tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70967357550251931702024-02-08T07:48:33.342-08:00Word HoardEat any good books lately?Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.comBlogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-57533955869711753092021-06-15T09:05:00.005-07:002021-06-15T09:05:45.503-07:00"Walking into a major league stadium is like no other experience in the world."<p>I've never managed to cultivate an interest in baseball, but I often enjoy baseball writing. I finally sat down with Paul Auster's baseball-themed noir novel, <i>Squeeze Play</i>. It was his first novel, supposedly written for money, and published under the name Paul Benjamin. It includes very little baseball and few glimpses of Auster-prose. It's a surprisingly straight-ahead pulpy noir with dames and toughs, punches and sarcastic quips.<br /></p><p>The summer before the pandemic Crystal's parents took us to a Twins game. The appeal of baseball was clearer to me in the stadium than it is to me on TV. The most impressive moment, though, was entering the stadium. Auster captures it precisely:</p><p></p><blockquote>Walking into a major league stadium is like no other experience in the world. You've been in the subway, crowded into narrow spaces, surrounded by metal and machinery, and then you've gotten out to find yourself in yet another landscape of bricks, stones, and urban blight. You've circled the stadium with a few thousand other people looking for the right gate, given your ticket to a guy in a uniform, gone through the turnstile, and entered the gloom of bare concrete tunnels, echoing voices, and jostling bodies. It makes you feel you've come all this way just to become part of a dream sequence in a Fellini movie.<br /><br />But then you walk up the ramp, and there it is. It's almost impossible to take it all in at once. The sudden sense of space is so powerful that for the first few moments you don't know where you are. Everything has become so vast, so green, so perfectly ordered, it's as if you've stepped into the formal garden of a giant's castle. </blockquote>Paul Benjamin, <i>Squeeze Play</i> (1982) p. 181.<br /><p></p>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-15030938315568121692018-04-14T07:30:00.000-07:002018-04-14T07:31:47.227-07:00Sit as kings in your desires.<div class="separator tr_bq" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
The <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/shakespeares-handwriting-in-the-book-of-sir-thomas-more">only extant manuscript written in Shakespeare's hand</a> is an insert to a play titled Sir Thomas More. Shakespeare has More deliver a speech defending refugees and upbraiding the proud populists anxious to rid their country of the immigrant threat. Ian McKellen contextualizes the passage and performs it here:</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/AjEAeOshUGQ/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AjEAeOshUGQ?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
<br />
<blockquote>
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise<br />
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;<br />
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,<br />
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,<br />
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,<br />
And that you sit as kings in your desires,<br />
Authority quite silent by your brawl,<br />
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;<br />
What had you got? I’ll tell you. You had taught<br />
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,<br />
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern<br />
Not one of you should live an aged man,<br />
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,<br />
With self-same hand, self-reasons, and self-right,<br />
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes<br />
Would feed on one another. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
What do you to your souls<br />
In doing this? O, desperate as you are,<br />
Wash your foul minds with tears, and those same hands,<br />
That you like rebels lift against the peace,<br />
Lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees,<br />
Make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven! </blockquote>
<blockquote>
You’ll put down strangers,<br />
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,<br />
And lead the majesty of law in line,<br />
To slip him like a hound. Say now the king<br />
(As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)<br />
Should so much come to short of your great trespass<br />
As but to banish you, whither would you go?<br />
What country, by the nature of your error,<br />
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,<br />
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,<br />
Nay, any where that not adheres to England—<br />
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased<br />
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,<br />
That, breaking out in hideous violence,<br />
Would not afford you an abode on earth,<br />
Whet their detested knives against your throats,<br />
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God<br />
Owned not nor made not you, nor that the claimants<br />
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,<br />
But chartered unto them, what would you think<br />
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;<br />
And this your mountanish inhumanity.</blockquote>
Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-79607400300492137002017-05-30T09:57:00.000-07:002017-05-30T09:57:25.558-07:00SETI and the drive to contact intelligent life<br />
I've been reading lots of papers in space ethics. One of the early texts is <i>Beyond Spaceship Earth: Environmental Ethics and the Solar System</i>, a collection of conference proceedings edited by Eugene Hargrove and published in 1986. It includes a wide-ranging paper by J. Baird Callicott. Among Callicott's criticisms of space fans in general is this comment on SETI in particular:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In the face of this sort of giddy enthusiasm for communicating with "intelligent life" on other planets, it is both sobering and irritating to observe that those involved in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, have not first established—as a kind of preliminary benchmark or data base, so that they would have some idea of what communicating with an exotic intelligence would be like—communication with nonhuman forms of intelligent life on Earth. Cetaceans carry the biggest brains on this planet, with richly fissured cerebral cortexes and a brain-to-body weight ratio comparable to that of humans. Like us they are social mammals. But they live in an environment, relatively speaking, very different from ours. Hence, theirs is a world apart from ours, a terrestrial analog of an extraterrestrial environment. And they engage, apparently, in complex vocal communication, of which we to date understand not one word—or rather click, grunt, or whistle. What this omission reveals is not only an arrogant disregard for nonhuman terrestrial intelligence; it also clearly shows that by "extraterrestrial intelligence" those involved in SETI mean something very like, if not identical to, human intelligence.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">
--Callicott, “Moral Considerability and Extraterrestrial Life”</div>
</blockquote>
<br />
Exactly so. This point was later taken up in a characteristically excellent short story by Ted Chiang, "<a href="http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/">The Great Silence</a>" (2015). Callicott tends toward anger; Chiang tends toward heartbreak. Both are appropriate responses to human refusal to value the Earth's animals.<br />
Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-26655497210691015182014-05-13T11:28:00.000-07:002014-05-13T11:28:51.633-07:00Adrian Mole, possible blameless bystanderFrom the Friday, February 26th entry in <i>The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4</i>:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My general physique is improving. I think the back-stretching exercises are paying off. I used to be the sort of boy who had sand kicked in his face, now I'm the sort of boy who watches somebody else have it kicked in their face.</blockquote>
Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-37752728814189054342014-03-08T14:09:00.002-08:002014-03-08T14:15:47.968-08:00Chad Oliver on animals: the only known life in the universeChad Oliver's "King of the Hill" is set in a near future in which Earth's environment has been almost completely destroyed. Desperate to find a new place to live, humanity sends out probes, establish deep-space telescopes, scour the universe looking for other planets that could support life. They find "only barren rocks at the end of the road."
<br />
<blockquote>
From this, he had drawn a characteristically modest conclusion.<br />
<br />
Man, he decided, was alone in the accessible universe. [...]<br />
<br />
The plain truth was that it was <i>earth</i> that was unique and alone. Earth had produced life. Not just self-styled Number One, not just Superprimate. No. He was a late arrival, the final guest.<br />
<br />
("All these goodies just for <i>me</i>!")<br />
<br />
Alone? Man?<br />
<br />
Well, not quite.<br />
<br />
There were a million different <i>species</i> of insects. (Get the spray-gun, Henry.) Twenty thousand kinds of fish. (I got one, I got one!) Nine thousand types of birds. (You can still see a stuffed owl in a museum.) Fifteen thousand species of mammals. (You take this arrow, see, and fit the string into the notch...)<br />
<br />
Alone? Sure, except for the kangaroos and bandicoots, shrews and skunks, bats and elephants, armadillos and rabbits, pigs and foxes, racoons and whales, beavers and lions, moose and mice, oryx and otter and opossum--<br />
<br />
Oh well, <i>them</i>.<br />
<br />
Yes.<br />
<br />
They too had come from the earth. Incredible, each of them. Important? Only if you happened to think that the only known life in the universe was important.</blockquote>
<div>
What a great way to pump non-anthropocentric environmentalist intuitions. Loads of people are interested in extra-terrestrial life, and few of those are interested because they want to eat it, or use it to fuel their cars. There must be something important about life other than what it can do for us, yes?</div>
Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-263911415882872072014-01-28T08:30:00.000-08:002014-01-28T08:30:11.319-08:00A gripping story, avoidedJack Williamson's "With Folded Hands" appears in SFWA's <i>Science Fiction Hall of Fame</i>, marking it as one of the most widely respected SF novellas of the 1940s. For me it mostly illustrates a pet peeve I associate more closely with science fiction than with mainstream literary fiction.<br />
<br />
The basic idea of the story: it's the future, but not the far future. The main character is a salesman in the robotic domestic assistants game. These robots barely clear the threshold of usefulness; they are big, clumsy, and dumb. The main character's-- and everyone else's-- world is disrupted by the introduction, from a distant planet, of sophisticated humanoid robots capable of out-performing people along just about any dimension of evaluation. They are programmed "to serve and obey and guard men from harm," and they rapidly take over all the difficult, dangerous, tedious, or otherwise unpleasant aspects of the industrial and service economies. Almost overnight, there is nothing left for most people to do but enjoy their free time and the excellent products of free robot labor.<br />
<br />
That setup is super interesting. What would it be like to live in a world in which nothing I did was connected to the comfort, let alone the success, let alone the survival, of anyone? What would it be like to have every possible use of my time boil down to leisure? I think I want that. But might there be downsides for me, or for other people in a similar position? Would there be social downsides when everyone found themselves in that position?<br />
<br />
Instead of developing the story to engage these questions, Williamson ducks them. The humanoid super robots interpret their prime directive with a maximalist zeal. They don't just protect people from serious harm, they prevent people from taking the kinds of risks that could lead to slightest harm. They protect people from unpleasant states of mind. If a person is persistently stressed, frustrated, or unhappy, the robots intervene to remove surgically the unhappy portions of the brain.<br />
<br />
So, duh. No one would want to live in that world. There isn't any question worth exploring. Nothing about the difference between work and leisure, or their respective products. Nothing about values at all. We're left with half an unhelpful lesson story ("Boys and girls, you don't really want guaranteed safety and happiness!") and half a standard adventure story about escaping from confused benevolent oppressors. (Our last hope for escape? A form a faster-than-light radiation that maybe possibly can scramble the circuits of the mothership from across the gulf of space. Snore.)<br />
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I think: did Williamson not see what an interesting issue he'd raised? Why did he turn it into another adventure-story-slash-cautionary-tale when it could have been deep? I think: is there something wrong with me that so many people-- readers and writers alike-- hold this up as an example of the best SF has to offer? Can it really be that a simple cautionary tale about technology was mind-expanding in 1947, two years after the atom bombs?<br />
<br />
We can do such much better than lessons gussied up as fiction. Science fiction is especially able to light up ambiguities that go overlooked in the real world and explore in new ways issues that are way too complicated to write essays about. It's frustrating when writers pass up obvious opportunities to use the power the genre gives them, as Williamson does here. And it's puzzling when readers react so enthusiastically to missed opportunities.Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-65242096145993325672012-12-08T12:54:00.000-08:002012-12-08T12:54:59.401-08:00Cosmopolis and two kinds of surpriseI recently read Don DeLillo's <i>Cosmopolis</i>. I pretty much hated it, and it's easy to identify why: there are no rules structuring the narrative. In <i>Cosmopolis</i>, everything happens with the sullen randomness of the third act of a JJ Abrams twist-fest. (This happened, and then this other thing happened, and you won't believe what happened next!)<br />
<br />
I tried to stay on board. I tried to focus on DeLillo's sentences, which are always rewarding, and to ignore the stupidity of the narrative. But when the main character, in his limousine in the year 2000, and for no real reason, used his wrist-watch to hack into his trophy wife's Swiss bank account, I gave up. There is no way I was not going to hate this book.<br />
<br />
Reading such an extreme example of rule-free fiction helped give some structure to some previously inchoate attitudes, so in that sense I'm glad I read it. The lesson lesson I took away from <i>Cosmopolis</i>:<br />
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Being <i>surprised</i> by a story is one of the main pleasures of fiction. "Predictable" is, in the context of fiction, everywhere pejorative. But there are different kinds of surprises. One kind of surprise invites a reaction like "that is what <i>would</i> happen-- why didn't I see that coming?" Another kind of surprise invites a reaction like "wow. I had no idea that could happen."
I love the first kind of surprise, and I hate the second. There is no pleasure, for me, in discovering that the author has been withholding important rules, characters, or information from me. There is nothing better known rules, characters, and information snapping together in an unexpected way.<br />
<br />
(A bit of introspection. The distinction between these two kinds of surprises is, effectively, the criterion I use for distinguishing science fiction from fantasy. I say I like science fiction, because it is characteristic of the kind of science fiction I like that it takes the world as given and changes no more than a few of the familiar rules. I say I don't like fantasy because it is characteristic of the fantasy I don't like that any rules are open to emendation at any time.<br />
<br />
This obviously isn't going to work as a genuine criterion of distinction. Far-future science fiction, which I can't tolerate, has effectively no rules. And when fantasy authors talk about world-building, one of the things they're talking about is setting up a set of rules. But having realized that this is how I divide the genres in my own mind, I should be able to talk more temperately about fantasy.)Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-49596898701782915722012-03-13T06:08:00.003-07:002012-03-13T06:33:45.701-07:00"...you think that you will never make it home."<span style="font-style:italic;">Bright Lights, Big City</span> is written in the second person, present tense. Both times I've read it, I found this jarring and distracting for about the first fifty pages. From that point on, the technique steadily develops power until, by the end of the book, I'm convinced it couldn't have been as good-- anywhere near as good-- if it had been written in the first or third person.<br /><br />The first time I read it, about ten years ago, I discussed the second-person narration with some people who had been assigned the book in college. Their view was that it is a powerful technique because it invites the reader to identify more closely than usual with the narrator. "You put yourself in the story," or something. That is just obviously wrong. It doesn't even make sense on its face-- the first person literally invites the reader into the mind of the narrator. You can't get closer to the narrator, or to the events of a story, than the first person.<br /><br />The most familiar use of the second person, for those of us who grew up in the 80s, is the Choose Your Own Adventure series. In those books, the second person really is an invitation to readers to imagine these events happening to them. This works because the Choose Your Own Adventure books don't characterize their protagonists. The whole point is for kids to imagine themselves experiencing an adventure.<br /><br />That is not the case with <span style="font-style:italic;">Bright Lights, Big City</span>. McInerney's narrator is characterized in detail. I know what clothes he likes (and they aren't the same clothes I like). He spends most of the book seeking or snorting cocaine (and I've never tried cocaine). He's younger than I am, he's more emotionally frayed than I am, he works a job I've never had. I understand the ambivalence he feels toward Tad Allagash, even though I am not ambivalent: I loathe the guy.<br /><br />So the narrator is not a blank on which I am supposed to project myself. And the choice of the second person is distancing, at least relative to the first or limited-third person. Why is it, in this case, so powerful?<br /><br />Stacey Richter has a short story in the second person, "The Land of Pain," and it is excellent. It includes a digression about the second person that I think answers the question. Richter's story is about a woman suffering from chronic pain, who is raising a brainless clone of herself that, she hopes, will eventually provide her with a new, pain-free body.<blockquote>You take your medicine and sack out in front of the television (which you can only really watch when you manage to nudge the pirouetting brainless clone into a corner). Now is the hour when citizens on talk shows tell their tragic stories in the second person, saying <span style="font-style:italic;">you you you</span> about all the bad, traumatic, unfortunate experiences in their lives ("You just feel so betrayed when you see that little panda pulling a gun") as though they have a genetic defect that prevents them from using the pronoun "I." This is sloppy and angers the grammar and usage thug in you. You've concluded that citizens telling their tales of adversity find the second person compelling because "you" is impersonal and removed, yet somehow includes everyone in its scope ("It could be you staring down the barrel at that panda bear next, sweetheart!") whereas "I" is an orphaned baby doe blinking in a dark forest.<br /><br />"You are aways in pain," for example, is a more manageable utterance than the direct, final, "I am always in pain."<br /><br />At nightfall, you can't find the assistive animal anywhere. Finally, you locate her curled up in the cage with the brainless clone, nose tucked under her tail. They adore each other. And you, you my friend, are filled with jealousy.</blockquote>Yes! The second person is powerful <span style="font-style:italic;">because</span> it is impersonal and removed. It is a pattern of speech characteristic of people who are in the process of struggling (and as yet failing) to digest, to accept "all the bad, traumatic, unfortunate experiences in their lives." As I get deeper into <span style="font-style:italic;">Bright Lights, Big City</span>, the choice of the second person starts to read less like youthful flamboyance from McInerney and more like a coping mechanism of the narrator's. Long before we start to understand just what bad, traumatic, unfortunate experiences have messed up our narrator, we start to develop the visceral, dreadful sense that he's in real pain. That's the second person in action.<br /><br />(Richter also helps explain why the second person is usually paired with the present tense. It's present pain, not remembered pain, that forces people into the shelter of <span style="font-style:italic;">you you you</span>.)Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-48583321955605219312012-03-08T20:27:00.003-08:002012-03-08T20:34:58.754-08:00What is it like to be a coke-addled bat?My limited experience discussing intro-philosophy standards with fiction writers suggests that fiction writers, as a group, are especially taken by Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Why? I think Jay McInerney might have an answer.<br /><br />I had forgotten that in <span style="font-style:italic;">Bright Lights, Big City</span>, the main character spends a night with a philosophy grad student named Vicky. The next day he loses his job, and his (former) co-workers press him for details about how and why it happened.<blockquote>"I really don't even know," you say. They're wondering: Could this happen to me? and you would like to reassure them, tell them it's just you. They're trying to imagine themselves in your shoes, but it would be a tough thing to do. Last night Vicky was talking about the ineffability of inner experience. She told you to imagine what it was like to be a bat. Even if you knew what sonar was and how it worked, you could never know what it feels like to have it, or what it feels like to be a small, furry creature hanging upside down from the roof of a cave. She said that certain facts are accessible only from one point of view-- the point of view of the creature who experiences them. You think she meant that the only shoes we can ever wear are our own. Meg can't imagine what it's like for you to be you, she can only imagine herself being you.</blockquote>Interesting! If it is true that the only shoes we can wear are our own, writers should worry that the entire project of fiction is threatened. If the effort writers put into characterization is to be something other than self-delusion, then writers, at least, must think they're imagining what it is like to be someone else. And if their effort is to be valuable, they might hope that readers, too, are imagining what it is like to be the character.<br /><br />I suppose there's a spectrum of possible imaginative projections. An easy imaginative projection is me imagining what it would feel like to me if I were experiencing the events of a story. (Good video games exploit the easy end of the spectrum reasonably well.)<br /><br />At the hopelessly difficult end of the spectrum is Nagel's bat: no one can imagine what it feels like for a bat to be a bat.<br /><br />Good fiction must fall somewhere in the middle. A lot then turns on just how much middle there is. How closely must readers and characters resemble each other before readers can imagine what it is like for the character to be that character? How closely must writers resemble their characters before they can write them well?<br /><br />So Nagel's paper, of all the post-war classics in philosophy of mind, really is specially relevant to fiction writers. Neat!Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-90182283287837549072012-01-28T20:31:00.000-08:002012-01-28T20:48:05.168-08:00I was there: spy novel editionOver the summer, Crystal and I met up with my parents in London. We stayed in the Hyde Park Rooms in Sussex Gardens, about 100 yards south of Paddington Station, a hotel that, for all I know, is the very same one described by Le Carre in the opening paragraph of part 2 of <i>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy</i> (page 119 in my edition).<blockquote>The Hotel Islay in Sussex Gardens-- where, on the day after his visit to Ascot, George Smiley under the name of Barraclough had set up his operational headquarters-- was a very quiet place, considering its position, and perfectly suited to his needs. It lay a hundred yards south of Paddington Station, one of a terrace of elderly mansions cut off from the main avenue by a line of plane trees and a parking patch. The traffic roared past it all night. But the inside, though it was a fire-bowl of clashing wallpapers and copper lampshades, was a place of extraordinary calm.</blockquote>I sent that paragraph to my parents, and my dad replied, "travel makes so many dimensions of life more interesting, doesn't it," which seems to me exactly right.<br /><br />(A ton of human history has unfolded on that little fleck of land. I spent two weeks walking around London, and that's all it took to cover the territory reasonably well. Novels and news stories, short stories, songs about Soho and assorted Underground stations, the little bits of history I stumble on-- Shakespeare and the Globe, Victoria, Elizabeth, Henry VIII-- in two weeks of walking I've been to those places. <br /><br />A friend from college is doing graduate work at University College London and staying in a dorm around the corner from where I (and George Smiley!) stayed. In class last semester I singled out a particular piece of art for scorn. I'd seen it at the Tate Modern, and although I didn't mention that, a student later told me that she knew exactly the piece I was talking about-- she'd seen it at the Tate, too. More than the other places I've been, London is a bottleneck in the world.)Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-74066476483013944892011-10-11T07:20:00.000-07:002011-10-29T07:56:03.700-07:00We're doomed: authorship question editionAds have started popping up on campus for <span style="font-style:italic;">Anonymous</span>, a new movie advancing the stupid idea at the Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who died ten years before Shakespeare died, is the real author of Shakespeare's plays. <br /><br />The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question">authorship question</a> has always struck me as the most pointless species of coffee-shop bullshit, given that there's no reason to think Shakespeare didn't write those plays. No reason, that is, except chauvinism: the belief that only a member of the genetic aristocracy could possibly write fine plays. <br /><br />As it happens, I just read Bill Bryson's Shakespeare book last month. The final chapter is devoted to this trumped-up controversy, which he entertains and dismisses more concisely than I ever could. His discussion culminates on page 195:<blockquote>[It] is possible, with a kind of selective squinting, to endow the alternative claimants [the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Derby, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and others] with the necessary time, talent, and motive for anonymity to write the plays of William Shakespeare. But what no one has ever produced is the tiniest particle of evidence to suggest that they actually did so. These people must have been incredibly gifted-- to create, in their spare time, the greatest literature ever produced in English, in a voice patently not their own, in a manner so cunning that they fooled virtually everyone during their own lifetimes and for four hundred years afterward. The Earl of Oxford, better still, additionally anticipated his own death and left a stock of work sufficient to keep the supply of new plays flowing at the same rate until Shakespeare himself was ready to die a decade or so later. Now that <span style="font-style:italic;">is</span> genius!</blockquote>What is it about the allure of conspiracy theories that makes otherwise smart people stupid?Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-34940504281773980482011-10-05T11:11:00.000-07:002011-10-05T12:57:05.587-07:00Misguided perfectionism in R.U.R.I'm most of the way through Capek's <span style="font-style:italic;">R.U.R.</span>, the play that coined the word "Robot." My favorite part, so far (and by far) is the long comic prologue, which occurs ten years before the main action of the play. <br /><br />Among other things, it's a funny and vivid illustration of one kind of worry about perfectionist moral theories-- that is, theories that hold that we have a moral obligation to develop or perfect our human natures. A lot turns on understanding what our natures are, and the implications of perfectionist theories, if we're off target in our sketch of human perfection, can be menacing. Thus the following conversation, which conflates "ideal human" and "ideal worker" to funny and terrifying effect (p 17-18 in my Penguin Classics edition). Helena Glory is a visitor at the robot factory. Everyone else supervises some aspect of the factory's work.<br /><blockquote>HELENA: Why do you make [robots] then?<br />BUSMAN: Hahaha, that's a good one! Why do we make Robots!<br />FABRY: For work, Miss. One Robot can do the work of two-and-a-half human laborers. The human machine, Miss Glory, was hopelessly imperfect. It needed to be done away with once and for all.<br />BUSMAN: It was too costly.<br />FABRY: It was less than efficient. It couldn't keep up with modern technology. And in the second place it's great progress that... pardon.<br />HELENA: What?<br />FABRY: Forgive me. It's great progress to give birth by machine. It's faster and more convenient. Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time. And in the third place--<br />HELENA: Oh, stop!</blockquote>I just love the line, "From a technical standpoint, the whole of childhood is pure nonsense." So true.Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-58454661964877411822011-10-01T12:40:00.001-07:002011-10-01T13:13:44.130-07:00To be or not to be, I there's the pointI've been reading Bill Bryson's <span style="font-style:italic;">Shakespeare: The World As Stage</span>. He includes this version of the opening of Hamlet's soliloquy from one of the "bad quartos," an early, published version of <span style="font-style:italic;">Hamlet</span> presumably transcribed from the memory of someone involved in the production (p 160 in Bryson).<br /><br />To be, or not to be, I there's the point,<br />To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all.:<br />No, to sleepe, to dreame, I marry there it goes,<br />For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,<br />And borne before an everlasting Judge,<br />From whence no passenger ever returned... <br /><br />This is funny, but interesting too. We're familiar with tons and tons of phrases from the first half of the Hamlet soliloquy:<br /><br />- slings and arrows<br />- outrageous fortune<br />- sea of troubles<br />- thousand natural shocks<br />- to sleep, perchance to dream<br />- what dreams may come<br />- shuffled off this mortal coil<br /><br />None of those stuck in the transcriber's mind. The thing that seems to have made the biggest impression is the ratio-like series, "to die, to sleep, to sleep, to dream." Seems like a great illustration of 1) the fallibility of memory 2) the importance of word-choice 3) the fact that there is no audience but individuals with idiosyncratic psychological makeups.<br /><br />The Bryson book has been a pleasure to read, though it was marketed to far too big an audience. It has nothing to say about the plays. Bryson seems totally uninterested in them. It has little to say about Shakespeare-- we hardly know anything. But it is a collection of interesting and often funny anecdotes of Shakespeare's day and subsequent Shakespeare scholarship. It's an easy way to satisfy a curiosity for historical context.<br /><br />Basically, if you're looking for a book to help you get into Shakespeare, this isn't it. If you already like Shakespeare, but don't know anything beyond the text of the plays, then this provides some quick and fun context.Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-38862138294649978312011-03-23T06:33:00.000-07:002011-03-23T06:36:14.824-07:00Rawls on HumeAnother quote forwarded me by my advisor. This is Rawls, from his <span style="font-style:italic;">Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy</span>. He nails one of the many things I like so much about Hume.<br /><br /><blockquote>A unique feature of Hume among the great moralists is that he is happy and contented with what he is. He is utterly without lament or sense of loss, with no trace of romantic anguish and self-pity. He doesn't complain against the world, a world that for him is a world without the God of religion, and the better for it.</blockquote>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-50092983683417374192011-03-06T08:19:00.000-08:002011-03-06T09:09:06.191-08:00Wilderness, school reform, and choice of metricAnother bit from <span style="font-style:italic;">A Sand County Almanac</span>. Leopold offers an illustration of how (non-obviously) poor initial decisions about evaluative standards can lock us into a self-destructive course. <br /><br />Wilderness is the home of big game. Thus one group that has long advocated for wilderness conservation is hunters. In fact, hunters and anglers were pushing for a quasi-environmentalist agenda long before there was any movement recognizable as modern environmentalism. It's because of hunters that the departments charged with tending the natural environment are Departments of Fish and Game, not Departments of Biodiversity, or some such. But the focus on quantity of big game-- on hunter satisfaction-- as the metric by which to judge the quality of wilderness areas proved self-destructive:<blockquote>One of the most insidious invasions of wilderness is via predator control. It works thus: wolves and lions are cleaned out of a wilderness area in the interest of big-game management. The big-game herds (usually deer or elk) then increase to the point of overbrowsing the range. Hunters must then be encouraged to harvest the surplus, but modern hunters refuse to operate far from a car; hence a road must be built to provide access to the surplus game. Again and again, wilderness areas have been split by this process, but it still continues.</blockquote>This is a good cautionary tale for the school reform movement. Choice of evaluative metric has profound effects on the thing being evaluated. It's very important, then, that your choice of metric do a good job of tracking what's actually valuable-- because a mistake in identifying what's valuable might not only miss the point, but actively contribute to the destruction of what's really valuable.<br /><br />I don't think many in the reform movement think that standardized tests are testing what's <span style="font-style:italic;">actually valuable</span> about childhood education. They think, instead, that they've settled on a reasonably good <span style="font-style:italic;">proxy</span> for educational value that has the virtue of being objective, analyzable with familiar statistical methods, and easily comparable between schools and years. This approach is almost certainly doomed. Leopold's wilderness example shows us that we should be humble and careful in settling on metrics, even when we sincerely believe the metric tracks what's valuable. (We often make mistakes in judging what's valuable.) The school reform movement has chosen a metric it <span style="font-style:italic;">knows</span> doesn't track what's valuable. The right attitude toward a future in which Rhee/Duncan/Obama-style standards-and-accountability reforms continue to take hold is dread.<br /><br />(Leopold quote from "Wilderness." Page 191 in my edition of <span style="font-style:italic;">A Sand County Almanac</span>.)Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-57268157173197476902011-03-03T19:58:00.000-08:002011-03-03T20:56:02.825-08:00The last Silphium dies: caring about nature for its own sakeMy first garden, about eight years ago now, changed my attitude toward plants. I planted it because I wanted food out of it: tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and herbs. I expected I'd care about the plants in my garden because their welfare was a necessary condition of my eating some delicious meals. After a few months of nursing seeds and transplants into full-grown plants, that isn't really how it turned out. When a neighbor accidentally snapped the stalk of a flourishing habanero, I wasn't mainly sad at the loss of a dozen peppers. I was sad that the plant didn't get to finish out its life. Which is to say, I was sad <span style="font-style:italic;">for the plant</span>.<br /><br />Once I discovered I that I can care about plants for their own sake, entirely apart from what they can do for me, it became clear that a lot of talk about conservation and environmentalism at least partly misses the point. Casting environmentalism as a means by which to improve the lot of human beings may be a good political strategy, at least in the short term, but it's only half the story. Acts or policies that harm the environment are prima facie bad, whether or not those environmental harms affect people.<br /><br />I've known some people who have had similar experiences that led to similar conclusions. (Most people I know who garden, in fact, have had similar experiences.) The problem is, there's no way to argue that someone <span style="font-style:italic;">ought</span> to care about plants for their own sake if they haven't had the relevant experience of caring about plants for their own sake. That's an uncomfortable position to be in, and it risks being insulting or infantilizing. ("Oh, you wouldn't believe the things you believe if you had a little more experience with nature.")<br /><br />I just finished Aldo Leopold's <span style="font-style:italic;">A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There</span>. It's great for lots of reasons, but one in particular has me excited: it includes a passage that I think might, maybe, be able to give people a little bit of vicarious experience of caring about a plant for its own sake. It's a little long, but definitely worth it:<blockquote>Every July I watch eagerly a certain country graveyard that I pass in driving to and from my farm. It is time for a prairie birthday, and in one corner of this graveyard lives a surviving celebrant of that once important event.<br /><br />It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces, and studded with the usual pink granite or white marble headstones, each with the usual Sunday bouquet of red or pink geraniums. It is extraordinary only in being triangular instead of square, and in harboring, within the sharp angle of its fence, a pinpoint remaining of the native prairie on which the graveyard was established in the 1840's. Heretofore unreachable by scythe or mower, this yard-square relic of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant, or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers. It is the sole remnant of this plant along this highway, and perhaps the sole remnant in the western half of our county. What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.<br /><br />This year I found the Silphium in first bloom on 24 July, a week later than usual; during the last six years the average date was 15 July. When I passed the graveyard again on 3 August, the fence had been removed by a road crew, and the Silphium cut. It is easy now to predict the future; for a few years my Silphium will try in vain to rise above the mowing machine, and then it will die. With it will die the prairie epoch.<br /><br />The Highway Department says that 100,000 cars pass yearly over this route during the three summer months when the Silphium is in bloom. In them must ride at least 100,000 people who have 'taken' what is called history, and perhaps 2,500 who have 'taken' what is called botany. Yet I doubt whether a dozen have seen the Silphium, and of these, hardly one will notice its demise. If I were to tell preacher of the adjoining church that the road crew has been burning history books in his cemetery, under the guise of mowing weeds, he would be amazed and uncomprehending. How could a weed be a book?<br /><br />This is one little episode in the funeral of the native flora, which in turn is one episode in the funeral of floras of the world. Mechanized man, oblivious of floras, is proud of his progress in cleaning up the landscape on which, willy-nilly, he must live out his days. It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.<br /><br />...<br /><br />Silphium first became a personality to me when I tried to dig one up to move to my farm. It was like digging an oak sapling. After half an hour of hot grimy labor the root was still enlarging, like a great vertical sweet-potato. As far as I know, that Silphium root went clear through to bedrock. I got no Silphium, but I learned by what elaborate underground stratagems it contrives to weather the prairie drouths.<br /><br />I next planted Silphium seeds, which are large, meaty, and taste like sunflower seeds. They came up promptly, but after five years of waiting the seedlings are still juvenile, and have not yet borne a flower stalk. Perhaps it takes a decade for a Silphium to reach flowering age; how old, then, was my pet plant in the cemetery? It may have been older than the oldest tombstone, which is dated 1850. Perhaps it watched the fugitive Black Hawk retreat from the Madison lakes to the Wisconsin River; it stood on the route of that famous march. Certainly it saw the successive funerals of the local pioneers as they retired, one by one, to their repose beneath the bluestem.<br /><br />I once saw a power shovel, while digging a roadside ditch, sever the 'sweet-potato' root of a Silphium plant. The root soon sprouted new leaves, and eventually it again produced a flower stalk. This explains why this plant, which never invades new ground, is nevertheless sometimes seen on recently graded roadsides. Once established, it apparently withstands almost any kind of mutilation except continued grazing, mowing or plowing.<br /><br />Why does Silphium disappear from grazed areas? I once saw a farmer turn his cows into virgin prairie meadow previously used only sporadically for mowing wild hay. The cows cropped the Silphium to the ground before any other plant was visibly eaten at all. One can imagine that the buffalo once had the same preference for Silphium, but he brooked no fences to confine his nibblings all summer long to one meadow. In short, the buffalo's pasturing was discontinuous, and therefore tolerable to Silphium.<br /><br />It is a kind of providence that has withheld a sense of history from the thousands of species of plants and animals that have exterminated each other to build the present world. The same kind of providence now withholds it from us. Few grieved when the last buffalo left Wisconsin, and few will grieve when the last Silphium follows him to the lush prairies of the never-never land.</blockquote>(Excerpted from "Prairie Birthday," p. 44-50 in my edition of <span style="font-style:italic;">A Sand County Almanac</span>.)Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-44904195563430039812011-02-19T17:55:00.000-08:002011-02-19T18:04:07.689-08:00Vonnegut on moral characterI'm thinking about re-reading <span style="font-style:italic;">Mother Night</span>. I've gone a while without a Vonnegut fix. I pulled it off the shelf this afternoon, and discovered the opening paragraph of the introduction, which I'd forgotten:<blockquote>This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.</blockquote>I think it's a marvelous moral. I should definitely re-read this book.Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-75538420344032699302011-01-03T06:46:00.000-08:002011-01-03T07:11:36.753-08:00Hornby on excellence's long tailMore Hornby. This is a long excerpt from <i>Fever Pitch</i> in which he recounts the story of Gus Caesar, who was, for a short while, a struggling fullback for Arsenal. It's a terrifying story, and makes me wonder if it's ever sane to choose to enter the big pond.<blockquote>Soon after I had stopped teaching and begun to try to write, I read a book called <i>The Hustler</i> by Walter Tevis. I was much taken by Fast Eddie, the character played by Paul Newman in the film, just as I had been much taken with the notion that I was the Cannonball Kid when Charlie Nicholas moved down from Celtic. And as the book seemed to be about anything you wanted to do that was difficult-- writing, becoming a footballer, whatever-- I paid it extra special attention. At one point (oh God oh God oh God) I typed these words out on a piece of paper and pinned it above my desk:<blockquote>That's what the whole goddamned thing is: you got to commit yourself to the life you picked. And you picked it-- most people don't even do that. You're smart and you're young and you've got, like I said before, talent.</blockquote>As the rejection slips piled up, these words comforted me; and as I began to panic about the way things that everybody else had, like careers and nice flats and a bit of cash for the weekend, seemed to be slipping out of arm's reach, friends and family began to try to reassure me. "You know you're good," they said. "You'll be OK. Just be patient." And I did know I was good, and I had committed myself to the life I had picked, and my friends, and Fast Eddie's friends, couldn't all be wrong, so I sat back and waited. I know now that I was wrong, stupid, to do so, and I know because Gus Caesar told me so.<br /><br />Gus is living proof that this self-belief, this driven sense of vocation (and I am not talking about arrogance here, but the simple healthy self-confidence that is absolutely necessary for survival), can be viciously misleading. Did Gus commit himself to the life he had picked? Of course he did. You don't get anywhere near the first team of a major First Division football club without commitment. And did he know he was good? He must have done, and justifiably so. Think about it. At school he must have been much, much better than his peers, so he gets picked for the school team, and then some representative side, South London Boys or what have you; and he's still better than anyone else in the team, by miles, so the scouts come to watch, and he's offered an apprenticeship not with Fulham or Brentford or even West Ham but with the mighty Arsenal. And it's still not over, even then, because if you look at any First Division youth team of five years ago you won't recognize most of the names, because most of them have disappeared. (Here's the Arsenal youth team of April 1987, from a randomly plucked programme: Miller, Hannigan, McGregor, Hillier, Scully, Carstairs, Connelly, Rivero, Cagigao, S. Ball, Esqulant. Of those, only Hillier has come through, although Miller is still with us as a highly rated reserve goalkeeper; Scully is still playing professional football somewhere, though not for Arsenal or any other First Division team. The rest have gone, and gone from a club famous for giving its own players a fair crack.)<br /><br />But Gus survives, and goes on to play for the reserves. And suddenly, it's all on for him: Don Howe is in trouble, and flooding the first team with young players: Niall Quinn, Hayes, Rocastle, Adams, Martin Keown. And when Viv Anderson is suspended over Christmas 1985 Gus makes his debut as part of a back four that's kept a clean sheet away at Manchester United.<br /><br />Howe gets the sack, and George Graham keeps him on, and he's used as a sub in quite a few games over George's first season, so things are still going well for him-- not as well as they are for Rocky and Hayes and Adams and Quinn, but then these players are having an exceptional first full season, and when the squad for the England Under-21s is announced it's full of Arsenal players, <i>and Gus Caesar is one of them</i>. The England selectors, like the Arsenal fans, are beginning to trust Arsenal's youth policy implicitly, and Gus gets a call-up even though he isn't in the first team regularly. But never mind why, he's in, he's recognised as one of the best twenty or so young players in the whole country.<br /><br />Now at this point Gus could be forgiven for relaxing his guard a little. He's young, he's got talent, he's committed to the life he's picked, and at least some of the self-doubt that plagues everyone with long-shot dreams must have vanished by now. At this stage you have to rely on the judgment of others (I was relying on the judgments of friends and agents and anyone I could find who would read my stuff and tell me it was OK); and when those others include two Arsenal managers and an England coach then you probably reckon that there isn't much to worry about.<br /><br />But as it turns out, they are all wrong. So far he has leaped over every hurdle in his path comfortably, but even at this late stage it is possible to be tripped up. Probably the first time we notice that things aren't right is in January 1987, in that first-leg semi-final against Tottenham: Caesar is painfully, obviously, out of his depth against those Spurs forwards. In truth he looks like a rabbit caught in headlights, frozen to the spot until Waddle or Allen or somebody runs him over, and then he starts to thrash about, horribly and pitifully, and finally George and Theo Foley put him out of his misery by substituting him. He doesn't get another chance for a while. The next time I remember him turning out is against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in a 1-1 draw, a week or two before the Luton final, but again there is a moment in the first half where Dixon runs at him, turns him one way, then the other, then back again, like your dad used to do to you when you were a really little kid in the back garden, and eventually strolls past him and puts the ball just the wrong side of the post. We knew that there was going to be trouble at Wembley, when O'Leary was out injured and Gus was the only candidate to replace him. Caesar leaves it late, but when the ball is knocked into the box seven minutes from time, he mis-kicks so violently that he falls over; at this point he looks like somebody off the street who has won a competition to appear as a centre-half in a Wembley final, and not like a professional footballer at all, and in the ensuing chaos Danny Wilson stoops to head the ball over the line for Luton's equalising goal.<br /><br />That's it. End of story. He's at the club for another three or four years, but he's very much the last resort centre-back, and he must have known, when George bought Bould and then Linighan and then Pates, with Adams and O'Leary already at the club, that he didn't have much of a future-- he was the sixth in line for two positions. He was given a free transfer at the end of the 90/91 season, to Cambridge United; but within another couple of months they let him go too, to Bristol City, and a couple of months after that Bristol City let him go to Airdrie. To get where he did, Gus Caesar clearly had more talent than nearly everyone of his generation (the rest of us can only dream about having his kind of skill) and it still wasn't quite enough.<br /><br />Sport and life, especially the arty life, are not exactly analogous. One of the great things about sport is its cruel clarity: there is no such thing, for example, as a bad one-hundred-metre runner, or a hopeless centre-half who got lucky; in sport, you get found out. Nor is there such a thing as an unknown genius striker starving in a garret somewhere, because the scouting system is foolproof. (<i>Everyone</i> gets watched.) There are, however, plenty of bad actors or musicians or writers making a decent living, people who happened to be in the right place at the right time, or knew the right people, or whose talents have been misunderstood or overestimated. Even so, I think there is a real resonance in the Gus Caesar story: it contains a terrifying lesson for any aspirants who think that their own unshakeable sense of destiny (and again, this sense of destiny is not to be confused with arrogance-- Gus Caesar was not an arrogant footballer) is significant. Gus must have known he was good, just as any pop band who has ever played the Marquee know they are destined for Madison Square Garden and an NME front cover, and just as any writer who has sent off a completed manuscript to Faber and Faber knows that he is two years away from the Booker. You trust that feeling with your life, you feel the strength and determination it gives you coursing through your veins like heroin... and it doesn't mean anything at all.</blockquote>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-38595926448439616832011-01-03T06:24:00.000-08:002011-01-03T06:46:16.281-08:00Hornby on choosing to grow upNick Hornby, in <i>Fever Pitch</i>, sees growing up as a matter of seizing occasional opportunities:<blockquote>I used to believe, although I don't now, that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can <i>choose</i> to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently-- during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere-- and one can ignore them or seize them.</blockquote>I think this is basically right, though I wouldn't put it in terms of "becoming an adult." I'd put it in terms of "becoming the sort of person one wants to be." The older I get, the clearer it becomes that the idea of adulthood is nonsense. We're all still muddling through, the same way we always have.<br /><br />Hornby seems to treat crises and fresh starts as distinct opportunities for growth. I'm inclined to think they are two necessary conditions. Turmoil reveals the things we'd like to change, fresh starts gives us the opportunity. This is why break-ups are growth experiences for almost everyone: the crisis and the fresh start come bundled together. In those situations, we have a choice about whether or not to change in ways that make us more like the person we want to be.Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-26990700409288666482010-10-21T09:17:00.000-07:002010-10-21T09:25:36.577-07:00Frankfurt on analytic philosophyMy dissertation advisor sent me this quote from Harry Frankfurt. It's encouraging to read a philosopher of such stature reflecting the same confusions and frustrations that dog me every time I go to a philosophy conference...<br /><blockquote>I have tried to stay closely in touch with problems and with lines of thought that I can recognize and appreciate not only as a professional philosopher but also-- and particularly-- as a human being trying to cope in a modestly systematic manner with the ordinary difficulties of a thoughtful life. It is sometimes claimed that the analytic philosophy in which I was educated, and to whose ethos and canons of intellectual style I still endeavor more or less to adhere, possess certain new and especially powerful tools and techniques, which allegedly enable it to achieve an invaluable penetration and rigor but which inevitably also distance it from the uninitiated. I have no idea what these remarkable tools and techniques are supposed to be, and I am pretty sure that I do not possess them.<br /><br />It is true that serious work on the problems of human life and thought, although it begins in common sense, must necessarily enter into painstakingly detailed investigations of a variety of unfamiliar puzzles and complexities. The results of these investigations could not be easy to comprehend unless they were shallow; and how would that be worthwhile? On the other hand, the results do not have to be arcane; and I cannot imagine what special tools and techniques they might be thought to require. Surely one need not have been trained in a very distinctive philosophical tradition or skill in order to be able to think clearly, to reason carefully, and to keep one's eye on the ball.</blockquote>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-18816905910239580552010-07-11T09:56:00.000-07:002010-07-11T10:04:52.186-07:00Margaret Atwood's ChickieNobs<p> One of the many aspects of <span style="font-style: italic;">Oryx and Crake</span> I liked: it has a few passages that read like philosophical thought experiments. My favorite is the initial revelation of ChickieNobs. Crake, super-genius transgenics researcher shows them to Jimmy, his best friend, on a tour of Crake's lab.</p><blockquote>"This is the latest," said Crake.<br /><br />What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.<br /><br />"What the hell is it?" said Jimmy.<br /><br />"Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit."<br /><br />"But there aren't any heads," said Jimmy. He grasped the concept-- he'd grown up with <i>sus multiorganifer</i>, after all-- but this thing was going too far. At least the pigoons of his childhood hadn't lacked heads.<br /><br />"That's the head in the middle," said the woman. "There's a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don't need those."<br /><br />"This is horrible," said Jimmy. The thing was a nightmare. It was like an animal-protein tuber.<br /><br />"Picture a sea-anemone body plan," said Crake. "That helps."<br /><br />"But what's it thinking?" said Jimmy.<br /><br />The woman gave her jocular woodpecker yodel, and explained that they'd removed all the brain functions that had nothing to do with digestion, assimilation, and growth.<br /><br />"It's sort of like a chicken hookworm," said Crake.<br /><br />"No need for added growth hormones," said the woman, "the high growth rate's built in. You get chicken breasts in two weeks-- that's a three-week improvement on the most efficient low-light, high-density chicken farming operation so far devised. And the animal-welfare freaks won't be able to say a word, because this thing feels no pain."<br /><br />"Those kids are going to clean up," said Crake after they'd left. The students at Watson-Crick got half the royalties from anything they invented there. Crake said it was a fierce incentive. "ChickieNobs, they're thinking of calling the stuff."<br /><br />"Are they on the market yet?" asked Jimmy weakly. He couldn't see eating a ChickieNob. It would be like eating a large wart. But as with the tit implants-- the good ones-- maybe he wouldn't be able to tell the difference.<br /><br />"They've already got the takeout franchise operation in place," said Crake. "Investors are lining up around the block. They can undercut the price of everyone else."</blockquote><p>From <i>Oryx and Crake</i>, chapter 8, section "Wolvogs." (Page 202-203 in my edition.)</p><p>After some story-time has passed, Jimmy seems to eat almost nothing other than ChickieNobs Buckets O' Nubbins. Hilariously gross, just like most of the novel.</p><p>I think this would pair well with Douglas Adam's cow that wants to be eaten, to prompt discussion of the morality of meat-eating. My own initial reaction: it would be OK to eat ChickieNobs, but not OK to eat the willing cow.</p>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-31029219448500119852010-07-11T08:54:00.000-07:002010-07-11T09:54:40.636-07:00Douglas Adams's cow that wants to be eatenLast semester one of my intro to philosophy students reminded me, at a handful of points through the semester, of scenes from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</span> that illustrate philosophical problems. I'd forgotten most of them, so this summer I've been working my way through the <span style="font-style: italic;">Hitchhiker's</span> trilogy. Here's a scene that would work well in a unit on the morality of meat-eating, especially paired with an Atwood excerpt I'll post later. The gang has settled down for dinner at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.<br /><blockquote>[Ford] sat down.<br /><br />The waiter approached.<br /><br />"Would you like to see the menu?" he said, "or would you like meet the Dish of the Day?"<br /><br />"Huh?" said Ford.<br /><br />"Huh?" said Arthur.<br /><br />"Huh?" said Trillian.<br /><br />"That's cool," said Zaphod, "we'll meet the meat."<br /><br />...<br /><br />A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.<br /><br />"Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in the parts of my body?"<br /><br />It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters in to a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.<br /><br />Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.<br /><br />"Something off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal, "braised in a white wine sauce?"<br /><br />"Er, your shoulder?" said Arthur in a horrified whisper.<br /><br />"But naturally my shoulder, sir," mooed the animal contentedly, "nobody else's is mine to offer."<br /><br />Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's shoulder appreciatively.<br /><br />"Or the rump is very good," murmured the animal. "I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there."<br /><br />It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.<br /><br />"Or a casserole of me perhaps?" it added.<br /><br />"You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?" whispered Trillian to Ford.<br /><br />"Me?" said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, "I don't mean anything."<br /><br />"That's absolutely horrible," exclaimed Arthur, "the most revolting thing I've ever heard."<br /><br />"What's the problem Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump.<br /><br />"I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing there inviting me to," said Arthur, "It's heartless."<br /><br />"Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod.<br /><br />"That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Alright," he said, "maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just... er [...] I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered.<br /><br />"May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months."<br /><br />"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.<br /><br />"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.<br /><br />"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"<br /><br />"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."<br /><br />It managed a very slight bow.<br /><br />"Glass of water please," said Arthur.<br /><br />"Look," said Zaphod, "we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare stakes please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years."<br /><br />The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle. "A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good," it said, "I'll just nip off and shoot myself."<br /><br />He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur. "Don't worry, sir," he said, "I'll be very humane."<br /><br />It waddled unhurriedly off to the kitchen.</blockquote>[From <span style="font-style: italic;">The Restaurant at the End of the Universe</span>, Chapter 17.]Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-27380233853281432372010-06-02T08:16:00.000-07:002011-02-19T17:47:53.984-08:00Jerusalem ArtichokeTwo summers ago I decided to learn to identify some common wild edible plants. I bought a bunch of books on foraging, and by far the most useful was Samuel Thayer's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Forager's Harvest</span>. He just put out a second book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Nature's Garden</span>, and I got hold of it last week.<br /><br />Thayer is reserved writer. He teaches foraging classes, and he writes like someone accustomed to teaching newbies: simple sentences and a calm style. So when I got to this paragraph in the chapter on Jerusalem Artichoke I laughed out loud.<br /><br /><blockquote>If jerusalem-artichokes are eaten when they are full of inulin, they will cause <span style="font-style: italic;">horrendous</span> gas and sometimes diarrhea in many individuals-- unless they are very well cooked. You might not have read "horrendous" loud enough; few people will ever experience worse flatulence. The Dakota in Minnesota relegated jerusalem-artichoke to the status of starvation food "from dread of its flatulent qualities," and many modern foragers avoid it for the same reason. Indeed, in certain circles this tuber has earned the uncouth but accurate name of <span style="font-style: italic;">fartichoke</span> (Nature's Garden p. 419).</blockquote>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-15948396281400682782010-05-13T08:25:00.000-07:002010-05-13T08:53:33.946-07:00Silence is no helpI've been flipping through <span style="font-style: italic;">Silence, </span>John Cage's first book of lectures and essays<span style="font-style: italic;"></span>. I thought maybe it could help me get my foot in the door of some of his less accessible music. It can't! His lectures are more obscure than his music.<br /><br />The foreword uses paragraphs, sentences, and punctuation. That's nice. I can read that. In these sentences and paragraphs, Cage catalogs some of his most obscure moments. Self-indulgent, maybe, but it makes for some great stories. From the second paragraph of the foreword:<br /><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">Lecture on Nothing</span> was written in the same rhythmic structure I employed at the time in my musical compositions (<span style="font-style: italic;">Sonatas and Interludes</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Three Dances</span>, etc.). One of the structural divisions was the repetition, some fourteen times, of a single page in which occurred the refrain, "If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep." Jeanne Reynal, I remember, stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, "John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute." She then walked out. Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen.</blockquote>I love the idea of prepared answers. Cage appends them to the end of <span style="font-style: italic;">Lecture on Nothing</span>. Good stuff:<br /><blockquote>1. That is a very good question. I should not want to spoil it with an answer.<br />2. My head wants to ache.<br />3. Had you heard Marya Freund last April in Palemo singing Arnold Schoenberg's <span style="font-style: italic;">Pierrot Lunaire</span>, I doubt whether you would ask that question.<br />4. According to the Farmer's Almanac this is False Spring.<br />5. Please repeat the question...<br />And again...<br />And again...<br />6. I have no more answers.</blockquote>Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7096735755025193170.post-23905552212641745282010-05-05T04:42:00.000-07:002010-05-06T07:21:16.742-07:00April activityBought in April:<br /><br />Geeta Dayal - Another Green World (33 1/3)<br />Hugo Wilcken - Low (33 1/3)<br />Wilson Neate - Pink Flag (33 1/3)<br />Nick Hornby - The Polysyllabic Spree<br />Mark Katz - Capturing Sound<br />John Wyndham - The Chrysalids<br />Denis Johnson - Jesus' Son<br />Julie Orringer - How to Breathe Underwater<br /><br />Read in April:<br /><br />Drew Daniel - 20 Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3)<br />Mark Katz - Capturing Sound<br />Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman<br />Nick Hornby - The Polysyllabic Spree<br />Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife<br />Geeta Dayal - Another Green World (33 1/3)Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295871036952808958noreply@blogger.com0