Hurray for you! Hurray for getting out of academic philosophy and its endless trolleying! And hurray for you coming to DC - if I walk by you and recognize you, I won't make a fuss, but might murmur "Stanley Cavell sure had some great ideas and an impenetrable style!" and run away to the nearest Metro stop. Seriously, though, good move.
Ha! Reading the marvelous passage in middle of this post (beginning with the bit about about technical and aesthetic scores) reminded me of this passage from Cavell (from his essay "Austin at Criticism", from Must We Mean What We Say?):
"And anything would be pleasanter than the continuing rehearsals—performable on cue by any graduate student in good standing—of how Descartes was mistaken about dreams, or Locke about truth, or Berkeley about God, or Kant about things-in-themselves or about moral worth, or Hegel about “logic,” or Mill about “desirable,” and so forth; or about how Berkeley mistook Locke, or Kant Hume, or Mill Kant, or everybody Mill, and so forth. Such “explanations” are no doubt essential, and they may account for everything we need to know, except why any man of intelligence and vision has ever been attracted to the subject of philosophy."
(To paraphrase something Cavell said in a class I had with him, we might rewrite "for our ears" the final phrase to read "...why any person...", a rewriting I assume he would have done himself had this essay been written twenty years later.)
Incidentally, if you find Cavell impenetrable, I recommend finding a video of him giving a lecture and listening to it. My experience of reading Cavell is that I need to hear it in his voice to hear how precise and perfect his language is. To take one small example, every time he says what for any other writer would be filler ("that is to say" or "we might think" and the like) he *really means it*, and it is a philosophical point he is making (that we MIGHT think this, etc). It's hard to hear in his prose without hearing it first in his voice (perhaps appropriately for a writer who wrote about the voice in opera so well. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results, of course, but after I had a class with him I found him much more readable. And even now, picking up his work again (as I do from time to time) it helps to hear a bit of his actual voice before reading his literary one.
You know, I never meant to make the man into an epithet - "impenetrable Cavell,' like- "grey-Eyed Athena." It's interesting - when I've returned to his essays ("Must We Mean What We Say" is the one I own) - I do read them aloud, and I look for his cadences. Thanks for letting me know what's on the 'Tubes.
Hurray for you! Hurray for getting out of academic philosophy and its endless trolleying! And hurray for you coming to DC - if I walk by you and recognize you, I won't make a fuss, but might murmur "Stanley Cavell sure had some great ideas and an impenetrable style!" and run away to the nearest Metro stop. Seriously, though, good move.
Ha! Reading the marvelous passage in middle of this post (beginning with the bit about about technical and aesthetic scores) reminded me of this passage from Cavell (from his essay "Austin at Criticism", from Must We Mean What We Say?):
"And anything would be pleasanter than the continuing rehearsals—performable on cue by any graduate student in good standing—of how Descartes was mistaken about dreams, or Locke about truth, or Berkeley about God, or Kant about things-in-themselves or about moral worth, or Hegel about “logic,” or Mill about “desirable,” and so forth; or about how Berkeley mistook Locke, or Kant Hume, or Mill Kant, or everybody Mill, and so forth. Such “explanations” are no doubt essential, and they may account for everything we need to know, except why any man of intelligence and vision has ever been attracted to the subject of philosophy."
(To paraphrase something Cavell said in a class I had with him, we might rewrite "for our ears" the final phrase to read "...why any person...", a rewriting I assume he would have done himself had this essay been written twenty years later.)
Incidentally, if you find Cavell impenetrable, I recommend finding a video of him giving a lecture and listening to it. My experience of reading Cavell is that I need to hear it in his voice to hear how precise and perfect his language is. To take one small example, every time he says what for any other writer would be filler ("that is to say" or "we might think" and the like) he *really means it*, and it is a philosophical point he is making (that we MIGHT think this, etc). It's hard to hear in his prose without hearing it first in his voice (perhaps appropriately for a writer who wrote about the voice in opera so well. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results, of course, but after I had a class with him I found him much more readable. And even now, picking up his work again (as I do from time to time) it helps to hear a bit of his actual voice before reading his literary one.
Congratulations Becca! Looking forward to reading you in the WaPo.
congrats on the gig.
Congrats on the book critic gig.
Also, liking in solidarity in finding Stoner to be f*cking annoying, too.
You know, I never meant to make the man into an epithet - "impenetrable Cavell,' like- "grey-Eyed Athena." It's interesting - when I've returned to his essays ("Must We Mean What We Say" is the one I own) - I do read them aloud, and I look for his cadences. Thanks for letting me know what's on the 'Tubes.