A SPECIAL THANKS TO DAVID AUERBACH

David Auerbach, a frequent commentator on this blog, is among other things a bread maven [he apparently has his own wood fired oven, which is pretty impressive], aside from being an MIT-trained philosopher teaching in my neighborhood at NC State.  In response to my e-mailed appeal, he recommended three Triangle area shops where one can get good bread.  This morning, at seven a.m., Susie and I set out for Loaf in Durham to try their wares.  Needless to say, we got lost [Durham, North Carolina, like Worcester, MA, is a city into which it is impossible to drive without getting lost.]  But with the help of my IPHone's GPS system and sheer luck, we stumbled on the shop and even found a handicap parking place across the street.

Well, the croissant was warm and flaky and very buttery, and the big loaf of bread I bought tastes very good on a first sampling.  Baguettes do not come out of the oven until eleven, so I shall have to return.  Warmest thanks to David for the guidance.  In my universe, this ranks considerably above tips for disambiguating the Critique of Pure Reason.

WHO KNEW?

Out of curiosity, I just checked my other blog, the one where two years ago I posted in daily segments a book-length introduction to the use of formal methods in political philosophy.  It turns out that the countries from which page views come most often, in order of frequency, are:

Turkey, The United States, China, and Croatia.  Now that is genuinely weird.  To paraphrase the immortal Mel Brooks, I am world-famous in Croatia.

BIG BROTHER IS NOT ONLY WATCHING, HE REMEMBERS WHAT HE SEES

I was reading The Daily Kos a few moments ago, and I noticed an Amazon.com ad.  Was Amazon advertising left-leaning political books?  A natural idea on The Daily Kos.  Nope.  Amazon was advertising super lightweight collapsible wheelchairs?  Why did an ad for super lightweight collapsible wheelchairs pop up on my Daily Kos?  Because yesterday I went to Amazon.com to look for a super lightweight collapsible wheelchair for Susie to use when we travel.

Now that is downright creepy.  To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, I might as well tell my secret password the live long day to an admiring bog.

Talk about the Global Village is so yesterday.  This is the Global Borneo Long Hut, where everyone knows who is making love to whom and what everyone had for dinner last night.

DUMPSTER DIVING

It is just barely possible that readers of this blog have formed the opinion that I am a high-minded type who occupies himself with eternal questions and the deeper meanings of otherwise incomprehensible books.  The purpose of this brief blog post is to disabuse anyone who has been thus misled.

I was idly surfing the web, reading some of my favorite blogs to see what was going on in the world, when I came upon a story about Kim Kardashian.  I am of course familiar with the name, and might even be able to pick her out of a police line-up, but I reflected that I knew absolutely nothing about her except that she is famous.  This led me to Wikipedia's entry on Kim Kardashian, who, it seems, is the daughter of now deceased lawyer Robert Kardashian.  I actually recall Robert Kardashian as one of O. J. Simpson's lawyers in the trial of the century.  Kim Kardashian, who is now thirty-three, has married Kanye West, with whom she has a daughter named [I am not making any of this up!] North West.  I assume that if the daughter makes it to puberty and conceives a child, the child will, if it is a girl, be named North by North West, and will in turn grow up to star in a remake of the classic Hitchcock film of that name.

The phrase "famous for being famous," Wikipedia tells me [yes, there is a Wikipedia entry on "famous for being famous."  Take that, Encyclopedia Britannica!] was apparently coined by Daniel Boorstin, a fact that pleases me for some obscure reason.

The concept, if not the term, "famous for being famous" has given rise to semi-synonyms, one of which is "celebutante."  This, Wikipedia explains without further attribution, is a portmanteau word.  It was of course Lewis Carroll who invented the term "portmanteau word" to explain such classic neologisms from The Hunting of the Snark as "frumious," which is "furious" and "fuming" scrunched together by someone who cannot decide which term should precede the other.  Lewis Carroll, by the way, under his real name Charles Dodgson, was a maths don in Christ Church, Oxford, who did some lovely work expanding on Condorcet's "paradox of majority rule" [see my In Defense of Anarchism for a brief exposition of the paradox.]   He was also the author of some spectacularly funny [and quite valid] ratiocinatio polysyllogistica.

I think this is enough to put to rest rumors of my intellectual sophistication.

TRANSITIONS

Susie and I flew in from London yesterday, and found two baskets of mail waiting for us, all of which was catalogues, bills, and political appeals for money.  Nobody writes letters anymore.  How sad.

On Friday, we went to Shakespeare and Company to look for books to read on the flight home.  I found an old 1933 Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot mystery, Lord Edgeware Dies.  After the five hundred pages of schlock by James Patterson that I chewed through earlier last week, it was a distinct pleasure to spend time with a real writer.  [I looked Patterson up on the web.  He was quoted as saying that when he creates novels in collaboration with some other author, which apparently is all he now does, he thinks up the plot and "the actual writing of sentences" is left to the collaborator.  I thought that was just about the most corrupt description of authorship I had ever read.]

I was surprised by the off-hand anti-semitic remarks by Poirot and others in the Christie book.  There was not the slightest suggestion that she was maintaining any sort of ironic distance from the statements she put in her characters' mouths, although she clearly was distancing herself humorously both from Poiret's self-satisfied self-evaluations and from the Bertie Wooster-esqueries of his sidekick Hastings.  It seemed pretty obvious to me that this genteel anti-semitism was the common coin of the British upper classes in the early thirties.  The anti-semitism played no role in the plot.  It was simply woven into the dialogue along with a good deal else.

This morning I took my usual early morning walk.  Time changes being what they are, Susie and I awoke at three a.m., so I got a good deal done before it was time to set out.  I missed terribly my daily visit with Notre Dame as I turn onto the quais to head west toward the Assemblee Nationale, but this morning I did see deer three separate times, so there are compensations.  And the HU Express bus driver honked hello as he passed me.  No one in Paris ever says hello to me on my walks.

Once I have caught up with chores, I shall start practicing the viola again and get to work on a mailing to raise money for the African Storybook Project.  When the letter is ready, I shall post it here to give you some idea what the project is trying to accomplish.

THERE AND HOME AGAIN

Just walked in the door after a two day journey from Paris to Chapel Hill [why does that sound like From Eternity to Here?]  It will take me a day or two to unwind and crank up the blog.  Suffice it to say Heathrow is the worst airport in the world.

More anon.

THE RP WOLFF READER

Jerry Fresia asks what would be included in a 250-300 page RP Wolff Reader.  Since this is a flattering question replying to which requires me to think about myself, I was quite naturally drawn to it and devoted my early morning walk today to crafting an answer.  The question itself reminds me of those stroll-down-memory-lane concerts in which a song writer sits at a piano.  After idly playing a few chords he says, “And then I wrote,” breaking into the first eight bars of a familiar tune.  The success of the concert depends on the audience recognizing each tune as its melody is played, always a chancy business if the composer is old and the audience young.

When I started to make up a Table of Contents of The Robert Paul Wolff Memorial Reader, my first thought was of a lovely story about the famous scholar of medieval religious philosophy Harry Austryn Wolfson, with whom it was my great good fortune to study during my undergraduate years at Harvard.  Wolfson was a scholar of astonishing breadth, having mastered the languages and literatures of the Greek, Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim traditions, along with the scholarship in all of the major modern European languages.  He was born in Vilna, and even when I studied with him in 1952-53, when he was sixty-five, he still spoke with a strong accent, reminding me of my grandmother.  Wolfson was a short man, rather like The Little King in a cartoon strip of the same name that was popular when I was a boy.  It is said that when Wolfson was nearing the end of his career, he passed Nathan March Pusey, President of Harvard, while walking across Harvard Yard.  They greeted one another formally, as was then the custom, and Pusey said, “I understand that you are about to retire, Professor Wolfson.  We would be very grateful for your wisdom in finding someone to replace you.”  Wolfson, so the story goes, thought for a moment, looked up at Pusey, and said “Vell, I vill tell you, first, you vill need three people.”

When Jerry asks me what would be contained in a 250-300 page RP Wolff Reader, my first thought is, “Vell, I vill tell you, first, you vill need 600 pages.” 

Section One of the Reader will certainly consist of the first 55 pages of In Defense of Anarchism, which is actually most of that tiny book.  In Defense is the book that made me famous, and even now, almost fifty years after I wrote it, if I were to hum a few bars in many an academic lounge, someone would sing along with me. 

By rights, the next section should contain selections of my writings on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, but that is easier said than done.  Excerpting Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity would be a bit like wheeling out the Berlin Philharmonic to play a movement of a Mahler symphony – uplifting no doubt, but rather trying on an audience’s patience.  I think I would settle for my late paper, “The Completion of Kant’s Moral Philosophy in the Tenets of the Rechtslehre.”  This essay is virtually unknown, and makes, I believe, an important contribution to our understanding of Kant’s ethical theory, which has for more than two centuries fascinated and puzzled readers.

Well, that’s not so bad.  Eighty pages, more or less.  I might make Jerry’s limit yet.

After anarchism and Kant, Marx.  I think I will include all of Moneybags Must Be So Lucky.  It is, pound for pound, the best thing I have ever written, it offers the only clear explication I have ever seen of Marx’s mysterious talk of the relative and equivalent forms of value in Chapter One of Das Kapital, and the last chapter is introduced by a Jewish joke.  What is more, the whole thing only runs eighty-three pages.

This would be a good place to put several lighter pieces of which I am fond:  The first is my review of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, which had the delightful effect of leading a number of gullible readers to doubt Bloom’s existence.  The second is my unpublishable report of a conference on Kant’s legal philosophy put on by Columbia Law School.  The piece is called “Why, Indeed?” and it so shocked the student editors of the Columbia Law Journal that they could not bring themselves to include it in their special issue on the conference.  The third is “The Pimple on Adonis’ Nose” – the original version, never published, not the version incorporated into a paper that I co-authored with my son, professor Tobias Barrington Wolff.  I don’t think Tobias’s stellar reputation as a scholar should be tarnished with this brush.

That gets us to two hundred pages, give or take a bit.  Pretty good.

For a change of pace, let’s throw in “Hume’s Theory of Mental Activity,” a chunk of my doctoral dissertation that has gained some recognition in the tiny world of Hume studies.  And just to show that I am not just a pretty face, how about “A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marx’s Labor Theory of Value,” which contains the only original mathematical material I have ever written – not terribly difficult mathematics, to be sure, but I am inordinately proud of it.

Now a nod to my on-going support of Women’s Lib, “There’s Nobody Here but Us Persons.”  And as a token of my quarter century long involvement with South Africa, “A Lover’s Lament:  Contradictions in South African Higher Education,” a paper delivered to the education faculty of Pretoria University and never again heard from.

I think I should also like to include “Narrative Time:  On the Inherently Perspectival Structure of the Social World,” which provides a philosophical and literary critical foundation for my account of ideology.

And to wrap things up, the Credo I crafted for and published on this blog.

There, that brings us in under Jerry’s original limit.  There is lots more stuff that could have been included, but not even my mother, if she were alive, would be able to stand even this much.

Now, all we need to do is find a publisher daft enough to undertake the project.