a rare baseball post

Mark Buehrle, Chicago White Sox, just threw a perfect game against Tampa Bay. Only the 18th perfect game in baseball history.

For those readers who don’t understand baseball, a perfect game means that no opposing batters reached base safely by any means whatsoever, whether through hits, a walk (4 bad pitches), being hit by a pitch, or through a fielding error.

27 Tampa batters were all retired, with none reaching base safely. Very, very hard to do, since it depends not just on the pitcher having a great day, but on good defensive play by his teammates as well.

Buehrle received an immediate congratulatory call from a White Sox fan named Barack Hussein Obama.

Best of all, DeWayne Wise saved the perfect game with an acrobatic robbery of what would have been a Gabe Kapler home run. This is worth savoring:

a point about Heidegger and medieval thought

To wind down the night I’ve been reading Jean-Paul Coujou’s interesting introduction to his French translation of Suárez’s first three Disputations (Disputes métaphysiques. Vrin, 1998). Those three alone run to 325 pages in the French, so it was a massive work on Suárez’s part. I envy Leibniz for having read it repeatedly like a novel in his youth. (As stated in the interview on Ennis’s blog, most of my own encounters with Scholasticism were mediated through Leibniz, my favorite philosopher of all time.)

Anyway… Coujou cites a point from one Alain de Libéra with which I agree. Libéra, in a 1989 book entitled La philosophie médiévale (PUF) apparently observes that Heidegger’s claim that medieval philosophy came from the encounter between Aristotle and the Bible misses one very important part of medieval philosophy– Islam!

As a consequence, Heidegger badly underrates the role of Neo-Platonism in medieval thought. There’s obviously plenty of Neo-Platonism in medieval Christian thought as well, but once you get into Islamic thought it just pounds you over the head and can’t be missed. They even thought Aristotle was a sort of Neo-Platonist, given that a Neo-Platonic treatise was mislabelled in the Muslim world as Aristotle’s Theology. My AUC colleague Catarina Belo is currently translating that work into Portuguese.

If you’re raised on Heidegger, it’s easy to be brainwashed into thinking that his judgments about the history of philosophy are infallible. They’re not. He was a very learned person, but his history of being, in my opinion, is unusually one-dimensional. I even prefer Deleuze as a historian of philosophy, despite some of his pretty crazy distortions, for the sole reason that Deleuze doesn’t try to pour a single sauce over the entire history of philosophy as Heidegger does. At least Deleuze tries to find something individually particular to each philosopher.

[ADDENDUM: Coujou also cites Courtine’s claim that by separating metaphysics from theology, Suárez even escapes the onto-theological character of metaphysics. That seems to go too far… you don’t actually need God for onto-theology in Heidegger. Any sort of total presence will do, even atoms.]

so far…

I’ve started the revision process of the book chapter drafts.

It’s still early, but already a pretty consistent mathematical pattern has emerged. It is taking only about 20% as much time to revise the sections as it took to write them. That’s the beauty of just plowing through a rough draft– they are generally a lot better than you think they are. The content is usually exactly where it needs to be, and in the right order. All that remains at this stage is to make the content convincing.

It is wrong to think that content, propositions, arguments, are convincing or unconvincing in and of themselves. Propositions and arguments skate along the surface of a topic, as McLuhan knew. Your subject becomes convincing only when the reader sees why it must be so, and walks amidst your words as if in a wonderland.

Naturally, the current 20% figure will expand a lot once I get to the sections that are too short rather than too long, because I’ll need to add additional content in those sections and in a few cases do a bit more thinking about things.

Nonetheless, if that ratio holds up, I’ll have perfectly polished versions of Chapters 1 and 2 by lunchtime tomorrow.

speed = morale

huh?

For various technical reasons, almost all of my music listening these days involves MP3 files either on this computer or the iPod. But generally I only use the iPod when riding to and from campus, and didn’t take it yesterday.

And according to my computer, I have not listened to a single piece of music since Sunday. 4 days. Have I ever gone 4 days in my adult life without hearing even one song? I’m not sure what that means, but it’s a bit weird that I have seem to have stumbled through 4 days of silence in this apartment without realizing it.

this, I wouldn’t emulate

But it may be of interest anyway.

I just printed out a chart showing how many words each section of the book draft is, and how much time it took to write them. It helps give me an overview of where the strong and weak points are in the existing draft.

All told, there are 26 sections in the draft. 17 of them are too long, 1 is just right, and 8 are too short.

As a general rule, the long sections are the ones where I know with absolute clarity what I want to say, and just need to discover how to say it a bit more concisely.

The short sections are either places where a couple of mild puzzles remain (the bigger puzzles are in the still undrafted second half of the book), or where I did know exactly what to say but was very tired while writing and hence satisfied myself with a few passing notations.

I think I’ll dig into some revision tonight instead of leaving it until tomorrow.

Once all of this is done, I’ll post the promised table showing the length of each section and exactly how much time each one took to write. But I can confidently state that it’s a lot easier to revise existing junk drafts than to try to create new prose ex nihilo.

Existing rough drafts are a safety net to protect you from the horror of the zero. They can also put vanity to work in your favor, because when you read these rough passages you’ll find yourself saying: “man, I’m so much better than that. What is this junk?”

Chapters 1 and 2 are going to need significant cuts, but that’s always easier than lengthening, so those could be finished relatively quickly if I wake up feeling on a roll.

Oh yeah, an obvious point… You have to make lots of backups for safety reasons. You don’t want to shoot yourself after losing 300 pages of dissertation. Send your drafts to gmail. Print them at a certain point. Whatever it takes. Nothing is more devastating than losing a whole bunch of writing.

My worst-ever story with lost work isn’t as bad as many people’s worst-evers… In order to audition for one of the book translations I did, I had to send a sample translation of 25 pages of the book (to the publisher’s credit, they paid me immediately for the sample at their normal translators’ rate; it wasn’t a scam on their part to get free translation work). I finished the sample, and was just letting it sit for a day or so to fine-tune the style before sending it to the publisher.

And guess what happened? My computer simply erased the whole document. I wondered at first if I had accidentally deleted it myself, but that same computer would pull similar tricks over the next year or so (but I had learned my lesson from the first incident and had turned into a fanatical maker of backups).

Luckily, I was in a very good mood at the time for other reasons, and this little disaster rolled off my back with a fairly easy laugh. But translating 25 pages from German to English is not so fast an exercise, and when having to redo pages I had already done it was highly frustrating.

There must be some unspeakable tragedies out there with graduate students and erased dissertations. Don’t add your name to the list.

a quick thought on that interview

The sample cited below from the Levi interview could have gone on for much longer, but it seemed better just to link to the full interview itself. The part I found most inspiring was the notion of philosophy’s encounter with its other, which is all over Latour but can also be found in an emerging author such as Bogost, who is refreshing in many of the same ways as Latour himself.

In Levi’s case, the parts about psychoanalysis were perhaps the most moving– how each person is different, and it makes you realize how wrong we are in assuming that everyone basically thinks and values in the same way we do. (And this is yet another reason that it’s important simply to write and think sincerely rather than trying to go into “thinker mode” or “author mode.” Just by being yourself, you are already extremely divergent from anyone else.)

Levi’s point about the problem with academic philosophy is also germane– in Philosophy Departments, philosophy is isolated from its other and is therefore not provoked into new thoughts as often as it should be.

Levi interviewed

Paul Ennis is on an interviewing tear, and has now posted his interchange with Levi Bryant. (I’m increasingly sad not to have met Levi in Chicago in the late 1990’s during our couple of years of urban overlap.)

My favorite of many good passages:

“I wouldn’t say that philosophers need to be acquainted with developments in the sciences, but rather that philosophy always needs its others in order to think. In my view, philosophical thought always occurs in and through an encounter with the other or non-philosophy. These others can be art, engineering, love, political revolution, harrowing defeat, programming, environmental work, ethnographic field work, or whatever else you might like.”

Composition of Philosophy. July 23.

The draft of the first half of the book is finally done.

It’s somewhere under 70 pages, meaning it’s just about the right length already. But there’s some unevenness– Chapters 1, 2, and 4 are too long, while Chapters 3 and 5 are too short. The entire draft is also fairly poorly written, but you all know I don’t care about that in the initial stage. The witchcraft that turns flat propositions into alluring riddles is best practiced near the end.

General remark: this was one of the toughest weeks of writing I’ve had in quite awhile, meaning that it wasn’t especially enjoyable, and thus I often had to force myself to work. The difference between 2009 and 1995, for me, is that in 1995 if I were having a tough writing week I would have done nothing and just read books while waiting for the mood to pass. These days, I don’t wait for it to pass. I’m able to put something together even when not especially feeling like working, and that something is always good raw material for when the special mood really does hit.

There seem to be two different schools of thought about the value of “inspiration.” Some find it essential, while others scorn this notion and think of writing as a craft that can be done for a specified number of hours per day.

So far on this blog, it might sound like I’m an advocate of the second approach. But that’s not quite true. I also think that inspiration is important. I simply don’t think you need to have it on the first draft. I’ve chosen to downplay inspiration on this blog simply because dissertation writers are guilty of waiting for inspiration far more often than they are guilty of the opposite extreme of soulless production. I do think there should be a spark of magic in any piece of writing, but I also think it can come at one of several different stages in the project.

The first draft can be a fairly flat aggregate of poorly written paragraphs strung together in a reasonably good order based on a preliminary outline. And then it can be recrafted from that form into something much better. Sometimes you get lucky and the Muses are with you from the start. But that isn’t always the case. And if you never try a first draft of anything until the Muses arrive, you’re often going to go for months without doing anything, because sometimes that’s how seldom they arrive.

Do you think Michelangelo or Rembrandt moped around at home waiting to be inspired? Not really. They went into the studio and worked. Which isn’t to say that it’s only a practical craft, just that a lot of the preliminaries can be done in the manner of a craft, and then maybe one night the spirit returns and you are able to breathe life into the whole thing. That’s the point when you really start to fall in love with a project. But you don’t need to be in love with a project yet just to work on it.

So far, I’m not in love with this draft. But I’ll surely be in love with it by the end of August. You’ll start to notice the change in tone once I reach that stage.

Now, what’s next? My new goal is still to have a completely polished first five chapters by July 31, which would give me all of August to write the second half.

Shall I start tomorrow? Or shall I press the reset button with a day-trip to Alexandria? I’m thinking the latter, but if I’m in an especially good writing mood then I’ll stay home and do that.

holiday

The University is closed, though hardly any businesses seem to be.

The holiday in question is the 57th anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution, when the Free Officers Movement of Naguib and Nasser took power and sent King Farouk into exile.