Sunday, June 30, 2013
In case you wondered …
… How the Human Body Evolved to Throw Fastballs | Surprising Science. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
The destruction of understanding …
'In the Fog,' Reviewed by David Thomson: Life Under Occupation | New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I don't know about anybody else, but increasingly, I feel as if this country is under occupation by the current administration. See The Sprawling, Dimming Age of Obama.
I don't know about anybody else, but increasingly, I feel as if this country is under occupation by the current administration. See The Sprawling, Dimming Age of Obama.
Self and experience …
… Maverick Philosopher: Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion.
It seems to me, however, that the nonexistence of what I fail to find does not logically follow from my failing to find it.
It may be that the self is the sort of thing that cannot turn up as an object of experience precisely because it is the subject of experience.
Here is my own analogy: The self is like light, which itself is invisible, but by means of which we see what is visible. This analogy also may be applied to God. It works both ways because it is by virtue of having a self that we may be said to be made in the image and likeness of God.
Hardly surprising …
… RealClearMarkets - With the Environment, Paul Krugman Forgets the Poor.
He is, after all, a member in good standing of those college-trained elites, and they don't call them elites for nothing.
He is, after all, a member in good standing of those college-trained elites, and they don't call them elites for nothing.
Predictions and Predictors
Baseball is far from the only area in which predictions can disappoint, and in recent years, a handful of writers have drawn attention to the biases and habits that influence our ability to make good forecasts. The two most recent entrants in this category, Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise and Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile, appeared to wide acclaim in late 2012, with each author winning scores of favorable reviews and profiles; both received invitations to Silicon Valley to speak at Google’s prestigious Authors@Google series within weeks of each other. The two books, then, seem to have captured the zeitgeist—despite having largely contradictory messages and methodologies.
A thought for today …
It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.
— Czeslaw Milosz, born on this date in 1911
David Cameron indeed...
A two-year-old has become the youngest member of British Mensa after taking an intelligence test that ranked him smarter than Barack Obama and David Cameron.The obvious remarks are made in the Comments.
May she be shunned …
… The Face of Cowardice: Theresa May : The Other McCain.
Of course this reflects badly as well on David Cameron, who has yet to impress me in any way whatever.
Of course this reflects badly as well on David Cameron, who has yet to impress me in any way whatever.
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Children and Resiliency
It's obvious why deprivation hurts development. The mystery is why some deprived children seem to do so much better than others. Is it something about their individual temperament or their particular environment?
20% -- one-fifth -- of trans people kill themselves. Many of the remainder pride themselves on their resiliency.
Strange …
I Did Not Vanish: On Writing - The Rumpus.net. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I cannot identify with this, but I can sympathize with, as I think any decent person must.
I cannot identify with this, but I can sympathize with, as I think any decent person must.
Well-trained fascists …
… Ed Driscoll — ‘The Tyranny of Choice’; the Boredom of Academia’s Summer Reruns.
That efficient strategy was the work of Herbert Marcuse, the political theorist whose ideas are generally credited with creating the basis for campus speech codes. Marcuse said, “Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed.” Marcuse created political correctness.So much for civil dialogue. Exactly who determines what cannot be expressed, and how we know they're right?p
The silence …
… J.D. Salinger and Eastern religion: Are there any lost books still in the vault? - Slate Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In the end, I had to respect Salinger for his choice of a deeply serious version of the Eastern mysticism he assaults readers with in the late fiction. Maybe that was the problem. For all his disclaiming of the Mind—in the Morgan letters he warns against “mind” as if the Mind were a beast in the jungle waiting to devour the devout—he was seduced by the sheer intelligence he found herein. Because I believe, of his own sheer intelligence.
Nice try …
… Liberal Opposes Immigration Refotrm | New Republic.
What the author doesn't seem to realize is that these same college-educated elites also don't care about low-wage American workers.
Most of America’s college-educated elites are little affected by illegal immigration. In fact, it’s often a benefit to us in terms of childcare, household help, dinners out, and other staples of upper-middle-class life. Many therefore view the problem as akin, in severity, to marijuana use—common but benign, helpful to the immigrants and minimal in its effects on Americans or anyone else. I know, because it used to be my own view.
What the author doesn't seem to realize is that these same college-educated elites also don't care about low-wage American workers.
Vintage commentary …
… Vladimir Nabokov: The Art of Translation | New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
All literature has the potential to be Christian literature.
Moses knew the Egyptian library and Daniel the Babylonian, but the most famous picture of this is the Apostle Paul on Mars Hill. Surrounded by idols, enveloped with pagan superstition, Paul didn’t quote Leviticus or Isaiah. He shared the gospel with pagans by quoting more pagans, namely the astronomer Aratus and his poem The Phenomena. “In him we live and move and have our being,” quoted the apostle, a line he put good effect (Acts 17.28).
On at least two other occasions Paul did the same thing, likely quoting Epimenides of Crete in Titus 1.12 (“Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons”) and another poet in 1 Corinthians 15.33 (“Bad company ruins good morals”). While early church historian Socrates Scholasticus ascribed the 1 Corinthian quote to the Athenian tragedian Euripides (Ecclesiastical History 3.16), it turns out the quote is more likely from the comic writer Menander and his play Thais.
I think, without checking, that C.S. Lewis, or maybe Chesterton, and even John Paul II made the point that other stories, and other religions, recapitulate, however imperfectly, the impulse of humankind to describe and worship the Divine.
A thought for today …
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing's left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, born on this date in 1900
Friday, June 28, 2013
This will disappoint many …
… Climate panic: Ecological collapse is not upon us, and we haven’t run out of oil or silver or copper or zinc. — Slate Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… the authors of The Limits to Growth predicted that before 2013, the world would have run out of aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc.
Instead, despite recent increases, commodity prices have generally fallen to about a third of their level 150 years ago. Technological innovations have replaced mercury in batteries, dental fillings, and thermometers: Mercury consumption is down 98 percent and, by 2000, the price was down 90 percent. More broadly, since 1946, supplies of copper, aluminum, iron, and zinc have outstripped consumption, owing to the discovery of additional reserves and new technologies to extract them economically.
Another back seat for blogging …
Another doctor's visit is on the schedule today, so blogging once again will have to take a back seat.
The Dangers of Making Reading Spiritual
Priests tell us we need religion. Therapists tell us we need therapy. Writers, with a parallel enthusiasm, insist that we need reading. “The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy," says Flaubert. “There is no friend as loyal as a book," announces Hemingway. "Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul," insists Joyce Carol Oates, who has apparently never seen a movie or had a conversation.
A thought for today …
When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.
— Luigi Pirandello, born on this date in 1867
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Huh?
… Gerard Streator Pleads Guilty To Having Sex With Couch.
If the couch was a consenting adult I see no problem.
If the couch was a consenting adult I see no problem.
Hmm …
… Anecdotal Evidence: `Have They Legs and Eyes?'
I'm sure that Emerson was as capable of thinking, speaking, and writing bullshit as any of us, but I'm not sure that “Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind” can be accounted such. It's a fairly time-honored view (see Pico della Mirandola's oration on the dignity of man). Man as microcosm may be hard for contemporary man to grasp, but earlier generations didn't have that problem.
Watch and listen …
… ART BLAKEY and THE JAZZ MESSENGERS, Children Of The Night - YouTube. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Oh, really …
… THE TRIAL OF POPE BENEDICT by Daniel Gawthrop | Kirkus. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The author also thoroughly documents the broader context of the hierarchy's theological and political commitment to overturn the legacy of Vatican II.I'd like to know who the members of the hierarchy mentioned here are. Not the late Cardinal Bevilacqua, whom I knew (and rather liked, actually). The Church is run by the heirs of Vatican II and no one is more reactionary than an aging revolutionary. Benedict was unusual in recognizing that something he had helped bring about had gone terribly wrong.
The author shows how resurgent opposition to discussions of reform initiated during the pontificate of John XXIII—e.g., birth control, abortion, ordaining female priests—provided the ground under which the now-exposed coverups of priestly rape and sexual abuse could take root.I suppose this tells us all we need to know about this review. Abortion is not a "reform" the Church is ever going to entertain.
RIP …
… Roger’s Rules — Free speech in the UK: Sayonara.
The irony of the situation is rich. Geller and Spencer speak out against the intolerance of Islam. Got that? They speak. They lecture. They write books. Spencer’s written a shelf of them. Geller was behind a campaign to place “defeat jihad” posters in New York subways. One of the reasons they were traveling to the UK was to participate in a commemorative ceremony for Drummer Lee Rigby. Remember him? He was the chap who last month was walking down a street in Woolwich when two Muslims ran him down in a car and then stabbed and hacked him to death with knives and a cleaver. Like the Earl of Stratford, their motto was “Thorough.” When these partisans of the religion of peace got through with him, he had to be identified by dental records. Geller and Spencer are denied entry to the UK. Quoth a government spokesman: individuals whose presence “is not conducive to the public good” may be denied entry by the Home Secretary. He explained: “We condemn all those whose behaviours and views run counter to our shared values and will not stand for extremism in any form.”
Quieting the hysteria …
… Gay Marriage Is Just One Piece of the Puzzle | Via Meadia.
… the Supreme Court and public opinion are demanding the return of more powers to individuals and states. DOMA, pot legalization, the limits on the Voting Rights Act, and a rash of new state limits on abortion all point to a strong public interest in the decentralization of power.
Why it's the national pastime …
… Baseball by John Updike | The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Belated blogging …
I have to with my wife to the doctor's this morning. So blogging will resume sometime later.
My latest column …
… When Falls the Coliseum — To see like a child.
Nothing is simple about childhood. It is an inchoate mass of urges and impressions. We haven’t sorted things out yet and, from the outset, we have nothing to go on. No one ever does. There is perhaps no more perfect image of the human condition than the look of consternation and perplexity one sees sometimes on the faces of toddlers. Somehow, over time, we get a handle on things, and it would be nice to know what combination of sense and judgment we employed to do that.
A thought for today …
To study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.
— Lafcadio Hearn, born on this date in 1850
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Sonorous abstractions …
… Orwell Watch #24: And the prize goes to … Stanley Fish! | The Book Haven.
It probably would have been a good idea for the Academy of Arts and Scienes to find an actual humanist to prepare their report. But they probably wouldn't know one if they saw one
It probably would have been a good idea for the Academy of Arts and Scienes to find an actual humanist to prepare their report. But they probably wouldn't know one if they saw one
Hmm …
What Do Most Philosophers Believe? A Wide-Ranging Survey Project Gives Us Some Idea | Open Culture. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
So most don't believe in God. Be interesting to know what they understand the term to mean.
So most don't believe in God. Be interesting to know what they understand the term to mean.
Does he matter?
...Karl Marx: a Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber – review
Its bible, of course, was Das Kapital – although few cadres actually bothered to read it. And Sperber again shows the relative anachronism of Marx's thinking by the 1870s. At its core was not an epic crisis of capitalism (there had been too many false dawns for that), but the question that David Ricardo and Adam Smith had been wrestling with since the late 1700s: the falling rate of profit. Marx tried desperately if vainly to offer an answer, but meanwhile the world was changing around him: industrial processes were reframing rates of surplus value; colonial markets were transforming the metropole's economics; the mid-Victorian boom meant a growing middle class; a new service sector was emerging ("from the whore to the Pope, there is a mass of such scum"); and marginal utility theory was stressing the market interaction of consumer preferences. Yet Marx was still wrestling with James Mill and Thomas Malthus.
Small is powerful …
… Nassim Taleb: 'The Black Swan' author in praise of the risk-takers - Business Analysis & Features - Business - The Independent. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
His reasoning is deliciously simple: "It's much easier to bullshit at the macro-level than it is to bullshit at the micro-level."
Defamiliarizing …
… A Good Gatsby | Commonweal Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… some American critics view Luhrmann’s adaptation as simply unfaithful to the book; having been taught the somewhat anodyne version of Gatsby canonized in the second half of the twentieth century, they fail to grasp that, by going back to the original sources, Luhrmann has in fact produced not only a more provocative but also a more fully rounded reading of Fitzgerald’s great novel.
A thought for today …
I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.
— Pearl Buck, born on this date in 1892
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Indeed …
Viewpoint: The Food Network Should Give Paula Deen Back Her Job | TIME.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This story is one you couldn't make up. Actually, I hope some other network hires her and the Food Network gets boycotted.
This story is one you couldn't make up. Actually, I hope some other network hires her and the Food Network gets boycotted.
Macklemore, Same Love and propaganda
So you have Theology of the Body or the arguments of natural law versus the word–image association of Macklemore—that’s not likely a ripe conversation—and Macklemore has a lead of 48 million views and a culture moving in his direction, not only in its beliefs but in its vocabulary.
That’s where the difficulty lies, not only in the conflict of judgment—conjugal versus revisionist beliefs on marriage—but in the mode of discourse, the process of how meaning is made.
First Things used to be a well done journal, primarily driven by Richard John Neuhaus. RIP. But now it has come to this. A lament that there is no effective propaganda for “our side.” Even though the article itself attempts to
use communication techniques in carrying its message, i.e., it is propaganda
too.
It might be much better, and more convincing, to come away from standard Catholic arguments regarding marriage, the potential procreative argument or even the complimentarily one, and think
up new ones, because neither one really is all that effective. Because they fail. The procreation argument fails of its own
weight. Ban marriages by any woman who is
past menopause? Really? The complimentarily one fails because the
Bible contains examples of Christ blessing those who weren’t married, or who had
five husbands and was living with one who was not her husband. In fact, the Samaritan
woman at the well brought His Good News to her village, and caused
many to believe. Christ truly has His
apostles everywhere and in every guise, and you who think they know best are
like those disciples who tried to stop others from preaching in his Name. Christ's Good News was simple. Love.
And not your definition of Love.
But God’s.
One of the true First Things necessary to carry that message
is don’t be like the Pharisees, busy making rules. He saved His strongest condemnation for them,
for the rule makers. And He showed the
most love to those who believed in Him.
Without rules. After all, nowhere
in the Bible does it say that He condemned the Samaritan
woman at the well for her five husbands, or her living in
sin. Rather it says because of her
testimony many believed. And the Bible has
Christ saying nothing more about her.
Anthology of consequences …
A Romantic Comedy | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Shakespeare’s late turn to romance is actually a return to a genre that was popular in his youth. So it makes sense that one of his earliest comedies would be framed in this way. But whatever the reason for that framing, the impact of taking that framing seriously, of remembering it when thinking about the farce that takes up most of the play, is to deepen the play, and the pathos of its comedy, considerably …
Surprise, surprise …
As More Attend College, Majors Become More Career-Focused - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Albert Jay Nock predicted this in his 1930 book The System of Education in the United States. Nock distinguishes between education and training and notes that just about everyone is trainable, but that not everyone is educable. Since in America what is thought to be good for anybody is presumed to be good for everybody, the only way to make education available to everyone is to call training education and to make all schools training schools. We see the result all around. The President, members of Congress, the justices on the Supreme Court are highly trained in something. But how many of them are really educated? The difference, by the way, between education and training is that the former is formative and has to do with character, while the latter is instrumental and has to do with technique. As Nock puts it, applied to the proper subject, education produces something in the way of an Emerson; training, applied to the proper subject, produces something in the way of an Edison.
The marketing of science …
… The Age Demanded an Image | Books and Culture. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Gladwell himself is not just allergic to traditional ethical discourse; the threat of it sends him into a sort of intellectual anaphylactic shock: in What the Dog Saw alone, he writes the blame out of the Enron scandal, the missed warnings about 9/11, and the Challengerdisaster. Gladwell's essay about this last tragedy has, in fact, a decisive counterweight in the popular media: Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist alive at the time, summarized the accountability by dropping O-rings into ice water at a press conference. This showed that, contrary to their manufacturer's claim, they could become inflexible in predictable atmospheric conditions, allowing a fuel leak from the joints they were supposed to be sealing. The Space Shuttle's design and operation weren't a hopelessly complex system to Feynman (hopeless complexity being Gladwell's standard plea, even though he acknowledges that complexity can be artificial and a blind)—nor to the public, when a truly expert, objective scientific communicator stepped forward.
A thought for today …
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
— George Orwell, born on the date in 1903
Monday, June 24, 2013
Red Smith and his columns
The style of writing Smith excelled at, which re-creates for the reader what goes on during athletic competitions, is almost dead, for reasons both technical and technological.One of the strengths of the Inky and the Daily News has always been sports writing.
Born to fake …
Book Review: "Middle C" by William H. Gass - Identity Theory. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… this is probably Gass’s most accessible work of fiction in the way it provides a conventional emphasis of sorts on character and events, even if finally the reader must be wary of extending complete sympathy to Joseph Skizzen, or even of entirely trusting that we have gotten a strictly accurate account of Skizzen’s life. The novel’s final episodes involve Skizzen’s potential exposure as a fraud, the story he has created about himself and his life a fiction.
Q&A...
...Bookforum talks with Karl Ove Knausgaard
One of the interesting things about the stories in the Old Testament is that the major ones are so short—Cain and Abel, for instance, is told in eight lines or so. That’s amazing, considering the impact that story has had, and continues to have, in the culture. For me, in my own writing, that kind of concentration is impossible—when I have written a hundred pages, if feels like I’ve said nothing.
Poet in prose …
… Anecdotal Evidence: `Recorded in Faultless Words'.
I rather like Emerson, and I think that Thoreau's poem "I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings" is quite readable.
I rather like Emerson, and I think that Thoreau's poem "I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings" is quite readable.
Lamentation …
… The Decline and Fall of the English Major - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
They can assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax. They can meta-metastasize any thematic or ideological notion they happen upon. And they get good grades for doing just that. But as for writing clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions and the world around them — no.
I noticed this back in the '70s when I was editing people's doctoral dissertations. The authors simply rearranged blocks of thought that been passed on to them in the classroom. It was unclear if the had ever thought about any of the material in a critical way. They all got their degrees, though.
Faith and reason …
… Maverick Philosopher: Anthony Flood on Philosophy as Misosophy, Part I. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Reason is weak and philosophy, whose engine is unaided reason, cannot deliver the goods. The salvific wisdom we seek it cannot supply. It remains an interminable and inconclusive seeking, but never a finding; it remains forever the (erothetic) love of wisdom, not its possession. So we look beyond philosophy to the data of revelation. But how do we authenticate such data? How do we distinguish pseudo-revelation from the genuine article? By what marks is it known? We are thrown back upon our infirm reasoning powers to sort this out.
A thought for today …
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
— Ambrose Bierce, born on this date in 1842
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Secrecy binge …
… Schneier on Security: Government Secrets and the Need for Whistle-blowers. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Joyce, Hopkins, and secrecy …
… Cryptogams and the NSA | Warscapes. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
There is nothing more frightening for a pseudo-intellectual than to be called out to explain something he does not actually understand. I cancelled my first appointment with the feds—Special Agents O’Brien and Bloom—just to brush up. The fact that one of the agents was named Bloom filled me with foreboding. I spent 48 hours reading secondary texts to assure myself of relevant theories of textual interpretation. I didn’t want to sound uninformed. Notes from the interviews would become part of the permanent historical record. It filled me with anguish to think of my sons reading the FBI Form 302 interview notes decades later and realizing their father was a fraud.
Writer and editor …
… Truth of the Matter | The Weekly Standard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Attempts have been made in recent years to elevate serious nonfiction, to pump it up into the realm of high literature. In their day, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote claimed to be writing nonfiction novels, by which they meant little more than that they brought a fiction writer’s sensibility, and a few of the techniques of the novel, to factual material. In some academic circles, nonfiction is referred to as “literary nonfiction,” or—man that pump: huff, puff—as “creative nonfiction,” and a magazine calledCreative Nonfiction has been in existence for nearly 20 years now. But is nonfiction in all its various subgenres sufficiently unified for a book of advice on how to write it likely to be of much value?
Language and physics and cleanliness
The fact that the mathematics allows for gazillions of variations is seen to be evidence for gazillions of actual worlds.
This kind of reification of equations is precisely what strikes some humanities scholars as childishly naive. At the very least, it raises serious questions about the relationship between our mathematical models of reality, and reality itself. While it is true that in the history of physics many important discoveries have emerged from revelations within equations — Paul Dirac’s formulation for antimatter being perhaps the most famous example — one does not need to be a cultural relativist to feel sceptical about the idea that the only way forward now is to accept an infinite cosmic ‘landscape’ of universes that embrace every conceivable version of world history, including those in which the Middle Ages never ended or Hitler won.
In the 30 years since I was a student, physicists’ interpretations of their field have increasingly tended toward literalism, while the humanities have tilted towards postmodernism. Thus a kind of stalemate has ensued. Neither side seems inclined to contemplate more nuanced views. It is hard to see ways out of this tunnel, but in the work of the late British anthropologist Mary Douglas I believe we can find a tool for thinking about some of these questions.
On the surface, Douglas’s great book Purity and Danger (1966) would seem to have nothing do with physics.
A thought for today …
Our entire life — consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.
— Jean Anouilh, born on this date in 1910
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Without contraries is no progression …
… Writing to Death by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
What I am suggesting is that a novelist’s work is often a strategy (I don’t mean the author need be aware of this) for dealing with some personal dilemma. Not just that the dilemma is “worked out” in the narrative, as critics often tell us, but that the acts of writing and publishing and positioning oneself in the world of literature are all part of an attempt to find a solution, however provisional, to some deep personal unease. In many cases, however hard the writing is pushed, the solution is indeed only temporary or partial, both author and work eventually succumbing. Obviously the easiest group of authors to look at in this regard would be the suicides, Woolf, Pavese, Wallace. But to finish, let’s consider William Faulkner.
Wow!
VATICAN COUNTY—Shattering the previous Eucharistic weight record set by Cincinnati’s Sisters of Mercy convent, the Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals confirmed Friday it has baked an 800-pound communion wafer, the heaviest ever recorded, for this weekend’s Vatican County Fair. “That there’s the biggest body of Christ under the sun, friend,” said Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who personally carved the image of the cross onto the 16-foot-wide wafer. “A full foot thick, batter-dipped, and completely unleavened.” After the colossal host is displayed alongside the fair’s butter sculpture of the Crucifixion and its 450-pound blue-ribbon bishop, each of the 40,000 paying attendees will reportedly receive a piece of the wafer and 32 ounces of wine in a commemorative plastic cup.Sorry Frank, couldn't help it. I'm still laughing.
Accurate, but contrary to narrative …
… Best of the Web Today: Meet Col. Williams - WSJ.com.
Perhaps some people do not know that the court-martial is a tool of the commander and not a regular court of law, or that the court-martial panel that convicted Capt. Herrera was not a jury. There are also other critical differences between military tribunals and civilian courts. All of these differences may explain why some have not understood General Helms's actions. But members of Congress familiar with the case should know better.Except that nowadays, in many cases, members of Congress seem to be as dumb as rocks.
Tilting at windbags …
… Peter Richardson: The Science Delusion - Book Review - Truthdig. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“In the end,” White claims, “the problem for science is that it doesn’t know what its own discoveries mean.” It isn’t that scientists can’t communicate that meaning, but rather that doing so requires a language of human value that isn’t itself scientific. This is only a problem, of course, when some of them try to forbid all other forms of meaning.
Hmm …
… How Reading Makes Us More Human - Karen Swallow Prior - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
When I was in college, one of my classes — it was Father Gannon's metaphysics class — had as one of its textbooks, William Luipen's Existential Phenomenology. If memory seves, one of the points made in that book is that one distinctly human characteristics has to do with uselessness. In other words, one of the things that makes us human is our ability to ditch the utilitarian for a while. Ornament an object for no other reason than that it makes it look nicer, not be cause it makes it perform a task better. Does reading require any justification beyond itself? I don't think so.
And The Selfish Gene stunk too...
It is surely rather surprising that we – creatures who are, as [Dawkins] has explained, merely lumbering robots, survival-machines entirely controlled by these super-beings – are, at this stage of our evolution, suddenly free to rise up with one bound and overpower them.
How Richard Dawkins went further than Hobbes and ended up ludicrously wrongDawkin's therefore somehow posits an ability -- free will -- that he would say we have never exercised to date. Moreover, his entire premise is based on a metaphysical extraction of an emergent property (“selfishness” of a gene) to an organism. Emergent properties of course are something reductionism of Dawkin's sort would not countenance, yet are the basis for his micro theory and his expansion to macro theory:
Criticizing Dan Brown: Is it his lousy writing? Or Something Else?
John Kinsella, a highly regarded Australian poet who teaches at Cambridge, was quoted not long ago in the Times Literary Supplement as saying that he has “not sold his soul to market fetishization.” Kinsella means that he doesn’t want even to think about making a profit from his writing. But Kinsella is also doing what comes naturally for most poets and many literary essayists: He is expressing a disdain for the commercial world. To think about selling books is tantamount to worshipping Mammon.
A thought for today …
The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.
— Graham Greene, born on this date in 1904
Friday, June 21, 2013
Minority report …
… Is Franz Kafka Overrated? - Joseph Epstein - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Kafka, the critic Jeremy Adler holds, is “less dazzling than Proust, less innovative than Joyce, [but his] vision is more stark, more painful, more obviously universal than that of his peers.” Kafka’s universality derives from his high level of generality. Places are not named; most characters go undescribed; landscapes, sere and menacing, appear as they might in nightmares. Joyce and Proust work from detail to generality; Kafka works from generality to detail, giving his fiction the feeling that something deeply significant is going on, if only we could grasp what precisely it is.
The art of the tweet …
The Ongoing Story: Twitter and Writing : The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Joyce Carol Oates, whom I don’t think of as famously concise but who has become a prolific and often ingenious tweeter, recently tweeted a question: “If an action is not recorded on a smart phone, does it, did it, exist?”
The Inquirer will make it, it will, it will
Digital news is finally starting to pay. Workable revenue models are emerging that make the future look brighter for publishers, a new report has found.
Minor-key world …
… Pride and Perseverance - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Pym, who started working on her first novel as soon as she finished at Oxford in 1934, was so pleased to be a published writer that she didn’t worry a great deal about receiving mixed reviews. She had a day job editing academic publications, so she didn’t have to live on her royalties. The positive notices appeared often enough to keep her buoyant. Then came the long drought. She was bewildered, humiliated and frustrated, but there was never a break in the writing. She completed two more novels, and filled notebook after notebook with the morsels of daily life she cherished. “MrC in the Library — he is having his lunch, eating a sandwich with a knife and fork, a glass of milk near at hand. Oh why can’t I write about things like that any more — why is this kind of thing no longer acceptable?”
Beyond paraphrase …
… Willa Cather: A Hidden Voice by Hermione Lee | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
All of us who have worked and published on Cather, and who have read some of the three thousand or so letters that remain from her life’s correspondence with friends, family, publishers, colleagues, admirers, and fellow writers, had to obey the embargo she left in her will against their publication. As a result, her letters have been paraphrased over and over again by critics and biographers. Her story was told, her secrets were known, but the voice of her letters was not heard.
Concise truths …
… Ronald Blythe is caught out in his gardening clothes. (Hat tip, Dave Lull, who also sends along Outlandish Proverbs: A Translation.
Questions and observations …
… Detectives Beyond Borders: Benjamin Black is history, and so can you. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A thought for today …
I considered the case and realized that if something can exist in opinion without existing in reality, or exist in reality without existing in opinion, the conclusion is that of the two parallel lives, only opinion is necessary – not reality, which is only a secondary consideration.
— Machado de Assis, born on this date in 1839
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Legal reality …
Can Judges Define The Structure of The Universe? | Religion and Other Curiosities. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I hold no brief for the Schaibles peculiar religious practices, but I think it worth noting that the same court that finds them liable for their child's death would have had no problem with their having terminated said child in utero.
Q & A …
… A Teacher and Her Student | VICE United States. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
After receiving my MFA this May, I left Iowa believing that there’s no good way to be taught how to write, to tell a story. But there is also no denying that Marilynne [Robinson] has made me a better writer. Her demands are deceptively simple: to be true to human consciousness and to honor the complexities of the mind and its memory. Marilynne has said in other interviews that she doesn’t read much contemporary fiction because it would take too much of her time, but I suspect it’s also because she spends a fair amount of her mental resources on her students.
Bad editing …
… Paranormalia: Guerrilla Skeptics. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It's obvious that sceptics are busily re-editing articles in their favour, and a reader has kindly sent me a link that shows how they do this. It's a project calledGuerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, run by Susan Gerbic, who recruits sceptics to give pages a makeover, both those that publicise their own side (ie debunkers, key sceptic figures, etc) and also the opposition's (celebrity psychics, paranormal claimants, etc).
One looks up something in an encyclopedia in order to find an unbiased account of something. Both sides of a disputed should be given adequate space, but to edit in order to slant matters on way or another is intellectually dishonest. The bane of intellectual life is wedded some people are to their conclusions. Best to regard them as much as one can as provisional.
Treasure …
… Bodleian Library acquires a classic of environmental literature | MobyLives. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
On second thought …
… Vice Removes Controversial Photo Spread | Observer. (Hat tip, Edward Champion.)
From C.S. Lewis to Google Glass
That Hideous Strength:
Google Glass Needs Phatic Interaction, Stat
“The cardinal difficulty,” said MacPhee, “in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, ‘Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you’ll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.’ The female for this is, ‘Put that in the other one in there.’ And then if you ask them, ‘in where?’ they say, ‘in there, of course.’ There is consequently a phatic hiatus.” He pronounced this so as to rhyme with "get at us."
"There's your tea now," said Ivy Maggs, "and I’ll go and get you a piece of cake, which is more than you deserve. And when you've had it you can go upstairs and talk about nouns for the rest of the evening.""Not about nouns: by means of nouns," said MacPhee, but Mrs. Maggs had already left the room.
Google Glass Needs Phatic Interaction, Stat
A thought for today …
Should a priest reject relativity because it contains no authoritative exposition on the doctrine of the Trinity? Once you realize that the Bible does not purport to be a textbook of science, the old controversy between religion and science vanishes . . . The doctrine of the Trinity is much more abstruse than anything in relativity or quantum mechanics; but, being necessary for salvation, the doctrine is stated in the Bible. If the theory of relativity had also been necessary for salvation, it would have been revealed to Saint Paul or to Moses.
— Georges Lemaitre, who died on this date in 1966
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
RIP …
… Journalist Michael Hastings dies at 33 - U.S. News.
Here's his last article: Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans.
Here's his last article: Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans.
In case you wondered …
… What's the Origin of "Kilroy Was Here"? | Mental Floss. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Surprised by immortality …
… Mere C. S. Lewis | TLS. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The final chapter of McGrath’s book, entitled “The Lewis Phenomenon”, charts the writer’s posthumous reputation, particularly in the United States. In the 1960s, Lewis almost vanished from view: by the end of the century he had become a cultural icon. Initially, in America, he was read only by Episcopalians, and was upbraided by Evangelicals as a smoker, a drinker and a liberal. But as barriers between mainstream Protestant denominations began to weaken, the author of Mere Christianity began to be admired across the spectrum. Roman Catholics, too, began to link him with G. K. Chesterton and Tolkien, and to consider him a fellow traveller. Most surprisingly, we are told, Lewis has now become the patron saint of American Evangelicalism. In a centenary article in 1998, its flagship periodical, Christianity Today, declared him “the Aquinas, the Augustine and the Aesop of contemporary evangelicalism”. Polls of American Christians, McGrath tells us, regularly cite Mere Christianity as the most influential religious book of the twentieth century.
Well, when I was in Catholic grade school, we read The Screwtape Letters in class and used to pray that Lewis would take the final step to Rome.
Language under duress
Kenneth Goldsmith is a conceptual poet, a literary trickster whose books are found art of a sort. He mines the mundane.
...To make “Seven American Deaths and Disasters,” Mr. Goldsmith has combed through archival radio and television broadcasts of painful events over the past six decades: there are chapters about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon; the explosion aboard the space shuttle Challenger; the shootings at Columbine High School; the attacks at the World Trade Center; and the death of Michael Jackson — and he has transcribed the reports as they unfurled on the air, live and unmediated.
To Mr. Goldsmith’s detractors this may seem like a cheap stunt, a snort of disaster porn. Or it may seem like proof that, in the author’s case, even a blind and snoutless pig will occasionally find a truffle. At times it made me uneasy.
But Mr. Goldsmith has also delivered a kind of found treasure of the American vernacular. His book is about the sounds our culture makes when the reassuring smooth jazz of much of our broadcast media breaks down, when disc jockeys and news anchors are forced to find words for events that are nearly impossible to describe. This book is about language under duress.
I don't get it. At all. And the review, with its excerpts not reprinted here, makes it no clearer. Alas, perhaps I violate Wittgenstein's dictum: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Or the review does. Or the book does. Or the original broadcasts do. Or we all do.
A new axis?
...India's Japan moment
There is another interesting parallel worth noting. There is no doubt that the transformation in India-US relations owed much to the personality of former US president George W Bush. He had a strong affinity for India, and his personal chemistry with Dr Singh helped resolve several apparently insoluble roadblocks during the negotiations on the civil nuclear agreement. In Shinzo Abe, India has a Japanese leader who wears his affection for India on his sleeve. It was Mr Abe who declared in 2007 that ties with India would be the most important relationship for Japan. He has often expressed his respect and admiration for Dr Singh in terms not very different from George Bush.
Go ahead …
… Go Google Yourself | The Weekly Standard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“The Internet,” Molly Haskell wrote, “is democracy’s revenge on democracy.” I take Ms. Haskell to have meant that there are places where democracy has no place, and in those places where it puts forth its snouty nose, disarray is likely to follow. Fifty million Frenchmen, to reverse an old cliché, are frequently wrong. Does this sound elitist? If so, that is only because it adamantly is. Many are the things on which one opinion is not as good as another, and culture is among them.
I marketable …
Bryan Appleyard —Stoner: The Greatest Novel You Have Never Read. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Stoner’s lack of success has baffled many. “Why isn’t this book more famous?” asked Snow. Ian McEwan, a recent reader, emails me to say: “I’m amazed a novel this good escaped general attention for so long.” The essayist Geoff Dyer has just read the book on the recommendation of a friend, the novelist and poet Adam Foulds. He thinks the title doesn’t help — it’s the hero’s surname, but nowadays might be taken to mean the book is about a dope-smoker. “Also,” Dyer adds, “it’s such a quiet book, it’s not entirely surprising it didn’t take the publishing world by storm.” Stoner, in short, is unmarketable — always, in my view, a good sign.
No words minced …
… Europe Must Stand Up to American Cyber-Snooping - SPIEGEL ONLINE.
It is embarrassing: Barack Obama will be arriving in Berlin for only the second time, but his visit is coming just as we are learning that the US president is a snoop on a colossal scale. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that she will speak to the president about the surveillance program run by the National Security Agency, and the Berlin Interior Ministry has sent a set of 16 questions to the US Embassy. But Obama need not be afraid. German Interior Minister Hans Peter Friedrich, to be sure, did say: "That's not how you treat friends." But he wasn't referring to the fact that our trans-Atlantic friends were spying on us. Rather, he meant the criticism of that spying.
By the numbers …
Big data meets the Bard - FT.com. (Hat tip, Dabe Lull.)
Who … would have guessed that, according to a 2011 Harvard study of four per cent (that is, five million) of all the books printed in English, less than half the number of words used are included in dictionaries, the rest being “lexical dark matter”? Or that, as a recent study using the same database carried out by the universities of Bristol, Sheffield and Durham reveals, “American English has become decidedly more ‘emotional’ than British English in the last half-century”?
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