I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: WEEZER-Hurley (2010).

In my head, no band garners as much debate as Weezer.  According to this article, a man offered them $10 million to break up.  Even I go back and forth about whether they are great pop song writers or incredible sell outs.  I mean, look at one of the items on their thanks list for Hurley: “Dodge–makers of the timeless Challenger.”  Is this ironic or not and if not, does it matter?  I’m also torn by Rivers Cuomo’s Harvard degree, which I would think means he would write intellectually rigorous songs–and yet he never does.

But what of it?  Let’s talk about the music.  It has dawned on me that the closest band to compare them to is Cheap Trick.  They write poppy songs with often heavy guitars that are completely sing along-y but are in no way alternative to anything.  And yet everyone loves Cheap Trick, so why not love Weezer, too?

Hurley is no different.  Each song is 3 minutes of pure pop (for crying out loud Desmond Child is on one track–put one in the sell out column).  But they also have some odd fans on this disc: the crew from Jackass sings backing vocals on “Memories” and Michael Cera plays mandolin and sings backing vocals on “Hang On” (although you can’t hear any of them really).  “Hang On,” by the way is their most Cheap Trick-y song to date.

“Unspoken” features a flute and acoustic guitars until about two minutes into a three-minute song.  Then it bursts out of acousticland and into heavy rocking guitars.  The one song I don’t get is “Where My Sex?” which I suppose is the controversial song on the disc.  He’s clearly talking about socks but he keeps saying sex.  I really have no idea why.  It’s not funny, even remotely.  It’s just an odd decision.  And I would say I rather dislike the song, but the chorus is great, as is the totally unexpected third section (which is like  pop song unto itself) that comes in 2 and a half minutes out of nowhere.

“Smart Girls” has to be ironic, but who knows anymore.  To me the most interesting song is “Brave New World.”  It eschews the standard big-chords-for-choruses format they’ve been using with a much heavier guitar and single guitar notes in the verses.  (Although the chorus is, once again super catchy).

My version of Hurley has bonus tracks which are separated by an interesting 10 seconds of string music.  The bonus tracks include a cover of a song from Yo Gabba Gabba ( I really must watch that show some time).  There’s also a great cover of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” (in many ways Weezer is like a harder rocking version of Coldplay in terms of success and obvious sellout possibilities).  Although this live version shows that Rivers’ voice is no match for Chris Martin’s.

“I want to Be Someone” is an earnest acoustic solo track while “Represent” (Rocked Out Mix) is one of the heaviest things they’ve done.  I assumed the original was on Raditude, but it’s not.  Evidently it’s the unofficial song of the U.S. World Cup soccer team.  Huh, who knew?

So yes, it seems that they’re pretty much sell outs.  And yet for thirty minutes (all of their discs are so nicely short) it’s easy to stop worrying about “indie or not” and just sing along.

[READ: November 7, 2010] Fate, Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will

First I wanted to thank Columbia University Press for sending me an Uncorrected Proof of this book. I was pretty excited to read it, but to get it a few weeks early was even cooler (and, no, this won’t have any impact on my review).

Second, I wanted to state exactly what this book IS (because I wasn’t entirely sure myself).  The book is a reprinting of David Foster Wallace’s philosophy graduate undergrad thesis.  However, rather than just publishing the thesis (and giving us a short book or a long book with one sentence per page), Columbia University Press has packed the book with a great many essays that help to contextualize the thesis.  The Preface by Steven H. Cahn & Maureen Eckert explains this quite neatly.

So, my (briefer) version of the background: DFW’s thesis is about Richard Taylor’s article “Fatalism” (1962).  CUP has also included Taylor’s initial article (so we can see what DFW is talking about).  And even more than that, when Taylor’s article was initially published, it caused a bit of controversy and a lot of responses.  So, to get a sense of everything that DFW was working with (and against), this book also includes the intellectual dialogue: articles that range from four to ten pages (and also include a dense of Taylor by Steven H. Cahn himself (published in 1964).

Part II of the book includes an introduction by Maureen Eckhart and DFW’s essay.

Part III is a brief look at DFW as a student written by a former professor, Jay Garfield.

Before I get to the meat of the book itself, I wanted to say that I didn’t know anything about this essay.  And I’d thought about this thesis as possibly an interesting piece of philosophy from an author whose work I greatly admired.    Well the introduction to this book states in pretty certain terms that my thinking about this thesis is a massive understatement.  For, in fact, DFW’s thesis undermined Taylor’s argument in ways that no other argument had been able to do before.  His thesis more or less repudiated Taylor’s original essay.  The thesis also won the Amherst University Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize in Philosophy (and a wonderful piece of trivia: DFW’s father James won the same prize in 1959).  So, yes, this isn’t just a graduate undergrad thesis, this is real philosophy.

On to the book:

As I mentioned, the Preface sets up the background of how the book is constructed and why it contains the work it does.  This is followed by an outstanding introduction by James Ryerson.  Ryerson contextualizes DFW’s life in terms of this thesis.  But he also summarizes the essential arguments of both Taylor and DFW’s response in layman’s terms that are pretty easy to understand (DFW’s argument is pretty esoteric and not terribly easy).  Even if you’re not interested in reading the thesis per se, the introduction is a great explanation of what’s going on and the philosophical maelstrom that DFW dove into.  It’s also, in my opinion, essential reading if you plan to read the whole book, because you really get put in a philosophical frame of mind.

But more than talking about just this essay, the introduction looks at DFW as philosophy student and a literature student and how he tried to reconcile and commingle the two.  The later sections of the introduction address DFW’s obsession with Wittgenstein, both his initial love of the Tractatus and his later obsession with Philosophical Investigations.  The obsession with P.I. is evident in The Broom of the System, but the introduction also talks about David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress and how DFW felt that Markson wrote a far more convincing fiction incorporating Wittgenstein than he himself managed in BotS.

The end of the introduction also talks about DFW’s single-minded viewpoint w/r/t Wittgenstein and solipsism (the whole point of P.I.) and suggests that although DFW was obsessed with this aspect of Wittgenstein’s writing, Wittgenstein himself did not seem terribly bothered by the idea of solipsism.  It’s a fascinating idea that when someone obsesses over an idea, he may obsess, if not incorrectly, then at least in a way the author never intended. And yet despite that one can still produce a work of greatness.

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Part I opens with another brief introduction by Stephen M. Cahn a three page article that discusses Taylor’s argument and talks sympathetically about Taylor himself.   Then comes Richard Taylor’s “Fatalism” article.  I’m not going to go into it really, but I will say that after 30 credits of philosophy graduate work, it is nice to read a philosophy article that makes such an astonishing point in just 6 pages and with so little jargon.  In sum: he argues that we have no free decisions in our life.  Basically, if the barrel of a gun is hot that means that I had to shoot the gun.  If it’s not, then  could not have fired the gun.  The outcome determines my action.   Obviously this is completely absurd, and yet with five simple steps he proves that it is logically true.

The next several articles are attempts to refute or defend the argument (some use natural language while others get into mathematical and logical symbols).  But what I find most interesting as a person who hasn’t read philosophy articles for over a decade is that Taylor seems so nice and unassuming in his earth-shattering article and the debaters all seem like jerks.  They seem so offended by what he wrote that they want to utterly refute his argument.  And when Taylor responds to them, he once again seems very nice.  I know this is not philosophically professional (or relevant) but it was still interesting, and had me rooting for absurdity.

The critics included are

• John Turk Saunders (who seems to be the major needle in Taylor’s side) and has two articles here
• Peter Makepeace
• Bruce Aune
• Raziel Abelson
• Richard Sharvy
• Charles D. Brown

This final article against Taylor is used as the basis for DFW’s argument, although DFW goes much further.

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Part II of the book includes what we’ve been waiting for: all 76 pages of DFW’s thesis.  There is an introductory article by Maureen Eckert who summarizes the argument in layman’s terms (thank you, it’s very helpful).

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As for DFW’s argument itself, I am going to try to summarize and cite some examples, but be mindful that my examples are simplified versions of his own and are, rankly, lame paraphrasing, so don’t take my version as meaning that DFW’s is lame as well.  Also, since this is an Advanced Proof, the page numbers may not be accurate.

The first few sections of DFW’s article are quite readable.   In Section I, he summaries Taylor and provides a new example of Taylor’s example (one that is slightly more specific than Taylor’s example of a general giving an order for battle).

In Section II he addresses the prominent criticisms of Taylor and why they haven’t worked. He dismisses most of them but when he gets to the above mentioned Brown article, he says that Brown has hit upon something: sometimes the necessary item is a condition of and other times it is a condition for.  So, in section III, he furthers the idea that Brown started and he gives two examples: Example 1: Giving an order means a battle commences.  Example 2: Combustion means the presence of fuel.  In example 1, the battle is a necessary consequence of the order, but in example 2, the presence of fuel is not a consequence of combustion (for many reasons).  This subtle distinction forms part of the basis of DFW’s argument.

In Section IV he sets out his argument that explains this example in more detail.  Although there are a lot of mathematical symbols and logic, he helpfully puts it in natural language as well.  And this natural language I found very helpful.  He distinguishes between “can’t have occurred” and “couldn’t occur.”  For example: “He can’t have gone for a drive in his car an hour ago; the hood of his car’s not even warm,” vs “He couldn’t go for a drive in his car an hour ago; an hour ago his car was broken.”  He also reintroduces the question of the Battle by changing the example it to the undoubtedly more humorous to his advisors:

Suppose that the day before yesterday a group of terrorists brought a completely assembled and fully functional nuclear weapon onto the Amherst College campus.  Suppose further that yesterday the head terrorist… [sat] with his finger on the weapon’s fully functional triggering mechanism all day, but did not press the trigger and so did not cause a nuclear explosion to occur (169).

I read  this whole example as if it were written with a mischievous grin.

Section V is the beast.  This is where his formal introduction of what he calls “System J” enters the paper.  System J is the methodology he created (with a mathematician) that sets up the “mother-daughter” systems and numbers of possible outcomes.   There’s lots of Capital letters with subscripts and diagrams and with circles and arrows on the back of each one.   I admit I skimmed some of the really difficult (to me) sections, but I was able to follow along reasonably well.

Section VI is where DFW goes beyond the original scope of his paper and begins applying System J to other questions of physical modality and time.   This leads to the one real joke in the paper (which seems quite funny after all the logic work).  Since in Taylor’s argument, you know that the battle happened when you see the headline in the paper.  And so but, with that in mind, DFW gives us:

Assume that there was in fact a sea-battle yesterday, and that, as Taylor cooks his example, the newspaper I am about to open is unprecedentedly efficient and conscientious (not to mention battle-fixated), and thus that only if there were no battle yesterday would there be anything other than a glaring battle deadline” (200).

He argues against another fatalist argument put forth by Taylor and Keith Lehrer.  This time he refines their example.  In the example, T & L talk about Smith arriving at 4PM only if he leaves at 3:30.  DFW notes that this is hard to quantify exactly because 3:30 is actually a pretty unspecific time.  By refining the time to 3:30:19.97, he makes the question more specific and also shows that Smith must make a decision to arrive or not–it can’t be both or neither.

Section VII is the conclusion.  He summarizes and reiterates that “if Taylor and the fatalists want to force upon us a metaphysical conclusion, they must do metaphysics not semantics.  And this seems entirely appropriate” (213).

The thing that struck me up front was how much longer this paper was than all of the others before it, and especially how much longer it was than the original Taylor article.  This is not because of DFW’s proclivity for length; rather it is his proclivity for thoroughness.   It also reads a lot like a thesis (as opposed to an article sent for publication) which adds more pages.  And yet DFW’s paper is over ten times as long as Taylor’s.  Now that’s  thoroughness!

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Part III includes two epilogues: the first is by Jay L. Garfield, the professor who helped DFW formulate his thesis.  It is a brief memory of working with this “philosopher with a hobby of writing fiction”.  The final one is another article by Taylor.  This is included because the editors of the book wanted to show that despite Taylor’s argument about Fatalism, he himself was not really convinced by the reality of his own argument.  This second article was actually published five years prior to “Fatalism” and it is an argument in favor of Aristotle’s statements that the future can never be said to be true or false.

Taylor states his case and then attempts to refutes several arguments that people have leveled against Aristotle over the years.  It’s quite an interesting article and really shows what a great and thorough thinker Taylor was.  No counterarguments are given to this article (the book would be huge otherwise).  But that’s okay, it ends on a nice note

I found this book to be very satisfying.  You certainly have to appreciate philosophical thought (and a little knowledge of logical/mathematical thinking certainly helps).

The only thing I don’t like about the book is the cover.  I find the picture of DFW sitting by a bare light bulb to be weird ad kind of off-putting.  But hey, maybe that’s an accurate look at how he spent his philosophical downtime.