He was unaffected by the singularities of time and place. His abode was anywhere. It was all the same to him whether he catheterized a pig at four o’clock in the afternoon in New Orleans or at midnight in Transylvania. . . . Yet I do not envy him. I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in (p. 52).
Here is the long awaited lineup for Bence Nanay’s issue for The Monist (97:1 Jan 2014).
Bence Nanay
The Dethroning of Ideocracy: Robert Musil as a Philosopher
Robert Musil was not a professional philosopher. He was a novelist— and according to the widely accepted canon, his contribution to the twentieth-century novel is only matched by very few. Why then should there be a special issue on him in The Monist? The reason is that Musil was a philosopher—just a different kind of philosopher. He was trained in philosophy (he wrote his Ph.D. on Ernst Mach) and gave up a promising career in academia, turning down a job offer in Meinong’s department because he thought it better to express his philosophical ideas by means of writing novels.
Philip Kitcher
The Youth Without Qualities
Achille C. Varzi
Musil’s Imaginary Bridge
Sabine Döring
What Is an Emotion? Musil’s Adverbial Theory
Kevin Mulligan
Foolishness, Stupidity, and Cognitive Values
Barbara Sattler
Contingency and Necessity: Human Agency in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities
Catrin Misselhorn
Musil’s Metaphilosophical View: Between Philosophical Naturalism and Philosophy as Literature
Philippe Mach
Ethics and Aesthetics: Reuniting the Siamese Twins
Catherine Wilson
Mach, Musil, and Modernism
Tamás Demeter
Mental Fictionalism: The Very Idea
Here’s a just published book on Pops.
Lana started to plan the ensemble with the globe. the chalk, and the book. If the thing had commercial possibilities, is should be done with a certain finesse and quality. She had envisioned several arrangements that would combine grace and obscenity (p. 146).
“Hey! I sure they a bird trade. White peoples always got parakeets and canayries they smoochin. Wait till them peoples fin out what kinda bird the Night of Joy offerin. You be havin a doorman in front this place. You be gettin the society trade. Whoa!” Jones created a dangerous-looking nimbus that seemed ready to burst. “Darlene and that bird jusgotta eye-rom out a few rough spot. Shit. The gal jus startin in show biz. She need a break.” (p. 148).
This from the NME. Always good to hear that Frank is getting recognition from unlikely quarters on the grounds that he gets no real radio play and that he pissed off the ideologues of both political wings.
P. Zappae is not the first time that Zappa has inspired the name of a new discover. The musician has provided inspiration for a mollusk, a new type of fish plus jellyfish and spiders in the past 40 years. There is also an asteroid named 3834 Zappafrank after the rock legend.
Here is one of the more thoughtful, subtle and insightful takes on one of Percy’s masterpieces.
This summary from the very excellent The Splintered Mind.
“Goofin off? Shit. Goofin off ain cleanin up this mother-fuckin cathouse. They somebody in here sweepin and moppin up all the shit your po, stupor customer drippin on the flo. I feel sorry for them po peoples comin in here thinkin they gonna have theirself some fun, probly gettin knockout drop in they drink, catchin the clap off the ice cube. Whoa! (p. 145).
A report on a paper recently published in Cortex.
Michael Baruzzini‘s thoughts on Percy’s famous “ode” to Bourbon. (A companion piece is Luis Buñuel’s recipe for the perfect Martini mentioned in his autobiography and perhaps most famously in the film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie — for another time).
Not only should connoisseurs of bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth—all real enough dangers. I, too, deplore these afflictions. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of bourbon drinking, that is, the use of bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cure the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic. What, after all, is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there’s Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadness of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: “Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?”
