This in the Guardian (h/t to Bart van Klink)
Until now, there were only two verified photographs of Johnson (1911-1938), who remains the most inspirational musician produced by the Mississippi Delta and the man Eric Clapton once anointed as “the most important blues musician who ever lived”. This weekend a third, newly cleaned-up and authenticated image has been released by the Johnson estate showing him standing next to musician Johnny Shines.
Few offer as balanced a scholarly assessment of “Dunces” and Toole than Vernon Leighton, Cory MacLauchlin and Robert Rudnicki. The three must surely be the first port of call for those engaged in Toole related research. Here is Leighton’s blog and here is a collection of his articles. Toole’s biographer Cory MacLauchlin has presented a fine exemplar the art of biography for what is a most difficult subject to do justice to. All those who have been drawn into the wonderful Toolean/Dunce orbit and who crave reliable scholarship, are indebted to these three chaps.
Here’s a great initiative started by Richard Brown. A top-notch lineup and free!
The Penn State Companion will have its launch as part of a colloquium sponsored by The Alexander Hamilton Institute and Colgate’s Center for Freedom & Western Civilization: the theme “What Is a Civilizational Struggle: The Work of Samuel Huntington.”
Dates: Thur, April 18 – Sat 20, 2013
Oakeshott session: Sat 20th: 12:45-2:00pm.
Location: Turning Stone Resort Casino, upstate NY.
The following contributors will be in attendance: Paul Franco, Tim Fuller, Steven Gerencser, Rob Devigne, Ken McIntyre, Corey Abel, Elizabeth Corey, Martyn Thompson and Ken Minogue.
All welcome.
Not exactly an in depth interview but still . . . if you want to know more details about Herzog’s work just play the commentary track on his films as released by Anchor Bay. Always such a pleasure to listen to this man. And yes he can make infinitely better films on a shoe-string budget – that’s why when you see his Hollywood bankrolled films, they are essentially crap and not befitting this maestro.
My chapter Mindscapes and Landscapes: Hayek and Simon on Cognitive Extension is published in this collection today. The full line-up as follows:
Foreword; V.Smith
Introduction; R.Frantz & R.Leeson
Friedrich Hayek’s Behavioural Economics in Historical Context; R.Frantz
A Hayekian/Kirznerian Economic History of the Modern World; D.McCloskey
Was Hayek an Austrian Economist? Yes and No. Was Hayek a Praxeologist? No.; W.Block
Error is Obvious, Coordination is the Puzzle; P.Boettke, W.Caceres & A.Martin
Hayek’s Contribution to a Reconstruction of Economic Theory; H.Gintis
On the Relationships Between Friedrich Hayek and Jean Piaget; C.Chelini & S.Riva
Cognitive Autonomy and Epistemology of Action in Hayek’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Thought; F.Di Iorio
Hayek’s Sensory Order, Gestalt Neuroeconomics, and Quantum Psychophysics; T.Takahashi & S.Egashira
Mindscapes and Landscapes: Hayek and Simon on Cognitive Extension; L.Marsh
Hayek’s Complexity Assumption, Ecological and Bounded Rationality, and Behavioural Economics; M.Altman
Subjectivism and Explanations of the Principle; S.Fiori
Satisficing and Cognition; Complementarities between Simon and Hayek; P.Earl
The Oversight of Behavioural Economics on Hayek’s Insight; S.Rizzello & A.Spada
Complexity and Degeneracy in Socio-Economic Systems; G.Steel & H.Hosseini
Here is a documentary film John Kennedy Toole: the omega point freely available to view. The subject matter, the greatest American novel of the 20th Century putting Toole (IMHO) up there with novelists of the order of Kafka, Musil, and Mann – and that based on one work alone.
Here is the excellent blog run by JKT’s biographer (and a producer on the film).
Here is the marvellous resource compiled by Leighton, H. Vernon.
An article from the Tulanian.
Here is another background piece.
Robert Anthony Byrne: In Memoriam by Maurice w. duQuesnay (mentioned in article above)
Walker Percy‘s Foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces
Perhaps the best way to introduce this novel — which on my third reading of it astounds me even more than the first — is to tell of my first encounter with it. While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown from me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it is a great novel, she said.
Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don’t want to do. And if ever there was something I didn’t want to do, this was surely it: to deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read a manuscript that she said was great, and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon.
But the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained — that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.
In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. I shall resist the temptation to say what first made me gape, grin, laugh out loud, shake my head in wonderment. Better let the reader make the discovery on his own.
Here at any rate is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of — slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one — who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt, in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective.
His mother thinks he needs to go to work. He does, in a succession of jobs. Each job rapidly escalates into a lunatic adventure, a full-blown disaster; yet each has, like Don Quixote’s, its own eerie logic.
His girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff of the Bronx, thinks he needs sex. What happens between Myrna and Ignatius is like no other boy-meets-girl story in my experiences.
By no means a lesser virtue of Toole’s novel is his rendering of the particularities of New Orleans, its back streets, its out-of-the-way neighborhoods, its odd speech, its ethnic whites — and one black in whom Toole has achieved the near-impossible, a superb comic character of immense wit and resourcefulness without the least trace of Rastus minstrelsy.
But Toole’s greatest achievement is Ignatius Reilly himself, intellectual, ideologue, deadbeat, goof-off, glutton, who should repel the reader with his gargantuan bloats, his thunderous contempt and one-man war against everybody — Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, Protestants, and the assorted excesses of modern times. Imagine an Aquinas gone to pot, transported to New Orleans whence he makes a wild foray through the swamps to LSU at Baton Rouge, where his lumber jacket is stolen in the faculty men’s room where he is seated, overcome by mammoth gastrointestinal problems. His pyloric valve periodically closes in response to the lack of a “proper geometry and theology” in the modern world.
I hesitate to use the word comedy — though comedy it is — because that implies simply a funny book, and this novel is a great deal more than that. A great rumbling farce of Falstaffian dimensions would better describe it; commedia would be closer to it.
It is also sad. One never quite knows where the sadness comes from — from the tragedy at the heart of Ignatius’s great gaseous rages and lunatic adventures or the tragedy attending the book itself.
The tragedy of the book is the tragedy of the author — his suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two. Another tragedy is the body of work we have been denied.
It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing. But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers.
Here is a recent paper co-authored by the very excellent Andries Engelbrecht, author of Computational Intelligence: An Introduction and Fundamentals of Computational Swarm Intelligence.
However long Ken Minogue has been writing about rationalism he always has a knack of bringing something new and elegant to the topic.
Oakeshott was passionate about ideas, and in casual conversation he did not stint on expressing his disdain for folly, but his philosophical instincts were always to discover some element of rationality in what he most detested. Living in a generation of philosophers, some of whom were so enthusiastic about criticism that they adopted it as a self-identifying slogan, Oakeshott always regarded criticism as merely a preliminary to further understanding— not, of course, in the sense of tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner, but as a vision of the world in which everything is a necessary evil. In the essay “Rationalism in Politics,” “rationalism” has few if any redeeming features. The interesting question is how he rethinks its character as he goes along.
Rationalism featured in the original essay as a vice of practical life, parasitic on history, science, and poetry—indeed, particularly on philosophy itself. The busy rationalist is unmistakably the most crashing bore in the conversation of humankind. Rationalism confuses part and whole. It corrupts the mind because it is both false and debasing (RP, 37). It offers a false dream of competence to the ignorant and cuts them off from whatever tradition is relevant to their enterprises, making them fancy that a doctrine is more flexible and responsive to reality than the inventive tradition that it merely abridges. Rationalism is idolatrous. In its political appearance it becomes a device for mechanically imposing some limited dream on an entire population. Individuals are corralled into abstract categories that suppress variety and aspire to uniformity. Rationalist projects inevitably fail, but in a rationalist atmosphere, an ignorant population can conceive of no better response to failure than to embrace some new collective project, so long as it promises an abstract social perfection. The outcome is an unstable political world, in political philosophy which what Tocqueville called la république, “the slow and tranquil action of society on itself,” is lost.
For Oakeshott the politics of skepticism is, at least in England, historically generated by legal assumptions and constitutes an escape from the abstractions of the politics of faith. Skeptical politics recognizes human beings as creatures responding to wants and ideas and as living in a contingent world whose spring of action is responsiveness to situations rather than in a world in which social conditions actually determine how people behave. It might well seem, however, that in escaping from the politics of faith by moving toward a politics of skepticism generated by legal thought, Oakeshott had merely substituted one kind of abstraction for another.
Oakeshott takes the view that the essence of the politics of faith is the failure to keep religion and politics apart. In all other cultures but our own, however, no such separation ever took place. In our current circumstances, “religion” has in any case become an ambiguous word. Humanism and secularism are beginning to take on many of the features of a faith. They increasingly parade their sensitivity to the presence of religious symbols (the cross, rosary beads, etc.) and demand an environment free of religious symbols. It is true that their concern is almost exclusively with Christian symbols, those of other religions being tolerated under the rubric of multiculturalism. For that reason, secularism has in part the character of a spiritual civil war within European states, and a secularism making such demands is clearly taking on faithlike attributes. We thus find ourselves in a rather paradoxical situation, in which for all our value of freedom, increasing numbers of Western people come to be subject to forms of supposedly enlightened despotism.
Right on Wynton – an amazing achievement.
His intense belief that jazz must be based on swing rhythms fused with elements of the blues and firmly rooted in black traditional music has long rubbed many in the jazz community the wrong way.
manwithoutqualities 