Atoms Arranged Meaningwise

Proctored a make-up logic exam last week in an unfamiliar building on campus. Met with some surprising wallpaper.





So, y'know. Gotta do what you gotta do.

Dear Atoms Arranged Meaningwise blog,

I'm sorry I've been neglecting you lately, but lots has been going on. I'm writing a thesis. I'm TAing logic. I'm taking a seminar on early modern causation. I'm in the middle of transferring to a new school. I'm trying to keep real food in my house and not just microwave frozen things from boxes. It's an exciting time, but also a busy time.

Anyway, Atoms Arranged Meaningwise blog, I wanted to drop you a line and let you know about a couple OTHER cool blogs that I've been reading lately that aren't about, like, David Lewis. Specifically they are about clothes. And I know we're supposed to be good little serious philosophers and clothes aren't supposed to be the sort of thing worth thinking too hard about, but that's just the kind of fucked-up masculinist logic that got us into this mess in the first place, right?

So anyway.

Academichic is a blog written by three PhD candidates at a Midwestern university. It's a great lookbook-type resource for lady academics. Maybe a tad too far on the Banana Republic/J. Crew side of things for me, but you will really appreciate the academic-activities outfit tags ("Office Hours," "Preggers", "Teaching," "Conference Wear," etc).

Threadbared is a blog by two junior faculty ladies with teaching and research interests in the politics of fashion and beauty. They are pretty much spot-on about everything, particularly representations of race and class.

The ladies over at Fatshionista are doing some really important critical work about the relationships between stigma, size, health, class and beauty. And they're sassy as hell and don't put up with bullshit.

OK, blog. That's all for now. Happy interneting!

<3 <3 <3,
Rachel

There's another video of Oscar Grant's murder floating around the internet today. I think this situation merits a post.





Kevin has a post up detailing the numbers of the BART police folks. Also see IndyMedia East Bay's post with information on Critical Resistance and National Lawyers' Guild legal support for Oakland arrestees.

Edit: The embed code doesn't seem to be working. The video is over here on A Slant Truth.

David Foster Wallace wrote up a short few pieces in Salon.com's 2000 Readers Guide to Contemporary Authors which yes, I own and yes, is woefully inadequate as far as canon-selection goes and already out of date (no Zadie Smith!) I was thumbing through it just now and came across a list he did for the book's section on him (some of the authors profiled wrote "Top 5" lists to accompany their profiles -- "Five Useful Novels" by Gore Vidal, "Books That Made Me Laugh" by Calvin Trillin, etc.) Foster Wallace's entry is called "Five Direly Unappreciated U.S. Novels Published Since 1960." The first four are Omensetter's Luck by William H. Gass, Steps by Jerzy Kosinski, Angels by Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian ("don't even ask." is the comment on that one) and David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress. The comments on the latter are as follows:

Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson
W's M is a dramatic rendering of what it would be like to live in the sort of universe described by logical atomism. A monologue, formally very odd, mostly one-sentence ¶s. Tied with Omensetter's Luck for the all-time best U.S. book about human loneliness. These wouldn't constitute ringing endorsements if they didn't all happen to be simultaneously true -- i.e., that a novel this abstract and erudite and avant-garde could also be moving makes Wittgenstein's Mistress pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.

Some of you might have seen the New York Times magazine article about DFW's Amherst undergraduate thesis on modal semantics. In the article you find out that DFW's father was a philosopher at the University of Illinois, and that DFW himself first applied to graduate school in philosophy and enrolled in the Harvard department only to drop out soon after. But in the article you also find a surprisingly coherent description of a very esoteric corner of the metaphysics/semantics of time and modality. And you learn that DFW was one technical motherfucker. From the gist of the NYT description of DFW's undergraduate thesis (which is not easy to follow, even for someone who has some experience following these sorts of things) it seems like the general take-home message of the paper he wrote is that the philosopher Richard Taylor isn't entitled to the wild, counter-intuitive metaphysical claims entailed by his 'fatalist' position. Another way of saying it: this stuff isn't about the way the world is -- it's about the way our language works.

This is all to say that I think DFW's relationship to analytic philosophy is really interesting. Part of me wonders what DFW's ontology looked like. Did he believe in properties? Numbers? Fictional objects? And I'm curious to read Wittgenstein's Mistress now. From the Amazon.com page it doesn't seem that calling it a "deconstruction of skepticism" would be entirely inapt.

Remember that post awhile back about de se attitudes and social space? I gave a really lame-duck example of a de se belief, but I've found a much better one.

In October, I saw a girl on campus wearing stirrup pants and metallic gold flip-flops. Every time I'm people-watching on campus and something like this happens, this Daria clip runs through my head. It's that episode where everyone's going to see Trent's band play, and the members of the Fashion Club walk into some greasy spoon diner on the way to the show.

Dialog:

Tiffany: Ew, stretch-pants everywhere. Stretch-pants.
Stacy: But these are stretch-pants! I'm wearing stretch-pants! *hyperventilates*
Sandi: No no no, they're leggings. Leggings. It's alright.





I realized the other day that Stacy's realization is actually probably an excellent little example of the sort of belief state or propositional attitude that I'm interested in -- that subset of de re attitudes that deal explicitly with property self-attribution.

It's the end of the semester, and things are pretty rough. Probably rougher than in past years. But I've got An Anthem for this year. The Fall 2007 Anthem was the Mountain Goats' "This Year." The Fall 2008 Anthem (which, I know, I've posted once already) is Santogold's "L.E.S. Artistes."






Lyrics:

What I'm searching for
To tell it straight, I'm trying to build a wall
Walking by myself
Down avenues that reek of time to kill
If you see me, keep going
Be a pass-by waver
Build me up, bring me down
Just leave me out, you name-dropper
Stop trying to catch my eye
I see you good, you forced-faker
Just make it easy
You're my enemy, you fast-talker

Chorus:
I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up
If I could stand up mean for the things that I believe

What am I here for
I left my home to disappear is all
I'm here for myself
Not to know you
I don't need no one else
Fit in so good the hope is that you cannot see me later
You don't know me
I am an introvert an excavator
I'm duckin' out for now
A face in dodgy elevators
Creep up and suddenly
I found myself
an innovator

Chorus:
I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up
If I could stand up mean for the things that I believe

Change, change, change,
I want to get up out of my skin
Tell you what
If I can shake it
I'm'a make this
Something worth dreaming of...

Today, November 20th, is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. This is a day that serves as a means of publicly mourning and honoring the lives of people -- marginalized even further within an already-marginalized community -- who otherwise might be forgotten. It serves also as a means of raising public awareness of hate crimes against transgendered people, and of expressing love and respect for this community in the face of national indifference and hatred.

Only last Friday, Latiesha Green, a transwoman here in Syracuse, was shot and killed.

From WSYR:

Syracuse, New York (WSYR-TV) - A Syracuse man charged with murder after shooting two people on Friday night, one fatally, could wind up facing more serious charges.

Police say Dwight DeLee, 20, shot and killed Moses Cannon, known by friends and family as Latiesha Green. The victim, 22, was a transgendered person. DeLee was arraigned Monday morning in Syracuse City Court on a charge of second degree murder. No bail was set and DeLee remains in custody.
...
A friend told Latiesha and her brother Mark Cannon, 18, to stop by a party at 411 Seymour Street on Friday night. When they pulled up to the building, police say a number of people took issue with the duo because of their sexaulity.

DeLee allegedly walked up to the parked car and began shouting profanities. Police say he then went inside the house and came back out with a .22-caliber rifle. DeLee fired a single round through the driver’s side window, according to police. The bullet grazed Mark Cannon’s arm and hit Latiesha in the chest.

Mark, who was sitting in the driver’s seat, drove to Arthur Street where an ambulance picked the siblings up and took them to University Hospital. Latiesha was later pronounced dead. Mark was treated and released.

And from the Syracuse Post-Standard:

Moses and Mark Cannon often hung out together, and family members referred to them as "Bonnie and Clyde." They described "Teish" as someone who loved family and helping others.

"I'm angry. It wasn't her time to go," said Tameka Johnson, Cannon's sister. "She was so full of life and had so much left to give."

Cannon's loss leaves a void in the family that's going to be hard to fill, relatives said. On Sunday, nearly 20 relatives and friends gathered at Cannon's home to comfort each other and share stories about "Teish."

"She was always there for me," said Cannon's niece, Maniya Cannon, 10. "She would do anything to help other people."