Imagination

I've been Netflixing some over the break.

That's a verb now.  (I've declared it to be so.)

Netflixing describes that sort of watching that has been enabled--or, rather, encouraged--by the patterns of availability of online streaming of television shows.  (I've been doing it over Amazon Prime, just as much as over Netflix, but we'll give the tip o' the hat to Netflix.)

One can't watch the current season of one's favorite shows on Netflix, so one dredges the catalog of available shows and wonders what calculus of licensing fees, popular demand, and bandwidth capacity led to, for example, the choice of only seasons four and five of Inspector Lewis being available, while the entire run of Midsomer Murders is on tap; Psych but not The Mentalist; or only two or three Jane Austen adaptations at a time (and never the best ones).

Still, one finds a series and watches it from beginning to end--in binges, if it catches one's eye or if one has some obligation to avoid, over a more prudent time span if it is merely enjoyable.

One could do this in the olden days, too, back when DVDs still existed.  But everything old is made new, and we'll let the young'uns believe that they invented glut-viewing.

I've been watching British mysteries, because I've already watched the entire run of West Wing (twice) and Firefly (seven times), and because when a nation decides it would rather have four well-written episodes per year than twenty-two episodes of, well, Castle, they do tend to crank out some decent stuff.

Also, the cliches of a different culture are always new to you, for at least the first several seasons, and even cliched and hackneyed dialogue sounds very fine in at least three-fourths of the different British accents I can more or less identify now.

In any case, once I started to get a feel for British cliches, I noticed one standout among some of the older shows.  They almost never end in armed confrontations, and even when they do, the arms rarely get used.

It's a very interesting contrast to American cop shows, which may, for the first season or two, play with different ways of creating tension and resolving the final show-down.  But if a show survives into the third season, you'll find the number and intensity of shoot-outs increasing dramatically as the series wears on.  (They run out of more interesting things to do, I guess.)

But Inspector Lewis, Inspector Barnaby, Inspector Lynley--they don't carry guns.  So they can't wrap up a case with a nice, satisfying shoot-out.  Oh, there's the odd villain threateningly waving around a weapon, the occasional deranged mass murderer whom the plucky detectives must confront without recourse to anything but their wits and their words.

Interestingly enough, British TV writers can come up with words for that sort of moment.  (The few times the writers of Castle have tried have been painfully cliched and strained the limits of suspended disbelief.)  Perhaps constraint--not being able to write in a shoot-out--is a goad to creativity rather than a limit to it.

Perhaps if writers of American crime shows set themselves a constraining goal--"Hey, let's write five episodes this season where the cops don't draw their weapons!"--they might come up with something better than "She wouldn't have wanted you to do this, would she?" at the pivotal moment.

Whether artistic creativity might be a goad to other sorts of creativity--the moral and intellectual resources to do something other than kill threatening individuals when they come our way--is another question entirely.

Or perhaps not.

Reading List

I've started my reading for the year, and have finished two books so far!  Wahoo!

I decided that coming up with a reading list would be more helpful than not, so I took a stab at it.

A few years ago, I tried making up a year's reading list by picking ten books in ten different categories.  I think I'm going to go with a similar approach, but I found it helpful to think about taking a course in something.  When you're taking a course, you read some primary materials and some secondary studies.  So, I've tried to come up with courses I want to take this year and to come up with a reading list for those courses.

I also have a reading list for the courses I'm teaching this year, as well as a Just For Fun list, because everyone needs one of those.

I don't have all of them filled in yet, but there's enough there to start with.

Let me know if you're planning to read any of these this year, too!  And if you have any suggestions for me to bulk up any of these "courses," I'd love it!

Great Books: Ancient History

1.     * SWB Story of the Ancient World

2.     Copleston History of Philosophy

3.     * Aristotle, Politics

4.     * Plato, Apology

5.     * Plato, Laws

6.     * Epictetus, The Discourses

Theology: Patristics

7.   Brown, Body and Society

8.     Augustine, City of God

9.     * Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian

10.  * Chrysostom, On Marriage and Family Life

11.  * Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty

12.  * Chrysostom, Homilies on St. John

13.  * Basil, On the Human Condition

14.  * Basil, On Social Justice

15.  * Lactantius, Divine Institutes

16.  * Ambrose, On the Duties of the Clergy

17.  * Griffiths, On Lying

Courtesy and Social Morality

18.  * Carter, Civility

19.  * Bourdieu, Distinction

Bioethics: Autonomy

20.  * Elshtain, Sovereignty

21.  * Elliott, Rules of Insanity

22.  * Weisstub, Autonomy and Human Rights in Health Care

23.  * Engelhardt, Philosophy of Medicine

24.  * Engelhardt, Bioethics Critically Reconsidered

25.  * Mazur, Informed Consent, Proxy Consent, and Catholic Bioethics

26.  * Pellegrino, For the Patient’s Good

27.  * Hester, Community as Healing

28.  * Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity

University Concerns

29.  Bain, What the Best College Professors Do

30.  Barzun, Begin Here

31.  * Twale, Faculty Incivility

32.  * Mason, Do Babies Matter?

33.  * Ward, Academic Motherhood

34.  * Nussbaum, Not for Profit

Jane Austen

35.  * Leithart, Miniatures and Morals

36.  * Chwe, Jane Austen, Game Theorist

Classes I'm Teaching

37.  The Portable Atheist

38.  Confucius, Analects

39.  Bhagavad Gita

40.  Santideva, Bodhicaryavatara

41.  Prothero, God is Not One

42.  Long, Christian Ethics

43.  Wells, Christian Ethics reader

Just For Fun

44.  * Howatch, Glittering Images

45.  * Matchar, Homeward Bound

46.  Gaskell, Cranford

47.  * Atwood, The Year of the Flood

48.  * Russell, The Sparrow

49.  Tolkien, Hobbit

50.  * Fforde, Woman Who Died a Lot

(Strikethrough means that I've finished reading them.  Asterisk means that I don't yet have a copy.)

Christmas Eve Recap

I did a lot of baking in the weeks leading up to Christmas.  But none of it was for us.

It was for teachers . . .

. . . nursery workers . . .

. . . neighbors . . .

. . . and other assorted folk.

But we did have a lovely Christmas Eve dinner, just for us.

Hope you all had a lovely holiday.  A very happy New Year to you.

Ordinary Reading

I calculated last year that if I lived a slightly-above-average lifespan and read a book a week for the rest of my life, I could read about 2500 more books in my lifetime.

This does not seem like nearly enough.

But I won't even read that many if I keep up my current pace, so we'll need to step up our game in 2014.

Now, if I read two books a week for the rest of my life (presuming a slightly-above-average lifespan), I could get a good 5000 more books read.  And that seems more reasonable than 2500.

So I decided to set 100 books a year as a goal.

I can't decide whether to get a list going and be organized about it or to grab the nearest book and read.

If I had a list of 100 books, I'd always have an idea of what to read next.  And I could put together some mutually illuminating selections.

If I just grabbed books that looked good, maybe I'd finish more books.

It's tough to say which is better.

It's hard to self-educate.  Much easier when someone else is assigning your reading list.  My best grad school classes had a one-page syllabus.  15 weeks, 15 books, one paper.  Boom.

Maybe I should just make up seven courses with 15 books apiece.  There's an idea.

In any case, I've already finished my first book of the year.  The fact that I only had twenty pages left to read is irrelevant.  I'm declaring myself off to a good start.