Last Night, 1961, The Mar-Keys.
Last Date, 1960, Floyd Cramer.
Save the Last Dance for Me, 1960, The Drifters.
At Last, Etta James.
Last Thing on My Mind, Doc Watson sings Tom Paxton
Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Simon and Garfunkel.
Last Man Standing, Ry Cooder
Last Call, Dave van Ronk. "If I'd been drunk when I was born, I'd be ignorant of sorrow."
Bonus: Last Chance Harvey.
To make it right is a royal PITA. First I make a killer sauce from scratch, a Bolognese or something pork-based. That's plenty of work right there. Then I cut an eggplant lengthwise, run the slices through egg wash, bread 'em and fry 'em in olive oil. Extra virgin, of course. Why monkey with anything else? Then I make a casserole with the cooked eggplant slices, intercalating plenty of sauce and mozarella and other cheeses between the slices. Then into the oven, covered, at 350 for 35-40 minutes until bubbly hot.
To make the one-pan quick version, crosscut the eggplant (so that it fits better in a large skillet) and fry with olive oil at moderate-high to high heat. Eggplant sucks up oil something fierce, so keep adding the stuff. Don't worry, it's a good fat. After all the pieces are cooked to the point of tenderness, set them aside to 'rest.' Now, in the same pan, add more oil and saute a blend of chopped onion, garlic, green peppers, and sliced mushrooms. When that mixture is tender, layer on the eggplant slices with mozarella and a store-bought sauce. There is no need to grate the mozarella, just slice it with a sharp knife. It melts readily. Dump in the usual spices: fresh-ground pepper, oregano, basil. Cover, and let simmer at low heat until you have a nice molten mess of vegetarian chow:
Serve with pasta, but you must absolutely avoid the Seven Deadly Sins of Pasta. Otherwise, I kill you. I prefer capellini, but it's all good. The true aficionado avoids oversaucing his pasta, and he doesn't mix pasta and sauce together a priori as it were. Do that, and I kick you, a posteriori. A trencherman true throws some sauce on top of the pasta and adds a little more or a lot more extra virgin olive oil. Freshly grate some Romano or Parmesan cheese on top of that. No crap out of a cardboard cylinder. Then add a green garnish to set it off such as Italian or American parsley, or, as I did last night, cilantro for a Southwestern accent. Fresh from the garden. Yes, you can actually grow stuff in Arizona in late December, which is another reason why Arizona is a terminus ad quem of Continental migration as oppose to a terminus a quo such as Minnesota. Some places are for leavin' as some are for arrivin.' You should get something that looks like this. Serve on a big white plate. Enjoy with a glass of Dago red. Not as good as the real thing, but good enough, especially on the second day, reheated.
To believe in Man is to believe in what is necessarily nothing; to believe in God is to believe in what is at least possibly something.
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See this post for explanation and exfoliation.
Allen Ginsberg's Howl begins like this:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz . . . .
Debra Saunders' parody of Howl begins like this:
I saw the vast majority of three generations destroyed by madness, cursing unethical betrayed
Spitting at frozen screens teasing 404 error waiting for the dusk of peak hours
Onesie-clad hipsters sipping hot chocolate little marshmallows bobbing blinking hashtags in a sea of brown
Who opened cancellation notices all hollow-eyed and bitter sat up spewing the PolitiFact-tested rhetoric of 2010 word wars that promised nothing unfair to anyone rural or citified, and all that jazz . . . .
Read it all, and howl with rage and laughter.
I am regularly solicited by Open Journal of Philosophy for article submissions. The e-mails never reveal the dirty little secret behind publishing scams ventures like this, namely, the charges levied against authors. Poke around a bit, however, and you will find this page:
Article Processing Charges
Open Journal of Philosophy is an Open Access journal accessible for free on the Internet. At Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP), we guarantee that no university library or individual reader will ever have to buy a subscription or pay any pay-per-view fees to access articles in the electronic version of journal. There is hence no income at SCIRP that comes from selling any forms of subscriptions to this electronic version of journal or from pay-per-view fees. In order to cover the costs induced by editorial procedures, routine operation of the journals, processing of manuscripts through peer-reviews, and the provision and maintenance of a publication infrastructure, the journal charges article processing fee that can normally be defrayed by the author's institution or research funds.
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Article Processing Charges |
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So it would cost you a grand to publish an 18 page paper, and a minumum of $600 to publish anything. And who reads this journal anyway? If you need to publish for tenure or promotion, then you need to publish in a decent journal. And if you publish to be read by people worth interacting with, ditto.
Besides, it is not that difficult to publish for free in good outlets. If I can do it, so can you. Here is my PhilPapers page which lists some of my publications. My passion for philosophy far outstrips my ability at it, but if you have a modicum of ability you can publish in decent places. When I quit my tenured post and went maverick, I feared that no one would touch my work. But I found that lack of an institutional affiliation did not bar me from very good journals.
Here are a few suggestions off the top of my head.
1. Don't submit anything that you haven't made as good as you can make it. Don't imagine that editors and referees will sense the great merit and surpassing brilliance of your inchoate ideas and help you refine them. That is not their job. Their job is to find a justification to dump your paper among the 70-90 % that get rejected.
2. Demonstrate that you are cognizant of the extant literature on your topic.
3. Write concisely and precisely about a well-defined issue.
4. Advance a well-defined thesis.
5. Don't rant or polemicize. That's what your blog is for. Referring to Brian Leiter as a corpulent apparatchik of political correctness and proprietor of a popular philosophy gossip site won't endear you to his sycophants one or two of whom you may be unfortunate enough to have as referrees.
6. Know your audience and submit the right piece to the right journal. Don't send a lengthy essay on Simone Weil to Analysis.
7. When the paper you slaved over is rejected, take it like a man or the female equivalent thereof. Never protest editorial decisions. You probably wrote something substandard, something that, ten years from now, you will be glad was not embalmed in printer's ink. You have no right to have your paper accepted. You may think it's all a rigged wheel and a good old boys network. In my experience it is not. Most of those who complain are just not very good at what they do.
Sorry if the above is a tad obvious.
Consider this argument:
1. Tom believes that the man at the podium is the Pope
2. The Pope is an Argentinian
Therefore
3. Tom believes that the man at the podium is Argentinian.
The argument is plainly invalid. For Tom may not believe that the Pope is an Argentinian. Now consider this argument:
4. Tom sees the Pope
2. The Pope is an Argentinian
Therefore
5. Tom sees an Argentinian.
Valid or invalid? That depends. 'Sees' is often taken to be a so-called verb of success: if S sees x, then it follows that x exists. On this understanding of 'sees' one cannot see what doesn't exist. Call this the existentially loaded sense of 'sees' and contrast it with the existentially neutral sense according to which 'S sees x' does not entail 'X exists.'
If 'sees' is understood in the existentially loaded way, then the second argument is valid, whether or not Tom knows that the Pope is Argentinian. For if Tom sees the Pope, then the object seen exists. But nothing can exist without properties, properties most of which are had independently of our mental states. If the object has the property F-ness, then the perceiver sees an F-thing, even if he doesn't see it as an F-thing. So Tom sees an Argentinian despite not seeing him as an Argentinian.
Now seeing in the existentially loaded sense might seem to be a perfectly good example of an intentional or object-directed state since one cannot see without seeing something. One cannot just see. Seeing takes an object.
But whether existentially loaded seeing is an intentional state depends on what all enters into the definition of an intentional state. Now one mark of intentionality is aspectuality. What I am calling aspectuality is what John Searle calls "aspectual shape":
I have been using the term of art, "aspectual shape," to mark a universal feature of intentionality. It can be explained as follows: Whenever we perceive anything or think about anything, we always do so under some aspects and not others. These aspectual features are essential to the intentional state; they are part of what makes it the mental state that it is. (The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992, pp. 156-157)
The phrase I bolded implies that no intentional state is such that every aspect of the object is before the mind of the person in the state. Suppose you see my car. You won't help being able to see it is as bright yellowish-green sport-utility vehicle. But you could easily see it without seeing it as a 2013 Jeep Wrangler. I take this to imply that the set of perceived aspects of any object of perception not only can be but must be incomplete. This should be obvious from the fact that, as Husserl liked to point out, outer perception is essentially perspectival. For example, all sides of the car are perceivable, but one cannot see the car from the front and from the rear simultaneously.
This aspectuality holds for intentional states generally. To coin an example, one can believe that a certain celestial body is the Evening Star without believing that it is the Morning Star. One can want to drink a Manhattan without wanting to drink a mixture of bourbon, sweet vermouth, and Angostura bitters. As Searle says, "Every belief and every desire, and indeed every intentional phenomenon, has an aspectual shape." (157)
Intentional states are therefore not only necessarily of something; they are necessarily of something as something. And given the finitude of the human mind, I want to underscore the fact that even if every F is a G, one can be aware of x as F without being aware of x as G. Indeed, this is so even if necessarily (whether metaphysically or nomologically) every F is a G. Thus I can be aware of a moving object as a cat, without being aware of it as spatially extended, as an animal, as a mammal, as an animal that cools itself by panting as opposed to sweating, as my cat, as the same cat I saw an hour ago, etc.
But now it seems we have a problem. If that which is (phenomenlogically, not spatially) before my mind is necessarily property-incomplete, then either seeing is not existentially loaded, or existentially loaded seeing is not an intentional state. To put the problem as an aporetic tetrad:
1. If S sees x, then x exists
2. Seeing is an intentional state
3. Every intentional state has an aspectual shape: its object is incomplete
4. Nothing that exists is incomplete.
The limbs of the tetrad are collectively logically inconsistent. Any three of them, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one. For example, the conjunction of the first three limbs entails the negation of the fourth.
But while the limbs are collectively inconsistent, they are individually very plausible. So we have a nice puzzle on our hands. At least one of the limbs is false, but which one? I don't think that (3) or (4) are good candidates for rejection. That leaves (1) or (2).
I incline toward the rejection of (1). Seeing is an intentional state but it is not existence-entailing. My seeng of x does not entail the existence of x. What one sees (logically) may or may not exist. There is nothing in or about the visual object that certifies that it exists apart from my seeing it. Existence is not an observable feature. The greenness of the tree is empirically accessible; its existence is not.
It is of course built into the intentionality of outer perception that what is intended is intended as existing whether or not the act or intentio exists. To put it paradoxically (and I owe this formulation to Wolfgang Cramer), the object intended is intended as non-object. That is, objects of outer perception are intended as existing independently of the mental acts that 'target' them, and thus not as merely intentional objects. But there is nothing like an 'ontological argument' in the vicinity. I cannot validly infer that the tree I see exists because it is intended as existing apart from my seeing. This is is an invalid 'ontological' inference:
A. X is intended as existing independently of any and all mental acts
ergo
B. X exists.
If the above is right, then seeing is an intentional state that shares the aspectuality common to all such states. A consequence of this is a rejection of 'externalism' about outer perception: the content of the mental state I am in when I see a tree does not depend on the existence of any tree. The object-directedness of the mental state is intrinsic to it and not dependent on any extrinsic relation to a mind-independent item. To turn Putnam on his head: the meaning is precisely 'in the head.'
Are there problems with this? We shall see. Externalism is a fascinating option. But I am highly annoyed that that typical analytic philosopher, Ted Honderich, who defends a version of externalism in his book On Consciousness, makes no mention of the externalist theories of Heidegger, Sartre or Butchvarov. How typical of the analytic ignoramus, not that all 'analysts' are ignorant of the history of philosophy.
No day without political incorrectness! And no night either.
Ray Stevens, Ahab the Arab. Here is the original from 1962. In the lyrics there are references to two hits from the same era, Chubby Checker's The Twist (1960) and Lonnie Donegan's British skiffle number Does Your Chewing Gum Lose its Flavor? On second thought, the reference is to Checker's Le't's Twist Again Like We Did Last Summer (1960).
Larry Verne, Mr. Custer (1960). "What am I doin' here?"
And now a trio of feminist anthems. Marcie Blaine, Bobby's Girl. "And if I was Bobby's girl, what a faithful, thankful girl I'd be." Carol Deene, Johnny Get Angry. Can't find the Joanie Sommers original, but this is an adequate cover. "I want a cave man!" k. d. lang's parody. Little Peggy March, I Will Follow Him. "From now until forever."
Meanwhile the guys were bragging of having a girl in every port of call. Dion, The Wanderer (1961). Ricky Nelson, Travelin' Man. (1961)
Addendum: I forgot to link to two Ray Stevens numbers that are sure to rankle the sorry sensibilities of our liberal pals: Come to the USA, God Save Arizona.
"We consider nothing philosophical to be foreign to us." This is the motto Hector-Neri Castañeda chose to place on the masthead of the philosophical journal he founded in 1967, Noûs. When Hector died too young a death at age 66 in the fall of '91, the editorship passed to others who removed the Latin phrase. There are people who find classical allusions pretentious. I understand their sentiment while not sharing it.
Perhaps I should import Hector's motto into my own masthead. For it certainly expresses my attitude and would be a nice, if inadequate, way of honoring the man. He was a man of tremendous philosophical energy and also very generous with comments and professional assistance. He was also unpretentious. His humble origins served him well in this regard. He interacted with undergraduates with the same intensity and animation as with senior colleagues. I was privileged to know this unforgettable character. What I missed in him, though, was spiritual depth. The religion of his Guatemalan upbringing didn't rub off on him. Like so many analytic philosophers he saw philosophy as a merely theoretical enterprise. A noble enterprise, that, but not enough for some of us.
How many read Hector's work these days? I don't know. But I do know that there is plenty there to feast on. I recently re-read his "Fiction and Reality: Their Fundamental Connections" (Poetics 8, 1979, 31-62) an article rich in insight and required reading for anyone interested in the logic and ontology of fictional discourse.
Hector's motto is modelled on Terentius: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a human being; I consider nothing human to be foreign to me." One also sees the thought expressed in this form: Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. Hector's motto is based on this variant.
Addendum
Horace Jeffery Hodges writes,
I appreciated your blog post on December 28 for your remark about the origin of the the Latin motto:Hector's motto is modelled on Terentius: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a human being; I consider nothing human to be foreign to me." One also sees the thought expressed in this form: Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. Hector's motto is based on this variant.Dostoevsky offers a variant (a conflation of Terentius's motto and the motto that Hector knew):
"Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto." (I am Satan, and nothing human is alien to me.) – Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
I borrowed Dostoesky's variant for the motto to my novella:
It's visible on the book cover (just click on expanded view or the click to look inside). The original motto is thus a rather malleable expression, useful in various contexts.By the way, is "Fiction and Reality: Their Fundamental Connections" (Poetics 8, 1979, 31-62) a work on literary fiction, as in novels, novellas, short stories, and the like? If so, I might benefit from reading it.
Given that the ubiquity of crosses all across this great land has not yet established Christianity as the state religion, why, as it declines in influence, do the cruciphobic shysters of the ACLU and their ilk agitate still against these harmless and mostly merely historical remnants of a great religion?
This question occurred to me after reading Michelle Malkin's Cruciphobia at Mt. Soledad.
Besides being incompetent and mendacious, Obama is brazenly lawless, as Mona Charen documents.
London Karl sent me to The Mad Monarchist, not that he agrees with it. Apparently, there is no position on any topic that someone won't defend. But we've known that for a long time. Descartes said something to that effect.
Is anarchism the opposite of monarchism?
Anarchism is to political philosophy as eliminative materialism is to the philosophy of mind. That is to say, it is an untenable stance, teetering on the brink of absurdity, but worth studying as a foil against which to develop something saner. To understand in depth any position on a spectrum of positions you must study the whole spectrum.
Study everything. For almost every position on any topic contains some insight or other, even if it be only negative. The monarchist, for example, sees clearly what is wrong with pure democracy. If there are any positions wholly without value, then they are still worth studying with the philosophical equivalent of the pathologist's eye and the philosophical equivalent of the pathologist's interest.
