memo it appears that more and more editorials are coming out saying we should give Iraq back to Saddam.

Fruit Loops is a popular cereal but this takes the cake.

I think the only thing to do is continue with the democratization of the Middle East. To back out now would be the equivalent of putting strychnine in the club soda.

When I shat gold...

ANOTHER MECCA: DAYTONA

Off the Florida coast at Daytona is where the Commodore went down leaving STephen Crane and several other members of the ship including the captain to get to shore. The small museum at Ponce de Leon inlet has parts of the ship on display and the local inhabitants who act as guides to the museum were quite thoroughly involved in the lore of the capsized boat and its famously near-dead survivors. We climbed the lighthouse to look out over the sea. A shark bumped Crane's boat and we did see a lone dorsal fin in the golden gloaming.

Most of the beach has become oversized hotdog stands, but this site has remained pristine due to Crane's accident as it was written in The Open Boat and in the less-celebrated journalism that accompanied the event. Crane spent two full days and nights trying to get to shore amidst the riptides. Wading in the water one can feel these riptides even today, and also see the snowy egrets walking along the shore next to Dionysian men covered head to toe in tattoos as they wait for the next motorcycle race down the very firm sand beach. Ponce de Leon inlet near Daytona has become a sacred site and has been nearly untouched by time over the last hundred years. It is surrounded by the detritus of the crummy coastal culture of the Florida beach basket-cases who live from moment to moment and from papaya to papaya.

Objective Versus Subjective Values

The ten commandments are objective values that cannot be toyed with. In the breach a burning sensation develops, followed by spiritual dullness and moral confusion.

Very obsessed with the commandment against graven images -- and for that reason going into the Brooklyn Museum today to look at mummies.

Revolutionary Communism has always created ideal conditions for poets. One could ask Mayakovsky or the Mandelstams. One could discuss this with the poets of North Korea today.

Liberal capitalism on the other hand from ancient Athens up to our own day has always been a disaster for the arts. Artists of any kind simply fail to prosper in liberal capitalism.

This is why I am so heavily in favor of revolutionary communism.

PHILIPPE SOUPAULT (1897-1990)

He wrote about 80 books, but many of them were recycled or cobbled together from earlier books. He was a major surrealist in the heroic years before 1926 when the rupture took place and many surrealists became communists. Soupault refused to join the communist party and was rejected from surrealism. He went on to play the role of an iconoclastic critic in Paris for the next 65 years outliving all the other major writers of surrealism.



Going through Walter Benjamin's Second Volume of Selected Writings 1927-1933 (Harvard UP 1999) he first blasts one of Soupault's most ridiculous novels Coeur d'Or for having been thrown together much too loosely to make an excellent book. Every throw a winner, Benjamin says, does not make for excellent books.

But then later on he cites a critical essay by Soupault on Chaplin. "Chaplin merely makes pople laugh. But aside from the fact that this is the hardest thing to do, it is socially also the most important" (224).

This side of surrealism has been much neglected -- the ludic character. Breton was a bit too heavy-handed and rarely created laughter in his readers, nor did he appreciate it very intensely. For Soupault, who wrote quite often on and of humorists, it was a central feature, as it is for us.

ANOTHER MECCA: BUFFALO

Drove across the state to Buffalo in order to show a visiting relative Niagara Falls.

We stayed at a Motel 6 on Maple Road just next to SUNY-Buffalo because I wanted to see the place where Robert Creeley taught for so many years. What a dump. SUNY-Buffalo is the worst kind of Soviet architecture and looks positively menacing from a distance. It's red-brick ferro-concrete bunker-style ugliness. It's hard to imagine how Creeley kept his sense of humor in the face of such architecture. Around the campus were miles of endless sprawl. Next door to the Motel 6 was a Hooter's. I couldn't find a Lutheran church anywhere along this strip.

We drove to Niagara Falls the following morning. The state park was quite tasteful (it was designed by Robert Moses & co. and had his understated elegance in almost every building). We took the Maid of the Mist up into the Canadian horse-shoe falls -- quite nice -- the baby enjoyed it immensely. We then drove up to the south shore of Lake Ontario and drove along an old highway 18 back to Rochester. All the big cities of New York state are failing. The jobs are going to third world countries. In Buffalo the state insane asylum once had 30,000 inmates. After a stroke of Clinton's pen it had 325. The enormous building may yet be saved. According to a policeman I spoke with on SUNY-Buffalo's other campus he said that they needed a half million to save the building, but have only a hundred thousand so far. The building is astonishing in its size and obvious quality but already looks derelict. There was a general impression that Buffalo was in a state of collapse, but around a park designed by Olmsted there were still signs of great wealth and things being kept up. The city of Niagara was largely composed of block after block of boarded up buildings. Rochester's Kodak has sent most of its processing overseas and has downsized from 70,000 to 20,000 employees. We went into a McDonald's in Rochester and saw obvious drug addicts! They were very thin and had weird sunglasses and lots of tattoos.

One aspect of surrealism that has always interested me is the emphasis on urbanism. You get it in Walter Benjamin but he got it first in Soupault and Breton. But the objectivists were also urbanists. Reznikoff's twenty mile walks in NYC, Williams' rounds in Paterson, provide an objectivist correlative to surrealist urbanism.