Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  The campy old television cartoon The Jetsons always portrayed George as working for Spacely Sprockets. His work consisted of occasionally pressing buttons that started or stopped sprocket manufacturing machinery.  For the record, a "sprocket" is a wheel-shaped object with teeth that mesh with a chain or belt. [If they mesh with each other directly, they are "gears".]  A sprocket sounds like a very old-fashioned 19th century sort of thing. But here in the early 21st century, there are large sprocket making corporations, such as JT Sprockets, which manufacture them for motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles. Indeed, in 2026 we are closer to the 2060s when the events of the cartoon are set then we are to the 1960s when it was created, and for all we know George's boss, Mr Spacely, may be a youngster now toiling, just out of high school, at a JT Sprockets facility. The importance of sprockets in the day-to-day life of that cartoon's world is a running gag. Geor...

An age seems to take a particular disease as a sort of emblem. One disease serves as greatest fear and most intensely over-used metaphor. I think of consumption for much of the 19th century, polio for the early part of the 20th, AIDS for later in  the 20th. Now, perhaps ... Alzheimer's. One point you may have gleaned from my short list is that the emblematic disease ceases to be emblematic when it becomes curable. It can't be a metaphysical bugaboo any longer once it begins the fade into a lesser status as a manageable health concern. Alzheimer's certainly qualifies on this account.  It also qualifies by virtue of the way it attacks an individual's identity, taking it away piece by piece -- in a century that seems intent on attacking personal identity from all directions even without literal organic assistance. It attacks our identity because as humans our identity is one with certain sorts of continuity within this stream of consciousness. Knowing you...

I wrote something about the first Falcon Lord book last month, here.   I would now like to add a few words about the sequel, the title of which also serves as the headline to this blog entry. I can't be as enthusiastic. We return to the same familiar island and meet the old gang again, and the plot is handled well -- a nice mix of the new the old, and some twists on the elements that are carried over. BUT ... Metrov's command of prose style seems to have left him. I'll give just one sentence by way of example. In the midst of the climactic battle of good and evil, when all his epic machinery comes together, Metrov writes this: "The fighters became pawns in a dizzying ballet, a symphony, cacophonous and head-splitting, orchestrated by a devil's baton." There are lots of ways in which I hate that sentence. Let's start with the end: "orchestrated by a devil's baton." An orchestra might be conducted by a devil, and by a natural me...

I wrote in early August of  Jonah Lehrer , and of the circumstances that led to his departure from The New Yorker. Briefly, he invented Bob Dylan quotations with which to fortify his thesis in his book, Imagine, about the neurology of imagination and creativity (two terms he uses as synonyms). I said in that post that I hoped this scandal would prove "a setback for the cause of contemporary neuroscience or for its prestige with the broader public." It now appears I may have had that wish granted. My evidence is a piece in a recent issue of The New Statesman , "Your Brain on Pseudoscience: The Rise of Popular Neurobollocks." (For those who don't know the Anglicism, "bollocks" literally means "testicles," and is used as a general term of exasperation. One of the Urban Dictionary's definitions for it is "unfathomable rubbish," which seems to fit.) Steven Poole, the author of this article, couples Lehrer with Malcolm G...