2025 Readings 35

 Last night I finished Voices of the Fallen Heroes, a collection of late Yukio Mishima short stories. Over the decades I've read a lot of his work, including Forbidden Colors, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Sound of Waves, Death in Midsummer, and his Sea of Fertility tetralogy (Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel; these four novels make my all-time favorite list, and I've read the collection multiple times - and it may be time for another read). It was odd to think that he was writing these short stories at the same time as the last couple volumes of the Sea of Fertility collection. 

Vermont Public Philosophy Week 2025

 Here's a nice picture of Janet, dominating at our Vermont Public Philosophy Week Doubleheader a couple Saturdays back. We had fifteen people stop by, which was a solid turnout, especially on a cold and rainy day and during a time that coincided with an anti-Trump rally downtown in Montpelier (we weren't counter-programming, obviously, and would have been down there ourselves, but we scheduled the talks several weeks before the protest). Janet discussed co-ops and community and read from her book, and I blathered away about Fernando Pessoa. Oddly, three people showed up who had read a goodly amount of Pessoa and had seen my talk listed on the Philosophy Week website. Who knew that Pessoa would be a draw? Although, and not surprisingly, Janet drew more folks than I did (which clearly says something good about her - and her community).

The Adamant Community Club is a great spot for a talk, although it's a more beautiful view out the window almost every other month of the year.

2025 Readings 34

 Yesterday I finished reading Vida Scudder's autobiography, On Journey. I included a Family label on this post, although I think that's a stretch. Yes, there aren't that many Scudders in the world, but I think our lines of the Scudder crew veered apart back in England. Still, I still claim her, mainly because, as I say way too often, she's the other socialist Scudder (socialism is definitely a recessive gene in our broader family). She certainly led an amazing life, from being born in India (as so many Scudders have over the years, which is why I think I was genetically determined to go to India), but then leaving early on after the drowning death of her missionary father, to eventually being a college professor and author and socialist and having her own feast day on the Episcopalian calendar. She was also lived a committed relationship with Florence Converse for decades, so I guess she has so many qualities that the radical right would hate today. I think their relationship was a well-known fact at the time, although it's handled gently in the autobiography, which I completely understand and respect for multiple reasons. However, she also doesn't dodge the reality of their relationship entirely, but instead handles it in a very understated and casual fashion. In this passage she discusses her living arrangements with her mother and with Florence: "So we settled at Wellesley (gs - where Vida taught); and it was lucky that the house had grown bigger than first planned, for neither my mother nor I wished seclusion. Someone always shared our home, and in 1919. Florence Converse and her mother came to make one family with us. Miss Converse had for years shared my life in all ways except in living under the same roof. Now that Joy was given us, and we have never been separated since."

There are so many beautiful passages, ranging from her views on socialism to faith to even her cats. Here's one of my favorites, reflecting up on her view of immortality:

"I fear I have never really made that Act. Immortality does not interest me. Stress on duration seems to me the note of an imprisoned mind. Now, this fleeting instant, I experience the Eternal and it suffices me:

          'He who kissed a joy as it flies/Lives in eternity's sunrise.'

Survival? It is to me an unreal conception. Moreover, by what right do I demand from Deity a privilege which I have no reason to expect my cats to share? Or the roses in the garden? Though looking at the matter from another angle, I should not be surprised to find that all the roses which have ever bloomed on earth, blossom forever in the Paradise of God."

Maybe I'll come back to this post and amend it later, adding more of her observations on life.

It's sad that she doesn't receive more attention. Her book Socialism and Character is queued up for one of my next reads.

Elks

 Yesterday I bought our tickets for the Edmonton Elks game in June, so the trip is starting to come together. Now I just have to wait a couple weeks for the Calgary Stampeders tickets to go on sale so that we're set. The Elks tickets are great, right on the 55 yard line. After this trip I'll have visited six of the nine CFL stadiums, and the challenge will be getting to the last three. These two games will certainly not be my only CFL games of the season: #VermontsLeadingCFLFan

Back To Me

 The other night I finally got the chance to see Kathleen Edwards in concert. We had briefly met years ago - as chronicled in this blog - when, on a drive across Canada, I swung over to Ottawa and stopped by Quitter's Coffee (the coffeeshop she ran during her temporary retirement from the music industry). She could not have been more gracious during my visit years ago, and I was really excited about finally getting a chance to see her perform in person. I'm a huge fan, and have been for twenty years, and a couple of her songs have been "the song" of different times of my life. It was a wonderful show, and I heartily recommend that you take the opportunity to see her if she comes anyplace close to your town.

I was less blurry pictures from the show, but not a picture that I like more than this one.

Kevin, Mike, and Cyndi - which made the event even more fun. As I told Mike at one point, referencing one of my favorite Edwards's song, I hoped he understood how much I appreciated all that times that he and his wife Jamie had been my soft place to land.

Missing Friends

 OK, so I shamelessly (although with permission) swiped this picture from my friend Heidi. She ran into our friend Sean at a conference (one of the best reasons to go to an academic conference is to catch up with friends). We're all in the same fantasy football league (and, similarly, maybe the best reason to play fantasy football is to keep in touch with folks),  but I don't see them nearly enough.

I miss these two way too much.

2025 Readings 33

 I just finished yet another reading of Homer's Iliad. Partially, I'm trying to finish my chapter on the Iliad for my book (never to be finished manuscript) on the Epics, and Homer's epic will serve as the first chapter in the envisioned work. Granted, the Ramayana is older, but I wanted to start with something that folks might be more familiar with, so that I can lay out the recurring structure of each chapter. So, with that in mind, the first half of the book would be: Ch 1: Iliad, Ch. 2, Aeneid, Ch. 3, Ramayana, Ch. 4, Shahnameh, Ch. 5 Journey to the West. The second half of the imagined book would be the thematic chapters, such as Ch. 6 on Heroism and Ch. 7 on Gender, etc. 

However, saying that, the other reason why I gave it a reread (of a seemingly endless series of rereads) is that I simply love the Iliad. Every time I read it I get something new out of it, and I can't imagine that I'll ever tire of it. Truthfully, I get so much more out of it than I did when I read it decades ago, and the desire to share what I've learned - and the tools that I've given students to make these epics more accessible - is at the core of my desire to write this book in the first place. Several sections jumped out at me this time, and I wondered why they didn't resonate with me as much previously. Maybe I just have more wisdom/experience or maybe I'm just giving the book more of my time and attention. One of the lines that spoke to me this time, not surprisingly, was from Nestor, the aged Greek who gives sage advice, while celebrating and lamenting the passing of time. In Book 23, during the games that were held to commemorate the passing of Patroclus, Nestor, in response to Achilles awarding him a prize because he is too old to complete, says:

"You've put the matter very well, my son.

My legs are strong no longer, as you say;

I am not fast on my feet; my hands no longer 

move out fast to punch or throw. Would god 

I had my young days back my strength entire . . .

That was the man I was. Now let the young 

take part in these exertions: I must yield 

to show old age, though in my time I shone 

among heroic men.

                                          Well, carry on

the funeral of your friend with competitions.

This I take kindly, and my heart is cheered 

that you remember me as well disposed, 

remembering, too, the honor that is due me 

among Akhaians. May the gods 

in fitting ways reward you for it all."

Casual History

 On our second (or third, depending how you count it) visit to Evora I spent part of a lovely day roaming around town. One of the many strengths of our relationship is that Janet and I are very comfortable with the other one carving off time for their own interests or internal schedules, which works on the macro-level (she's heading off to Iowa this summer for a writer's conference whereas I'm heading off to Portugal to present at a conference, while also skiving off to Alberta for a CFL doubleheader; obviously, she's the more serious scholar/person) and the micro-level (as is well-documented, I'm the early revolutionary riser and she takes a more evolutionary approach to starting the day). When we're overseas, this usually takes the form of me getting up early for breakfast and then going for an exploratory walk. On that particular day in Evora, while Janet gave into the overwhelming peace and serenity of the Convent, I ubered into town and went for a walkabout, or at least as much of a walkabout as I could pull off (I remember it being one of those days when my legs were very unhappy with me). I've travelled enough in Italy or, for that matter, Jordan, so I'm used to seeing Roman ruins, so I guess it didn't surprise me to find a temple in the heart of Evora. Still, it was beautiful, and so much a natural part of the city. I was just elected to the Calais Historical Preservation Commission, which I'm enjoying and am looking forward to serving on, but it definitely brings you back to history and real history. I think what struck me about the ruins in Evora was how they were just integrated into the city itself as a very casual and natural part of the city life (in this way I guess it's sort of a microcosm of the entire Portuguese experience).

The ruins, now around two thousand years old, are a temple dedicated to the Emperor Augustus.

2025 Readings 33

 As I mentioned earlier, as part of this project to track my readings for 2025 I'm also forcing/allowing/encouraging myself to read authors or genres that aren't normally on my list. I do think I fall into the habit of reading an awful lot of novels, especially novels from certain authors, and works on religion, whereas I could/should broaden my focus and include new authors or works on, say, history, which is an odd thing for a historian to say. However, after saying that, I suspect that I usually have a more diverse palette than most folks, even before this year's effort. For instance, when I'm at Northshire in Manchester I'm likely to pick up a book or two from the new fiction or staff suggestions section. With that in mind, on my recent visit to Northshire I picked up Jayne Anne Phillips's Night Watch, which I finished last night. Obviously, she's a very good, and rightly celebrated, writer, although I don't think I loved this particular novel. It seems to me that you can think of an interesting story, but that doesn't mean that you necessarily tell it in an interesting fashion. The story rotated between events in 1874 (at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum) and 1864 (covering background events during the Civil War), before finally summing things up in 1883. Sometimes when authors try to achieve a level of mystery they can end up just being needlessly opaque, and thus more difficult to follow than is merited by the interest of the characters. The end felt a bit rushed and convenient, sort of like some Dickens novels where hidden connections are suddenly revealed that tie things up but not in a convincing or satisfying way. This all sounds more critical than I intend, because I did like the story. I do want to read Phillips's Lark and Termite, which I hear is excellent.

Home

 But, in spite of so much sorrow in the world at the moment, I'm very blessed. Five years ago I would have never thought that I'd find someone again or experience such a profound level of happiness. And where would I be without these two (and, of course, Miss Mollie, my constant lap companion).

It is scientifically impossible to get a shot wherein Cici is more still than this one, whereas you could complete a painting of Miss Mollie in real time.

The Pain of the Painful Surprise

 The human soul is so inevitably the victim of pain that it suffers the pain of the painful surprise even with things it should have expected.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 245

Yesterday I was having a chat with a colleague on why our students are so remarkably disinterested this semester. Yes, on the one hand this sounds like a conversation that every professor has had with a colleague since the beginning of time (including my professors about me, doubtless), but on the other hand there is definitely something going on here. In my forty years of teaching I've never experienced a semester where there have been so many absences and late papers and general disinterest. Granted, maybe I've simply, finally, lost it as a professor - or maybe I've grown so old that the consistent ageism of my students (and my colleagues, for that matter) has overwhelmed me. However, I think it's more than that. For decades now the corporate and anti-democratic elements of our country have been attacking expertise. One way to diminish the inconvenient truth of climate change is to shoot the messenger, championing, and somehow equating, the less than one percent of scientists who downplay the danger we're facing. Certainly all professors were hit with shrapnel in that war. Now we've reached the point where the VP is identifying the professors as the enemy. However, I think it's even bigger than that. This generation has had to begin its college and professional careers with the knowledge that they'd probably never be able to buy a house, essentially facing the prospect of having less than the previous generation in the history of the American experiment. Hence, a college education is a more stressful than what I faced, where I wasn't facing crippling debt and could actually just focus on reading great books and discussing great thoughts. We've completely commodified a college education and removed the magic associated with it. But I think it's even bigger than that. With the horror of the Trump administration we're facing an almost existential crisis as a nation, and even though my students are remarkably un-self-aware, they must at least realize that something terrible id brewing. From our side of things we're also suffering a sense of helplessness, and, sliding back up to the top for the Pessoa quote, even though we knew it was going to be a freak show it doesn't make the pain any less debilitating.

2025 Readings 32

 I just finished listening to Elizabeth Vandiver's Great Courses series The Iliad of Homer. This must be the third or fourth time I've listened to it, and I feel like I get something new from it every time (as I do with the Iliad itself). I'm trying to finish my chapter on the Iliad in my probably never to be finished book on the Epics. Essentially, it's done, but I can't convince myself that it's done. There are times when I want to just dump the entire project, and it's become a sort of albatross around my neck. There are just other projects I want to start or continue working on, but I don't feel I can do anything with them until the Epics project is completed wrapped up; at this point I don't know if it even mattes whether or not it's published, I just need to be finished with it. Maybe simply knowing that I've done everything I can do with it will give me some peace of mine on it. My thinking is that I'd like to send off my chapter on the Iliad, which leads off the book, and then on Women in the Epics, which is featured in the second half of the project. That would give an agent/publisher and idea of the larger scope of the book, and while that is slowly working its way through the system I can put the final touches on the rest of the chapters. I've been reading Vida Scudder's autobiography and it gives me some hope that she wrote sixteen books after she retired.

Groan Redux

 If it seems like it's the end of March that is apparently a delusion, although it's clearly not warm enough to qualify as a fever dream.

Greed

 After brooding over the question for several weeks, this morning I went ahead and cancelled my Audible membership. On one level it was hard to do, because I have a long commute and books on tape and Great Courses help make the drive manageable. Essentially, I don't mind the drive as much if I feel that I'm learning something at the same time. I recently made the decision to stop ordering things from Amazon, although it has often made my life a lot easier because I could track down objects, especially books, which would have been difficult to acquire. However, simply because I can punch a button on my phone and have a book magically appear at my doorstep doesn't make the process an ethical one. And if I'm going to ween myself off of Amazon, it didn't make much sense of keep Audible. Bezos climbing into bed with the other oligarchs in their adulation of Trump made all of this an easier decision. There was a time when millionaires invested their money in building libraries, whereas now they alternate between creating vanity spaceships and overthrowing our democracy. I was asked for a reason why I was cancelling my Audible account, so I simply wrote: "Greed of Jeff Bezos."

2025 Readings 31

My good friend Kerry is a huge Ursula K. Le Guin fan and has suggested her books to me several times over the years. However, somehow I've never tackled them. I guess I'm not a big science fiction fan, although the science fiction I like I tend to like a lot. In the end I ended up reading Le Guin's The Dispossessed because Janet came across a Substack discussion of the novel, and she decided to set up a local book chat. She and I have been thinking a lot about community lately, even as we seriously plan to leave this one that we love. Her decision to set up the chat - and our decision to present as part of Vermont Public Philosophy Week - reflect our desire to be part of the community, but also to take part of something positive, as compared to just giving into the temptation to rail against the authoritarian takeover of America. As we say in Islam, small kindnesses are a foundational part of making a better world. Anyway, we've had some lovely conversations with our little community that showed up to read The Dispossessed, and we're already talking about selecting another book to keep the momentum going. In regards to the book, I liked it a lot, and ended up liking it more than the other members of the group.

2025 Readings 30

 It's bizarre to think that in my long life I had never managed to read all of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. To be fair, it's one of those works which gave us so many familiar passages that the average person would never even associated with the poem: "Water, water, everywhere,/Nor any drop to drink," or "A sadder and a wiser man/He rose the morrow morn," or "He prayeth best, who loveth best/All things both great and small," or "And till my ghastly tale is told,/This heart within my burns." Some classic works don't age well, but, especially in this horrible, heartless age, Coleridge's message continues to resonate.

2025 Readings 29

 I recently finished Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be. He was briefly discussed in Charles Mathewes's Great Courses lectures on Why Evil Exists. Tillich's The Courage to Be, which is his work designed for a popular audience - as compared to his three volume masterwork Systematic Theology - was still a challenging read. I listened to it on Audible, which made it harder to pause for a deeper reflection, obviously, but I did what I normally do in situation like that - I sometimes pull the car over and email myself a note about a certain chapter. Of course, trying to find a physical copy of The Courage to Be proved to more challenging that I figured, since the local library in Montpelier doesn't have one. However, I will track one down, because I would like to revisit this work in greater depth. Tillich discussed the role of anxiety in the development of the self, focusing on the Anxiety of Death (which he associated with the beginnings of Christianity), the Anxiety of Faith (which he associated with the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation), and the Anxiety of Meaninglessness (which he associates with the 20th century and beyond). Obviously, these are not purely chronological phenomena, and they can exist concurrently today. In response, he discussed the need to focus on the concept of Being, including coming to terms with Non-Being. This is the part of his argument that is going to require that I track down a physical copy of the book for a more sustained reflection and analysis. Tillich talked about reaching the God beyond God, that is, not the theistic God that is limited by our perceptions of essence and existence, and who turns us into a mere Object (in fact, Tillich proposes, I would say correctly, that placing God in a Subject/Object relationship with us is also insulting to God), and instead is existence. I found this notion really moving, even as I struggled to truly get my brain around it. Again, I need to track down a physical copy for serious study.

2025 Readings 28

 As part of this year's goal of not only recording what I'm reading, but also giving myself more time to read. That includes, tackling books that I wouldn't normally consider. With that in mind, I just blew through Tana French's The Searcher. It's funny, I don't think of myself as someone who reads mystery or detective novels, but I've also read all of Arthur Conan Doyles's Sherlock Holmes short stories and novels (several times) and all of Craig Johnson's Longmire series and almost everything that James Ellroy has ever written. So, obviously, apparently I do read detective novels. On a lark I picked up Tana French's The Searcher when I was roaming around the Northshire bookstore in Manchester. I didn't realize that she had already written a number of novels, and was a quite successful author. All of this goes to show how we pigeon hole ourselves. As it turns out I enjoined the book quite a bit and blew through it very quickly, and might go back and read a couple of her earlier works. I didn't love the novel, but I liked it quite a bit, so now I have to decide whether to buy the next one of her novels or get it out of the library in Montpelier. I tend to always buy, mainly because I'd rather do what I can to support authors (even the successful ones). However, I'm also starting to consider a future overseas, and any book I read will be one I need to sort out. Anyway, I liked The Searcher and I can envision revisiting some of French's other works. 

2025 Readings 27

 OK, so it definitely seems to be cheating if you're recording the books that you read in the year, and include the Qur'an during Ramadan. So, I guess I'll have to give you that one. However, it is one of the books that I've read in 2025. As I've proposed several time on this blog, my favorite part of Ramadan is the extra time that we can devote to rereading and studying the Qur'an. I would argue that we focus too much attention on fasting, which I suspect is simply because it's easier to quantify. If we're so tired and hungry that we can't focus during our Quranic study, then it seems to me that we've allowed fasting to become the sort of distraction that we warn ourselves against. What amazes me every year is how I keep discovering new things as I work my way through my tattered  copy of Syed Nasr's The Study Quran. There is something beautiful - and necessary - about a consistent deep dive into a complex text. One morning this year I was reading one of Nasr's points (in his voluminous commentary) about praying, and I thought of something that I had never thought of before - or at least thought of something in a different way. It occurred to me the almost parallel similarity between the macro-world of our eternal spiritual life and the micro-world of our daily prayers. In my mind, it looked something like this:

             Death - - - - - - - - - - - - - Life - - - - - - - - - - - - Death

             Prayer - - - - - - -Time Between Prayer - - - - - - Prayer

In a monotheistic tradition where you only live one life, you almost need the time before and after life to make it all make sense. In Hinduism you just keep coming back until you work off your karmic shortcoming, so in the end, even if it may take thousands of lifetimes, everything will balance out and things will be fair and just. However, with one lifetime it almost certainly can't be fair and just, unless you take the much longer view of the time both after but also before you are alive. Essentially, you are with God during those times, and the time in-between, even if God is closer than your jugular vein (as we are told in the Qur'an), you're still not with God. As I was thinking about it that early morning, it seemed to me that the micro equivalent would be our daily time with prayer, with the time we are praying separated by the time where we are forced to go out into the crass and materialistic and decidedly non-spiritual world, before once again coming back into contact with the beautiful. Now, I don't even know if this makes any sense, and I'm still working my way through it. However, it spoke to me of the beauty of Ramadan, and, more generally, the necessity of carving off time for a deep dive into texts, whether the text is the Qur'an or The Book of Disquiet or the Meditations or the Iliad or Bleak House; there's always more time find. However, my joy was short-lived when I read the email from school celebrating the partnership that we're signing with an AI firm. More and more, it's clear that I don't fit in with the college to which I've given a quarter-century of my life.

High Pressure Marketing

 How are you going to get people to attend your Vermont Public Philosophy Week talk? Well, one obvious way is to schedule your talk before your far more popular wife's talk, which I've done. In addition, you'd of course want to include a notice on the local Calais Front Porch Forum. And, the truly savvy, would run off flyers to leave at the local grocery stores.

This displays some real technical sophistication.

 

Willow and Misty

 You know when you live in central Vermont when you know the names of the dogs of the guy who runs the dump transit station. One of the high points of the Calais weekly social scene is running into folks at the transit station on Saturday mornings. And, naturally, my favorite neighbors are Willow and Misty.

And, yes, I bring them treats.

2025 Readings 26

 I've been listening to Craig Koester's Great Courses lectures on The Apocalypse: Controversies and Meaning in Western Civilization. Like most, although not all, of the Great Courses it's been fantastic. I chose it for a few reasons. I tend to listen to a lot of Great Courses on religious themes - or a bunch of podcasts on religion - and obviously books on religion, so this is not a surprising choice. Plus, this deep dive into the Apocalypse and the Book of Revelation was interesting to me because I think it impacted the Islamic view of the end times more than we realize or at least want to admit. Plus, I'm trying to understand the increasingly radical Christian base, who have an outsized influence on policy. It's not enough to simply ignore them or make fun of them. On some level I feel I have to understand where they're coming from, even if I dramatically disagree with them (which I do).  Essentially, is there something in their view of the Apocalypse and a general fascination with the Book of Revelation that explains their worldview - and is there something in that worldview that is revealed in the message of Trump and so many GOP politicians. One of the things that I got out of it, which I already knew quite clearly from readings too many Bart Ehrman books, is that we should not take the Book of Revelation as a predictor of the end times. I guess I always knew this, but once you get into the serious scholarship it is so astonishingly clear that it isn't about that at all - and, truthfully, if you, living today, think that someone living two thousand years ago was predicting the events of your own age, then that speaks more about your own vanity and self-absorption. Rather, the Book of Revelation, like the other Apocalypses that didn't make it into the New Testament, was a metaphoric reflection on the age that John (although not that John, just someone who took that an important name associated with early followers of Jesus, a common phenomenon at the time - which is also the case with the more famous Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John). Even the name Apocalypse simply means something like "disclosure" as compared to the end of the world meaning that we associate with it today (which makes me want to ask Francis Ford Coppola if that was his hidden meaning in entitling his Vietnam film). Consequently, on the one hand I was probably too willing to simply discount the Book of Revelation, but Koester did a wonderful job laying out the beauty of the metaphoric message, and that it was as much a call for justice as anything else, which would actually make it a great fit for Islam. The second half of the lengthy lecture series focused on the influence of the Book of Revelation over the centuries, which was also interesting and important. Anyway, highly recommended.

Stampeder

 The summer 2025 CFL Doubleheader of Excellence trip is coming together. The dates are chosen and the plane tickets are purchased: a Thursday Edmonton Elks game paired with a Saturday Calgary Stampeders game. We haven't purchased the tickets yet because individual tickets haven't gone on sale yet, or at least they weren't last week. That left the most important part of the process: purchasing appropriate CFL swag for the games. I mean, we don't want to look like visiting yokels (or proto-fascists) from south of the border. This was made more difficult was that the original plan was a Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Saskatchewan Roughriders doubleheader, which meant that I had already purchased excellent Blue Bombers and Roughriders jerseys. Oh well, they won't go bad, and they'll just wait patiently for that trip down the road (after this summer I'll have seen games at six of the nine CFL stadiums, so obviously I'll have to eventually complete the circuit). My Stampeders jersey arrived yesterday. My friend Kevin accuses me, quite rightly, of being irrational in love of the CFL and my pursuit of associated swag, but I was somewhat logical with my Stampeders purchase because I chose the jersey of the player who had just signed a free agent contract elsewhere, so I got it for half-off. In the end, any money I saved went back into the CFL coffers (much better them than the NFL) because of the challenge of purchasing an Edmonton Elks jersey (more on that later). Soon I'll have enough jerseys that when we live overseas I'll be able to wear a different one every day (and twice on selected days) and either pass as Canadian or earn the reputation as that odd expat who lives down the lane.

I also chose  this James Vaughters jersey because he is originally from Georgia (and played college football at Stanford), and it reminded me of my time teaching at GPC in Atlanta. He recently signed a free agent contract with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers (one of my four favorite CFL teams - truthfully, I should just say one of my nine favorite CFL teams). Over the years he's also had a cup of coffee with the New England Patriots, San Diego Chargers, Chicago Bears, Atlanta Falcons, and Pittsburgh Steelers - which, to me, makes him a classic CFL story.

Vermont Public Philosophy Week - 2025

 I'm presenting at this year's Vermont Public Philosophy Week, as I did last year. It's a program run by Tyler Doggett from UVM, which features talks around the state. It's a wonderful program, and Tyler does a great job bringing it all together, and I'm very happy to support his efforts. I love these community talks, and it's such a positive way to bring folks together to talk about ideas - and, well, it's also just a lot of fun. The entire lineup of talks can be found on their website: publicphilosophyweek.org

Saturday, 5 April, features a doubleheader here in Calais at the Adamant Community Club (1161 Martin Road).

1:00 p.m.

Gary Scudder

"Self Identity and Why Fernando Pessoa Was the Four Best Portuguese Poets"

What is the relationship between our concepts of Self and Identity? One of the most interesting ways to think about this question was provided by Fernando Pessoa, who produced over one-hundred "heteronyms," four of which might be the greatest poets in Portuguese history.

2:30 p.m.

Janet Pocorobba

"Co-ops and the American Myth of the Rugged Individualist"

A readings from a work-in-progress about the Adamant Cooperative Store, which in 2025 marks its 90th year. We'll discuss the realities and myths about community, isolation, and co-ops.

Obviously, I'm the opening act. Get there early when there will be lots of empty seats! It's free to the public, and we (well, Tyler) will provide some treats. 

Artificial

 I don't know if it happens only to me or to everyone who, through civilization, has been born a second time. But for me, and perhaps for other people like me, it seems that what's artificial has become natural, and what's natural is now strange. Or rather, it's not that what's artificial has become natural; it's simply that what's natural has changed. I have no use for motor vehicles. I have no use for the products of science - telephones, telegraphs - which make life easy, not for its fanciful by-products - phonographs, radios - which make life amusing for those who are amused by such things.

None of that interests me, none of it appeals. But I love the Tagus because of the big city along its shore.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 50

This week is my COR 204 class I lined up Craig Gillespie's wonderful film Lars and the Real Girl, a brief discussion of Karl Marx's ideas of alienation and reification, and readings like this from Pessoa. The students, at least in my Monday class, stared vapidly at me and went back to looking at their phones. At that moment I could only reflect, "Thank you for proving Marx and Pessoa correct, and for putting an exclamation mark on this evening's lesson plan."

On a happier note, I'll be returning to that big city on the banks of the Tagus in June to present at a conference.

A Thin Sheet of Glass

There's a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can't touch it.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 80

This very Pessoan observation feels very true to me at the moment, and it's a decided change from how I've felt for the last fifteen years. It's one of the reasons why I was up for hours in the middle of the night last night, and why I've been haunting the cabin on too many nights lately. I suppose I could relate it to the passing of my father, although I think it's true more symbolically than emotionally. Simply put, we weren't that close to each other. We loved each other, but neither of us ever played a very big role in the other's life, and I'm sure I was just as guilty on that front as he was. So, I don't think I miss him the way my siblings miss him, and that, largely, eliminates the emotional side of my recent struggles. Symbolically, however, well, that's another story. It's an old chestnut, but when both your parents have passed the great wheel of life has spun, and you're next in the queue (and, by simple mathematic logic, if you're the oldest of your generation of siblings that is even more true). As I've proposed on this blog, doubtless far too many times, I'm not worried about dying. I don't waste one moment on any day fretting about my eternal fate - that's just not how I view God. The thought that there's a divine figure adding and subtracting figures from a spectral spreadsheet is both illogical, and I would argue an insult to God. Rather, I think my father's passing has made me think about life's transition points, and, obviously, since I just turned 65, I'm in the midst of one. I've been teaching for over forty years, and even if I weren't struggling with health issues - mainly my lingering and mysterious leg ailments (another visit to my long-suffering doctor yesterday gave me no hope for a medical solution) - I'd also have to admit that I'm just tired. If I'm honest with myself, I just don't think I love teaching anymore, or at least I don't love teaching as much as I used to; even that is conditional, however, mainly because I don't think anyone ever loved teaching as much as I did). You can do many jobs in the wide world quite effectively if you don't love them, but I'm not certain that teaching is one of them. But if I retire, then what? I've defined myself - and measured myself - by my identity as a teacher for over forty years. What am I on the other side?

Dinner with the Kids

 I can't imagine a phone call that would ever give me more joy than a random phone call from my asking if I want to get together. I've made this point before, but having an adult child who wants to spend time with you is an extraordinary gift. We met up at the Langdon Street Tavern for a burger, and when I left my heart was very full.

Too beautiful for their own good.

O Grande Gatsby

 Hopefully I'll be featuring this book again, because it's queued up for my list of readings for 2025 (of course, so it Saint Augustine's The City of God, so who knows if I'll get to all the works on my list). This is a gift from my truly wonderful wife. We've acquired a small collection of works in Portuguese, which are supposed to empower by work on Portuguese (which I've woefully punked on lately). Obviously, you don't have to be fluent in Portuguese to figure out that this is a translation of The Great Gatsby.  Over the years I've read Gatsby a couple times, at least, and I've never completely warmed to it (as all right-thinking individuals can attest, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio is the greatest American novel) but maybe I wasn't in the place to appreciate it at those moments in time. Anyway, I'm definitely looking forward to a reread (or initial Portuguese reading).

I also wanted to revisit The Great Gatsby, or O Grande Gatsby, because my great friend Sheila Liming has a Great Courses talk on the Fitzgerald classic soon.

Bingo

 I snapped this picture that was hanging on the wall outside of my truly excellent friend Steve's office; consequently, I figured it had passed into the public domain. Obviously one of his students whipped it up as an homage to SW. This is a brilliant bit of parody, and hilarity, and I'm sure it gave Steve a great laugh.

Steve is, deservedly, completely loved by his students, which matches the love he has for them. He never gets the credit he deserves for being a truly gifted teacher.

False Sphinxes

 Let's act like sphinxes, however falsely, until we reach the point of no longer knowing who we are. For we are, in fact, false sphinxes, with no idea of what we are in reality. The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 23

In my COR 204 class this week we're plunging into The Book of Disquiet, which I suspect the students will either love or it will break them. I'm not certain which one I'd prefer. By that I mean that while I would like my students to appreciate Pessoa (this is apparently one of my life goals) I think it might benefit them more to have their untroubled brains shattered, if only so that they can be put back together again. To be clear on this subject, I'm not really interested in putting them back together again: it is for others, hopefully themselves, to carry out that job. That said, they can't begin that process until they're broken down in the first place, which is essentially the point that I think Pessoa is making in the passage above. We can't connect or reconnect until we first disconnect.

2025 Readings 25

 Let me make an absolutely "duh" statement, at least for my generation, or at least my portion of my generation, that still loves reading: it's so lovely to give yourself over to reading, putting the bloody phone away, and simply immersing yourself in a great book. Janet and I just returned from a few days down in Manchester, VT, which was a great break. It was mainly designed to be a writing trip, and I did get some writing done (more on that later), but the trip was also designed to give us some unstructured time to get some serious reading done. Plus, naturally, we ended up going to the Northshire Bookstore every day. As I'm certain I've expressed previously, Northshire is the best bookstore in Vermont, by just about a million miles. Technically we were stopping by to hangout in the coffeeshop there and write, which we did, but we also knew full well that we'd end up buying more books, which, of course, we did. I Monday night I picked up James Kaplan's 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool. I immediately delved into the 430 page book, and finished it last night. I guess it's not surprising that I would love it, considering that I absolutely love Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans; essentially, I have solid jazz instincts, but not the most adventurous (I like the idea of Ornette Coleman and appreciate the role that he played in the evolution of jazz, but I'd prefer to not listen to him). Still, to blow through a book of that length, or at least a book of that length (I tend to read much longer books) that quickly, speaks to how good the book was but also about the mood I was in and the environment of our time in Manchester. It's so strange to think of a time when jazz was so central to American culture, and how sad it is that it possesses such a tiny and unappreciated niche today. A lot of the book, naturally, focused on the time around the recording of Kind of Blue, and that was fascinating, but it also went pretty far afield from that. It's so staggering to think that Kind of Blue was recorded in about five hours, and that the six artists who recorded it never played together as a group again. Or, it's amazing to think that Coltrane's A Love Supreme was recorded in less than four hours. Giants walked the earth then. Obviously, the book is highly recommended. On a side note: one of the last things that my Dad admitted to me was that he hated jazz, which, considering my love of it, I think I find more disconcerting than his love of the MAGA movement. 

An Escape Leading Outside of God

 But the horror that's destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It's a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my body and soul. It's the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?

And then I feel an overwhelming, absurd desire for a king of Satanism before Satan, a desire that one day - a day without time or substance - an escape leading outside of God will be discovered, and our deepest selves will somehow cease participating in being and non-being.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 43

This may seem like an odd posting for Ramadan, but, actually, I think it makes perfect sense for how I approach the month. As I've said, too many times, I think we reduce a month that should be focusing on intense study and self-reflection, and turn it into a  competition about who can fast the most hours. It's not that the fasting isn't important, because it teaches us so many things, but if we don't tie it a period of exploration and questioning then I think we're cheapening the beauty of this time set aside from the more quotidian demands of the external world, focusing on what is quantifiable (hours fasted) as compared to what is harder to quantify (study and self-reflection). One of the things that I love about Pessoa is his internality, his quest to find beauty away from the crass, ugly, commercialism of the world that we're forced to live in. It's a world outside of God, at least our commodified vision of God in religion, and because of that it is fully inside of God, the transcendent God beyond being and non-being.

2025 Readings 24

 And here's another reread (technically, re-listen) that I routinely revisit during Ramadan: Dr. Mark Muesse's Great Courses series on "Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad." I'm afraid that too many of my co-religionists never delve into the religious thinkers and works of other faiths, which I suppose doesn't make us any different than folks in other religions, I guess. In Islam we are told repeatedly that we are Peoples of the Book with Jews and Christians, and thus I would argue that we really need to explore the holy texts and traditions of our two predecessors in the Abrahamic monotheistic tradition. this is, again in my mind, especially true since the Qur'an doesn't tell lengthy stories, but rather more routinely comments on earlier stories from Judaism and Christianity. You'd get something like, "Remember what We (that is, God) told Moses (or other earlier prophets) . . ." and then comments upon it, sometimes reaffirming that earlier revelation or commenting on it. If we're not familiar with those earlier stories - and tests - how are we supposed to understand the Quranic references and admonitions? I'd take it further than that, actually. We are told that God sends a messenger and a text to every people, and some Islamic thinkers would propose that this would also apply to thinkers such as the Buddha or maybe even Confucius. And even if we don't go that far, and only consider them as distinctive thinkers who are not part of a larger religious worldview, isn't it possible that they might have something important to say that would make us better people - and, in my mind, that's sort of the point of all this. Consequently, we really should study these thinkers as well. Is our faith so fragile that we can't expand our vision?

Endless

 Yes, I'm sure that if you simply looked at the calendar you could convince yourself that we were a third of the way through March here in Calais, Vermont.

Endless #YankeeHellhole

2025 Readings 23

 Lately I've been thinking about cutting myself off from all-things Amazon, as part of a larger process of eliminating aspects of my life that are either distracting or downright harmful. I guess this stretches back a couple years, when I first dropped off of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter - and I'm getting ready to take the same approach with YouTube. Like way too many Americans, I default to Amazon simply because it's so easy, although in my heart of hearts I know the harm it does to local businesses. That alone should have been enough to make me dump Amazon, or at least as much as I can do so. However, it wasn't until Bezos climbed in bed with Trump as part of the Oligarch Guild of Calamitous Intent that I decided enough was enough. Truthfully, if I were a better person I would have made this decision earlier - apparently simply destroying local towns and businesses wasn't enough to move my internal moral scale to outrage (which means I have a long way to go on the path to being a better person). I mainly use Amazon to order books, and I tend to not choose books that are on the shelves of my local bookstore. However, and here's why I need to call my own hypocrisy and laziness out for a public flogging, any local bookstore could order exactly the same books for me - I would just have to wait until the next day to call the bookstore and drop in on the way through town. All of this is my way of saying that I'm going to try and follow up on that resolution. It reminds me of a conversation that Janet and I had in Evora, Portugal a couple years ago. We had stopped in their branch of Livraria Bertrand, our favorite bookstore from Lisbon (which is the oldest bookstore in the world). We were talking to the nice gentleman who was helping us, and we ended up talking about our love of Portugal and bookstores and our frustration with the US. He told us, proudly, that Portugal didn't let Amazon into the country, for the reasons stated above. We were charmed by this fact, and it made us love Portugal all the more. However, it's actually only partially true, although it's true in all the ways that it could be true, if that makes any sense. There is no Amazon warehouse in Portugal, and the Portuguese don't want their to be, but it doesn't mean that you can't order from Amazon if you're living in Portugal. Apparently you'd order from one of their warehouses in a nearby European country, with your best/worst option being Spain, and it would still be delivered. So, I think Portugal is making the right decision, but I don't think they cold actually stop an Amazon delivery, so I don't think they could do more than that. How would you feasibly or legally stop a delivery? I'm still impressed by their rejection of Amazon. I remember when I lived in the UAE I ordered a copy of Murakami's 1Q84, back when it was just coming out, and, yes, they pulled it off, and my goal is to always take that approach and avoid the all too easy temptation to simply click on my Amazon app. 

However, this also made me think about those other aspects of the Evil Bezos Universe, such as Audible. With an hour drive each way to Burlington I live off books on tape and Great Courses, and I somehow don't begrudge the universe the drive if I'm learning something on the way. Now, if I'm going to be true to the better angel of my nature, I should just go ahead and dump Audible as well, right? Yes, I probably should. Our local library has books on tape, so, once again, there are other options that do not benefit the Super Rich and Evil, so I should just get over myself and go ahead and do it.

This is all a long and meandering way of introducing my latest "read," in this case a "reread", or more accurately a "relisten", to Martyn Oliver's wonderful Great Courses lectures on "Introduction to the Qur'an." I listen to them as part of my study every Ramadan. Like reading the Qur'an itself, I feel that I get something new every time. For instance, just yesterday it struck me a point that Professor Oliver was making about the use of metaphor in the Qur'an. I've always known, or at least have known since I began to study the Qur'an in more detail, that the book has more metaphor than people realize. For instance, one of the reasons why Surah 18 is one of my favorite chapters is simply because of the strong and sustained metaphoric underpinning. However, he makes the obvious point that every time the Qur'an references the face of God or the hand of God or the throne of God, God or Gabriel or Muhammad is clearly and routinely making use of metaphor. It just speaks to the complexity of the balancing act between the Qur'an as a literal or a metaphoric document, and how trying to separate out one section as metaphoric and another section as literal is more than a bit of a fool's errand, and says more about the person doing the arbitrary separating than it does about the document. And also, going back to one of my consistent points, you need to view it all as one larger whole and focus on several essential concepts, and not cherry pick specific points, especially if they're considered "literal," to back up your personal believes (and, sadly, biases).

Searching

 I know I've said this before, many times, but for me the absolute best part of Ramadan is the time that the month gives us to devote more time to study. Granted, that time is always available to us, but life always seems to have other plans. The solemnity of Ramadan helps to refocus us. It's a pity, again, as I too frequently lament, that we turn the entire month into a competition about who can fast more assiduously. Fasting is very important, obviously, but if we're doing that in isolation from devoting ourselves to a deeper dive into study the Qur'an and the Hadith and related writings then we're missing out on the essence of a transformative experience. What amazes me every year is that every time I reread the Qur'an I discover deeper and deeper meanings. Essentially, I perpetually ask myself, "How has this particular passage never jumped out at me before?" For example, this is the one that I found myself underlining and writing corresponding notes to myself in the margin: "Why should God punish you if you give thanks and believe? God is Thankful, Knowing." (4:147) When I'm asked to speaking about my faith I almost always end up pointing out that I simply can't understand why we're so determined to turn our perception of God, no matter what form it takes, into an angry, vengeful deity. The phrase I tagged above makes the point about as cleanly and simply as I can imagine - and, again, it makes me wonder why that line went unmarked the previous 124,000 times (typical number in Islam for "a whole bunch") times I read over that passage?

Blessings

 Last weekend my best, and oldest, friend, Jack, made his way up to Vermont for a visit. We were doing the math, and we've been friends for over fifty years (and that does my head in).  I often make the point that I'm blessed beyond what my meagre virtues can justify, and his extraordinary friendship is proof of that statement. Any words that I would try to fashion to explain what he means to me would pale in comparison to the depth of the love and appreciation I feel for having him in my life for all these years - and hopefully a few more.

Two distinguished gentlemen at Sarducci's in Montpelier. Or maybe it's a picture of us heckling the other Muppets on stage.

2025 Readings 22

 Last night I finished Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium, my 22nd book of the New Year. It's also my second novel from Tokarczuk. We have a couple more lying around the house, but, truthfully, I'm not in any great hurry to jump into either of them. I appreciate her unique vision and the audacity of her choices, but I have to also say that I don't think I've cared about any character in either of the two novels I've read so far. It simply feels like (and, obviously, this could partially be a translation issue) there are major characters or themes that she simply hints at and never comes close to exploring. While there is a virtue in leaving room for the reader to bring their own experiences, emotions, and views into the reading process, the author can't provide so little that there's no there there. It didn't help that it was difficult to read this novel and not think of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, a novel that I love, and the ways that this story simply didn't stack up.  Having said all that, I have her Drive your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead lying in my reading queue, it's just not forcing its way to the top.

My Peerless Wife

 When Janet and I talk about moving overseas, which we talk about quite a bit, one of the reasons why we sometimes cite for not following through on that dream is how much we love our odd little community here in Vermont. However, we also had to be honest with ourselves and admit that, having said that, we haven't been engaged in the community as much as we should be. That may be something as simple as making an effort to shop more at the Adamant Coop as compared to Shaws's, or taking a more leading role in organizing things where we can get the community together. For example, we're both presenting as a part of Vermont Public Philosophy Week this year, and, in fact, we're arranging a doubleheader on Saturday 5 April, with me talking at 1:00 and Janet at 2:30 (obviously, more on this later). Mainly, I'm just taking advantage of Janet's popularity to get someone to come to my talk. Another example of this goal is that Janet set up a community book group to discuss Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed. We held our first chat a couple of days ago, on a very frosty Sunday morning at the Maple Corners Community Center. It was a great chat, and we have two more coming up.

I snapped this picture as we were getting things set up. Janet had to pop in around 6:00 in the morning so that she could turn the head on (yes, it's Vermont). I just liked this picture, which I sent to my friend Jack with the comment, "Janet and her peers," which lead to his response, "Peerless." And hence the title of this post. She had to pay a nominal fee to rent the space, but getting the community together was, as they say, priceless.

It was an enthusiastic crowd and people made some great points, with the exception of me, naturally.

2025 Readings 21

 I just finished the Mother of Books (not to be confused with the Qur'an, also routinely known as the "Mother of Books," which, obviously, I'm also rereading at the moment). This Mother of Books is an example of a rare category, Gnostic Islamic literature. As you know, during Ramadan I always read, in addition to the Qur'an, a number of other related books, and this year is no exception. When you think of the Gnostics you, naturally, think of Christian works such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of John or the Gospel of Mary, but there are a couple Islamic texts which somehow, through a cultural/intellectual sharing which is often still somewhat mysterious, reflect a Gnostic influence, an the Mother of Books is one of them. The work was written in the late eighth century in the town of Kufa, and comes, not surprisingly, out of the Shi'a tradition as compared to the Sunni. 

Some portions read very Gnostic, such as these lines which speak to the need to free humans from their body:

                              "Then the vacillators grieved

and said, 'Our lord, if only you command us, 

we will be washed and clean of sin, even 

in this, our present form.' The high lord said, 

'Atonement for such sin I won't accept 

as you are in your bodily form. Doubt hangs 

on you.' They answered him. 'What can we do 

to become pure again while in our bodies?'"

The answer is this case reads more "traditionally" Islamic, although, again, from a more Shi'a side of the fence:

"The high king said, 'You must fulfill my four 

conditions to exist closer to me.

The first is that in every each shape and form 

you see me, testify in all the tongues: 

Arabic, Farsi, Greeks, Hindi, Sindi, 

Georgian, Slavic, Syrian. And with decisions, 

prove that you are upright.

                            The second is 

you recognize the proper imams and holy 

and enlightened ones who know, and learn 

from them about my knowledge and my nature; 

witness the deity with their words and spirit.

"Third is that all of you must become brothers 

and sisters to each other, and not withhold 

your life or limb; give up possessions, wealth, 

and blood for our religion and believers.

Hold to religion and your worldly life 

in proper orders, and never choose the ways 

of evil and of violence - neither in public 

nor in your heart share food and sustenance 

or time with them. Witness the deity 

and spirit and be as friendly as you can, 

so fellowship is real because you testify. 

'Believers are brothers.' These three conditions 

are triple witness to the exalted kings: 

one to the prophets, one to right imams, 

and one to brothers and sisters who keep faith.

"The fourth is that you not live by profit 

and worldly fancy. Do not indulge desires. 

When you've fulfilled these three conditions I 

assign you, I will grant you one last pleasure: 

I'll pardon you and give you back eternal 

paradise. As it is written, 'But the believers 

who do what's right will go into gardens 

whose hollows are filled with flowing streams, and stay 

forever.' And elsewhere it says, 'He must 

behave with honor,' and elsewhere it reads, 

'those of good works.' If you keep my covenant, 

I also will. Be dutiful to me 

and I will do my duty toward you.'"

I'm not normally a huge fan of the Gnostics, although I find them interesting. Mainly, I think, they are all too often guilty of gilding the lily. You're adding a whole lot of extra complexity to something that, in its essential form, is already beautiful and profound.

2025 Readings 20

 I finished Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood yesterday morning, a book that I hadn't read in almost thirty-five years. I first read it early in my time at Georgia Perimeter College during the President's Retreat. It's a novel that I think is really good, although one that, because of the many, many racial epithets thrown around, is difficult to read today. It's strange to think that it was a book chosen by one of the professors at the retreat, and I don't remember there being any kickback at the time, and that probably says something bad about the time period. I can't imagine it being read in a similar situation today, at least not in a general meeting, although I could still see specialists reading it in a meeting. That said, I don't know if we actually benefit from simply tossing it aside without even trying to consider the contextual worlds involved, because, even considering the difficulties it presents, there's a lot more good here than bad.

2025 Readings 19

 I just finished my 19th book of 2025, Robert Zaretsky's The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas. As compared to some of the other books I've read lately, where I seem to be somewhat indifferent to (at least according to my rereading of my own posts), I absolutely loved Zaretsky's book and highly recommend it. In fact, I'm going to do the ultimate academic man-crush act: email Zaretsky to let him know how much I loved the book. I've actually only done this a few times. Scholars spend years and years grinding away at books which, because they're academic, never have much of an audience. Writing is a lonely profession, and academic writing is an especially lonely profession. So, I always want to let professors know that I've read their work and tell them how much I appreciated it. 

I first stumbled across Simone Weil's work when I read her essay on the Iliad as part of my research. She's yet another one of those brilliant writers or artists or thinkers that I can't believe I didn't know anything about (once again, I blame Indiana for the grossly inadequate education it gave me). Zaretsky's five core chapters gives you a sense of the aspects of Weil's thought that he explores: 1) "The Force of Affliction," 2) "Paying Attention," 3) "The Varieties of Resistance," 4) "Finding Roots," and 5) "The Good, the Bad, and the Godly." In my class on the Nature of Evil we read about her view of Affliction, so she's been  gaining more and more intellectual traction with me. I'm seriously thinking about using Zaretsky's book to construct a class around her thought for next spring semester (which, theoretically, might be my last semester at Champlain), using Zaretsky's book as the foundational piece. Zaretsky's book introduced me to other fascinating corners of her thought, and I was especially blown away by her view of Attention and Roots.

Let me include a paragraph from Zaretsky's discussion of Weil's philosophy focusing on Roots, to give you a sense of how accessible he makes a very complex thinker:

"Nevertheless, Weil's notion of uprooting captures one of modernity's defining characteristics: the fact and feeling of homelessness. For Weil, the act of uprooting is not just physical, but also social and psychological; one can be uprooted without ever having moved or having been moved. What Thomas Carlyle called the 'cash nexus' - the transformation of all human relationships into monetary transactions - pollutes our traditional and nurturing places. 'Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate,' Weil writes, 'and manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of numbers.' The rationalization and industrialization of the workplace grinds into bits the moral roots of countless workers. 'Although they have remained geographically stationary, they have been morally uprooted, banished, and then reinstated, as it were on sufferance, in the form of industrial brawn.' The bonds that once existed among artisans - the traditions and travels of masters and journeymen that tied them to the past and future - had been snapped. As a result, Weil writes, 'each thing is looked up as an end in itself.' The consequences are a catastrophe to which we have grown accustomed, being taught to embrace ends, not means; to see others as objects, not subjects; and to accept what Weil calls idolatry, and forget the integrity that once defined out relationship to work and ourselves."

As you'd expect, I pestered Janet with this paragraph as I was reading it. Her new book relates to community, and this is a marvelous fit. I can't recommend this book too highly. 

I'm getting close to having read twenty books this year, which brings me back to the article that started this count: the astonishing amount of Americans who don't read much of anything. Remember, that a whopping 46% of Americans in 2023 didn't read even one book - and only eleven percent of the American population read twenty books (which was listed as the far end of the reading spectrum). I never wanted to quantify reading because I naturally love it, but this is sort of an interesting experiment. I suspect I'm reading a little more than I normally read, although that has more to do with escaping the nightmare of these years than it does because I'm trying to impress myself with any particular number. On the surface it probably seems that I'm reading a lot, but this is also an indication of the fact that like most readers I normally have several books going at the same time. For me, there's 1) the book(s) on my nightstand, 2) the books in the living room where Janet and I often read at night, 3) the books squirrelled away upstairs in my office, 4) the Audible (although I'll probably switch to the library to wean myself even more from the evils of Amazon) books or Great Courses that I listen to on my way to school or at the gym, and 5) the book(s) on my desk at school. So, if I post one book here at the blog and then another one the next day, that's not an indication, probably, that I blew threw a book in one day, but rather that I finished a book in the different reading corners of my life.

Nothing To See Here

 We're in the middle of a little warming phase. The pro: the three feet of ice and snow on the roof is starting to slide off. The con: the three feet of ice and snow on the roof is starting to slide off.

Janet proposed that if one of those blocks of ice landed on you it would really hurt. I suggested that "hurt" should be replaced with "brutally kill" you.

Stella Urquhart

 Last night I showed my students Bill Forsyth's Local Hero. I told them it was one of my favorite films of all-time and that it was the movie that introduced me to the beauty of independent cinema, mainly because it clearly didn't care what the audience thought, in a formulaic fashion, should happen next. Sadly, the conversation wasn't as rich as I had hoped, mainly because they didn't do the assigned readings on the Relational and Moral self (sigh); pearls, swine, yadda yadda. It reminded me of what a crush I had on the character of Stella Urquhart, played wonderfully by Jennifer Black. There are scenes in movies wherein I could imagine myself living, and running the hotel with Stella in Ferness is probably first amongst them. "I'll be a good Gordon, Gordon."

I love the end of this film so much. 

2025 Readings 18

 Last night I finished Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. I had been thinking about reading it for a while, and watching Woody Allen reference in Annie Hall (I forgot that scene, although not the theme behind the scene) recently doubtless inspired me to finally take the plunge. I don't know if I got out of it what I could have gotten out of it, but I still really enjoyed it. It features a smug Freudianism and assurance of shared understanding that made perfect sense in the early 1970s but which doesn't translate as well to the mid-2020s.The book devoted an extraordinary amount of time to a background discussion of Freud, which cleared up some of my misconceptions, and especially Otto Rank, who I knew almost nothing about it. I finished up Becker's book definitely wanting to dig into Freuds Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and Otto Rank's Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development. Oddly, one of my critique's of Becker's book is that I thought, in the end, that his discussion of the denial of death got lost in the wealth of background information on Freud.

Mi Dolce Vita

 Here's a pretty random shot that I snapped during November's trip to Venice. We never met Marcello Mastroianni during our time in Venice, although I always imagine that his ghost haunts Rome instead. I don't think I lead a life of "heedless pleasure and luxury," but, on a more basic linguistic and pesonal level, I do lead a pretty sweet life. Janet and I have been talking a lot lately about whether we want to settle in Italy or Portugal (as I've said before, I'm pushing, gently, for the latter), but it always strikes me that we are blessed to be able to have this discussion. Yes, in many ways it speaks to privilege, although neither of us were born into wealth, but decades of working, and the nature of our jobs, is giving us an opportunity to have a discussion that many people can't have. However, the other side of that is that it's a conversation based on a perceived possible reality, which has less to do with accumulated wealth (we don't have a lot), but rather a perceived possible reality based on, well, possibility. It would be very easy during this dark days, and in light of my uncertain health, to self-limit our options, but we're both excited about creating a new life, and not simply wringing the last drops out of the old one.

This is only tangentially related to this picture and post, but if you get the chance definitely check out the films of Paolo Sorrentino, especially The Great Beauty. I've just discovered his films (thanks, as always, to the Criterion Channel), and they are truly wonderful.

2025 Readings 17

 "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

This coming Monday I'm giving a Blue Stool talk on the Mythology of American Exceptionalism. The Blue Stools, long hosted by my friend Chuck, are designed to be short public lectures, which are given during the breaks in between classes, hence they're all around twelve minutes long, presented, sadly, in a mad rush. Mainly they're designed to throw out an idea, and in the process inspire our students to keep learning, and to understand that learning is not something that simply begins and ends in the classroom itself. I haven't given one for years. When I came back from my year in the UAE I gave one related to the experience and the false perceptions that people on the this side of the Atlantic had about the Middle East. Truthfully, however, I'm not certain what I actually spoke on, partially because it wasn't filmed (I asked them not to do so because I was going to talk about the university where I taught and individuals there, who, even if I didn't mention their names, it would have been easy to figure out who they were; I wasn't saying anything terrible, but what might be constituted in the UAE as terrible is not necessarily what I would have thought constituted terrible) and also because I didn't have any notes (another one of my typical shortcomings as a speaker). They are going to film this one, but my passive-aggressive scheme to make sure that the talk never sees the light of day is to say fuck at least three times, evenly spaced throughout the talk.

This odd introduction relates to the seventeenth book I read this year: Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In between the impending talk - and also the continued nightmare of the Trump junta - I naturally found my way back to Kundera's work. This is a book that I've read several times, the first being around thirty-five years ago, when folks were still routinely reading this novel as well as The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Sadly, this doesn't seem to be the case anymore, and it's rare that you see his novels on the shelf. I still remember reading, and then writing down, his definition of the Czech word litost, "a state of torment created by the sudden light of one's own misery." Although, truthfully, that might have just been part of an exoticizing of my own suffering - or maybe I was just listening to too many Smiths albums. Fernando Pessoa said that his greatest regret was never being able to read Dickens's The Pickwick Papers again for the first time. Maybe one of my greatest regrets is not being able to read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting again for the first time. This is true not simply because it would mean that I was a younger man, but rather that that younger man was more intellectually hungry and also that my mind, my intellectual/cultural soil, was more ripe for planting (less over-planted). I still enjoyed the novel, although not as much as when I was younger, but, again, I'm not in the place to be as profoundly moved as I was all those decades ago. Now I mainly felt sad, which I suspect is a product of living in a country in the process of being invaded, not a Czechoslovakia invaded by the Soviets, but an invasion still the same. 

2025 Readings 16

 "And Dante is not the only poet whom Virgil has conducted to the threshold of paradise."

Marcel Proust

This reading was definitely a short one, which is a strange thing to point out when you're talking about Marcel Proust. A while back I stumbled across a very brief collection of Proust's writings called Days of Reading. It opens with a piece that Proust wrote honoring John Ruskin after his death (and if you know your Proust you know that he loved Ruskin), and then it passes on to a couple essays that gave their name to the collection. They a lovely homage to the sheer joy of reading, and so they naturally spoke to me. For example, here's a lovely passage on the feeling of loss that one feels when they finish a book (and it made me think of every time I finish rereading The Chess Garden or Bleak House or, naturally, In Search of Lost Time): 

"Then the last page had been read, the book was finished. The frantic career of the eyes and of the voice which had been following them noiselessly, pausing only to catch its breath, had to be halted, in a deep sigh. And then, so as to give the turbulence loose inside me for too long to be able ot still itself other movements to control, I would get up and start walking up and down by my bed, my eyes still fixed on some point that might have been looked for in vain either inside the room of without, for it was the distance of a soul away, one of those distance not to be measured in metres or in miles, unlike others, and which it is impossible moreover to mistake for them once one sees the 'remote' stare of those whose thoughts are 'elsewhere.' Was there no more to the book than this, then? These creatures on whom one has bestowed more attention and affection than on those in real life, not always daring to admit to what extent you loved them, and even, when my parents found me reading and seemed to smile at my emotion, closing the book with studied indifference or a pretence of boredom, never again would one see these people for whom one has sobbed and yearned, never again hear of them."

Oh, and, obviously, I'm swiping that opening line for the Epics chapter on the Aeneid.

My Book on College Teaching

 And another odd Scudder rabbit hole. Truthfully, I'm not even certain where this book came from. I don't remember ever buying it, so it must have been a gift from someone over the years. It's John Scudder's (1798-1855) 1849 book Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers About the Heathen. Obviously, not every Scudder who went to India to serve as doctors and missionaries was a liberal-minded as our family propaganda paints them out to be. I'm going to definitely do some research on this little gem.

I'm currently teaching COR 303, which is essentially a book about how history works, as compared to an actual history course. I think I'm going to bring in John Scudder's book, and Vida Scudder's Socialism and Character and On Journey, and Samuel Scudder's Every Butterflies: A Group of Biographies. Actually, I think Ida (I haven't even mentioned her, although I did visit her hospital in India), Vida and Samuel were all within a generation of each other. That would make an interesting novel