Recent Thoughts and Efforts

I'll admit, we haven't been posting as much lately: though Joshua has been quite consistent, Matt's in the finishing stages of his PhD, but what have I been doing?

1. Book reviews. These are ostensibly what our blog is about, and yet the last one that we posted, back in late April, was my review of Danto's Andy Warhol. As per my new year's resolution, I have written two reviews since then, but both are destined for journals, one of them on Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Literature, the other on Bernard Stiegler's For a New Critique of Political Economy. The Rancière review should be up soon. This leaves, for the next few months, one more review to which I have committed, on Miguel Abensour's Democracy Against the State. For those of you who are curious, it was not a programmatic decision to take on three books recently published by Polity Press.

2. The Rancière book. For the moment we'll call it The Aesthetics of Equality. The book will range from discussions of Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Sartre/de Beauvoir, Marx and recent Marxism, to Schiller and maybe even F.T. Marinetti (adding Marinetti to the list surprises me as well). As I've mentioned before, I've already presented talks on Rancière in relation to Marx and in relation to Sartre (with a dash of Fanon, for that matter), and I hope to see these essays through to print relatively soon (in academic terms). Perhaps my blogging has slowed down, though, because I'm spending a lot of time reading through Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes.

3. Revisiting Schelling. On the heels of my keynote address to the "Aftermath of German Idealism" conference in Wuppertal, I will be giving a talk in October entitled "Pure Contingencies: A Critique of Markus Gabriel's Formal Ontology," and a talk, co-authored with our own Sean Moreland, in January, entitled "'Urged by Schelling': Schelling's Philosophy of Art and Poe's Critical and Fictional Practice." More on these soon.

4. And, of course, reading. The highlights include books by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chinua Achebe, Gonçalo M. Tavares, and Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant's In Praise of Creoleness.

The Notes Taken at One Year

Today marks the one year anniversary of The Notes Taken. We began with this short post setting out our ambitions (to review books), and since then we've written 231 posts, 60 of them being book reviews.

To me, these are decent numbers; but more importantly, I find that maintaining a blog has changed the way that I work with non-blog related reading and writing. There are other factors involved here, including the kind of clarification that is required when one starts thinking about the problems that were left unresolved with one's previous efforts, mine being the book Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art, but blogging has transformed the way I engage with texts, and the way I write (not to mention that it has expanded the circle of those with whom I converse with about philosophy, through either blogs, email correspondence, or a few guest features). It has also increased the amount that I write. And that, I think, is a positive development because writing requires a lot of practice. Some of that work has appeared here, with varying degrees of success, and much more of it remains stuck in my notebooks.

For our more recent readers, I would just like to highlight a few of the successes, primarily those of the other contributors to The Notes Taken. If you would like to get a sense of where we stand, I'd recommend, first, the online reading group/self-clarification that Matthew McLennan and I undertook around David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

Then I would add Matt's review of Slavoj Zizek's Living in the End of Times, which captures the exasperation that I know he and I feel at every new book of Zizek's that begins with some promise and ends with the same jokes he used in The Ticklish Subject or Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? I'd also recommend Matt's long running series on Yukio Mishima.

And with these I would include Sean Moreland's thoughts on the legends of J.D. Salinger, occasioned by the author's death on January 27th (on the same day as Howard Zinn).

That rounds out our Ottawa-based contributors. But the blog would not be complete without Jason Smith, currently based in Korea, who has been engaging questions of imperialism, including this post on U.S.-South Korean relations, which drew the ire of a conservative blogger, and even a small bit of traffic therefrom. Nor would the list be complete without the weekend posts by Joshua, currently living in the Central Valley of California where several of us grew up. It took a while to convince him, but eventually I prodded Joshua into making his nearly all-consuming Youtube habit a blogging habit. For me it's like going to visit his place every weekend, when he's just got to show you that clip of William F. Buckley Jr. interviewing Huey P. Newton, or Georges Bataille discussing literature and evil.

I could keep adding links, but I think I've already added too many. I'll close by saying that I've had a good year writing for The Notes Taken, and I think next year will be even better.

Off to Continuum...

Last week, I announced that Continuum is publishing a revised version of my dissertation as Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art, and today, I sent the penultimate draft to them. Two months of writing and revising, done. Now I've got another view months of clarifications and copy editing (and three conference presentations to write over the rest of 2010; but that's another story). However, at this moment, it's time for some rituals of closure. It's time to discard all the previous drafts, all those sheets of printer paper littering the apartment. It's time to take all the library books back to the office.

And then it's time to get back to the blog. I've haven't been writing much lately, which is probably understandable. But I've been keeping up, and watching the readership grow along with the work of Jason Smith (here's his latest review), Matt McLennan (his latest) and the occasional piece by Sean Moreland (one more link for his essay on Salinger). Last week, Joshua began posting choice youtube videos, a feature that I hope he will continue, putting one of his favorite hobbies to work. Before getting back to blogging in the next few days, however, I just wanted to say thanks to the other contributors for the quality work.

Sunday with Red Emma

It's been two months (minus one day) since we began The Notes Taken. The first post is dated September 16 (our 'about us' description), although the first content post is dated September 18. Two months in, and we have statistics: they are incomplete, because we've only have a sitemeter since late October, but they are revealing. Since October 25th, we've had 428 visits and 735 page views. In the last week of October, we had 98 visits/174 page views, while in the first two weeks of November, the numbers are 330/561, indicating a healthy growth in readership for the new site, courtesy of you. So, thank you.

For published posts, Devin has written a majority, at 42, Matt 7, Jason 3, Sean 1 and Josh 1. This post is the first signed by the 'Notes Taken Review.' We've been mulling it over, and we have decided to search for additional writers. Some of you, obviously, might want to contribute book reviews or brief review essays, and if you do, you can email (go to the Notes Taken Review profile and the link is there) us, and we will look it over and try and publish it if it accords with what we take our purpose to be.

Over the last week, we again had plenty to say: we discovered that Matt's been teaching the moral dilemmas of the Twilight series to his students (some people thought that Devin had posted it! Imagine!). There's some information up on the upcoming Sartre Society meeting in Memphis, filed under some shameless self-promotion. And I (meaning Devin; I can't keep writing in the third person at the moment) displayed some cynicism about the process of applying for tenure track positions, and then, more importantly, wrote a trio of blogs about politics and the economy: about the Federal Reserve as an ideological apparatus, the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the future of reform, and finally, about Tom Reifer's tribute to Giovanni Arrighi.

And then, as per tradition, if you only have time to read one post, read Joshua Kurdys's discussion about the status of women in philosophy. I've made the subject of the philosophical canon important to my Great Philosopher's course as a set up for reading The Second Sex. I've learned that if you make the status of women a critical issue in reading the canon, students are responsive (as much as they can be for a class of 130). They don't ignore questions like, what gender/sex is the Cartesian cogito? Who are the citizens in Plato or Rousseau's political philosophy? Could Hume doubt personal identity if he thought about bodies as gendered or sexual? We'll soon see how they take to Simone de Beauvoir...

When I taught this course in Toledo, my class loved Emma Goldman, despite the concerns of several 'philosophers' that Emma was not doing 'philosophy'. I didn't listen, and nor was I even the sole professor teaching Goldman's work (I ended up substitute lecturing that semester for a course in Women's Studies and one of my students was in both courses. Imagine her surprise when I walked into the other class!). I'm pretty sure we read "Anarchism: What it Really Stands for", "Traffic in Women" and "Marriage and Love" (for the rest of the book, see this page). Judge for yourself!

As for next week, since I will be out of town at the Sartre Conference, Sean Moreland is going to step in for the Sunday Review, wherein he will provide the best in links to material by or about David Foster Wallace.

Until then, a few odds and ends:

• Look into the most cited authors in 2007 (they are measured according to books cited, not articles), and see how many you are familiar with. Standing tall at the top, after all these years, is Michel Foucault.
• From the NYT Book Review, a review of Paul Auster's Invisible, and Nabokov's The Original of Laura.