[lit-ideas] A good learning
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2007 11:32:20 -0800
JL:
I don?t want to get in the middle of your intellectual and philosophical
discussion with McEvoy, but your ?I spent a high fee to get a good learning
into something apassionate? reminded me of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle?s entrance
into the Juan Stein?s poetry workshop in Concepcion. Of course Alberto
Ruiz-Table wasn?t his real name. His real name was Carlos Wieder and from
the activities he engages in described by the narrator (in Roberto Bolano?s
Distant Star) I took him to be a serial killer, but after reading several
reviews, I now suspect he was an assassin for the Pinochet regime. He was
at least a lieutenant in the Pinochet Air Force and disposed of prisoners
because there wasn?t room for them in prisons; so one of his jobs was
killing. The thing that threw me off ? made me think he was an ordinary
demented serial killer ? was his killing of the Garmendia sisters. Yes they
were mildly engaged in subversive activities but so was everyone. It went
with being a poet, but if Carlos Wieder killed people for Pinochet, he may
well have been sent to kill them. One evidence of that is that even though
it became well known that he as Alberto Ruiz-Tagle had killed them, he was
never really pursued by the police. He merely changed his name.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;?xml=/arts/2004/12/12/bobol12.xml
In one review I learned that one would be well to have read La Literatura
Nazi en América
http://www.centerforbookculture.org/review/bookreviews/05_1/bolano.html
before reading Distant Star. This has been translated into English but has
not yet been published. One can preorder it at Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Literature-Americas-Roberto-Bolano/dp/0811217051/
ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8
<http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Literature-Americas-Roberto-Bolano/dp/0811217051
/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195499352&sr=1-7>
&s=books&qid=1195499352&sr=1-7 From Amazon.com:
?Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical
dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
?Composed of short biographies about imaginary writers from Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Columbia, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the USA, Nazi
Literature in the Americas includes descriptions of the writers' works,
cross references, a bibliography, and also an epilogue ("For Monsters"). All
the writers are carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds.
There are fourteen thematic sections with titles such as "Forerunners and
Figures of the Anti-Enlightenment," "Magicians, Mercenaries and Miserable
Individuals," and "North American Poets."
?Brisk and pseudo-academic, Nazi Literature in the Americas delicately
balances irony and pathos. Bolaño does not simply use his writers for target
practice: in the space of a few pages he manages to sketch character
portraits that are often pathetically funny, sometimes surprisingly moving,
and, on occasion, authentically chilling. A remarkably inventive, funny, and
disquieting sui generis novel, Nazi Literature in the Americas offers a
clear view into the workings of one of the most extraordinarily fecund
literary imaginations of our time.?
Anyway, when Alberto Ruiz-Tagle joins Juan Stein?s poetry workshop in
Concepcion, he claims not to have been to college (even though as Carlos
Wieder he had) or to be a student but to be an autodidact. Being an
autodidact had its own form of prestige amongst Chilean poets. There he was
amongst students and college graduates and functioning as an equal because
he had developed to their level through his own efforts (he led them to
assume) and had not (getting back to the beginning of my note) ?spent a high
fee to get a good learning.? Autodidacts are mentioned several times by
Bolano. Perhaps many of the Chilean poets claimed that, but this term has
always puzzled me. Surely everyone, even those of us who have received ?a
good learning? are autodidactic to a considerable degree ?- else we would be
like puppets or parrots. Although this would apply more to the Liberal
Arts than to the sciences ? many of them need to be parrots. I knew a
great number of engineers and scientists and many of them had very poor
understandings of anything outside their narrow fields. Those engineers who
did seem well educated had accomplished that feat on their own ? as
autodidacts, because they didn?t get it in the Engineering department.
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, November 19, 2007 9:40 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Can You Imagine 2 + 2 = 5?
McEvoy recalls one of the questions for his course in Oxford analytic
philosophy of mind -- and the foundations of Hilbertian finitist programme
before Goedel, with a special reference to Frege and Cantor, and the wrongs
of Intuitionism a la Dummett.
Answer by McEvoy:
"Yes, I can imagine 2 + 2 = 5. In fact, I imagine that every Friday
afternoon, when I'm off from Oxford, and must do the shopping on the way to
London."
"You must have heard of the greengrocer's dozen. Well, by a reductio ad
absurdum, I can show you -- but won't -- how 2 + 2 = 5 is indeed imaginable
and imaginative, if you wish."
"Give me a break. I spent a high fee to get a good learning into something
apassionate, and all you can ask me is that shit?"
"Yours respectfully, etc."
MORALE: After Freddie waltzed the waltz (and read his bestselling book by
Golancz), the Oxonian groupies were convinced to _heart_ that 'mathematics'
is *analytic* a priori, and that Kant was dozed when he thought that 7 + 5 =
was synthetic a priori.
Plato was possibly wrong too, but then so was Pythagoras, and the rest of
them before Ayer.
So, as Wittgenstein showed on his trench-diaries (c. 1915) later typed as
"Tractatus" and presented as his PhD. dissertation at U. Cantabrigensis,
mathematics does not speak about the world.
Wittgenstein was possibly enamoured of Frankie Plumpton Ramsey who _had_
written alla Russell about the logicist foundations of algebra.
In Oxford, we have to wait for the school of Dummett (Grice was once asked
-- by Michael Wrigley, "Have you read Dummett on Frege"? -- he was his
graduate student at UC/Berkeley --, getting the reply, "No, and I hope I
won't" -- Grice was more convivially interested when upon learning that
Wrigley's alma mater was "Trinity", "We're just across the wall", said
Grice, referring to the fact that Trinity is next to St. John's on St.
Giles.
--- The school of Dummett, under which I include E. J. Lemmon (died young I
suppose of cancer?) to revive a sort of interest in formalistic philosophy.
Lemmon's Logic is thus pretty formal. Too formal for my Oxonian taste!? :-(.
Then there's David Bostock, who is very kind, and Oxonian, and has written a
rather dull (but brilliant) book on ELEMENTARY Logic which is used in the
Curriculum. The dull parts are the symbolic parts that Bostock _MUST_
present. The brilliancy is in his quotes, and references to much of the
classical tradition -- Plato -- he is so familiar with.
The history of logic has in MERTON COLLEGE a big thing. Indeed, "Merton
logicians" were pretty interested in matters of calculus, etc. -- and they
would be Leibnizians, if only German.
And then there's NEWTON, who although he never made it to Oxford (he was a
Lincolnshire shepherd), was studied at Oxford with reference to his
treatment of Euclides.
Loeb has two volumes in the history of mathematics in Greece, which I should
get, since I love MATHEMATICS! (ed. by I. Thomas, an Oxonian).
Cheers,
JL
J. L.
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