ese oscuro objeto del deseo

Javier Moreno's Spanish translation of 'That Obscure Object of Desire' has just gone up on Hermano Cerdo. What a wonderful story! I wish I'd written it!  It has splendid illustrations by Luis Blackaller.

How to Print an Internet Magazine
An Evening with Triple Canopy and Project Projects
McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, New York, NY
Thursday, January 19, 7–8:30 p.m.
Free and open to the public

How to print an Internet magazine is the problem addressed by Invalid Format. Triple Canopy editors Alexander Provan and Peter J. Russo will read selections from Invalid Format and discuss its genesis and form with the book’s designer, Prem Krishnamurthy, and Adam Michaels of the firm Project Projects. Krishnamurthy and Michaels will, in turn, discuss how Project Projects makes productive use of the tension between new and old print technologies and design conventions in its work, which ranges from exhibitions to pamphlets, websites to catalogues.

There has been no lock on the front door of the house for the past few months.   I went to Kaiser's for milk and came back to find a new lock on the door.  Assumed my old key would not work; buzzed Frau Finke, who let me in and explained that the old key did in fact work.  Since I had routed her out anyway this seemed a good time to ask whether I could leave a spare set of keys with her, in case I got locked out.  Frau Finke (goodhumouredly): Ja, das ist Ihre Spezialität.  This seemed a bit hard - I haven't been back to the Schlüßeldienst in years, seems like - but the main thing is, a spare set is now safely with the concierge.

This may be a useful precaution.  Now that I am immersing myself in Python, Unix and R I find myself losing track of practical details; I forget that there is something on the stove and come to only to find caramelised broccoli in a charred pan, this sort of thing.

The Rooster

Lightning Rods is in the running for the Rooster, a prize offered by the Morning News for its Tournament of Books.  The books go through a series of play-offs - at each stage, each judge reads two and decides which goes on to the next stage.  There is also a zombie round:

In the Zombie Round, the two books most favored by TMN readers, but unfairly tossed aside in an early round by the capriciousness of a power-mad ToB judge, will rise from the dead to do battle against the only two undefeated novels of the tournament. The winners of those matchups become the Tournament of Books finalists. Each will be read by the full complement of 16 Tournament judges, plus an additional jurist, and the resulting tally will yield us the 2012 Tournament of Books champion, and its author will be awarded/threatened with the presentation of a live, angry chanticleer.

 So anyone who'd like to have a say can go over to the MN and cast a vote (though you may well, of course, see some other book you'd rather see on the short short short list).  Link for Zombie Poll here. (Poll closes January 18.)

Two other aspects of sensed betrayal should be mentioned. First, those who suggest the
possibility of another's entering a mental hospital are not likely to provide a realistic picture
of how in fact it may strike him when he arrives. Often he is told that he will get required
medical treatment and a rest, and may well be out in a few months or so. In some cases they may thus be concealing what they know, but I think, in general, they will be telling what they see as the truth. For here there is quite relevant difference between patients and mediating professionals; mediators, more so than the public at large, may conceive of mental hospitals as short-term medical establishments where required rest and attention can be voluntarily obtained, and not as placed of coerced exile. When the prepatient finally arrives he is likely to learn quite quickly, quite differently. He then finds that the information given him about life in the hospital has had the effect of his having put up less resistance to entering than he now sees he would have put up had he known the facts. whatever the intentions of those who participated in his transition from person to patient, he may sense they have in effect 'conned' him into his present predicament.

I am suggesting that the prepatient starts out with at least a portion of the rights, liberties,
and satisfactions of the civilian and ends up on a psychiatric ward stripped of almost everything. The question here is now this stripping is managed. This is the second aspect of betrayal I want to consider.

Erving Goffman, Asylums (130)

David Hume was born three hundred years ago, in 1711. The world has changed radically since his time, and yet many of his ideas and admonitions remain deeply relevant, though rather neglected, in the contemporary world. These Humean insights include the central role of information and knowledge for adequate ethical scrutiny, and the importance of reasoning without disowning the pertinence of powerful sentiments. They also include such practical concerns as our responsibilities to those who are located far away from us elsewhere on the globe, or in the future.

...

As it happens, contemporary theories of justice have largely followed the Hobbesian route rather than the Humean one. They have tended to limit their considerations of justice within the boundaries of a particular state. In an important essay in 2005 called “The Problem of Global Justice,” Thomas Nagel explained that “if Hobbes is right, the idea of global justice without a world government is a chimera.” The most influential modern theory of justice, namely John Rawls’s theory of “justice as fairness,” presented in his epoch-making book A Theory of Justice, concentrates on the identification of appropriate “principles of justice” that fix the “basic institutional structure” of a society, in the form of a cluster of ideal institutions for a sovereign state. This confines the principles of justice to the members of a particular sovereign state. It is worth noting that in a later work, The Law of Peoples, Rawls invokes a kind of “supplement” to this one-country pursuit of the demands of justice—but in dealing with people elsewhere, Rawls’s focus is not on justice, but on the basic demands of civilized and humane behavior across the borders.

Amartya Sen on Hume, the rest here.  (HT MR)

we are what we habitually do

Like the prophets of old, today's addicts may remind us that our desire for God is trivial and weak, and our horizons of hope and expectancy are  limited and mundane. We recoil at the presence of the addict, for we fear that the addict's life is an indictment of the insufficiency of our own lives. The addict has rejected the life of respectable and proximate contentment and demanded instead a life of complete purpose and ecstasy. We recognize that our own lives are not interesting and beautiful enough to offer a genuine alternative to the addict, and we fear that a gospel powerful enough to redeem the addict would also threaten our own lives of decent and decorous mediocrity. 

Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue

This is a brilliant book, which in itself has justified my purchase of a Kindle in my last week with my mother.  (I saw the book on Amazon just after proposing a review to a magazine; the book looked relevant to the review, so a more prudent would-be reviewer would have waited for a free copy --but I could have it in seconds on my Kindle!)  The reason I subjected my credit card to further abuse was that Dunnington addresses a startling gap in discussions of addiction, one I was particularly struck by in Gene Heyman's (generally excellent) Addiction: A Disorder of Choice. 

Reading avidly along in Heyman, I had been baffled by the complete absence of discussion of Aristotle on voluntary and involuntary action, on the role of habit in the virtues and vices, all treated so extensively in the Nicomachean Ethics.  And here is Dunnington, bringing Aristotle and Aquinas to bear on the subject! (When I say the book is brilliant, I do not mean that I have finished it; I mean that I am just getting into the thick of a discussion of Aristotle and Aquinas. )

Dunnington, as will be obvious from the quotation, is writing from a Christian perspective; it's rare for authors of  "mainstream" works of scholarship to thank a supervisor for praying with the advisee. Radicalism is not necessarily the norm among Christian writers any more than it is among scholars, but part of the power of the book lies in the challenge it offers the non-addict: Du muß dein Leben ändern.