Helmintholog

Dan Dennett writes — and I wrote back that I would publish this here, since the Guardian is unlikely to correct every one of his niggles. I should say at once that the errors he complains of are largely my fault, and that I am damn pleased about getting the ideas right.

Hello, Andrew,

Thanks for the heads-up. It’s in general a nice piece, and I give
you high marks for your rendition of my main views, especially your
version of my line on semantic engines and the absence of mystery. But
there is a curious scattering of minor errors, which could easily have
been cleaned up with a little fact-checking.
1. I was not born in Beirut but in Boston (as the article notes at the
end, when it gets it right)
2. My father died in 1947, not 1948.
3.We weren’t honeymooning in Greece in 1963 (that was my assistant’s
guess when she titled the scan she sent you); we were married in 1962.
4. Gould was attending my seminar at Tufts when my students held his
feet to the fire; I also attended his seminar at Harvard (by myself),
but he was reciprocating.
5. I wrote DDI before he called me a “Darwinian fundamentalist” (though
we had had the set-to about Cronin’s book in the NYRB before DDI was
published).
6. Only 1 chapter in DDI is “devoted” to Gould’s errors and
inadequacies–though if you had said 2 (including chapter 9, which has
quite a lot about Gould in it) I wouldn’t demur.

It’s amusing to see the metamorphoses that have crept into the
recollections of my friends–
7. I’m no expert skier and have often told of my preposterous
misadventure in my lone downhill race in 1964.
8. My only tennis trophy came from summer camp when I was about
thirteen, though I did teach tennis the first year I was married.
9. The marble sculpture I was working on in 1963 was not a mother and
child but a man reading a book. Nicknamed “Herman,” it has resided in a
friend’s apartment in Manhattan for lo these many years.
10. Both my friends and enemies are wrong in their guesses about the
advance for my book in progress.
11. Also, two books of mine were left out of the list at the end: my
favorite, Elbow Room, 1984, and The Intentional Stance, 1987.

(Does the Guardian ever print errata notices in the wake of
their profiles? If so, perhaps you can transmit these details to them.
If they publish letters from the profilees, the first sentence could
read: “I give Andrew Brown high marks. . . especially his version. . . “
There are a few other points that are marginally misleading: I think
Babar the gazelle departed our garden some time before my father died,
for instance, though your way of telling it is poignant indeed, and my
boat [which I hasten to add is 20 years old, and a bargain in need of
much work] officially sleeps nine–though I doubt if many couples would
be comfortable sleeping in the ‘double’ berth that is one of four in the
main cabin.)

Best wishes,

Dan

p.s. Do you think it is “breath-taking rudeness” to conjure up the
school of New Jersey Nihilism? I think you might have found something
more pungent than that. Too bad you didn’t have my more recent
comparison of Jerry Fodor to Baghdad Bob (London Review of Books of a
few weeks ago) in hand. I’m only rude to bullies, that is, to those who
have been breath-takingly rude to others over some time.

DCD

The radio programe I have been making on ethnic cleansing went out on Thursday for the first time, and is repeated tonight at 9.30pm; the profile of Dan Dennett was published yesterday, with a fantastically good photograph by Eamon McCabe.

I have been too busy, and then too exhausted, to keep this up properly. But here is a snippet, before I go on holiday, that should really go in the cuttings blog, except that doesn’t exit yet properly. It was published in the Independent’s excellent Talk of the Town magazine which got killed at the end of February. There should be no blogging next week, because I will be in Ithaca, feeding the Odyssean curiosity of my daughter the web designer.

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