Last Days of a Great City

Text Messages From Gotham

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       S   A   L   L   Y

	Hello, Auntie. I’m in Times Square.  I like it here. Here’s what I see: A black man with earphones, in his late thirties, holds up an arm and shouts, “There is no word, fool!” A middle-aged white woman talks into her cell phone. “If you don't know,” she hisses, “just say you don’t know.”
I walk past the My Way Nails and Spa where a bearded man is getting a pedicure. A boombox in the doorway blares the latest Hip-Hop anthem.
A old couple wanders past. They’re plugged into separate iPods. Each has a different soundtrack for the moment they share on Gotham’s streets. I begin to wonder how people manage to meet and fall in love in this confusion.	A woman sitting at a restaurant booth waves a sheaf of yellow papers covered with rows of numbers. She lays them down and writes more numbers, dating each one as she does. You can tell she’s as crazy as a jay.
There’s a surfeit of consciousness in Times Square. One consciousness begins to push against another. People cope by transferring some of it into machines and other objects. As I write this, a woman in a trench coat and a headscarf looks up and talks to one of the buildings.

Outline Of A Proof That P

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       S   A   L   L   Y

I keep turning up new treasures in my father’s old philosophy papers.  Last time I looked, I found what looked like a lost fragment of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.  My father knew Wittgenstein, so I assumed it was genuine.  Last night I found a dusty old monograph attributed to Saul Kripke.  I reproduced the full text below.  Although unusually short (even when you include its extended footnote), it’s fairly typical of arguments in the tradition of analytic philosophy …                                          

Some philosophers have argued that not-p.  But none of them seems to me to have made a convincing argument against the intuitive view that this is not the case.  Therefore, p.*

___

* This outline was prepared hastily—at the editors’ insistence—from a taped transcript of a lecture.  Since I was not given an opportunity to revise the draft before publication, I cannot be held responsible for any lacunae in the published version of the argument, or for any fallacious or garbled inferences resulting from faulty preparation of the manuscript.  Also, the argument now seems to me to have problems which I did not know when I wrote it, but which I cannot discuss here, and which are completely unrelated to any criticisms that have appeared in the literature (or that I have seen in manuscript).  All such criticisms misconstrue the argument.  It will be noted that the present version of the argument seems to presuppose the intuitionistically unacceptable law of double negation.  But the argument can easily be reformulated in a way that avoids employing such an inference rule.  I hope to expand on these matters further in a separate monograph.

Message in a Bottle

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       S   A   L   L   Y

M.J. sends a message to A.J.  “Please find me in the States!  Not a day goes by that I don’t remember your gentle touch & soft kisses.”

How far has this message traveled?  Is it a stunt? a beachside dramatization that ironically incorporates the message-in-a-bottle motif?  Is it little more than the unlikely chronicle of an unlikely event?  Or is it a heartfelt statement about the irreducible impossibility of human communication? 

_____

Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations:

Expectation is, grammatically, a state; like: being of an opinion, hoping for something, knowing something, being able to do something … We say “I am expecting  him,” when we believe that he will come, though his coming does not occupy our thoughts … But we also say “I am expecting him” when it is supposed to mean: I am eagerly awaiting him. … The feeling of confidence.  How is this manifested in behavior? … What is a deep feeling?  Could someone have a feeling of ardent love or hope for the space of one second—no matter what preceded or followed this second?——What is happening now has significance—in these surroundings.  The surroundings give it its importance.  And the word “hope” refers to a phenomenon of human life.

_____

Groping neuron to neuron toward that homunculus within, I find a child who speaks no English; an ocean rising up in anger; a tape of that rebellion playing to an empty house; a limitless space created by a clever trick of words; our vaunted speech, wrought in common, failing to rise above the herd now silent, now braying each to each.

Madonna and Other Scattered Objects

We invited Enrique the Gay Philosopher to guest blog on White Courtesy Telephone.  In this installment, he uses the latest issue of OUT Magazine to explore the BIG QUESTIONS that exercise the minds of people in the gay community …

There’s a cover photo of Madonna, then this photograph, six short pages into the magazine: a beautiful man, strong-jawed, bearded and most noticeably dirty.  But why?  The most compelling explanation I’ve heard is that it’s a visual pun: Acknowledging that we have succeeded in sweeping aside many barbarous stereotypes, the editors of the magazine now ironically encourage sex with a miner.

The interview with Madonna raises new questions.  No one will stop calling it the Eiffel Tower if I replace one of its beams.  But what if I replace ten? or a hundred? or all of them?  At what point does it strain our sense to identify it with the structure built by Gaustave Eiffel?  Philosophers call this the problem of identity conditions for scattered objects, and it arises with other historic structures like Cher.  We might remove a rib here, enhance a breast there, replace her nose entirely, so that over time we’re left with only a few ratty bits of the original Cher.  Would the creature then really be Cher?  I should mention that Madonna claims her supernaturally youthful appearance was achieved without plastic surgery.  Yeah, right, and I’m the Eiffel Tower!