Late readings: A. Daudet's Lettres de mon Moulin (first time I ever read the thing straight through, with all the footnotes and dossier at the end); A. Pope's Satires and miscellaneous poetry (life's too short, ever, to read the Genial Dwarf's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey). Love 'em both very, very much.

But now, reflecting: Much as I admire Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, Etc., and his reinvention of faculty psychology (which he has not quite i coglioni to acknowledge humbly and simply to be such), I have from the beginning had grave reservations about his attempts: (1) to stretch and straiten psychology on the Procrustean bed of evolutionary theory; (2) to redefine plain, old-fashioned mental faculties as "modularities;" and (3) to insist, despite every evidence to the contrary, that faculties so redefined are "computational." Still, to my delight, he has given a good, richly deserved thwacking to behaviourists, dualists, primitivists, and pragmatists. I just knew when I started reading the mindless, placid bovine excretions of Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, et alia, that Pinker had to be their natural wolvish enemy; that he would nip them; and that they would panic, run in circles, and bleed. And so, of course, th'event (the disgraceful bitch-fight between Pinker and Lakoff) did prove. Of course, I've been laughing my butt off. My basic sympathies, as you might suppose, are still with Pinker (and Chomsky)--But damn, why can't he just give up the silly, over-particular insistance on how our faculties distinguish themselves, where they come from, and what they're for? Just a little more slack on the ideological, pseudo-scientific reins, would produce so much more clarity and insight. But nothing drives a man like adherence to a theory which in his heart he knows to be untenable.