17 Sep 2013

First thing 20 min workout at 6AM: although I wanted to get to 250 lowrise steps, got only to 220. Will stay at this level for the next few days. Also did a short walk including 10 midrise steps.

Strawson’s The Bounds of Sense

Trying to complete, and understand, PF Strawson’s book, but the reason I don’t “get” it may be, other than fatigue, age and natural stupidity, Strawson’s ignorance of intuitionist mathematics. Strawson’s concept of infinity, which he uses to find faults in Kant’s “antinomies” of space and time (in which, in a four-part dilemma, we suppose space unbounded/infinite/etc.) only to find a paradox, then find yet another paradox when we suppose space bounded/finite, etc.

In Kant’s supposition, that time is infinite with no beginning, Strawson finds it unacceptable that a clock that started ticking at the beginning of time should have an infinite number of ticks recorded in some sort of log, or, minimally, should have ticked an infinite number of times. Why should it be unacceptable if we’ve already assumed that time has no beginning? If time has no beginning, all bets are off.

Kant, more than Strawson, seemed aware that “infinity” has two faces. We can easily enough specify an infinity by means of a rule, moreover we can specify two kinds of infinity.

We can say “zero is a number, and the successor of a number is a number”; we’ve just specified the “denumerable” integers of which there are a “denumerable” infinity such that between any two of these denumerable numbers there is no number. “Number” here means “integer”.

If we say on the other hand, “all integers are numbers, and furthermore between any two numbers N1 and N2 such that N1<N2 there exists a third number N3" we've just specified a far (far) (infinitely far) larger set of the real numbers.

Strawson doesn’t seem aware of the two types of infinity discovered by Georg Cantor in the 19th century as above, or of the two ways of thinking about infinity, as the above construction rules versus the Platonic idea of a finished infinity yet Kant, in a tortured “Whopper” of a sentence of 150 German, 180 English words (in the Guyer Moore translation) on p 613 of the G/M translation and p 712 of the 2nd edition, seems to have understood that there are two ways of thinking about (cognizing) infinity…and the Platonic way where we specify “infinity” simpliciter is where we get into trouble, for example by thinking of a clock that has logged an infinite number of ticks.

Strawson seems to believe that the bare possibility of such a monstrous thing refutes Kant’s argument by way of reduction to absurdity, but we have a lot more such “reductios” to deal with if we hypostatize (literally represent an abstraction as something concrete) a finished infinity going back infinitely to the beginning of time an infinite number of ticks ago.

Nonsense emerges from Kant’s hypostatizations of infinite time or space whether they are integer or real number simulations. In the integer model, if negative integers represent times before “now” there is an integer whose absolute value is infinitely small. It gets worse if in the real number model we ask what is the smallest real number r0>r1.

This is why I wish Strawson wouldn’t use “infinity” without precisely defining what he means as to the type of infinity (denumerable or non-denumerable) and the specification method (constructive as opposed to Platonic). Kant’s infamous verbosity resulted from his apprehension that there are “There are more things in heaven and earth …
than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy”.

Dream

I had a room in a motel that was also a sobriety center. Many meetings as I packed to go. I chaired one such meeting. The carpet of my motel room was fresh green grass and the room led out into the sunlight.

A Visit to the So-Called “Genius Bar”

I went in the waking world to the IFC mall since I needed to regain access to my computer, where about 4 keys have been disabled by the infamous Congee Spill of a few days ago.

I’d gone thru all the riga-marole and brou-ha-ha of signing up for a visit to a “genius” at the over-hyped “genius bar”: don’t pay people minimum wage and make them all wear the same shirt if they’re supposed to be “geniuses”, and don’t insult real geniuses with this bloody nonsense.

My “genius” was not as I’d hoped able to get rid of the short circuiting congee gunk on my keyboard so I wound up buying a new keyboard. I am now trying to get used to typing using the new keyboard on my lap and the laptop with its unused congee gunk keyboard on the rolling hospital tray table at a clumsy angle…with its touch pad that I am forced to use…like the man who bought the ill-fitting suit from Levine the Genius Tailor.

Sigh: I shall try putting the laptop back on my legs and using it for most keys, using the new keyboard for the Netvigator (Internet) dongle and to poke in the keys that were hammered by the congee flood: exclamation point, 1, Q, A and delete. This way I can get back to the situation I had before, with the PowerBook on my lap and not using the hospital rolling table. OK. Let’s try that. I keep on mistyping in this situation. Why couldn’t that clown simply have cleaned my keyboard?

OK, the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. No, typing that was a nightmare. So now I go back to using the new keyboard exclusively and the touchpad…all because quickly just cleaning a keyboard so that keys send the correct signals is a lost art, and the bottom line at the “Genius Bar” is getting rid of the customer, for whom is shown no respect, while hopefully selling him or her something.

As soon as I can I am exiting the Apple world and getting a PC Netbook style machine. There are really only three silver linings in this whole dreary and sordid situation. The first is that I have to pay attention to what I type in order to make sure it is correct, and Attention is a good thing. I got into computer work to strengthen my capacity for rule-following and Attention.

The second is that I found inexpensive but fine chocolate at the IFC grocery store, the most expensive grocery store in the world taken whole, but one with some bargains, including Grey and Black and Marquesse de Sevigny Noir Absolut.

There I go again, buying trivial luxuries as consolation for the harsh world.

The third is that the visit confronted me with the near impossibility of managing on my own any more. I am trying to set up an appointment with a sort of eldercare center in Sheung Wan since it’s clear I need a place where I can shuffle to noodle houses and dim sum joints since dramatically, I am now He Who Shuffles where just yesterday I walked, strode and ran down the street without a thought.

Talk about Acceptance…more precisely don’t speak to me about Acceptance, since I am the one who must Deal here with this world-historical weenie. And I realize that your professional Christians are always delighted if that’s the word when some big rogue comes a cropper and is thereby humbled and in the lingo, “broken”. Well, I was “broken” a long time ago. I realized that I had no control. But I’m damned if I will celebrate this. I will just chronicle my efforts to make the best of a bad situation.

That is (das ist) this situation is so bad as to be amusing and to demand every effort in response to make it better as opposed to lying supine or prone and moaning and groaning. “That is not what we do around here.”

A Note on Facebook and the Truth

Facebook has just prompted me for the town in which I worked for “Bell-Northern Research” and, in an innovation similar to one found long ago in resume processing, Facebook, at least by default, forces one to select from a list of known towns and USA states where the town is “Mountain View”.

So you cannot just make up the town anymore. Boo hoo, since most of my career I have had to compete with psychopathic liars, and I think it’s a good thing that, more and more, truthiness is enforced.

16 Sep 2013

20 minutes with pain and difficulty first thing at 6 AM after what was a good night sleep: my goal was 300 lowrise steps, had to stop for a breather after 220, and then resumed. Then, very tired, slept until 10:30 AM save for breakfast.

Chemotherapy after-effect?

COPR Challenge Question 2: Is Kant a nominalist and a realist? Is that even possible?

Look at Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding #18 (B140): “one person combines the representation of a certain word with one thing, another with something else; and the unity of consciousness in that which is empirical is not, with regard to that which is given, necessarily and universally valid.”

Comments: It is possible (logically consistent) to be an epistemological nominalist (regarding it, as Kant regards it above, an “empirical” matter, a local agreement as it were, that two people agree on the referent of a word) and an ontological realist, regarding the ultimate fabric of the world as does Wittgenstein of the Tractatus “Independent of the will” (“the world is independent of my will”, Tractatus 6.373).

But: is “independent of my will” a definition of ontological realism?

15 Sep 2013

20 minute workout first thing: 150 supine warmup movements without weights, 250 lowrise steps (goal was 300: did 150 with right leg pushoff, 100 with left leg pushoff – unable to get past 100 on the left leg, 250 total, will retry tomorrow), 150 supine movements with weights.

Kant

Outlining of Transcendental Deduction continues but with great difficulty – recording Kant’s points verbatim, cannot translate them to simpler or more modern English lest I lose the meaning.

Have finished section 20 which, according to Dieter Henrich is key especially when conjoined with section 26 gist (perhaps) as a direct quote, and my comments in square brackets:

“All sensible intuitions [sense data in Humean terms, once transformed by the activity of our mind into intuitions such as “I see the sunrise”] stand under the categories [are defined by, judged to be dependent on, 1 or more categories].”

Extending this now with my own words:

“What I see isn’t an abstract painting or a figment of my imagination it is an instance of the category ‘sunrise’.”

We’re like the Terminator in the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Linda Hunt/Eddie Furlong movie Terminator II whose heads-up screen (a visor which displays information in line of sight) displays information about friends or enemies, that uses categories.

Reading Johansen (A History of Ancient Philosophy)

Also having difficulty with Platonic Ideas as discussed in various dialogues, covered by Johansen. To say that the Idea is just the perfection of a reality, which ignores Ideas based on Sophistical fictions and inferior things (the Idea of the Toilet) ignores the large amount of work Plato did on these counter-examples in the later dialogs including (if memory serves) the Timaeus. The problem right now being that I cannot conveniently access the dialogues in free Gutenberg form on my Congee-damaged PowerBook. Never say die, I can access them here on this Windows desktop in the common or day room, and get the PowerBook fixed, hopefully, as soon as tomorrow.

Johansen remains however readable in comparison to Kant or a commentator on Kant because the Platonic dialogues are less complex than the Critique of Pure Reason. Perhaps I am just being macho, trying to hold it together because, truth be told, I am still exhausted after ten hours of sleep. This isn’t good if it has to do with my illness. I will retire early and start the workout not earlier than six AM.

This could just be an after effect of chemo. The last blast was just last week. Then, one hopes, the greater mortality of the bad (cancer) cells will manifest in an increase in strength. But wir sagt?, who knows.

14 Sep 2013: The Congee Spill

30 minute workout first thing at 5:15 AM – 150 warmups (no weights) 300 lowrise steps, 150 warmups (with weights)

Overtired later in the day – unsatisfactory to get only 8 hours of sleep – go to sleep not later than 8:30 PM.

Discouraging spill of part of a bowl of congee on laptop – a couple of keys no longer work and as a result the unit is unusable although it boots properly. In fact, at first, I was able to use it and the problem only emerged after a while. Will need to trek to Apple’s center at IFC since my consiglieri has spent entirely too much time in moving my stuff out of my flat and has blown an Achilles tendon in this.

But hopefully the keys will “dry out” (or something) although that is improbable given that they stopped working after a while – after having had the opportunity, perhaps, to dry.

Switched to my “laptop”: one of those big, cheap, well-bound, well-made Chinese notebooks with the red and black cover, and preoccupied myself with reading Johansen (History of Ancient Philosophy) and outlininig the Transcendental Deduction in the Critique.

Kant COPR Challenge Question I, or, I Thought I Saw a Puddy Tat

In the Transcendental Deduction, Kant clearly states that all our perceptions, to be anything more than passive sensations belonging to no-one, like computer input, must be apperceptions starting with “I think”:

“The I think must be able to accompany all my representations.” (COPR B131)

But doesn’t this make Kant an idealist, if we can never just see, hear, feel, but can only say “I think I see the sunrise”. This sounds like we doubt the existence of a real world in a weakened form pf “strong” idealism, the Berkeleyan denial of an external world that scandalized Kant’s contemporaries and Kant himself.

No, because Kant’s “I think” considered as an operator which cannot adjoin the specific sensation report (such as “I see”) provides two forms of certainty, in place of the doubt found in a statement which adjoins “I think” and “I” sensationReport.

Suppose we see something, and we’re drunk. As long as we’re not unconscious, we receive, let’s guess, a confused sensation and we say “I think I see a Jackson Pollock painting”: although a “Jackson Pollock painting” could be considered to be an artistic vision of raw Kantian sensation, as long as we retain a unified consciousness though we’re drunk (where an “alcoholic blackout” may be an interesting example of the absence of a unified consciousness and its unified pain), our report “I think I see …” is idealistic in the sense of admitting doubt:

He thought he saw an Elephant
That practised on a Fife:
He looked again, and saw it was,
A letter from his wife.

– Lewis Carroll, The Mad Gardener’s Sing

Just remove the phrase “I think” from the example and keep “I see”: “I see a Jackson Pollock painting” doesn’t have to be true (our drunk art appreciator could be seeing a Rothko, or a letter from his wife for that matter) but if it is true it is certain (synthetic apriori). And, if it is false it still has Humean certainty because the viewer cannot doubt a sensation report in Hume, or in Kant.

But because it can be wrong even when the art appreciator is sober (he may be looking at a forgery, a clever reproduction, or a Rothko) this means there is an external world after all in which objects make judgements objective. I conclude that “I think” isn’t an idealistic predicate, it has the sole function of establishing a unity of consciousness.

13 Sep 2013: workout, pain, Kant study and my need for a citation, and other such crap

20 minute workout first thing: 50 motion warmup without weights and 300 lowrise step aerobics. No physio anticipated because I have to go to Causeway Bay to get a higher magnification in my readers. Running out of commercially available magnifications at 300, do not need this magnification when rested; a midday nap often eliminates the need. Do not look forward to hike to stall/shop near public library, but will check library status if I feel up to it. Need to make an appointment thru my Grantham doctors with an eye doctor.

No need for pain-killah before workout, mild to moderate pain now. This despite the fact that on my request the doctor has reduced the Fentanyl patch dosage to about 2.1 mg per day (6.4 for three days) on my request. I don’t want to be sent let’s say back to Chicago with Fentanyl need, for this will probably be assumed to be an addiction.

But that’s stupid. If I have metastatic pain then won’t I need some form of opioide? Even during the summer of 2012 before my son’s death I was using Tramadol, an opioide, probably just as addictive as Fentanyl, psychologically. Which means that to be close to my son & grandchildren I will have to travel back on the Grantham prescription and get some sort of pain control > Bayer aspirin at the other end. This pain is not my friend.

Study

Reading the Gorgias dialogue of Plato as I read Johansen (History of Ancient Philosophy) on Plato. Take one book (Johansen) and the large red notebook into Causeway, the laptop too heavy.

Asked Bill Liktor at his Sitdown Tragedies blog to give credit to my use of diagrams as the “objective” source if his, where my understanding is that you cite when the previous work has or could have been a source “objectively”. No reply. I really hate having had to make this request but I did discuss “a picture is worth a thousand words”, the relation of Kant to art, etc last summer and would appreciate the acknowledgement. But my picture is sloppy and may not have been seen by Liktor…who may not be replying to the thread because of my demand for a cite…quite possibly disturbing Internet crap to him.

I used another type of “art”, the sentence diagram, to discover something interesting about Kant’s complexity of style in doing just a partial diagram of “the whopper”, an enormous 180 word sentence on p 613 of the Guyer/Moore translation.

But there is a real issue raised. Sensation to concept can go to multiple concepts at the same level or thru a series of lower then higher level concepts, and is this part of what Kant called the empirical. I think it must be, with the final concept (possibly a logical expression with more than one part such as “clown(x) & evil(x)”) emerging into the timeless/spaceless world of phenomena as a final step.

Need then to redraw last June’s “evil clown” diagram to show this.

Same deal as at Coursera where I’d waste time with peer review to get a piece of meaningless paper. Same instinct as of old (1971) to leave humanities with all its BS, for computer science or math, where you can be right if you are right without a lot of BS.

All is vanity. Do I just want to be recognized as right? I am old, time must have a stop: after many a summer dies the swan.

11 Sep 2013

30 minutes, 300 lowrise steps, 250 movements with weights and 100 without first thing at 5:15 AM. No physio today: have to go to chemo and cancer followup.

Rested, the usual pain, a sort of tug deep within the butt as if a malignant dwarf is ringing changes inside my leg for my funeral Mass. Prospero says in the Tempest, i’th’old play,

And thence retire me to my Milan, where
Every third thought shall be my grave.

The nice thing about pain is that you don’t have to dress in black, and pray all the time, and pull a long face and rebuke the children for farting around, there is the pain to make every third thought to be of your grave.

Study? No progress. But see where Mr Sitdown tragedies realizes as I have the utility of diagramming:

http://sitdowntragedies.wordpress.com/2013/09/10/aaaaaaaand-im-back/

If only Kant were an artist, he says. But his diagram doesn’t explain the formation of multi-level concepts.

cf also my comment at his site. Abstract expressionist painting the representation of pure sensation?

The chorus of soft screaming, the singing, the “ay-yahs” erupt as we awake to pain.

7 Sep 2013 (significantly updated 8 Sep)

Couldn’t sleep, had the idea to do my first-thing workout at 3:38 AM, but keep it at only a supine 20 minute workout. Had a surprisingly vigorous if supine 25 min workout: 150 motions warmup, 250 with the weights and then a conductus (air conducting) of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s 3rd or Eroica symphony. Not having a chopstick to hand, I did open hand stickless conducting to great effect, communicating my intention for a liquidity to occur using a very flexible hand wave, but, of course, the result was strangely like Leonard Bernstein, the conductor of the recorded music.

Hope that this tires me out enough to get some sleep [it didn’t]. Will need to reset, limiting my sleeping during the day in order to get up at dawn on Sunday.

The problem was that I ate both large Lindt bars and this has been a caffeine and theobromine blast. When will I learn … I cannot eat like a kid with what used to be called terminal cancer. It’s just that the 90% Lindt bar is soooo good, altho now the thought doesn’t appeal, I am sated unpleasantly. Yes, I should kiss the joy as it flies even the selfish solitary food joy which growing up in a large family causes (you don’t want to fight for it) but I don’t want to destroy my taste for quality chocolate, either.

My grandmother, my father’s grande dame mother, a Hochwalt, praised my temperance once, searching my character desperately for signs of noble conduct for she’d had hopes for me that were destroyed by my smoking and hippie behavior. I am glad that after her death I was finally able to live up to her ideal and even, in some measure, that of my father, for after I started running my father said I reminded him of Edward Joseph the war hero and perfect Elder Brother, fulsome praise indeed.

When Grandmother praised my temperance I’d merely refused a second helping of ice cream. She was always kind and lived in hope. I honor her memory now in my struggle with the same prostate cancer her husband had.

Indeed, I didn’t know “where I got off” with not being an athlete. Athletics definitely filled in, not all the craters on my airstrip but a large number of them. I realized that I wasn’t fooling anyone by rebelling against my father’s ideals, expressed as they were by Casablanca. The rebellion was that of a bum and it was hellbound. Dad was right, men need to be noble, and protect women. Oh women don’t need it? Protect ‘em anyway. It’s what the male primate is made for. And running prepares it and him.

But now my running is reduced to supine movements and a low-rise step. The drop foot is at 110 and not 90 degrees with respect to the leg and if run as of the glorious Old, and I come down with the foot anywhere between 110 and 120 it won’t be pretty. And, it’s unlikely that I can reverse the drop foot, all I can do is keep the angle at 110 degrees by wearing the ski boot between 1 and 2 hours per day. But the ski boot won’t enable a return to running. A grim prognosis since for a primate, which among many other things I am, being able to break even for a second per stride “the surly bond of earth” this flying as first confirmed by Muybridge’s photos, is, for the primate, ju-ju of a high order.

One smallish, almost invisible hopeful sign, like the ship some goers to the Palais Louvre see and others do not in Delacroix’ Raft of the Medusa is the fact that my foot rise has, I think, increased by five or ten degrees, probably as a result of using a boot to keep the left foot’s angle at 90 degrees.

But it also exists one other place, in the ocean and in swimming. The ocean, full of our trash! My used and stinky running shoes going back to Sep 1981 when they seemed so magic out of the box, New Balance light grey are floating somewhere in the Pacific Garbage Gyre! Shame, shame, nothing but shame on me for pursuing a product, but honor, honor too for discovering how to break the surly bonds of earth and experience ** JOY ** in chasing after Eddie and Peter, not anger: God how they ran everywhere in the sunshine of Mountain View, lookit dose jungle trees. It’s … complicated.

It is tragic this denoument. It is like Phedre and I am Theseus for sure or even Phedre herself: “Jusqu’au dernier soupir, de malheurs poursuivie,
Je rends dans les tourments une pénible vie.” However I do not believe that I have committed a frightful crime. I just want to be able to say those lines and to SCREAM “Je rends dans le tourments une pénible vie” and thereby put in art all our pain, and, like Bottom, condole in some measure.

But staying up ALL NIGHT and writing reams! It’s what moony adolescents do, not 63 year old retired gents.

A mystery body change is coming to me. I have no hair anymore other than on me head. My new skin (for skin as an organ replaces itself) is that of a baby or woman, soft and slightly fatty under the epidermis. My old grey pubic hair is disappearing, gone on the left side of my dick, almost gone on the other side. My John Thomas lolls limp and exhausted having done its work of reproduction, thinking on past insertions but definitely hors de combat. This would be caused by the hormone therapy, I’d hazard. The skin so pleasant to feel. Is this a fatal disease? A transfiguration, death and transfiguration? Stun me if I know.

Idea: Leonard Bernstein in a Box

Surely the software technology exists to support a software package with the scores and a mechanical, machine-made performance of a menu of works including the Third symphony, or alternatively the score and some conductor’s version.

OK, so the user stands or sits in front of his laptop with its Web camera and a motion sensor in the software (eg., no new hardware), and the computer alters the performance to correspond to the user’s specific hand motion. BOOM, like Flight Simulator, an empowered Walter Mitty!

I would definitely like this technology to exist for my use and I’d pay for it, but my music and software skills are deficient with respect to my idea. I hope someone steals it and creates the program for profit or Open Source. If they create it as a proprietary program I hope to see a cheque for this idea but I won’t hang by the thumbs. All men live in hope, but cheques for mere ideas are a capitalist myth.

It may exist. I don’t want to add a search for it to my overweight List of Things That I have not done, or have ill done and done to others harm.

Study

Kant: Three forced marches through Dieter Henrich’s 1969 essay on “The Proof Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction.” Still unclear. Need to outline the essay after seven forced marches.

Sections 20 and 26 are “two parts of the same argument?” I am still confused. Did Henrich really penetrate and solve once and for all the mysteries of “Chapter II, On the Deduction of the Pure Categories of the Understanding”? That is his boast.

No, it’s called literally, in English translation, “Transcendental Analytic, Second Section, On the Deduction of the Pure concepts [not “categories”] of the Understanding.” I had thought that Kant’s own loose and shifting lexicon excused his reader from precision: it does not since Kant’s own murk is quite enough without you Structuralist chaps setting off a blasted feu de joie, and adding, if I may be permitted a metaphor and I bloody well may be at this point, your own French confusion, damme your eyes and rot your boots.

My edition is not only broken in its spine at several points, the glue of the backing gaping thru having given way, so that you have to check to make sure pages haven’t fallen out, the pages are greasy as if soaked at some point with skull-sweat. I never busted out crying or slit my wrists after reading critical passages seven times only to be as ignorant as I was before I started but it was a near run thing.

[I fall into a watch, then a Prose and then a dream while watching reruns of Sharpe’s rifles on my computer…thank G-d for YouTube…zzzz…shhhh don’t wake Grampa…]

When the Sarn’t Major (the one who hated me) found my copy while rooting in my kit in Portugal he screamed at me why did I make it harder on myself and my mates with this extra weight? I honestly don’t know save that Kant is so painful as to be analgesic with respect to lesser pains such as when my foot was half shot off at Corunna and dangled at an angle, causing me agony in the slightest movement. The Sarn’t Major (the one who hated me) positively oozed consideration: as i’th’old play,

“Consideration, like an angel, came
And whipp’d the offending Adam out of him,”

and he asked whether I shouldn’t like to burn my Kant since we’d be heading over the mountains to rejoin Hooky (Wellington) after Sir John Moore’s death. I said no since I had only read it five times through and found it amusingly incomprehensible. It was literally the only book in our entire division save for Moore’s Army Regulations, Johnson’s Dictionary, and a bound set of Tatlers, all three of which volumes constituted Sir John’s library. After his death, the Sarn’t Major was seen to abstract (steal) the Tatler with the Duchess’ udders on the third page but that was understandable. Good old Sir John. But I digress…zzzzz…who’s that?…hmpf bllllrrrrrgggg…Esme?…you want another Roundabout Mouse?…very well…there’ll be rest enow when I’m gone…

[I awake from my dream…]

Ancient Philosophy: Johansen’s finest hour: chapters on Stoics and on Socrates.

The Stoics caricatured of course as nihilists but I noticed in 7th grade (in Evanston’s magnificent public library) that at least in the humanities, arguments apparently cogent were being constructed all the time to prove A and ~A. This seemed connected with my ability, almost a tic, to modify mentally any word to any other by a short series of letter relations based on sounds.

The caricatures of the Stoics, and the sympathetic if patronizing Platonic dialogues, still don’t let us access the truth of the Stoics.

As Johansen relates, Plato had every advantage in life…the equivalent of a trust fund. He was related to Tyrants (Critias and Charmides).

It has always been so plain as pikestaffs that graduate students and untenured faculty with trust funds can always outcompete others, that one wonders, how could anyone believe otherwise? Plato used this in his war with the Stoics who, underneath the polite phrases, wanted Plato dead, for Plato, unlike Thrasymachus (a Stoic and major foil to Plato’s Socrates in the Republic) Socrates and Plato could afford to believe in Truth and not Power…Socrates because like Diogenes, Socrates managed his needs, and Plato because Plato had powerful relations.

In fact, the Stoics’ epistemology looks far-forward to Foucault. Ask yourself this question which I find in Foucault: what if words needed no one-for-one referent? It’s too facile.

What if there is no truth, no power and just truth-power as in certain African philosophies “truth” has to be translated rough and readily to “that which gets over in council, and whups other competing truth-powers’ ass”?

Oh? That’s skeptical? Well boo hoo. Is skepticism a luxury good destined for the metropolis? Nuts to that.

The Stoics needed Truth and Power to make space for Truth when faced, as they clearly were in Johansen, with an Athenian Power quite ready as in Socrates’ case to put people to death. We cannot blame the Stoics any more from the standpoint of a world in which the children of the wealthy and the haute bourgeois struggle through test preparation classes such that the more the parent can afford, the harder the child must struggle to pass and complete, not only the exam, interview and/or paper required for admission but also the test prep classes. The Stoics seem to me to have been in my position as a non-tiger, struggling, and isolated teacher trying to survive and avoid academic fraud, for I retained my hunger for truth. Indeed, truth is the fun part.

Who even, in the contemporary world, remembers “Critical Legal Studies”? Precisely because in the 1990s, CLS threatened to bring back free Legal Aid for the poor and the middle class from the 1960s, Legal Aid and Critical Legal Studies delenda est: like Carthage and for much the same reasons. Because of the 1964 Civil Rights act and associated jurisprudence Queer Legal Studies and racial theory survives on life support but the idea that the merely middle class person might be systematically wronged by lack of access to the courts is a non-starter which a general legal theory from the left would bring back.

That is (das ist)

I’ve been born, and once is enough.
You don’t remember, but I remember,
Once is enough.

– TS Eliot, Fragment of an Agon

6 Sep 2013: Marching UP and DOWN the Square!

25 minute workout started at 6:27 AM: 200 middle-height steps in the stairwell, walking, dance to iPod. Then had Physio at 2:00 PM: 20 minutes: 8 centuries.

Breakfast was the best white congee and the Egg, with Nescafe instant coffee.

Only in Asia is instant coffee a delicacy, and mine is even more so because, as described below, I must make a trader’s voyage in my Delicate Condition to get it.

A beautiful day, cooling down nicely from August.

Study

Doing a Lucky Seven read (7 reads) of Dieter Henrich’s 1969 article, a real rib tickler, “The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction” online at jStor, with my own outline to follow.

I dragged a frayed, dog-eared copy of Evert W. Beth’s book “The Philosophy of Mathematics” around with me as an undergraduate, blaming myself for finding this rather thick book hard to understand especially in comparison to Korner’s admirable Philosophy of Mathematics.

But I now realize that this was the result of Beth’s obvious preference for mathematical intuitionism, the Kantian philosophy which accounts for number and geometrical forms as being forms of our intuition thru sensation of time (arithmetic) and space (geometry) in themselves. Oh yes, and in intuitionism, trivial sums such as Kant’s 7+5=12 are grand high synthetic aPriori. This is because the concept of 12 is in neither 7 nor 5 and mathematics is not derivable from logic, according to the Intuitionist.

The Intuitionist philosophy of mathematics is far more difficult to understand than Russellian logicism: mathematical forms are Platonic and eternal, and, because math follows from pure logic, 7+5=12 is trivial analytic apriori.

And, mathematical intuitionism is far more difficult to understand than Hilbertian formalism (in which math is a game like chess, but played on journal article papers, blackboards, and such, and without any meaning whatsoever.)

But this helped forty years on for as soon as I read the Whopper (that 180 English/150 German word sentence on p 712 of the 1787 Critique and p 613 of the Guyer/Moore translation that I have covered in this blog) I realized that here was mathematical intuitionism and its distinction, between constructive and Platonic infinities, “slouching towards Bethlehem to be born”, and as an infant, lacking language outside of Babel, language that it provided to its descendants.

To avoid the paradoxes (what Kant would call the antinomies) of logic and mathematics (the showstopper paradoxes of set theory discovered by Bertrand Russell, the impossibility of proving the simultaneous completeness and consistency of mathematics discovered by Godel, the parallel halting problem discovered by Turing) Intuitionism restricts the logician’s toolset. She may no longer assume the existence of an infinity (denumerable and isomorphic to the natural numbers, or nondenumerable and isomorphic to the reals, it makes no matter) of anything as opposed to a construction rule and she may not argue by contradiction (p => … => ~p no longer can be used to prove ~p: in other words, excluded middle can no longer be used.)

This elegant and severe, almost moralistic, reductionism of the toolset (no constructed infinity, no excluded middle) reminded Donald Knuth of structured programming, an Italian discovery to be sure but emerging in the Dutchman Dijsktra’s praxis first. It reminds me of Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg’s De Stijl (the Style) movement of the 1930s, and their prohibition of the use of lines not at a 90 degree angle to each other and/or the painting’s borders, and likewise of non-primary colours, which resulted in Mondrian’s grand work during the war and under the conditions of the Nazi occupation of Holland.

Mondrian: Severe de Stijl (primary colours and right angles exclusively)

van Doesburg: Moderated de Stijl (primary colors and some 45 degree angles)

An Expedition to Causeway Bay

DON’T STAND THERE GAWPIN’, LIKE YOU NEVER SEEN THE HAND OF GOD BEFORE!!! – Monty Python, “Marching Up and Down the Square”

Went at 10 AM to Causeway Bay by taxi.

“And there’s Uncle Joe, he’s a movin’ kinda slow
At the Junction! Petticoat! Junction!”

– Old TV show song

Yeah, and it’s disgusting: I see myself in the window of Sogo, tall, thin, fit, but moving glacially slowly owing to cancer, and cancer’s pain. This is it, aka Reality, which in Saul Bellow’s early novel Seize the Day overwhelms us like a wave tunneling the surfer or the Tsunami. And like a wave, it is full of all colors. The saint sees all things in a day.

“Gentile or Jew,
Consider Phlebas, who was once as tall and strong as you.”

– TS Eliot, Phlebas the Phoenician, The Waste Land

But can’t stand there gawpin’ after the hand of God has touched me. I have things to do, whether reading a book or marching up and down the square.

So…I cabbed it at 55 Hong Kong dollahs to Causeway and made it to Wellcome. I remembered the white chocolate donut and also the dark one: 22 dollah in coins alone dug out of the bottom of my bag. You see, my consigliere has my ATM card so I have to act as if I am broke, and get people to accept all coins, which, I find, is easier than I expected. This preserves my folding money and creates a wealth effect. I like wealth effects.

Then to the choco rack which at Wellcome in Causeway is *pour mourir*, to die for. I snagged two 90% Lindt cacao *noir* bars. Expensive to be certain but the point of the trip as well. O reason not the need, as King Lear says i’th’old play.

A small jar of Nescafe and payment in coins completed the Wellcome experience. Forgot to smell the Durian fruits, tho.

Not enough “available” money and unable to walk more than glacially slowly to the Mom and Pop stationary store opposite the Rugby Sevens stadium, have sufficient paper and pens until I can get my personal allotment from my funds as I have budgeted. Most pleasant to be frugal. Simplifies things.

And, of course, without funds, had no motivation to go to the new book superstore, Eslite books. Even with the funds, my intention is to get the Kindle and download free books from before 1920. No more dead tree books, heavy as sin, left for others to move.

Donuts duly snarfed after return to Grantham, Lindt bars lie quivering with anxiety in my bag, discussing their fate like the soldiers on the troopship in Malick’s thin red line: “So whaddya want me to tell ya?” “Tell me nothin’!”

Next weight check will be on cancer follow up day (11 September). Last one still surprisingly low at 150 pounds. Will reimpose my old food patrols when up to 165, ten pounds under the norm. But that means no chocs. Yikes. This may be difficult.

Going Proustian on levels of detail here, which is damned odd, since I have never read Proust. My late son did. Read Proust. I should. I wonder if Proust is off copyright? If Gutenberg has him old fellow is indeed off copyright…wait a sec…aha, du cote de chez Swann and Swann’s Way and Remembrance, all in Gutenberg. Serve contemporary publishers right if the impoverished middle class just stops reading copyrighted content…there’s a lot of content that is indeed off copyright: Homer. Cervantes. Dickens. Shakespeare. It’d be nice to read Aldous Huxley, still on copyright except for one or two titles from the early 1920s…Brief Candles, I believe. Hey hey what what mumble mutter…

A Note on Racine’s Phedre

Thesee
“Hé bien ! vous triomphez, et mon fils est sans vie.
Ah ! que j’ai lieu de craindre ! et qu’un cruel soupçon,
L’excusant dans mon coeur, m’alarme avec raison !
Mais, Madame, il est mort, prenez votre victime :
Jouissez de sa perte, injuste ou légitime.”

– Racine, Phedre, Acte 5 Scene 7

Theseus
Very well, Phedre, you triumph and my son is no more
But what room have I for terror and how unjust was I
To blame him for his death when your incestuous eye
Has slain him, he is dead, accept your victim
Let your black heart leap for joy now that you have slain him!

– Tr Edward Nilges

But Phedre replies taking the blame and dying.

Moral: do not accuse Phedre of wrong-doing, as soon as she realized her love for her step-son she disavowed it. She is NOBLE and without baseness.

The backstory is the loss of Hypolyte shared by Theseus and Phedre, not Phedre’s incestuous love, for she had none.

And my backstory? That there’s no point in blaming anyone (myself or anyone) for my son’s death. That would waste energy I need for weeping in taxicabs.

The actor who plays Theseus comes close to breaking the wall between the actors and the spectators when he falls down weeping. In my scene in 2010 playing Sheldon Levene tearing up the bad check and saying the Kaddish for his daughter and himself, I was only inches from the audience and came likewise close to breaking the wall. The redoubtable Adam West in his incredible one man Vincent likewise did so, and magically sealed it.

5 Sep 2013

20 minute workout at 6:00 AM: warmup (100 motions), 300 lowrise steps. 20 minutes physio, again, six “centuries” (sets of 100 movements) using legs, hand weights and hand gestures without weights.

Study

Constant rereading of Kant and the Cambridge companion will be the only road to full understanding. The Critique is a new obsession. But I am also reading my poor son’s copy of the Groundwork for a Metaphysic of Morals in a copy with his underlining and commentary. My former wife was cleaning out his room (I don’t know how she found the courage) and the Groundwork turned up, so she asked me if I wanted it. I very much did. Particularly heartbreaking are my son’s underlinings of passages on suicide.

Also heartbreaking are the first paragraphs of the Groundwork where Kant points out that all we can know to be good is the “good will”. The decision of a low bottom alcoholic to stay sober for a day is Good even if he takes a drink in a day or the next hour after all.

The alcoholic’s sponsor after a couple of weeks introduces her to the Second Step, perhaps at a “Step” meeting where the chapter is read aloud. Some people prefer solitary reading, but most, I’d hazard, prefer the oral route. AA tries hard not to be elitist. The Big Book and here the book “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions” are marvels of simple yet brilliant writing, for our time the equivalent of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Holy War and God’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.

I found the god-concept of the Second Step perfectly understandable in part because it was natural of me, having studied St Anselm’s “ontological proof” to conceive of a God more perfect than I willing to take action and kick my ass into gear. I don’t know if God is “perfect”: God allowed the Holocaust.

But how to bear witness? Perhaps a literature table at Princeton’s registration. I am typing while nodding off, and dreaming of Princeton:

… Thou hast nor youth nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep,
Dreaming on both …

Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

John Bunyan as Prose Stylist, and More

Despite the Miltonian complexity of his sentence structure, something that Kant’s readers as well as Bunyan’s mastered and seemingly liked in contrast to readers today (or, perhaps, what we are told about contemporary readers), Bunyan is widely acknowledged to be a master of prose style: as here.

CHR. Wherein, O Apollyon! have I been unfaithful to him?

APOL. Thou didst faint at first setting out, when thou wast almost choked in the Gulf of Despond; thou didst attempt wrong ways to be rid of thy burden, whereas thou shouldst have stayed till thy Prince had taken it off; thou didst sinfully sleep and lose thy choice thing; thou wast, also, almost persuaded to go back at the sight of the lions; and when thou talkest of thy journey, and of what thou hast heard and seen, thou art inwardly desirous of vain-glory in all that thou sayest or doest.

CHR. All this is true, and much more which thou hast left out; but the Prince whom I serve and honour is merciful, and ready to forgive; but, besides, these infirmities possessed me in thy country, for there I sucked them in; and I have groaned under them, been sorry for them, and have obtained pardon of my Prince.

APOL. Then Apollyon broke out into a grievous rage, saying, I am an enemy to this Prince; I hate his person, his laws, and people; I am come out on purpose to withstand thee.

Some Semi-Random Academic Thoughts

Fascinated as always by academia, without being a success. Left academia in disgust for software engineering when I saw how bullying apportioned rewards in graduate school, and how an unemployable if brilliant thug with three PhDs to his name dealt with his rage by attacking women in the bookstore where we worked for wearing feminist buttons and threatening physical harm to undergraduates who challenged him. Later realized how tenure is guarded so jealously and how it’s cynically treated as a privilege with a certain dollar value.

The thought “hmm, I can’t get fired or laid off in all probability: how best to exploit this asset?” replaces the ideal of protecting outspoken people who think (which group includes union organizers, entrepreneurs, and me). Outspoken people who think are pushed aside whilst tenured academics produce little of value.

I love uni press books but most of them are authored by people who want tenure. Unlike me or my Dad, most people (including most male academics in my experience) do not like to read, think, or write, and many academics, mostly male, strike anti-intellectual poses as a way of asserting shaky manhoods and putting down the work of junior people, especially women.

You make a name for yourself in male academia thru verbal violence. This seems to have started in the 1960s. PF Strawson, at that time, accused Kant of a “non sequitur [doesn’t follow]fallacy of numbing grossness” went Kant reasons from change to an underlying substance which is changed in B232 of the Critique. In the accusation that the inference cannot be made, Strawson was assuming Humean ontology, so Kant in fact made no errors of numbing grossness when he reasoned that substance cannot be destroyed; the numbingly gross error was to assume Hume; our world consists of something more than bundles of sensation, it certainly seems to contain objects (such as children, wives and husbands) that persist and which in some cases make ethical demands on us. In fact, that’s been a standard claim of realism since Aristotle yet by 1960 standards of respect for the past had declined and postwar philosophers were less well-educated than the Bloomsbury generation which allowed them to attract attention and get cheap laffs by mocking the past…it’s basically easier, the past can’t fight back.

I make, probably, too many thinly-researched claims owing to my wide reading. To do justice to what I only suspect to be Strawson’s intellectual irresponsibility I need to reread and make sure I understand his book The Bounds of Sense. But I can Open Source this reconsideration of Strawson’s work. Ignoring the 1787 edition of the Critique certainly sounds like an oversight of numbing grossness even though Strawson didn’t have the 1998 Cambridge edition of the Critique as translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Moore. Surely Strawson knew of the later edition. So as Open Source (eg., let me pick your brain) comment on this matter.

The metaphysical claim, which Kant entertains in B232, that there’s an underlying monism of substance makes sense if the world is constructed like paintings were until the time of Sir Joshua Reynolds: as layers of thin translucent color glazes over a monochrome grisaille; perhaps the artist’s underlying drawings are things in themselves. A monistic substance ontology might be the fanciful claim that “we’re all living inside a narrative painting so the world is made of oil paint”.

I was quite shocked at meetings of Northwestern’s philosophy club at the not so veiled threats of physical violence, and since that time (circa 1970) the filth on the Internet (the Sokal hoax, the bullying of posters known to be women or minorities, etc.) has confirmed my dim view of academia’s hidden violence which may be how Strawson made his name.

Eddie

My son Eddie had all we know to be good, a Good Will. He was delighted to have a baby brother and always seemed to treat his baby brother well. He would ask, given a treat, if Peter was going to get one too. He would tell me that what I thought to be innocent teasing of Peter was wounding Peter. He helped Peter and Wendi with the babies and in one photo is looking down at one of them with a tender smile he must have learned from his mother and me.

My ex wife told a particularly heart-breaking story at the funeral: every year in Eddie’s grade school and high school she would take him shopping and they would have fun buying school supplies while Eddie would reassure her that “this year will be different”.

I too remember September’s love of scholarship, and being on the fall Dean’s List at uni only to have the year dissolve into those dreams we have, of academic tasks ill-done. I finally learned to maintain the pace in graduate school.

But my son never learned and I quite frankly blame the system. I have two brilliant friends whose parents failed to blame the victims of poor education and were pulled from secondary school. One went from racist schooling in South Africa to the prestige Bishop Cotton school in Bangalore to Princeton where we encountered each other. The other went from incomplete high school to the wonderful dance school Bennington.

Oxonian and Cantabridgian friends, also, tell me of the tutorial system where you don’t have to attend classes, more precisely, lectures. You read the books in the class and meet with a tutor.

Having to attend classes was to me at uni one of the most onerous demands of my education, strange to say, and apparently my son (whose stellar SAT scores and interviews landed him a scholarship) also found this onerous…especially morning classes.

Mornings unless freely chosen are the bane of intellectuals such as my son. Descartes was hired by the Queen of Sweden to tutor her; unfortunately Queen Christina, a wonder of her sex, liked to get up for exercise in midwinter in the Swedish mode, and then rouse poor Descartes at six. Being French, Descartes preferred ten am for his rising time and after a few months of this rigor, poor Descartes died. NoSleepSo ergo erat, no sleep so therefore I was.

Christina Vasa, Queen of Sweden

Apparently, at that moonswept, utterly cold in winter, hot in summer campus of the University of Illinois, the instructors took attendance as if this was a kindergarten, and Eddie was frequently not there.

But I was also frequently absent, discussing philosophy in the round-tabled cafeteria annex of Roosevelt, where its intellectuals would hold forth primarily, in these pre-feminist days, to impress women; it may as well have been an ape watering hole. But the worst that happened was that I’d get Bs, and gentleman’s Cs, in this era before competition to get the best GPAs, and graduate cum laude.

Poor Eddie lived in a different time, when his lordly contempt for grades assigned by his intellectual inferiors wasn’t quite the thing anymore, and even I torpedoed, in the short run, an academic career…only to get admitted, in a sense, to Princeton, and there repeat my insistence on following my own path, “marching to a different drummer” as my unusually understanding boss put on a performance review.

Damn. I seem to be suffering from after-effects of yesterday’s extra pain killers altho I’ve had none today in excess of what I had yesterday, two in as many hours owing to pain caused by a “ski boot” that prevents my foot drop. I am exceedingly drowsy.

4 Sep 2013

30 minute workout first thing at 6:00 AM: warmup (100 motions), 250 lowrise steps, walk and 150 very-low-impact dance movements (the old soft shoe) which are getting aerobic but without impact, (note to self, increase the count and recharge the iPod for further advances on the dancing front), 50 supine weight movements. Will probably do 20 minutes physio later today, so that’s two workouts and a total of 50 minutes (five mile equivalent by my old metric in which 10 minutes of most exercises = one mile of running).

A Note on Stupid Errors!

On Facebook, WordPress, and other facilities I am very careful about proofreading for two reasons.

One is that the sheer volume of my postings mathematically increases the probability of stupid, foolish errors in spelling, grammar and even logic. These errors as made by an unknown person like me cause my credibility to drop to a negative range. Computers only seem to make many errors; the rate is low but perceived to be high because computers execute so many operations (for example, in a modern spreadsheet such as used by Harvard researchers to call for austerity in the infamous Rogoff/Reinhardt brouhaha).

Example: I wrote “One is that the sheer volume of my postings mathematically increase” which only sounds right. Logically and syntactically it’s very wrong: do you know why?

It’s an example of thinking that the closest noun to the left of the verb controls the “number” of the verb, and that because the closest noun is “postings” I must use “increase”.

But in fact the controlling noun is “volume” which is not in the scope of the preposition “of” as is “postings”, and “volume” is singular!

Explaining grammar is so much fun and I miss teaching ESL. I could do so on Skype or in my jammies from my Grantham hospital bed. I could be “bound in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space”.

But I miss work per se. I love watching the nurses do things right, and I love helping the sweepers sweep up the crap from under my bed. I miss The Great Chinese Fire Drill in which we all hustle to get to work on time and work hard once we get there.

These digressions are pretty obvious as italicized interjections but I also miss the ability one has in Word: to create light grey sidebars with marginalia, for marginalia usually contain your best work, such as “I have discovered a marvelous proof that for n>2, there’s no solution to x**n+y**n = z**n”. This ability may exist in WordPress and I will research WordPress to see if that is so.

One woman complained about my “frequent” spelling errors. She’d found one or two. They stick out, I believe, because of their rarity, as Homeric Nods. At the same time, despite having taught “its” versus “it’s” (neuter possessive versus a contraction of subject and the head of its predicate) I can make, in the heat of writing, that very confusion. When other strangers on the Internet make that error I think of them as rubes, Yahoos, and worse, for I have some really choice things to say when I get in a rage about the general degringolade. When I make it, it’s a case of “even good Homer nods”. Yeah, right.

The problem is, as I learned when I had the services of one of the most notable authors of computer books internationally (Dan Appleman) and subsequently of a less well known but brilliant man at Fawcette Technical Publications, nothing replaces a separate set of eyeballs connected to a giant brain and good heart. Dan is the reason why I had few errata in my computer book and the Fawcette guy helped me with a number of articles when I was living at the YMCA and desperate for cash, mostly to buy donuts and coffee and Bennison’s and Italian Beef at Gigio’s to be sure. I was willing to work all night to get away from Korean noodles in a styrofoam cup, fueled only by the remnants of that morning’s coffee, nursed until four AM.

Well, “name” celebrity bloggers like Paul Krugman (Princeton prof, courageous Keynesian) and Stanley Fish (slowly reforming neo-con, retired English professor, writer on language aspects of the law) have nameless editors such that, when unknown people with good qualifications (formerly tenured professors et al.) make stupid errors in the Comments zone, it makes them look bad…whereas Fish and Krugman (outside of Krugman’s personal blog as far as I can tell) sail on, looking good, lookin’ “fly”, because one doesn’t find stupid spelling, grammar and logic errors (“I have read Socrates’ and Homer’s writings” eewwwww you pompous SOB) in Fish or Krugman at all…their interns eradicate any similar howlers from Fish and Krugman’s own posts. People who recently went to college retain more, such as the use of the apostrophe in the neuter personal pronoun and who was Socrates, dammit. People including college professors retired or not forget what they learned in school. So an intern is nice to have as a proof-reader.

“Fly” – outdated African-American slang as in “you look so FLY in that suit” to mean you look good, eg., like SuperFly or John Shaft. Canya dig it. Not really because it’s really OLD slang.

I will find stupid errors months, even years after posting an entry in my blog, so I often reread old postings and make corrections, documenting them (as I learned to do when correcting software code) in a “Change Record” at the end of the posting.

Dan Appleman repeatedly encouraged me to “read your work aloud” because he didn’t have much spare time as it was yet he was up all hours finding stupid errors in my drafts: likewise some PhD types who tried to clean my essays on computer science up for an ACM conference in 2005 (they never were published because I could not financially attend the conference). It is especially important in writing poetry because poetry, even “free verse” (is there any such thing?) has to sound good, period, no exceptions, because as the brilliant editors of the Norton Anthology of English poetry assure us, poetry is writing meant to be read aloud. Very few exceptions exist to this.

Finally…that “red squiggle” you now see ubiquitously should be taken seriously. Correct red squiggles (sometimes they are a different color). What’s happening? An Open Source code has been developed to do really thorough spelling checks in all cases where you’re entering text. It even highlights unfamiliar given names (as opposed to surnames) which takes some non-trivial syntax analysis. Might as well pay attention to it although it does NOT avoid all errors (spelling checks never do, and never will).

Notes On Having an English Professor in the Family

My sister, an English professor, constantly beats me up, figuratively to be sure, over my careless writing. Makes her look bad once people make the connection.

On Nipping “Budding Writers” in the Bud

People who use the phrase “budding writer” as in “I yam a medical billing specialist and budding writer” are probably great medical billing specialists in a world that needs such specialists, especially when they can advocate for patients, tell us what we have coming under ObamaCare, and teach classes in their profession at community colleges. As a retired computer programmer I think that the sort of skills that are taught in community college build employability and hence self-esteem…not being an unpublished writer, or a writer like me, with a rather disappointing record of sales. That lowers self-esteem.

People who can drive trucks with 17 separate gearshift settings, program in object-oriented C++, and advise sick people about their rights under ObamaCare don’t live with their Mom and Dad after graduation. Their salaries pay the rent. They do not max out their credit. They make extra money by teaching and consulting on the side, becoming later on full-time consultants owning their own business. They get jobs that pay into their Social Security for their retirement.

Their salaries pay the rent and support Mom and Dad.

The people living with Mom would be Princeton PhDs who know why Saul Kripke crashed and burned. This group needs to go to South Korea’s DMZ (that part that will get nuked if a war with North Korea breaks out) and use that Master’s degree that comes with the PhD to teach South Korean kids ESL. They are great kids, much less formal than China’s equally great-in-their-own-way kids, for PJ O’Rorke (the conservative humorist) was right: South Koreans are the Irish of Asia, and Pyongyang is its Belfast. Don’t worry, North Korea probably won’t nuke you, and if it does, it will all be over in a flash.

But the former group, of honest hard working skilled people, should not be writers, both because of the hackneyism “budding writer” which occurs too often in the corpus to be anything but lame (6 million hits on Google) and because “writer” is too abstract: the reader wants to know, about what?

Heck, I am a published writer of one book…a nerd book which is sad and lame when you think about it, and the smallness of my royalties: I try not to, it makes me weep.

30% international tax withholding and 13.00 USD charged by HSBC merely to credit 100.00 USD net to my account. Boo most assuredly hoo.

As a startup, not a budding, writer, you need to decide on your genre: if you love mysteries, crime and noir you need to decide what type you shall write about (Downton Abbey, Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett ). Before you set pen to paper or switch electrons on in your computer, be prepared to write about whatchoo wanna write about. Eliminate mention of any other writer. If you write “I want to make millions and be a writer like that woman who wrote Harry Potter, whatsername CK Rowling”…boom, there’s the door, both because you are engaging in “me-too marketing” (“I sell the same product at a discount!”) and because no one will read it.

I mean: I love writing. It should be obvious, one never has seen such a flood of words since Edward Gibbon as one finds here. But I also love proof-reading. I love proofing my own work, it looks so nice (which means I don’t do a very good job on my own work). I also love editing and proofreading others’ work, it’s remarkably easy and avoids the commitments of writing. This love of the nitty gritty of writing helped me get published three years after starting to write (in 1976).

“Nitty gritty”…hackneyed phrase or Nod Homerique? You decide! My rule: if it’s something that would be said in a boring and vicious office, don’t use it. “Nitty gritty.” “We’re going to have to let you go.” “ring a bell?” “Productivity.” Don’t use these words and phrases.

Dream

…wandering around my home town (Evanston, Illinois) on the southern side near the lake, a neighborhood of big homes and flat blocks built in a false mediaeval style (with turrets and gargoyles) in the 1920s which have retained their value and are used as investments. I go to the Orthodox church there (in the dream: there is no such actual church), the one with very steep and missing stairs to its main entrance that must be negotiated by worshippers and wedding parties.

I am in my flat next to the library and hotel (Orrington) but the electricity is failing. Some things work, others do not. I had this experience in the waking world in China but never in America. You get confused: what is the ON setting on this thing? How long should I wait after turning the device on or off, that is, how long does this complex computer take to execute power down instructions in firmware?

At the end of the dream I had a whole room of Northwestern students trying to help me, switching various devices on and off.

In darkness, then, I seek the light. “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light”. I know more Scripture from good old Handel than actually reading the Bible. It is well known that just as Tea Baggers never read the Constitution (its reading level is pitched way above grade school) they cannot name the four Gospels whereas their Protestant ancestors could. But I seldom read the Bible, just listen to works including the Messiah and Bach’s St Matthew Passion.

But here I go spreading religious hatred. I need to stay away from that stick of shitfire with a wick on it, it’s ruined Belfast and Glasgow. I shall leave it here as an example of how religion so often becomes hate, and if I find myself becoming overly compulsively Catholic I will leave the Church again. I just find prayer calming given my situation.

Study

Grand High Re-read of Kant’s Critique: did a long review of PF Strawson’s Bounds of Sense (a reading of the Critique) with academic footnotes “and all”. It’s been bounced, I now realized by an automated scoring tool that measured its size and…the automated tool “was like, WTF”. In addition, an automated tool can detect one or more external Web addresses which might indicate spam and/or promotion. Finally, there may also be “bad language”. Good people, I feel, use bad language in a bad world.

Not really up to revising it, replied (like a silly man) to the automated tool saying back off: need instead to contact a Human Being at Amazon. May say heck with it. It’s published here on my blog. It’s really just part of my Kant study. I’m not even happy with its contents as opposed to its outside references. I never deeply read Strawson who is a great analytic philosopher. Perhaps I need to do a quick re-read and then rewrite the Strawson review.

“ESF Shocker??”

ESF stands for the English Schools Foundation whose charter seems to be “reserve places in good English medium-of-instruction schools for wealthy parents”.

The “shocker” is that the fee merely for applying for your child to an ESF school has gone from 150.00 to two thousand Hong Kong dollars. The fee doesn’t guarantee admission and is not refunded if your kid doesn’t get in. Whereas the parents of the kids that I teach balk at paying much more than one hundred fifty per hour of my teaching.

This unconscionable charge, together with the facts found by the BBC about millionaire “super star” English and test prep tutors, primarily young and sexy Chinese with English names who dress fashionably, alarm me.

See the BBC documentary here.

I have these questions.

Why is such an important social task, the preparation of children for life, such a sordid, almost gangsta affair and what sort of message does it send kids when they and their future are bought and sold…on dat ole cross of gold?

Why does the millionaire star tutor of the BBC documentary get away with merely feeding kids, whose parents pay him thousands, lists of words he thinks will appear on the exam merely because they appear on past papers available on the Internet to his students?

Why does he use Cantonese as his medium of instruction when we know that learning a new language demands that that unfamiliar language, in this case English, be the medium of instruction from day one?

Why does he fail to teach grammar, for all I can tell, and then smirk when the student tracked by the BBC fails the trial examination because he doesn’t know grammar???.

And finally, why is it that I am retiring on US Social Security and an MPF balance where MPF is Hong Komg’s limited retirement savings scheme, also known as Mandatory Provident Fund, whereas this clown Lam, the so-called “tiger tutor” is a millionaire? I hammered the Oxford Reference Grammar cover to cover, I created charts for verb phrase analysis using my knowledge of formal grammars in computing …

I used YouTube movies to get the students’ attention: at several schools I reversed deep alienation by taking the risk of showing kids bored to tears by the pap they were being fed, the film I Not Stupid about the system in Singapore, which is very similar in intensity and cruelty to Hong Kong’s system …

… and, as I have said, I am on Queer Street financially …

… Why? Am I just a wanker, or does the system manufacture wankerdom when you don’t choose to be a shark? When you’re not an American Psycho of any nationality? Just askin’. …

… BTW, “Queer Street” doesn’t have anything to do with homosexuality: it is a British English phrase that means “the poor house” …

The rest is silence …

Change Record

7 Sep 2013 Correct “nuked if a war with North Korea”