Black Maps

"Dactylitis"

2011-03-31T12:05:00.001-05:00

Periosteal reaction

to adjacent tendonitis

is occasionally evident

radiographically.

Pollini on music

2011-01-05T11:26:00.002-06:00

"In a way art is a little like the dreams of a society. They seem to contribute little, but sleeping and dreaming are vitally important in that a human couldn't live without them, in the same way a society cannot live without art."

From his interview with the Guardian, "Maurizio Pollini: a life in music"

Hacker on Philosophy

2010-11-16T17:40:00.002-06:00

James Garvey discusses Peter Hacker (wiki) and Wittgenstein in "Hacker's Challenge" in The Philosopher's Magazine. Here is a quote from that article by Hacker:

“Philosophy does not contribute to our knowledge of the world we live in after the manner of any of the natural sciences. You can ask any scientist to show you the achievements of science over the past millennium, and they have much to show: libraries full of well-established facts and well-confirmed theories. If you ask a philosopher to produce a handbook of well-established and unchallengeable philosophical truths, there’s nothing to show. I think that is because philosophy is not a quest for knowledge about the world, but rather a quest for understanding the conceptual scheme in terms of which we conceive of the knowledge we achieve about the world. One of the rewards of doing philosophy is a clearer understanding of the way we think about ourselves and about the world we live in, not fresh facts about reality.”

Emerson

2010-09-16T09:38:00.001-05:00

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.

"Assistance"

2010-06-09T21:39:00.009-05:00

In a cloud of exhaustion the train pulls into the station. The doors slide to the side meeting the crowded platform full of mothers and girlfriends and children jostling for a clear vantage of their loved ones spilling from the door one by one like chickens from a narrow coop. The sun, still low in the sky, peeks through the slots in the roof. Rigid from the long night ride in artificial illumination, you raise a hand to block the morning sun, then realize the futility of the act and lower your hand. You stare at the sun and the sun stares back.

The night ride wasn't easy, a passage common enough, but this time your quota for hardship is full. You're ready to be done. Now, once you're finally stationary you drop from the train, breathing a sigh, but your deliverance is drowned by the push of passengers, and you're reminded of the unbearable absence of breathable air.

Coming out of the crowd, there's a man in a gray wool suit holding a small piece of paper with your name on it. He raises his hand in greeting and leans forward to catch your eye.

"I'm glad you're here," you manage to say, reaching the man.
He nods. "Thank you for the payment. Now that everything is in order are you sure you'd like to continue?"

The man motions toward the parking lot. "How was the train ride? Did you get any sleep?" "The lights in the carriage were blinding," you say. "I couldn't see the stars for my reflection."

His car is waiting. Leather seats, water bottles, boxes of white tissue. A sweat of rain pervades the interior like a mountain forest after a downpour.

We arrive in front of a smart-looking apartment building. You get out, and as you cross the narrow street the uneven lay of cobblestones buffet the soles of your feet. The stones look recently washed in strips, shiny and clean where the cars run. Even the gutters are clean. The air here is light and crisp as if never having been inhaled. The sky is blue and full, the sun shining sideways as if saying, "Behold, the world."

The man opens the door of the building and enters, beckoning in. You mount the staircase until the door with DIGNITAS written on a plaque. The man shows you in and closes the door.

"Here it is," says the man. The apartment is sparsely decorated with a large window opening onto the city. The lake, shimmering in the morning light, is visible to the right. "Are you sure you'd like to continue?" the man asks.

The man motions to the plush seat by the window. You lower yourself gently into it and breath out until your interior and exterior reach equilibrium, an equilibrium that sinks you lower and lower into the plush. The train ride tired you. A lifetime of renewal and fatigue pulls on your body.

The man walks out of the room returning immediately with a glass of water. Out of a cabinet he removes a small vial and empties the vial into the glass watching the two colorless liquids mix, twisting and contorting around each other in a lewd dance. He places the glass on the side table next to the window.
"The doctor's forms are all in order. Are you sure you'd like to continue?"

Your fingers wrap around the glass, cold with its colorless fluid, and outside the sun shines on the still lake, and trolleys snake proudly up and down the street like parents with their children in tow. A couple below, a boy and a girl, walk hand in hand. Their gait is so youthful in its moxie that the street scene becomes hopelessly infused with a seductive nectar of vitality, one that lures the innocent into a room with no exit and clouds the view with a mist of impossible dreams. The couple, they must be on their way to the lake to drink in the new day. The boy stops, hand around the girl's waist, and pulls the girl close. He whispers in her ear, and they dive together into an endless embrace.

Back in your plush seat you see the man in gray and he looks at you sitting in a cloud of dust and the colorless liquid in your hand.

You put the glass to your lips, close your eyes and let the poisonous drink chill the back of your throat. It coats your throat, then esophagus, then gut and you can feel your arms and legs not feeling your arms and legs. And the air in the apartment suddenly wanes thin and frigid lifting hanging dust particles that grow in prominence like countless waxing moons. And your mind stumbles back to the apartment, to the gray scratching wool of the man's suit, to the life you've just about finished, a burnt day-old-pizza-crust-of-a-life lying still after the delicious part is gone. Gone and you're ready to go, fantastic visions of color-wheels and city lights, the purple surge of passion in youth and its measured companion in aging brown, and the blurred majesty of sunflower fields, memories eddying, spilling like neglected spaghetti water boiling over in protest. Boiling dust in colorless liquid. Boiling leather seats and tissues. Trains stop and breathe. Sputter.

And as you lean your head to look over the city one last time, you are blinded by the glory of the morning sun, dead in the dusty plush seat by the window.

J.D. Salinger is dead

2010-01-28T14:20:00.002-06:00

Hide not thy tears on this last day

Your sorrow has no shame;

To march no more midst lines of gray;

No longer play the game.

Four years have passed in joyful ways — Wouldst stay those old times dear?

Then cherish now these fleeting days,

The few while you are here.

By J.D. Salinger

NYTimes

The Arrow of Time

2010-01-12T09:34:00.007-06:00

He [Sean Carroll] explains how, at a subatomic or quantum level, it is far from obvious why the arrow of time should point the way it does, for the laws of physics stipulate that particle interactions are reversible. In the quantum world, time might as well run backward as forward. Imagine a film clip of two billiard balls moving at a steady pace, colliding and bouncing off each other. How can you be sure that the film was not shown to you in reverse—that what you actually saw was time running backward? So Mr. Carroll persists: "Why then, in the observable universe, does time appear to run in one direction only? Why, for instance, when an egg is broken and scrambled into an omelette, if the quantum processes that allowed this to happen are reversible, why does the omelette never reassemble itself into an egg?"

- Alexander Waugh in the WSJ

It is exactly for the reason that billiard balls would not be moving at a steady pace, rather would be slowing down at each instant through resistance, that the arrow of time points the way it does. And this resistance, or reaction activation requirements in the language of interactions reversible or otherwise, would accumulate at each infinitesimal moment leading to a formidable requirement at the meta level manifested in unidirectional time, just as the billiard ball noticeably slows down. This may be more evident in the cracking of an egg as each quantum crack, falsely proposed to be reversible, has a very low activation requirement to be overcome in one direction, yet a much larger one in the opposite direction due to the reduction in entropy. Hence, the overall reaction is irreversible.

"I must retire now"

2010-01-07T14:47:00.005-06:00

I must retire now to the sandbox,
to make cloud castles of sand
to steel them with lettered might
while seated squarely in this box;
prolix castles too vast, too sandy
to stand and bear their weight.
They cannot escape
the lashing waves of one life.

I must retire now, dear friend,
for castles are crumbling
fine dust to the incessant wind.
In the morning light, sand layered
on sand, and later, without notice or care,
decay undoes what builds the mind
its rotting hands sculpt and boil
the castle immensity to grain.

I'm sorry, dear friend, for I must retire
and tend the castles towering
beyond the overhead bulbs
that bleach the eyes white.
I can't see you any more, dear friend,
for the castles need tending,
and the lashing waves
lick and dissolve my words.

- Atticus Plumm

Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus.

2009-12-21T22:18:00.005-06:00

Again from the wonderful Letters of Note, a Christmas note:

Transcript

Question:

Dear Editor,
I am eight years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says "If you see it in the Sun it's so." Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O'Hanlon.
115 W.95th St

Answer:

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank GOD! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Go to Letters of Note, or the post.

"Vocabulary Changes... as an Indication of Dementia"

2009-12-15T16:37:00.007-06:00

Retrospective diagnostic strategy employing linguistic analysis of works by the champion of murder-mysteries, from the Times:

"Did Agatha Christie, who wrote several dozen mystery novels during her 53-year career, suffer from Alzheimer's-related dementia? Though some of her biographers have suspected as much, actual evidence was advanced in March by a research team led by Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst, professors at the University of Toronto, in a paper called 'Vocabulary Changes in Agatha Christie's Mysteries as an Indication of Dementia.'"

Pandora's Galaxy and the 2009 Top Ten Astronomy Photos

2009-12-15T13:15:00.001-06:00

"Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one… two… three…"

2009-12-13T16:15:00.004-06:00

Taken from Letters of Note, a note on Tesla:

In the summer of 1899, whilst alone in his Colorado Springs laboratory working with his magnifying transmitter, the inimitable Nikola Tesla observed a series of unusual rhythmic signals which he described as 'counting codes'. Having just detected cosmic radio signals for the first time, Tesla immediately believed them to be attempted communications from an intelligent life-form on either Venus or Mars, and later said of the experience, 'The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another'.

The next year, Tesla was asked by the Red Cross to predict man's greatest possible achievement over the next century. The letter below was his reply.

Read on for the transcript...

Why vaccinate?

2009-12-08T15:52:00.007-06:00

Most of the time we run across arguments against vaccination, there is a tendency to dismiss. Yet to successfully counter the 0ff-the-cuff citation of vaccinations gone wrong necessitates a solid retort both logical and pragmatic. Here's the intro of an article, in Le Monde, that gives it a go...

"L'obstacle à la vaccination est que, du point de vue rationnel, il ne faut pas se faire vacciner : pourquoi prendre le risque de complications qui peuvent être graves pour éviter une maladie en général bénigne ? On comprend que les foules ne se soient pas précipitées dans les centres de vaccination mis en place par les autorités. Les appels au civisme, à la responsabilité, à la solidarité restent lettre morte quand on voit que s'abstenir de courir un risque est parfaitement raisonnable..."

John Keats, The Poet - Y.

2009-12-06T11:50:00.002-06:00

An article, "Who killed John Keats?" in the Times Literary Supplement reads "A letter by Keats's old friend makes clear how much 'sensative-bitterness' the poet felt after attacks on him by critics."

And now the letter, published Friday July 27, 1821, five months after Keats’s death, in the Morning Chronicle:

JOHN KEATS, THE POET.

To the EDITOR of the MORNING CHRONICLE.

Sir, I find by the Daily Papers, that the young Poet, John Keats, is dead. I shall feel gratified if you will allow a few remarks from his School-fellow and Friend, a place in your Paper.

It appears that Mr. Keats died of decline at Rome, whither he had retired to repair the inroads which the rupturing of a blood vessel had made upon his constitution.

It is not impossible that his premature death may have been brought on by his performing the office of nurse to a younger brother, who also died of decline; for his attention to the invalid was so anxious and unwearied, that his friends could see distinctly that his own health had suffered in the exertion. This may have been one cause, but I do not believe it was the sole cause. It will be remembered that Keats received some rough and brutal usage from the Reviews about two years since; particularly from the Quarterly, and from a Northern one; which, in the opinion of every gentlemanly and feeling mind, has rendered itself infamous from its coarse pandarism to the depraved appetites of gossips and scandal-mongers. To what extent the treatment he received from those writers operated upon his mind I cannot say; for Keats had a noble – a proud – and an undaunted heart; but he was very young, only one and twenty. He had all the enthusiasm of the youthful poet burning in him – he thought to take the great world by the hand, and hold its attention while he unburthened the overflowings of an aspiring and ardent imagination; and his beautiful recasting of “The Pot of Basil” proves that he would have done so had he lived. But his ardour was met by the torpedo touch of one whose “Blood is very snow-broth;” and the exuberant fancies of a young and almost ungovernable fancy were dragged forward by another, and exhibited in gross and wanton caricature. It is truly painful to see the yearnings of an eager and trusting mind thus held up to the fiend-like laugh of a brutal mob, upon the pikes and bayonets of literary mercenaries. If it will be any gratification to Mr. Gifford to know how much he contributed to the discomfort of a generous mind, I can so far satisfy it by informing him, that Keats has lain awake through the whole night talking with sensative-bitterness of the unfair treatment he had experienced; and with becoming scorn of the information which was afterwards suggested to him; “That as it was considered he had been rather roughly handled, his future productions should be reviewed with less harshness.” So much for the integrity and impartiality of criticism! This charge would no doubt be denied with high and flouncing indignation; but he told me he had been given to understand as much, and I believe him. If the object of this hint was to induce the young Poet to quit the society of those whom he had chosen for his friends, and who had helped him in pushing off his boat from shore, it shows how little his character was known to his assailants. He had a “little body,” but he too had a “mighty heart,” as any one of them would have discovered, had the same impertinences been offered to him personally which were put forth in their anonymous scandal-rolls. Keats’s great crime was his having dedicated his first production to Mr. Leigh Hunt. He should have cowered under the wings of Mr. Croker, and he would have been fostered into “a pretty chicken.”

I remember his first introduction to Mr. Hunt, and the pleasure each seemed to derive from the interview. I remember with admiration, all that Gentleman’s friendship and disinterestedness towards him – disinterestedness, which would surprise those only who do not know him. I remember too, his first introduction to Mr. Haydon; and when in the course of conversation that great artist asked him, “if he did not love his country,” how the blood rushed to his cheeks and the tears to his eyes, at his energetic reply. His love of freedom was ardent and grand. He once said, that if he should live a few years, he would go over to South America, and write a Poem on Liberty, and now he lies in a land where liberty once flourished, and where it is regenerating.

I hope his friends and admirers (for he had both, and warm ones) will raise a monument to his memory on the classical spot where he died; and that Canova, the Roman, will contribute that respect, so amply in his power, to the memory of the young Englishman, who possessed a kindred mind with, and who restamped the loveliest of all the stories of his great countryman, – Boccaccio.

And now farewel, noble spirit! You have forsaken us, and taken the long and dark journey towards “that bourne from whence no traveller returns;” but you have left a memorial of your genius which “posterity will not willingly let die.” You have plunged into the gulf, but your golden sandals remain. The storm of life has overblown, and, “the rest is silence.”

“Fear no more the heat of the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

* * * * * *
Quiet consummation have,
And renowned be thy Grave.”

Y.

"Having a coke with you"

2009-11-22T13:23:00.001-06:00

Thank you 3QD

Hilary Putnam on the Philosophy of Science

2009-11-16T21:07:00.003-06:00

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

Part Five:

"Lipid Lectures"

2009-11-10T13:09:00.008-06:00

The lecture starts droning
and the kids stop chatting
and the heads begin to drop;
and a small pattering of keys
babble and yak to each other
like gnats, drowning the drone.
Then a key point is mouthed
to an ocean of Powerpoint light
projected before a rapt lecture hall
that alternatively nods
and nods off;

Which starts a thousand manic fingers
over laptop keyboards,
building a subtle crescendo,

a tingle in a sleeping foot,

an ocean wave
washing over the shore,

or the sound of pebbles
raked from the beach
on a wave's long regress.

Then it's pulled back
into the pulsating sea of a void
where knowledge goes
to procreate and die,
and the scattered key clicking
ticks and resumes,
like countless cockroaches
in basement cracks.

From the mouth of Wu Ming 1

2009-11-05T12:38:00.009-06:00

Wu Ming 1 explains the group's (Wiki) aversion to being photographed or filmed by the media:

"Once the writer becomes a face... it's a cannibalistic jumble: that face appears everywhere, almost always out of context. A photo is witness to my absence; it's a banner of distance and solitude. A photo paralyses me, it freezes my life into an instant, it negates my ability to transform into something else. I become a "character", a stopgap to hurriedly fill a page layout, an instrument that amplifies banality. On the other hand my voice - with its grain, with its accents, with its imprecise diction, its tonalities, rhythms, pauses and vacillations - is witness to a presence even when I'm not there; it brings me close to people and doesn't negate my transformative capacity because its presence is dynamic, alive and trembling even when seemingly still."

Collective Nouns

2009-10-12T21:38:00.001-05:00

So, when naming groups of items [called collective nouns], you've heard of a pride of lions, an exaltation of larks, a conspiracy of ravens and a charm of finches. ... ... How about the following?

a hassle of errands,
a magnum of hit-men,
a quarrel of lawyers,
a shortage of dwarves,
a sulk of teenagers,
a plunder of goons.
an encroachment of fence-builders.
a fascination of on-lookers/listeners.
an embellishment of fishermen.
a treachery of spies.
a thrombosis of heart specialists.
a vagary of impediments.
a minuscule of sub-atomic particles.
a conflagration of arsonists/pyromaniacs.
an assassination of gangsters.
a mixture of pharmacists.
an incantation of witches/wizards/warlocks.
a density of meatheads.
an obfuscation of philosophers/politicians/economists.
a clutch of mechanics.
a phile of lovers.
a spider of webmasters.
a clique of computer mice.
a plurality of collectives.
an enterprise of trekkies.
a 404 of lost web pages.
a ___ of nihilists.
a brace of orthodontists.
a somephony of music critics.
A clique of photographers. - Lydia Ross (lydiarossATaol.com).
A barf of bulimics. - Steph Selice (redheditorATaol.com).
A surfeit of spammers. - Peter Moore (petermoore1ATgmail.com).
A blather of bloggers. - Scott S. Zacher (scottzATnorthwestern.edu).
A contingent of understudies. - Ben Yudkin (ben_yudkinATonetel.com).
A flight of runaway brides. - Michelle Geissbuhler (goathillATcolumbus.rr.com).
A Covey of highly effective people. - Esther Krieger (estikriegerATjuno.com).
A pinch of shoplifters. - Jim Vander Woude (jvanderwoudeATmacatawa.com).
A stupor of television viewers. - Rabbi Vander Cecil (rabbiATaataa.org).
a remora of lawyers. -- (if you're not familiar, look up 'remora' - it's worth it)

via Chet Meek's Page of Puns

"Studenting"

2009-09-21T16:20:00.012-05:00

The world sways this way when the hawk bends
its beak threshing and punctating the black night

And the ink bleeds in droplets like florescent
bulbs twisted just right into the soiled ceiling

Above my cubby. Of a desk.
What life of youth studenting

And moons that roll the waters to and fro
unseen,

Purgatory couldn't be said to be as promising
me i'll be a drug one day to be useful

job security;
But where are those days? when

Wrappers strewn as leaves on bare skin
and eyes beturned and talk confused

Stories rubbished, sin reputed,
the missed wave passed on the freeway to what

for the eyes were too shut and fists too paunchy
to open

Viduus Moore

Tonight

2009-08-25T20:33:00.003-05:00

Mansur Al-Hallaj

2009-08-23T17:50:00.005-05:00

I was researching the layers of the pericardial sac for our first anatomy exam, which is Thursday, and I ran across Mansur Al'Hallaj, a 9th-10th century Persian mystic/revolutionary, maybe not an unusual combination in its day, and his description of God through a beautiful anatomically-relevant analogy:

God is He "who flows between the pericardium and the heart, just as the tears flow from the eyelids."

Linguistic Relativity

2009-08-22T11:33:00.004-05:00

John Lucy has identified three main strands of research into linguistic relativity. The first is what he calls the structure centered approach. This approach starts with observing a structural peculiarity in a language and goes on to examine its possible ramifications for thought and behavior. The first example of this kind of research is Whorfs observation of discrepancies between the grammar of time expressions in Hopi and English. More recent research in this vein is the research made by John A Lucy describing how usage of the categories of grammatical number and of numeral classifiers in the Mayan language Yucatec result in Mayan speakers classifying objects according to material rather than to shape as preferred by speakers of English.

The second strand of research is the "domain centered" approach, in which a semantic domain is chosen and compared across linguistic and cultural groups for correlations between linguistic encoding and behavior. The main strand of domain centered research has been the research on color terminology, although this domain according to Lucy and admitted by color terminology researchers such as Paul Kay, is not optimal for studying linguistic relativity, because color perception, unlike other semantic domains, is known to be hard wired into the neural system and as such subject to more universal restrictions than other semantic domains. Since the tradition of research on color terminology is by far the largest area of research into linguistic relativity it is described below in its own section. Another semantic domain which has proven fruitful for studies of linguistic relativity is the domain of space. Spatial categories vary greatly between languages and recent research has shown that speakers rely on the linguistic conceptualization of space in performing many quotidian tasks. Research carried out by Stephen C Levinson and other cognitive scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has reported three basic kinds of spatial categorization and while many languages use combinations of them some languages exhibit only one kind of spatial categorization and corresponding differences in behavior. For example the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr only uses absolute directions when describing spatial relations — the position of everything is described by using the cardinal directions. A speaker of Guugu yimithirr will define a person as being "north of the house", while a speaker of English may say that he is "in front of the house" or "to the left of the house" depending on the speakers point of view. This difference makes Guugu yimithirr speakers better at performing some kinds of tasks, such as finding and describing locations in open terrain, whereas English speakers perform better in tasks regarding the positioning of objects relative to the speaker (For example telling someone to set the table putting forks to the right of the plate and knives to the left would be extremely difficult in Guugu yimithirr).

The third strand of research is the "behavior centered" approach which starts by observing different behavior between linguistic groups and then proceeds to search for possible causes for that behavior in the linguistic system. This kind of approach was used by Whorf when he attributed the occurrence of fires at a chemical plant to the workers' use of the word empty to describe the barrels containing only explosive vapors. One study in this line of research has been conducted by Bloom who noticed that speakers of Chinese had unexpected difficulties answering counter-factual questions posed to them in a questionnaire. After a study he concluded that this was related to the way in which counter-factuality is marked grammatically in the Chinese language. Another line of study by Frode Strømnes examined why Finnish factories had a higher occurrence of work related accidents than similar Swedish ones. He concluded that cognitive differences between the grammatical usage of Swedish prepositions and Finnish cases could have caused Swedish factories to pay more attention to the work process where Finnish factory organizers paid more attention to the individual worker. Other research of importance to the study of linguistic relativity has been Daniel Everetts studies of the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon. Everett observed several peculiarities in Pirahã culture that corresponded with linguistically rare features. The Pirahã for example have neither numbers nor color terms in the way those are normally defined, and correspondingly they don't count or classify colors in the way other cultures do. Furthermore when Everett tried to instruct them in basic mathematics they proved unresponsive. Everett did not draw the conclusion that it was the lack of numbers in their language that prevented them from grasping mathematics, but instead concluded that the Pirahã had a cultural ideology that made them extremely reluctant to adopt new cultural traits, and that this cultural ideology was also the reason that certain linguistic features that were otherwise believed to be universal did not exist in their language.Critics have argued that if the test subjects are unable to count for some other reason (perhaps because they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so) then one should not expect their language to have words for such numbers. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary.

More on the Worfian hypothesis and Linguistic Relativity via Wikipedia

And check out the article at the Theory and History of Ontology for a more in-depth and contextualized history with tributaries and distributaries into other related disciplines.

Nicolai (crater)

2009-08-21T15:44:00.004-05:00

Nicolai is a lunar crater that is located in the southern hemisphere of the Moon, in a region that is less disturbed by significant impacts than most of the highlands. It is 42 kilometers in diameter and reaches a depth of 1.8 kilometers. The outer wall of this crater is worn, with a number of tiny craterlets lying along the rim. The most notable of these is a tiny crater located across the northern rim. The satellite crater Nicolai B is attached to the exterior of the southwest rim. The inner walls slope down relatively smoothly to the flat interior floor filled with lava. The only marking on the inner surface is a tiny craterlet in the northern part of the crater.

Nicolai has a tolerably regular ring-plain, with a border, rising more than 6,000 feet above a level floor, on the north side of which Schmidt shows a minute crater. The bright plain surrounding this formation abounds in small craters; and on the east is a number of curious enclosures, many of them overlapping.

Nicolai is from the Nectarian period, which lasted from 3.92 billion to 3.85 billion years ago.

Alternative takes on Obama-Crowley-Gates party

2009-08-09T15:12:00.008-05:00

1. “The Sheriff at the Gates: A Farce in Three Acts’’

Act One

(A street in Cambridgeham. Most Exalted University Professor HENRY LOUIS GATES, freshly returned from the Land of the Asian Khan, is rattling the door of his keep. Enter a WENCH.)...

From The Boston Globe

----------------------------------------------------------------------

2. A Beer with Obama

The Oval Office. Late. President Obama sits across from Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Officer James Crowley, who share a couch. They sit amidst several empty beer bottles. No one’s wearing shoes...

Posted by John Kenney in The New Yorker

Bowman's "Irony without Irony"

2009-08-09T14:47:00.002-05:00

When my oldest son was a Boy Scout in England 20 years ago, I once watched his troop play a game in which the boys formed a circle around a troop leader holding a soccer ball. The leader proceeded to throw the ball to the boys at random, saying as he did so either "head" or "catch." If he said "head," the boy was supposed to catch it; if he said "catch," the boy was supposed to head it. Anyone who slipped up and caught the ball when instructed to catch it or head the ball when instructed to head it, was out and had to leave the circle. Eventually, only one scout was left standing. That boy, as I have often had occasion to think since, must have been one of nature’s ironists. He and the others had certainly had an education in the central principle of all ironic — and, for that matter, non-ironic — discourse, namely that meaning depends on context. A boy who’d said that he would just love to play such a game could have meant either that he’d love to play it or that he’d absolutely hate it, and all but the most literal-minded would have been able to tell which it was on hearing the words spoken in their context.

The ability to read that context, to pick up the cues indicating irony or its absence, depends on a certain degree of social skill and experience in complex social interactions. Irony, that is, belongs to the world of face-to-face communication, even when we encounter it in a book or a movie. If we are able to recognize the irony in fictional contexts it is because we have previously experienced it, or something like it, in real ones. Maybe that’s why, as we have begun to spend more and more of our time interacting with each other remotely and electronically, rather than face-to-face, it seems that our irony-reading skills have tended to atrophy, or else to go haywire, producing, on the one hand, a leaden literalism or, on the other, the sort of paranoia which supposes that everything must mean something other than what it says.

Continue reading James Bowman's article "Irony without Irony."

"What is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said." - Heidegger

Hinzen's "...On names and truth"

2009-08-08T15:47:00.012-05:00

The contemporary debate on the nature of semantic content looks, at least from afar, like a battle between two armies. On the one hand, one ﬁnds the externalists, who claim that the content of what you have in your head depends on what’s out there in the world. For example, the content of my concept of WATER is determined by the substance in the world that instantiates it, while the content of my thoughts about ARTHRITIS is dependent on the social conventions of my community. Internalists, on the other hand, have ‘pushed the world into the mind’ (to borrow Ray Jackendoﬀ ’s phrase) and hold that it is the compositional and/or inferential nature of conceptual representations that determine their content.

Curiously, the defenders of externalism seem to come largely from a philosophical background, while linguists often opt for the internalist mode of explanation. Wolfram Hinzen, who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Durham, but works within the biolinguistics program, seems to be the ideal person to reanimate this sometimes gridlocked debate.

Hinzen’s latest book, An essay on names and truth, is part of an ambitious venture in which the author aims to invalidate the central intuitions behind externalism, while at the same time arguing for a type of internalism that has next to nothing in common with comparable theories on the market. Hinzen takes as a starting point two traditional strongholds for externalist theories of meaning : names, ‘ the very paradigm of a referential expression ’ (2), and truth, which few theorists would dare suggest have nothing to do with the external world. His central idea is that the judgements of truth we make are dependent on the syntax that underpins thought, and that names, like all other expressions, get their content from their syntactic form...

Fascinating review by Georg Kjøll of Wolfam Hinzen's latest book "An essay on names and truth." Find the article under Reviews here, at the Journal of Linguistics, and read on.

lost city of Cahokia

2009-08-07T12:27:00.008-05:00

Pauketat's masterstroke may be his reanalysis of an obscure dig conducted in the '60s by Charles Bareis, who found an enormous 900-year-old Cahokian garbage pit, so deeply buried that its contents still stank atrociously.

Analyzing the strata of rotting gunk found therein, Pauketat concludes that there was probably an upside to Cahokia's appalling "mortuary rituals," which he suspects were officious public ceremonies to honor the ruling family or to install a new king. The garbage dump reveals the remains of enormous Cahokian festivals, involving as many as 3,900 slaughtered deer, 7,900 earthenware pots, and vast amounts of pumpkins, corn, porridge, nuts and berries. There was enough food to feed all of Cahokia at once, and enough potent native tobacco -- a million charred seeds at a time -- to give the whole city a near-hallucinogenic nicotine buzz.

There's no way to know for sure whether these multiple-day, citywide shindigs were simultaneous with the human-sacrifice rituals, but it's highly plausible, and they were certainly part of the same social system. (Pauketat also finds in the trash heap evidence of "spectacular pomp and pageantry.") At any rate, if you weren't personally being decapitated and thrown into a pit to honor some departed leader, life in Cahokia evidently came with some benefits that, like almost everything else about the city, were unprecedented in the Native American world.

Read on... "Sacrificial virgins of the MIssissippi" by Andrew O'Hehir

Thanks to A&L Daily

Smörgåsbord

2009-08-04T13:43:00.005-05:00

Smörgåsbord is a Swedish word which refers to a type of Scandinavian meal served buffet-style with multiple dishes of various foods on a table. In Norway it is called koldtbord and in Denmark it is called kolde bord. Smörgåsbord became internationally known as Smorgasbord at the 1939 New York World's Fair when the Swedish Pavilion offered Smörgåsbord at the Swedish Pavilion’s "Three Crowns Restaurant". "Smörgåsbord" consists of smörgås ("open faced sandwich") and bord ("table"). The word open faced sandwich, "smörgås" in turn consists of the words "butter" and "goose", (smör and gås). Gås literally means goose, but also refers to the small pieces of butter that form and float to the surface of cream while it ischurned. These pieces reminded the old Swedish peasants of fat geese swimming to the surface [naturally]. The small butter pieces were just the right size to be placed and flattened out on bread. Smörgås came to mean buttered bread. In Sweden, the term buttered open-faced-sandwiches (bredda smörgåsar) has been used since at least the 16th century. In English and also in Scandinavian languages, the word smörgåsbord (or in English, more usually without diacritics as smorgasbord) refers loosely to any buffet with a variety of dishes — not necessarily with any connection to Swedish Christmas traditions. In an extended sense, the word is used to refer to any situation which invites patrons to select whatever they wish among several pleasant things, such as the smorgasbord of university courses, books in a bookstore, etc.

For a more in-depth discussion of the term smorgasbord, and an explanation of a Julbord that is just as engrossing, check out the rest of the Wiki here...

Some rapid kayaking

2009-08-03T18:58:00.004-05:00

A trailer with some amazing footage from a new kayaking film called Dream Result. Thanks to The Adventure Life for this one.

"Poem"

2009-07-29T23:13:00.019-05:00

I remember once, when you were ahead of me walking through the main square, after you had dropped a scoop of ice cream, pistachio it should have been, onto the solid black coffee stone sitting at the bottom of that porcelain thimble and had sat there sipping, taken out of space and time, your face like a child seen hiding the secret mirth of a stolen cookie; and you had already postulated to the air (i just so happened to hear) that you feared the seagulls would impale us on their beaks (those bags of flying pools genetically shallow; don't worry i said they are just jealous) and we already tried to lounge languidly on those large concrete jackstones that some giant tumbled into the sea but I feigned cool because you weren't looking; it was then, passed the port where the fish were gutted and the squid were peeled and the manta rays were wacked against the undulating concrete punished for some crime unknown, their thousand eyes bulging and lifeless; it was as we walked back with the sun at our backs back through the square heavy with milling people and with beggars parading their wizened palms and broken backs, there that the smile set from your magnetic countenance that beguiles those lost planets orbiting the uncharted star. I remember once, when the smile set, that I was lost suddenly in the unknown sea, calm and deep, a sky of a sea, with neither stars nor sense to guide me and I threw these tired hands soaked with salt and rubbed raw with the sands of one too many dunes, sent them as a weed pushes from the earth to rotten air, sent them without sending them and you saw, because you looked at me, your tender eyes flying into mine like two seagulls big and brown with glistening heads and sharpened beaks and I saw the shadow of a smile shimmer, a time of long ago echoed in the present, felt but not touched, heard but not listened to. I remember, when that smile set, the last yawn of the morning.

Hildebrandt Trumble

The Messiah: is it real?

2009-07-29T02:45:00.006-05:00

"[Stewart] Pollens, the 51-year-old conservator of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum, has ignited a most undignified firestorm of rancor and name-calling in this insular area of collecting. He did so by uttering the worst kind of blasphemy: He suggested that arguably the world's most celebrated Stradivarius violin is a fake. This so-called Messiah, or Le Messie, is housed in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University and estimated to be worth some $20 million."

Read on here...

Gertrude Anscombe @ SEP

2009-07-27T01:51:00.003-05:00

Some of Anscombe's most influential work was on the nature of causation. The relation between cause and effect has been notoriously difficult to analyze. Anscombe's work in “Causality and Determination” challenged some of the empiricist orthodoxy of Hume's account. For example, she challenged the view that the causal relation is characterized by constant conjunction in discussing Feynman's Geiger counter case:

An example of a non-necessitating cause is mentioned by Feynman: a bomb is connected to a Geiger counter, so that it will go off if the Geiger counter registers a certain reading; whether it will or not is not determined, for it is so placed near some radioactive material that it may or may not register that reading.

And yet, if the bomb explodes it was caused by the Geiger counter arrangement. Causation does not involve determination, or necessity. Since the radioactive decay was not sufficient for this effect, the case tells against viewing causes as sufficient conditions. There is no general causal connection between cause and effect.

From a new entry on Anscombe at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

"Your Goodbye"

2009-07-25T03:14:00.015-05:00

And I read your goodbye
anonymously, my insides
sinking slowly, unbelieving,
down deep into a sinkhole
that I was not there;
and the dewy-eyed sun rises
everyday, Hope dawning on my sheets,
a reddish glow spreading from my thorax
begging you to remember;

but your sheet was painfully void,
highlighting the blank charade
with pregnant words sprinkled
lithely on my page:
seagulls, orange marmalade, wild gestures
but no brief hint of mine
as if our time reared not the smallest leaf,
(leaving only that which my mind enshrines
and sings to those sorrowing birds)
none of the wise words uttered before death;
remember, remember what you whispered
through the waves' soft mist?
or the little boy outside who tried to sell us
children's shoes, meandering from table to table,
remember? I am like him, pandering
to a girl with too many shoes;

for sailing with sails unfurled
saying what æther fills my lungs
what wakes my dreams from slumber
would burst the seams and cost too much to bare;
so i choose this, i prefer this,
this plebeian oblivion.
Yet we know that children grow
that shoes get worn and weary
and new ones take their place;
then, it seems, the shoe-panderer,
though breathless and fallen
by a melancholy fit, will find
a quiet corner to sit and breath
and review the feast and the wine and
the many-crowned carouse.

Viduus Moore

"Poem"

2009-07-19T02:20:00.014-05:00

If Time be a stream
bittered by the wet rocks
swept into sand,
the sorrowful current,
then let me be a beaver
hungry with impatience
and this damned clubtail (dragging like a thick willow clinging to the water)
to stop its flow, to live,
to feel a moment's repose
in this loveliness
forlorn.
These months,
these long weeks
illimitable day hours
like patterns in the cove's
bank or tears on a
glistening face, they pass
unseen. The innocent Moon
and its bed of stars slide
in vain, for my thoughts are
water, both moving and unmoving,
filling the stream bed.

Marcel Xavier

"NOBLESSE OBLIGE"

2009-07-18T15:25:00.002-05:00

I always put on a whole-slick tuxedo
when I jump off tall buildings so

when I'm sprawl in the streetdust
that passersby can say, "Oh no: and just

when he was at the height of his success;
look at that tux—now that's the way to dress."

Bill Knott (his blog)(you can also download his books free(!) from here)

"BEDDYBYE" by Knott

2009-07-18T15:19:00.001-05:00

Just hope that when you lie down your toes are a firing-squad

"Lovelade"

2009-07-18T15:17:00.002-05:00

The sea is the cargo of empty ships
Moon bears the sun when it’s gone
My face with the trace of your lips
Will fare from now on and on

Bill Knott (you can download his books free(!) from here)

"What would happen"

2009-07-13T00:18:00.005-05:00

What would happen if the sun never shone?
he, against the splintered boards
rubbing two palms by the concave waves
drip drip dripping salt into the red,
he lives here now, and asks

Don't you miss the warmth
of its blinding smile, ringing the vast,
that soars through air wisteria-soaked
the blazing arms to the very towers that beg the sun,
the one, that sun
that will never shine again?

"I think of you"

2009-07-08T17:11:00.007-05:00

In the airport
waiting with lost beetles
eyes, suspicious, lash out;
our leggy model saunters by
which makes me laugh and turn to my side
to tell the closest; but there was no one,
and I think of you.

Fingers lash the strings
like crashing crests to the shore
and the bow whistling the burnished box
of wood and glue, sweating,
what might have been and what has been
are nothing; the beauty of music,
and I think of you.

I see you in the clarity of stars in the night black,
and they purr pure gold from afar.
I see you twice in the shimmering sparks of the ocean
deep from the hustle-bustle life brimming with nothing
worse than nothing, everything;
hiding in your castle town, your own kingdom
of hypnotized monkeys, and the gate stays shut;
below, the branches of the fig
and the quince intertwine, but the fruit do not touch;
I cling to these like ink to paper
and think of naught but you.

"Tonight I can write"

2009-07-05T19:28:00.007-05:00

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write for example, 'The night is full of stars
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like these I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think I do not have her, to feel I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to a pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.

That is all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.

Surely I no longer love her, but how I once loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

Another's. She will be another's. As she once belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

Surely I no longer love her, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short and forgetting so long.

Because on nights like these I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.

Though this be the last pain she makes me suffer
and these the last verses I write for her.

Pablo Neruda

"Your Laughter"

2009-07-05T19:27:00.004-05:00

Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

Do not take away the rose,
the lance flower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in joy,
the sudden wave
of silver born in you.

My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.

My love, in the darkest
hour your laughter
opens, and if suddenly
you see my blood staining
the stones of the street,
laugh, because your laughter
will be for my hands
like a fresh sword.

Next to the sea in the autumn,
your laughter must raise
its foamy cascade,
and in the spring, love,
I want your laughter like
the flower I was waiting for,
the blue flower, the rose
of my echoing country.

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.

Pablo Neruda

translated by Donald Walsh

"I named your lips Fate"

2009-06-28T07:30:00.013-05:00

I named your lips Fate
to give myself no choice.
I wouldn't have had the courage,
I would have burned my eyes.

I brushed Fate thrice with my tears
and the preacher mouthed foreign words
that bounced from rooftop to rooftop
like grains of sand in a storm.

The blister squirted me in the eye
and I wept rose liqueur,
mixing salt-sand grit and fig juice
on my cheek and lips.

Bitterly, I bathed in them
with no power to turn them to gold.
I am no alchemist, no tyrant,
and the buskers kept playing to the beggars.

But they call to me, I said, the waves.
If I were captain of a grand ship,
they would all be mine,
this temptuous tempest.
Yet I have neither the courage
nor the roses to woe what I would.

"Katharina"

2009-06-28T07:15:00.005-05:00

The king sat proudly on his throne
with looks stonelike, beyond reproach,
and said he naught nor blink'd nor yawn'd,
for wasn't there foe forever known?

But then with no warning nor shout
the castle hold did melt below;
molten keep and crown begone,
and they unknown forever more.

Amidst the heap all lay the vanquish'd,
charred and broken, tired, forgotten;
for there she stood, glorious Beauty,
and her in their eyes forever more.

"Alas, young lass, we've no defense:
your lips too soft, your tread so light,
your eyes lush gardens of delight.
For what power is this that rends
our heart from hand, this cruel paresse,
your loveliness all blinds the bright!"

Clouds sift the sun, and grass does grow
and many years on the meadow waits,
springs well, winds dwell but the King sits
still by the castle thinking ever more

With pain does he who muses poorly
and pours what thoughts of drops that laid
where only night had blindly reigned.
He ponders, silent, and happy.

Then, softly do they float with him
on its lovely scent, this ever-blossom.

"One moment when I was dead"

2009-06-28T07:05:00.013-05:00

When I was dead,
There was one moment
When it seemed I was living;
and it lasted for four days.

On the first day, I awoke from my death
By cinnamon breath and grass,
Surprised by the very Greatness
Like a new-born faun, trembling.

On the second day, my heart ballooned,
A jellyfish caught in sugar wind,
Drunk with the sweet syrup,
Without a single thought, simply a-flight.

Yet by the third day, I saw the present through the future.
You laughed, oh you laughed,
But I could only smile
For I knew I would be dead again
the moment I turned away.

The fourth and final day came with no fanfare.
My hands working next to yours
Steeped in tagine, safron fingers.
I see myself going forever through arid plaines
With thick heat scratching at my neck.
But on that last day, you were there,
there to say
Goodbye.

And now I am dead again
With no chance against these thousand hordes;
Yet this time I have a weapon:
They vanish at the echo of your voice
And fall under the memory of your eyes.

A single moment in time that would never recur

2009-05-26T16:35:00.009-05:00

"Both deeply loved their native land. Each had devoted decades to collecting and perpetuating its musical traditions and had become Hungary's greatest musicians. Although now physically safe in America, they were keenly aware that the world they had left behind was on the brink of extinction. It was with that crushing burden that they transplanted their culture to a new, hopefully temporary home, in the symbolic form of a recital at the Library of Congress, the shrine of intellectual freedom. (Although Szigeti lived until 1973, Bartok would die in exile in New York in 1945, never again seeing his country.) Both the style and the content of the recital seethed with emotional significance. This concert was nothing less than a deeply personal plea for an entire culture that was about to evaporate."

from a review of The concert given by Bartok and Szigeti on April 13, 1940 at the Library of Congress. They performed the following program:

Beethoven: Sonata # 9 in A Major, Op. 47 ("Kreutzer")
Bartok: Rhapsody # 1 for Violin and Piano
Debussy: Sonata for Violin and Piano in g minor
Bartok: Second Sonata for Violin and Piano

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) in 1909
Joseph Szigeti (1892-1973)

Richard Wollheim

2009-05-18T18:15:00.006-05:00

Paintings do not instantly disclose their meanings; and Wollheim has left us an amusing description of his own method of looking at paintings: "I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognise that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was. I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture that I was looking at."

Though he disclaimed any intention of psychoanalysing works of art, many of the remarkable interpretations in Painting As An Art seem to presuppose psychoanalytical ideas. In a virtuoso reading of a painting by Willem de Kooning, for example, he wrote: "The sensations that de Kooning cultivates are the most fundamental in our repertoire. They are those sensations which give us our first access to the external world, and they also, as they repeat themselves, bind us for ever to the elementary forms of pleasure into which they initiated us - sucking, touching, biting, excreting, retaining, smearing, sniffing, swallowing, gurgling, stroking, wetting."

The three threads of Wollheim's life and thought unite in this description: painting, philosophy and psychoanalysis. He argued that if painting presupposes a universal human nature, then "it must be absurd to bring to the understanding of art a conception of human nature less rich than what is required elsewhere." And he nails this thought down with the profound observation that "many art historians, in their scholarly work, make do with a psychology that, if they tried to live their lives by it, would leave them at the end of an ordinary day without lovers, friends, or any insight into how this came about."

from Richard Wollheim's obituary in The Guardian. Another item here.

Catharsis

2009-05-18T17:41:00.005-05:00

taken from wiki:

The term in drama refers to a sudden emotional climax that evokes overwhelming feelings of great sorrow, pity, laughter or any other extreme change in emotion, resulting in restoration, renewal and revitalization in members of the audience.

Using the term "catharsis" to refer to a form of emotional cleansing was first done by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his work Poetics. It refers to the sensation, or literary effect, that would ideally overcome an audience upon finishing watching a tragedy (a release of pent-up emotion or energy). In his previous works, he used the term in its medical sense (usually referring to the evacuation of the "katamenia", the menstrual fluid or other reproductive material). Because of this, F. L. Lucas maintains that catharsis cannot be properly translated as purification or cleansing, but only as purgation. Since before Poetics catharsis was purely a medical term, Aristotle is employing it as a medical metaphor. "It is the human soul that is purged of its excessive passions." Lessing sidesteps the medical aspect of the issue and translates catharsis as a purification, an experience that brings pity and fear into their proper balance: "In real life, he explained, men are sometimes too much addicted to pity or fear, sometimes too little; tragedy brings them back to a virtuous and happy mean." Tragedy is then a corrective; through watching tragedy the audience learns how to feel these emotions at the proper levels. Some modern interpreters of the work infer that catharsis is pleasurable because audience members felt ekstasis (Greek: ἔκστασις)(ecstacy)(literally: astonishment, meaning: trance) from the fact that there existed those who could suffer a worse fate than them was to them a relief.[citation needed] Any translator attempting to interpret Aristotle's meaning of the term should take into account that Poetics is largely a response to Plato's claim that poetry encourages men to be hysterical and uncontrolled. In response to Plato, Aristotle maintains that poetry makes them less, not more, emotional, by giving a periodic and healthy outlet to their feelings.

In literary aesthetics, catharsis is developed by the conjunction of stereotyped characters and unique or surprising actions. Throughout a play we do not expect the nature of a character to change significantly, rather pre-existing elements are revealed in a relatively straight-forward way as the character is confronted with unique actions in time. This can be clearly seen in Oedipus Rex where King Oedipus is confronted with ever more outrageous actions until emptying generated by the death of his mother-wife and his act of self-blinding.

In contemporary aesthetics catharsis may also refer to any emptying of emotion experienced by an audience in relation to drama. This exstasis can be perceived in comedy, melodrama and most other dramatic forms. Deliberate attempts, on political or aesthetic bases, to subvert the structure of catharsis in theatre have occurred. For example, Bertolt Brecht viewed catharsis as a pap for the bourgeois theatre audience, and designed dramas which left significant emotions unresolved, as a way to force social action upon the audience. In Brecht's theory, the absence of a cathartic resolving action would require the audience to take political action in the real world in order to fill the emotional gap they experience. This technique can be seen as early as his agit-prop play The Measures Taken.

here's the full article: "Catharsis"

A divided nature

2009-05-12T13:20:00.006-05:00

"Whatever the chaos in Brahms's mind, he negotiated his life with extraordinary discipline, common sense, integrity and honesty. The chaos of emotion shackled and subdued by a relentless sense of form and discipline: that is Brahms's art in a nutshell. Likewise, his life. And the most familiar and beloved note in his art is the note of yearning"

from Jan Swafford's article, "Bittersweet symphonies", on Brahms in The Guardian.

"By the end of 1854, their intimacy was so advanced that Brahms felt able to end one of his letters to [Clara] with a quote from the Arabian Nights: 'Would to God that I were allowed this day instead of writing this letter to you to repeat to you with my own lips that I am dying of love for you. Tears prevent me from saying more.'"

from Steven Isserlis' article, "Dying of love for you", on Robert and Clara Schumann and Brahms in The Guardian.

The lure of eros

2009-04-24T05:53:00.003-05:00

... that hardened heart softened at once the first time the literary man spoke to him again... though it was only in passing and in the form of a mythological allusion, which to be understood required an education in the traditions of the West. It occurred after dinner; they ran into one another at the door that no longer slammed. Catching up with the young man, but with the intent of moving right past him, Settembrini said, "Well, my good engineer, how did you like the pomegranate?"

Hans Castorp smiled in confused delight. "I'm sorry - what did you say, Herr Settembrini? Pomegranate? We haven't had any pomegranates, have we? I don't think I've ever. . . no, wait, I did once drink some pomegranate juice and soda. It was too sweet for me."

Already past him now, the Italian looked back over his shoulder and carefully stated: "The gods and mortals have on occasion visited the realm of shades and found their way back. But those who reside in the nether world know that he who eats the fruits of their realm is forever theirs."

From The Magic Mountain by Mann, translated by John Woods

Choosing the true path

2009-04-07T12:02:00.013-05:00

"May I say a few words to you, Master, while you're washing your hands and putting on your jacket? I'm starving for a mouthful of truth. I want to say something to you that I might perhaps be able to say right now and never again. I must speak to a human being and perhaps you are the only one who can understand. I'm not speaking to the man with the famous workshop who is honored by so many assignments from great cities and cloisters, who has two assistants and a rich, beautiful house. I'm speaking to the master who made the madonna in the cloister outside the city, the most beautiful statue I know. I have loved and venerated this man; to become like him seemed to me the highest goal on earth. Now I have made a statue, my statue of St. John. It's not made as perfectly as your madonna; but that can't be helped. I have no plans for other statues, no idea that demands execution. Or rather, there is one, the remote image of a saint that I'll have to make some day, but not just yet. In order to be able to make it, I must see and experience much, much more. Perhaps I'll be able to make it in three or four years, or in ten years, or later, or never. But until then, Master, I don't want to work as an artisan, lacquering statues and carving pulpits and leading an artisan's life in the workshop. I don't want to earn money and become like other artisans. I don't want that. I want to live and roam, to feel summer and winter, experience the world, taste its beauty and its horrors. I want to suffer hunger and thirst, and to rid and purge myself of all I have lived and learned here with you. One day I would like to make something as beautiful and deeply moving as your madonna - but I don't want to become like you and lead your kind of life."

...

And now the decision was at his fingertips; everything had become clear. Art was a beautiful thing, but it was no goddess, no goal - not for him. He was not to follow art, but only the call of his mother. Why continue to perfect the ability of his hands? Master Niklaus was an example of such perfection, and where did it lead? It led to fame and reputation, to money and a settled life, and to a drying up and dwarfing of one's inner senses, to which alone the mystery was accessible. It led to making pretty, precious toys, all kinds of ornate altars and pulpits, St. Sebastians and cute, curly angels' heads at four guilders a piece. Oh, the gold in the eye of a carp, the sweet silvery thing down at the edge of a butterfly's wing were infinitely more beautiful, alive, and precious than a whole roomful of such works of art.

From Narcissus and Goldmund by Hesse, translated by Ursule Molinaro

La vie retentissante et L'étranger

2009-03-21T11:42:00.016-05:00

Du L'étranger, de Camus

"J'étais sûr de moi, sûr de tout, plus sûr que [l'aumônier], sûr de ma vie et de cette mort qui allait venir. Oui, je n'avais que cela. Mais du moins, je tenais cette vérité autant qu'elle me tenait. J'avais eu raison, j'avais encore raison, j'avais toujours raison. J'avais vécu de telle façon et j'aurais pu vivre de telle autre. J'avais fait ceci et je n'avais fait cela. Je n'avais pas fait telle chose alors que j'avais fait cette autre. Et après? C'était comme si j'avais attendu pendant tout le temps cette minute et cette petite aube où je serais justifié. Rien, rien n'avait d'importance et je savais bien pourquoi. Lui aussi savait pourquoi. Du fond de mon avenir, pendant toute cette vie absurde que j'avais menée, un souffle obscur remontait vers moi à travers des années qui n'était pas encore venues et ce souffle égalisait sur son passage tout ce qu'on me proposait alors dans les années pas plus réelles que je vivais. Que m'importaient la mort des autres, l'amour d'une mère, que m'importaient son Dieu, les vies qu'on choisit, les destins qu'on élit, puisqu'on seul destin devait m'élire moi-même et avec des milliards de privilégiés qui, comme lui, se disaient mes frères. Comprenait-il, comprenait-it donc? Tout le monde était privilégié. Il n'y avait que des privilégiés."

D'aprés cela, il semble plus evident pourquoi a-t-il finalement eu un désaccord d'idéologie en quelque sorte avec Sartre et Bréton.

Last Supper with Proust

2009-03-21T11:39:00.002-05:00

"Proust looked wan, dank and sickly; he died six months later. At least he was conscientiously polite, and set out to ingratiate himself with Stravinsky by praising Beethoven's late quartets. 'I detest Beethoven,' snarled Stravinsky, and turned away. Proust then exchanged formulaic compliments with Joyce, although neither of them had read anything by the other. They were able to agree on the subject of truffles, which they both liked." - "Last supper with Proust"

Others on Beethoven

2009-03-21T11:25:00.011-05:00

"One of [Christian] Neefe's first students was a sullen, grubby, taciturn 10-year-old keyboard player named Ludwig van Beethoven. He was the son of an alcoholic singer who had more or less beat music into him. The kid seemed more like a charity case than a budding musician, but Neefe soon discovered that his talent could put him in the league of the musical phenomenon of the age, a child of freakish gifts named Mozart." - "How the Illuminati influenced Beethoven"

"Beethoven’s last act was to sit up in his deathbed and curse the thunderstorm that raged outside." - "Touched by Fire"

L'art des vers

2009-03-20T15:39:00.008-05:00

Qui pleure là, sinon le vent simple, à cette heure
Seule, avec diamants extrêmes?... Mais qui pleure,
Si proche de moi-meme au moment de pleurer?

The opening of Valèry's La Jeune Parque

Limbo

2009-03-01T09:07:00.006-06:00

Now, according to the common shift from one stage of education to another, knowing full well that it was my decision, mine and mine alone, to deliberately ski through the small impression in the glacier that turned out to be a hungry crevasse, we find each day slicing the syllables e-ter-ni-ty into larger and larger chunks; they plop with defiant plops into a state very much like limbo, the stream gurgling through straiten'd banks fanning itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream keeps head against the freshnets. The wind shifts direction above the waves shimmering; the stark cliffs tunneling on either side the dangerous strait, but here and there we spy a hidden nook, protected by soft banks of sand from the buffeting wind, opening to a lush meadow promising fruit and youth evermore; but we, these Florentines, self-retired in hungry pride and gainful cowardice, praising not thy pregnant morrow but rather thy unplowed greens, are forever drawn by human nature's megrim. and how do we plead: unsure.

Endeavoring to find the spiritual plenipotentiary

2009-02-18T10:08:00.004-06:00

From Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer and it was his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at least a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts and scruples. His soul traversed a period of desolation in which the sacraments themselves seemed to have turned into dryed up sources.

Young Stephen Dedalus

2009-02-16T09:06:00.007-06:00

From Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Stephan watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss of fortune or of the temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless...?

He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's fragment. Its alternation of sad human ineffectiveness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving.

Band-e Amir

2009-02-11T10:17:00.002-06:00

The Credo

2009-02-10T15:18:00.003-06:00

It was midsummer 1819, the period when Beethoven was working on the Missa at the Hafner house in Modling, in despair that every section was turning out much longer than expected, so that the deadline for its completion - it was a date in March the next year, for the installation of Archduke Rudolf as archibishop of Olmutz - could not possibly be met. And it happened that two friends, both musicians, came to visit him one afternoon, and no sooner had they entered the house than they heard shocking news. Both the master's maids had bolted that same morning after a wild scene that had occurred the night before, around one o'clock, awakening the entire house from slumber. The master had worked all evening, well into the night, on the Credo, the Credo with its fugue, never giving a thought to his evening meal, which still stood on the stove, whereupon the serving girls, having waited long in vain, at least yielded to nature and went to bed. But when, between twelve and one, the master had demanded his meal, he had found the maids asleep, the food ruined and charred, and had broken into the most violent rage, paying still less heed to the sleeping household since he could not even hear the racket he was making. "Could ye not watch with me one hour?" he had thundered over and over. But it had been five, six hours - and so the aggrieved maids had absconded by the first light of day, leaving to his own devices so uncontrollable a master, who, having had no midday meal either, had not eaten a bite since yesterday noon. Instead he had labored in his room, on the Credo, the Credo with its fugue; his disciples could hear him working behind the closed door. The deaf man sang, howled, and stomped over that Credo - the sound of it so horrifyingly moving that the blood froze in the eavesdroppers' veins. Just as they were about to depart in great trepidation, the door was flung open, and there in the doorframe stood Beethoven - what a sight! What a horrifying sight! In desheveled clothes, his facial features so distorted that they could inspire fear, his eyes listening and filled with mad abstraction, he had stared at them, looking as if he had just come from a life-and-death struggle with all the hostile spirits of counterpoint. He had first stammered something incoherent and then broken into complaints and curses about the mess in his household, about how everyone had run off, how they were letting him starve. The two attempted to calm him - one helped him to get properly dressed, the other ran to an inn to order a cheering meal... Not until three years later was the mass completed.

From Mann's Doctor Faustus

Of the 1905 revolutionaries

2009-02-09T10:57:00.005-06:00

From The Rebel:

A life is paid for by another life, and from these two sacrifices springs the promise of a value. They believe in the equal value of human lives. Therefore they do not value any idea above human life, though they kill for the sake of ideas. To be precise, they live on the plane of their idea. They justify it, finally, by incarnating it to the point of death. We are again confronted with a concept of rebellion which, if not religious, is at least metaphysical.

By means of this, the terrorists, while simultaneously affirming the world of men, place themselves above this world, thus demonstrating for the last time in our history that real rebellion is a creator of values.

Contrarily,

Others to come will find their methods sentimental and refuse to admit that any one life is the equivalent of any other. They will then put an abstract idea above human life, even if they call it history, to which they themselves have submitted in advance and to which they will also decide, quite arbitrarily, to submit everyone else. The problem of rebellion will no longer be resolved by arithmetic, but by estimating probabilities. Confronted with the possibility that the idea may be realized in the future, human life can be everything or nothing. The greater the faith that the estimator places in this final realization, the less the value of human life.

Hegels arbitrary psychology

2009-02-09T10:49:00.005-06:00

From The Rebel:

The arbitrary psychology set in motion by Hegel's [idea that values are only found at the end of history is] as human minds in bling combat, dimly groping on the sands, like crabs that finally come to grips in a fight to the death, and voluntarily abandoned the equally legitimate image of beams of light painfully searching for on another in the night and finally focusing together in a blaze of illumination.

If the revolution is the only positive value, it has a right to claim everything - even the denunciation and therefore the sacrifice of the friend. Henceforth, violence will be directed against one and all, in the service of an abstract idea.

The distinction between human and divine is illusory

2009-02-09T10:09:00.007-06:00

From The Rebel:

Individuality has replaced faith, reason the Bible, politics religion and the Church, the earth heaven, work prayer, poverty hell, and man Christ." Thus there is only one hell and it is on this earth: and it is against this that the struggle must be waged. Politics is religion, and transcendent Christianity - that of the hereafter - establishes the masters of the earth by means of the slave's renunciation and creates one master more beneath the heavens. That is why atheism and the revolutionary spirit are only two aspects of the same movement of liberation. That is the answer to the question which is always being asked: why has the revolutionary movement identified itself with materialism rather than with idealism? Because to conquer God, to make Him a slave, amounts to abolishing the transcendence that kept the former masters in power and to preparing, with the ascendancy of the new tyrants, the advent of the man-king. When poverty is abolishing, when the contradictions of history are resolved, "the real god, the human god, will be the State."

Camus on the Spiritual

2008-11-08T10:08:00.004-06:00

"Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But out task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. Rebellion, the secular will not to surrender of which Barres speaks, is still today at the basis of the struggle. Origin of form, source of real life, it keeps us always erect in the savage, formless movement of history."

What does Camus mean when he marries excess and solitude in the church of the human heart?

Camus on Rebellion and Man

2008-11-08T09:55:00.006-06:00

Camus introduces The Rebel:

"...the reasons for rebellion cannot be explained except in terms of an inquiry into its attitudes pretensions, and conquests. Perhaps we may discover in its achievements the rule of action that the absurd has not been able to give us; an indication, at least, about the right or the duty to kill and, finally, hope for anew creation. Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is. The problem is to know whether this refusal can only lead to the destruction of himself and of others, whether all rebellion must end in the justification of universal murder, or whether, on the contrary, without laying claim to an innocence that is impossible, it can discover the principle of reasonable culpability."

Let's hope he finds a solution.

Hamlet on the Subjugation of Beauty to Self

2008-11-03T07:17:00.012-06:00

".... indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erchanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; nor woman neither...."

Forty-third day

2008-10-20T06:35:00.006-05:00

And there, right where the lights filter
cigarette stench thick,
on plastic chairs, stuck in a blur,
common, alone, thinking

Alone; and then your mind your world,
cosmos and towers dark
towering in your head; yet still
unhurried, loneliness

In infinitude; don't ask what
is worth the time you have,
to make westing, chaos the womb
grave of Nature, a lone
nightingale floats life calmly,
quiet strings shiver, her song.

First day

2008-09-07T08:34:00.004-05:00

This morning I had one of those rare feelings of excitement. Who knew that a good cup of coffee, a crisp bite in the air, and a cafe full of healthy, happy people could invest such a feeling of living in my vest? It could be the anticipation of a worthy challenge, or the open door of the future, or Goethe's worldly yet deeply personal verses expressed by Dr Faust that accompanied the cafe creme sitting in front of me and made me taste the very wind brushing over the cobbled streets and flying through the orange-tinted trees. despite the want of permanent lodging or any knowledge of tomorrow, i felt like grabbing the nearest violin and having my way with it. it was eternal youth that flowed through my veins just for an instant, grasping the very straws of permanence that are so often mistaken for real, live straws, straws that limit the intake of your preferred beverage; is it moderation that is so grotesque, or is it this one-sided conversation which lives without structure or direction that can turn any talk of rejuvenation into nonsense? with your best interests at heart, I will now relinquish the proverbial pen, pull up my socks and move onto my much-needed french lessons; wish me good mental health.

Bringing Higher Education back to Reality

2008-08-13T17:30:00.002-05:00

Read Charles Murray's (Wiki) article in the Journal: College is a Waste of Time

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121858688764535107.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Should I call this one... pointless?

2008-08-10T21:34:00.003-05:00

"Once, when I was about twenty-five and not yet entirely aware of the extremity of my unclubbability, I did try to go to a writers conference. Thirty minutes into the keynote address I had a migraine. It turns out I have an aversion to cooperative endeavors of all sorts. I couldn’t imagine making a play or movie, for instance; so many people involved. I don’t like orchestral music. I don’t like team sports. I love the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught. Make mine the desert saints, the pole-sitters, the endurance cyclists, the artist who paints rocks cast from bronze so that they look exactly like the rocks they were cast from; you can’t tell the difference when they’re side by side. It took her years to do a pocketful. You just know she doesn’t go to art conferences. Certainly not zillion-strong international ones, giant wheeling circuses of panel discussions."

says Kay Ryan (poets.org; wiki), our new poet laureate, in her article, I Go to AWP.

Assessing the new poet laureate.

Enjoy

Comment dit t'on...

2008-07-08T11:28:00.003-05:00

What is there to say about l'Institut de Francais? Too many things of interest. I will come back to this topic later. For the time being I'll just mention something almost completely unrelated, that is, the most remarkable drawings to ever have been created. I'm sure you've read the article on the ancient cave drawings in Southern France and Northern Spain by Judith Thurman. If not, then its worth a read.

Read it here>>>

"Modern Life" in poetry

2008-06-11T01:26:00.004-05:00

Interesting verse (examples from Joan Houlihan's review of Matthea Harvey's new book of poems Modern Life):

I put on my coat of pastilles and glass and hit the road
with a Phillips screwdriver. Dog Pants. The way out is in,
cried a newly promoted magpie. Look inside me, Trojan
the Horse said. Someone succumbed to a shape of stars.
Someone folded in like an Robo-accordian. Someone
smelled a herd of centipedes. Someone wondered why
poetry so publicly acclaimed could be so barren of life.

Required reading

2008-06-08T21:58:00.004-05:00

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (and Wiki). I like this guy. He speaks espresso-black, concrete blocks of Truth. This is a man with a ferocious ego. Read it.

A simple illustration:

He reads for 60 hours a week, but almost never a newspaper, and he never watches television.

“If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.”

But the biggest rule of all is his eccentric and punishing diet and exercise programme. He’s been on it for three months and he’s lost 20lb. He’s following the thinking of Arthur De Vany, an economist – of the acceptable type – turned fitness guru. The theory is that we eat and exercise according to our evolved natures. Early man did not eat carbs, so they’re out. He did not exercise regularly and he did not suffer long-term stress by having an annoying boss. Exercise must be irregular and ferocious – Taleb often does four hours in the gym or 360 press-ups and then nothing for 10 days. Jogging is useless; sprinting is good. He likes to knacker himself completely before a long flight. Stress should also be irregular and ferocious – early men did not have bad bosses, but they did occasionally run into lions.

Compiled Reading List

2008-06-06T00:19:00.011-05:00

I know I already posted about what books are on my list for post-graduation but it's much more convenient for me if they are in one place and updated. They are in some kind of order, with most wanted near the top. From here on I'll just modify this post as the list expands rather than add new posts.

Round 1 (immediate):
V.S. Naipaul: Guerillas
Hesse: Steppenwolf
Goethe: Faust part 1
Keats
Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Auster
Jonathan Culler: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature
Rousseau: Discourse on Inequality, Social Contract
Wilde: Dorian Gray
Mishima: Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Round 2:
Homer: the Iliad and/or Odyssey
Dylan Thomas
Hesse: The Glass Bead Game
Rupert Brooke: Collected poems
Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned
Plath
Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five
Kafka: The System, The Metamorphosis

Round 3:
Faulkner: Light in August, A Fable
T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land
Dante: Divine Comedy
Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls, Moveable Feast
Shakespeare: sonnets, King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet
Lord Tennyson: Ulysses
Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals
Emily Dickinson
Wittgenstein: Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics), or Philosophische Bemerkungen
Mann: The Magic Mountain
Sophocles: Antigone
Vasilii Semenovich Grossman: Life and Fate
Tennyson: suggestions?
Shaw: Pygmalion (maybe)
Goethe: Götz von Berlichingen
Oppen
Carver: Will you Please be Quiet, Please?, Cathedral
Bertrand Russell: Principles of Mathematics
Schiller: William Tell

Pre-concert lecture

2008-06-05T20:49:00.007-05:00

I just lost half my dignity by having to record a pre-concert lecture for my music history course. It's on Haydn's Symphony No. 4, Szymanowski's first Violin Concerto, and Mendelssohn's "Italian" symphony. Simply listening to my voice over and over when editing, saying horrible horrible things, squeezed what little happiness I had in me straight out into the open, where it was caught by huge invisible butterfly nets, jumbled up a bit and deposited some place where I won't be able to find it; somewhere in a tiny pocket of time.

Click here for the link.

Imagine if space/time had little pockets everywhere, that you could see and slip things into, like little cotton bulges in mid-air. or maybe little black holes sitting just over your head, sucking ideas out of you without you even noticing.

Ives and the Music of The Future

2008-06-03T15:59:00.003-05:00

From an article by Charles Ives, Music and Its Future:

THe future of music may not lie entirely with music itself, but rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits, the aspirations and ideals of the people, in the way it makes itself a part with the finer things that humanity does and dreams of. Or to put it the other way around, what music is and is to be may lie somewhere in the belief of an unknown philosopher of half a century ago who said: "How can there be any bad music? All music is from heaven. If there is anything bad in it, I put it there - by my implications and limitations. Nature builds the mountains and meadows and man puts in the fences and labels." He may have been nearer right than we think.

Gas Tax

2008-06-03T14:18:00.003-05:00

There's been a lot of talk about a gas tax, what with the Lieberman-Warner bill being debated on the Senate floor. I read an enlightening op-ed in the Journal a few weeks ago that contextualized the discussion of such a tax in such a way that helped form my own opinion into a somewhat more concrete form. Summarizing, the article shed light on the progressive view, at least currently progressive, that ultimately, in the struggle to stop global warming, society should strive to reduce できれば the consumption of gas by the masses; a gas tax does exactly this. There are other effects, however, on businesses and such that raise prices of goods and services, which happens to be the core argument against such a tax. The appropriate approach to "solving" global warming through this conduit is reducing the public's reliance on gasoline by improving mass transit. Cap and trade seems to be a decent solution for the other sector, but politics has of course infiltrated this system by inappropriately compensating large corporations and others with heavy influence in Washington. This is completely unacceptable and defeats the purpose entirely. Someone needs to step into the scene with the reputation, strength, and integrity to slap the lobbyists on the wrist, wrest the opium pipe away from the corrupt, and return the system to something even close to resembling a functioning and accountable government.

The Mikado

2008-06-03T00:51:00.007-05:00

Some great Gilbert humor from The Mikado by G&S:

(of the Mikado's son and his fleeing from his unattractive wife-to-be, Katisha)

Pooh-Bah: I'm surprised that he should have fled from one so lovely.

Katisha: That is not true. You hold that I'm not beautiful because my face is plain. But you know nothing. You are still unenlightened. Learn, then, that it is not in the face alone that Beauty should be sought.
My face is unattractive.
But I have a left shoulder blade that is a miracle of loveliness. People come miles to see it.

My right elbow has a fascination that few can resist.

Pooh-Bah: Allow me.

Katisha: It is on view Tuesdays and Fridays on presentation of visiting card.

As for my circulation, it is the largest in the world.

Ko-Ko: And yet he fled.

The Mikado: And he is masquarading in this town disguised as a second trombone.

America's New Favorite Past-time

2008-05-30T13:47:00.003-05:00

Elite-bashing. A term that encapsulates many of the problems I have with American culture. Susan Jacoby has written a beautiful article on the subject in the Times. And I quote:

"During the past few months, I have received hundreds of e-mail messages calling me an elitist for drawing attention to America’s knowledge deficit. One of the most memorable came from a man who objected to my citation of a statistic, from a 2006 National Geographic-Roper survey, indicating that nearly two-thirds of Americans age 18 to 24 cannot find Iraq on a map. “Why should I care whether my mechanic knows where Iraq is, as long as he knows how to fix my car?” the man asked.

But what could be more elitist than the idea that a mechanic cannot be expected to know the location of a country where thousands of Americans of his own generation are fighting and dying?"

"Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?"

2008-05-27T21:24:00.005-05:00

A great Scientific American article by Sean Carroll, who is at UofC. Definately worth a read if you are interested in time asymmetry, the origin of the universe, or cosmology in general. Excerpt:

"[The] scenario, proposed in 2004 by Jennifer Chen of the University of Chicago and me, provides a provocative solution to the origin of time asymmetry in our observable universe: we see only a tiny patch of the big picture, and this larger arena is fully time-symmetric. Entropy can increase without limit through the creation of new baby universes."

"...A striking feature of our observable cosmos—the arrow of time, arising from very low entropy conditions in the early universe—can provide us with clues about the nature of the unobservable universe."

Debussy

2008-05-25T14:09:00.004-05:00

I've found a new battle cry in an article by Debussy's imaginary critic, named Monsieur Croche (Mr. Eighth-note), who Debussy used as a mouthpiece in the Revue blanche:

"Remain unique!... unblemished! Being too influenced by one's milieu spoils an artist: in the end he becomes nothing but the expression of his milieu"

"Search for a discipline within freedom! Don't let yourself be governed by formulae drawn from decadent philosophies: they are for the feeble-minded. Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind..."

21st Century America(ns)

2008-05-19T22:24:00.020-05:00

How to Define Yourself in a World of Definitions

1. Research
"I have a mind!" should be the first words out of your mouth. Second should be, "And how shall I use it?" with a healthy, dramatic pause for the audience, who mercifully gasp holes in the air. Go out there. Observe. Choose role-models. Throw them away. Choose others. Place yourself in unorthodox situations and work your way through with that courage you've been waiting to use. Throw some of that youthful instinct on the burner, toss some broccoli or orange slices in there with a pinch of enthusiasm, and take a whiff. What's it smell like? Terror? panic? death...? Not a chance. There should be a spiral of smoke circling from your concoction thats tinged with a fresh sprig of parsley-scented opportunity. Now take it and...

2. Bend the Rules
"Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness" as the saying goes. I prefer "demand adherence." if the irony is not immediately apparent, let me just add that i'm one of the most lily-livered idea-men out there; if only i could drop the social obligation and take a page out of the objectivist handbook I would be allll right. Innovation is the name of the game and if you don't have dreams of Greatness then hand the reins over to your non-existent ego, sit back in your carriage pulled by two surging steads named Nescience and Oblivion, and enjoy the ride.

3. Persona
"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character" and character breaths life into the fabric of our modern reality. True character can be found in the work of Brauer or Frobenius, but our character comes from negation and a healthy suspicion of society. Re-creation, in the literal meaning of the word, and rediscovery, as psychoanalysts breath it, both lie beneath the warm, comforting covering of the self. The uncovering happens in step 1, harvesting comes in step 2, and profits flow here, when your exuberantly unique personality is established and nationally recognized. Craft every thought with a pre-thought and dominate yourself with deliberate ease. This is the Schillerian moment when the two impulses flow as one from without and within, ebbing and flowing with balance, ever intertwined, complementing each other. Cash it in: sell your self on the stock exchange and watch your stock grow.

4. The Part
Play the Part. Your Persona that you created in the previous steps steps into this all-star role with confidence and poise. Sharpened by experience, enlightened by Truth, protected by dignity and ego, experienced by protection, truthed by sharpen-ment, ego-ed by enlightenment, dignity protected by ego, truth sharpened to enlightenment through experience, and ..... and loved by all.

Coffee Breath

2008-05-13T15:39:00.008-05:00

I'm sitting in Unicorn reading the newspaper, listening to Shosta 4, and suddenly the humor slaps me with gusto. A large man wearing a thin mustache and holding his belly laughing with deliberate power. In a sinister way I think. That's what's coming through my headphones, molded from earwax; if that doesn't steel your breath to a deep metal-hue then I'm not sure what will. But then again who am I to pass judgement.

Love in the time of Boredom

2008-05-10T22:16:00.008-05:00

I once told friends that life around me tasted bland, like my mind's tongue had turned into a dusty piece of cardboard. I feel now that I was right. But I can't help from thinking how hackneyed my feelings are, how utterly and exactly average. At the risk of sounding like I need gallons of self-pity poured down my throat, i recall a time when I went to the doctor in high school for a check up and was confused to hear that I was exactly average height and average weight; someone please tell me I have average sentiments as well. Thankfully I have been successfully bred to have a violent gut-reaction to average-ness, so that I feel horrible about it. In a society where labeling is a thinly-veiled substitute for intellect and value, the paradox seems to be lost on everyone including me, or, rather, its simply accepted and brushed under the rug.

What is needed is a firm, irrefutable passion to walk through the door wearing robes of thyme and singing odes of joy at the top of its translucent lungs that fill the entire room, wall to wall. I need to drown in an endless golden pond, going down and down to its depths weighted by my own, seeing singing fish holding lutes with their mouths full; a lightness like day-dreaming. Mmm... cloudberries. I'm glad I no nothing of poetry. Imagine the trouble I'd get in if I did.

I just read that McCain proposed forming an organization of true "democratic" states to promote and protect the democratic spirit, something he says the UN is hopelessly failing at. Discuss.

Spring Inspiration

2008-05-08T14:16:00.007-05:00

or lack there of. This spring quarter ranks unmistakeably and prominently among the tired and soiled dregs of the past 5 years of college quarters. Outside the sun shines, flowers blossom, trees regain foliage, hyped students fresh from their winter hide-aways run around on fields of new grass throwing flirtatious glances at one another. Impervious to all the world's reinvigorated sparkle, I sit thinking of things I should be thinking about, not doing any of them. And there are indeed important things that need to be done right now (as I write about doing them), like making sure the Registrar knows that I'm graduating next month.

but it ruffles the feathers of my equanimity. i dont picture myself as the lazy, unmotivated type, but that's exactly what I have become over the last few weeks. it would be a cop out to lay the blame on senioritis, but what else is there. I am tired of the classes, the homework that doesn't lead anywhere, that seems so incongruous to what I feel. and online TV doesnt help at all. its probably the best worst part of the internet. i'm looking forward to lausanne where internet connections are scarce and email isnt the default crutch i lean on everytime i'm in my apartment. with graduation just around the corner, lets all hope for a gentle end to this chapter.

Summer list addendum

2008-05-03T18:55:00.006-05:00

Reading This Side of Paradise has added some members to my reading list [1][2]:

Rupert Brooke: Collected poems
Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Tennyson: suggestions?
Rousseau: Discourse on Inequality, Social Contract
Shaw: Pygmalion (maybe)
Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned
Oppen
Faulkner: A Fable
T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land

5 best things post-trip

2008-04-25T01:49:00.003-05:00

This article is just too fun to pass up. Famous outdoor athletes name their 5 favorite things about returning to civilization after an extended trip into the brush.

Fun Snowboarding/Skiing Video

2008-04-25T01:44:00.002-05:00

I found this video over on the GoBlog earlier. Great clips of some beautiful carving and even cooler paragliding/skiing.

EXTREME - RIDE THE PLANETS
by tv8montblanc

Teton Gravity Research

2008-04-23T13:28:00.005-05:00

If you're into cliff jumping on skis, or even if you've never done it but still consider it a worthwhile way to wile away those empty hours, then you may find this video from the Teton Gravity Research site riveting:

http://www.tetongravity.com/viewer/Clip_RECORDCLIFFHUCK.aspx

Rafters Get Last Look at the Great Bend of the Yangtze

2008-04-23T13:17:00.006-05:00

"A year from now, it will be impossible to repeat the eight-day rafting trip we just completed down the Great Bend of the Yangtze. This 120-mile section of the Yangtze, like many of China's rivers, will be dammed in 2009. It was amazing to experience this world-class stretch of whitewater before it changes forever...."

View some pictures and read the rest of the story>>>

Summer reading list

2008-04-18T23:09:00.012-05:00

Going through Daniel Marcus' book on Number Fields, completing the proofs of the elementary results about number rings in Microsoft Word is getting tedious so I'm extending my break again. In the same vain as the post on my summer poetry list, I'm starting to compile another list. The two are really one list, but we can think of them as subgroups or, more aptly, orders. ok -

Goethe: Götz von Berlichingen, and maybe Faust part 1

Bertrand Russell: Principles of Mathematics

Wittgenstein: Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics), or Philosophische Bemerkungen (Philosophical Remarks) if I don't like Russell's

Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise, The Last Tycoon

Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Mann: The Magic Mountain
Hesse: Steppenwolf(!), The Glass Bead Game

Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals

Secondaries:

Schiller: William Tell (maybe)
Sophocles: Antigone
Vasilii Semenovich Grossman: Life and Fate

Have any recommendations?

Poets to read

2008-04-18T22:43:00.008-05:00

I'm taking a break from writing my thesis, which is due in a week, and I started thinking about all the post-graduation reading I'd like to do. And this got me thinking about poetry. With the internet at my fingertips, I searched for poets I'd like to invite to sit on my never-ending reading list. Given the sheer volume of the poetic repertoire, one can easily imagine the difficulty anyone has in narrowing down the potentials to a manageable collection. I've come up with the following poets so far. Feel free to add or subtract, keeping in mind my position as a genuine new-comer to the world of poetry and the limited amount of time and energy I have to gobble up these works. (Remember, this is not a complete list, but rather a realistic list of the poets I can approach this summer and next year)

Homer: the Iliad and/or Odyssey
Dante: Divine Comedy
Shakespeare: sonnets
Lord Tennyson: Ulysses

Emily Dickinson

Dylan Thomas

Keats

Sylvia Plath

What does your list look like?

Roma Journeys

2008-04-17T22:21:00.009-05:00

The photographer Joakim Eskildsen has an incredible show at Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center about the Roma people, spanning many countries. A few pictures from this incredible compilation can be found on his website, and I urge you to take a moment and riffle through them.

Tricky Linguistics

2008-04-12T18:28:00.005-05:00

A great example of the absurdly hilarious comedic style that Fry & Laurie excel at.

"Hold the news-reader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers".... a unique child delivered to a unique mother

Gelliant Gutfright

2008-04-12T18:04:00.007-05:00

Between imagination and desire, between reality and ambition, between what is known and what is feared, between purpose and despair, between sense and shite, between the outer world and the inner world, that straddles the curtain between what we know and what we think we suspect, hangs a dark veil that waves gently between the beckoning finger drawing us into the world of what could be and what never couldn't be possible to have dreamt; or do they? Perhaps it isn't. Maybe we were only dreaming. Perhaps the answers could be found in that other realm, that lies between the boundary of the heart and the sweaty laundry room of the imagination, where the only rhythms are the smiles of the forgotten winter and the incessant beating of the human thigh that we call fear...

"When your knight is a perilous yo-yo eaten by Destiny's right hand." Stephen Fry's narration is fantastic.

"Memo to Bush on Darfur"

2008-04-10T18:54:00.008-05:00

Nicholas Kristof has written a great article on what steps the Bush administration should take toward tackling the situation in Darfur. A great read that stands solidly sober in a teeming sea of indignation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/opinion/10kristof.html?ex=1365566400&en=a3d65fc4bc87211e&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Googly Eyes Gardener

2008-04-10T00:43:00.007-05:00

I try not to post videos of no consequence, but I found this one hilarious:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/16417/saturday-night-live-googly-eyes-gardener#s-p1-st-i0

Sage Wohns, the Rakuten Warrior

2008-04-09T11:02:00.008-05:00

I'd like to bring to everyone's attention Sage's profile on page 11 (if you're going by the web viewing application, or page 9 if you're going by the magazine) of the May edition of J-Life.

One can immediately tell by his sinister stance and dangerously stylish suit that his presence in Japan is hazardous to the well-being of the Japanese nation. If it wasn't for his mystifyingly cabalistic look that says, "I may be dangerous, but man I look good in this suit," in a monastic sort of way, but with a touch of dash, I would notify the authorities forthwith.

Posthumous Poet

2008-04-01T18:08:00.005-05:00

O here is my left hand and here is my right hand,
And I on myself cast up as on a desert island,
In my right hand a dagger and on my left hand a ring,
And from under my feet the earth falling.

O here is my beginning, and here is my ending,
And at my bedside the armoured day standing,
Saying, Rise up, my lost one, and begone
Into reality as into a prison.

- Sylvia Townsend Warner

Claire Harman's discussion of Warner's love poetry in "The Guardian"

Tibet protests

2008-03-29T12:59:00.002-05:00