Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

A classmate of mine is getting married this summer and has gone back and forth between taking her fiance’s last name and keeping her own (and, of course, all the possible combinations of the two).  Watching her go through this, I was glad I didn’t have to do all that again.  Although I really like my maiden name, Erin Birdsong Penner just sounded too heavy to me (and I always use my full name), so I guess I’ll save it for something else.  Taking Sydney’s name is, I’ve always thought, simply easier.

Well!  A couple of days ago I went to the library to check out some books and spend some time in my carrel.  Some other person’s books and papers were there!  He even had pictures up–he’d moved in!  I raced down to the library office to figure out why I’d been dropped from their records, and there I was told that I had requested a change of location.  News to me!  But when she insisted she remembered my name from the petitions for changed carrel locations, four floors up, I suddenly said, “Oh!  You’ve confused my husband and me!”  Yes, I know, tact was lacking in my initial response.  But we figured out that she had seen Sydney’s petition for a changed carrel and, by mistake, changed me instead.  He’s actually been living in his new carrel all semester long, but I had had no home for several months.  I’ve been spending most of my time on north campus because that’s where I’m teaching this year, but I’d been counting on carrel space when my department office got too busy with four or five graduate students holding student conferences at the same time.  In the end, I got a nicer carrel than the one I’d had, all the way at the back of the floor (less likely to be used by undergrads) and with a bit more space and light.  Woohoo!  Now, I just have to make sure they don’t drop me in future renewal sessions!

Erin

In Pride and Prejudice, the heroine’s young and very foolish sister elopes with a devious military officer at the age of sixteen.  When the family learns that she has been tracked to London, they begin to despair.  London, it seems, is where the energy of a bustling city covers all sins, and where it is possible for a young girl to be lost to her family entirely.  In the quiet country social circles, her plight would be sure to be known and protection offered on all sides.  But in London such help is futile, as the lady may be cast into inappropriate society, beyond the help of her friends.  Something similar happens in Clarissa, a mammoth novel of 1000+ pages of tiny print.  As the lady holds stoutly to her virtue, attempting to fend off a lascivious suitor, her heart quails at the thought of being carried off to London, where she will not be able to rely on public decency to keep her young man from impinging on her virtue.

I was reminded of these 18th- and 19th-century views of London recently as I reread Pride and Prejudice, and as Sydney and I are ourselves preparing to venture a trip to London (one month away!).  I will be glad that, for most of his stay, he will be holed up in the much smaller community at Oxford, but I am excited to see a bit of the city with him.  The list of recommended places to visit from friends who’ve been there is swelling, and I haven’t even started looking for things to do!  At the moment, we’re just working on finding suitable housing for Sydney.  With tickets and housing, we’ll feel pretty ready to go.  Until then, we’ll keep scouring college website and attempting to read British English (wait!  did they forget an article in that sentence?  what exactly do they mean by these terms?  so much the-same-but-different language!).

Erin

I went to a lecture this evening at Ithaca College by Peter Singer, the Princeton professor who may well have the distinction of being the most adored and reviled living philosopher. Interestingly enough, he manages to get attacked about equally often both for being horribly immoral and for being implausibly morally demanding. But the lecture this night was pretty tame — he mostly argued that factory farming animals for consumption is immoral. I suppose this is controversy enough in many quarters, but it strikes me as an entirely sensible position.

Incidentally, it seems to be a common practice these days to google various terms and use the number of respective hits as a measure of how important the things are taken to be. The professor who introduced Singer today was no exception. He made a fair bit of the fact that if you google Peter Singer you get more hits than if you google Aristotle. Besides general questions about the significance of Google hits, I was suspicious of this professor’s figures. Peter Singer may be famous (or infamous) and all, but he’s not that famous. So what might have gone wrong? Well, ‘Peter’ is a pretty common name and ‘Singer’ isn’t exactly rare either. Besides, ‘singer’ is also a fairly common word. I bet there are quite a few websites that use the word ‘singer’ somewhere and also mention some Peter or other. With Aristotle, of course, we have none of these worries. Anyway, my hunch was right: once you do a search that at least roughly controls for these worries, the number of hits plummets to a small fraction of the number of hits for Aristotle.

Moral? If you want to make a point using Google numbers, at least make sure to get the search terms such that the results stand a chance of being relevant.

Sydney

Apparently diamonds are the push present of choice, frequently in the form of earrings.  I’m just thinking about all of those times I cared for  infants, and each time I removed my earrings before taking them on.  You hold them up to your ear, and you don’t want to scratch them, particularly when their heads are wobbly!  Don’t diamonds seem like a really, really bad idea?  Perhaps I worry too much, but it just seems that scratching your newborn with your expensive present is not the best thing to do on Day One of parenting.

Erin

Expectant mothers out there: A Bundle of Joy Isn’t Enough?

“A recent survey of more than 30,000 respondents by BabyCenter.com found that 38 percent of new mothers received a gift from their mate in connection with their child. Among pregnant mothers, 55 percent wanted one. About 40 percent of both groups said the baby was ample reward.”

I have to say, this is a new one for me.  Though I don’t know if I have any room to speak, I’m with the experts in the article who recommend that, in lieu of giving your wife diamond earrings in the delivery room, you consider learning how to change diapers or take up chores that she’ll be too exhausted to do.  But I do disagree with the (male) obstetrician who was quoted in the article as saying, “I think husbands are more involved with the prenatal process.  Women go through back pain, morning sickness, stress and so on. We just sit around and take the credit. I think a lot of 21st century husbands are a little more in touch with that.”  What credit?  Other than some good-natured ribbing by and for both sexes, what I’ve seen is mother-and-child mentality, with the guys left to define their role somewhere on the sidelines.  They can’t, like mothers, presume that they share the spotlight.  Some families work this out to the satisfaction of both parties, but I’m guessing for others it may be a real point of tension: in the age of sperm donors, where do dads fit in?

At any rate, I’d be interested in hearing your opinions about “push” gifts and the roles of mothers and fathers at the child’s birth.

Erin

I thought today was a good snowy day to go out and feed the chickadees some sunflower seeds. I was gratified to find that they still remembered from last winter how this procedure works. The first bird landed on my hand within about five seconds.

Sydney

[C]onsider the black seadevil. It’s a somber, grapefruit-sized globe of a fish—seemingly all fangs and gape—with a “fishing rod” affixed between its eyes whose luminescent bait jerks above the trap-like mouth. Clearly, food is a priority for this creature, for it can swallow a victim nearly as large as itself. But that is only half the story, for this description pertains solely to the female: the male is a minnow-like being content to feed on specks in the sea—until, that is, he encounters his sexual partner.

The first time that a male black seadevil meets his much larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a fetus-like dependent who receives from his mate’s blood all the food, oxygen, and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is a loss of function in all of his organs except his testicles, but even these, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male seadevil simply vanishes, having been completely absorbed and dissipated into the flesh of his paramour, leaving her free to seek another mate.

See here for a picture of the beauty which the males find so irresistible.

Sydney

I think I may be out of touch. Here’s the opening of a NYTimes piece:

Just about any sports movie, airport paperback or motivational tape delivers a few boilerplate rules for success. Believe in yourself. Don’t take no for an answer. Never quit. Don’t accept second best.

Above all, be true to yourself.

It’s hard to argue with those maxims. They seem self-evident …

Really? To me, everyone of them sounds some combination of dumb, false, and/or harmful.

Sydney

Who says that philosophy is of no practical consequence?

Indeed, it is one of the many ironies of the history of philosophy that Aristotle, who was himself so naturalistic in spirit, and whose teleology was motivated throughout by strictly scientific considerations, should have set back the flowering of the scientific method and its fruit of modern invention by some seventeen hundred years. It is certainly arguable that had the mechanical theory of Democritus and the habit of explaining events by their antecedents rather than by their consequences prevailed, and had the nascent application of that method by Archimedes to the investigation and control of natural processes not been discarded in favor of Aristotelian teleology, all the triumphs of applied science that exist to-day might have been won for the race as early as the first or second century A.D. Conceivably, Pontius Pilate might have flown to Rome to ask for precise instructions, and the news of the Crucifixion might have been flashed by radio to the ends of the world and have been read next morning in the papers by the ancestors of the Mayas in Yucatan (B.A.G. Fuller, ‘Meditation upon Teleology’, The Journal of Philosophy 31 (1934): 513-14).

If Aristotle can cause so much harm by a bit of philosophizing, then perhaps some other philosophers might do similar amounts of good by their philosophizing? Of course, Fuller may be a tad excessively confident in his pronouncements …

Sydney

Last night we had ten philosophers over at our house. We’ve had fairly large groups, particularly when Nelson was here and cooking up a storm, but this is our first full shindig by ourselves, with our own food. It’s also the first time we’ve had professors over. The food was well-received, and although our living room is small, all seemed happy and well-fed by the end of the night. I think people find our little house kind of amusing (if we have the hallway closed off, keeping cat pan out of sight, the only way to the bedroom is through our tiny bathroom), and I’m grateful that they’re amused, rather than dismayed. Our bookshelves are also a big hit with the academic crowd, and what with the books, the canned goods on display, and his cooking (of vegetables he grew), Sydney looked pretty good all around 🙂 He and I worked out a system to make sure preparations were in hand: I did lots of prep work far in advance, since it makes me antsy to leave things ’til the last. So the house was cleaned, baked veggies were in the oven, and a casserole was made well before we were expecting guests, and I only had pretty salad preparations to do closer to the time of arrival. Sydney did most of the frenetic work, with several saucepans going as people were arriving, so that we could also serve fussy pasta dishes and whatnot, and threw in extra dishes of various sorts to fill our menu (“I thought I’d make some corn, too, and a baked beet dish”). Thanks to some recent contributions to my dish collection from my mom, we had plenty to go around, and I did dishes in our kitchen (which is actually in the living room, anyway) as I watched the conversation groups form and reform, so that by the time everyone left we once again had a clean kitchen. Knowing that we are not big bakers of delicate pastries, we were grateful that one of the attendees offered to bring dessert (thanks, Alice!), so we also got a bit of surprise and oohing and ahhing out of the meal. All in all, it was good fun and a great way to build our hosting self-esteem.

Erin