Primrose Road

In attempting to contribute an article to RationalWiki about the Shakespeare authorship "debate" -- relevant in my view only because of the ways in which the arguments behind it resemble Intelligent Design and various pseudohistorical propositions -- I have overlooked one important factor: any great idea I have after 20mg of Flexeril is probably not such a great idea after all.

I am also not what one would call a "good writer," especially when it comes to types of writing I encounter outside my specific field of study. In fact, this is one reason why I blog; I need to constantly write in order to keep my writing skills at a level where I can at least cogently express my thoughts for academic papers.

So I'm putting a request out there: if you're a better writer than I, and feel that you can better express the reasons why (1) Shakespeare's plays were for the most part accurately attributed to the guy from Stratford, and (2) the argument "one author wrote another author's plays" simply doesn't make sense in the context of what we know about writing and stage practices in the English Renaissance, please contribute a better article than the one I did.

Meanwhile, here's a picture of a door to nowhere on the third story of the Starbucks on 86th and Broadway:

Students today and their view of how grading works amaze me. I turned in grades two weeks ago and so far have received five emails from students with grades ranging from A- to B, asking me if there was anything they could do at this point (after the end of the semester) to raise their grade half a letter so that they wouldn't lose scholarship money. First of all, if they are at risk of losing scholarship money and got an A-, B+, or B in my class, it likely means that *my* class isn't what's causing the major problem with their GPA, which suggests to me that they assume that 5-foot-2 in-her-late-twenties not-yet-Dr. L. is more likely to say, "aww, I'll raise your grade so you can get your scholarship money" than is, say, the 60-year-old math prof who gave them a C. Which makes me laugh a bit, because, really, grades are earned based on work done during the term.

I also like it when students assume I'm the *nicest teacher ever* when they earn an A or A-, even though they actually earned the grade because I give challenging assignments that force my students to work hard.

There needs to be an essay collection entitled " 'You Are So Nice, Can I Please Have an A?' : On Being Young, Short, and Female in the University System."

It's *great* that the BBC, in a rather American-newsmagazine-type manner, can't report on the renovation of Shakespeare's gravestone without claiming that there is a curse on anyone who moves it. Fortunately, we are assured, the renovation will not "incur the wrath of Shakespeare." Quick, someone make a Hamlet joke.

Some of the ScienceBloggers have picked up on a story about a teacher who threatened, via email, to sue her (freshman comp!) students for harassment. It's quite obvious that the woman was simply litigious -- she also tried to sue her superiors because they "ignored" the harassment -- and couldn't handle her students' challenging her. (I wish more students would disagree with and challenge me in class.) Unfortunately, this one case of a teacher's thin-skinned childishness is being used in the science blogosphere to attack postmodernism in general, which I think is unfortunate and reflects a continued misunderstanding of the term and philosophies it encompasses.

Sure, some postmodernists will argue that science is just one "way of knowing," but their aim is to question beliefs that we accept as "natural" because of religious and social norms, not to present a drippy New Age form of relativism. The scientific method is in my view the most effective and safest "way of knowing" in the medical field; people who sell magic water make me angry too. But the ways in which many scientists and proponents of the "new" atheism on the blogosphere praise Enlightenment seems to me philosophically problematic: while the "scientifically study the natural, reject the supernatural" aspect of it makes sense, the (implied) "only (certain privileged) humans can shed light on what's been kept in the dark" aspect can be somewhat unsettling. Historically, there's a little bit of colonialism buried in Enlightenment, a factor that should be acknowledged.

Basically, just because there are perhaps more than a handful of New-Agey relativists out there who call themselves postmodernists doesn't mean that postmodernism runs counter to science.

I've created a Shakespeare authorship page on RationalWiki, figuring it's appropriate because of the resemblance between "anti-Stratfordianism" and intelligent design and since it's a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory (the best kind!). If you can contribute to the article by making it more informative and/or more hilarious (it definitely needs to be far hilarious-er), please jump in and edit it!

There's an item in this month's Wired about a new slot machine that looks like an old-school 'destroy some boulders' arcade game. What's interesting about this game is that the odds of winning are the same regardless of where you move your spaceship or what you shoot, because skill-based payouts are not legal in Vegas (or anywhere, I think). I don't know ... it seems like non-traditional slots could attract too many people who aren't entirely responsible with their money ... though the slot machines in casinos now also seem to attract people who aren't responsible with their money ...

NB: Grad students who get paid in the change found in the cushions of the department's couch and have memberships at five Atlantic City casinos don't count. ;)

I picked Betraying Spinoza up after hearing author Rebecca Goldstein talk at last week's Nextbook: Jews and Power conference. Goldstein briefly discussed the challenges inherent in writing a "Jewish" Spinoza biography and focused mainly on her personal narrative of encountering Spinoza as a high school student at an Orthodox Jewish Bais Yaakov school. Despite my distrust of personal narrative, I decided that the book was worth a read.

What Goldstein offers is far more than a personal narrative of her experience as a young Orthodox woman hearing the story of Baruch Spinoza's excommunication from Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish community due to his insistence on reason over superstition, being told that Jews should avoid Spinoza, who asked questions that he shouldn't have asked. She presents a captivating speculative biography (though, in my view, she doesn't do enough to announce that the bio is speculative) of the philosopher, deriving her narrative of Spinoza's life from historical documents describing seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Spinoza's own work. Perhaps most interesting are the moments when Goldstein subtly analogizes the Dutch Jewish community headed up by Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira to the post-Holocaust religious Jewish community in the 20th and 21st century: severe unthinkable trauma, she suggests, led to three possibilities for people in the community: "fierce religiosity, messianic and mystical," "disappointment, disillusion, attempts to argue with the rabbis about what true Judaism ought to be," and "ultimate rejection and a return to Christianity," to which many had converted when the Inquisition came to Portugal a generation earlier (120-121).

Interestingly, Goldstein argues against her high school teacher's assertion that Spinoza was an atheist simply because he believed in reason over superstition and because he claims in his Ethics that one is naturally inclined to preserve oneself before anyone else. (No wonder this work led, via Locke, to some of the ideas on which America was founded ...) Reading Spinoza's ethics of love, Goldstein seems to find a frustrating God in his work: "He who loves God cannot endeavor that God will love him in return" (237). The mistake made by "superstitious" religions is that they carry on as though God were a tyrant, requiring believers to act in certain ways in order to earn his love.

Another important strength of the book was Goldstein's ability to explain relatively complicated philosophical ideas to a general audience, especially in relation to what she labels the "if-is" gap (a gap that, she notes, Spinoza closes up). This book could conceivably be used, therefore, as a "way in" to Spinoza for students.

In sum, read it.

From my dissertation prospectus: "A significant portion of the theory on which this project is based derives from Deleuzian (and neo-Deleuzian) concepts of affect."

Is it okay to have a "portion of theory"?

Current break-from-dissertation reading list:

1. Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

2. Ruth Wisse, Jews and Power

3. Rebecca Goldstein, Mazel

4. Robert Burton, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not


I've also recently had the chance to read Revolutionary Strategies in Early Christianity, which I would review in depth were I qualified in any way to review a political science text. It's actually a very clearly-written book (in the interest of full disclosure, the author is a friend of mine) and a useful primer for terms regularly encountered in the political science blogosphere, especially those related to military strategy. The book is an interesting read regardless of what side of the political spectrum one is on -- though the analyses often skew right, this is more of a text intended to expound terminology, not ideology. My only [major] concern is that the history element of the book rests on the assumption (stated explicitly in the introduction) that the New Testament is for the most part an accurate historical record. I'd like to hear Dan's explanation of what warrants this assumption (i.e. I challenge him to a duel).

After my three week post-semester break, I'll get started tracing the history of blank verse as a new medium. [sarcasm]Woohoo![/sarcasm]

Oprah terrifies me. The other day she had a psychiatrist on her show who "hypnotized" the audience so that they could "remember" past lives. Oprah and Dr. Mehmet Oz ("America's Doctor" and actual surgeon) looked on excitedly and gullibly.

The psychiatrist then hypnotized Dr. Oz, who said, "We don't have to advocate [the therapy], but we do have to evaluate it" and compared it to the once-new idea of doctors washing their hands before delivering babies. This obviously isn't a fair analogy because while bacteria were invisible to the naked eye, they could be perceived via the already-invented microscope.

And finally,

"Dr. Oz says he does feel like there is a collective unconsciousness out there. "I actually in my heart think that all of our minds are connected and all of these minds in history are then reflected, and we're feeding into this energy system that we can tap into. It's like karma. You can bounce into it. It bounces you back," he says. "So what I really think we want to do is challenge people to the belief and understanding that life is not as real as it seems. There's other stuff out there."

"Other stuff" is a matter of belief, but Dr. Oz doesn't present it that way. I certainly wouldn't want my heart surgeon thinking about collective unconsciousness and bouncy karma in the same way he thinks about my heart.

And she's doing another show on past-life regression on 6/17, which most likely means that past-life regression is going to become a new Oprah-induced fad that allows people to think (and make stuff up) about themselves. Granted, it's not as scary as the Nazi-philosophy-like The Secret, and not as elitist as her funding a school in South Africa that does little more than create an instant upper class, but it's still pretty damn stultifying.