Author: Ophelia Benson

You’ve been clamoring and longing for more news from Amherst New York (except for the one of you who has been clamoring and longing for less, of course), so here is some. (Anyone who finds the whole idea lame: here’s a bit of advice: don’t read it.)

I’m in the back hall of the Center for Inquiry (or Centre for Enquiry, if you prefer – Jeremy remarked as we passed the sign outside that it was odd for such a place to spell its own name wrong not once but twice), surrounded by Russian students talking to each other, typing on one of the Center’s spare computers that are available for guests. There is no internet in the guesthouse (no broadband, no WiFi, no anything) which is not always absolutely convenient, such as when Jeremy is working on his next lecture and wants to look things up and find useful video clips, or when he wants me to find and print some relevant quotations from B&W’s Quotations. Dear CfI could do a little better in the, um, organization and equipment department; but never mind.

Jeremy’s lectures are going down very well on the whole, despite the fact that what he is basically doing is undermining or challenging pretty much everything Paul Kurtz has ever said. Well it’s this humanist thing you see – we’re atheists, we’re secularists, but we’re not humanists. People got quite uneasy with determinism yesterday – but that’s how these things fall out.

Joe Hoffmann gave a lovely opening address this morning, which I asked if I could publish here the moment he’d finished saying it, and he said I could, so you have that to look forward to. He’s a very amusing guy, Joe is.

There are a lot of groundhogs here. I’m not used to larger mammals – larger than squirrels. Well I’m used to dogs and cats, but I mean running around on their own authority. It’s fun to see groundhogs. I saw a snake yesterday – I followed it through the grass for awhile, until it vanished under a shrub. I like seeing snakes, and would like to see them more often. I don’t get out much, you know – out in the sense of traveling – so I like to be in a new place, even if it is a slightly Martian one with a bad case of suburban hyperexpansion.

You remember I said about Jeremy the fashion icon? It’s even worse than that – he struts, and he shows off his biceps while lecturing. It’s really quite shockingly immature and embarrassing. He also kept smelling the T shirt he’d worn when lecturing on Saturday – he couldn’t believe what it smelled like and kept going back to confirm; he went on doing that for two days. He wanted me to say that here. Yes I know all this is lame, but I don’t have time to do real posts while I’m here, so I do absurd ones instead. I haven’t posted half the ridiculous things about Jeremy that he’s suggested I should.

Julian’s not as absurd – but he’s quite absurd. He does a broad American accent, and he sings little snatches of song complete with sound effects and similar. He keeps trying to do a Joe Hoffmann imitation which is entirely hopeless, it sounds nothing like him, but he does a good Tony Blair. He went to Toronto then came back here then went back to the UK. I saw Toronto far far far in the distance on Sunday, across Lake Ontario from a town called Niagara-on-the-Lake. It voss pretty.

I gotta go. The building is locking up.

I don’t usually do this, of course, but time is limited, as you know, so I’m just going to adapt a comment I left at Talking Philosophy. Someone had replied to Julian’s remark about being unable to blog much while here with the observation that they have the Internet in Buffalo…

They probably do have the internets in Buffalo, but we’re not exactly in Buffalo (Julian is a little shaky on geography*), we’re in Amherst, which is a suburb of Buffalo. Man is it a suburb. It’s the most suburban suburb I’ve ever seen. It’s like a Platonic suburb. All the roads are four-lane highways (at least) with a speed limit of 45 mph (at the slowest). Even the dang campus of the University (SUNY Buffalo, north campus) is full of 45 mph freeways – which seems very bizarre, to me, used as I am to the campus of the University of Washington where the speed limit is 15 mph. The shops are all chains, and so are the ‘restaurants.’ Still – joy is available – yesterday evening Jeremy and I took the now-familiar long walk up one mini-freeway (which goes under a real freeway, which roars so loudly overhead that we have to stop talking until we reach the other side) and along the one that has all the chain shops and eateries – he wanted a bit of electronic equipment, and he spied a Macy’s so we tried that but it seemed to be all clothes so that was no good and I was just saying why don’t we ask someone instead of walking around in here forever when we got to the far side which opened onto – you’ll never guess – a mall. Jeremy was in instant bliss. ‘I’m in heaven!’ he exclaimed rapturously. He likes malls.

Here’s something you don’t know about Jeremy, and neither did I. He’s a clothes horse. He’s a fashion idol. It’s just T shirts and jeans, but it’s a particular kind of T shirt and jeans. Very amusing.

Anyway, internet is patchy at the Center and non-existent at the guesthouse where we’re living, so we really can’t do much internets stuff.

*(joke!)

Julian did his lectures last week, Jeremy is doing his this week and next; I did the keynote address at the beginning. The three of us rented a car and drove to the Finger Lakes on Thursday; it was great fun, especially since we had the rare perfect weather for it – bright, clear, sharp, ideal for gazing at long blue lakes with rolling country around them. The last bit was slightly hairy, because we dawdled too long in Seneca Falls (the Stoical birthplace of US feminism) and we had to be back by 6:30 because Jeremy was scheduled to give Opening Remarks at the dinner that launched the second set of lectures. Jeremy doesn’t drive and Julian hasn’t driven a huge amount, especially on US freeways, so I drove, and I went 10 to 20 miles faster than I had in the morning, but the time still kept sliding away and our ETA kept changing – 6:00, Jeremy will still have time for a shower; oh dear, 6:10, Jeremy will have to swipe his armpits and let it go at that; uh oh, 6:20, we’re just plain going to be late, but they’ll be eating, the remarks come after the dinner, it’s okay – and then I took the wrong exit, and mass despair took over. But in the event Julian skillfully navigated us through some squalid bit of outer Buffalo and we weren’t late after all and Jeremy smelled like a rose (well not really) and all was well.

He’s been working on his lecture for today, with me kibbitzing (Julian’s in Toronto, and he’s going back to the UK tomorrow); he may use some of the thought experiments he’s done here; we’re talking about Jonathan Haidt on disgust and purity and so on. It should be a very interesting afternoon.

So this is the end of the first module (as they call it). Julian got a (partial) standing ovation – most embarrassing. We went out for a celebratory (or good-bye [to Julian and to Charles Echelbarger]) with Ibn Warraq and Joe Hoffmann and others. Jeremy wondered if he could ask skeptical questions about skeptics and humanists, and the consensus seemed to be that he could and should, though everyone for miles around urged him to be sweet about it. Two women came up at the end and said ‘We have some questions for you’ and I figured it was a delegation from Homeland Secuurity or Animal Control or similar, but it was just a survey about how wonderful everything was or wasn’t. It seemed odd that it took two people, but never mind.

My ‘keynote address’ went better than you might expect considering that it was me giving it, that is to say, it went well, and I didn’t fall down or cry or throw up or anything. Jeremy took pictures of me doing it. Perhaps he’ll stick them on here some time. We’ll see.