Stars fell on Alabama
Being given the impetus by a hot cat to look at a book called Wandering Significance, which I at first thought might have to do with hiking, I checked it out of the library and was in short order won over by, not the author's philosophical positions, which I have in the main yet to discern, but his writing style, which has a pleasing bagginess and high-flownness in places. (How easy it is to win me over by such means! & how quickly am I turned off by either dry-as-dust prose or the smugness and satisfaction I perceive in places in the likes of Danto and Davidson—the section of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace in which the former explains how Lichtenberg couldn't possibly have been a plagiarist is a decent example in his case. It is possibly the case that one oughtn't be guided in philosophical matters by aesthetic considerations, and if I did that, it is possibly also the case that I'd have to join Quine and his desert landscapes—but then, is it not also precisely the case that possibly one should do nothing but? Weighty questions indeed.) Of course there are perils in grandiloquence too; one might be tempted, riding high and not caring what trouble one incurs, to try an unknown path, and suffer deflection, in the form, perhaps, of misspelling a five-dollar word beyond one's means: "filagree", say, for "filigree", on p 7. (Does no one edit anymore?) Or one's metaphors may become confusingly overwrought: Some of this appetite undoubtedly derives simply from the inertia that keeps old doctrines aloft even after they have become detached from the bow from which they were originally sprung
(xiv)—quite right, old bean, and I'd be willing to overlook the, hmmm, excessively poetical "sprung" there if not for that odd "detached": an arrow isn't attached to a bow in the first place—how would you shoot it?—and it isn't, when sprung therefrom, detached, either, but rather shot, loosed, released, aut cetera. (And why would appetite derive from that inertia?)
Further in: it is probably best not to assert that e2πi+1=0, when actually it equals two. It is eπi plus one that equals zero. Confidence is not inspired in such wise.
Comments
on 2008-07-04 12:09:28.0, caldwellian commented:
Have we already ascertained, then, that you are a fan of the inimitable Mountain Goats? Or is this an improbably repeated coincidence?
and, further, on 2008-07-04 8:46:17.0, ben wolfson commented:
That would be telling.
and, further, on 2008-07-04 10:52:46.0, caldwellian commented:
So coy! Of course.