BUT WHO'S COUNTING?

Well, the shortest day of the year is behind us;  good riddance.  Now we can all luxuriate in those extra few seconds of daylight each day as we slowly creep past the vernal equinox toward the summer solstice, which this year, as in years past, I shall spend in Paris celebrating fete de la musique.

This is a good time to look back at the year in blogging [since I am totally out of things of significance to say.]  Google, always on the job, tells me that this is my four hundred and eleventh post of the year.  Some posts have been long and other short, but that is probably about 200,000 words, give or take, which is the equivalent of two good size books.  Good grief.  No wonder even the faithful don't read everything I write.   I think I am giving logorrhea a bad name.

I have reached that age when half century anniversaries present themselves as occasions for celebration and reminiscence.  Nineteen sixty-four was most notable in my life as the year in which I achieved that desideratum of all aspiring academics -- tenure.  In my case, it came with an Associate Professorship in the Philosophy Department of Columbia University.  I was thirty, and thought [mistakenly] that I would be spending the rest of my career on the seventh floor of Philosophy Hall.  Little did I know.

Having achieved tenure, I responded by publishing almost nothing, thereby confirming the worst fears of appointment committees.  My sole publication in 1964 was a six page review in the JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY of a fine book on Kant's Metaphysics of Morals by a real Kant scholar [not like me], Mary Gregor.  Her book, Laws of Freedom, told me a good deal about one of Kant's less well known works, which I had read but of which I had taken very little notice.  Next year is a tad better.

I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time this year blogging about economics, what with the extended review of Thomas Piketty's book and the exchange with several Marxists.  Inasmuch as my course at UNC on Marx starts two weeks from tomorrow, I imagine there will be a good deal more of that in the coming year.  I shall try not to be too tiresome.

On a lighter note, just today I discovered that on Amazon.com, I can binge-watch a new series that went up today entitled Mozart in the Jungle.  It is a soap opera about classical musicians in New York City, focusing on an oboist.  Judging from the first episode, which I have already watched [you need Amazon Prime to get it], it is a delightful mixture of classical music, sex, drugs, ambition, and clashing egos, with the always lovely Bernadette Peters as the Chair of the orchestra committee.   I mean, how much better than that can you get?

Well, so much for number 411.  I suppose tomorrow I must say something about all the really awful things happening in the world.  A blogger's work is never done.