Offensive Misreadings

I went to lunch on Wabash near Madison today, which for those who aren't in the know is where all the diamond emporia, jewelers, etc., are. There's currently a shitload of construction going on and Wabash abounds with places where the sidewalk is temporarily redirected, closed off, etc. There's also an abundance of those sawhorse-style construction barrier/signs. I noticed one of them in particular right outside a diamond dealer's; I assume they were all marked in this fashion, but this one caught my eye; it was stenciled with the letters J E M in big black letters, but that's not what I read; I inverted the final letter and for half a second thought the sign read "JEW". "Wow," I thought, "that's pretty blatant. I'm surprised they haven't taken it down - oh."

In other news: the chicken shawarma in a weird little "Mediterranean" style deli in the back of one of those jewelers is pretty good, and I'm not a big fan of that sort of cuisine, all paprika and hummous. Of course, it might be that I've always objected to the label, since as best as I can tell "Mediterranean" as a cuisine style means something like "Lebanese but sometimes we have spanakopita".

Reminiscences

On the first night I spent in the condo, which would have been this past Saturday, I grabbed an unearthed binder of dubious provenance to glance through before I went to sleep. It turned out to be a binder I kept during the winter quarter of my final year of college, and I primarily used it for the sketches I was writing for the musical composition lessons I was taking at the time. I didn't put enough energy into the affair, and probably wasn't ready to get as much out of it as I would now, or (hopefully) would in a few months/years, but there were some helpful nuggets tossed my way by my instructor. More to the point, I was surprised to glance through some of the pieces I had been writing. I was quite dissatisfied with them at the time because I felt certain that I wasn't coming close to capturing the sound-ideas in my head, but several years removed from the frustrated fever of inspiration, I thought both of the pieces I was working on at the time had interesting ideas worth revisiting and, furthermore, the execution was a little more interesting and ambitious than I would have guessed. I was, at the time, playing a lot with a way of continuously fluctuating the harmony while keeping an overall tonal center; I've since actually heard a bunch of music that plays in the same ballpark and while I wouldn't just take those sketches and hold them up for comparison, I wasn't embarrassed by the naive effort.

The other thing of note in the binder was some scattered papers from my Philosophy of Science class, namely the proposal and subsequent outline I produced for my final paper. The final paper - on the scientific study of intelligence - turned out, per my memory ... ok. I would've given it a B or B+, but the instructor was a little kinder. If I want to reread the thing - and I suppose I do - it's somewhere in the bunch of notebooks I insisted on packing and bringing to the new location. My father's mild annoyance was overcome by observing, as I glanced through contents, "no, this is great: it's like my education in a little pile." I did reread the proposal and subsequent outline, though, and for the first time since graduation I began to truly, emotionally, miss college, or to be vaguer, being a student / living in academe. I don't have idealistic notions about the purity of the "life of the mind" in an academic setting, but that kind of intellectually supersaturated atmosphere, where everyone around you was theoretically able and often willing to engage in the kind of conversation you can very rarely get in general public life, is rich in a way that I've started to miss. Part of the point, as well, is that it's not "conversation" in the sense of dialogue with a like-interested individual, it's the collective engine of a classroom, microcosm for a community, which spurs every individual to be smarter, in the same sense that the best, sometimes only, way to get better at chess (or basketball, or jazz) is to play chess (or basketball, or jazz) with people who are really good at it, all the fucking time. I'm much much wiser than I was as a college student, and my knowledge-acquisition has continued with strong net gains in both academic and nonacademic fields, but I'm not nearly as smart - not as intellectually nimble, not as acutely and aggressively perceptive - as I was three and a half years ago when I was writing the proposal for a paper on the philosophical implications of The Bell Curve. And I didn't even like the class all that much at the time!

Looking at those papers also got me thinking about my failed attempt at a career in philosophy. I did have a bit of a conceited reaction on rereading my preliminary work - "Goddamn, but I am pretty clever and insightful, aren't I?" - but the way I was self-impressed reinforced certain suspicions I've developed that at least in the modern context it wasn't meant to be and it's probably for the best that I didn't start down the path of trying to get tenure at a prestigious institution. I'm quite certain that I would've either failed miserably or succeeded in such a way that I didn't respect and indeed resented my own accomplishment; the hoops through which one must jump to become an acknowledged member of the philosophical community are disinteresting to me and uncongenial to my aptitudes.

As a sidebar, a mildly commonplace critique of the modern philosophical academy is that, by current standards, Ludwig Wittgenstein would never have achieved tenure. This is a strong gestural point to make, but I'm dubious that it holds much truth; as far as I can tell, by the standards of his day, Wittgenstein probably didn't qualify for tenure either. The idea is that there's no accomodation made today for the eccentric and eccentrically credentialed genius, but Wittgenstein was a very biographically eccentric fellow in his own day as well, and accomodations were made despite the extreme irregularity. In an alternate universe where I'm capable of writing something with the philosophical weight and path-blazing genius of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, I'm inclined to think that the University of Chicago might just go ahead and let me start teaching classes even though I never went to graduate school. Appeals to exceptions are often rhetorically shoddy for this sort of reason; unless you have strong foundation for the belief that there are unnurtured philosophical geniuses running around doing odd jobs and writing brilliant work in their spare time because Princeton wouldn't give them the time of day, there's no evidence that Wittgenstein couldn't succeed today. He was, then and now, a truly exceptional figure in many aspects and in the most literal sense of the word.

(Sidebar to the sidebar: I don't know if there are any living Wittgensteins today, and if there are I don't know their financial circumstances, but if I were one I'd probably be pretty pissed off that my maiden aunts or whomever it was refused to leave their Viennese home in the 1930s and as a result effected the transfer of what was then the largest family fortune in Europe to the Nazis as a gigantic bribe to overlook their Jewish heritage so they could continue living in oblivious familiarity. Further that if I recall correctly, this is not something the ladies did themselves, it was something organized by Ludwig's brother Paul, a famous concert pianist [who became a famous one-handed concert pianist, and for whom most of the notable works for "Piano, Left Hand Only" were composed], on their behalf because they didn't really understand the gravity of the situation and its urgency as concerned their own personal wellbeing.)

ANYWAY (and, yes, I've decided to just wholesale steal that tic from Chuck Klosterman), the bigger point is that the alternate universe Me who writes something akin to the Tractatus wouldn't just need to be massively smarter and more gifted than the real Me, he'd need to have a substantially different personality and mindset, because I have no particular ambition, and never did, to produce work of that nature. My ambitions were more along the lines of being a teacher of philosophy than a "philosopher" per se, in the modern sense of "university professor with some obligations to his teaching load but whose primary directive and primary interest is in doing his research and writing." I believe that in most if not all subfields there is still important, valuable research to be done and ground to be broken, I just (a) never felt it was likely I'd do it or have the drive to try (w/some exceptions, to be fair about my own imaginative hubris) (b) think the overwhelming majority of philosophical work done in service of this goal in the next decade will absolutely pale in importance compared to teaching preexisting philosophical concepts and methods to undergraduates - majors and nonmajors alike - over the same period of time. The incentive structure of the profession does not, however, support this conviction of mine, and I should probably be happy that I'm not gearing up for ten+ years of swimming against the tide to try and get job security and a comfortable income.

What I really wanted to be, in a way, was a poor man's Sidney Morgenbesser, and I still believe that I have the aptitude to be something like a homeless man's Sidney Morgenbesser. Morgenbesser's publication record isn't anything to write home about, but he was intensely valued and respected by his peers for his intelligence, insight, and capability to engage with their research in productive ways. He was also a hugely influential teacher to the philosophers who passed through his classes. Also incredibly funny (NB that the "yeah, yeah" witticism cited by Wikipedia, while one of my favorite witticisms, is hiiiiiiiiighly apocryphal as best as I've been able to figure out, and Morgenbesser/JL Austin is just one of the pairs to whom I've seen this story attributed). I think there's probably be a place for Wittgenstein in modern academia, but there might not be much room left for the occasional Sidney Morgenbesser.

OHMYGODINTERNET

It's been a long week plus. I am now in my new condo. Miscellaneous thoughts on the move:

(1) Being perhaps overly solicitous of my dad's bad back, I tried to prevent him from picking up anything which weighed more than ten pounds. I failed, but managed to keep most of the heavy stuff to myself. This was on Saturday. On Sunday I was sore in ways I cannot recall ever having been. No specific muscle group, just my entire body. Not the intense, deep soreness of having worked muscles which long went unworked, and nowhere near the refreshing exhilaration I get along with the exhaustion of a good weight-training workout (when I'm weight training, which I haven't in several months). I just felt like I got beaten. By, apparently, heavy boxes.

(2) Three years' worth of spare change weighs something like twenty pounds.

(3) Various women assisting my father and I in the selection of goods for the apartment have been, lets say, overly solicitous of my masculinity. I don't mean overly solicitous of my masculinity in the way I might wish, e.g., certain employees of Restoration Hardware had been. I mean assuring me, when I express distaste for a particular item, that it's "not too feminine," or pointing out a duvet while saying "I think it's nice. It looks masculine." (For the record, it looks taupe.) I eventually asked my father if I gave off insecure-about-my-sexuality vibes; he said that in his experience women tried to be generally sensitive and solicitous of single men my age and pointed out that his girlfriend has no hesitation in pointing out something pink and frilly and telling him it'd go well in his bedroom.

(4) My dad doesn't like to refer to his girlfriend as his girlfriend.

(5) I am capable of being polite after venting to a customer service lady about how in the last 24 hours I'd been misdirected and transferred and for all intents and purposes lied to numerous times by numerous agents of her employer, my putative phone/internet provider, even after the latest transfer (to the very helpful lady) had me waiting on the phone for half an hour. I did not tell her that for this half hour I was made to listen to the same 2:30 of, I'm guessing, a Haydn quartet, over and over, with a really jarring and obvious break in the loop. I don't think this was meant to test my willingness to stay on the line. I think it was meant to test my dignity as a human being.

(6) The apartment currently has a bed (mine), a mattress (my father's, bed on the way) and a couch. We are in dire need of tables or, at the least, trays.

There's other stuff, maybe a little more substantive, but I spent a total of 90 minutes on the phone with AT&T and I am fucking starving and pretty tired and worked until 7:30 and I'm running out of steam.