“Ignatius, what’s all this trash on the floor?”
“That is my worldview that you see. It still must be incorporated into a whole, so be careful where you step.”
“And all the shutters closed. Ignatius! It’s still light outside.”
“My being is not without its Proustian elements,” Ignatius said from the bed, to which he had quickly returned. “Oh, my stomach.”
“It smells terrible in here.”
“Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate” (p. 41).
Fats’ piano
This from Offbeat.
Satchel Mouth
This lovely piece for the kiddies (.pdf – 3.1MB). From People to Know: CHILDCRAFT: The How and Why Library, Vol. 12 (from my wife’s childhood book).
Louis Armstrong: Good Evening Ev’rybody
Though not Jazz Fest NOLA this must rate one of the greatest performances ever captured on film. Two titans who were to leave us soon after.
I’m pasting in Stephanie DePue’s review from Amazon:
“Louis Armstrong: Good Evening Ev’rybody,” an invaluable live concert recording, is based on never before publicly seen footage of the entertainer’s 70th birthday party at the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival. The feature-length high-definition production has recently aired, in a shorter version, on public broadcasting channels (PBS) in the United States, and on several international broadcasters, including BBC4 in the United Kingdom.
Famed jazz producer George Wein, who created the Newport Jazz Festival and has produced it for many years, threw Armstrong’s all-star party, featuring Mahalia Jackson and Dizzy Gillespie as well as many other jazz greats; he also had the foresight to get it professionally filmed, though the film was never released. He even went to Armstrong’s house, in Queens, New York, and, by asking the musician a series of artfully-framed questions, got what is, in effect, a narration from the master. Mind you, Armstrong was not well at the time; he passed on July 6, 1971, and this is believed to be his last filmed concert performance. The original, first generation 16 mm. film of the 1970 concert was produced and directed by Wein, filmmaker Sidney J. Stiber, and executive produced by Jack Lewerke. Producer Albert Spevak created new hi def masters from the original, and digitally restored the audio from the original concert masters.
On the DVD, we see Armstrong rehearsing and performing many of his greatest hits. He is joined by performers such as Jimmy Owens, Bobby Hackett, Wild Bill Davison, and Ray Nance, who perform some too. I believe I counted 24 songs in all. Gillespie does “I’m Confessing,” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” Davison does “Them There Eyes.” Owens does “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Nance, a big band performer with lounge lizard style, gives us “I’m in the Market for You.” We also get “Thanks a Million,” and “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.” Armstrong gives us his signature tune, “Sleepy Time Down South,” “Pennies From Heaven, ” and “Mac the Knife.” We get “What a Wonderful World” and “Hello Dolly” in rehearsal. Also, his surprising, unpretentious take of “Blueberry Hill,” which he sings complete with New Orleans accent: “you bodder me still.” Well, the New Orleans accent, like the famed Brooklyn accent, grows out of the Irish accent, and the troublesome “th” sound might as well not exist.
Watching this, you can never forget that these artists are making music, in the truest sense of the word. They are largely older adults at the time, with bags under their eyes and around their waists; some of the women performers appear to be wearing $10 wigs, and some could use them; everybody smokes – and there’s Schlitz beer everywhere. And the performers just stood and made the best music they knew how, with, apparently, little attention paid to outer appearances, polish, or presentation; there’s not a writhing dancer to be seen. However, in her show-stopping, show-closing appearance, the late gospel star Jackson, who would herself pass fairly shortly, on January 27, 1972, does get carried away by “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and breaks her vocal to dance a few steps. The crowd stood and roared. Armstrong found himself coming out on stage, and joining Jackson in the gospel standard, which he’d never professionally sung before. Producer/impresario Wein calls the evening’s stars out, and we see them in a final unrehearsed jam of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” sung, once again, by Jackson and Armstrong. Armstrong hadn’t released that tune since 1938; Jackson had never professionally sung it before.
In his remarks, Armstrong says that “there ain’t but two kinds of music, good and bad, and if it’s got a beat, it’s good.” He has, he adds, just bought the Beatles’ “Let It Be;” and he gives us a few bars of it. Gospel star Jackson will say that everyone loves Armstrong, who’s from her home town, and “if you don’t, you don’t know how to love.” If you love good music with a beat, you will love this DVD, as I do.
Oakeshott Symposium on Science and Religion
This is the first of six contributions to a symposium published in Zygon, vol. 44, no. 1 (March 2009).
Abstract. This paper introduces a symposium discussing Michael Oakeshott’s understanding of the relationship of religion, science and politics. Essays by Elizabeth Corey, Timothy Fuller, Byron Kaldis, and Corey Abel are followed by a review of Corey’s recent book by Efraim Podoksik.
Keywords: category error; creationist science; Stephen Jay Gould; ignoratio elenchi; modality; non-overlapping magisteria; Michael Oakeshott; politics; religion; science.
Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) has the twofold distinction of being acknowledged as one of the greatest political philosophers and as one of the greatest philosophers of history of the twentieth century. He also made a distinguished contribution to the philosophy of education, philosophical jurisprudence, the history of political thought, and aesthetics. What is not widely known is that his earliest writings were centrally concerned with religion and theology and that this remained an implicit interest through most of his long career. In his first book, Experience and Its Modes (1933), Oakeshott gave a metaphysical and epistemological account of the place of history, science, and practice in human experience, in which religion and politics are subsumed into the domain of practice. This modal conception (not to be confused with modal logic) is structurally key to all of Oakeshott’s work. It is therefore no surprise that each of the five contributors in this symposium spends a significant amount of time on this aspect of Oakeshott.
The motivation behind my suggesting this symposium had its source in the late writings of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. It struck me that Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria” (Gould 1997; 1999) bore a striking resemblance to Oakeshott’s modal conception, presented some 66 years earlier. The resonance was ever so strong when examined in the context of the current hot topic of “scientific creationism.” On both Oakeshott’s and Gould’s terms, scientific creationism is a star example of an oxymoron because it conflates subject matter that they believe ought to be kept distinct. For Oakeshott, human experience comprises distinct spheres or modes of knowledge—practice, science, history, and poetry (aesthetics), each of these domains modal in the sense that each is constitutive of its own criteria of objectivity and standards appropriate to its own subject matter.1 Oakeshott’s modal conception sought to preserve the integrity of each and every mode, including science. Religion and politics, on Oakeshott’s account, were consigned to the world of practice, the realm of agency characterized by the endless deliberation of reconciling is with ought. Thus, the fusion of scientific with creationism amounts to the politicization of science, or its corollary, the politicization of religion. Oakeshott’s modal conception is best known through his critique of “scientific politics.” Scientific politics denotes the attempt to make political activity answerable or reducible to scientific criteria and is a canonical example of what Oakeshott took to be the misunderstanding of an activity and which he famously called rationalism (Oakeshott [1962] 1991). For him, this conflation of modes—the political (practical) and the scientific— is neither political nor scientific. The abstract apriorism implied in scientific politics is profoundly inappropriate to the complex manifold that is human conduct because it abstracts from the minutia of lived experience. The scientific perspective and the practical perspective are of completely different orders, and to allow one to bleed into the other is to generate at best irrelevance and at worst profound human misery. Practice, being ever present, constantly pressing up against human experience, beckons one on; its intrinsic malleability carries with it the greatest of consequence. Indeed a conflation of any of the modes (choose your permutation: history, science, practice, poetry) results in something that is neither fish nor fowl. The modes, for Oakeshott, are not and should not be conversable. To enforce conversability is to commit what Oakeshott terms ignoratio elenchi, which refers to any process of argument that fails to establish its relevant conclusion or any counterargument that fails to establish the contradictory of the proposition attacked. Gould (1997) marks this supposed modality: “No supposed ‘conflict’ between science and religion should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap (nor do they encompass all inquiry).”
Conceived thus, any perceived conflict is a pseudo problem, an error of irrelevance, generated through either ignorance or a promiscuous, imperialistic, or immodest ideological viewpoint. Science covers the empirical realm (sub specie quantitatis in Oakeshott’s terms), and religious experience extends over questions of moral meaning and value (sub specie voluntatis), and these two magisteria just do not overlap. Furthermore, they are not coterminous in some metamode. For Gould and for Oakeshott, it would be incoherent to posit the notion that these domains be separated by a noman’s land, and so it seems that magisteria, at least in Gould’s view (1997), will inevitably “bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border.” This then is the crux of the matter. Is this inevitability to be taken as a hostile skirmish or welcomed as a benign and innocent dialogue? This is the question that animates the following discussion—and speaks directly to Zygon’s aims and scope. Many take Oakeshott’s well-known invocation of ignoratio elenchi to be roughly coextensive with Gilbert Ryle’s “category mistake” (Ryle [1949] 1990, 17–18).2 It has to be admitted that Oakeshott’s use of ignoratio elenchi is tendentious. It is so in five ways:
1. Only because Oakeshott holds particular views does he regard certain arguments as failing to establish a relevant conclusion.
2. The irreducible plurality of modal worlds forbids any commonalities—the use of relevant evidence, the use of logical inference, and so on. Oakeshott seems to rule out the notion that there are general virtues of evidence and inquiry that we appeal to regardless of the domain of inquiry (of course the standards of accuracy will vary between subject matters).
3. Given the irreducible plurality of the modes, Oakeshott has to rely upon some notion of coherentism. Coherentism in epistemology and metaphysics— that is, justification and truth—inherits several well-known difficulties. It invites transference to ethics, politics, and society—else we are incoherent in having coherentism in one sphere and something different in the other. Coherentism about ethics, politics, and society leads directly to relativism (Marsh 2005), because it is empirically and conceptually possible for there to be any number of sets of ethical, political, and social beliefs and activities that form equally coherent systems, with ex hypothesi no decidability on grounds of coherence between them.
4. How does Oakeshott handle the blending of religion and politics if they are both intramodal?
5. Oakeshott’s later addition of poetry as a mode complicates matters— it is just a mode of sensibility and is devoid of evidence or inquiry. (Interestingly, Gould also mentions the magisterium of art).
With these points in mind, Oakeshott’s modal conception plays a vital role in the discussion that follows. The authors, through their unique expository styles and particular substantive concerns, all contribute to getting a grip on what may be for some a rather obscure notion. First up is Elizabeth Corey (2009), who makes a case for the view that although Oakeshott’s writing is not conventionally religious, there is a religious sensibility that infuses all his philosophy. Timothy Fuller (2009) specifically offers an analysis of the relation of science and religion in Oakeshott’s modal scheme, although he is not directly concerned with the public-policy implications of this view. Byron Kaldis (2009) presents a close-grained examination of Oakeshott on science, examining its internal consistency and locating it within contemporary discussions in the philosophy of science. Corey Abel (2009) looks at the implications of Oakeshott’s modality for public policy, refracted through Oakeshott’s metaphor of civil conversation. Abel focuses here on the hot topic of the day—creationist science. By way of a postscript, Efraim Podoksik (2009) reviews Elizabeth Corey’s book Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics (2006). Her discussion of the relation between religion and aesthetics in Oakeshott brings to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein’s gnomic remark “Ethik und Asthetik sind Eins”—Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same (Wittgenstein 1969, 24.7.16), both to be conceived as sub specie aeternitatis (from the standpoint of eternity) or, more loosely translated, as “free from considerations of time.” The atemporality ascribed by Wittgenstein to ethics and aesthetics seems to have more than a faint resonance in the “delicate” noninstrumental link between religion and aesthetics that Corey discerns in Oakeshott. As is clear from the title of Corey’s book, it is a perfect accompaniment to the main course.
I Am a Strange Loop: The Life and Times of John Kennedy Toole
Here is the intro to a review essay:
Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces. Cory MacLauchlin. Boston and New York: Da Capo Press, 2012, 319 pages, $26.00 hardcover.
The book is not autobiography; neither is it altogether invention. While the plot is manipulation and juxtaposition of characters, with one or two exceptions the people and places in the book are drawn from observation and experience. I am not in the book; I’ve never pretended to be. But I am writing about things that I know, and in recounting these, it’s difficult not to feel them.
No doubt this is why there’s so much of [Ignatius] and why his verbosity becomes tiring. It’s really not his verbosity but mine. And the book, begun one Sunday afternoon, became a way of life. With Ignatius as an agent, my New Orleans experiences began to fit in, one after the other, and then I was simply observing and not inventing . . .
John Kennedy Toole, cited in Butterfly in the Typewriter, pp.178-179
We are all “strange loops” but perhaps none more so than John Kennedy Toole. His life’s narrative is a Möbius strip of irony layered upon irony, a loop of consciousness that had a deep seated self-prescience heightened by our presentism; a consciousness that continues to writhe, twist and fold back upon itself, throwing up a raft of self-referential and feedback paradoxes that concern the nature of the self or the soul.[1]
Where does the boundary between the protagonist George Arthur Rose (Hadrian the Seventh, 1904) and his creator Frederick Rolfe (a.k.a. Baron Corvo) lie? The same question can be asked of a handful of other twentieth-century literary titans, including Franz Kafka, Robert Musil and Yukio Mishima. Joseph K. has been taken to be Kafka’s alter ego in Der Prozess (The Trial, 1925), as has Ulrich in Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities, 1930–42), and Kochan for Mishima in Kamen no Kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask, 1949). To this very select group one must add John Kennedy Toole and his creation Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces (1980/1981).
One cannot help but feel that one is communing directly with Toole when Ignatius opens up his feverish letters with “Dear Reader,” a style of writing that displays a conceptual precision and biting observation that is more plausibly Toole than the whimsy of Ignatius. This autoscopic[2] phenomenon had particularly deep implications for Toole, clearly exacerbated by a prevailing cultural antipathy to an autotelic[3] conception of aesthetic experience. This Gordian knot of the autoscopic and the autotelic presents a philosophical minefield for any would-be biographer.
With this in mind, Cory MacLauchlan’s new biography judiciously and deftly fills the lacuna between the low-grade psychological speculation that marred an earlier biographical (René Pol Nevil and Deborah George Hardy’s Ignatius Rising, 2001)[4] and the unabashedly affectionate but still informed memoir by Joel Fletcher entitled Ken and Thelma: The Story of A Confederacy of Dunces (2005). The former, an exercise in “farthing” journalism, shamelessly rides on the coattails of Confederacy. The latter was issued as a promissory note, awaiting someone with the right motivation and finesse to come along.
The discussion that follows is very much in keeping with MacLauchlin’s own methodological stance, sidestepping the hackneyed trope of the troubled artist: “I neither aimed to diagnose him, nor cast him in the mold of the tortured artist” (MacLauchlan, 2012, pp. xiv, 216). The body of discussion falls broadly into two sections. In the next section I discuss the notion of autoscopia as it relates to literature, discussing the “blurred” sense of self between the author and his creation. The section that follows focuses on the notion of autotelic art, the idea that art should not answer to any extrinsic considerations, political or economic. This scaffolds the publishing backstory to Confederacy and the role of the didactically inclined editor – Robert Gottlieb – the then head of Simon and Schuster and an avatar for a broader cultural malaise. The closing section offers a few concluding remarks.
[1] Hofstadter, 2007, pp. 101-102. “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond” (Toole, 1981, p. 194; Hofstadter, 2007, pp. 9-10).
[2] “Autoscopic”: from the Greek autos (self) and skopeo (looking at). A dream-like apprehension of a duplicate self. Other literary names that are invoked in connection with autoscopic phenomena include Dostoevsky, Goethe, Hoffmann, de Maupassant, de Musset, Nabokov, Poe, Richter, Shelley and Stevenson (Mishara, 2010b; Sforza and Blanke, 2012).
[3] “Autotelic”: Greek autos (self) and telos (end). A self-complete artifact that doesn’t depend on any extrinsic considerations.
[4] As MacLauchlin summarizes it: “[T]hey also depict Toole as a man suffering from an Oedipal complex, suppressed homosexuality, alcoholism, madness, and an appetite for promiscuity” (MacLauchlin, 2012, pp. xiii-xiv, 214-216). Myrna writes to Ignatius: “Great Oedipus bonds are encircling your brain and destroying you.” (Toole, 1981, p. 156). Even a clinical psychologist such as Mishara resists the idea of diagnosing Kafka’s supposed schizophrenia on the basis of his literary work (Mishara, 2010a, p. 24).
And there is the food . . .
Chef Susan Spicer amongst several others
Herb Hardesty @ Jazz Fest
The very excellent Keith Spera reports on day 2:
Hardesty is best known for his many decades in the Fats Domino band. His tenor is featured on the original recordings of many Domino classics, “I’m Walkin’,” “Blue Monday” and “Ain’t That a Shame” among them. As Domino’s bandleader, Hardesty was known for his explosive, acrobatic solos.
But the 88-year-old’s epic resume also includes collaborations with Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Duke Ellington and the Count Basie Orchestra, among many others. It was that jazzier mindset that Hardesty, a 12th Ward native who has lived in Las Vegas since the early 1970s, tapped on Saturday.
A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 9
I would very much like to know what the Founding Fathers would say if they could see these children being debauched to further the cause of Clearasil. However, I always suspected that democracy would come to this . . . “A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss” (p. 37).
Pilgrimage for “Pops”
It was a dream come true (as they say) to finally visit “Pops” Corona house and take in the archives at Queens run by Ricky Riccardi, who did such a brilliant job in writing Pops’ biography. The highlights:
1. What is striking is that all employees, paid or volunteer, are so passionate about “Pops.”
2. My favourite room of course was “Pops'” den the only room in the house that had his imprint. It was lovely hearing him tell an interviewer about Tony Bennett’s portrait of him while I was standing right next to it.
3. Thanks to one of the volunteers (and Ricky) she sent me a shot of a Hebrew bible sent to “Pops” and inscribed as follows: “To Louis Armstrong who made the bible sing, from Yacov Uriel whose people wrote it.”
4. Highlights at the archives included being able to page through Pops’ original handwritten ms where he talks about the Karnofkys.
5. Courtesy of Ricky, listening to Pops pleading letter to Joe Glaser to ensure that forthwith he need a) an constant supply of dope (weed) and b) that he needed protection from prosecution – read the full details in Ricky’s bio.
6. Listening to Pops and Lucille having an argument with her showing her ability to use language as colourful as Pops’ in contrast to “Lady” Armstrong’s public persona.
7. Seeing the shelves of tapes (and Pops decorated boxes) and artifacts of all sorts from around the world.
8. Last, but by no means least, and I can’t believe this actually happened, Ricky allowed me to hold one of Pops’ gold-plated horns.
I would urge all New Yorkers who love that musical Einstein and God’s angel on earth (reference to Wings of Desire), to visit the house and by appointment the archives. It’s a very modest place, nicely cared for and will only take 45 minutes to see. I was in tears which came as no surprise to the folk that work at the archives – apparently not an uncommon phenomenon. Support them please. Thank you Ricky and Enid.
manwithoutqualities 