Virginia Tech for the win.

I just got an e-mail accepting me to Virginia Tech's Masters program. I am on a waitlist for funding.

So far I've been accepted to three of the four places I've applied:
NIU
Tufts
Virginia Tech.

Now I'm just waiting to hear from CUNY, the one PhD program I applied to.

Why did I apply to these schools? Let me tell you.

I studied philosophy at Biola University, a small private school that is not well known. Accordingly, my professors recommended to me that I apply to terminal Masters programs to use as a stepping stone from my small school, at which I did well, to a top-notch PhD program.

According to the Philosophical Gourmet Report, which is more or less respected as authoritative on the matter, Tufts is the top terminal M.A. in philosophy in the U.S. So I applied there. They have a few professors who are doing neat things in philosophy of language and philosophy of logic. (Though, this guy left for Harvard this year, which is sad.) (They also have the famous "bright" Daniel Dennett.) After Tufts, PhilGourmet ranks a little group of schools as having good M.A.'s; so I searched through those to see whether any of them did stuff I was interested in. NIU had plenty of folks doing work in metaphysics (not magic crystals metaphysics; more like the Aristotle kind); Virginia Tech folks doing philosophy of science and logic.

I applied to CUNY because of their emphasis on logic, and because they aren't ranked so prohibitively high that I'd have no chance of getting in. Though, even if I do an M.A. (which would put me in a better position to get into a really good school) I will re-apply to CUNY in a couple years time anyway, because all that I've read of their program really does make me like it and want to be a part of it. I want to go here. The professor that drew my attention to CUNY is Graham Priest, who is awesome.

In other news, still no job.

Jacques Brel: Je ne sais pas

Also: I'm in love with Jacques Brel, and this video.



To see the video with decent English subtitles, go here.

Videos of a talk.

Here's a couple videos of a lecture by Graham Priest, now a professor at CUNY (which I'm still waiting to hear from whether they've accepted or rejected me). In these videos Priest gives a very intuitive and straightforward summary of Gottlob Frege's work. It's really cinchy to understand, but gives you a good understanding of the basic terrain. Enjoy.

Life's deliverances persist.

I still don't have a job. Still looking.

But I just got accepted to Tufts for a Masters in Philosophy.

If there's one thing Hasbro's Monopoly has taught me, you have to take Chance cards as they come. The same goes for Community Chest cards.

A couple stipulative definitions.

hu (pronoun): used to refer to a person of unspecified sex.
hut (possessive adjective): belonging to or associated with a person of unspecified sex.

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Ben Rohrs may have made up "hu"--I remember discussing it with him years ago. I have just made up "hut". I have used a "t" to finish this word as a way to distinguish it from "hu" without making it too closely associated with either "his" or "her".

The proposed words above, if added to the English lexicon, should obviate much trouble experienced when writing academic papers in which one is to describe persons in the abstract, and wants to avoid both the ungrammaticality of "they" and the general awkwardness of "his or her", without falling into linguistically sexist tendencies.

Toodle-oo.

I wrote the following on December 31, 2009:

It is the last day of the year, and I have just walked from Colorado and Pasadena to Colorado and Lake, and back.

Already by 2pm today the south side of the street had been exhaustively divided by masking tape on the sidewalk into 4x10 sq. ft of 24-hour realty. Sometimes this property was adorned by the names of its proud, territorial inhabitants; sometimes they were actually fenced off. They were staging areas for folding chairs of every shape and color, a surprising profligacy of mattresses, and gads of people people people. Most people played games: according to my personal field research, these games included, but were not limited to, monopoly, sorry, chess, checkers, texas hold'em, solitaire, scattergories, operation, dominos, risk, and mah jong. Some people read books, some played musical instruments, many from a sweeping assortment of socio-economic/cultural groups blasted inexcusably bad music. Some people drove "tricked out" automobiles. Some people took shelter from the maddening crowds from behind restaurant windows, out of which they gazed back at those maddening crowds into which they would soon be subsumed. Oregon, Ohio, and Jesus were all well represented--most seemed to be rooting for Oregon. Some people sold cotton candy, some sold hats, some gave hats away. People moved together until hardly perceptible as individuals. People spoke in ambient noise. It was a complex network of trajectories, attempting to navigate the maze it composed.

A stone's throw from Colorado and Lake I found what I was looking for: a used book store, to which I had been months before. Or, more specifically, a book I had seen months before, within said store. It had waited for me: "The American Language" by H.L. Mencken. There were majestic old volumes of both the text itself and its 600-page supplement. I may have salivated. The temptation was strong. I felt the weight of the large black volumes in my hands as I weighed mentally the magnitudes of my desire and my penury. I could not justify purchasing the expensive books, and did not. Instead, I will continue to aggrandize my desire, which has grown beyond the simple want of an object, and, feeding on itself, has become, in addition to mere desire for some erudite text, a desire for its own satisfaction. There is pleasure to be had in my snowballing covetousness, the gradual accretion of which is delightful pain, promising to me, as it grows more difficult to endure, greater pleasure in its eventual fulfillment. As I left the bookshop, I winced and inhaled through my teeth, savoring the delay.

On my way back, threnging through the throngs that had chosen the streets of Pasadena for their year's birthplace, I was impressed less by the mass as a single phenomenon, and more by its components. I saw a portly security guard, guarding a door, asleep on his feet; I saw two very young children, just older than babies, pretending to play monopoly; I saw a young woman toting freshly bought art supplies, including a 5x5 ft frame; I saw a boy playing an xbox that was connected to a big screen TV and powered by a rumbling engine that could have belonged to a jeep from the earlier half of the 20th century; I saw, and heard, two boys blaring horns at every car that passed, especially the cop cars; I caught a girl checking me out.

I made it back to the coffee shop from which I began--my feet ache of payment, my shoulder of a full book bag; my mind dwells not on the year behind me, but on the burgeoning present, as it seems always to do, and perhaps must do. Thus will I let another year die, most of it lapsing unnoticed.

A poem.

I wrote this poem, like it, and now post it.

The James Wright mentioned in this poem is the poet, not my father

Now I get what James Wright means
when he mentions the delicacy
of a girl's wrist.
I got it when I saw her lift her tote bag,
the straps wrapped around her index finger
and her thumb,
like rings.
I imagined circling her wrist with my index finger
and my thumb,
like a bracelet.
And I imagined her turning her palm upward
delicately,
adjusting slightly her bracelet,
my hand.

E-ri-e Canal by Burl Ives

I have been listening to this song on repeat.

If you can make me rich, do not hesitate.

The felt absence of gainful employment is almost, perhaps, as bad as its felt presence. The principal, infuriating bother of a job, had or not had, is having to pay any attention to it. Jobs, like driving, are to be condemned because they make a chore of one's mental life.

There is probably nothing I cherish so much as my own free-wheeling thoughts, left to themselves--but it is precisely these which the duty to scrape for hourly pay and the nuisance of changing lanes aim to destroy. And they tend to succeed in their aims. It is not the strain on my body or my time that I cannot tolerate, but the taxing of my mind, my whole mind.

But, as I say: not having a job does no work to solve the problem. After two weeks of delightful, idling indigence, I am obligated by threat of insolvency and the nagging nags of loved ones to fill out my share of applications, and make my personal contribution to the working force. He does not want it, but in addition to my man-hours, the man shall take, free of charge, my very soul.

I am not surprised that so many refuse the life of the mind. I cast no contempt upon one who retreats from thought to television, when thought consists of solicitude over one's credit score.

What could you do for a million dollars?

A week ago I asked my brother if he thought he could make himself to believe that a given ordinary object were in a sealed box simply upon my asking him to, and he said he could: he would trust my testimony. So, if I said "Jeff, believe that there are scissors in this box", he thinks he could believe it, just like that. So he claims.

Then I asked him if he thought he could make himself to believe, for a million-dollar reward, that a given ordinary object were in a box, after my having opened the box, clearly showing him that nothing whatsoever was in the box, and then sealing the box in his presence. A million dollars to believe that scissors are in a box he had plainly seen moments before to be empty. He thought he could do it.

He said he would have to really lie to himself--deceive himself into discrediting the evidence that I'd just presented him with.

Then I asked, "what if you had to shake the box up and down?" That got him.

A reply to Dillard.

Read this bit from Dillard today:

Once, when the pond was younger and the algae had not yet taken over, I saw an amazing creature. At first all I saw was a slender motion. Then I saw that it was a wormlike creature swimming in the water with a strong, whiplike thrust, and it was two feet long. It was also slender as a thread. It looked like an inked line someone was nervously drawing over and over. Later I learned that it was a horsehair worm. The larvae of horsehair worms live as parasites in land insects; the aquatic adults can get to be a yard long. I don't know how it gets from the insect to the pond, or from the pond to the insect, for that matter, or why on earth it needs such an extreme shape. If the one I saw had been so much as an inch longer or a shave thinner, I doubt if I would ever have come back.

How do such parasites get to the pond, you ask? Let me help you out, Dillard. The internet has an answer: they turn their insect hosts into zombies.

Read all about parasites turning insects into zombies here, courtesy of Scientific American.
Watch a video of hairworms going all 'Dawn of the Dead' on crickets here, courtesy of the French internet.
Play a cartoony video game based on this biological premise here, courtesy of Nitrome.

Here's another little passage from Dillard that I dog-eared because it made me laugh aloud, not because it also mentions hairworms (but it does mention hairworms for those of you waiting to read any and all sentences about them).

Along with intricacy, there is another aspect of the creation that has impressed me in the course of my wanderings. Look again at the horsehair worm, a yard long and thin as a thread, whipping through the duck pond, or tangled with others of its kind in a slithering Gordian knot. Look at an overwintering ball of buzzing bees, or a turtle under ice breathing through its pumping cloaca. Look at the fruit of the Osage orange tree, big as a grapefruit, green, convoluted as any human brain. Or look at a rotifer's translucent gut: something orange and powerful is surging up and down like a piston, and something small and round is spinning in place like a flywheel. Look, in short, at practically anything--the coot's feet, the mantis's face, a banana, the human ear--and see that not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create anything. He'll stop at nothing.

Hello and Jon, on the floor.

This morning I petted Hello, the cat my family feeds. I happened upon it as it lay lounging in the sunlight, like pagan royalty. Without explanation I flopped prone down next to it, and extended my hand. Hello took little notice, and continued to service the immediate needs of its back by rolling back and forth on the carpet. However, my hand, proving by its movements to be more in line with Hello's agenda of satisfying ever-present itch, established for itself a place of primacy among Hello's fund of nearby objects against which to rub an itchy body. I thought to myself how itchiness truly is ever-present for Hello. This cat's life is devoted to the stimulation of its fur, and it will be not be sated. Considered renaming cat Sisyphus. Or, I thought, if not a single physical craving, there is a small set of basic appetites--itchiness, hunger, horniness--that Hello will tend to for its feline lifetime. And there I was, stupidly stretched out on the floor, scratching the cat, helping it along merrily merrily merrily. I saw in Hello some reduction of myself: although I boast a chorus of (perhaps) subtler and more sophisticated iterations of desire, it is difficult not to think of the range of my behavior as at root an ongoing, elaborate, idiotic scratch.

These were my thoughts just before Hello started playing with my hand: biting it, holding it in its front paws, kicking at it with its back paws--behavior apparently gratuitous. And me, playing along, also without explanation.

Quotation of the Day.

"If you don't feel happy when you're reading or when you're writing, of if you don't feel greatly moved, then you are not really reading or writing. The whole thing is merely reading, I mean for examination marks, and that, of course--I won't say that way madness lies, but that's the way dullness lies." - Jorge Luis Borges, on William F. Buckley's Firing Line.

Methodology:

My method this morning of consuming my orange (grown 10 feet from where it is being ingested--little distance has it traveled), is to insert large portions of it (2 slices a time at least) into my mouth, to chew, letting the fruit's natural juices to trickle tranquilly down my throat, and then to open my mouth widely, facing downward over the trashcan, letting the orange remains plop down into the garbage.

You don't even want to know how I'm drinking my coffee.

A Valedictory Gift.

I have just received a letter from Coeur d'Alene Idaho, from my recent landlady. She has mailed me a check for around 2/3 of the deposit I put down on the beautiful apartment I loved and inhabited for 9 months. But this is not what the woman, Beatrice, has given me.

She signs her brief note, "As Ever, Bea". This valediction is her gift: whatever sentiment manages to be expressed in signing a letter "As Ever", something simple and quotidian, verging on tedium--maybe the sentiment of not working to express any particular sentiment. This valediction is a small stroke that, by its mere statement of fact, will serve me as an available ornament to adorn otherwise meaningful or important or good letters, imbuing them with a faint sense of hollowness, at least for myself; this is the wonderful, lifelong gift Beatrice has given me.

As Ever,
Jonathan

Poem, Discovered.

I wrote the following poem in the Coeur d'Alene Library some months ago. I just now stumbled upon it on my computer, and am both taken by it and doubtful as to its poetic merits.

Today, in the Library

I smiled at a reader,
who was frowning at a baby,
who was wailing inconsolably.

PPM--San Francisco Bay Blues

I have watched this dozens of times. I love it.

Grizzly Bear - Deep Blue Sea

This is a video of a band I've recently been enjoying, performing one of my favorite songs of theirs, live, on a beach, surrounded by some people.