Over at Teekay’s

1933-2004

Times obit here.

Update, 12/29: The Times evidently doesn’t want a re-run of the Derrida debacle couple months ago and pulled the hack job they had on the website last night (okay, it wasn’t as bad as the Derrida obit — hey, they even called Danto in, like, real time!) and put this one up. (Warning: these links are usually dead after a few days. Free registration required.)

Update 2, 12/29: Sorry, been shooting from the hip. They didn’t pull last night’s obit, and McGrath’s piece is not an obit. Otherwise, my story was accurate.

Update 3, 1/11: I’ve been meaning to write about Sontag’s famous piece in the New Yorker right after 9/11, which I found awful — but somehow I don’t know what to say beyond that visceral reaction. This is what’s been bothering me (and many others, obviously):

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.

What I found most disingenuous were those scare quotes.

Als die europäischen Regierungschefs letzte Woche der Türkei einen Termin zur Aufnahme von Auftrittsverhandlungen anboten, taten sie dies keineswegs leichten Herzens. Der allfällige Beitritt der Türkei - groß, arm, muslimisch - wirft in der Tat viele Fragen auf, die ins Herz des europäischen Selbstverständnisses zielen, nicht zuletzt jene, ob das europäische Konstrukt ein primär christliches sein soll.

[Since nobody’s printing this slightly out-of-date opinion piece, I’m posting it here for those of you who read German.]
(more…)

I wrote about “tools of the trade” in previous installments. But what’s the trade I’m talking about?

In my line of work — and I fully count my academic work here too, even though I’m not a traditional academic insofar as I don’t teach — most time is spent on rephrasing and recoding stuff that’s already there. (By recoding I mean a conceptually coherent rephrasing, a rephrasing based on some theory or approach or at least jargon. Take a historical record and feed it into a rational choice model — that’s recoding.)

“Stuff” can really be all sorts of things. Rarely do we “produce” anything new, other than the “new” character of a specific conceptual configuration that may not have existed before.
I don’t think this is a problem, but I guess it could freak out some people.

How this thread really started: I read this terrific quote from Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society over at This Academic Life (sorry, I don’t have the link to this particular post, but you should check out this dude’s blog anyway for some pretty interesting methodological stuff, especially on IR):

The search for conclusions that can be presented as “solutions” or “practical advice” is a corrupting element in the contemporary study of world politics, which properly understood is an intellectual activity and not a practical one. Such conclusions are advanced less because there is any solid basis for them than because there is a demand for them that it is profitable to satisfy. The fact is that while there is a great desire to know what the future of world politics will bring, and also to know how we should behave in it, we have to grope about in the dark with respect to the one as much as respect to the other. It is better to recognize that we are in darkness than to pretend that we can see the light.

I remembered this quote only vaguely and had frankly forgotten how well it captured the strange position of academic disciplines that happen to deal with “real stuff” that’s “out there,” especially political science, where the demands on applicability or relevance are always higher than in seemingly more arcane pursuits. (This Academic Life has interesting thoughts on this topic too — about the pressure from the administration and students alike to provide “tools” for a career in international affairs instead of purely “academic” debates in the classroom. Check out this post in particular.)

No punch line coming here, I’m just reacting to something I read.

F: You always contradict me!
M: That’s not true!

F: Why do you answer every question with another question?
M: Do I really?

F: You’re in denial.
M: I’m not!

*In fact, I don’t think one needs to be married in order to have one of these.

In a previous post, I concluded that MS Word really is the only option if you need to exchange docs with people out there — especially in the corporate world, where everyone’s surprised that there are alternatives at all. (I call this type collaborative writing even if the writing as such may not be collaborative. In fact, isn’t writing always a horribly lonely pursuit?)

In non-collaborative writing, fewer such restraints exist. (Of course, there may still be restraints with regards to the ultimate output, for example, journals that only accept certain formats etc.) That makes it easier to indulge my preference for Open Source software — a preference that is not simply based on ideological reasons but also on the fact that its code is publicly available and documented, which helps protect my files from sudden obsolescence.

In a non-collaborative environment, we can distinguish between tools that help you achieve beautiful output and tools that make the process of writing easier, for example by providing good thesauri or close integration with external bibliographers.

In other words, there’s usually a bit of a trade-off between output quality and ease of production. (more…)

Words written: 0 (not counting e-mails, my blog, and comments on other blogs)
Words edited: 398 (pathetic, but today is a day off)
Meals cooked: 1 (lunch: bean soup. My wife claims this is “Dalmatian,” whatever that means. Soak some beans overnight. Stir-fry in some cooking oil with two onions and some garlic; cut two potatoes into little cubes and add, still stirring. Add two sliced carrots. Keep stirring. Add pepper and salt. Add water. Boil it up, then reduce the heat and let it simmer for, like, an hour or so. Add a fresh, sliced tomato and maybe some of those small soup pasta. When the beans are soft, the soup’s ready. Add some olive oil)
Alcohol units consumed: 0 (though about to change as soon as the damn soup is ready)
Caffeine units consumed: 2 (I should point out that these are big mugs of Turkish coffee)

John Updike (thanks to Kottke.org for the tip — head over there and check it out, it’s worth it) went over to the new MoMA and liked it.

I went over to The New Yorker: The Critics: A Critic At Large and liked the same quote Jason K did:

My guide, William J. Maloney, the genial project director, quoted the architect as saying to the museum trustees something like this: “Raise a lot of money for me, I’ll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I’ll make the architecture disappear.”

Damn, isn’t that exactly how good art and design is? (OK, some good art and design.) You give ‘em money and they give you something you don’t even notice is there, it’s so good.

This Academic Life: Certification has a great summary of the practitioner/scholar cleavage, in this case in the field of international relations (close and dear to my heart). Go there right now and read it!

“The pitfalls of being married to a linguist”
“Speaking truth to power”

This is a quick rundown of the tools I use to grab and process information and to write.

The writing part is easy — basically, because most tools out there suck.

I divide writing into two broad categories: collaborative and non-collaborative. Non-collaborative means I don’t need to worry about any sort of compatibility issue (and I’m not saying that because I’m on a Mac — see below). Collaborative means I have to adapt to the needs and requirements of the people who review/revise/comment on/post/print my stuff.

Collaborative: sorry, there’s really no alternative to Microsoft Word out there if you need footnotes, comments, and revision tracking. Mellel is an incredible value for money, far better than Nisus Writer Express (don’t let the “Express” fool you: there is no other version, at least not if you’re on OS X, which you should be anyway). Not only was it developed by a bunch of really cool guys over in Tel Aviv who are very responsive to questions and suggestions, but it’s simply superb for writing and costs an unbelievable 29 bucks (last time I checked — I bought this thing right away and am very happy). My only problem is that RTF import/export is not as smooth as it should be, though probably about as smooth as it can be. It would be terrific to have the one feature I love about Nisus: the live thesaurus, which checks whatever word your cursor is on. The thing is fast and cool and really much nicer than having to go through the Services menu.

Upshot is, if you’re looking for a non-collaborative writing tool (about which more in my next post), check it out. If your docs are not too complex and you don’t mind importing/exporting from and to RTF, check it out. If you want to see how this baby deals with foreign scripts, check it out. (Terrific!) And, it’s got BookEnds tie-ins (which I’m not using because I’m on BibDesk).

But back in the real world, it’s Word. Argh!!

This is from an obit in today’s Times magazine (actually, it’s their annual “The lives they lived” or whatever it’s called thing) of Sidney Morgenbesser:

The New York Times > Magazine > Sidney Morgenbesser, b. 1921: Sidewalk Socrates
Armed with logic and distinctions and conceptual clarity, he tirelessly patrolled the borders of truth. Large, sweeping theories made him suspicious. ('’To explain why a man slipped on a banana peel,'’ he argued, ‘’we do not need a general theory of slipping.'’) In place of grand systems, he cultivated a set of attitudes, ways of thinking about ideas — a sense of what it is to really, truly think. Not for nothing did Robert Nozick, the late Harvard philosopher, claim that as a student at Columbia he ‘’majored in Sidney Morgenbesser.'’

I like that. A set of attitudes — it seems to me that that’s what the social sciences are all about, rather than rigorous theorizing. I’m not saying there’s no theorizing, or there shouldn’t be any, but in terms of grand theories, I’ll prefer Morgenbesser’s corrosive skepticism any time.

Morgenbesser was not a brute skeptic, but as a former believer who had lost and never recovered his faith, he understood that the truth was hard; hard to come by, and sometimes hard — even painful — to take. ‘’Why is God making me suffer so much?'’ he asked in the final weeks of his life, as he struggled with complications from Lou Gehrig’s disease. ‘’Just because I don’t believe in him?'’

B92 is always good for those. In the latest bulletin:

Federal parliament crisis to be resolved by January

US-Belgrade relations “improving”

This story — still courtesy of B92 — is also pretty neat:

Kostunica sends greetings of Western Season

BELGRADE — Friday. Serbia’s prime minister has sent Christmas greetings “to all the faithful who celebrate the holidays according to the Gregorian Calendar”.

As an editor, I never get to use these.

Even less as an academic writer.

One day, I want to sneak them into a book and smuggle them past my editor. (Should be easy, given the way academic books are no longer really edited by anyone — or proofread, for that matter.)

Persnickety. Pernickety.

Curmudgeonly.

Kerfuffle.

Use the comments to tell me about yours.

…will be an important day for Ukraine, but for a lot of non-Ukrainians as well.

It’s one of those moments where otherwise smart and reasonable people start talking nonsense.

Nonsense about how U.S. funding is behind the mob that forced an undemocratic reversal of a perfectly fine result. You see, we can’t be too demanding and expect democracy to be perfect in a place like that. It took us 200 or 300 years to work it out ourselves, and besides, who are we to judge?

It’s the same attitude described to such devastating effect by Brendan Simms in his Unfinest Hour with regards to the war in Bosnia. Not an exclusively English attitude, but certainly typically English.

Instead, I just propose to see what happens, and to hope that the more trustworthy of the two candidates wins. And I have no doubt who that is.

Razgovor izmedju slovenske kontrole letenja i aviona na preletu:

Pilot: This is ABC123, requesting flythrough.
Slovenska kontrola letenja: - Welcome to Slov… Goodbye.

The Bosnian prime minister has just resigned in protest at parliament’s failure to pass the government’s version of a bill introducing VAT.

Ooops, sorry. Wrong month. That was November.

The Bosnian foreign minister, the Bosnian Serb rep on the three-member presidency, and the prime minister of the Bosnian Serb statelet (RS) resigned last weekend in protest at actions by the international high representative to force cooperation with the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

This tells us that (i) Paddy Ashdown’s actions — he’s the high rep — have hit a raw nerve, and (ii) resignations are perhaps more easily tendered around here than elsewhere. See, other than the nice Audi that comes with the job (and the expense account that allows you, for example, to buy 4,000-dollar suits, according to the last audit of the government — or maybe it was only 2,000 bucks, but never mind) there’s actually little real power associated with office. Well, there’s the power of patronage which is more easily exerted when you’re in public office, but ultimately this country isn’t ruled by those at the top, and certainly not by those at the top of country-wide (state-level) institutions. Here more than elsewhere, power is essentially local: in towns and villages, in cantons, or at the level of the two entities that make up Bosnia.

The presidency member has retracted his resignation in the meantime. Maybe that Audi really is a damn good car?

Be that as it may, some interesting things have been said in relation to this whole story — my personal favorite is Ashdown’s statement that if someone wanted to resign because they were asked to cooperate with The Hague, that was their problem. Spot on! (For more, head over to the excellent take Gordy has over at East Ethnia and to Transitions Online [premium content].)

I wonder what the folks at the grandly-named “European Stability Initiative” — basically a bunch of ex-staffers of the high rep that found out, after they left, that really the high rep had too much power — make of this? One of them was on local TV recently and was, uh, not all that convincing. They’re basically saying, “why don’t we leave this up to the locals — their politicians are grown-ups and we should be democratic and let them do their thing without interfering.”

It would take much more than a few resignations to make me believe in that!

You will have heard of Firefox.

Everyone has.

It’s just a browser, but you wouldn’t know from the hype. Now, that’s understandable if you’re on a Windoze (which I’m not) since MS hasn’t updated IE for Windoze in several years. No tabbed browsing, no pop-up blocking, no security. And I’m all too happy to use Open Source software — one of the reasons I’m using WordPress.

But frankly, I’m not sure what the point of Firefox on the Mac is unless you’re willing to deal with something that’s still very close to a Beta. What drives me crazy, for example, is the fact that the Services menu isn’t enabled, which means I don’t have access to my psellcheker. Try Camino instead — also part of the Mozilla family — which has a much more mature feel, or stick to Safari.

What’s cool about Firefox though are the plugins and extensions, which allow you for example to capture pages in all their glory and sort them into folders and search their full text etc. Sweet!

(For a quick overview of OSX browsers, head over to the LowEndMac.)

Update, 1/13: One of the things that drives me nuts is Firefox’ tendency to just lose a link when it times out, which is often when you’re on dial-up. How am I supposed to remember all the links I was trying to open simultaneously in all these tabs? Fix this, please please please! It makes it impossible for me to use Firefox as my default browser…

…all I need to do is actually write. We all know the feeling when you spend so much time figuring out the ideal set-up that you neglect output. It’s tinkering to avoid producing, I guess. And will the holidays be all that much better time-wise? Don’t think so…

Oh, but wait! I have written a lot over the last few weeks! I’d say an average of 500 words a day, not counting e-mail. (That wouldn’t be fair — email is also often a procrastination technique.) Let’s see: 1,600 words on a client report yesterday and the day before; two 1,800-word editorials last weekend and the one before; maybe 200 revised on my dissertation proposal; and lots of smaller things here and there.

Maybe I haven’t been that bad after all.

Just a quick update. I migrated to WordPress and am quite happy so far. It’s a drag being on a dial-up connection, but hey, can’t complain when you live in a place like this.