Moving… Again

No, I’ll still be in beautiful Statham, Georgia, but I’ve made the move to a self -hosted blog.  Below are a live link and the url.

Hardly the Last Word

http://www.nathangilmour.com/hardly/

As you’ll see fairly quickly, the look is cool, there’s a menu in the lower left corner so that each user can save your data for the sake of easy commenting and pick a color and background that suits the eyes, and I have some more control over the layout.

I know that I have a smart and dedicated readership, and I’m counting on both in this case.  Please update your links, and don’t think of this as goodbye so much as cut-and-paste.  There WILL be new material there before February 2009!

The Spirit of Monarchy and the Spirit of Republic

Comp class yesterday was quite fun.  We started out digging into the text of the Declaration of Independence, a document that, for good reasons and bad, has become a sort of canonical document in America, good for quoting and waving as a talisman but not often good for reading.  My students immediately picked up on all of the John Locke and Montesquieu in the document; what they didn’t immediately see was that the document was not addressed to the English government at all but rather to the rest of the world.  The declaration part of the Declaration is a note to the nations that diplomatic relations should from this point forward happen directly with the government of America, not through the Crown.  Setting things in that frame helped, I think, make some more sense of the list of complaints.

We also spent a bit of time on Tom Paine, whose railing at the concept of hereditary monarchy in Common Sense is always fun to read.  If the royal family started out as the toughest gangster on the block, he writes, why in the world should anyone pay that institution any respect at all?  No grand philosophy going, but as people say facilely about certain public figures, his rhetoric is so powerful!

The bulk of the class, though, we spend talking about Montesquieu monumental On the Spirit of the Laws.  Most folks know it as the “separation of powers” document, and indeed it does prescribe that the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the government should not fall into the same human being’s hands.  But the real wonder of the document has to do with the spirit part–Montesquieu develops a full ethical theory of government after the manner of Plato’s forms of the city, and his insights bring together the best of Locke’s Commonwealth theory and the best sort of Platonic psychology to form a new theory of democracy.  

In a despotism, Montesquieu holds, the chief virtue of the population is fear: what angers the despot is deadly for the people, who have no protection from the laws, so the people who fare best are the ones who stay down.  In a monarchy, where laws buttress the state, honor is the premium, or rightful respect for the rightful king.  Here the people know their place (under the king) but nonetheless rightly expect a certain fixed order beyond the leader’s will.  In a republic or democracy, on the other hand (Montesquieu does not distinguish between the two), the people must be possessed of manhood, or somebodiness.  (I made that word up, though I’m sure I’m not the first.)  Because in a democracy every person is the highest authority (because everyone is an equal authority), education in that system must move towards a self-respect rather than respect of a king-who-is-not-one’s-self, and the fruit of that self-respect should be active participation in the community.

We finished off with one of the Federalist papers, in which Madison, writing as Publius, sets forth regional representatives as the cure for the mob rule to which pure democracy is prone.  I told my students that, although regional representation is simply the way things are for us, Madison and the Constitutional Convention really were sharp on that, given that their chief models for genuinely non-monarchical government were Rome, where the patrician families controlled the state, and Athens, where the population was only a few thousand.  I’m not sure that I communicated that as well as I should have, but such is life.

Conjuring with the Bible and Listening to Devils

The most interesting line of questioning from today’s lit survey class was one for which I had not prepared adequately.  (I recognize that such is the finitude of humanity, but I still often wish to have such days back.)  As we discussed the opening scenes of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, a couple students noted what I hoped they would note, namely that the materials with which Faustus conjures the minor demon Mephistophilis include the name of God in various forms, the New Testament, the Psalms, and other Christian texts.  I explained to them (as I had prepared to do) the implications of a belief (common enough in a world of limited literacy) that texts for them were something like lumps of plutonium for us–potentially useful but ultimately very dangerous, especially in the hands of hubristic mad-scientist types like Faustus.

So far, so good.

Then one bright student asked how the Bible, which is inherently good, could be used for the sake of damnable purposes like conjuring devils.  That brought on an opportunity for me to do my normal riff on positive and privative (or Manichean and Augustinian, if you prefer) theories of evil and their implications for ethics.  For those who have not done much historical theology/philosophy (and who don’t read this blog, as this is one of my favorite riffs), positive theories of evil hold that good and evil are matched and warring forces in the universe, and the fate of things hinges upon the good rather than evil winning the war.  The best response to evil in this model is to journey forth and defeat it.  Privative theories, on the other hand, hold that all being is, because God-given, good, and that evil names not a substance in its own right but some perversion of genuinely good being.  Therefore evil cannot ultimately “win” because every evil is after some kind of good, only in a perverse manner.  So good beings can resist those seeking bad means to the perverse good but must beware the possibility that one’s self becomes the evil that one sought to destroy.

At any rate, the possibility of conjuring with the name of God depends, I think, on an intuitive if not theorized theory of privative evil: the purpose of the Mosaic commandment against using the name in vain, I told them, was not to limit people’s vocabularies when they missed with hammers but to forbid cursing and conjuring by using the tetragrammaton, the four-letter name for God in Hebrew.  I started off down the right path, but about midway through I started reversing terms, forgetting vocabulary, and doing the sorts of things that one does when one hasn’t prepared.  Ah, well.

We also had a good discussion about some of the naievete of people who try to do criticism of Marlowe, attributing to Marlowe ideas from Mephistophilis’s speeches without considering  the realities that a character in a play, not the playwright, speaks them, and further that said character is by definition a deceiving spirit whose aim at the moment is to get Faustus’s soul to Hell.  So who could be more likely to tell Faustus that Hell is really no different than earth, that one carries one’s own Heaven or Hell inside one’s soul?  Who more likely to tell Faustus, after he signs the contract, that he’s no longer able to repent?

And here’s the one that I’m still wrestling with: What if Mephistophilis was lying about the reason he came when Faustus called?  Mephisto, in his first long speech, tells Faustus that the doctor’s magical spells really have no sway over a demonic spirit, that devils come running not from compulsion but for the opportunity to take a soul to Hell when they hear a mortal cursing the Godhead. So far as the devil tells Faustus, the spells have no power over his will.  But a few scenes later (scene ten in the Revels edition, which uses the B-text), Mephistophilis, summoned by Dick and Robin (Ralph and Robin in the A-text, Beavis and Butthead in my estimation), complains to the audience that he’s been summoned by two idiots and laments the life of a devil.  Now in their case, they seem too stupid for genuine blasphemy, and they do not as far as I can tell from their garbled Latin curse the Trinity.  So Mephisto, in that scene at least, is very much under the sway of the magic, even when wielded by two buffoons.

Now I acknowledge that such a reading might be taking a comic relief scene too seriously, but given all of the obvious interlacing between the grave and grand Faustus scenes and the clown scenes, I have to wonder whether that bit of comic relief gives away the grandest joke of all in the play, one that a devil with no cards to play pulls on the gullible doctor of magic who falls for his bluff.

I’ll have to think some more on this, but that possibility does impress me as something plausible in the logic of the drama.

Arm’s Length or All In?

I didn’t give my best lesson ever yesterday in comp, but it wasn’t bad either.

Our main texts for the day were excerpts from John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and my initial plan was to use the question of children’s education to point up the radical differences between the two.  Whereas Locke paints civil society as an agreement among consenting adults to protect each other’s private property rights, Rousseau has a more radical vision, one in which all of each citizen’s power comes to be part of the polis and the polis only succeeds insofar as its actions mirror the General Will, Rousseau’s name for those actions that confer true benefit on all rather than benefitting some at others’ expense.

However, I mentioned the children thing with Locke (noting that Locke does not spend much time at all thinking past the formation of a polis into the perpetuation fo the same) and then forgot it entirely with Rousseau (who actually does talk about education as a means of advancing beyond the “State of Nature” and achieving a genuinely human Moral Freedom).

I’ll blame this, like my Lear omissions the hour before, on this cold (which I’m still fighting).  I suppose that’s the best means I have for believing that I can and will do better tomorrow.

My Tragic Lesson Plan

I’m looking at my notes for today’s lesson on the final two acts of King Lear in English Literature Survey course, and I believe that if I made a list of the six most interesting bits I wanted to get to, I’d have missed five of them.  I know we were there for seventy-five minutes, but I really can’t remember what ate up that much time.

What we did have was an interesting discussion on tragedy as a dramatic genre.  I first went over the Aristotelian formulation and told them to put that on the shelf–more than likely Bill the Bard didn’t have access to it.  Then we talked, starting with Greek tragedy and working our way through Roman and into the Renaissance revenge tragedy, about Nietzshce’s theory (I forgot to mention Nietzsche, which I will do next time, but I did use his categories) that tragedy as a genre pulls the elements of Dionysian song, which internalizes and surrenders to chaos, into conflict with Apollonian statuary, which hold chaos at a distance for the sake of walling it off.  In our class this took the shape of a discussion on justice and whether the Stoic, Machiavellian, Augustinian, and commercial could ever work together.  Now that I think of it, that discussion ranged over most of the class, so perhaps I can forgive myself for the five good bits I lost.

Thursday we start with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (remember, we’re moving backwards in time), so I should have plenty of opportunity to dig into the Nietzschean theories then.

In Praise of Small-Town Post Offices

I think that the Heidegger podcast saved me from the grumpiness that I could hear over the lecture around me.

Yes, I’m listening to a Berkeley course on Heidegger’s Being and Time as I read through it with Michial Farmer.  It’s quite nice.

Anyway, as I listened to Hubert Dreyfus expound on the role of norms in the life of Dasein, a line of roughly twenty-five people formed up at the one register (there was equipment there for four to be open) active at the Athens west side post office.  A couple college boys expounded on how awful banks are going to be if Obama nationalizes them (never mind that the Postal Service makes its money selling stamps rather than through government bailouts), a young woman was cussing like Rod Blagojevich on a wiretap about having to wait in a bleeping line to buy bleeping stamps, and an angry woman two people from the counter was expounding loudly on the fact that an employee was meandering, seemingly without aim, in and out of doors behind the counter while we waited.

I let my eyes follow this gentleman as I listened to my lecture, and sure enough, he didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular.  The employee operating the one active register was moving as fast as I’ve seen any postal employee move, but she was but one person, and her response time differed, predictably, with the complexity of each customer’s request.

Still the man wandered.

After about half an hour, I gave up, delivered the last three months’ cardboard to our town’s recycling center (that was my other task after work today), and headed for the Statham, Georgia post office.  Once inside, I waited for a few minutes until, seeing that there were four people in line (four whole people!), an employee opened a second register to handle us as quickly as possible.  I was in and out, despite having to mail a dozen packages of various weights (enjoy Micah’s school pictures, mine family!), in ten minutes.

Now both of these are branches of the same self-sustaining government agency, but in a place where people know each other’s faces, things went more quickly.  (The man who helped me at the counter has helped me the last dozen times I’ve been in that post office).  This ain’t communism; it’s subsidiarity, and it’s nice.

I just wouldn’t be able to make it

No Snickering–That Road Sign Means Something Else

This NYT article had me laughing out loud–being a sucker for the unintentional inappropriate joke, I was loving every minute of it.  The best part, though, was this map of the place-names.  Now there’s a map.

“Sniggering at double entendres is a loved and time-honored tradition in this country,” Carol Midgley wrote in The Times of London. Ed Hurst, a co-author, with Rob Bailey, of “Rude Britain” and “Rude UK,” which list arguably offensive place names — some so arguably offensive that, unfortunately, they cannot be printed here — said that many such communities were established hundreds of years ago and that their names were not rude at the time.

“Place names and street names are full of history and culture, and it’s only because language has evolved over the centuries that they’ve wound up sounding rude,” Mr. Hurst said in an interview.

New Home Page Up and Running

On my brother’s advice, I went ahead and registered the domain http://www.nathangilmour.com a while ago, and in the intervening time I’ve been putting together a new professional page.  So take a gander if you will, and if you have suggestions for the banner, do give them–I’m no graphic designer, and this fourth iteration of the banner graphic still does not please me.

On Putting One’s Eyes Out

I’m once again in debt to Fran Teague, my wonderful dissertation director, for a bit of pedagogical gold.  When we took on King Lear in her graduate Shakespeare class in 2005, she introduced the history-of-theater question of how one could stage Cornwall’s and Regan’s brutal act of putting Gloucester’s eyes out on a thrust stage.  After all, no matter what object one hid behind, someone would be able to see what’s actually going on.  Our class, as I remember, pretty much gave up on verisimilitude and conceded the impossibility of anything but a stylized gouge.  (The next spring, UGA’s theater department, putting on Lear, went for a stylized pantomime.)  She set before us a simple and elegant solution: since Gloucester is tied to a chair, the actors playing Cornwall and Regan could simply tip him back, apply the stage-blood, and tip him forward again when time came for Gloucester to speak his lines.  So, as you might have anticipated, I picked two burly boys (I had the class pretend that one was in fact a cross-dressing Jacobean actor, even though both had pronounced facial hair), sat in a chair, and for the last five minutes of today’s class (whose reading ended with the end of act three, where Gloucester loses his eyes) they figured out how to put my eyes out for the audience’s delight.  The gentlemen tipped me back without a hitch (I told ’em I’d flunk ’em if they dropped me), and the class went out with a good visual.

Thank you, Dr. Teague.

In comp class we spent the bulk of our time dealing with agents and actions and making sure they actually appear in each clause’s subject and verb, so I won’t have a teaching post tomorrow.  I suppose I’ll have to think of something to write between now and then.

Playing the Atheist

Yesterday’s class landed me in a strange place but one that, for the moment, I’m alright with.  As I’ve noted elsewhere, I don’t go out of my way to announce that I’m a Christian but also don’t duck the question when students ask.  (I do, after all, often make reference to the text of biblical books when I teach literature and philosophy, so the question is a natural one.)  I’ve taught three semesters, as readers here no doubt know, of a special section of freshman comp based on the Hebrew Bible in translation.

But yesterday we were tackling an essay by David Hume on miracles, and my students didn’t quite grasp the power of his argument, so stepping inside the role of Hume as so often I’ve stepped inside the role of Plato, I parsed his dense prose not as a step towards refuting it but in the process of becoming a Hume for my students to fight. So I broke down the following sentence for them:

…no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior. (The Portable Enlightenment Reader 110)

To break that down, since a given miracle is by definition not reproducible (Princess Bride aside), therefore only available to the bulk of humanity by means of somebody’s account of that miracle, the credibility of that miracle depends upon the credibility of the reporter.  So given the incredible character of a miracle, only a supremely authoritative witness, one effectively invulnerable to deceit and incapable of deceiving, could relate a miracle believably.  But to say that a given person believes in such things as the dead rising from the grave is to call that person credulous at the outset.  Therefore no account of a miracle can be authoritative, and thus no reasonable person ought to believe a miracle.

One good man in the back row took me on, and I respect that, but I quickly reiterated and solidified Hume’s position using his vocabulary, and once again the class was in what I called (at the end of the class) Hume’s headlock. As I dismissed the class to go watch Obama’s inauguration on television, I could tell that the air was still somewhat heavy in the room.

I hope that the experience leads some of my evangelical students (I’m sure they’re in there–this is UGA, after all) to talk with some educated Christians about Hume’s argument rather than give up on the whole project.  I’d hate to have that on my conscience.  But all the same, as I’ve said in conversation if not here, I’d rather have these students encounter ideas like Hume’s in the safety of my classroom, where the conversation ends and allows for reflection and help-seeking, than some day in conversation with a coworker or some other context in which a genuinely aggressive atheist is pushing the ideas.  That might ultimately be a cop-out on my part, but I do think that, among the ways that my students could encounter Hume, mine is at least not the worst.

Psychology Grad Students, Get your Dissertation Notebooks Ready

Micah to Mary yesterday:

“Pretty soon I’m going to be a grownup, and then people will call ME Daddy.”

Hard to Blame Anyone in Lear

I realized while planning today’s lesson that, until some of the characters just go devilish on the audience, I have a hard time blaming anyone in King Lear for what comes to pass.  On one hand, Regan and Goneril don’t speak up when the old man insists on keeping a 100-man private army after ceding the throne.  On the other, with half of Britain to run, I can’t blame either daughter for objecting to Lear’s 100 knights causing trouble in the palace.  And while it’s rotten for the daughters to turn the old man out in the storm, they do note immediately afterwards that they would have been happy to house Lear, just not his soldiers.

Now I realize that as acts three and four move along, the play’s traditional baddies move from merely frustrated to openly nasty, but I’m talking about the opening acts here.

I gave good mini-lectures today on the history of the English Bible (because there are so many echoes of Paul in King Lear) and on the changing character of the term “natural” (because a firstborn’s privilege is, in the eyes of Edmund, supernatural and thus nonsense) as we went along, and this class has been wonderful about coming prepared and talking in class.  I suppose Jess Walker was right about this (even if she remains wrong about Merchant of Venice): sophomore English and journalism majors make for a fun conversation.

Look for a post on the Enlightenment and religion tomorrow.

If Anyone Wants to Lavish Gifts on an Obscure Scholar

If there are any rich blog-patrons out there, I have good news for you.  The C BD academic calendar showed up in the mail this weekend, and I’m positively salivating over some of the offerings.  If you want to start a career as a wealthy blog patron, you could make my year by sending any or all of these gems to the following address:

Nathan Gilmour
Department of English
254 Park Hall
Athens, GA 30602

Barth’s Church Dogmatics in Paperback

Calvin’s Complete Bible Commentaries and Institutes

Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament

The Early Church Fathers

Bibleworks 8.0

The Geneva Bible

Christian Writers’ Market Guide, 2009

Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament

Babylonian Talmud in Translation

N.B. If you are taking this as a serious request, please do not send these books.  This is a bit of a pipe dream, not a serious request.  I have neither the time nor the shelf space for these multi-volume beasts.

Attack of the Cockroach

Weatherman and Cockroach

This shouldn’t be nearly as funny as it is, but it is.

Kant’s Strange Disconnect

Immanuel Kant: “What Is Enlightenment?”

Thursday’s comp class (the brave souls trying out my Enlightenment special topics class) got into some pretty good discussions of this surprising text.  Kant sets out sounding like the very spirit of the age, calling on people to dare to understand, but the essay ends in surprisingly contradictory terms, or at least parts of our class saw contradiction.

Kant’s opening pages are promising enough: no matter what a person’s employment, he claims, that person should be free to exercise what he calls “public intellect,” namely the publication of whatever speculations are possible.  At the same time, the institutions which employ that person should have the power to enforce certain behaviors within the contexts of official events. Therefore a politician should serve a country even if he publishes criticisms of it, and a priest should be free to explore ideas that, in the context of liturgy, have no place.  So far, so good–he’s laying out some outlines of academic freedom in terms to which Stanley Fish could say “amen.”

The weird bit about the essay is that, in the last couple pages, Kant writes in harsh terms against the American republic and the republican surge taking hold in France.  Without an enlightened despot, Kant says, democracy cannot help but be mere rabble.

I suppose none of this should surprise me too much; Plato is, after all, a hard habit to break, and although Plato puts more limitations on some people’s literary activities, he does put a premium on education for the ruling classes while calling democracy a bad mistake.  And Frederick, so far as I can tell, was a powerful enough personality that he might well draw intellectuals in the way that the Fascists and Communists and Capitalists did in the 20th century.  I suppose I’d just expect more of a piece that claims for itself the mantle of a manifesto in favor of Enlightenment.

Dissertation Anxiety

I don’t know why, but it’s taken me a month to actually set eyes on the copy of my Milton chapters since I printed off the latest draft.  I’ve been working on other chapters, but I’ve been terrified of finding nothing worthwhile when I revisit the chapters on which I’ve worked hardest.

On Wednesday morning I did finally revisit, mark up, and plan revisions on them, but the terror was weird.

A Dirty Play Gets Moralistic

We finished up The Country Wife today, and my classes agreed with me that the in vino veritas scene in act five seems forced.  The play as a whole, as I mentioned last time, is a nonstop flurry of dirty jokes, stratagems to get sex, and more dirty jokes.  The most central characters are the most experienced player and the most natural study (it’s not clear to me whether they actually get together, but I’m no Restoration comedy scholar), and in the end, predictably, things nearly fall apart when all of the scheming characters (which is to say all of the characters) wind up in the same room, and a skillfully applied but professionally convincing lie on the part of Horner’s physician saves his skin.

The drunken truth-telling scene comes a couple scenes before, when Horner and two of the women he’s (likely) enjoying on the sly get good and drunk and start talking about men’s and women’s reputations and the lengths they go to in order to enjoy illicit sex.  Right in the middle of it, two of the women and Horner launch into what I thought (and my students agreed) sounded like some kind of broad social critique of the expectations surrounding marriage and sex in polite society.  The problem is, of course, that none of the characters in the play seems to have enough of a soul to suffer from anything, much less repression, so even the drunken truth-telling seems entirely hollow.

I was perfectly honest with my class that I only taught this play because the department contracted me to do a historical survey of English literature; there are all sorts of things I’d rather teach.  That said, now I know that I can in fact teach really bad comedy for a week, and I imagine I might have even taught somebody something.

A Look into Another Conference

Philosophers at Work, and Hoping for it

I had to laugh a bit and commiserate with my compatriots over in the philosophy departments when I read this article.  I don’t have much to add to it, but this exchange with Jeremy Morris, a recent Ph.D, rang quite true:

Asked where he’d be willing to go to teach philosophy, he replied, “Anywhere on the planet. Anywhere at all. Whether or not I get paid.

“To tell you the truth,” he quickly added, “the only thing that could push me out of philosophy is the student loans I’ve accrued.”

Amen and Amen.

Dirty Jokes and the Enlightenment

The two really don’t have much to do with one another, save that I taught both this morning.  Starting Thursday I’m likely going to start writing a post for each, but today, we mainly did interviews in my Enlightenment comp class, so there wasn’t much on the order of content save a brief lecture on my part about the intellectual, political, social, economic, and other upheavals that created the need for an Enlightenment.  Thursday we start in with Kant’s essay about the world’s coming of age, so I should have more interesting things to write then.

In English lit class, we did the first act of William Wycherly’s (I never know how to pronounce that last name) The Country Wife.  I’m still torn about whether I should have put that play in the syllabus, and our discussion today largely revolved around what criteria teachers should use when deciding what to teach and what not to teach.  I confessed to them that, were the class not a historical-era-defined survey course, I likely would have taught something more interesting to me, but they seemed alright with the idea that a survey ought to engage all sorts of texts from the historical periods covered.  Our most interesting digression had to do with whether or not, three hundred and fifty years from now, 21st-century literature classes should view (or read the screenplay) to Wedding Crashers or not, since the plots of that Vince Vaughn and our William Wycherly are so closely akin.

Overall I’d call it a good teaching day.  I’ve got two full-on lesson plans to put together for Thursday, though, so I’d better get on that and then on to dissertation writing.

Pretty Funny Bit

Reblock Yourself the Polly Frost Way!

There’s not much to say about this aside from it’s really funny.

I moved to Sedona, Arizona, and once again began to focus on my own creative work. Easing back into my own true nature, I had sketched out a temporary title for my novel and had settled on an author photo when I decided to take a break and explore this newfangled thing they called the Internet.

What a revelation! Everywhere on the web I found writers expressing themselves.

I was swept up in the exhilaration. I ran multiple WordPress blogs. I dashed off rants about the New York City book publishing world, sharing them on Scribd as downloadable PDFs. My “What I Ate for Lunch” Tumblr photoblog earned consistently high rankings on Technorati. Fame came to me as well as one of the most prolific photo commenters at Flickr.

But after a year of madness and intoxication I took an honest look at myself. I took an honest look around me. And I didn’t like what I saw.

There was too much writing. And it was everywhere. It was time for me to help writers everywhere find some balance. That’s when I developed:

THE POLLY FROST BOOT CAMP FOR SHUTTING YOU UP!

The seminar lists are pretty phenomenal.

Of course, I know full well about the legions of abandoned blogs out there, and I have to claim three or four of them myself.  As it turns out, writing is work, no matter how many fun toys go into it.  But the bit is funny nonetheless.