Wm Jas

Bugs to fearen babes withall

2010-07-11T20:56:00.000+08:00

In case anyone still checks this site from time to time, you might like to know that I'm now blogging (though still not very regularly) elsewhere. All the old posts from this site, with the exceptions of ambigrams and brief "I read book X on date Y" entries, have been transfered there.

Announcing a separate blog for ambigrams

2010-02-24T15:47:00.000+08:00

Since many of my regular readers are mainly in it for the ambigrams and ignore the other stuff, and most of the others are interested in the other stuff and ignore the ambigrams, I've decided to make things easier for both groups by creating a separate blog just for ambigrams and related diversions. So, ambigram people, reset your bookmarks to wmjasambigrams.wordpress.com. Everyone else, as you were.

Ambigram: Virgil

2010-02-21T10:50:00.002+08:00

Ambigram: Life/Love

2010-02-21T09:44:00.002+08:00

Fifteen translations of Dante compared

2010-02-07T12:44:00.001+08:00

In my last post I compared John Ciardi and Allen Mandelbaum's translation of the Inferno by looking at how they handled Canto XXVI, lines 112-120. Here I want to expand that exercise, comparing 15 different translations in a more systematic way. The 15 translations are those of Ciaran Carson, John Ciardi, Anthony Esolen, Robert and Jean Hollander, Robin Kirkpatrick, Stanley Lombardo, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Allen Mandelbaum, Mark Musa, J. G. Nicholls, Robert Pinsky, Tom Simone, John D. Sinclair, Charles Singleton, and C. H. Sisson.

I will be looking at the same passage as before, but I've broken it into 10 sections, each of which will be graded based on its fidelity to the original Italian. (I don't actually know much Italian, but I do have a dictionary and 15 different translations of the passage in question.) The grading is as follows: 3 = perfectly faithful, 2 = defensible paraphrase (same basic meaning), 1 = dodgy paraphrase, 0 = unforgivable paraphrase (putting words in Dante's mouth). The translators scored as follows:

Longfellow, Singleton (27)
Sinclair (26)
Mandelbaum (25)
Simone, Sisson (23)
Hollander, Kirkpatrick (22)
Lombardo (21)
Musa, Nicholls, Pinsky (18)
Ciardi (17)
Carson (14)
Esolen (13)

As might be expected, the three prose translations score highest in terms of fidelity, with Allen Mandelbaum close on their heels as the most accurate of the 12 verse translations. Ciardi unsurprisingly ranks rather low.

Here are the details of the scoring:

O frati, dissi,

Brothers, . . . I said (Carson) - 3
Shipmates, I said (Ciardi) - 1
O brothers (Esolen) - 2
O brothers, I said (Hollander, Simone, Sinclair, Singleton) - 3
Brothers, I said (Kirkpatrick, Lombardo, Musa, Sisson) - 3
O brothers, said I (Longfellow) - 3
Brothers, I said, o you (Mandelbaum) - 3
O brothers! I began (Nicholls) - 2
O brothers . . . I began (Pinsky) - 2

che per cento milia perigli

who . . . through perils numberless (Carson) - 1
who through a hundred thousand perils (Ciardi, Lombardo, Longfellow, Sinclair, Singleton) - 3
who have borne innumerable dangers (Esolen) - 1
who in the course of a hundred thousand perils (Hollander) - 3
a hundred thousand perils you have passed (Kirkpatrick) - 2
who having crossed a hundred thousand dangers (Mandelbaum) - 3
who through a hundred thousand perils have made your way (Musa) - 2
who . . . through perils without number (Nicholls) - 1
who . . . through a hundred thousand perils, surviving all (Pinsky) - 0
who through a hundred thousand dangers (Simone, Sisson) - 3

siete giunti a l'occidente,

have reached the west (Carson, Ciardi, Lombardo, Longfellow, Pinsky, Sinclair, Singleton) - 3
to reach the setting of the sun (Esolen) - 1
at last have reached the west (Hollander) - 2
and reached the Occident (Kirkpatrick) - 3
reach the west (Mandelbaum) - 3
to reach the West (Musa) - 3
to the west . . . now have reach'd (Nicholls) - 3
have come to the west (Simone) - 3
at last have reached the occident (Sisson) - 2

a questa tanto picciola vigilia d'i nostri sensi ch'è del rimanente

now that you've run the race of life, in this last watch that still remains to you (Carson) - 0
to the brief remaining watch our senses stand (Ciardi) - 2
from those few hours remaining to our watch, from time so short in which to live and feel (Esolen) - 0
to such brief wakefulness of our senses as remain to us (Hollander) - 3
For us, so little time remains to keep the vigil of our living sense (Kirkpatrick) - 1
to the last glimmering hour of consciousness that remains to us (Lombardo) - 0
to this so little vigil of your senses that remains (Longfellow) - 2
to this brief waking-time that still is left unto your senses (Mandelbaum) - 2
during this so brief vigil of our senses that is still reserved for us (Musa) - 3
to this the short remaining watch, that yet our senses have to wake (Nicholls) - 3
So little is the vigil we see remain still for our senses, that (Pinsky) - 2
for this so limited vigil of our senses which still remains to us (Simone) - 2
to this so brief vigil of the senses that remains to us (Sinclair) - 3
to this so brief vigil of your senses which remains (Singleton) - 2
to this short vigil which is all there is remaining to our senses (Sisson) - 3

non vogliate negar l'esperïenza

I ask you not to shun experience, but boldly to explore (Carson) - 0
do not deny . . . experience (Ciardi, Lombardo) - 3
do not refuse experience (Esolen) - 3
do not deny yourselves the chance to know (Hollander) - 1
Do not deny your will to win experience (Kirkpatrick) - 2
be ye unwilling to deny, the experience (Longfellow) - 3
you must not deny experience (Mandelbaum) - 2
do not deny yourself experience (Musa) - 2
refuse not proof (Nicholls) - 0
you should not choose to deny it the experience (Pinsky) - 2
do not be content to deny yourselves experience (Simone) - 2
choose not to deny experience (Sinclair) - 3
wish not to deny the experience (Singleton) - 3
do not deny experience (Sisson) - 3

di retro al sol,

beyond the sun (Carson, Ciardi) - 3
of the lands beyond the sun (Esolen) - 1
following the sun (Hollander, Longfellow, Singleton) - 2
behind the sun (Kirkpatrick) - 3
that lies beyond the setting sun (Lombardo) - 0
of that which lies beyond the sun (Mandelbaum) - 3
of what there is beyond, behind the sun (Musa) - 2
following the track of Phoebus (Nicholls) - 1
behind the sun leading us onward (Pinsky) - 0
Follow the sun into the west (Simone) - 0
in the sun's track (Sinclair) - 1
following the course of the sun (Sission) - 1

del mondo sanza gente.

the vast unpeopled world (Carson) - 1
of the world (Ciardi) - 0
the world where no one dwells (Esolen) - 2
the land where no one lives (Hollander) - 2
of worlds where no man dwells (Kirkpatrick) - 2
of the unpeopled world (Lombardo, Nicholls, Sinclair) - 3
of the world that hath no people (Longfellow) - 3
and of the world that is unpeopled (Mandelbaum) - 3
in the world they call unpeopled (Musa) - 0
of the world which has no people in it (Pinsky) - 3
of the world without people (Simone) - 3
of the world that has no people (Singleton) - 3
of that world which has no inhabitants (Sisson) - 2

Considerate la vostra semenza:

Remember who you are (Carson) - 0
Greeks! (Ciardi) - 0
Think well upon your nation and your seed (Esolen) - 1
Consider how your souls were sown (Hollander) - 1
Hold clear in thought your seed and origin (Kirkpatrick) - 1
Consider the seed from which you were born (Lombardo) - 2
Consider ye your origin (Longfellow) - 2
Consider well the seed that gave you birth (Mandelbaum) - 2
Consider what you came from: you are Greeks (Musa) - 0
Call to mind from whence we sprang (Nicholls) - 2
Consider well your seed (Pinsky) - 2
Consider your seed and heritage (Simone) - 1
Take thought of the seed from which you spring (Sinclair) - 2
Consider your origin (Singleton) - 2
Consider then the race from which you have sprung (Sisson) - 1

fatti non foste a viver come bruti,

what you were made for: not to live like brutes (Carson) - 2
You were not born to live like brutes (Ciardi) - 2
For you were never made to live like brutes (Esolen) - 2
you were not made to live like brutes or beasts (Hollander) - 2
You were not made to live as mindless brutes (Kirkpatrick) - 2
You were not made to live like brute animals (Lombardo) - 2
ye were not made to live as brutes (Longfellow, Singleton) - 3
you were not made to live your lives as brutes (Mandelbaum) - 2
You were not born to live like mindless brutes (Musa) - 2
Ye were not form'd to live the life of brutes (Nicholls) - 2
You were not born to live as a mere brute does (Pinsky) - 2
you were not made to live like brutes (Simone) - 3
You were not born to live as brutes (Sinclair) - 2
You were not made to live like animals (Sisson) - 3

ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

but for the quest of knowledge and the good (Carson) - 1
but to press on toward manhood and recognition (Ciardi) - 0
but to pursue the good in mind and deed (Esolen) - 0
but to pursue virtue and knowledge (Hollander, Singleton) - 3
but go in search of virtue and true knowledge (Kirkpatrick) - 3
but to live in pursuit of virtue and knowledge (Lombardo) - 2
but for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge (Longfellow) - 3
but to be followers of worth and knowledge (Mandelbaum) - 2
but to follow paths of excellence and knowledge (Musa) - 1
but virtue to pursue and knowledge high (Nicholls) - 1
but for the pursuit of knowledge and the good (Pinsky) - 2
but to follow virtue and knowledge (Simone, Sinclair) - 3
but to pursue virtue and know the world (Sisson) - 2

Mandelbaum vs. Ciardi as translators of Dante

2010-02-06T20:19:00.001+08:00

I just finished Allen Mandelbaum's translation of the Inferno and found it much more moving that John Ciardi's, the only other translation I've read. As I did before with Goethe's Faust, I want to compare the two translations in terms of their accuracy by looking at a sample passage. I chose one of my favorite parts, Ulysses' speech to his shipmates (Canto XXVI, lines 112-120).

First, the original Italian:

   'O frati,' dissi, 'che per cento milia
perigli siete giunti a l'occidente,
a questa tanto picciola vigilia
   d'i nostri sensi ch'è del rimanente
non vogliate negar l'esperïenza
di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente.
   Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.'

Here's John Ciardi's rendition:

'Shipmates,' I said, 'who through a hundred thousand
   perils have reached the West, do not deny
   to the brief remaining watch our senses stand

experience of the world beyond the sun.
   Greeks! You were not born to live like brutes,
   but to press on toward manhood and recognition!'

And Allen Mandelbaum's:

   'Brothers,' I said, 'o you, who having crossed
a hundred thousand dangers, reach the west,
to this brief waking-time that still is left
   unto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled.
   Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes,
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.'

Mandelbaum is clearly the more faithful to Dante here. Ciardi condense's Dante's nine lines into six, makes the first sentence hard to parse by throwing in the random word "stand" (to rhyme with "thousand," which it doesn't really), cuts out "the world that is unpeopled" altogether, and stretches his poetic license to the breaking point when he chooses to translate "Considerate la vostra semenza" as "Greeks!" (Mandelbaum's only real liberty -- adding "that gave you birth" -- seems a necessary one, since otherwise "your seed" would seem to be referring to descendants rather than ancestors.)

The two translators' very different renditions of "virtute e canoscenze" -- "manhood and recognition" vs. "worth and knowledge" -- are intriguing. Since my knowledge of Italian doesn't go much beyond the ability to recognize obvious cognates, and since both translations seem etymologically plausible, I don't know who's closer to the mark here. If I had to bet, though, I'd put my money on Mandelbaum. "Press on toward manhood" isn't the most natural exhortation to give to a company of veterans who are "already old and slow."

Chinese anagram: Castor/Pollux

2010-02-06T15:14:00.001+08:00

The twin sons of Zeus.

Chinese anagram: capo/coda

2010-01-31T11:24:00.000+08:00

Another Dante-inspired Chinese anagram: The Italian words for "head" and "tail."

Divine Dante

2010-01-23T11:34:00.001+08:00

I'm not sure what to call wordplay of this type. It's not exactly an anagram, though the general idea is the same. Unlike an anagram, it doesn't require that all the rearranged components be full letters, nor that they be arranged linearly. The components can be rotated and can be placed anywhere. (No overlapping allowed, though; that would be cheating.) The same concept can be seen in Nagfa's One Swallow piece and (almost) in my own attempt at a Chinese anagram. In fact, come to think of it, "Chinese anagram" might be just the term I'm looking for. "Chinese" because it's the closest thing you can get to an anagram in a non-alphabetic language like Chinese; because it's basically a verbal version of the Chinese art of the tangram; and because there's a long tradition in English of just randomly calling things (checkers, auctions, fire drills) Chinese. So, until someone proposes a better term, I hereby dub this art form the Chinese anagram.

I'm reading Dante again, by the way -- Allen Mandelbaum's translation. I was so impressed with his Odyssey that I went from bookstore to bookstore until I had finally tracked down copies of his Aeneid and Commedia. He's also translated Ovid, Quasimodo, and Ungaretti, and I'll snatch those up too if I can find them. For someone who is such a virtuoso at translating poetry (and from three different languages!), Mandelbaum surprisingly turns out to be a bit of a klutz when it comes to English prose, at least if his nearly unreadable introduction to the Inferno is any indication. A typical passage:

For Dante is an Aeolus-the-Brusque, a Lord-of-Furibundus-Fuss, the Ur-Imam-of-Impetus. Or, for brutish Scrutinists, who reach for similes among the beasts and not among the gods, he is the lizard that, "when it darts from hedge/ to hedge beneath the dog days' giant lash,/ seems, if it cross one's path, a lightning flash" (Inf. XXV, 79-81)

Note how the dead, bloated language suddenly springs to life as soon as he stops speaking for himself and starts translating Dante. Like Plato's Ion, he has nothing to say except as a reciter of his favorite poets -- of which, unlike Ion, he happily has more than one.

Ambigram: Wm Jas

2010-01-19T23:44:00.000+08:00

I don't know why it took me so long to get around to doing this one.

Ambigram: Faust

2010-01-17T17:55:00.000+08:00

I haven't been doing ambigrams much these days, but sometimes they just jump out at you.

This is so natural that I'm sure it's probably been done before, but the only I've been able to find on the Net is in Cyrillic.

Shaw and Darwin

2010-01-17T17:25:00.001+08:00

Bernard Shaw's preface to Back to Methuselah, "The Infidel Half Century," is something you don't see much of these days: a non-creationist attack on Neo-Darwinism.

Back to Methuselah was published in 1921, a good 15 years before the modern synthesis got underway, so "Neo-Darwinism" as Shaw uses the term means something different: not Darwin-plus-Mendel, but Darwin-minus-Lamarck. Unlike Darwin himself, who was willing to grant that Lamarckian processes (the inheritance of acquired characteristics) might play some role, the Neo-Darwinians broke with Lamarck completely and insisted that evolution was driven almost exclusively by what Shaw -- not wishing to profane the name of Nature -- insists on calling Circumstantial Selection.

It's not that Shaw doesn't believe in natural selection -- he grants that it occurs and that it influences evolution -- but he considers it to be an incidental process. He thinks of natural selection the way a more orthodox evolutionist thinks of genetic drift: It undeniably happens, but it's not all that important and evolution could go on just fine without it. The real driving force behind evolution is voluntary change.

If you can turn a pedestrian into a cyclist, and a cyclist into a pianist or violinist, without the intervention of Circumstantial [that is, natural] Selection, you can turn an amoeba into a man, or a man into a superman, without it. All of which is rank heresy to the Neo-Darwinian, who imagines that if you stop Circumstantial Selection, you not only stop development but inaugurate a rapid and disastrous degeneration.

Let us fix the Lamarckian evolutionary process well in our minds. You are alive; and you want to be more alive. You want an extension of consciousness and of power. You want, consequently, additional organs, or additional uses of your existing organs: that is, additional habits. You get them because you want them badly enough to keep trying for them until they come. Nobody knows how: nobody knows why: all we know is that the thing actually takes place.

The details of this process are admittedly a little sketchy, even if we take the heritability of acquired characteristics for granted. It's easy enough to imagine how a giraffe -- the canonical example, which Shaw dutifully trots out ("I do not remember how this animal imposed himself illustratively on the Evolution controversy; but there was no getting away from him then; and I am old-fashioned enough to be unable to get away from him now.") -- might want a longer neck, try to get one by stretching, and succeed in lengthening its neck a bit. But when one tries to picture a cartilaginous fish "trying" to have bones, or a monkey "trying" not to have a tail (not to mention a plant or an amoeba "wanting" or "trying" to do anything at all), the theory seems to break down.

For Shaw, the important thing about Lamarckism is not the inheritance of acquired characteristics, but the importance of will in the evolutionary process. In fact, Shaw seems to think that the former depends on the latter -- that acquirements are inherited if and only if they were acquired deliberately rather than by accident. (He expresses this in a rather confusing way, saying that only "habits" can be inherited, but makes it clear that he is using "habit" in a special sense which includes not only customary behavior patterns but anatomical features as well. A Shavian "habit" is any feature that is voluntarily acquired and thereafter becomes involuntary and automatic.)

Because of Shaw's focus on the inheritance of voluntarily acquired characteristics, he dismisses the experiments of August Weismann -- in which he cut off the tails of 20 successive generations of rats and observed that their offspring were nevertheless born with tails -- as missing the point. Shaw considers it self-evidently ridiculous to suppose "that injuries or accidents coming from external sources against the will of the victim could possibly establish a [heritable] habit: that, for instance, a family could acquire a habit of being killed in railway accidents." He proposes the following as an alternative experiment which, if it were practicable, would be more relevant to the Lamarckian hypothesis as he understands it.

The scientific form of his experiment would have been something like this. First, he should have procured a colony of mice highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. He should then have hypnotizes them into an urgent conviction that the fate of the musque [sic] world depended on the disappearance of its tail, just as some ancient and forgotten experimenter seems to have convinced the cats of the Isle of Man. Having thus made the mice desire to lose their tails with a life-or-death intensity, he would very soon have seen a few mice born with little or no tail. These would be recognized by the other mice as superior beings, and privileged in the division of food and in sexual selection. Ultimately the tailed mice would be put to death as monsters by their fellows, and the miracle of the tailless mouse completely achieved.

The objection to this experiment is not that it seems too funny to be taken seriously, and is not cruel enough to overawe the mob, but simply that it is impossible because the human experimenter cannot get at the mouse's mind.

The odd thing about this -- okay, there are a lot of odd things about it, but one of the odd things about it -- is how thoroughly Darwinian it is. A true Lamarckian would perhaps expect that, once the mice had been suitably hypnotized, they would somehow try very hard to reduce the length of their own tails and would succeed in doing so, if perhaps only to a very slight degree. (Exactly how this would be done is, as I have said, not so clear.) Their children would then be born with very slightly shorter tails, which they in their turn would shorten a bit by the same method, and after many repetitions of this process a generation of tailless mice would finally be produced.

Shaw predicts something completely different. Instead of the mice changing their own bodies by willpower and then passing on those changes to their children, he imagines that the mice's desire for taillessness would somehow cause a few tailless mutants to appear a generation or two later, and that the tailless mutation would become the norm by means of a process which can only be described as eugenics -- that is, self-imposed artificial selection, which is nothing more than a special case of Darwinian natural selection. The bit about the mutation arising "very soon" as a result of the mice's desire (rather than arising eventually by chance) is the only hint of anything non-Darwinian in Shaw's story.

Unlike the mouse story in the preface, which is not Lamarckian at all, the Back to Methuselah plays themselves do feature the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In the story, a few people read a book arguing that the human lifespan must be extended to at least 300 years, and as a result they themselves -- not the next generation, as in the case of the mice -- go on to live for 300 years! Somehow their desire directly causes sweeping physiological changes, which are then inherited by their children. The implication is that, had they instead read a book arguing that humans all ought to be nine feet tall, they could simply have taken thought and added the requisite cubits to their stature. (The physiological changes implied in increased longevity are internal and invisible, which helps make the story seem a little less obviously ridiculous. That's probably why the mouse story, featuring a more obvious physical feature, used a different mechanism. It would be too clearly bogus if the mice's own tails had simply disappeared after the hypnosis.) After that, eugenics -- in the form of sexual selection and genocide -- once again takes over. The long-lived people seek each other out as mates "for the good of the race," and eventually they decide to kill off all the short-lived ones. No matter how hard he tries to be a good Lamarckian, Shaw's imagination keeps being drawn back to Darwinian mechanisms.

What I thought about Avatar

2010-01-06T15:30:00.000+08:00

I finally went and saw Avatar, and, while it certainly does blow you away with its technical brilliance, I found just about everything else about it frustrating and disappointing.

The biggest disappointment is that, having demonstrated his ability to bring a totally alien world to life, Cameron doesn't bother to populate it with totally alien aliens. Six legs and spiracles notwithstanding, most of the animals are instantly recognizable as having been based on specific terrestrial genera (Brontotherium, Tapejara, Panthera, Equus, etc. -- and of course Homo), and sometimes the resemblances get even more precise. The horse-analogues, rather than just being vaguely ungulate-like, specifically call to mind draft horses of the Shire breed, and the human-analogues (if that's even the right word for something so human in every anatomical detail) are recognizably Nilotic under the blue skin. The alien humans are by far the worst. While the other animals may give the general impression of a Shire horse or a panther, they are still clearly not from earth. The people, though, are -- well, people. The USB-cord thing in the hair is about the only thing that would make anyone hesitate to classify the a Na'vi as primates, and human primates at that, albeit with atavistic tails. Not only do they lack spiracles, they have eyebrows and breasts and five-toed feet and long hair in the same place humans have long hair, and they smile and laugh and shed tears as an expression of sadness and speak a language with no features that would surprise Noam Chomsky. Talk about convergent evolution! They're so thoroughly human that we don't find it even remotely shocking or unsettling when the earth-human protagonist falls in love with one of them.

Which brings me to the second big disappointment: the complete lack of moral tension. The decision to turn against your own people and make war on them has got to be a monumentally difficult one, even when your own people are clearly the bad guys. Every instinct of loyalty and prudence is pulling you in the other direction, and to override those instincts requires heroism. Jake, though, doesn't seem to wrestle with his choice at all. "How does it feel to betray your own race?" the colonel asks him at the movie's climax -- a question which apparently goes right over Jake's head. As far as we can tell, he doesn't feel anything in particular about turning against his species. The discovery that his people are the bad guys and that it is his duty to kill them -- which should be at least as wrenching as learning that your father is Darth Vader -- makes no discernible emotional impression on him. He doesn't see "us" and "them" at all, only good guys and bad guys. This is all perhaps very morally admirable, but it comes so easily to him that it's drained of its heroism. Courage means feeling the temptation to do the wrong thing but doing the right thing anyway; Cameron never manages to convince us that Jake feels the temptation. The same goes for the handful of other humans who join Jake, from whom betrayal is as easy as saying (almost in so many words) "Screw this, I'm switching sides," and never looking back.

In an early scene Jake thanks his alien love interest for killing some nasty alien predators that were about to have him for lunch, and she rebukes him with, "Don't thank. You don't thank for this. This is sad." I assumed at that point that Cameron was foreshadowing the ending of the film -- that when the war had been won and the Na'vi were thanking Jake for helping them kill off the nasty humans who were going to bulldoze their village, he would echo those words back to them. I could hardly have been more wrong. With so many critics complaining about Avatar's very predictable plot, I guess I should be happy that Cameron managed to surprise me, but, well -- you don't thank for this. This is sad.

Still, though, when all's said and done, the special effects were pretty damn cool.

Baboons react to the death of Michael Jackson

2009-11-25T10:47:00.003+08:00

I'm sure this page will come to Yahoo's attention soon and be corrected, so for the benefit of posterity here's what it looks like now:

In addition to the headline/photo combination, there's this great line from the text: "The baboons were named local officials who are supposed to prevent baboons from entering houses and cars." Presumably they meant to say they were named by local officials -- or maybe South African politics really is that corrupt.

The end of the reading log

2009-11-18T16:59:00.000+08:00

I've decided to terminate the "reading log" aspect of this blog -- the feature in which I put up a post every time I read a book, even if I don't have anything in particular to say about it except that I finished reading it on such-and-such a date. It's out of place on a blog where I otherwise stick to notes and ideas and steer clear of autobiographical trivia. I'll still be writing about what I read, of course, but only when I actually have something to say.

Reading: The Encantadas, by Herman Melville

2009-11-09T09:25:00.003+08:00

I finished Melville's The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles on 5 November, 2009.

Reading: Benito Cereno, by Herman Melville

2009-11-05T16:23:00.000+08:00

I finished Melville's Benito Cereno on 5 November, 2009.

Reading: "Bartleby" by Herman Melville

2009-10-31T21:30:00.000+08:00

I read Melville's story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" in April 2009 and again on 31 October 2009.

Wocky-Bocky; or, the general public

2009-10-30T10:52:00.006+08:00

I found this in Conrad Roth's review of Michael Neo Palaeologus His Grammar, by his Father Stephen N. Palaeologus:

The language of the Grammar is, in fact, utterly delightful, and possibly its chief selling-point. . . . Wocky-Bocky, the name of an Indian chief in a story by Artemus Ward, is resurrected to mean 'the general public'.

Now this, it must be admitted, is perfect. So perfect that I intend to resurrect it myself. (I almost wish I were a more politically oriented person, so that I might have more opportunities to refer, say, to the Wocky-Bocky Republic of China, or to a certain rough beast which I should of course rechristen wockibockiocracy.) This post exists so that I (or, reader, you) can unobtrusively link to it when using the word, in much the same way that one might include a courtesy link to the Wikipedia page for an obscure historical personage mentioned in passing.

Here is the relevant passage from Artemus Ward's Panorama:

But there were too many of these Injuns--there were forty of them--and only one of me--and so I said--

"Great Chief--I surrender." His name was Wocky-bocky.

He dismounted--and approached me. I saw his tomahawk glisten in the morning sunlight. Fire was in his eye. Wocky-bocky came very close to me and seized me by the hair of my head. He mingled his swarthy fingers with my golden tresses--and he rubbed his dreadful Thomashawk across my lily-white face. He said--

"Torsha arrah darrah mishky bookshean!"

I told him he was right.

Wocky-bocky again rubbed his tomahawk across my face, and said--"Wink-ho--loo-boo!"

Says I--"Mr. Wocky-bocky"--says I--"Wocky--I have thought so for years--and so's all our family."

Reading: "The Piazza" by Herman Melville

2009-10-27T15:03:00.003+08:00

I finished Melville's short story "The Piazza" on 27 October 2009.

Ho-hum. The first Melville I've read that wasn't excellent.

Reading: Billy Budd, by Herman Melville

2009-10-26T21:07:00.003+08:00

I've read Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor twice, finishing it on 20 April 2007 and 26 October 2009. It's a memorable and provocative tale dealing with the rule of law and the unhappy fate of innocence in a fallen world.

"But your scruples: do they move as in a dusk? Challenge them. Make them advance and declare themselves" (Captain Vere).

Reading: See You in a Hundred Years, by Logan Ward

2009-10-25T13:28:00.001+08:00

I finished Logan Ward's See You in a Hundred Years on 25 October 2009.

One of my side jobs is working with a reading group associated with the Changhua Toastmasters Club, and this is the book they're reading now. It's not the sort of book I would have been likely to read of my own accord, but it turned out to be pretty good. Ward tells the story of how he, his wife, and their two-year-old son lived for a year without using any technology not available in 1900.

The mystery of violet and red solved

2009-10-24T10:29:00.000+08:00

Why is red so much more important than violet? I finally found an answer on this page:

As there are around an order of magnitude fewer bluish-violet cone cells than the other two types – and as the other two types are both sensitive to greens – this explains why the human eye is particularly sensitive to variations in the green portion of the spectrum. (For the more pedantic amongst us, the actual ratio of bluish-violet to bluish-green to yellowish-green [i.e., "blue" to "green" to "red"] cone cells is about 1:10:20.)

So the reason red and yellow are the top two colors while violet is an also-ran is simple: there are 20 times as many red/yellow-sensitive cones as violet-sensitive ones. By assuming that "red" cones are specially attuned to red and that the three types of cones are present in equal numbers, I made a mystery out of something that's really quite straightforward. Remember what the no-nose guy says, kids!

Now I'm going to go read the rest of that page I linked to. It looks like a very clear and thorough explanation of color.

The high Berlin-Kay rank of yellow

2009-10-23T10:14:00.000+08:00

In a previous post I wondered why, given that our color vision uses an RGB system, our languages consistently treat the non-primary yellow as more basic than blue and sometimes more basic than green. Well, sometimes you have to step back and question the givens.

The above diagram shows the sensitivity of the three cone types to different wavelengths of light. (It comes from Wikipedia. All I've added is the vertical lines dividing the spectrum into "colors.") Once you see that the sensitivity of the so-called red cone actually peaks at yellow, the latter color's status as an honorary primary makes more sense.

Now the question is, why is red considered so much more basic than violet? Being both a bookend of the visible spectrum and the region where the "blue" cone's sensitivity peaks, violet ought to be as important as red and yellow put together -- but, while red is universally treated as the very most basic spectral color, violet is not a basic color in any language. (Purple sometimes is, but purple is not the same as spectral violet.) In fact, violet is so unimportant in our color vision that it's the one spectral color your computer monitor is physically incapable of displaying -- and no one notices.

Reading: The Qur'an

2009-10-22T15:01:00.000+08:00

I finished John Medows Rodwell's translation of the Qur'an on 22 October 2009.

I suppose it's inevitable -- if unfair -- for the Western reader to compare the Qur'an with the Bible. Unfair because the latter is the work of an entire civilization, written by dozens of authors in three languages over a period of a thousand years. One could hardly expect the Qur'an, a single book by a single author, to approach the Bible in scope or depth, and, sure enough, it doesn't. Muhammad's book is endlessly repetitious, returning again and again to the same narrow family of themes: the infidels who treated God's messengers as liars, the folly of joining gods with God, the flames of hell, the shaded gardens beneath which the rivers flow, and so on.

The comparison is also unfair because, if the Bible is greatest story ever told, the Qur'an doesn't really tell a story at all. Familiar stories, some biblical and others not, are often alluded to and sometimes summarized, but never properly told. If the Bible often seems to tell stories for their own sake, the Qur'an tends to be more interested in the moral -- which is almost always the same. The people of Noah treated God's signs as lies, so God drowned them. The people of Lot treated God's apostle as a liar, and God rained stones on them. Pharaoh treated God's -- well, you get the idea. There are a few stories which the Qur'an expands in an interesting way, though:

In Sura 12, Jacob goes blind with grief over the loss of Joseph and later perceives him by smell. ("I surely perceive the smell of Joseph: think ye that I dote?") This recalls Jacob's younger days, when he deceived his own blind father, partly by means of smell, and passed himself off as Esau.
Aaron's golden calf -- which in the Qur'an is actually the work of one Samiri, Aaron being guilty only of not preventing him -- is not a dumb idol, but is animated by some occult power and lows. When Moses returns and demands, "And what was thy motive, O Samiri?" Samiri's reply is, "I saw what they saw not: so I took a handful of dust from the track of the messenger of God, and flung it into the calf, for so my soul prompted me." (Sura 20)
Solomon appears (in Suras 27 and 38, for example) as a magician, able to command the winds and the satans and to understand the speech of birds and ants. This aspect of Solomon, the butterfly-who-stamped Solomon, doesn't really turn up in the Bible.

Conspicuous by their absence are the 72 virgins we hear so much about. The houris of paradise are mentioned often, but the number 72 doesn't come from the Qur'an. Nor is there much of a focus on martyrdom or smiting the infidels. There's a bit of "slay them wherever ye find them" in places, but overall the Qur'an is less militaristic than some of its modern-day adherents would lead one to believe. One passage did jump out at me in connection with 9/11, though: "And who shall teach thee what Hell-fire is? It leaveth nought, it spareth nought, blackening the skin. Over it are nineteen angels. None but angels have We made guardians of the Fire: nor have We made this to be their number but to perplex the unbelievers" (Sura 74). Could that be the reason the al-Qaeda guys chose to use 19 hijackers?

Orange hair

2009-10-21T15:31:00.004+08:00

In his collection of Obvious Untruths, Chrs mentions "red" hair:

No person naturally has Red Hair, They only have Orange Hair. Why do people become so hysterical when you suggest that someone has Orange Hair?

Despite the proverbial hotheadedness of orangeheads, I've never known anyone to react hysterically to this observation. Rather, it tends to be treated as a bit of quasi-wit of the why-do-we-drive-on-the-parkway-and-park-in-the-driveway variety, rarely eliciting more than a monosyllabic chuckle.

But why do we call orange hair -- and orange foxes and purple wine and a lot of other non-red things -- "red"? I remember learning about "red" hair as a kid, around the same time that I learned to call brown and peach people "black" and "white," and being confused by it. Calling things by inacurate color names doesn't come naturally to kids -- they have to be taught it -- so why is it so common among adults? It's not just a quirk of the English language, either. In Chinese, for example, the word for "carrot" literally means "red radish," and orangutans are called "red-furred apes." What's going on here?

Part of it seems to be a preference for what Brent Berlin and Paul Kay called "basic color terms." After surveying numerous languages, they identified 11 basic color terms, some of which are more basic than others. Donald Brown summarizes their findings as follows:

[i]f a language has only two colors--and all languages have at least two--they are always white and black; if a language has three colors, the one added is red; if a fourth is added, it will be either green or yellow; when a fifth is added, it will then include both green and yellow; the sixth added is blue; the seventh added is brown; and if an eighth or more terms are added, it or they will be purple, pink, orange, or gray. (quoted here)

So the hierarchy goes something like this:

black, white
red
yellow, green
blue
brown
purple, pink, orange, gray
all other colors

In every case I can think of where something is consistently described with an objectively incorrect color term, the term used is always more basic than the actual color. Many orange things (foxes, flames, Yellow trucks) are called "red" or "yellow," but few if any red or yellow things are called "orange." Gray dogs and purple violets can be called "blue," but bluebirds are never called "gray" or "purple." Human skins come in various shades of brown and pink, but we prefer to call them instead by the most basic of colors: black, white, red, and yellow.

Berlin and Kay would say that English has 11 basic colors and that all other colors are non-basic. If a color is non-basic, you can get away with using a more basic color word instead and no one will look at you strange. Words like "magenta" and "goldenrod" are available if you want to use them, but you can always just say "pink" and "yellow" instead. Basic colors, on the other hand, are mandatory vocabulary. If something is unambiguously blue in color, "blue" is the most basic word you can use for it. You can get less basic if you like (cornflower, navy, turquoise, etc.), but you can't use a more basic word like "green" or "black." I think there's also a middle rank of semi-basic colors like purple an orange. In some situations these words are basic (if a guy's wearing an purple T-shirt, you can't call it "red" or "blue"), but in others they're not ("red grapes" is okay). The truly basic colors in English are black, white, red, yellow, green, and blue. The semi-basic colors are brown, pink, purple, orange, and gray. Other languages will draw the lines differently (in Chinese, blue is only semi-basic and you can get away with calling the sky "green") but will presumably always conform to Berlin and Kay's hierarchy.

Which leads to a more fundamental question: why that particular hierarchy? The most basic colors are certainly not the ones you'd tend to encounter most often in nature. If the purpose of language is to describe what we see, you'd think every language on earth would consider brown a basic color, with red much lower on the hierarchy. You'd also think that at least one of the many languages spoken by Caucasians would have a basic color word for describing their own skin! I mean, how much more basic can you get? But they don't.

The other obvious theory would be that the basic colors reflect some property of the human eye, but that doesn't quite seem to work, either. As far as the eye is concerned, the basic colors are black and white (rods) and red, green, and blue (cones). So why does yellow outrank blue and sometimes even green? And what's so special about red that makes it more basic than its fellow primaries?

Reading: "The Bell-Tower" by Herman Melville

2009-10-17T15:36:00.001+08:00

I finished Melville's short story "The Bell-Tower" on 17 October 2009.

Bilingual/bilateral ambigram: 凶/bad

2009-10-12T17:26:00.001+08:00

Back when I made my Dead/死 ambigram, I said, "Now if I could come up with an English rotational ambigram which is also a Chinese rotational ambigram, and which has the same meaning in both languages, that would be the holy grail." I'm getting closer:

The symmetry here is reflectional rather than rotational, but it still comes close to my goal: an English ambigram which is simultaneously a Chinese ambigram with the same meaning. Unfortunately, the symmetry involved is pretty trivial, even more so in the Chinese than the English. (Bilaterally symmetrical Chinese characters are approximately 0.68 RMB a dozen.) Ideally I'd like something involving more than one character, or at least a character that's not naturally symmetrical.

Still, it's a start.

Ambigram: Christ is Lord

2009-10-09T11:07:00.000+08:00

Since I seem to be on a prophet/messiah theme...

A few minor changes could make it read Christ / Islam.

Ambigram: Joseph Smith / prophet man

2009-10-09T10:33:00.000+08:00

Ambigram: William/Messiah

2009-10-08T17:12:00.001+08:00

No, I don't mean me. This ambigram is for my uncle William John Tychonievich -- poet, singer, retired janitor, and freelance Messiah.

Ambigram: Nancy Herman

2009-10-08T15:10:00.000+08:00

Ambigram: Burning

2009-10-06T22:49:00.000+08:00

Blake's "The Tyger," with its reference to "fearful symmetry," strikes me as a natural theme for ambigrams. I've been working on making an ambigram of the whole first stanza (which is the same as the last stanza, so I can later expand the ambigram to include the whole poem). In the course of my doodling, I discovered that the third word, burning, is itself almost a natural ambigram.

Ambigram: up/dn

2009-10-06T22:27:00.002+08:00

I'll wager I'm not the first to have noticed this 100% natural ambigram.

French-English ambigram: pas bon / no good

2009-10-01T22:42:00.003+08:00

Pas bon means "no good" in French.

French ambigram: bon/mal

2009-10-01T18:01:00.002+08:00

French for "good" and "evil," respectively.

Chinese-English ambigram: Yes/是

2009-10-01T13:05:00.002+08:00

This is almost a naturally occurring ambigram, requiring very little tweaking. I can't say that 是 is "Chinese for yes," since Chinese doesn't really have a single word that corresponds to yes, but it's about as close as you can get.

Muhammad vs. Paul on slavery

2009-09-30T14:46:00.001+08:00

I'm still reading the Qur'an. I found this passage on slavery.

God maketh comparison between a slave the property of his lord, who hath no power over anything, and a free man whom We have Ourselves supplied with goodly supplies, and who giveth alms therefrom both in secret and openly. Shall they be held equal? No: praise be to God! But most men know it not (16:77).

Compare this with the familiar line from Paul's epistle to the Galatians:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus (3:28).

At first glance, Paul seems much closer than Muhammad to our modern ideas about freedom and equality, but I'm not sure that's really the case. Paul's point is not that all people should be made equal, but that in God's eyes they already are -- that the question of whether a person is Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free, is simply not important. Paul's writings make it very clear that he saw no need for Greeks to be made into Jews, and I suspect that he would likewise have seen no need for the slaves to be set free. Abolitionists can argue that if all men are equal in the eyes of God we ought therefore to treat them equally in society, but Paul's writings could just as easily be used to dismiss slavery as a non-issue.

Muhammad, on the other hand, seems to be enthusiastically endorsing the institution of slavery, praising God that the slave and the free man are not held equal. I think there are two ways of reading his statement, though. Is God saying that slavery is appropriate because men are not equal, or is he saying that men are not equal because slavery exists? Under the first reading, the message is: "Should all men be held equal and equally deserving of freedom? No! Some should be free and others should be slaves." The second reading would gloss the same passage thus: "Should we pretend [as Paul does] that being a slave is just as good as being free, that the slave and the free man are in fact equal? No! Being free is clearly better." The latter reading is supported by Muhammad's focus on the ability to give alms as the distinguishing feature of a free man. If a free man is better able to do good and serve God than a slave is, the natural conclusion is that it would please God if every man were free. Muhammad clearly thinks that his point about slaves is a controversial one ("most men know it not"), and, given that he is clearly familiar with Christian teachings and often argues against them in the Qur'an, I wonder if this passage might even be intended as a direct response to Paul's feelgooderism: No, Paul, slaves are free men are not to be considered equal, and all men will not be equal until all men are free.

High and low

2009-09-29T15:54:00.003+08:00

The Boston Globe has a summary of recent psychological research indicating that some metaphors are so fundamental that our minds conflate their literal and metaphorical senses, such that manipulating the one can influence how people think about the other.

Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how “warm” or “cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how “weighty” people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful. What they have found is that, in fact, we do.

The article discusses the following metaphors:

Warm/cold: People holding a cup of hot coffee rate a person as happier and friendlier than those holding a cup of iced coffee. When people recall an episode of social ostracism, the room feels physically colder to them,
Weighty/light: People answer questions more carefully (as if judging them to be weightier) when writing on a heavier clipboard.
High/low: People unconsciously look up when they think about power. People who tell a story while moving marbles to a higher position tell happier stories than those who are moving them to a lower position.
Rough/smooth: Handling sandpaper makes people less likely to think a social situation went smoothly.
Clean/dirty: Guilt makes people feel physically dirty. Washing their hands makes them feel less guilty.
Hard/soft: Sitting on a hard chair makes people think of tasks as harder.

One fundamental metaphor that the article doesn't mention is the use of "high" and "low" to describe the frequency of sounds -- a metaphor that is used in every language and culture with which I am familiar. It seems a strange one to me, given the general rule that large objects produce "lower" sounds than small ones. What makes it natural for us to think of the voice of a grown man or a buffalo as "low" and that of a child or a mouse as "high"? The only explanation I can think of is that you lower something in your throat in order to speak or sing in a "low" voice and raise it for a "high" one.

In any case, the acoustic sense of "high" doesn't seem to mesh well with the other metaphorical meanings of that word. We may unconsciously look upwards when we think of power, but we certainly don't associate power with a high-pitched voice. And the expectation that the Most High God have a most deep voice is so automatic that giving him a high-pitched one (as in this video) seems blasphemous. It seems that we expect everything about God to be high ("God is in heaven and thou art on earth") except his voice.

So why is it that we so universally describe acoustic pitch in terms that clash with our other habitual metaphors? "High," like "white" (as so exhaustively detailed by Melville), seems to be a concept in conflict with itself.

Joyce on the supreme artist

2009-09-28T20:12:00.000+08:00

I found this line from Joyce's Stephen Hero quoted in Umberto Eco's "A Portrait of the Artist as Bachelor":

The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and 're-embody' it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist.

Ambigram: Dinosaurs

2009-09-27T11:35:00.000+08:00

This is almost a naturally occurring ambigram. I happened to see the word on the cover a kids' book, and it jumped out at me.

I'm not completely satisfied with the D/S, which still looks too much like S/S. (My Charles Darwin ambigram has the same problem.) One solution to the problem is to notice that there are also such things as sinosaurs.

Thoughts on the Qur'an, mostly from Sura Al-An'am

2009-09-25T11:33:00.000+08:00

I've been reading the Qur'an. I'm about a quarter of the way through John Medows Rodwell's English translation.

It's pretty slow going for the first several suras, an impressive portion of the text being devoted to endlessly repeating that believers will go to paradise and infidels will burn in hell. The fourth sura offers this charming description: "Those who disbelieve Our signs We will in the end cast into the Fire: so oft as their skins shall be well burnt, We will change them for fresh skins, that they may taste the torment. Verily God is" (here even Muhammad seems to realize that the customary epithets "compassionate, merciful" would sound odd and opts instead for) "mighty, wise!" (4:56) This, astonishingly, is presented as a just punishment for the crime of failing to believe something -- not for doing wrong, but for being wrong, for having incorrect opinions. As the Qur'an makes clear in repeated rhetorical questions, its author can imagine nothing more wicked. Now I understand why Muhammad says not to make friends with unbelievers; knowing that your friend is having his skin endlessly burnt off and replaced might interfere with your ability to properly enjoy paradise.

But I already knew that about the Qur'an. Everybody does. Here are a few interesting bits -- all from the sixth Sura, it turns out -- which I didn't know about before:

It is He who taketh your souls at night, and knoweth what ye have merited in the day: then He awakeneth you therein, that the set life-term may be fulfilled . . . (6:60)

I suppose this might be talking about death, judgment, and resurrection -- but the bit at the end about awakening so that the set life-term may be fulfilled makes me think that it's talking quite literally about sleeping and waking up, saying that God takes our souls during sleep and returns them to us when we wake up. I find that interesting because it reminds me of an argument used by Sam Harris in a debate with Andrew Sullivan, who found it difficult to believe that his consciousness would simple cease at death.

Presumably, you don't find it hard to accept that you didn't exist before you were born, so why is it so difficult to believe that you will cease to exist after you die? . . . Or imagine dying in parts: what if you had a stroke that damaged your visual cortex-where would your faculty of sight be thereafter? If a priest said that your visual self had gone on to heaven before you, would you believe him? . . . There is simply no question that brain damage can cause any of us to lose the specific faculties that constitute our conscious selves. Why is it so hard to imagine that we can lose all these faculties at once?

Or consider the analogy of sleep: each night you fall asleep and surrender your subjectivity to oblivion. You . . . awaken each morning without any sense of having lived for most of the night. You already know, therefore, what it's like for your experience of the world to cease. Is a permanent cessation really so difficult to imagine?

Harris's series of analogies doesn't actually prove anything. Instead it relies on the listener's judgment, on his subjective sense of what is absurd. The believer always has the option of biting the bullet and saying, for example, "Why, yes, in that case I would believe that my visual self had gone to heaven before me." Mormonism does this when it comes to our apparent nonexistence before we were born, insisting that, yes, we did exist before birth, that each human soul has always existed and is co-eternal with God, but that memory of the "pre-mortal life" is erased or suppressed at birth. The Qur'an seems to be doing the same thing with sleep, taking the idea of the afterlife to its logical (if absurd) conclusion. Consciousness seems to cease at death, but in fact the soul lives on in another world; therefore, if consciousness seems to cease temporarily during sleep, it stands to reason that in fact the soul has temporarily gone to another world. I'm not sure that this is what the Qur'an is saying -- a lot obviously depends on matters of translation and interpretation -- but if it is, it offers an interesting new take on the familiar prayer "Now I lay me down to sleep / I pray the Lord my soul to keep."

This next line is one I had read before, when, many years ago, I was studying stories about Abraham from various sources (a study that culminated in my discovery that the Mormon Book of Abraham was a transparent hoax and my subsequent resignation from the Mormon church). The "he" in this passage is Abraham:

And when the night overshadowed him, he beheld a star. "This," he said, "is my Lord:" but when it set, he said, "I love not gods which set." (6:76)

I love that line. It has a certain Nietzschean grandeur, at least in this translation. One can't help but notice, though that Abraham's reason for concluding that the star is not a god is based on ignorance. The star didn't really "set" or fall or cease to shine; all that happened was that the earth rotated until it was no longer in Abraham's line of sight. A more astronomically literate prophet might have found in this a metaphor for the true God: If He sometimes seems to be absent, it is only because we have turned away from Him.

One more passage that caught my eye:

Revile not those whom they call on beside God, lest they, in their ignorance, despitefully revile Him. (6:108)

This comes surprisingly close to the Golden Rule and "Judge not lest ye be judged." It would have been nice if Muhammad had pursued this line of thinking a little further and come up with "Murder not the infidels for disbelieving in your God, lest they, in their ignorance, murder you for disbelieving in theirs." -- but, in fairness, I shouldn't assume he didn't until I've finished his book.

Ambigram: William/Vivian, version 2

2009-09-22T15:16:00.000+08:00

Reading: The Odyssey

2009-09-21T21:40:00.001+08:00

I've read two translations of Homer's Odyssey:

Robert Fitzgerald (29 Aug 2001)
Allen Mandelbaum (19 Sep 2009)

I've also perused bits of W. H. D. Rouse's translation, although I've read his Iliad and wasn't impressed. As I might have expected, he manages to mangle even the most beautiful passages. Compare these lines from Mandelbaum's Odyssey

Tenacious, shameless, driven to deceive,
even in your own land you cannot leave
behind the tales and traps, the lies you love.

with their counterparts in Rouse's

Irrepressible! everlasting schemer! indefatigable fabulist! Even in your own country you wouldn't desist from your tales and your historiological inventions, which you love from the bottom of your heart.

The man simply has a tin ear.

That scene, by the way, from Book XIII has always been for me the heart of the Odyssey; I find his reunion with Athena, who knows and loves him as the inveterate old schemer he is, more moving than his reunion with Penelope, who knows him only as a husband. Yes, Odysseus loves his wife and is as true to her as could reasonably be expected given the circumstances, but man's love is of man's life a thing apart. The final reunion is Penelope's scene, not his; Odysseus is no more himself than when sitting under that olive tree with his old friend Athena, plotting.

Ambigram: William/Vivian

2009-09-21T18:00:00.000+08:00

Ambigram: caffè latte

2009-09-21T17:27:00.000+08:00

Another take on this very ambigram-friendly drink:

Ambigram: caffe latte

2009-09-18T16:50:00.002+08:00

Just a quick rough sketch (freehand with touchpad in MSPaint). I'm sure I'm not the first person to have thought of this.

Aristotle and the function of man

2009-09-18T11:22:00.000+08:00

I've been doing some remedial reading of Aristotle these days. The following comes from Nicomachean Ethics I.7:

[A clearer account of happiness] might perhaps be given, if we could first ascertain the function of man. For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the 'well' is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function. Have the carpenter, then, and the tanner certain functions or activities, and has man none? Is he born without a function? Or as eye, hand, foot, and in general each of the parts evidently has a function, may one lay it down that man similarly has a function apart from all these? What then can this be? Life seems to be common even to plants, but we are seeking what is peculiar to man. Let us exclude, therefore, the life of nutrition and growth. Next there would be a life of perception, but it also seems to be common even to the horse, the ox, and every animal. There remains, then, . . . an activity or actions of the soul.

Two things strike me as odd about this line of reasoning. The first is Aristotle's assumption that "the" function of man -- the function most relevant to his happiness -- must be something peculiar to his species, and that we can begin by setting aside all functions which man has in common with other organisms. The implication is that in a differently populated universe, one in which man was still man but shared his world with a different cast of organisms, Aristotle's reasoning might have led to vastly different conclusions. For example, in a universe with many highly intelligent species (and our universe may yet turn out to be such a place) the soul and its virtues would no longer be peculiar to man and could no longer be considered central to man's happiness.

The focus on a distinctive or peculiar function also raises the question, "Peculiar to whom or what group?" Aristotle focuses on what distinguishes the human species from others, but that focus seems arbitrary. He could just as easily have focused on what distinguishes Greeks from barbarians, or aristocrats from commoners, or each individual from his fellows. Or, going the other direction, he could have thought of himself more broadly as a hominoid and found that happiness comes from exercising our distinctive ability to brachiate. Aristotle rejects both the too-narrow focus (I'm a tanner, so my function is to make leather) and the too-broad (I'm an organism, so my function is to vegetate), zeroing in on the species level, but he never explains why or makes it clear why being a good man is more important than being, say, a good carpenter or a good mammal.

The second thing I noticed is how facilely Aristotle makes the jump from functional organs to functional organisms, passing over one of the most significant (and, before Darwin, baffling) features of biology -- namely, that while individual organs tend to be very clearly "for" something, whole organisms have no obvious function at all other than the circular ones of staying alive and reproducing their kind. (More precisely, every organism's function is to keep its genes alive, whether in original form or as copies, and it's the genes that have no function other than to go on existing. But Aristotle obviously couldn't have known that.) Aristotle, being both knowledgeable about biology and skilled in reasoning about purposes, would have been the perfect person to notice this and call it to everyone's attention, but instead he contents himself with the rather weak move of choosing an organism's most distinctive organ (the mind, in the case of man) and ascribing that organ's function to the organism as a whole.

The Argument from Desire

2009-09-17T17:09:00.000+08:00

I've recently read two discussions -- one by philologist Edward M. Cook (of Ralph the Sacred River), and one by Christian apologist Peter Kreeft -- of what is being called the Argument from Desire. Then, by a strange coincidence, John C. Wright also came out with a post about it while I was in the process of composing this one.

The argument, though not the name, comes from C. S. Lewis, who summarizes it as follows in the tenth chapter of Mere Christianity:

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

This is not strictly speaking an argument for the existence of God, but for an undefined something which is beyond all known human experience. As Kreeft puts it, "What it proves is an unknown X, but an unknown whose direction, so to speak, is known. This X is more: more beauty, more desirability, more awesomeness, more joy." Still, if even this much can be proved -- if we have reason to believe in something beyond this world which is nevertheless intimately connected with human desires and interests -- it gives us at least a starting point from which to theologize.

Of course no one would argue that every human desire -- including my desire for an ansible and a cloak of invisibility -- implies the existence of an object that would satisfy it, only that we are not born with vain desires. Lewis's argument only applies to natural, innate, instinctive desires, so the first question that arises is how to distinguish these from artificial ones. Kreeft proposes the following criteria:

We generally "recognize corresponding states of deprivation" for natural desires, but not for artificial ones. "There is no word like 'Ozlessness' parallel to 'sleeplessness.'"
Because natural desires come from our shared human nature, they "are found in all of us, but the artificial ones vary from person to person."

Kreeft's first point seems not to favor Lewis, who was so far from seeing his unsatisfied desire as a state of deprivation analogous to sleeplessness that he actually dubbed it "Joy" -- not the desire for Joy, mind you, but Joy itself. As far as Lewis was concerned, his desire was not for Joy; it was Joy. The desire was itself intensely desirable. In that respect it seems more like an artificial, fanciful desire than a natural, biological one. Are intense hunger, loneliness, sleep deprivation, and so on ever joyous experiences? Wouldn't it be odd if they were? Fantasizing about the land of Oz, on the other hand, can be rather pleasant.

The second point is also problematic, since so many obviously fanciful desires are nevertheless near-universal. As Wright (who, despite his Lewisian sympathies, finds this particular argument weak) puts it, "Who has not longed to fly to the stars . . . to speak to the trees and rivers and hills, . . . or peer into the thoughts of another, or live his life?" And who has not felt Lewisian Joy, the "desire which no experience in this world can satisfy," a persistent longing which is no less intense for being vague? All of these must be in some sense "natural," since they come so naturally to us, but it hardly follows that there must exist something which can satisfy them.

Desires, after all, do not exist to be satisfied; they exist to motivate behavior. Often the behavior elicited by a desire will result in its satisfaction (e.g., hunger motivates eating, and eating satisfies hunger) but this need not always be the case. Take for example the proverbial method of motivating a donkey to move by dangling a carrot in front of it, where the donkey's desire serves its purpose (making the donkey move) even if it is never satisfied. In fact, the minute you actually let the donkey eat the carrot, it will stop walking and the purpose of the desire will be frustrated. You should only let it eat the carrot after you have reached your destination and no longer want the donkey to move; if you want it to keep moving indefinitely, you should never let it eat the carrot. Creating a desire serves to make the donkey move; satisfying the desire serves to make it stop. (Of course this is a highly artificial example, but in principle there's nothing to stop nature from doing something similar.) So in thinking about desire and satisfaction, we need to keep in mind two important points -- important enough to be bulleted:

To understand why a given natural desire exists, the correct question to ask is not what would satisfy it, but what evolutionarily useful behavior it serves to motivate.
Other things being equal, we should expect a desire to be satisfied only when, and only for so long as, the behavior it serves to motivate is no longer useful.

If there were some behavior which it were evolutionarily beneficial for us to perform only once, or only a specific finite number of times, then we could expect to find a natural desire which could be satisfied in the fullest sense of that word -- we reach the intended goal, the desire is completely and permanently quenched, and we move on to other things. Mission accomplished. It's hard to think of any clear examples of this in the real world, though, which is perhaps only to be expected. The evolutionary project -- ensuring that copies of as many of our genes as possible continue to exist for as long as possible -- is inherently open-ended, a race with no finish line, and we might expect a similar open-endedness in the desires which were created to serve it.

More typically we find that our natural desires can be satisfied, but only for a time. The satisfaction is temporary, and the desire is quenched and rekindled, quenched and rekindled, in a cycle that can continue indefinitely. We eat, we drink, we sleep -- but hunger, thirst, and fatigue are never banished for long. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. This is a confusing state of affairs if we see satisfaction as being the purpose of desire, but it makes perfect sense if we keep in mind that desires exist to trigger behavior and satisfaction exists to turn it off. When the body needs fuel, the desire to eat is turned on; when it has enough, and eating more would actually be detrimental, the desire is turned off -- satisfied -- but only until fuel supplies begin to run low again.

The on-again off-again nature of hunger is explained by the fact that eating regularly is evolutionarily useful but eating until you burst is not. But what if there were a behavior which, unlike eating, was always useful and never needed to be turned off? Well, in that case we would expect that behavior to be motivated by a desire which could never be satisfied. The most obvious example of this in nature is our desire for life itself. Nature has given most of us an insatiable desire to go on living indefinitely, not because immortality is actually on offer, but to motivate us to extend our finite lives for as long as we possibly can. Other ways of coping with our unacceptable mortality -- having children, trying to bequeath something of lasting value to posterity, and so on -- also tend to serve evolution's ends. So long as we keep chasing the carrot of eternal life, pulling our wagonload of selfish genes behind us, the desire serves its purpose, even if satisfaction remains forever out of reach.

Lewisian Joy isn't as straightforward as a desire for immortality -- it's a vague desire for a certain je ne sais quoi -- and so the behavior it serves to motivate is less easily characterized. However, I suspect that it still does serve to motivate broadly predictable patterns of behavior. Someone who is motivated by Joy is likely to seek, as Kreeft puts it, "more awesomeness" -- where our idea of awesomeness will tend to be drawn from our other, more straightforward (and more clearly evolutionarily useful) desires. The inchoate longing for "something more" is not as open-ended as it might seem, since our human nature will predictably direct it towards certain goals (such as power, wisdom, and beauty) rather than others (such as trying to ensure that the number of carrots in the world is prime). Given how clever our species is, and how good we are at finding ways to cheat evolution by satisfying out desires without reaching the goals for which those desires were created (see my post on the Genie scenario) -- Joy may be a broadly effective way of keeping us from resting on unearned laurels.

I'm getting into just-so-story territory here, but all that's really necessary to counter Lewis is to come up with an explanation for vague unsatisfiable desires which, however hypothetical and ad hoc it might be, is at least less far-fetched than his own "most probable explanation" -- namely, that there must exist some "other world" than the known universe and that it was for this hypothetical world that we were "made." And, that, I think, is a pretty easy standard to meet.

Ambigram: The Lion in Winter

2009-09-12T15:44:00.004+08:00

Ambigram: Pious nerd

2009-09-07T18:32:00.004+08:00

I'm thinking I should put this on a T-shirt.

Update: As suggested by Nagfa, here's a version with a smaller "s." I agree that it reads better this way.

Ambigram: Nihilist

2009-09-07T17:41:00.003+08:00

Rough draft of Ibsen/Schopenhauer ambigraphic

2009-09-05T12:01:00.005+08:00

Henrik Ibsen's side-whiskers . . .

. . . make him look like an upside-down Arthur Schopenhauer . . .

. . . so I'm working on an ambigram/ambigraphic double portrait. Here's a very, very rough draft.

It's still got a long way to go, but I think this basic structure will work.

Ambigram: Kierkegaard

2009-09-05T11:22:00.004+08:00

The inverted name of a practitioner of "inverted dialectic." I'm very happy with the kie/ard match, but the rest of it could still use some work.

Reading: What Philosophy Is

2009-09-05T09:59:00.004+08:00

I finished reading the essay compilation What Philosophy Is: Contemporary Philosophy in Action, edited by Havi Carel and David Gamez, on 5 Sep 2009. It includes the following:

Simon Blackburn, Foreword
Matt Matravers, "Philosophy as Politics: Some Guesses as to the Future of Political Philosophy"
Julie Kuhlken, "Philosophy as Logo: The Thought of Branding and the Branding of Thought"
Bence Nanay, "Philosophy as Biology: Evolutionary Explanations in Philosophy"
Manuel DeLanda, "Philosophy as Intensive Science"
Michael Friedman, "Philosophy as Dynamic Reason: The Idea of a Scientific Philosophy"
Bruce Janz, "Philosophy as if Place Mattered: The Situation of African Philosophy"
Juan Cristóbal Cruz Revueltas, "Philosophy as a Problem in Latin America"
Ed Brandon, "Philosophy as Bricolage"
Julian Baggini, "Philosophy as Judgement"
Simon Glendinning, "Philosophy as Nomadism"
Eran Dorfman, "Philosophy as an 'As'"
Simon Critchley, "Philosophy as Poetry: The Intricate Evasions of As"
Evgenia V. Cherkasova, "Philosophy as Sideshadowing: The Philosophical, the Literary, and the Fantastic"
David J. Rosner, "Philosophy as Therapy"
Havi Carel, "Philosophy as Listening: The Lessons of Psychoanalysis"
Patricia Sayre, "Philosophy as Profession"
David Gamez, "Philosophy as Deep and Shallow Wisdom"
Hilary Lawson, "Philosophy as Saying the Unsayable"

Ambigram: energy = mass·c²

2009-09-04T09:53:00.004+08:00

This was inspired by Nagfa's draft of a Nietzsche/Einstein ambigram that incorporates E=mc².

Seven heads and ten horns

2009-09-04T09:02:00.004+08:00

The Rev. Brendan Powell Smith's Brick Testament website, which uses Legos to illustrate stories from the Bible, recently (or since my last visit, anyway) added a section on the Revelation of John, including a Lego version of the great beast with seven heads and ten horns. Like many illustrators of the Apocalypse, Smith seems unsure of how to deal with the mismatched number of heads and horns; he arbitrarily allots one horn each to some of the heads and gives two to others.

Now I don't know if John really had a clear mental image of this beast or not -- the fact that he gives the beast seven heads and then refers to its "mouth," singular, suggests that perhaps he didn't -- but if he did, I suspect he pictured it with all ten horns on a single head. To see why, look at John's description of the beast (Revelation 13):

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast. And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.

and compare it with its obvious source (Daniel 7):

Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea. And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another. The first was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings: I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man’s heart was given to it. And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear, and it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh. After this I beheld, and lo another, like a leopard, which had upon the back of it four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads; and dominion was given to it. After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns. I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.

The ten horns clearly come from Daniel's beasts, and I think the seven heads do as well. Put the four beasts together, and you get one lion head, one bear head, four leopard heads, and one head with ten horns -- for a total of seven heads, only one of which has horns. John probably imagined his beast as looking less like this

and more like this

Actually, on second thought, he probably didn't imagine the seventh head looking quite so -- what's the word? -- ornithischian. That might make a great premise for a thriller, though: Scientists attempt to clone a styracosaurus from blood found in an amber-preserved mosquito, but the DNA is incomplete and, having learned from Jurassic Park that replacing the missing pieces with frog DNA would be a really bad idea, they decide instead to splice in some genes from lions and leopards and bears. (What could go wrong, right?) Little do they realize that what they have just created is -- the Antichrist!

Figure/ground: At ease in Zion

2009-09-03T10:17:00.005+08:00

"Woe to them that are at ease in Zion, and trust in the mountain of Samaria. . . ." (Amos 6:1)

"Therefore, wo be unto him that is at ease in Zion! Wo be unto him that crieth: All is well! . . . Yea, wo be unto him that saith: We have received, and we need no more!" (2 Nephi 28:24-27)

White whale, version 2

2009-09-03T09:16:00.000+08:00

Figure/ground: White Whale

2009-09-02T11:45:00.000+08:00

John C. Wright's anti-gay argument

2009-09-02T09:47:00.001+08:00

John C. Wright's case against homosexuality, laid out mostly in Part V of his essay on sex (links to all six parts available here), can be summarized as follows:

It is in society's interests, for various prudential reasons, to insist that the sex act proper (copulation) be restricted to marriage.
People will be able to comply with the above restriction only if they cultivate habits of sexual self-command (chastity) rather than sexual self-indulgence (unchastity).
All sexual acts other than actual copulation -- that is, sodomy and other acts called "unnatural" in less sensitive times -- are "unchaste in essence" because they "mock or impersonate the sex act with the same physical sensations as the sex act, but they are [sexual] by accident, not sexual essentially." Unnatural sexual acts may nevertheless be permitted within marriage as an adjunct to, but never a replacement for, the sex act proper, "provided these acts increase the union and love of matrimony."
A preference for unnatural acts over copulation, such that one's preference weakens one's appetite for copulation rather than strengthening it, is a neurosis. Unnatural sex acts should be treated as we treat drinking and gambling: "If done in moderation, in certain times and settings, no opprobrium attached. When they become addictive, obsession, or neurotic, they become vices, and must be deterred." "Customs and manners therefore cannot support non-copulation forms of neurotic sexual deviance without eroding matrimony. The two are mutually exclusive."
Therefore, regardless of whether or not homosexuality is in itself harmful or bad, "it still cannot escape the general prohibition against non-essential forms of sexual gratification neither leading to nor supporting copulation."

I basically agree with (1), though it must be stressed that the marriage-only rule works only if it is enforced by society, and that in a society which does not enforce it there's no particular merit in choosing to live by it as a matter of personal principle. In this way marriage is a bit like a driver's license. It's in society's interest to insist that all drivers have a license -- but if driver's licenses were considered by the law and society to be completely optional, a driver would be under no moral imperative to get one. He would be under a moral imperative to drive competently and safely -- the behaviors which the institution of driver-licensing is meant to enforce -- but provided he did so, there would be no need for the formality of getting an actual license. That formality is of no benefit to society unless it is mandatory. The same goes for marriage, which is basically a license to have a sexual relationship. It's arguably a good idea for society to require that all sexual relationships be licensed (more on this in another post, perhaps), but absent such a requirement, there's nothing particularly moral about getting such a license yourself (though in some cases you might do so for reasons of self-interest). As with driving, the important thing is not the license itself but the behaviors the license is meant to enforce. But, all that aside, I'm going to grant (1) for the sake of argument here. Whether or not you agree with it, it should be interesting to accept it as a premise and see whether the suppression of homosexuality follows -- whether, that is, any valid line of reasoning lies behind the common use of "pro-marriage" as a euphemism for "anti-gay."

Point (2) is an interesting one. Though it seems almost a truism, it's often overlooked in discussions of sexual morals. If it's important to control one's sexual urges in at least some situations (and everyone agrees that it is, though they may differ on what those situations are), then there's a case to be made for sexual self-control as a general principle, for chastity as a virtue to be cultivated. Masturbation, for example, may be a harmless habit in itself, but by abstaining from it one develops a habit of controlling one's sexual urges, making it easier to refrain from committing actual sins such as adultery and rape. (Quoting Hamlet at this point is almost a reflex, but I'll control myself.) That's one theory, anyway; the other theory is that suppressed lusts eventually burst out in a far more virulent form -- that, as Nietzsche has it, lust begs for a piece of spirit when a piece of flesh is denied it. The latter idea is so fashionable, and the intellectual fashions these days are so uniformly obtuse, that my natural inclination is to side with Wright on this one -- but really it's an empirical question, to be settled by psychological observation and experiment rather than armchair philosophizing. In any case, let us grant this point also for the sake of argument.

Point (3) is more of a jump: that all unnatural/non-coital sexual acts are essentially unchaste -- by which word Wright means vicious rather than virtuous in the Stoic sense, demonstrating (and, through the power of habit, reinforcing) a tendency to self-indulgence rather than self-mastery. It's not immediately clear to me why yielding to lust should be considered less self-indulgent when done in the biologically correct manner, and the bit about their being sexual only accidentally rather than essentially doesn't really clear it up much. Reading between the lines, though, I think Wright's point is something like this. Sex has three basic functions: reproduction, bonding, and personal gratification -- the last of which is obviously self-indulgent in nature. Even in cases where personal pleasure is one's primary motivation, the fact that other purposes are also being served makes it fundamentally less of a vice than, say, solitary masturbation, which has only one possible purpose and has therefore rightly become synonymous with self-indulgence. To borrow an analogy Wright has used elsewhere, we may often eat primarily for pleasure rather than nutrition, but the latter end is also being served; eating for pleasure and then making oneself vomit it up, on the other hand, has no possible function apart from pleasure and is therefore fundamentally vicious.

But are non-coital sex acts really vices pure and simple, in the same category as masturbation and bulimia? They may not have any reproductive function, but they retain the bonding function of sex proper. Wright admits as much when he allows for non-coital acts so long as they "increase the love and union of matrimony." Even outside of a matrimonial context, it's hard to argue that these acts are purely vicious, since personal pleasure is not their only function and is sometimes not even a function. (For many people, I suspect, performing fellatio or cunnilingus or allowing oneself to be sodomized is actually an act of self-sacrifice, something in which they take little pleasure themselves but which they are willing to do as an expression of love and to give pleasure to their partner.) So I can't agree with Wright's classification of these acts as "unchaste in essence," a designation which should be reserved for acts which have no function apart from self-indulgence.

Point (4) is that any sexual preference or appetite that draws one away from the sex act proper rather than towards it -- i.e., homosexuality -- cannot be supported by society without eroding matrimony. I find this to be a very weak argument. First of all, the "matrimonial position" Wright advocates is not that everyone must get married (as a Catholic, he obviously has no problem with celibacy), but that no one should be having sex outside of marriage -- and, as Wright emphasizes again and again, the sexual practices of gays are not really sex. Gays are not engaging in extramarital sex and are thus not part of the problem marriage was instituted to solve. Wright tries to argue that non-coital acts are nevertheless a problem because they are detrimental to sexual self-control, and that a person who indulges in such acts makes himself less able to resist the temptation to indulge in extramarital sex. But, as Wright emphasizes again and again, gay sex (unlike non-coital heterosexual acts) draws people away from copulation rather than towards it and therefore cannot be said to be making anyone more susceptible to the temptations of extramarital sex. Once again, the matrimonial position is that extramarital sex (in the narrow sense of copulation) should not be allowed. Since homosexual acts are not extramarital sex, and presumably do not make one more likely to indulge in extramarital sex, it's hard to see what the problem is.

The only way I can see that tolerance for gay sex could undermine marriage would be if the sexual liberties of gays somehow had a tendency to negatively affect the chastity (sexual self-control) of straight people -- a possibility which is perhaps not as far-fetched as it seems. One could perhaps make a case for gay abstinence similar to St. Paul's argument that Christians should not eat food offered to idols. (See 1 Corinthians 8.) If you're a staunch Christian, says Paul, eating food that has been offered to a pagan god doesn't mean anything and is not an act of idolatry, since you know that the god in question doesn't actually exist and are therefore not worshipping it -- but for someone less firm in his monotheism, less sure of the nonexistence of the pagan gods, the very same act would be idolatrous and potentially damning. Therefore, writes Paul to his Christian audience,

take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumblingblock to them that are weak. For if any man see thee which hast knowledge sit at meat in the idol's temple, shall not the conscience of him which is weak be emboldened to eat those things which are offered to idols; and through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ died?

In the analogy I'm proposing (one which will undoubtedly rub some Christians the wrong way), the strong Christians Paul is addressing represent gays, the Christians whose monotheism is shaky represent straights, idolatry is extramarital sex, and the eating of food offered to idols stands for extramarital sex-like acts other than actual copulation (for the sake of brevity, I'll just use the word "sodomy" in its broad sense). For gays, extramarital sodomy does not lead to extramarital sex and is therefore not (or not always) wrong -- but, if practiced openly and with society's approval, this liberty of theirs could embolden straights to indulge in similar acts, which for them do lead to extramarital sex and are wrong.

The obvious solution is to eliminate the double standard, not by suppressing homosexual acts altogether -- that would be a double standard the other way, leading to the opposite problem of gays being emboldened by the liberty of straights -- but by creating an institution of gay matrimony and insisting that all sex and sodomy be limited to marriage. Aside from the Corinthian argument, there are other reasons this is a good idea. Although the strongest arguments for matrimony involve children and are therefore not directly applicable to sodomy, other arguments -- about minimizing emotional pain, dealing with the problem of violence between sexual rivals, and controlling the spread of venereal disease -- apply to both equally.

This proposal is unlikely to find many supporters. Advocates of gay marriage are, after all, accustomed to thinking of it as a freedom rather than a restriction, a right rather than an obligation, and might not be so enthusiastic about it if it comes at the price of suppressing gay fornication. Nor are conservative Christians likely to think much of it. Still, I think it's the logical conclusion of Wright's argument.

Dream

2009-09-01T09:27:00.004+08:00

I was in a small college classroom, with all the chairs arranged around a large central table, waiting for the professor to arrive. One of my classmates, the movie actor Pierce Brosnan, wanted to get to his seat, but there were some backpacks and things lying on the floor between the table and the wall, blocking his path. He just stood there silently, glancing now down at the bags and now up again, and looking very uncomfortable. Finally, one of the girls in the class noticed and, looking quite annoyed about it all, got up, moved her bag, and let Brosnan through. He took a seat across the table from mine.

I thought his behavior was ridiculous and decided to take him down a notch. I said in a very loud voice, "JAMES BOND--"

"James Bond!" whispered the person next to Brosnan, nudging him to get his attention. Brosnan turned (a little too quickly, I thought, for someone who's supposed to be cool) to face me. Everyone else was looking at me now, too.

"--wouldn't do that," I continued. "If something was in his way, he would move it or walk around it. He wouldn't just stand there and wait for a woman to help him. But it doesn't matter because you're not Stallone anymore, anyway." (I'm not sure why I thought the names Stallone and James Bond could be used interchangeably, but it made sense to me at the time.)

After a brief pause, Brosnan said, "I did that on purpose to demonstrate a little vulnerability and make myself more approachable." He didn't say, "So there," but his face communicated as much. He'd put me in my place with that snappy comeback. Still, I could see I'd embarrassed him and pissed him off.

Later, after the class, I was in the lobby of the building. My socks were too loose and had sagged down, and I was pulling them up. Brosnan walked up to me and said -- I could tell this was his idea of revenge -- "Ha! What are you doing? Pulling up your socks?"

"As a matter of fact, I am," I said, as if it were my proudest accomplishment. "The elastic has become a little loose and so I need to pull them up from time to time." -- this in a "What are you gonna do about it?" tone of voice. Brosnan, having no answer to that, just walked away sheepishly.

Reading: Nim Chimpsky, by Elizabeth Hess

2009-08-30T23:05:00.003+08:00

I finished reading Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, by Elizabeth Hess, on 30 Aug 2009.

This is a very well-written and even-handed biography of Nim Chimpsky -- a chimpanzee who was raised as a human and learned wash dishes, communicate in sign language, and smoke dope -- and the various people in his life. Nim's personality, with its unsettling combination of the human and the bestial, comes through very clearly, as do the personalities of his human associates, many of whom are colorful characters in their own right. One of the blurbs on the inside cover praises the author for her "boundless empathy," which I think is an accurate description. Each of the people and chimps in the story is portrayed in an admirably sympathetic but unsentimental manner. Highly recommended.

Greek ambigram: Λυκαων

2009-08-26T16:31:00.002+08:00

I'm still on my Greek ambigram kick. This one came very naturally: Λυκαων (actually ΛυκαΩν, with an uppercase omega) -- that is, Lycaon, a son of Priam who is killed by Achilles in the Iliad, or, if you prefer, a mythical king of Arcadia who was transformed into a wolf by Zeus as punishment for his cruelty.

Why Lycaon? It just happened to be the first Greek name I thought of that started with lambda and ended with nu. The other letters in the name turned out to be equally cooperative.

Reading: The Trojan Women, by Euripides (with an ambigram)

2009-08-25T17:20:00.014+08:00

I finished reading Paul Roche's translation of Euripides's The Trojan Women on 25 Aug 2009.

The original Greek title of this play is Τρωιαδες -- or, in capitals, ΤΡΩΙΑΔΕΣ. That's what my Euripides book says, anyway. A Google search shows that the spelling Τρωαδες is overwhelmingly more common, so I hope the spelling with iota is a legitimate variant, not a simple error, since I made an ambigram of it:

The play deals with Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra, and Helen in the aftermath of the Trojan War. I found it to be one of the most moving of Euripides's plays -- a simple, raw tragedy with no hint of the playwright's trademark anticlimactic deus ex machina endings. Instead, the gods make their (very effective) appearance only at the beginning; by the end of the play, it is clear that the humans are very much on their own. As always, the characters, even fairly minor ones like the Greek herald Talthybius, are palpably real.

Reading: The Bacchae, by Euripides

2009-08-25T17:20:00.013+08:00

I finished reading Paul Roche's translation of Euripides's The Bacchae on 25 Aug 2009.

Pentheus attempts to suppress the cult of the new god Dionysus, who wreaks his revenge by causing Pentheus's mother to tear him apart in a god-possessed frenzy. The moral is one typical of the Greek myths: don't mess with the gods. Respect them, not because they deserve it, but because they're bigger than you. Pentheus suspects that Dionysus's cult is an immoral influence, and Dionysus proceeds to prove him right -- but he also proves that might makes right irrelevant, and that a prudent mortal knows his place. Knowing Euripides's general attitude toward the gods, though, I doubt that the play is really about respecting an actual Dionysus. More likely, Bacchus and the Bacchae stand for intractable aspects of human nature which must be respected whether you like them or not; people can't all be strait-laced Penthei all the time, and trying to force them to is a recipe for disaster. Or it could be read as focusing on the Dionysus cult as a potent cultural/religious force which it would also be folly to mess with, since suppressing such movements often only makes them stronger and nastier. (Reading The Bacchae today, it's hard not to think of Islamic extremism.) In any case it seems clear that Euripides is not defending the Bacchus cult itself as a good thing but warning against fanatical opposition to it.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about this play is its lack of a hero. One expects a tragedy to have a hero, albeit a flawed and doomed one, and the absence of anyone sympathetic or noble in The Bacchae makes it deeply unsatisfying. (That's not necessarily a criticism. Who says the purpose of art is to satisfy?) Pentheus is portrayed as a small-minded prig, Cadmus and Tiresias as self-serving cowards, and Dionysus as a ruthless and self-absorbed maniac. There are no sympathetic characters, and when the audience feels little sympathy for the suffering, tragedy loses its force as tragedy. Somewhat ironically, given its ostensibly pro-Dionysus message, this is a play that makes you think rather than feel.

A side note: I went to Ohio State University, where post-football game celebrations sometimes devolved into violent alcohol-fueled riots (setting fire to cars, that sort of thing) which were described as bacchanalian. Reading this play, it occurred to me that there might be some comedic potential in a travesty based on a Bacchae/Buckeye pun.

Reading: Medea, by Euripides

2009-08-25T17:19:00.004+08:00

I finished reading Paul Roche's translation of Euripides's Medea on 23 Aug 2009.

Jason abandons his wife Medea for a young princess, and the enraged Medea pulls out all the stops to destroy his life, murdering her rival, her rival's father the king, and finally her own two sons -- whom she loves, but not as much as she hates their father.

This is Euripides's most popular play, and with good reason. The emotional intensity is remarkable, and Jason and Medea are sharply rendered. Not many writers can turn someone as purely malevolent as Medea into a realistic and even sympathetic character, but Euripides pulls it off.

Reading: Iphigenia Among the Taurians, by Euripides

2009-08-25T17:09:00.007+08:00

I finished reading Paul Roche's translation of Euripides's Iphigenia Among the Taurians on 23 Aug 2009.

Iphigenia, having been spirited away from Aulis to Tauria by Artemis, now works as a priestess offering human sacrifice. When her long-lost brother Orestes shows up she nearly sacrifices him but recognizes him just in time, and the two (together with Pylades) make their escape together. (I'm beginning to wonder, by the way, why Euripides is always described as a tragedian, when so many of his plays have happy or quasi-happy endings.)

I understand Goethe wrote an adaptation of this play, and I think the story would be perfectly suited to his gifts. I'll have to track his version down and read it.

Ambigram: Κυκλωψ

2009-08-25T09:55:00.003+08:00

My first Greek ambigram, the word Κυκλωψ (Cyclops):

Note, added in response to Nagfa's comment: In the Greek alphabet, as in the Roman, some letters have very different capital and lowercase forms -- omega (Ωω), for example -- which may make it difficult for readers unfamiliar with Greek to see how my ambigram matches the original letterforms. The ambigram actually reads ΚυΚΛΩΨ, using all capital letters except for the second one.

Reading: Iphigenia at Aulis, by Euripides

2009-08-24T09:04:00.003+08:00

I finished Paul Roche's translation of Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis on 23 Aug 2009.

The events in this play take place prior to, and help explain, those in Electra, so I wish I'd read it first. The story deals with the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon before the Trojan War (which is what motivated Clytemnestra's later murder of Agamemnon). In the end, despite attempts by her parents and Achilles to find some way out of the sacrifice, Iphigenia herself accepts her fate and insists on going through with it. At the moment of the killing, she is magically spirited away by Artemis, a deer appearing on the altar in her place. As I've come to expect from Euripides, the characters are subtly rendered and believable.

This play contains a reference to the two levels of meaning I mentioned earlier: "Orestes will be there bawling his head off: a baby crying meaninglessly with cries so fraught with meaning."

John C. Wright on sex in society

2009-08-20T16:32:00.005+08:00

John C. Wright is apparently a science fiction writer. I've never read any of his books, but now that Scientists Considering Christianity is defunct and Jim Kalb seems to be posting less and less often, Wright's LiveJournal has become one of my main sources for intelligent conservative Christian writing. (I try to read such material regularly as a counterbalance to my natural tendencies as a clueless liberal atheist.)

Recently, in response to a deluge of comments from gay activists who accused him of (among other things) being opposed to homosexuality solely for religious (read: irrational) reasons and questioned whether there could be any other reason for such opposition, Wright has posted a six-part secular defense of marriage and traditional sexual morality, explaining the train of thought that led him to become a sexual traditionalist before his conversion, when he was still a passionate atheist.

It's given me a lot to think about, and I intent to return to it at my leisure and spend some time thinking about each of his points. So, for my own future reference (and for anyone else who is interested), here are links to the six parts, with summaries of what each covers:

Part I: On self-control. On the objectivity of morals. On virtue. Law and custom. Do as thou wilt. The bounds of the question.
Part II: Is marriage a contract? How pliant is human nature? Is sex entertainment? Men are jerks.
Part III: The sex act. Passions related to the sex act. Prudence related to the sex act. Humans are altricial. Bastards and cuckoos. Permanence. Exclusivity. Polygamy. Violence between sexual rivals.
Part IV: Third parties to marriage. The father of the bride. The grandparents of the child. The investment of the interest in virginity.
Part V: Matrimony and fornication. Prudence regarding matrimony.
Part VI: What does this have to do with science fiction? A personal note to Mr. Charles Stross. A general challenge. Christian modifications to this position.

Although triggered by an argument about homosexuality, Wright's essay isn't primarily about that topic. It mentions it only as a sort of postscript, and my initial reaction (as I said, I plan to reread it later and take some more time to think about it) is that his case against homosexual acts isn't nearly as strong as his case against premarital and extramarital sex. (As I mentioned in the course of my discussion with A. C. Grayling, I just don't think sex-like acts other than actual copulation are anywhere near as morally serious as the act itself; because they are disconnected from the possibility of childbirth, less is at stake.) I'll come back to this topic later after I've had some time to digest and dissect his arguments.

Incidentally, the barrage of angry comments from homophobophobes to which Wright was responding was triggered by another post (since deleted) in which he made some sarcastic remarks about this news story: It seems the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) releases an annual report grading TV networks on their depiction of gay, lesbian, and otherwise sexually atypical characters, and that Syfy (formerly Sci Fi) got an "F." Predictably, the network executives fell over themselves to apologize and earnestly insist on their commitment to diversity, and Wright, being in the science fiction business himself, was understandably worried about the precedent set by GLAAD's ideological bullying and Syfy's groveling submission.

What, you may ask, did Syfy do to deserve an "F"? Well, you see, their shows featured only two gay characters this past year -- sympathetic characters both (as far as I can gather, not having actually watched the shows in question), but still only two. That's it. That, according to the bozos at GLAAD, is defamation. You'd think they'd give at least a "C+" for a marginally positive portrayal, but apparently these guys take the idea of "damning with faint praise" very seriously: If you say gays are cool, but you don't say it often enough or loud enough, you're serving the Dark Side.

Reading: Electra, by Euripides

2009-08-20T15:39:00.002+08:00

I finished Paul Roche's translation of Euripides's Electra on 20 Aug 2009.

Orestes and Electra murder their mother Clytemnestra to avenge her murder of their father Agamemnon, which was vengeance for Agamemnon's murder of their daughter Iphigenia as a sacrifice to obtain favorable winds for the Achaean fleet to sail to Troy and bring Clytemnestra's sister Helen back to her husband Menelaus, Agamemnon's brother. After the deed, Orestes and Electra succumb to remorse and belated second thoughts about having killed their own mother, foreseeing that they will be branded as matricides and cast out of society. At this point Clytemnestra's brothers Castor and Pollux, now gods, show up and try to arrange something better for their sister's murderers: Electra is to marry Orestes's friend Pylades, and Orestes is to go to Athens to stand trial for murder, where he will be acquitted. The tragic ending is thus mollified a bit, though Electra and Orestes are still unhappy about having to part.

As usual, Euripides shows himself to be a master of characterization, Clytemnestra and Electra being particularly compelling. Castor and Pollux, whose reaction to all these murders going on in their own immediate family seem strangely unemotional and detached, are less than convincing, and I think it would probably have been a better play if it had ended before the Dioscuri made their appearance.

All I had known about Electra before reading this play, I'm a little embarrassed to admit, was that certain Freudians (but not Freud himself) used her as the namesake for the female equivalent of the Oedipus complex. The analogy between the two characters seems to be a strained one; Electra loved her father (in a natural filial way) and killed her mother, but there's no hint of anything incestuous going on.

Euripides's greatest hits

2009-08-18T10:51:00.004+08:00

A quick glance at Amazon or LibraryThing is usually all it takes to find out what a given author's most popular works are, but it's not that easy for an author like Euripides, whose plays are published in collections more often than as stand-alone works. For the following statistics, I went to LibraryThing's Euripides page, looked at all the books owned by at least ten users, and broke them down into their contents, given a more realistic picture of the popularity of each individual work. For example, only 64 users own Electra as a book, which would make it Euripides's 8th most popular play; if we tally up all the collections and anthologies which include Electra, though, it shoots up to third place, owned by 2,133 users.

Medea, the most popular of Euripides's plays, is owned by 3,246 LibraryThing users, and the numbers in parentheses below represent percentages of that number. I also note which plays won prizes at the City Dionysia.

Medea (100, third prize)
Bacchae (79, first prize)
Electra (66)
Alcestis (65, second prize)
Trojan Women (54, second prize)
Ion (49)
Hippolytus (45, first prize)
Iphigenia in Tauris (42)
Hecuba (39)
Iphigenia at Aulis (39, first prize)
Heracles (35)
Children of Heracles (34)
Cyclops (33)
Helen (31)
Phoenician Women (27)
Andromache (20)
Orestes (16)
Suppliant Women (15)
Rhesus (14)

I'm pleased to note that the volume I own -- Signet Classic's Euripides: Ten Plays, translated by Paul Roche -- matches this list very well, coinciding almost exactly with its top ten (the one exception being that it includes Cyclops rather than Hecuba). The modern popularity of Euripides's works also seems to be in broad agreement with the judgment of his contemporaries; of his six prize-winning plays, four of them also make the top six on the above list, and one of them misses it by a hair. (The other, Iphigenia at Aulis, won the prize as part of a trilogy that included Bacchae, so it may not have been first-prize material in its own right.)

Reading: Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

2009-08-17T17:06:00.004+08:00

I finished Rudyard Kipling's Kim, the Barnes & Noble edition with introduction and notes by Jeffrey Meyers, on 17 Aug 2009.

This is the first Kipling I've read since I was a kid (Jungle Book, Just So Stories, that kind of thing), and I was impressed. He's a remarkably skillful writer with a knack for choosing precisely the right word. The settings and characters are completely convincing (particularly the Lama, the Babu, and Kim himself), and the spirit of the novel is generous, perceptive, and humane. The plot isn't especially strong, but other aspects of the book are so gripping that one hardly cares.

The notes accompanying this edition are useful but suboptimal. Meyers often neglects to gloss unfamiliar words until the third or fourth time they occur, and the many geographical footnotes are less helpful than a map would have been. Meyers also sometimes seems to see literary allusions which are simply not there. For example, when the Lama bids his disciple farewell with "Dost thou love me? Then go, or my heart cracks," a footnote informs us that this is a reference to King Lear's "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!" -- leaving the reader to guess what, other the word "crack," the two passages have in common and why a Tibetan Lama would be alluding to Shakespeare.

Reading: The Cyclops, by Euripides

2009-08-16T21:09:00.004+08:00

I finished reading Paul Roche's translation of Euripides's The Cyclops on 16 Aug 2009.

This is probably more notable for its historical significance as the only surviving satyr play than for its literary merit. It presents the familiar story of Ulysses and the Cyclops -- only with satyrs! (Satyrs were to the ancient Greeks what pirates and ninjas are to us; no narrative was considered so perfect that it couldn't be spiced up by throwing in a few of those crazy satyrs.) The storyline proceeds essentially as it does in the Odyssey, with the satyrs mostly just standing around making off-color jokes which are occasionally -- but only occasionally -- funny. In short, it's not exactly Great Art but is still worth reading just for the experience.

Reading: Ion, by Euripides

2009-08-16T21:07:00.002+08:00

I finished reading Paul Roche's translation of Euripides's Ion on 16 Aug 2009.

Compared to the other Euripides plays I've read so far, I found this one less than satisfying. I didn't identify with the characters or find their motivations plausible, and, while I know from reading Alcestis that Euripides is capable of pulling off an aesthetically effective deus ex machina ending, the one in Ion seems clunky.

Reading: Hippolytus, by Euripides

2009-08-16T21:03:00.006+08:00

I finished reading Paul Roche's translation of Euripides's Hippolytus on 16 Aug 2009.

The basic story is as follows: Hippolytus, the bastard son of Theseus, has no interest in sex or love. He devotes himself to Artemis and the hunt and slights Aphrodite. As revenge, Aphrodite causes Hippolytus's stepmother Phaedra to fall in love with him. Unwilling to act on or even to reveal her passion, Phaedra wastes away and contemplates suicide. Finally a nurse gets the secret out of her and tells Hippolytus, after swearing him to secrecy. Hippolytus is disgusted by the whole idea and tells Phaedra so, and she kills herself, leaving behind a note saying that Hippolytus tried to rape her. Theseus believes the letter, and Hippolytus's attempts to defend himself against the accusation are handicapped by his unwillingness to break his oath of secrecy. Theseus calls down the curse of Poseidon on his son, who dies a terrible death shortly thereafter.

The characters, particularly Hippolytus and Phaedra, come close to being as believable and multidimensional as those of Alcestis, and the storyline is more plausible.

I recently read an essay on C. S. Lewis by Edward M. Cook, which I mean to comment on in a later post, which mentions in passing that Hippolytus was instrumental in Lewis's conversion to Christianity, in that it caused in him such a powerful renewal of "Joy" (a word Lewis used idiosyncratically to refer to an intense and pleasurable desire which has no readily identifiable object and which nothing in this world can satisfy) that Lewis retreated from his "sensible" dismissal of Joy as mere wishful thinking and began taking it seriously as evidence for the existence of another world. Come to think of it, that mention in Cook's essay is probably what made me finally pick up that volume of Euripides that had been sitting untouched on my shelf.

I didn't experience anything as intense as what Lewis did, but I know how personal and unpredictable such experiences can be. Others have been moved by books that left me cold and vice versa, and sometimes even the same book reread by the same person will be found to have unexpectedly gained or lost its magic. The first time I read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man it was quite literally a religious experience (so much so that it started me down the path to deconversion by making me question whether such religious experiences could really be taken, as I had been taught to take them in Mormonism, as revelations of the Truth from God). The second time around, Portrait was still a good book but my reading experience was nothing out of the ordinary. (This elusiveness of Joy is another of Lewis's pet themes, and, as I say, I mean to comment on the whole "Argument from Joy," as laid out by Lewis and defended by Cook, in another post.)

Reading: Alcestis, by Euripides

2009-08-15T21:00:00.003+08:00

I finished Paul Roche's translation of Euripides's Alcestis on 15 Aug 2009.

This is the story of Admetus, who has been promised immortality if he can convince someone to die in his place. He first asks his parents, thinking that they will be sacrificing less since they have few years left to live anyway, but in the end only his wife Alcestis will agree to die for him. After Alcestis's death, Admetus is overcome with grief at his loss, and he has a serious quarrel with his father, each accusing the other of murdering Alcestis by selfishly refusing to die in her place. As he sinks deeper into depression and resentment, it becomes clear that his wife's wonderful "gift" to him has in fact ruined his life.

The characterization, intensity, and emotional power of the play up to this point is phenomenal, making the sudden arrival of a happy-go-lucky Heracles, oblivious to what has just happened and hoping to enjoy a good time at his buddy Admetus's place, almost physically jarring. The scrupulously hospitable Admetus hides the truth from Heracles and welcomes him into his home. Heracles proceeds to get drunk and have a great time until one of the household servants reveals the secret -- that Alcestis is dead. Heracles then goes down to Hades, brings Alcestis back to the world of the living by force, presents her to Admetus, and all's well that ends well.

Of the improbably happy endings of this and others of Euripides's plays, the translator writes that they "must have seemed silly to Euripides too . . . it is as though Euripides were saying: 'You want a happy ending, but can't you see that the ending would not have been happy? Very well, I'll give you an ending that you can't believe in.'" I'm not sure I buy that as an explanation. After all, the ancient Greeks weren't exactly known for their insistence on happy endings, and I'm sure there was nothing stopping Euripides from writing the play as a straight-ahead tragedy if he had felt so inclined. These tacked-on happy endings have a long history, going at least back to the Book of Job, and it's possible that they just didn't seem as silly to the ancients as they do to us. Perhaps they serve to underscore the tragedy by showing that even when a god shows up and magically makes everything all right, it's still not all right. Admetus's relationship with his father is probably irreparably damaged, and both Admetus and Alcestis will have to live out the rest of their lives knowing that Admetus was willing to let her die. And in the end Alcestis will die anyway and Admetus will live on (I think he still gets to live forever) without her. It's hard to escape the feeling that Heracles hasn't so much saved the day as ruined everything, trivialized it, deprived them of tragedy without relieving them of suffering.

This was my first exposure to Euripides, and it was extraordinary. I've got a book with nine other plays of his and am looking forward to reading them.

Hate crimes

2009-08-12T17:58:00.003+08:00

Chrs wrote a post about hate crimes some time ago, and, while the post itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense, it got me thinking about the topic. After mulling it over for a couple of weeks, I've surprised myself by coming to the conclusion that, yes, hate crime laws are probably a good idea.

Motives are relevant because they affect the likelihood that the person will commit a similar crime in the future. A crime of passion is generally a response to a very unusual situation that is not likely to recur, and it can thus be punished more leniently. When the passion in question is the indiscriminate hatred of any and all members of a given group, though, that's a different story. A man who flies into a homicidal rage when he finds his wife in bed with his best friend is obviously less of a menace to society than is someone who flies into a homicidal rage every time he sees a black/white/Jew/homosexual/Muhammad cartoon/whatever. People who can be moved to violence by such an everyday experience are dangerous, probably more dangerous than your average violent criminal.

When I say I support hate crime legislation, I should specify that I'm talking only about criminal behavior which happens to be motivated by open-ended hatred, not about the idea that such hatred or the expression thereof should itself be a crime. "Hate speech" laws are a very bad idea and are carried to outrageous extremes in some countries, going so far as to outlaw unpopular opinions about morality or history -- punishing people who say that homosexuality is evil, for example, or that the Holocaust never happened. Holocaust denial laws are especially ridiculous -- they're like defamation laws in reverse, declaring the Nazis guilty and forbidding anyone to say that they're innocent. (Hmmm... Does that mean Holocaust deniers are guilty of "anti-defamation"?) Aside from being tyrannical, such censorship is probably counterproductive; suppressing an opinion or movement by force just encourages people to think there must be something to it.

Ambigrams: Isaiah, seraph

2009-08-12T15:50:00.004+08:00

The central "aia" makes the name Isaiah a natural choice for a reflection ambigram.

On a related note, here's my first reasonably successful Hebrew ambigram, the word "seraph."

Three measly letters, I know -- but as far as I'm concerned, that's pretty good. I've tinkered with Hebrew before and found it to be a terrible language for ambigrams. You need some freedom to distort the letters a bit without rendering them unrecognizable, and the Hebrew alphabet is just too finicky. Make any of the lines a little longer or shorter, and chances are you've changed it into a different letter. On the other hand, the very same features that make Hebrew a horrible language for rotations and reflections would probably make it great for perceptual shift ambigrams.

Qodesh

2009-08-12T11:34:00.007+08:00

The year Uzziah died I heard
The seraphim and saw the Lord.
The temple filled with roiling smoke,
Their beating wings, my pounding heart.
The doorposts quaked, the seraphs spoke:
"God is apart -- apart -- apart.
The earth with glory to the brim
Is full. There is no room for Him."

Then looked I up and saw the throne
Where, lifted up, He sat alone.
And in my heart I heard Him say,
"A great forsaking shall take place.
Oh, far away! Oh, far away!
Oh, empty time! Oh, empty space!
Whom shall I send to prophesy?"
Then came the answer: "Here am I."

Oh, who am I? What have I seen?
My eyes are red, my lips unclean.
Still must I speak, but to what end?
Ye hear but will not comprehend.

Language and numeracy

2009-08-10T12:02:00.005+08:00

Daniel Tammet's Embracing the Wide Sky mentions some interesting research -- though he unfortunately neglects to mention who performed this research or where I can read more about it.

[R]esearch suggests that the counting words we use in English (and many other European languages) can have a negative side effect on some young children's numeracy and arithmetic skills. Studies consistently show that Asian children learn to count earlier and higher than their Western counterparts and can do simple addition and subtraction sooner. The reason is that the teen and ten numbers in English and other languages are irregular and difficult for children to learn. In contrast, the number words in most Asian languages are much more consistent; in Chinese, the word for eleven is 'ten one', twelve is 'ten two', thirteen is 'ten three' and so on. . . . The language helps rather than hinders early understanding of the base 10 system. (pp. 134-35)

Knowing how the current intellectual climate systematically deemphasizes racial differences in everything except skin color, I tend to overcompensate, assuming when I read something like this that of course boring genetic differences are probably the real explanation. Just because it's crimethink, though, doesn't necessarily mean it's true, and the language theory is an interesting possibility. Here's how you could test it:

Limit the sample to a single ethnic group. For example, see if Chinese-speaking Chinese people are better at math than ethnically Chinese Americans who speak only English.

Look at non-Asian languages with regular number terms. While I don't know of any examples off the top of my head, it seems unlikely that this feature would be exclusive to East Asian languages. Are there any African or European languages, for example, that express numbers in a regular way? Do speakers of those languages excel at math in the same way that Asians do?

I haven't been able to track down the research Tammet alludes to, so I don't know whether such tests have already been performed. It would be fascinating to discover that language can have such a strong influence on thinking.

There's no question, though, that Chinese way of expressing numbers is much better-designed than the English and matches the decimal system more closely. In English, if I say "three hundred seven--," you have no idea what the second digit is going to be; the number could turn out to be 307, 317, or 370, among others. If someone is dictating the number to you, you have to wait until they've said the whole thing before you can write the second digit. Chinese is much clearer; 307 is "three hundred zero seven," 317 is "three hundred ten seven," and 370 is "three hundred seven (ten)" (the final "ten" is optional). The assumption that if you say "three hundred seven," the seven is the next digit rather than the final one, is a convenient one. We deal with numbers with zeroes at the end (like 6,500) more often than those with zeroes in the middle (like 6,005), so it makes sense to reserve the short form "six thousand five" for the former.

Reading: Embracing the Wide Sky, by Daniel Tammet

2009-08-09T14:29:00.009+08:00

I finished Daniel Tammet's book Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind on 9 Aug 2009.

Embracing the Wide Sky is a popular science book, an overview of various topics related to the mind. Tammet, an autistic savant with extraordinary mathematical and linguistic gifts, is interesting primarily as the owner of a remarkable mind, not as an expert on the mind in general, and this book is thus less compelling than his memoir Born on a Blue Day. Much of it is interesting, but one is still left with the sense that there was no need for this particular person to write this particular book, that any reasonably competent science journalist could have done as good a job of it.

The best chapters are those on memory and perception, which summarize some very interesting research. The chapter on statistics and logical thinking is one of the weakest, contenting itself with defining mean, median, and mode; explaining that the chance of winning the lottery is very low indeed; and listing various familiar logical fallacies. Perhaps because Tammet is used to other people struggling to follow ways of thinking that come naturally to his own mind, he sometimes fails to realize that some things are elementary even to us dear Watsons.

Some of the fallacies enumerated in the logic chapter are on display in the chapter on IQ. Tammet discusses various theories of intelligence, usually in a scrupulously evenhanded way; he seems always to appreciate both sides -- but when it comes to the politically radioactive research of Herrnstein and Murray, Tammet suddenly opts for a black-and-white approach (no pun intended), asserting without further argument that they "misinterpreted data on intelligence to lead to some racist conclusions." He also disregards his own admonitions about statistical thinking in citing the single case of Van Gogh (talented but financially unsuccessful) as evidence against the claim that there is a statistical correlation between IQ and financial success.

One final oddity is the bibliography, in which the majority of the entries look like this: "A Beautiful Mind New York Simon & Schuster" -- just the title, city, and publisher, with no punctuation and no mention of the author. These are interspersed with a handful of ordinary entries which include authors, years, and punctuation. So much for the fabled proofreading skills of autistic people.

Overall it's an interesting enough read, but people who are expecting another Born on a Blue Day are likely to be disappointed.

Thinking about meaning

2009-08-06T15:09:00.004+08:00

Some detached thoughts on meaning:

The verb mean and its derivatives are used in a number of different ways in English, but I think there's a common thread, a core meaning that is present both in the 26th word of this sentence and in the following examples:

Üzüm suyu means "grape juice." [in Turkish]
A handmade gift means more than a check.
The ruling means that he could spend the next eight years in prison.
It's just a meaningless coincidence.
Of course you realize, this means war!
The typhoon means we can't go to Hualien this weekend. [This happens to be true.]
She means everything to me.
I didn't mean to do that.

Though the last two examples are a stretch, I think that in every case here, mean means to convey information about something else. Words have meanings because their whole purpose is to convey information. A handmade gift conveys more information than a check -- information about the giver's understanding of, relationship with, and feelings for the recipient, for example. Knowing the judge's ruling lets you know that the accused could spend eight years in prison. And so on.

I'm not so sure about the last two, but I think they also fit the pattern. If she means everything to me, it means I use facts about her to draw conclusions about all kinds of things -- what I ought to do, whether life is worth living, and so on. And if I say "I didn't mean to do that," I mean that there is no causal connection between me, the person, and what I just did -- that no amount of information about my personality or intentions could have helped you predict the action in question.

I'm sure I can't force every use of the word mean into this pattern, but I think it's a useful place to start. Particularly when considering ideas like "the meaning of life," which sometimes seem to be so vague as to preclude clear thought, it's helpful to have a hard core to anchor oneself to. It's easier to think clearly about the meaning of life if you keep in mind that the basic question is: What information does life -- that is, the bare fact that life-as-we-know-it exists -- convey about things other than life itself? When I think about it that way, I can see (for the first time, I'm a little embarrassed to admit) why the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are considered to make life more meaningful. If life came into existence by chance, then the fact that it exists, rather than not existing, tells us little; it it was created for a purpose, then the fact of its existence tells us a lot. If life is a blip in a cosmic history characterized mostly by its absence, then it conveys little information about the universe as a whole; if life is destined to continue forever, then it conveys an infinite amount of information about the future history of the universe.

There is often a difference between past-oriented and future-oriented notions of meaningfulness. A particular throw of a pair of dice is meaningless in the past-oriented sense; the bare fact that I rolled two fives rather than some other combination of numbers tells us almost (if not quite) exactly nothing about the past. That doesn't stop it from being meaningful in a future-oriented sense, though; in certain situations it might mean, for example, winning or losing a large amount of money.

There are at least two levels of meaning. If a random text generator spews out a grammatical sentence, that sentence itself will mean something, but the fact that that particular sentence was produced will be meaningless. If the same sentence is spoken by a person in conversation, it will also be meaningful in the second, higher sense.

Ambigram: Racist

2009-08-05T11:56:00.004+08:00

It seems fitting to write the word with a less-diverse cast of letters.

I keep meaning to get off my coincidence-hunting kick (ambigrams and "prophecies") and post something else for a change, but once your brain has learned to look for these things it's hard to get it to stop.

Ambigram: GW Bush / The Beast

2009-08-01T18:34:00.003+08:00

Having done an Obama/Change ambigram, I tried to come up with some perceptual shift ambigrams based on other presidents' names, of which this is the first.

I know I come across as a little biased here, mapping Obama to a feelgood slogan and Bush to a biblical baddie -- but, hey, it's not my fault what these guys' names look like.

The old savanna calling

2009-07-30T17:14:00.013+08:00

In my "One After 909" post, I showed that the titular number is 11/11 (that is, 1), which comes after 10/11 (that is, .909), and that moving over twice from 11/11 brings us to 9/11. I also mentioned, but didn't discuss in any detail, the fact that the song ends with "Oh, Danny Boy, the old savanna calling."

That the song ends with the word "calling" is significant, since 911 is also a phone number. A reference to a phone call also appears, together with the "move over once, move over twice" pattern, in another Beatles song, "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window," which includes the line "Sunday's on the phone to Monday, Tuesday's on the phone to me." (9/11 was a Tuesday.)

But in this post, instead of focusing on "calling," I want to look at the significance of "the old savanna." The original version of "Danny Boy" doesn't say anything about a savanna; the first line is "Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling" (meaning, presumably, the bagpipes calling Danny off to war). But in the Beatles' version, it's not pipes but a savanna. This made me think of Magritte's famous "this is not a pipe" painting:

As it happens, there's another Magritte painting with the same concept, only it uses an apple (sorry, a non-apple) instead of a pipe.

The apple, of course, is a symbol of New York. It also occurs in several other Magritte paintings, including this one, which also includes shapes evocative of the Twin Towers.

The same apple appears in the Magritte painting below, which is called "The Son of Man" after a biblical figure who appears in the Book of Daniel.

So by conspicuously not being a pipe, the Beatles' "savanna" leads us to Magritte and the Big Apple, a connection which is reinforced by the use of the name Danny. But there's more to it than that. A savanna is, as I mentioned before, a kind of plain (sounds like "plane"). More specifically, the savanna is the natural habitat of the lion (or, in Arabic, osama). "The old savanna calling," then, could refer to a phone call from a lion -- or, as it says in the They Might Be Giants song "The Guitar," "Hush my darling, be still my darling, the lion's on the phone."

I've mentioned the 9/11 references in "The Guitar" in a previous post. In addition to the phone reference (the number the lion is calling is of course 911, and the music video cuts to footage of buildings collapsing right after the word "phone"), it contains the line, "In the spaceship, the silver spaceship, the lion takes control." The lion hijacks a spaceship rather than an airplane because this song is from the 1992 album Apollo 18, which has a space travel theme. (The year most closely associated with space travel is, naturally, 2001.) Here's the album cover.

The reader will perhaps already have noticed the significance of the number 18 (9/11 = .8181818...) and the similarity of the words Apollo and apple. The name Apollo also resembles Apollyon, which in fact is an anagram of "Apollo NY." This connection is reinforced by the giant squid on the cover. It brings to mind that other giant cephalopod, the North Pacific Giant Octopus. The standard scientific name for this species is currently Enteroctopus dofleini, but dated synonyms include Polypus apollyon, Octopus dofleini apollyon, and Octopus apollyon. Apollyon is the angel of the abyss, which is probably why the name was chosen for a deep-sea creature; as such, it would actually be more appropriate for the giant squid, which frequents much deeper waters than the octopus. What's the big deal about Apollyon? Well, you see, the name appears in the Bible only once -- in Revelation 9:11.

Aside from the apple/Apollyon connections, the Apollo 18 is clearly meant as a reference to the lunar missions of NASA's Apollo program. The use of the number 18 in connection with the moon is significant, because the 18th tarot trump is called "The Moon" and features two towers.

If we move over once, move over twice, from XVIII to XVI, we find an image even more obviously evocative of 9/11.

A well-established occult tradition, derived from mapping the 22 Major Arcana to the 22 Hebrew letters and their astrological correspondences as given in the Sefer Yezirah, associates Arcanum XVI with the planet Mars. Nostradamus's 9/11 quatrain (quoted here) mentions Mars, and Tuesday is also the day of Mars (diēs Mārtis). In most English-language decks, Arcanum XVI is called simple "The Tower," but in the Tarot de Marseille its title is, oddly, "La Maison Diev" -- that is, the house of God. If the god in question is Mars then the Tower represents the House of War or Dar al-Harb, the Islamist term for the infidel world. Another old name for this trump is "Sagitta," the arrow, which brings us back to Apollo.

Another Whitley Strieber ambigram

2009-07-30T16:42:00.003+08:00

The Whitley Strieber ambigram I did before was just ugly, so I tried a different approach.

The design is of course a nod to the iconic cover of Strieber's 1987 book Communion.

Ambigram: Obama/Change

2009-07-28T17:01:00.001+08:00

My first attempt at a perceptual-shift ambigram. Does it work?

Ambigram: Louis and Nancy

2009-07-27T18:33:00.000+08:00

For my parents:

Ambigram: Daemon est Deus inversus

2009-07-26T15:08:00.004+08:00

The name Yeats used when he was playing at being a magician:

Of course this particular ambigram version is self-falsifying -- its "Deus" inversus is still "Deus." I'm working on a longer one, "W. B. Yeats: Daemon est Deus inversus," which will incorporate the required daemon/deus ambigram.

Ambigram: Clifford

2009-07-25T20:40:00.002+08:00

I did a Grayling ambigram, and then Nagfa did one of Anthony Grayling, so I was going to go one step further with Anthony Clifford Grayling (that, Wikipedia tells me, is what the C stands for). I couldn't come up with an Anthony/Grayling design that was significantly different from Nagfa's, though, so this Clifford is really all I have to contribute:

The "Cli"/"rD" part was a no-brainer, but the "ffo" gave me a lot of trouble until it occurred to me to try the same i-dot-as-o trick I used for Childe Harold.

Ambigram: Whitley Strieber

2009-07-25T19:37:00.002+08:00

A tribute to my favorite alien-abduction author:

I'm not completely satisfied with this one. The "W" still looks too much like a "Y."

Reading: Umberto Eco

2009-07-24T11:02:00.001+08:00

I've read the following books by Eco:

Foucault's Pendulum, translated by William Weaver (15 Mar 2008)
On Literature, translated by Martin McLaughlin(24 Jul 2009)

Foucault's Pendulum is an excellent and extremely clever novel about a fake conspiracy theory, cooked up for kicks, which unexpectedly gives rise to a real conspiracy. I was referred to this one by Steve Sailer's review.

On Literature is a collection of essays on various literary topics, from Dante to Joyce to Eco's own work. Also extremely clever.

The 1 after 909

2009-07-24T09:45:00.005+08:00

In a previous post I listed various song lyrics and such, most of them discovered by William John, which could be read as prophecies of 9/11. Many of these prophecies included internal clues that it was necessary to add two to the numbers given. For example, Nostradamus refers to "l'an mil neuf cens nonante neuf sept mois" (1999, 7th month) -- but "sept mois" is ambiguous. If we add two to "sept," we find another "Sept. mois," September. If we apply the same add-two formula to the year, we get 2001.

In reference to this pattern, I titled the post "Move over once, move over twice," a line from the Beatles song "One After 909":

My baby says she's trav'ling on the one after 909
I said move over honey I'm travelling on that line
I said move over once, move over twice
Come on baby don't be cold as ice
I said I'm trav'ling on the one after 909

At first glance this seems to fit the pattern established by Nostradamus. We have 909, we have the line "move over once, move over twice" telling us to add two, and that brings us to 911. It's always bothered me, though, that the math doesn't really work -- because we don't start at 909, we start at the one after 909, which presumably means 910.

That takes us to 912, the wrong number -- and the song does later say, "then I find I got the number wrong." His baby said she was traveling on the one after 909, which he assumed was 910, so when he told her to move over once, move over twice, he expected to find her on 912 -- but she wasn't there. They misunderstood each other. What was his baby thinking? She must have interpreted the numbers or the moving over in a different way.

Then it hit me: what he got wrong was the sequence itself. He assumed, naturally enough, that 909 was followed by 910 -- but what's the song called? "One After 909." The next number in the sequence isn't 910, it's one. But what kind of number sequence goes . . ., 909, 1, . . .? Try this one.

If you move over twice from 909 you get 911, but if you move over twice from the 1 after 909, you get something even better: 9/11, complete with the slash between month and day. This interpretation also fits with the end of the song:

I said we're trav'ling on the one after 9 0,
I said we're trav'ling on the one after 9 0,
I said we're trav'ling on the one after 909.

"Nine oh" and "nine oh nine" are two completely different numbers if we read them as integers, but they are the same if we consider them as two different ways of referring to the repeating fraction .90909090909 . . . .

What about the singer, who "got the number wrong" and ended up at 12 instead of 11? Well, this song comes from the album "Let It Be," which has 12 tracks -- and the 12th one is called "Get Back."

While listening to "One After 909" just now, I noticed for the first time that it ends with, "Oh, Danny Boy, the old savanna calling." A savanna is a kind of plain (as in plane), and "calling" alludes to phone calls and therefore to the emergency number 9-1-1.

Ambigrams: Mitt Romney

2009-07-23T15:40:00.003+08:00

This guy has a couple of very ambigram-friendly names.

and

Middle East ambigram

2009-07-22T17:04:00.004+08:00

If only they could see that their enemies are just like them! . . . only, uh, upside down or something . . . uh, well . . . anyway, you get the idea.

(By a strange coincidence, Nagfa also posted some racial harmony ambigrams today.)

A response to Anthony Grayling

2009-07-22T13:07:00.001+08:00

(This is in response to A. C. Grayling's comments on this post. Read them first.)

Dear Prof. Grayling,

You are correct that not all of the things I find "wrong" with The Reason of Things are simple errors. Rather, they exist on a continuum from things no informed person would agree with to things I personally don't agree with, the line between factual error and difference of opinion not always being an easy one to draw. (Since you asked where I'm "coming from ideologically," this might be the right time to mention that I'm an atheist, a Darwinian, and an anti-solipsist, and that I come from a conservative Mormon background.)

There are also a few grammatical infelicities, which I might as well get out of the way first. "Peninsular" is apparently just a typo, so we'll say no more about it. The other one that got my attention was "Pushkin's grandfather was thought to be an African slave in Moscow," which means that Pushkin's grandfather's contemporaries were under the impression that he was an African slave. If you want to say (as I presume you do) is that it is now thought that Pushkin's grandfather was a slave, try "Pushkin's grandfather is thought to have been an African slave in Moscow." But these are, as you will no doubt agree, trivialities. On to more substantive issues.

Regarding kosher laws, the problem is not that you made a trivial error about the precise reason that pigs are unclean, but that you confidently put forth a theory about the origin of kosher laws without actually being familiar with said laws, the content of which seems to me to be inconsistent with your theory. Under kashrut, the following classes of animals are unclean:

all mammals except those that both chew their cud and have cloven hoofs
all aquatic animals except those that have both fins and scales
all insects except four species of locust
a laundry list of birds, including many birds of prey but otherwise following no obvious rule

The list of unclean birds does contain some zoological oddities, such as the bat and the hoopoe, but overall it's hard to see this as a list of monsters. The insects are a case in point: kosher locusts are so similar to unkosher locusts that the rabbis can't agree on precisely which four species Moses had in mind, and so to be safe all insects are treated as unkosher. Can a "monster" still be considered a monster when it's so similar to a non-monstrous animal that even those hairsplitting rabbis can't tell the difference? Also, as I mentioned before, many unkosher animals are perfectly ordinary and were not seen as horrible or unclean, even by the Jews, except in the dietary sense. Horses, lions, and eagles, in particular, are portrayed in the Bible, as in our own culture, as noble and admirable animals, not as monsters. But the Jews still thought, as we too think, that eating them would be a little icky.

Every culture has its traditions about "kosher" food, though in most cultures the taboos are informal and unspoken. The Jews are unusual only in their insistence on codifying the list of unclean animals and trying to reduce it to a few simple principles. Before "Moses" or whoever it was, their traditions about what's okay to eat were probably just as haphazard as ours. Where I come from, for example, civilized people can eat pigs but not dogs, cattle but not horses, rabbits but not opossums, crabs but not spiders, muscle tissue but not digestive-tract tissue, and so on. Some animals are taboo because we see them as dirty, others because we see them primarily as pets or beasts of burden, and others for no particular reason that I can see; if for whatever reason you're not exposed to a particular kind of meat as a child, you'll probably grow up to find it disgusting, a mechanism that allows for a considerable amount of random "kosher drift." It's interesting, too, that it's always meat that's unkosher. I'll try any fruit or vegetable I'm served without a second thought, even if I've never seen it before and have no idea what it is, but I always experience a little hesitance (and sometimes more than a little) when faced with an unfamiliar meat dish such as dog meat, duck's blood, or silkworm pupae.

Regarding Japanese pornography, it's possible that our disagreement boils down to differing definitions of porn, but I doubt that. (For me, erotica is a kind of art, while porn is basically just a masturbation aid. Is that similar to the distinction you make?) China, Japan, and many other Asian countries do have a strong tradition of erotic art which philistines might regard as mere pornography, and perhaps this is all you have been exposed to. I'm sure your innocence does you credit, but let me assure you that, in addition to erotic art, these countries also produce a great deal of simple pornography which is virtually indistinguishable from the Western variety. By that I mean it portrays sex in a graphic and often degrading manner, has no artistic pretensions, is sold in sleazy shops with no windows, and is considered "dirty" or "perverted" just as in the West. Despite what you say, Japanese porn is regarded as porn by the Japanese and labeled as such. (In fact, porn is technically illegal in Japan and subject to strict censorship, though of course such laws are difficult to enforce.) The Chinese also produce a great deal of pornography (see the Taiwanese film Wayward Cloud for a touching and humorous look at the Taiwanese porn industry), and they even have a history of suppressing erotic novels as pornographic (the Ming novel The Plum in the Golden Vase, banned for years but now considered a classic, is the Chinese counterpart to Lady Chatterley) -- all without any help from the Abrahamic religions.

Incidentally, your essay also cites monasticism as a manifestation of a uniquely Abrahamic hostility towards sex, but of course the dharmic religions also have a strong monastic tradition. This is especially pronounced in Buddhism, and artworks with a Buddhist agenda, from the Ming novel Journey to the West to the modern Korean film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring, often outdo the Puritans themselves in their portrayal of sex as inherently dirty and corrupting.

Which brings us to the broader subject of sex and whether it is in need of control. Of course I don't think you are actually in favor of rape or pedophilia. Nor am I necessarily opposed to the idea that many of the traditional sexual restraints imposed by the Abrahamic religions can and should be loosened a bit. What bothered me, rather, was your cavalier dismissal of the whole idea that sex ought to be controlled and limited, which you treated as a bizarre quirk meriting nothing more than a mixture of outrage and bemused curiosity, a good topic for etiological speculation but nothing we need to engage as a serious idea. That you hold the opinions that you do about sex is fine; but that you seem to take them as obviously true, that you seem not even to see the strength of the opposing position -- that I find worrying.

The idea behind my reference to rape was that of course sex is in need of control. People may disagree over precisely how much control is necessary or reasonable, but sex is such a powerful force, both for good and for bad, that it should go without saying that some degree of control is necessary -- because sometimes sex just is wrong, bad, and dirty. No matter how strong my urge to have sex with a given person, if she's not willing to have sex with me, I control myself. If she's a minor, I control myself. If there's a strong risk of pregnancy and we are not in a position to become parents, I control myself. If she expects, even tacitly, a higher level of commitment than I am willing to give, I control myself. If I've promised loyalty to another woman and she's not that woman, I control myself. If she's promised loyalty to someone else, I control myself. Et cetera. I would go so far as to say that most people's default relationship with their sexual urges is -- and must be -- one of control, because only a small minority of most people's sexual urges are such that indulging them would be morally acceptable. Your dismissal of this whole line of thinking as beneath your notice makes you come across as an irresponsible thinker. (Of course it's possible that your oracular pronouncements about sex are the end product of a long and rigorous process of thought to which I am not privy, but I know you only by your short essays, and that's what I'm responding to.)

That's about it, I guess. As you can see, "wrong so many times that I lost trust" doesn't have to be all that many times, just as (according to a recent news article) it only takes a few typos on a resume to dramatically reduce one's chances of being hired. The two clear errors -- about kosher laws and pornography -- were big ones, because you drew conclusions from these "facts" without having first checked them adequately. If I been less informed about those two fields, I would have trusted what you said and have gotten the wrong idea, and that realization led me to be more cautious about believing anything you said on topics about which I was less familiar. I nevertheless enjoyed and was stimulated by many of your essays. I especially liked your essay on autodidacts and your incisive take on Harold Bloom. And I perhaps should have paid more attention to your praise of Michael Hofmann as one who "in manifesting a willingness to be unreserved in praise but temperate in criticism ... shows that [he] knows how much endeavour goes into writing, and how few rewards it usually gets."

All the best,

Wm Jas

Ambigram: Grayling

2009-07-19T23:19:00.007+08:00

In my last post I was a bit hard on Anthony Grayling, who is, after all, one of the good guys. So to make up for it, here's ambigram in his honor:

Reading: A. C. Grayling

2009-07-19T11:39:00.003+08:00

The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life (25 Nov 2008)
The Reason of Things: Living with Philosophy (19 Jul 2009)

The Reason of Things

This is another collection of very short essays on various topics, essentially just another installment of The Meaning of Things. While it was readable and mildly stimulating, more often I found it frustratingly wrongheaded, full of errors and infelicities both minor and major. One can forgive an otherwise good writer who uses peninsular as a noun (repeatedly!), and perhaps only an English teacher would bristle at "Pushkin's grandfather was thought to be an African slave in Moscow" -- but what to do with a book that tells us that every culture throughout history, except those dominated by the Abrahamic religions, is marked by "a complete absence of pornography"? Has the author ever heard of, say, Japan? Does he just pull these fun facts out of a place that Judeo-Christian prudery forbids me to mention directly?

Then, in an essay entitled "Monsters," Grayling offers this explanation of the Mosaic dietary code: "Ancient zoology identified three classes of creatures: feathered birds, furred quadrupeds, and scaly fish -- and therefore Israel was forbidden to eat anything which failed to fit those categories neatly, such as snakes, rodents with their human-like hands, sea-dwellers without scales, and pigs because they have the wrong kind of feet." Uh, actually, Mr. Grayling, the Bible goes out of its way to say explicitly that pigs have the right kind of feet; their problem is that they don't chew their cud. But it's not just the pigs; his whole theory is ridiculous. Are we really supposed to believe that the reason such everyday animals as horses, rabbits, donkeys, and dogs are unkosher is that the Jews considered them unclassifiable freaks of nature?

Grayling is so often wrong when writing about fields I'm familiar with that I found myself unable to trust him as an authority on anything else. Even his charming historical anecdotes left me thinking, "That's a cool story. I'll have to look it up and see if it really happened like that."

Nor does he exactly inspire confidence in his discussions of morality. "What," he asks, "is the source of the moralists' strange idea that sex is wrong, bad, dirty, and in need of control? One answer is: the consequences of just such control." Of course we enlightened moderns will all smile along with him at the idea that sex is wrong, bad, and dirty -- but what to make of someone who so lightly dismisses the idea that it is in need of control? If Grayling really means what he implies here, then he's a monster, and I don't just mean that he's got the wrong kind of feet! I suspect he doesn't, though; while he seems to be okay with adultery and such, he's far too much a man of his time to be pro-rape or pro-pedophilia. More likely he simply hasn't thought out what he's saying -- which, while clearly a lesser sin here, is still not exactly what one looks for in a philosopher.

The Meaning of Things

This is a light but stimulating read, consisting of 61 very short essays on a wide variety of philosophical and moral issues. It's not the sort of book that will convince you of anything -- at three or four pages per topic, there is little room for sustained argument -- but serves more as a lightly annotated list of interesting questions to think about. The author's views are invariably conventional and in some cases (generally wherever biology is involved) obtuse -- he assures us, for example, that concern for chastity is an arbitrary artifact of religion, and that racism is wrong because there is actually no such thing as race. On less politically charged topics his embrace of conventional wisdom is more thoughtful and thought-provoking. He points out several times that clichés are, after all, usually true and deserve to be thought about, which is true enough.

The words "famously" and "commonplace" are overused throughout the book, as are allusions to Hitler and the Holocaust, which turn up in at least 13 of the essays (I skimmed the book counting them to quantify my sense that the book seemed oddly Nazicentric). Other than that, the style is graceful and readable, which, combined with the shortness of the chapters, makes it all too easy to read just one more chapter and then just one more and end up going to bed far too late.