Confessions Of A Bad Poet

Like every non-serious person who grew up as a gifted kid, I secretly harbour hopes of achieving greatness through what I think of as a cheap shot. I might elaborate on what I mean by this another time, but one thing that would qualify is writing a widely and rightly beloved poem that shows up in anthologies all the time because it's such a stone cold banger. You'll be relieved to hear that this is not the only iron I have in the fire, but it is one of them. I should hasten to clarify that I do not expect any of the poems I've written so far to ever attain this status; the most likely candidate is probably 'My Hair Is Remarkably Long', which fans of the blog will already know and presumably love. One point in that poem's favour is that the balder I get the funnier it gets, which is incidentally a nice demonstration that the quality of a poem need not be fully intrinsic to it.

Immortality And Mortality

Achieving artistic immortality through a cheap shot is in many ways a numbers game, for a couple of reasons, of which only one is the obvious fact that one must typically cast many a sprat to catch a hake. The other reason is that in order to promote one's poetry one will ideally be legible as a poet, and this means putting out at least one slim volume of verse to supply a friendly environment for your banger to shine. The poems don't all have to be bangers, but people are much more receptive to a poem when they're in poetry-reading mode and it's surrounded by other poems than when it's sitting awkwardly in a rectangular space carved out of a magazine article.

So what I need is enough poetry to fill a slim volume. Let's suppose that'd be about fifty poems, counting long poems that take up multiple pages as more than one poem. I'm now forty years old, I have been writing my poems for about twenty years, and I have about ten poems that I consider successes, so at this rate I should be able to put out my slim volume when I'm 120. Actuarially speaking, I would do well to up my work rate a little.

Now you might be surprised to hear this if you're familiar with my poetry, but I actually find it very difficult indeed to write them unless inexplicably struck by inspiration. I don't know what prompts it or how to speed it up; I have just occasionally been struck by inspiration and written a poem I consider a success. I have also sometimes been struck by inspiration and written a poem I consider a failure, but there aren't very many of those either. I am painfully unprolific. In contrast to my blogging output, which I have been able to ramp up enormously over the last few weeks through an act of sheer will, I would have no idea how to make myself a more productive poet. I suppose I could commit to posting a poem every Tuesday come rain or shine, but nobody really wants to see that. So I fear that my projected slim volume may never appear, and any bangers I write will go wasted on the desert air.

Hits And Misses

As I said, I've written a handful of poems I consider successes, and a handful or two that I consider failures. 'My Hair Is Remarkably Long' is of course in the former category, but I'll show you another of the successes and one of the failures so you can get a sense of what my standards are.

First, the success. It is a double dactyl, information which is necessary to read it with the right meter and which helps explain some of the artistic choices. Years ago there was a brief and minor vogue for writing them about philosophy to which I made a couple of contributions, and I'm sorry to inform you that this is the better of the two.

Guggenheim Flügenheim
Leopold Löwenheim
Pondered the hierarchy
Cantor had sired

With Skolem's help he proved
Model-theoretically
Higher infinities
Are not required

I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but I'll say a little about why I consider the poem a success, because I think it illustrates some things about the ethos with which my poems are written. First and foremost, when read correctly it scans. Lots of poetry settles for not scanning properly, whereas I am quite keen for my poems to scan more or less perfectly (except in the case of one called 'Computer' in which the meter breaks down intentionally in the middle).

It also adheres strictly to the rules of the form I've written it in, at least as I understand them, which is important to me when I write one in a specific form. Beyond these things the success criteria become more nebulous, and it's not something I've reflected on a great deal. Perhaps part of it is that there are no secrets: you might have to google who Leopold Löwenheim is, but in principle I think the reader should be able to understand this poem just as well as I do without me having to explain anything further about it (assuming you recognize a double dactyl when you see one). It is, in an important sense, not personal. When asked what my favourite poem is, my longstanding answer is 'Recipe For A Salad' by Sydney Smith, and I think one could say the same about that. Irritatingly, however, this isn't actually the case for 'My Hair Is Remarkably Long', because to fully appreciate it you have to know what I look like. Oh well.

Now for the moment you've all been waiting for: the failure. This poem is a limerick about Goethe.

There once was a fellow named Goethe
A novelist, bard and Frankfurter
Man of science astute
And a statesman to boot
He was basically Norris McWhirter

This poem is a failure in my eyes, although I hold out some hope that with some judicious workshopping in multiple places it could become a success. So, what's wrong with it?

Attentive readers will have noticed that it meets all the success criteria I mentioned for the successful one. It is undeniably a limerick. (If you don't already know, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that it really is normal for English people to pronounce "Goethe" to rhyme with "Frankfurter" and "Norris McWhirter".) When read correctly it scans perfectly. And while you might need to Google Norris McWhirter, you don't need me to tell you anything in order to understand the poem as well as I do. And yet, as I am sure you'll agree, it is deeply unsatisfying as a piece of art.

The problem as I see it is that it has holes in it: some of the words are essentially placeholders where a word that improved the poem could have been put but I couldn't think of one. "Fellow" is an example. That should be replaced by a more interesting word applying to Goethe. "Astute" is not great. "He was basically" is an abomination. When writing it I looked up whether I could put "The Westphalian Norris McWhirter", but unfortunately that's not where Westphalia is. Returning to it today I considered "The Enlightenment's Norris McWhirter", but I don't like that because drawing attention to the fact that Goethe was one among many polymaths of approximately his era rather detracts from the point of the poem. Maybe one day I'll come up with something, but today is not that day.

The poem was originally written as a reply to a tweet seeking recommendations for "a decent biography of Goethe that isn't 20'000 pages long"; it appears that the date (21 March 2018) was World Poetry Day, and so I replied with a poem. I thought it was funny, but as I recall the poster didn't like the tweet. I'm over it; as I say it's not a good poem. But when looking this up, I realized that today is March 21 too, so happy World Poetry Day, and see you next week!

No Post Today

I'd intended to write a post today about Susan Stebbing and the second dogma of empiricism, but through a combination of it being a more challenging topic and this Friday having more distractions than usual, it got to the point where I realized that wasn't going to be happening today, so you're getting this post instead.

Regular readers will recall that I'd hoped that by getting into a routine from writing frivolous posts I'd be able to send more substantial posts down the production line and produce them in a timely manner. On the other hand, I mentioned a couple of philosophy posts that I said I was proud of but wouldn't have been able to write quickly, and so I shouldn't really be surprised that the one I had planned for today has been taking a bit longer.

It is, without doubt, a setback, but I still hope to be able to have a post for you about Stebbing and reductionism in the next couple of weeks. I guess I'll keep working on it on off days and put it into the schedule when it's ready. But hopefully it won't get torpedoed by the kind of perfectionism that'd been keeping me from writing much in the past. What I will say is that I should be careful not to go into next Friday expecting to get it finished and then find myself unable to, so hopefully if you don't get that one you'll get something more interesting than this one. Or at least something longer.

I'm sure you're all as disappointed about this as I am, but I'm still new to regular blogging and still learning my limitations, and I won't let it get me down. I'm happy enough with how I've handled this setback. See you next week!

Plastic Man

Like all British people, my dream is to one day become notable enough to be invited onto onto the long-running BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs. I expect most of us have also got our list of eight songs plus a book and a luxury at the ready for when we get the call, and one of my songs is Plastic Man by the Kinks.

It's a catchy song, and Wikipedia informs us that is was released specifically in the hope of having a hit following their now critically lauded but then commercially disappointing album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, but this didn't work out for them because the BBC wouldn't play the song on account of it containing the word "bum". The best laid plans.

Anyway, while the catchy tune and lyrical cheekiness do appeal to me, that's only half the story about why I'm taking it to my desert island. The other half is that I think that in a way I'm something of a plastic man myself, and this week I'd like to talk a little about why.

Žižek

I'm not exactly a fan of Slavoj Žižek, and I've sometimes heard from people who speak with more authority about him than I can that there are good reasons not to be, but he's a big name, and one time I decided that even if only in a fairly minimal way I should check out what the deal was with him and I so I read a picture book called Introducing Slavoj Žižek: A Graphic Guide (Kul-Want and Piero 2011). The book contains several fairly arresting images, but one thing that really made an impression on me was in a section titled "The Removal Of Risk":

'A further reason why Žižek is suspicious of the equation that is made between happiness and self-realization in Western society today is how cautious and guarded people are about allowing any sesne of intensity, risk or emotional excess into their lives.

"This is reflected in the creation of a new series of products: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol."

These products are popular precisely because they are deprived of their malignant properties.' (Kul-Want and Piero 2011: 115)

He goes on to talk about the same mindset being manifested in some modern varieties of warfare, sex, politics, and also multiculturalism, but that's not so much what struck me about the passage. What struck me about it was that I thought "That's me! I drink decaf coffee and non-alcoholic beer, and I eat vegetarian meat too! I even have multiple plastic plants in my home. What's wrong with depriving things of their malignant properties?"

I expect it was around the same time that I first discovered Plastic Man, which (as you'll be aware if you're familiar with the song or at least followed the YouTube link earlier) is about a man made of plastic (bum included) who surrounds himself with plastic objects, including plastic flowers like I have. And so the song and Žižek's tirade against my beloved defanged simulacra became inextricably linked in my mind.

Keeping It Unreal

Now, I don't want to oversell my plastic lifestyle. I do drink plenty of real coffee (mostly instant, but still caffeinated) but switch to decaf after around four or five in the evening, and sometimes go with decaf earlier in the day too if I already feel sufficiently wired at that moment. There are now at least two real plants in my home in addition to the several plastic ones (including some lego flower arrangements which I think are especially nice, although they were built by my partner so I can't take credit for them). I am a vegetarian and so all the meat I eat is fake meat, and a month or so ago I switched to drinking mostly but not exclusively non-alcoholic beer. I also drink diet Coke, Pepsi etc in preference to the sugary versions when they're available.

Embracing products like this can be quite liberating, because it essentially means you can uncouple drinking coffee from getting wired, drinking beer from getting drunk, surrounding yourself with plants from looking after plants and so on. It allows you to be more intentional about how you spend your time: you're not finding yourself doing one thing just because you decided to do the other. It's also worth noting that non-alcoholic beers have got a lot better since they first appeared, just as vegetarian meat has. I'm not old enough to rembember being able to tell decaf coffee from regular in a blind taste test, but if you are, that's got better too. With most of these things, if you think it's bad because you tried some twenty years ago and it tasted kind of nasty, then your information is out of date. Even astroturf has come on a lot as I understand it.

The Desert Of The Real

Žižek did in fact write these things over twenty years ago, in an essay called "Passions of the real, passions of semblance", which is the first chapter of a book called Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (Žižek 2002)¹. The excellent title of the book, as he explains in the essay, is from something Morpheus says to Neo after he wakes up from the Matrix and sees "a deslolate landscape littered with burnt-out ruins — what remains of Chicago after a global war" (Žižek 2002: 15).

I read the essay for the first time quite recently, and to be honest it didn't really flesh out the critique of my plastic lifestyle in a way I found very satisfactory. I quite enjoyed reading it nonetheless, although I don't really feel equal to giving a précis of it for you. One theme in it is the idea that Americans in then-recent times had tried to insulate themselves from the real, but 9/11 happened and America was forced to confront the kind of violent and dangerous realities that it had been trying to confine to other parts of the world, and when it did Americans processed the events in a manner more suitable for processing fiction. Major American landmarks being destroyed is something that happens all the time in disaster movies, but wasn't supposed to happen in real life.

I don't really feel qualified to have much of an opinion about whether he's right about 9/11, but after taking the side of the plastic men against Žižek for so long, maybe it's worth me re-evaluating my position now that I've finally read the essay he was attacking us in. Should I be waking up, cleaning off the goo and walking among the burnt-out ruins of Chicago?

The Experience Machine

Before we give the obvious negative answer to this question, let's think a little about the experience machine. Robert Nozick (1974: 42–5) proposed a thought experiment where people can plug themselves into a machine and experience a virtual reality much nicer than the one that Neo and the rest of us experience in The Matrix, and in fact one of our own choosing, with the only catch being that none of it is real. (We'll ignore David Chalmers' (2009) surprisingly persuasive arguments that the world inside the Matrix actually is real.) Nozick's argument is supposed to be an argument against hedonism, or any other view of wellbeing on which only experiences matter, and by extension hedonistic utilitarianism, because the experience machine gives you all the experiences you could want but doesn't give you everything of value, and so there must be something of value other than experiences (and a fortiori something other than pleasure.)

Nozick notes some things you might want from the machine — to do things rather than just feel like you're doing them, be a certain way, and to experience a deeper reality — and proposes further machines to meet some of those further needs. He still doesn't think we should want to plug in, and thinks that the problem is the machines living our lives for us, rather than our living them ourselves, "in contact with reality" (Nozick 1974: 45).

This is a fun thought experiment to discuss when you're new to studying philosophy, and not everyone agrees with Nozick that plugging yourself into the machine isn't the way to go. I personally do have the hoped for negative gut response to the scenario, but my considered view is that people act as well as experiencing and the idea of a human life that's experiences-only isn't really coherent, and I'm not sure the results machine really helps. A life with all cognition and no conation would be like a life with all inhalation and no exhalation. Introducing conation into the experience machine scenario — there's conation in the Matrix — would change it a great deal, and I think it's possible that if it could be fully made sense of and still contain enough pleasure to be the challenge to hedonism Nozick is after then we might stop being able to ignore Chalmers' surprisingly persuasive case for the reality of virtual worlds.

This doesn't sound like a complete response to the experience machine case because it isn't one, but it's where I am with it these days. But now we've been sweet-talked into valuing the real, let's see if we can get ourselves some sympathy for Žižek's take on plastic plants².

Blurring The Boundaries

Žižek complains that "What happens at the end of this process of virtualization, however, is that we begin to experience 'real reality' itself as a virtual entity" (2002:11), and then he starts talking about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and disaster movies. So, is he right? Does drinking non-alcoholic beer and filling your home with plastic plants lead you to start seeing reality itself as a virtual entity?

Let's see if we can find our way round to it by thinking about the experience machine and what it tells us about the value of the real. The problems with the machine are that it stops you doing things, being certain ways, and communing with a deeper reality, and that it lives your life for you. But non-alcoholic beer and the rest don't have these problems. You're still doing things, and you still have a personality; they're just different things and perhaps a different personality. They might stop you communing with a deeper reality, I suppose, but if so it's contingent and not at all for the reason Nozick gives about the experience machine, which is that it's limited to what we can create. That's a problem that's really quite specific to being hooked up to a machine, because if you're drinking a non-alcoholic beer there's still plenty of non-artificial stuff in your environment to be communing with.

I've tried to figure out a case for it, but I just don't think Žižek's right here. Maybe he's right about disaster movies or some other aspect of American life at the end of the 20th century, but I think the decaf angle is a red herring. And the reason essentially boils down to this: non-alcoholic beer is real. Decaf coffee is real. Plastic plants are not real plants, but I don't think it's that much of a stretch to say that they're real too. They are real things in my home. You can knock them over. They don't make as much of a mess as real plants when you do, but you can still do it, and if you can knock them over, they are real.

Now, I realize that by writing that last paragraph I'm leaving myself wide open to the charge that the blurring of the real and the virtual has already happened to me! Perhaps that's true; it would be difficult for me to know. But I don't think it has, so I'm going to keep drinking the unreal ales for now. Cheers, and see you next week!

Notes

[1] If you want to read it then I should give you a content warning for discussions of self harm and violent pornography, but I won't be discussing those themes here.

[2] The latter is not one of his examples but I think it would serve: apart from anything else, real plants die.

References

• Chalmers, David J. (2009) 'The Matrix as Metaphysics', in Susan Schneider, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell) pp35–54
• Kul-Want, Christopher and Piero 2011: Introducing Slavoj Žižek: A Graphic Guide (London: Icon Books)
• Nozick, Robert 1974: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books)
• Žižek, Slavoj 2002: Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London and New York: Verso)

Reading Habits

I like to read, and like a lot of people with the same affliction, I've sometimes found that I'm not quite where I want to be as regards reading. Maybe I'm not reading enough, maybe I'm not reading the kinds of things I want to be reading, or even if I am maybe there's still a mountain of things that I feel like I should have read but haven't got round to, and I wonder if I ever will. At one point I was legitimately confused at how it's possible that I seem to have read thousands and thousands of books when I only seemed read about ten books a year if that. Twitter's search function isn't what it was and I couldn't find the tweet, but perhaps some of you will relate.

The good news is that while I'm still not exactly where I'd like to be with respect to this stuff, I'm in a much better place than I used to be a few years ago. I've hit on a few habits that I find help me, and I'm going to talk about them here. I'm not recommending you try any of this stuff at home; different things help different people and we don't all have the same options in our lives. This post is about me.

Three books at once

Perhaps the biggest breakthrough was when I hit on the system of having three books on the go at the same time. It's great, and so much better than what I was doing before. I used not to have a system at all really; I'd start a book when I thought I could handle taking it on or couldn't wait, whatever else I was reading at the same time. I'd often put one book on hold to read another, and then put that on hold to read another, until I ended up with a matryoshka of unfinished books with bookmarks sticking out of them somewhere near the beginning. That's no way to live.

In the current system I'll read three books at once, but not just any three books. It's three distinct slots with different purposes, not an unstructured quota of three. Basically the idea is to have a light one, a heavy one, and an intermediate one.

The light one doesn't have to be especially light in either its content or its materiality; previous occupants of that slot include The Goldfinch and Crime and Punishment, although admittedly I read those on an e-reader rather than lugging them around. The key criteria are that it should be a book that I can still appreciate if I read it in short bursts, and it should be something that I can reliably get in the mood for when circumstances provide a short burst for me to read it in. The current occupant is Upstate by James Wood. I'm not as into it as I was into his The Book Against God, which I think I've read twice, but I'm still enjoying it and I'm glad to be finally checking it out after it's sat on my bookshelf so long. It's good; I just really liked his other one.

The heavy slot is for books which very much don't fit the two criteria for the light slot, but which I'd still like to read. The Critique of Pure Reason went in the heavy slot, for example. The current occupant of that role is the set theory textbook I mentioned a couple of weeks ago — I am now partway through chapter 3 but have been slacking off on the exercises — and the previous heavyweight was A Discourse Concerning The Love Of God by Damaris Masham. I've mentioned this before, but it's especially important to have at least one other book on the go when I'm reading a book by Kant, because otherwise when you think "ugh, that's enough Kant for the day" you also have to stop reading books for the day altogether, and things really don't need to be like that. Just because you're willingly reading a book on your own initiative doesn't mean it's not effortful or even a bit of a chore, and you don't want to put yourself in a position where reading in general is, for you at this time, a chore.

I've sometimes heard people who for professional or educational reasons had a lot of books to get through saying that they feel bad about reading anything not on their list of obligatory reading, because if they're reading at all they feel they should be working their way through the list. But of course they're not always up for reading something from the list, and so they just scroll on their phone or watch TV or go to the gym or whatever instead. This doesn't make sense. There can be reading on both sides of your work/life balance.

The intermediate slot is for other books. Books which are in no way a chore to read but which don't quite fit the criteria for the light book. The current intermediate book is Why Are We 'Artists'? 100 World Art Manifestos, edited by Jessica Lack. There's a certain amount of slippage between the intermediate slot and the slots on either side; when I finish Upstate I may put the art manifestos in the light slot and put a philosophy book in the intermediate slot.

Occasionally I'll be down to two books when I've finished or given up on the book in one slot and haven't decided what to replace it with, and sometimes after very careful consideration I'll introduce a fourth. The latter only really works when it's something I'm confident I can get through pretty quickly, because otherwise I'm back to the matryoshka. I tried it once with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit when I was reading it along with Gregory Sadler's YouTube lectures, and you won't be surprised to learn that I did not get especially far into it, although that was still a lot of lectures and I think that at the time I got a fair idea of what the Preface is about¹.

Recordkeeping

The other big breakthrough for me was that in January 2019 I started keeping a record of what I read. I don't include squibs like Daily Mash articles, but books, magazine articles, blogposts, encyclopedia articles, op-eds and poems go on there. I originally intended to include things I only read parts of but that's no longer such a big issue because now that I've got my system I tend to finish things more.

It's sometimes useful to be able to check whether I've read something or to find something I've read — I include URLs to things I read online in the entry — but it also just makes me feel better about my reading life to have a record of it. I don't show the list to other people, and to be honest I don't really understand why it makes me feel better. I guess it's partly that knowledge is power and so recordkeeping is empowering, and partly that if you're scared that you're not where you want to be with respect to your reading life, then some of that can be a fear of the unknown and keeping records makes it less unknown. If I spent a lot of time reading through the list and thinking about what a great guy I was to have read all those things then that would explain it, but that's not something I really do, so it isn't that. But whatever it is, it does seem to make me feel better about my reading, and so I'm going to keep doing it.

Read on the bus

I get the bus to and from work, and on the bus I usually read my light book. I also read it on my breaks at work. That's why it's important for the light book to be something that works when read in short bursts and which I'll reliably be in the mood for when those short bursts present themselves.

One benefit of this habit is that I don't have to make the effort to carve out time to read. I'm as lazy and weak-willed as the next person, and when I'm left to my own devices I'll often go on social media or play online chess or do some puzzles. But it's nice to have a book on the go which you dip into regularly, a little narrative running in the background, and having dedicated situations when I dip into it makes sure that this nice thing is an ever-present part of my life. Except when I'm off work.

Read at bedtime

I'm actually not doing this one at the moment. Currently at bedtime I just go on the internet for a bit, and sometimes watch some TV or a movie if there's time. But a month or two ago I was in the habit of reading at bedtime instead, and it was really good. I got to sleep more quickly, I was safe from the possibility of getting stressed out by the internet when I was supposed to be going to sleep, and I had extra time to read. What's not to like? I didn't stop for any particular reason. Perhaps I'll get back into it, although as I say, I'm as lazy and weak-willed as the next person. I got a new bedside lamp recently so maybe that'll tip the balance.

Read aloud

It's a little unusual to read a book on the bus these days, but probably my most eccentric reading habit is that when I'm reading by myself I often read aloud. As I recall I first started doing this with Thomas Kuhn's The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions, which according to my records I finished in July 2020. I suppose a lot of people probably developed some eccentricities around then what with the pandemic and the lockdowns, but I've kept this one up and I'm glad of it. I think I understand things better when I read them aloud, and it gives you a heads up when you're misparsing a sentence because you'll read it wrong and probably stumble over it.

Reading aloud also opens up new avenues for having a bit of fun with what you're reading. One thing I sometimes find happening is that I'll do different voices for blockquotes, perhaps modelled on the voice that was used for reading out viewers' letters on the old BBC show Points Of View, or at least my memory of it; doubtless if I went back and listened to it the voice they do would turn out to be nothing like the one I do. I also sometimes find myself reading the footnotes in my head even when I'm reading the main text aloud. I don't know why.

Some people will tell you that the ancients all used to read aloud except for St Ambrose, but I vaguely remember hearing that this is based on a misunderstanding of something St Augustine wrote. So I won't pretend that by reading aloud to myself I'm participating in a long and venerable tradition. I expect some people would also find that reading aloud slows them down a lot, but I read pretty slowly at the best of times, at least for someone who reads as much as I do — I usually reckon on about three minutes a page, adjusted up or down a bit depending on the usual sorts of thing — and so I don't have to slow down all that much for my voice to keep up.

Device compartmentalization

I don't have a smartphone but don't be fooled: I'm still probably at least as internet addicted as you are, and perhaps more so because I'm accessing the internet on a Chromebook with a proper keyboard and a much bigger screen and so it's much more enjoyable for me. So ideally I wouldn't do my reading on an internet-enabled device, with the siren song of social media within earshot. Sometimes this is hard to avoid of course, but I've managed to get round it to some extent with one weird trick that I call device compartmentalization.

Put simply, in addition to the Chromebook that I use for my social media and so on, I also have a PC laptop that I don't. I break the rule occasionally, for example when I slip on some ice and break my Chromebook, but for the most part I don't use social media on my PC. This, somehow, has the effect of meaning I'm generally not tempted to go on social media on my PC. So if I'm reading something and don't want to be distracted, I can read it on my PC. I read FH Bradley's Appearance and Reality that way, and let me tell you that if you can focus on the longer second part of that ('Reality') without getting distracted then you can focus on anything.

Print magazines

There's a flaw in the device compartmentalization method though, which is that it only works when I'm at home, as I don't carry my big chunky PC laptop around with me. And sadly when I'm out and about is exactly when I want to read quality longform magazine articles. What to do? Enter the last of my eccentricities to save the day: I subscribe to the print edition of a well-known American magazine. Perhaps you think this is an absurd thing to do in 2025, and that as a fully grown adult you would simply get a hold of yourself and read 15,000 words of Louis Menand on whatever he's become interested in this week without abandoning ship for your favourite microblogging site, but in the words of Cher, I really don't think you're strong enough. I'm certainly not. See you next week!

Notes

[1] It's about dialectics.

Bananas

I'm not really a big one for new year's resolutions, but this year, and not for the first time, I began with the intention of eating more bananas. I like bananas, and when I do my weekly big shop at the weekend I almost always buy a bunch, but I've often found that by the end of the week I've only eaten one or two and the rest have had to be thrown out. It's far from ideal, and I've now decided to take control of my life in this small way and eat lots of bananas.

It's been going well: to the best of my estimation, I've eaten one banana each day this year, and I don't remember having to throw any out. I think once or twice there have been small parts of the day's banana that weren't good and which I didn't eat, but that goes with the territory when it comes to bananas.

I've also been recording my journey in a Twitter thread, which mostly consists of posts with a number of banana emojis corresponding to the number of bananas I've eaten to date. I also occasionally use the thread to document obstacles I've encountered and the like. It's now day 52 and I think I've proven my commitment to the bit, so although I have no intention of stopping any time soon I thought I'd take some time to reflect.

Because It's There

An obvious first question that someone coming across my thread might ask is "Why are you doing this?" It's a fair question. A mutual called The Outsider Humanist actually did ask me this on February 4, and my response was "I felt like I wasn't living my best life". I think that's accurate: I mentioned above how I like bananas but I wasn't getting through the ones I bought and that wasn't ideal. Eating a banana every day is much closer to ideal. But although that was why I started doing it, I think that the project has gathered an increased significance for me.

It's not just about eating bananas anymore; it's about starting something and then keeping it going come rain or shine, or snow. Leaving the record of it in my Twitter thread is important to me too: there's a lot of sadness in the world and a lot of it probably gets presented to you on the timeline of your favourite microblogging site, but I hope that when people see my banana tweets they'll think "Ah good, Mike's still out there eating his bananas" and that'll give them something positive to cling to.

Human endeavour is not typically something that stands in need of external justification. People run marathons, they put people on the Moon, and I'm eating a daily banana, not to secure some instrumental good, but just as a further expression of the human spirit. Humans are not the only animal that eats bananas, and we may not even be the only animal that eats a banana every day, but we're the only animal that decides to eat a banana every day and then follows through on it for as long as fate permits, and I think this unique quality of ours is something to be celebrated.

The Thread

If you'd like to read the thread and you're willing to access Twitter, it begins here. I'll briefly recount some themes that have emerged when making the thread.

Arrangements

Partly to inject a bit of interest, and partly just to make them easier to count, I often put the banana emojis into some kind of special arrangement rather than just putting them in a long string. I first put them into a 2D rectangle on day 15. On day 19 I arranged them into the number 19, which was how I learned that they don't always display the same way when you post them as they did in the composing box, and so the 19 is a bit wonky. I tried finding a blank emoji that I could put in as a spacer, but I didn't find anything suitable so I've just been using spaces and being mindful of how it might look with different widths for the emojis and/or spaces. On day 36 I arranged them into a triangle rather than a square, to draw attention to the fact that in addition to being the sixth square number, 36 is also the eighth triangular number. On day 42 I arranged them into what was supposed to be a Babel fish. And on day 50 I arranged them into an L.

Shopping

Bananas often don't last the whole week between my big shops, especially since most of the bananas in a bunch will tend to be at around the same stage of ripeness, so I've often found myself running out of bananas midweek and having to swing by a shop to secure the supplies I need to keep my project on track. The most dramatic occasion was fairly early on, when I still wasn't sure how committed I was, and buying the bananas would mean taking a detour through the snow and ice. Near the end of last year I had quite a scary fall on some ice and so when it got icy again in January I was quite nervous walking through it, but I decided to make the effort and continue with the daily banana-eating. Forty-six days and forty-six bananas later, I'm glad I did.

It's also not so bad having a midweek banana run pencilled into the diary on occasion¹, because it means that if there's something else I need or want I don't have to decide between going without and making a special trip.

Potassium

More than one person has suggested that by eating so many bananas I might eat too much potassium. It is possible to do yourself a mischief by eating too much potassium — if you get it your doctor will apparently call your condition "hyperkalemia", which sounds to me like Greek for "too much potassium in the blood" — but I looked it up and I'm not worried about this happening to me. In the course of researching this issue I learned that, assuming I didn't miscalculate, a healthy amount of potassium to eat is about a kilo a year. (That's about 2.2 pounds, for my American readers.)

Eating a banana also exposes you to a small amount of ionizing radiation, apparently mainly due to the radioactivity of one of the isotopes of potassium. The Banana Equivalent Dose is even sometimes used as a unit of radiation, equivalent to approximately 0.1 microsieverts. My understanding is that this is not very much radiation and so I don't need to worry about this either.

Discipline

[W]hen philosophy is not disciplined by semantics, it must be disciplined by something else: syntax, logic, common sense, imaginary examples, the findings of other disciplines (mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, history, etc.) or the aesthetic evaluation of theories (elegance, simplicity, etc.). Indeed, philosophy subject to only one of those disciplines is liable to become severely distorted: several are needed simultaneously. To be ‘disciplined’ by X here is not simply to pay lip‐service to X; it is to make a systematic conscious effort to conform to the deliverances of X, where such conformity is at least somewhat easier to recognize than is the answer to the original philosophical question. (Williamson 2006: 182)

It's a long time since I read that paper; I haven't reread it in order to research this post, and I don't appear to have read it since I started keeping extensive albeit non-meticulous and non-comprehensive records of my reading in January 2019. But the idea in this passage that philosophy must be disciplined by something stuck with me. Of course Williamson says that you need to be disciplined by more than one of them, but why is it OK not to be disciplined by all of them?

I really don't expect this would be Williamson's answer to the question, but I think that at least some of the value of discipline is that by anchoring oneself to a project with legible constraints you give yourself a structure for valuable things to accrete around. You give yourself problems you need to work on, and reasons to do things you'd rather not do. Discipline your philosophy of language with logic, and you can't just wave away semantic paradoxes. Discipline your philosophy of time with physics and you can't just wave away the relativity of simultaneity. Discipline yourself with going to the Moon and you have to invent teflon and astronaut ice cream, or whichever of the supposed by-products of the space program wasn't an urban myth. Discipline yourself with daily banana-eating and posting about it, and you have to face your fear of the snow, go to the shops midweek and figure out which arrangements of banana emojis will display properly on the screen. Or decide to write more frequent blogposts even when you don't have anything to say, and perhaps you'll eventually find that you do.

Last week I said I wasn't intending to write them weekly, but I've changed my mind and now that's the plan. It wasn't long after finishing the last one that I started looking forward to writing this one. It feels good, like I've finally got my voice back. See you next week!

Notes

[1] Why not every week? Well, after acquiring some bananas midweek I'll sometimes have some left over when I do my big shop, which means I can buy a bunch that's still green and so will have its most delicious period at the back end of the following week.

References

• Williamson, Timothy (2006), 'Must Do Better', in Patrick Greenough, and Michael P. Lynch (eds), Truth and Realism (Oxford, 2006; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Sept. 2010), pp.177–187, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199288878.003.0010, accessed 21 Feb. 2025.

Field Of Dreams

Fans of the blog will have spent the last decade or so becoming increasingly dissatisfied about the infrequency with which I post on here, and so have I. It's not that I don't have the time, and every so often I am still struck by inspiration for a post which never makes it up here. Part of it is doubtless down to a lack of things to say, but I think a significant part of it is that the process of writing a post and putting it up here, from start to finish, is very time-consuming for me. I fantasize about posting here regularly; perhaps every Tuesday I would sit down for an hour or two and put something up. But of course I'm very far from that place at the moment, and realistically if I was to get to that place I'd need something in the way of a production line.

To this end, I thought it'd be good to write a post with the kind of production values I'm aspiring to, in the kind of time-frame I'm aspiring to, but without putting too much pressure on the content. This way I can try to get the basic mechanics down, and once I've got that in position, the hope is that in future I'll be able to let the banger content pour out me unobstructed by practicalities, much as one might on Bluesky (other microblogging sites are of course available), or in an IRL conversation. It may take a few such test posts to get there, but this is the first. Just so that nobody who likes reading this sort of thing gets their hopes up, I have no intention of putting them out weekly at this stage.

The Template

I'm writing this on an html template that I made back in the day. I'm not what one thinks of as a person who codes, but I do write these things directly as html, because I find that if I use Blogger's wysiwyg interface things don't end up looking the way I want. Here is the template:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<font face="calibri" size="3">
<h1></h1>
<div style="line-height:1.5">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<h3>References</h3>
<ul>
<li></li>
</ul>
</div>
</font>
</body>
</html>

I am happy for you to use or adapt it for your own blogposts without acknowledgement. I had to look up how to get the html to display as plain text rather than having it behave as html. You have to replace "<" with "&_l_t_;" (minus the underscores) and ">" with "&_g_t_;" (likewise). The underscores are there because without them I don't know how to make them display as is rather than turning into "<" and ">". I considered not showing you the template at all, but I figured that my production line should allow for a certain amount of looking things up, as long as I don't get too carried away and try look up every last thing, such as the second thing which I didn't look up. It's OK to use a workaround if it's the difference between getting these things out there and having a bunch of fragments sitting on my computer.

There are a few things that aren't in the template but which I do use in my posts, for example hyperlinks, footnotes and images, but text, headings and bullet points are the main thing. I should add templates for links and notes even if not for images, but right now is writing time, not template construction time.

When I'm writing from the template, I need to save a new copy of it with the blogpost title, the date and the .html extension and save it somewhere that my Chromebook will allow me to open html files in a browser from. Then I write the post as html in Caret, periodically saving it and refreshing the version in the browser to see what it looks like. It's presumably not an optimal system but I find it fairly pleasant and it's what I'm building on at the moment. Once I've got the html document as I want it, I can paste it into Blogger, read the preview on that site, correct inevitable typos, read the preview again, and post it. This is supposed to give me control over the process rather than having to do things Blogger's way.

The Production Line

To summarize and elaborate, let's look at the production line as a set of bullet points. This will also allow me to test out another key blogging mechanic:

• Percolation: In the week leading up to sitting down to write the post, I can turn over the ideas for what I'm going to write about in my head. I might write down some notes, but on no account must anything that looks like drafting the post start early.
• Set-up: On the day, get myself somewhere I can work, close my browser tabs, locally save a version of the template with the post name and date, and open it up in the browser.
• Draft: Write the thing! Try not to stop in the middle. Write it in Caret as html and refresh the version in the browser to see what it looks like.
• Proofread: Proofread it in the browser.
• Blogger: Only at this point do I open up Blogger. I paste it into their html interface.
• Preview: Open Blogger's preview and correct any typos. I should do the corrections in Caret and paste the whole thing in again, rather than typing in Blogger and having to go backwards and forwards to get my own copy accurate.
• Final read and post: Once I've read a version in the preview that I haven't seen any typos in, I can post it to the site. For the post's keywords, choose three and don't stress too much about what they are.
• Promotion: Post the link on Bluesky or wherever I'm mostly microblogging nowadays. Watch the plaudits roll in.

Perfectionism

I think that one of the things that stands in the way of me being as prolific as I am in my fantasy is a kind of perfectionism, but I don't want to mislead: perfectionism paradigmatically has benefits and maleffects, and my variety of it is skewed towards the latter. I think my blogposts do skew towards a lack of typos, but aside from that it's really just a kind of obsessive anxiety about putting out something that's not as it should be, even in parts. Last year I did a bit of work on that particular debilitating personality trait of mine with some success, and in a more interesting post than this one I might take a little digression and talk about it, but this is just a test so I'll move on. ¹

The negative aspects of perfectionism speak for themselves, I think, at least in terms of how they might slow a person down. But the positive aspects perhaps deserve a little comment. There are some things that really can't be done well if they're not done with a meticulous attention to detail. But that's not how I roll when it comes to my personal projects. I do a bit of html but don't know how to make "&_l_t_;" display without the underscores, I learned Esperanto on Duolingo but can't follow a podcast in it, I play the guitar badly, I have a blog I hardly ever post on. Regular readers will recall that I occasionally write about set theory but instead of talking sense about it I talk nonsense and make a joke out of it. I actually got a set theory textbook out of the library recently and have been working through it; I'm currently partway through chapter 2 and will let you make your own speculations about how that'll pan out. You get the idea. Perfectionism can lead to perfection, but in my case it typically doesn't. A possible exception is my ability to learn flags, capital cities and other such things that come up in geography trivia games.

The Future

I've got a kind of "If you build it, they will come" attitude towards actually finding interesting things to write about on here. For the moment you should just expect more test posts like this, and you shouldn't expect them regularly at first. The important thing is just getting back in the game, so that when I feel like I've got something interesting to write about, the infrastructure will be in place for me to get it out there.

When I was thinking over some posts I'd written that I was proud of, four that came to mind were this poem, this post about the normativity of logic, this post about a book about ancient Greek philosophy by WKC Guthrie, and this post about collective nouns. So I think poetry, philosophy, and frivolity are the ways to go. I've written about politics in the past too but I don't think I'm very good at it.

I don't often get inspired to write poetry, and while a post like the present one can be dashed off without a great deal of thought, I don't think that's true of poetry, at least not as I write it. Similarly with the two philosophy posts I mentioned: there's no way I could have written those in an hour or two. But frivolity I can probably manage, and probably some less intense philosophy too. I recently had an idea about the Repugnant Conclusion that I could perhaps write a post about. I could also write posts inspired by other people's posts. People sometimes say blogging is dead, but this is obviously bunk. And if the time to write the next instalment comes and I don't have anything interesting to write about, I can just write another one of these. Wish me luck!

Notes

[1] I considered saying a little bit more about it in a footnote to test out the mechanics of footnotes and avoid interrupting the lightness of the main text, but decided to test the mechanics by writing this instead.

Santa Baby

Christmas is almost upon us, and as is customary its musical outriders have now been harrying the airwaves for weeks. Among the most lyrically perplexing of these is ‘Santa Baby’, the classic version of which was sung by Eartha Kitt, although it has been covered many times by artists including Taylor Swift, Wolf Alice and (with a significant reworking of the lyrics) Michael Bublé. Ostensibly the song is a love song addressed to Santa, in which someone who has been a faithful partner to him over the past year demands a series of extravagant gifts and then eventually at least the promise of marriage, with the implication that if he doesn’t stump up then their fidelity can no longer be counted upon. It’s possible that it’s not really addressed to Santa, and this is just a seasonal metaphor in line with the demand for gifts in exchange for good behaviour. Either way, what kind of relationship is this? One of the demands is for the deed to a platinum mine! Surely the surface reading is not the whole story.

The interpretive key to the true meaning is in the title. Who is this “Santa baby”? It’s a Christmas song, and so a natural answer presents itself: the santa baby is the baby Jesus. “Santa” means “holy”, and the Christ child is famously referred to as a “holy infant” in the classic carol ‘Silent Night’; once it is pointed out the connection becomes unignorable. With this interpretation in hand, other lines begin to make more sense. The demand for marriage is a clear reference to the old idea of the Church as the Bride of Christ. “I believe in you” is self-explanatory. “Sign your X on the line” is a reference to Christ’s ultimate gift to humankind on the Cross, “been an angel all year” is not especially deep but offers additional confirmation of the song’s theological meaning for anyone still hesitant. “Think of all the fun I've missed/

Think of all the fellas that I haven't kissed” can be taken literally as a reference to the faithful believer adhering to the church’s teachings regarding sexual ethics but I think a more fruitful interpretation of this line is as a metaphor for all the graven images the singer hasn’t made unto themselves and before which they haven’t been bowing down. In any case, the song is a plea to Jesus from a faithful believer, asking for their reward. To feel hard done by in this way may not be the most noble sentiment but it is a perennially relatable one, having clear resonances with the book of Job.

Equipped with our new understanding of the original, let’s turn to Michael Bublé’s controversial reimagining of the song. The most common complaint against it is that he mostly addresses Santa as “Santa buddy” or “Santa pally” rather than “Santa baby”, which gives the impression that he’s worried that if he, a man, addressed Santa, also a man, as “baby” that would make him seem gay. We expect better than that kind of homophobic cowardice from a song recorded in 2011. Since the song is superficially a love song to Santa and widely read as such, I think this feature of the song was clearly foreseeable and probably intentional, and the standard critique of it is valid. But Bublé is clearly also aware of the true meaning of the song and in his reworking of the lyrics he develops it into the radical theological message that we’ll now explore.

Baby, buddy, pally, Poppy. Do you see where he's going with this? Well, Santa baby is the baby Jesus, as we’ve already established. It doesn’t take any great insight to realize that Santa Poppy is God the Father. This leaves Santa buddy (and its synonym Santa pally) referring to the Holy Spirit. And with this simple reasoning we unlock Bublé’s message: the proper relationship between humans and the Holy Spirit is one of friendship. Norman Greenbaum’s classic contribution to theological pop music “Spirit in the Sky” also says “I’ve got a friend in Jesus”, but it’s a throwaway line that can easily be read as saying that Jesus is on his side, whereas the fact that Bublé really is talking about friendship is hammered home repeatedly throughout the song, including him switching to “pally” for the benefit of the inattentive listeners in the back.

But can one truly be friends with God? It would certainly not be a friendship of equals, and the unequal nature of that friendship is of course laid bare in the song. But even allowing for great inequalities, the relationship of total dependence between God the Father and creation seems to make friendship impossible, and while Jesus had mortal friends during his time on Earth, the inequality is similarly great now that he sits in glory at the right hand of the Father. But the Holy Spirit’s role has always been more mysterious than that of the other two persons, and its proceeding from the Father and the Son gives it a (perhaps undue) sense of being somehow least among equals. Perhaps this is someone we can truly be friends with. 

It won’t be easy, but Bublé never said it would be easy. And the potential payoff is high. What’s the payoff? Bublé gives us a further clue with the gifts he mentions in the song. There are seven of them, corresponding to the seven gifts of the spirit:

Gifts for Bublé Gifts of the Spirit

Rolex Wisdom

’65 convertible, steel blue Understanding

Yacht Counsel

Deed to a platinum mine Fortitude

Canucks tickets         Knowledge

Mercedes decorations         Piety

Cold hard cash Fear of the Lord

I’ve listed Bublé’s gifts in the order they appear in the song and the gifts of the Spirit in their traditional order, but the mapping from one list to the other is other is straightforward and I leave it as an edifying exercise for the reader.

So there we have it: Bublé’s contention is that the Holy Spirit is or at least can and should be truly and literally our friend, and it is in its capacity as our friend that it gives us its gifts. What can we give it in return, poor as we are? Fortunately, since the Holy Spirit is God, it is entirely self-sufficient and has no need of anything we might give it, or indeed of anything else. But we can give it something anyway, and Bublé’s suggestion can’t really be topped. This Christmas, for the Holy Spirit and indeed for all your friends, just be an awful good guy.