Values of the 19th century

At the Guardian, Stefan Collinis diagnosis after reading the latest volume of Isaiah Berlin's letters:

Berlin’s admirers are prone to say that there is mean-spirited, reverse snobbery at work in criticisms of his constant hobnobbing with the rich, powerful and well-connected. But the justifiable charge against him here is not that he liked the company of such people: it is that his cultivated intimacy with such circles habituated him into thinking of himself as being on the inside, able to pull strings and to drop a word in the ear of those with one kind of power or another without having to mount a properly argued case in public, which might then have been open to challenge. He enjoyed his insider status and he liked his opinions to have influence, but he hated to have to acknowledge them publicly or to be drawn into controversy over them. He undeniably possessed a streak of deviousness or even cowardice, and his genuinely liberal principles were often in tension with his equally deep need to be liked and admired.

Mind games

Great letter by Mary Midgley on women and philosophy. (Via Matt Hart.)

School year tidbits

The beginning of the spring semester always kills me; I don't think I'm really breaking any confidences when I say that we've had three candidates for each of two different junior faculty positions come to give talks in the last two weeks (the final candidate of the group is coming on Tuesday), and of course they must also be lunched and dined and so forth (I am drawing the line at dining this year, lunching is less overwhelming to my schedule!), and their talks subsequently chewed over with colleagues in offices and corridors; it is most tiring for them, and I do not mean to make light of their plight, but it is ultimately rather tiring for the visited as well as for the visitor!

There are a lot of regular talks at this time of year, too: good ones I've heard in the past week include Columbia instantiations of this and this. I wanted to go to this one this evening, but I was so tired that I instead took to my bed!

(Yesterday started very early, with 7am boot camp at Chelsea Piers, and ended late, sitting down around 11:15pm for a very pleasant and satisfying if nutritionally unsound dinner at the Penny Farthing; I had - I am slightly ashamed even to name it - buffalo chicken macaroni and cheese, and G. had fried chicken of evident deliciousness. We had come from the highly satisfactory though perhaps not absolutely stellar - it is such a good play, though! - production of Three Sisters at the Classic; the only thing I didn't care for was the translation, which struck me as obtrusively colloquial in a rather dated way, but many of the performances are very good, and Juliet Rylance was superb as Irina.)

My classes are both well underway, I think; I'm really enjoying being back in the classroom. Yesterday: the last half of The Country Wife, a play which continues to perplex and intrigue me ("Write as I bid you, or I will write whore with this penknife in your face").

Some bits of light reading around the edges: Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air (superb in parts, less compelling in others, but the voice is at its best spectacular); Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead, which I loved. It was a recommendation via The Big Dime, a list that also sent me to Stuart Neville's Belfast thrillers; near the end of the first one now, and finding it very good, though perhaps a bit more conventional/not as much to my taste as Roger Smith's Cape Town thriller.

My only plans for tomorrow are to reread Robinson Crusoe and do a great deal of exercise.

The ambition "to do a big Frogs"

An obituary (in the old style!) for Sir Kenneth Dover, and an appreciation by Stephen Halliwell here.

"That is what I need to learn"

Rather belatedly, a bit that struck me in Laura Secor's New Yorker piece a few weeks ago on the dissident Iranian economist Mohammed Tabibian (not sure about the current situation vis-a-vis reading electronically, but I think the article is available online only to subscribers who have also registered at the site):

One day, on his way to school, Tabibian noticed in a bookstore window a thick new book for sale titled "Economics." It was a word he had never heard before. Tabibian asked his literature teacher what it meant. "He said it meant using your money wisely," Tabibian told me. "I thought the phrase he expressed was more often true by default. Everybody knows how to use their money wisely if they've got some." When he went home that night, Tabibian put the question to his father, who said he wasn't sure but he thought that economics had something to do with the creation of wealth.

The next day, Tabibian went to the bookstore and pulled the book from the shelf. "It was full of graphs, tables, formulas, and lengthy arguments," he said. "I noticed that the subject of creation and distribution of wealth is no simple matter. I thought, That is what I need to learn."

Tabibian later realized that the book was a translation of the 1948 introductory-economics textbook by the American neo-classical economist Paul Samuelson. By then, Tabibian was majoring in the subject at Shiraz University. He went into the field, he told me, "hoping that someday I would help find solutions for the misery and deprivation of many around me."

It is an interesting anecdote in itself, but I am especially intrigued by the clarity and intensity of the thought That is what I need to learn.

(It is like an Augustinian call - take up and read!)

I think it well recalls childhood moments experienced by anybody with a fundamentally analytic or academic orientation towards the world - it is in my experience quite different in kind from the feeling one has when encountering a magically transporting novel, or even a novel that gives indispensable insights into some particularly relevant aspect of human nature.

I would say I had glimpses of this as a quite young child (it was not the way I went eventually in terms of field, but books about mathematics and logic were favorites with me at that stage!), perhaps eleven or twelve, reading Martin Gardner's delightful Aha, Gotcha! - it showed me not so much how to do things as a way in which one might think about things, a way that was uniquely appealing to the point of being almost indispensable!

But certainly the reading experience that quite literally made me think That is what I need happened the summer after I'd graduated from high school. I was sixteen turning seventeen - I had read a huge amount of literature and quite a lot of older literary criticism (I had thoroughly immersed myself in the critical prose of Anthony Burgess and Ezra Pound!), and had been intrigued by the rather ambivalent New York Times-type coverage of work by Derrida and the deconstructionists and so forth - I had yet to encounter it directly, but I already had a very strong suspicion that this was exactly that I wanted to learn about.

I was spending the night at my friend Sara's, at her dad and stepmother's house, and her stepmother had done a master's degree in English - her books were on shelves in Sara's room. As if in a trance, I snagged Roland Barthes's S/Z and was subsequently deaf to the calls of ordinary social interactions...