Blog Schmog
By Jon Cogburn One of the pleasures of being married to a novelist is that I get to help out with the research sometimes. One of the books that Emily is working on now concerns a couple of disenchanted Classics professors. So one of the things we've been thinking about is what could be the […]
By Jon Cogburn One of the benefits of being a philosophy professor is that there's never any trouble with playing Opposite Day with your kids. This is the game where the world has been transformed such that English (insert your language here) is now an idiolect where every sentence means "the opposite" of what it […]
By Jon Cogburn One of the epiphanies near the end of Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company involves the proper typology of neuroses. The protagonist/narrator is finally able to sustain a romantic relationship because his girlfriend convinces him that his obsessions, ticks, compulsions, and avoidances fall into three categories: Absolutely unacceptable, Endearing, To be […]
By Jon Cogburn New Criticismbegin intro here –language means on its own terms –> intentional fallacyBut these lines are not by EliotSoul making*difference and the free play of wordsBut Eliot admits that the note is bogus – Bolgan is here taking the note too seriously.LessingBurnt NortonYou wanna bet?cf. Essential is third termcf. Tradition […]
By Jon Cogburn I'm still processing the interesting comments on my post about Babette Babich's views about the analytic/continental split.* As is often the case, J. Edward Hackett's intervention (first comment on the thread) has been quietly gnawing at me (albeit not in an unpleasant way) for a few days now. This morning I figured […]
By Jon Cogburn Friend of the blog Chris Bateman recently hosted a two part (Part One HERE and Part Two HERE) interview with Babette Babich about the fate of continental philosophy. As with many interventions by Babich, (1) readers are not unlikely to find it equally exhilarating and infuriating, and (2) Joe Bob says check it […]
By Jon Cogburn Nearly everyone, and certainly everyone reading this, has had the following experience. You are having a pretty good conversation and suddenly your interlocutor says or does something of (in your opinion) such astonishing unreason that from that point onwards you are precluded from taking them seriously. If the variety of unreason on […]
By Jon Cogburn This is Part III on a set of textually inspired meditations on the connection between author and narrator. Part I defended Jack Kerouac's On the Road from common misreadings that wrongly conflate narrator and author. Part II showed how Ian McEwan disastrously conflates himself with his narrator in his recent Nutshell: A Novel. […]
By Jon Cogburn One of Netflix's noblest services is introducing the Canadian mockumentary series Trailer Park Boys to an American audience, and then commissioning new seasons (eight through ten taking place in the park, with an extra eight episodes covering the three protagonist's European trip just out last month; an eleventh has been filmed but […]
By Jon Cogburn The major argumentative and explanatory tasks in Boris Johnson's re-revisionist The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History concern whether Winston Churchill did have an outsized effect on history, whether this effect was good or bad, and how he was able to achieve it. The book is extraordinarily entertaining as well as fair-minded. Here I […]