“Piety! Hope! Generosity! WOW!!”

It's gray and misty outside, and the campus trees—pines aside—are knobby and naked. It's the kind of day where you don't want to walk through the woods by yourself at dusk because you will almost certainly be eaten by werewolves.

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I'm out of the thick part of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, which is great because I'm mowing through the rest. The section on Hutcheson really slowed me down; I set the book aside for at least a month on account of it. But then I read everything on Hume yesterday, which got really interesting. And now I'm in the section on liberalism and tradition, so MacIntyre's delivering the goods again:

“The evidence for the failures of Kant's heirs in these constructive enterprises [i.e. morality for tradition-free individuals—wrb] is contained in the reviews of the books expounding them in the professional philosophical journals. The book review pages of these journals are the graveyards of constructive academic philosophy, and any doubts as to whether rational consensus might be not after all be achievable in modern academic moral philosophy can be put to rest by reading them through regularly.”

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I don't comment much on JL Wall's blog Phaidimoi Logoi, but I love reading it. Like many book lovers—myself included—he's working through his suspicion of this new-fangled “Kindle” reading machine. One of his objection is that you can't write in the margins:

“The biggest impediment — let’s set aside all aesthetic for a moment — has to be the inability to scribble something in the margins. I can’t imagine reading much of anything without jotting down beside a passage, ‘cf. such-and-such’ — whatever it happens to remind me of. Or not having a blank page at the start of ‘The Waste Land’ on which to hastily put down a verse from Leonard Cohen’s ‘Take This Waltz’ because both talk about hyacinths. My marginalia in Absalom, Absalom! has become almost organically integrated to my reading of the book. Faulkner in particular makes me feel compelled to enter into some sort of margin-conversation with the text and its author. Not having a pencil in hand is what makes reading on the screen so distinct from reading on the page for me.”

Which is a good point. I probably should do more writing in the novels I read. Or at least the ones I own. I read a lot of library books when I was younger, so sometimes it's hard for me to bring myself to mar the page. University libraries are a constant reminder that not everyone feels the same way. For example, a previous reader of one of UNC's copies of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition was evidently enthusiastic about the introduction:




This reader's inclination to circle key words and names two or three times makes the text quite hard to read in places. And I bet this isn't even too bad an example of an over-active writer. So my question is this: what's the proper protocol for writing in the margins of university library books? I'm thinking that if you want to do more than lightly underline and make notes in pencil, you should copy the pages you need.

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Please read Mark Thompson's Culture11 piece on how CPSIA will ruin small-scale toy manufacturers. It's a really well-done bit of reporting and explanation.