I'm about 80 pages into Clive Wynne's book Do Animals Think? Interesting fact: there are 4,200 mammal species of which approximately 1000 are bats.

Bats have leathery wings as opposed to feathered wings.

Wynne says that outside of the west bats are generally well-liked, and are often eaten. They taste like chicken.

Wynne is mostly writing about non-charismatic animals because he thinks we can think the most clearly about them. No one has ever stood up for a pig's rights, he says. (What's about Charlotte's Web?) And few think about the rights of bees. His chapter on honeybees was magnif.

He argues that bees are not conscious, that they operate according to codes, like computers. If this, then this. They have simple binary codes and proceed accordingly.

Deduction from incomplete information he argues is a human trait that no other animals share.

I am like a wineskin
Shriveled by smoke
But I have not forgotten your laws.

Psalm 119: 83

LOLA'S QUESTIONS

Does God have a mommy?

Does God have birthdays?

Did he ever get to play as a kid?

Tristan's Frist Poem

What if the whole world
were made out
of
butter-
flies, not people

but
mountains,
rivers,
roads,
hospitals,
the car even

No wait, scratch that --

Even better -- what if
gingerbread houses, castles, babies,
Men and women, everything was
Made out of gingerbread,

Even
Butterflies.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY

If the left would adopt John Locke rather than Karl Marx as their top theorist then I could run around screaming that I am a leftist.

I could carry around sandwich boards that said things like, "I believe in private property!"

And, what about this, "Life, and liberty, are essential rights!"

And I'd get invited to a party now and then, and would feel welcomed, and would leave feeling that I had so much in common with the left.

But if the left adopted John Locke as their top theorist then I would probably become a Marxist.

If we were not permitted to use words at all but one, and also gestures, would there be more confusion or less?

We tried this for an hour at our house. The word was moota. We could change the tone and inflection and use it as many times in a row.

There was no confusion at all, but it was lots of fun, and it was surprising how much could be communicated. However, I was glad when the hour was over.

Moota moota.

I'm teaching six courses over the next four weeks. In addition we have a new baby, and therefore new sleeping arrangements and I rarely sleep through the night. I am going to do a reading on Sunday in a town called Hobart at 2 pm.

And in a few minutes I'm off to the park with three children. It's a golden evening in the Catskills. The hills have a blush of red. The rivers are free of ice. The daffodils are out. Soccer practice has begun for the little ones. Every day I try to walk two miles to get the winter lard off my body.

Lutheran Surrealism sometimes has to leave behind theory for the world of praxis and this is one of those times!

There is too much of the law of love in contemporary thought and too little love of the law.

What are human rights? What are animal rights?

I spent several hours today thinking I would teach a class on this topic as part of our Honors Course. I went through Amazon.com looking for books.

Peter Singer's book.
Luc Ferry's book.
The Idea of Human Rights, by Michael Perry.
The French Revolution & The Idea of Human Rights.


Charlotte's Web, by EB White.
Turtle Diary, by Russell Hobsan.

That's a sort of preliminary set-up. There was a huge book called Animal Rights at Oxford UP. Another called The Philosophy of Human rights, at Paragon Press.

I want to get a number of different approaches, and build in a lot of laughs and wonderment.

I especially like Singer because he always makes me laugh because he makes gaffes all over the place that even my freshmen will howl over.

There's a couple of really interesting books: Romanticism and Animal Rights (takes into account Clare's poems on the Badger!) but it costs 70 dollars!

So, here's what I want: books about 200 pages or less. Big print. Fun writing. Good ideas. Price between 10 and 20 dollars.

I want about five books along those lines. The total price should be no more than 70 dollars.

The course is called Contemporary Thinkers 201, and I can do a number of different authors. I thought about doing comedy, or Beat writers, but this rights thing is a meatier issue. In almost every class I get a green anarchist or two, and they're fun to tease, but they also generally give as good as they get. So that keeps things lively.

Any other ideas?

IMPROVEMENT

Lola (6)
Had read Peter Rabbit
She knew all about the naughty boy

Tristan (5)
left-clicked his way through the Boom-bahs

Julian (2.5)
Speaking better and more clearly
Calling his siblings, Poopheads

March 18, 2006

I attended the keynote address given by Dr. Paul Santilli at the SUNY-Oneonta Undergraduate Philosophy Conference. The topic was the Inhuman. It was a very good talk, I felt. I am not by profession a philosopher. I am a literary critic. Because in my day a philosophy education was necessary to understand postmodernism I did a lot of philosophical study but I didn't want to do it in the philosophy department because of its reputation for positivism which I consider a dead-end.

Santilli spoke quite well of the notion of horror that we attribute to the non-human or the barely human and gave examples from horror films such as The Fly, Frankenstein, etc.

At the end of the talk the students asked him if he would permit highly intelligent gorillas to be under the umbrella of human rights.

He hesitated. This is a new area where students are pushing further and further as the line between human and animal is erased.

Other students asked him if he would welcome robots or cyborgs. He hesitated, and demurred.

I think he didn't want to do this, and I was wondering if he was a Christian.

So I asked him whether the traditional Christian term of the soul which limited humanity to humans would be useful to him, and whether he would be willing to put it back on the table.

He said, no.

It was interesting to me. The vocabulary we use limits and clarifies what we are able to say, or so it seemed. Without the term, "soul," we can no longer distinguish between human and non-human. Can we also no longer distinguish between humanity and inhumanity?

The precious language of theology is no longer permissible although we are still able to quote Kant, and C.S. Lewis, and others who came out of that tradition as long as we stay off the language that links them to their tradition. The whole idea seems to be to pulverize that tradition. Anyone who seeks to extend it is immediately considered out of court.

And yet, if this language is abolished, it seems to me that the very notion of our humanity is also abolished. Oy vey.

I can say, neither animals nor cyborgs have souls. Non-Christians can't.

What else can't they say? Can they distinguish between good and evil?

Language is fictive, and yet it permits certain realities. Isn't that what Carl Sachs was saying last summer at our lunch that Kant was saying?

It isn't precisely what a true Christian theologian would say. The reality of God and Christ would be foremost. If Kant were to rule these as useful fictions, where would Lutheran Surrealism stand.

We would say yes.

But we would nevertheless side with the theologians. It's a useful fiction. It's also a permanent reality.

Calvin Coolidge

I have had many political heroes. Paul Simon, senator of Illinois. Peter Kropotkin, the author of Mutual Aid. Calvin Coolidge is the latest, but he's lasted the longest. I admired him first as the author of the miraculously compact sentence, "Business is the business of America."

He had a Vermonter's way of putting a lot into a pithy phrase. "Patriotism is easy to understand in America. It means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country."

But more than anything else it's his zany sense of humor. Last spring I read an enormous history of the American people by a British historian named Paul Johnson. I didn't think much of the book. He seemed to have everything slightly out of focus. But there was a gem. Towards the end he wrote of Coolidge and a prank he used to play on his secretary. He would call her into the Oval Office and then hide underneath the desk, a prank worthy of a three-year old. I think in heaven that kind of thing is pretty much all that people will do.

Coolidge rarely spoke in public. A society woman once came up to him and said, "I made a bet with my husband that I can get you to say more than two words for once."

"You lose," he replied.

Many claim that Coolidge let in the Grat Depression. Since that was a world-wide depression I doubt if we could pin it all on Calvin Coolidge. I prefer to remember him for his bizarre compact statements. In 1928 he was urged to run for the presidency. He called a press conference and the newsmen and women of 1928 dutifully assembled to hear the speech. It consisted of one sentence, "I do not choose to run for reelection in 1928."

Then he retired to his rooms.

Coolidge's autobiography is supposedly fabulous. I haven't read it. It's one of those summer projects that awaits, or perhaps one which I'll finally get around to in retirement. Has anybody out there read it?

David Hume believed that only things exist.

George Berkeley believed that only God exists.

Kant believed that both things and God exist, but we can never really know either one.

11 million illegal workers in the country making less than minimum wage. So now the idea is to make them all legal citizens, so that then they can make the minimum wage, plus social security. So, Einstein, who's going to hire them at the legal wage? Nobody.

So they are given citizenship and at the same time thrown out of work. So now we have 11 million unemployed citizens. So, now we have to pay them unemployment, and if that's not enough they turn to crime. So now we expand the prisons.

And meanwhile, another 11 million illegal aliens sneak in to work for three dollars an hour, no social security.

Not that I have a solution, but this is riotous. It is as if logic has gone on holiday.

LOCAL NEWS

In this tiny upstate village of some 3000 we have recently had a new Price Chopper. Price Chopper is a grocery store. For years we have suffered from the lack of a good grocery store and almost everyone as a result has had to make a weekly trip twenty miles away to the small city of Oneonta to obtain groceries.

The Price Chopper is new, and although its aisles are somewhat narrow, it's quite a comfortable place. The only problem is that the checkout lines are almost always too long, and usually the checkout people make at least one mistake while ringing up your goods. If you pay close attention by the way this is true in almost any store you'll ever go into. The person behind the counter can almost invariably be found to have made a mistake.

So it's often ten minutes or more getting out of the store. And while I am nitpicking at the store and arguing that the price they rang up is not the same as the price that appeared out on the floor, I would like to note that the back of the store has already seen enormous cracks appear in the flooring tile. I asked the manager about this, and he shrugged his shoulders and said, "That's Delaware County."

What is this, an earthquake zone? No, it's just that the county land settles unevenly apparently.

It's funny to see all my neighbors going in and out of Price Chopper. I like to sit in the parking lot, and read the local papers, and watch the Episcopalian deacon going in, and the retired biology teacher, and the funny guy with a beard who does something with the county courthouse, etc. etc.

All going in, and all fairly satisfied. The Price Chopper, in spite of my carping comments, is fairly satisfying. Best part: the parking lot is big enough and new enough that it is possible to park without hitting a pot hole even in the dark, and one can get pretty close to one of the two doors so that one is in, even in the darkest winter months, without very much pain.

New Review of Temping Appears!

Rain Taxi, a journal that appears from Minneapolis, has published a new review of my novel Temping.

The review is odd and interesting. The reviewer says, "Posing as a self-help tract, Temping tells of how a down-at-heels, down-on-his-luck temp, who aspires to nothing more than having 'no responsibilities... so that the wheels of my imagination could turn,' ends up finding love, long-term labor, and Lutheranism. Under the surface, however, the book is a portrait of a Bohemian without a cause..."

The reviewer, a man whose name is purportedly Jim Feast (a true name?), then goes on to put my book into historical context, in that it appears to him that the circuses established in Finland in which my character Milhouse Moot works shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union were established in fact to counter the desolate economy that did indeed exist in Finland in those years, in which unemployment had reached a level of 30%.

This review made me rethink my whole project. Is it so in fact that my character Milhouse Moot is actually in pursuit of Bohemia, and not God and Love, afterall? And the idea of expatriation that once led our Bohemians to Paris -- is the move to Finland a pursuit of just that kind of world as posed by the films of Aki Kaurismaki? It's worth a long pause of reflection.