ApatheticLiberalDepressingPostModernEvangelicalRedNeckTechnoApocalypse

"Although it is unscientific & therefore unconstitutional to teach that 'some natural structures appear too complex to have evolved naturally', nonetheless the hand of God is implicit in cataclysmic natural disasters." How is it that the MSM, less than one week after covering the defeat of ID as science, can flip on 'year-in-review' mode and ask a panel of religious leaders if the tsunami, hurricane, & earthquake of the past year were "acts of God" [CBS]? I don't mean to belittle the questions involved here, nor their asking, but why does this come off as so two-minded? Is this the clash of the sensational and debunking journalistic impulses? Should CBS have had a geo-physicist and meteorologist sitting next to the imam, rabbi, and minister?

a brief history of the last book I read

in principio erat verbum [....] And a well-mannered bourgeois neurosis begat Kafka. And Kafka begat Borges, the blind. And there were knife-fights in the back streets of Buenos Aires between noble, cowardly, young, despicable gauchos who were all the same person. And at this time there were others who wandered in labyrinths and enclosed libraries seeking the lost answers to existentialist metaphysical puzzles involving Jewish mysticism. And there were fake encyclopedia articles complete with footnotes and other signs of heavy intellectual activity. And once, things really all got together, and there was a knife fight in a labyrinth which had been previously foretold in a book of tales, so that anyone who wondered whether he was still reading Borges would be more confused.

And in a particularly mouldy, depressed, rural part of England there was Hardy. And Hardy begat D.H. Lawrence and a less-cerebral, more-visceral strain of modern English novelists who were few-and-far-between because of the sudden coming of war- and Freud-induced stream-of-consciousness, as if the mutterings of the ego were all that matters James Joyce I'm talking of your lot.

And it came to pass that Borges begat Garcia Marquez, who was like unto him in a way, but with more humidity and sex. And Borges also begat Rushdie and a host of practitioners of magical realism from all manner of countries under the sun (all hotter and sexier), which wasn't bad for a blind, celibate Argentinian. And Rushdie begat fatwas but that really doesn't come into this.

And since in all England no one had done a whole lot with the encyclopedic sort of novel since Joyce except to intentionally avoid it and do something more intriguing, a la Graham Greene, Hardy somehow begat Fowles, though he, Hardy, was long dead, and there was The French Lieutenant's Woman. And therein was irony, and dark humor, combined with critical respect for the Victorian-era past in all its highly-researched detail, and a sense that in many ways we hadn't really come that far. And Fowles had a brother Farrell, who brought forth The Siege of Krishnapur, which made it quite clear that we hadn't. And it was the heyday of the historical novel. And at this time C.S. Forster begat Patrick O'Brian, and there were written many historical novels about the English navy, which were damn good, and also full of weevils.

And Borges and some pert little French post-structuralist semiotics begat Eco, and there was The Name of the Rose. And Jorge of Borges was blind librarian at the Abbey therein. And the English friar was named William of Baskerville, whose opiated namesake made many women swoon.

And Eco and Fowles begat Byatt in ways arduous to mention, but we will nonetheless, and there was Possession. For Fowles delighted in quoting Victorian poets for the epigraphs of his chapters, and made his male lead an amateur naturalist, and finally suggested a deep-rooted desire for 'possession' as motive for his enigmatic title character's enigmatic character in her (his?) novel's last pages*. And Eco also delighted in quotation, though of esoteric quality, and preferably in Latin, so that the reader should feel very dumb. And Eco reeked of scholarship and mystery together, which is a pretty good smell once you get accustomed. And thus was Byatt impelled to scrutinize the Victorian era for juicy plots, nor did she forgo close study of the textual evidence pertaining thereupon, which she herself writ in good fashion. Thus did the English well acquit themselves.

But Byatt, together with John of Grisham, begat in secret Dan Brown, who brought forth The DaVinci Code, and there was a three-hour devouring of the text followed by another rereading. And we looked, and lo, Brown had the flimsiest of scholarly backing despite his authorial claims to truth in an oft-quoted preface. So multiplied our guilt. And there was much disillusionment with the state of the genre the closer it got to Hollywood.

*Along with other revelations which we will not reveal except to say Byatt clearly inherited them, lest we be the spoiler of many plots.

id is dead, long live id

Opinion in the Dover School Board case today. [more here]. I just had a question about two phrases from the judge's decision. First quote, take from the opinion's discussion about whether ID can be classified as science:

Second quote, towards the conclusion of the opinion:

Since ID is not science, the conclusion is inescapable that the only real effect of the ID policy is the advancement of religion.

I'm just nitpicking for fun, but isn't it a stretch to conclude, against the logic of Quote #1, that 'if it's not science, it must be religion'? I guess that any and all bad science is now a form of religious belief. [The Rev. Richard Dawkins, anyone?]

nature's animator

One of joys of having younger sibling #2 around for Christmas (besides having someone around who sleeps in long enough to make your truly look positively alert) is rooting through his movie collection. In the last few days we've romped through the films of Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki is a gift; his films are magic. He makes Walt Disney look like a thieving hack. Where classic Disney animation is rambunctious, sentimental, optimistic, Miyazaki is brooding; where modern Disney animation is big-budget, spectacular, show-stopping, Miyazaki is quiet; where Pixar animation is spiffy, sparkly, and stuffed with gags in all the right places, Miyazaki is enigmatic. Master of the long shot, the slow scene, of the power of visual detail, he understands how to tell pictures with stories.

How pleasurable his films are! Odd characters, impossible machines, the everyday whimsified fanciful. In Porco Rosso, the "Red Pig" of the title is literally that animal—as a 1920's Italian aviator who flies the Adriatic in his red seaplane, a bounty-seeking pilot, battling lawless air pirates. "A childrens' story!"—but characters and film share darker secrets. If an animator is an artist who creates for children, here is an artist in that rare tradition of Hans Christian Anderson, Lewis Carroll and Tolkien, who draws his pretty dreams, and draws the dreary world into them. As air force squadrons fly over a landscape of smoking factories, the film hints at Mussolini's growing ambition for empire, of the coming world war. The aviator tells of that strange, deadly flight that disfigured him; that made him 'Porco Rosso'.

In his films the same character types recur: wizened old seer-women; loyal, mop-mustachioed servants; soldier-princesses calculating and dreadful. Miyazaki's favorite central characters are adolescent boys and girls, on the verge of their maturity. as they encounter and use violence in pursuit of peace; as they fall in love struggling to break other enchantments, they enact the human paradox: unlimited desire of faltering strength.

The bedrock constant through all Miyazaki films is the stateliness of the natural world, its serene patterns and order. For Miyazaki, Nature is a character, and it is the tragedy of our age that we give her, at most, passing regard. As his films show, again and again, the natural world is sickly and decaying; full of rage and grief. The wounded, maggot-ridden boar of Princess Mononoke, and the polluted river-spirit of Spirited Away are parables of a world sinned against; and of civilization unable to stop hurting. But nature also is a source of hopefulness. I am reminded of Hopkins's sonnet: "For all this, nature is never spent. / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things." Miyazaki sees this freshness, and so he draw landscapes close against the screen: dawns, clouds, forests, deserts, hills, sunsets, rivers, trees. They hold the substance of his story; they comfort; they stir the heart. No animator has ever let wind brush grass so beautifully.

polyphants & other noisy creatures

Things I really ought to do to figure this metaphor thing out include: wrestle with Aquinas' pair of Summas; CSL's essay 'Transposition'; Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin on the dialogic nature of the novel.

But all that's by the by right now, since my current favorite concept-word's polyphony. I went to a [pre-]Christmas musical thingy—service—last night and didn't get enough polyphony. [Yes, I know that musical productions take a lot of work and I don't even attend that church so why am I criticizing yada yada yada—I'm complaining about the musical nature of some church music, so this is really a rant aimed at the composing/arranging crowd.]

Now, there was lots of music, and it was sung in parts, and there was accompaniment by piano and organ, and a darn good percussion section with timpani [my favorite percussion instrument because they look like they'd double as good pots for cooking sweet Pakistani wedding rice] plus some handbells [less filling]. The best piece of the evening, bar none, was a piece titled "Bwana Asifiwe" for handbell choir and percussion. We know it was a good piece because it got applause, which Presbyterian congregations (unlike concert audiences, or Baptists) are encouraged to withhold. It also happened to be, and I submit not by chance, the one truly polyphonic piece of the evening.

So what wasn't polyphonic about the SATB choral pieces? Well, strictly speaking, compared to monophony (Gregorian chant), nothing. Four parts, plus organ can get you 5+ intertwining lines, each with their own beauty. But multiple melodies are unwieldy creatures, and so the polyphony we are used to is generally half-polyphony: a single melody, broken out into chords, and propped up by accompaniment. The sturdy format of the hymn, in essence. We rarely hear the true, complex polyphony of interwoven, separate melodic lines, with their separate rhythmic variations giving a contrapuntal kick. CCM (Christmas Choral Music) gives the effect of a large beast moving gracefully through a field. There's nothing wrong with that; it's just more sublime to see smaller beasts plashing in a surging sea.

a chesterton dilemma

It started when Italian semioticist Umberto Eco [The Name of the Rose] wrote an article on the declining size of faith and used the quote "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything."; a statement which, Eco wrote, "G K Chesterton is often credited with observing".

The next day [Dec 6] Fr. Neuhaus of First Things complained, in his daily online ruminations, "GKC is 'often credited'? Of course, because he wrote it."

The following day, Fr. Neuhaus admitted difficulty finding said quote among Chesterton's published works. As things stand at this moment, there is a tentative (and to me, rather un-compelling) offering for the source of said quote.

I searched Bartlett's quotations and the other dictionaries of quotations on bartleby for Chesterton quotes, but found not this one. The researchers at Oxford, on the other hand, included said quote in their list of the Top 100 Quotes; regrettably, they include no source, although a date of 1936 is given.

After going through my local library site I was able to access the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations

48. When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything.
[widely attributed, although not traced in his works; first recorded as ‘The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything’ in Emile Cammaerts Chesterton: The Laughing Prophet (1937)]

Well, that's somewhat closer to wrapping things up, though I really ought to quote Chesterton himself at length before this post ends. Since the man was riotously funny, the quote doesn't have to have any bearing on the matter at hand. So here's 'The Song Against Grocers' from The Flying Inn which I started reading at someone's bequest while I was at their house, but never have gotten around to finishing.

more equivalence

Another problem of metaphor: 'Why do we reason using binary pairs?' True three-way correspondences just don't seem to be the order of things. Biologically, I'm lacking that third eye, and that third hand; that third half of the brain. [Handel, however, was half German, half Italian, and half English.] Walker Percy's book Lost in the Cosmos - a self-help farce, or the true self-help book - has a 50-page middle digression (or elevation) on the subject of semiotics, the theory of signs and communication, in which he argues for a triadic understanding of human communication. In Percy's view, human interaction depends upon the triad of sign, sign-giver, and sign-recipient; or, variously, God, self, other. [By the way, after the nuclear holocaust that ends the world, the only radiation-safe place left is in Tennessee. So the book says, and as I said, it's either farce or fact.]

Anyhow, what I'm calling 'metaphor' would, in Percy's schema, be lumped under 'sign' (skip the discussion here where 'sign' is further analyzed into the standard semiotic categories of 'signifier' and 'signified'); no conflict between Percy's relational triad, and the rational binary. But, assuming both theories are right, how is it that a triadic-relating species comes to be binary-reasoning? Is our thought is always a dollar short? Are we cutting something off? Is thought analogous — itself a metaphor! — to the representation of a three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional plane?

Isaac Asimov wrote a sci-fi novel about a parallel world where the beings live in triadic relationships. Mathematically speaking (in my fast and loose mathematical way), a relationship where

a is to b as b is to c as c is to a

Is there a real solution to that where a, b, and c are unique?

Metaphor, weird conceptual geometry, synesthesia;— I wish I could bring in [our perception of] time into my thoughts at this point, but it makes a third or fourth party, and it's hard to hold all together. This may be a question that only schizophrenia can answer.

equivalence

Where's the equivalence gene? It must lie lost somewhere in our DNA, hidden like a screw in a pile of gravel. It's the one that lets us think about things, make comparisons, come to conclusions. It's what makes mathematics a form of language, or literature a series of equations. The fundamental cognitive process is the same whether the operative agent is written '=', similied, or just implied. Take distinct objects

love ≈ rose(red)² [My love is like a red, red rose]
'the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides' [a² = b² + c²]

and make the connection. And repeat. Eventually comes the Sistine Chapel, Bach, Newton, Ulysses, Einstein, and puns, Hamlet and The Simpsons.

Call it metaphor, for lack of a more academic term. It must be genetic. It has some relation to remembrance, because we can't compare without memory to provide data, and it's hard to reminisce without comparing. [Where's an evolutionary psychologist when you need a bad story to make your point? Insert hunter-gatherer scene in eastern Africa, 1 million years ago, with early hominid realizing "Red-leaf plant is danger".] When I say 'metaphor', I mean to include every activity in the word-using business. I'm certain it's more a basic than a cultural form of thinking. Can you think of a thought process that does not rely on metaphor? Am I forgetting something in the Buddhism department?

rough diamond

Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee* belongs to the class of books that makes you feel horrible after reading them. It is also a well-ordered, knowledgeable history of human evolution. But in the last chapters, as Diamond took pains to dissuade one from the fantasy of the 'Golden Age', or Rosseau's idea of the 'noble savage', the book devolved into the catalog of environmental destruction & genocide. 'Devolved' is not exactly the right word for what is both convincing and conclusive; I suppose the logical name for Diamond's scientific and historical argument for the perpetual destructiveness of the human species must be 'proof by depression'. There are three pages of maps & tables of known genocides from 1492 to the recent present (early 1990s). A narrative of the total eradication of the inhabitants of Tasmania in the 19th century. A haunting picture of Ishi, victim of America's own Indian Wars. If Diamond's right, you and I won't recognize this planet in fifty years.

All this bleakness persists despite Diamond's pervasive sense of humor. Thinking of SETI and other attempts to attract the attention of other alien life, he writes:

I find it mind-boggling that the astronomers now eager to spend a hundred million dollars on the search for extraterrestrial life have never thought seriously about the most obvious question: what would happen if we found it, or if it found us.... We've already discovered two species that are very intelligent but technically less advanced than we are—the common chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee. Has our response been to sit down and try to communicate with them? Of course not. Instead we shoot them, dissect them, cut off their hands for trophies, put them on exhibit in cages, inject them with AIDS virus as a medical experiment, and destroy or take over their habitats. That response was predictable [from our treatment of technically less-advanced humans.] ... If there really are any radio civilizations within listening distance of us, then for heaven's sake let's turn off our own transmitters and try to escape detection, or we're doomed.

Even that may strike normal people as rather bleak humor, but I found it funny.

[Btw, I gave up on Penrose after chapter 7, though I skimmed chapters from that point on. It wasn't a bad book, but you'll need a thorough knowledge of mathematics or physics to really make headway. So I guess if you're a mathematician wanting to get into physics, or a physicist needing to brush up on the mathematics of physics, it would be a good book to have around. Light evening reading it is not.]

darned scandinavians

The Indian state of Rajasthan is now publishing tourism guidelines, in part due to the behavior of a Finnish tourist. Do you suppose it's the long winter nights? Because they aren't getting any shorter around here, either. And seeing as this state is purportedly second in the number of obese people per capita, methinks something hideous is just waiting to happen.

wish list

1. A stainless steel / brushed aluminum / titanium insulated beverage device that's microwave-safe.

2. A signed copy of Shakespeare's First Folio.

3. A tree. In a subdivision. Older than the houses.

ketchup happens

Once upon a time, Christians made great art. Lately, the attachment of "Christian" to a product is second- or third- or fourth-class status. To some degree, Christians will not make great art again until they realize why they made bad art, why they dropped out of Hollywood. And to some degree, I think Christians deserve the chance to go in there and make movies and have them torn apart, have them judged, have them flop.

in a holiday mood

Well, I just had a good writing session started and then BellSouth called with their latest long-distance "deal," delivered by a mile-a-minute-talking customer service rep from Nigeria, over a bad connection, who delivered the sales pitch without breathing — meaning that it took longer than usual to (politely) get them to hang up. But in the Spirit of Thanksgiving (E&J's Cask & Cream this year, because I'm too cheap to buy Baileys') I give you a little number pulled from the closet:

meanwhile, in the real world

Law hath no fury like a violinist scorned.

'My, but isn't that just the cutest little book you've got on!'

How to make a functional city government from objects you may find in the Middle East. "We picked up the tab for ... necessities such as painting, tea, and copies."

long time no whatever

I have to blame a nasty cold (aren't they all?) and lack of argumentativeness for lack of posting. Hopefully I'll get healthy and cynical again. That may not be enough, however, to take on the Two-Month American Christmas Retail Season ("It's Patriotic to Buy Chinese Merchandise!"). The real battle, however, will be whether I ride my bike to work Tues-Thurs as I promised myself, now that it's really, really cold.

techno twang

Continuing the tradition of grown men addicted to computer games, today's WDVX playlist offered up Tim O'Brien's "Running Out of Memory (For You)" [no lyrics link yet; it's from his "Cornbread Nation" album]. It's like Bluegrass meets Big Blue, or [insert your pun here]. There's a twisted pleasure that comes with those banjos strumming, all ready for sin and repentance, and then hearing the words "my motherboard don't have no open pci slots" slipped in over top of those lightning-fast plucks. I was out wardriving at the time and almost crashed a server.

Speaking of speaking in puns, William Faulkner is just too serious with his stream-of-consciousness. The man ought to joke it up, babble like James Joyce the lighthearted. Few experiences in literature are more discouraging than unpacking a s-o-c sentence and finding out that it meant only what it said.

technological breakthrough

From Newsweek's 'exclusive' article about TL(TW)²:

Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson) is a magnificent bit of computer animation, whether or not you think he's Jesus.

mrs robinson, predux

Delighted in another graceful Marilynne Robinson novel, her firstborn, Housekeeping.

If I could see my mother, it would not have to be her eyes, her hair. I would not need to touch her sleeve. There was no more the stoop of her high shoulders. The lake had taken that, I knew. It was so very long since the dark had swum her hair, and there was nothing more to dream of, but often she almost slipped through any door I saw from the side of my eye, and it was she, and not changed, and not perished.

So very long since the dark had swum her hair. We are so used to prose exchanging the musical souls of words for narrative firmness, for speed. This novel melodiously rebukes all who make antagonists of plot and poetry, healing that root of language cleft into meaning and sound. I couldn't stop reading it aloud, and fell asleep whispering its paragraphs of verses. Accuse me, justly, of skimming through the plot to get to the style.

the sound of mordor

Friday night, the electrical power being unavailable due to lightning strikes in the neighborhood, I decided to venture downtown to the geek farm where I work and watch RoTK on the theater setup mit mon bhai. That movie certainly has enough Evil Creature Sound Effects; the subwoofer got a thorough workout. Anyhow, just as Frodo et al. were climbing 'the winding stair', I perversely started humming "Climb Every Mountain" — at which point it was inevitable...

the consolations of fantasy

exist only in relation to its special terrors... All the great fantasies have this ingredient of extremity; without it they are indeed, as Moorcock says, a ''lullaby."

phlegm and metaphysics

One way to tell that you've been playing computer games too long (in this case, King's Quest I through VI, with the exception of V ("cannot initialize audio hardware") [for the geeky: all running in the DOS shell in Windows 98 on Virtual PC on my Powerbook G3 which is running OS 10.2 over Darwin (FreeBSD ) subsystem ... how many operating systems can you stack at once?]) is that when you cough and catch a little foamy sputum in your hand, you stare at it thinking of syntactically-correct noun-verb combinations of actions which, upon being entered into a suitable command-line interpreter, will cause this ball of mucous and spit to dispose of itself. Perhaps by collecting itself into a jar you picked up some scenes earlier? Or by turning into a hag with a lisp? Or brewing a ferocious storm? Or giving a weasel the whooping cough? Mucousy balls of spit are not much disposed to dramatics, however; nor do they appear to harbor functional command-line interpreters.

earthquakes etc

My parents have been rather busy lately and probably will be for quite some time. Among other things, they're collecting and distributing aid supplies, matching up donations with needs as they come in. Some Pak workers have gone on foot up what were at best of times one-road valleys to find their family villages completely devastated. They were able to take tents & food back home. The mission hospital - apparently one of the few operating rooms near the epicenter - has been treating patients for free and trying to send aid back home with them. The maulvi of the local mosque came and said that the local village community would take care of feeding all the people; that's been an unexpected but welcome partnership.

As for long-term goals (next week & beyond) they're looking to rebuild peoples' houses. Absent winterized tents, a lot of road-building, there are prospects of a refugee crisis in the cities. Lots of people still afraid - sizable aftershocks continue - and in need of hope. Also on the long-term list: earthquake-resistant housing on a cheap budget from the materials available.

smell of drunk fish

Smell of hot self. The drunk fish was whiskey-marinated salmon which lived in my backpack long after its flesh was consumed, and which will reside there until I choose to wash it. Of course, I smelled about the same after four days of hiking. But I have showered.

The hike was pleasant even if the weather only cooperated for days 3 and 4. I (we) put in 34 miles wearing fishy-smelling backpack, slept in mousey shelters, pump-filtered a dozen-odd liters of water, sweat the same, talked to one gap-toothed individual along the trail ("going south to help them hurricane victims" he said), and didn't see any bears. And we packed out all our trash. I have doubts that certain other hikers we met along the way will do the same, after "accidentally" leaving their bags of trash on the ground overnight for any passing critters to feed on. In their defense, "it was late and we were tired." And so presumably couldn't read the big signs posted on the shelter walls about Not Attracting Animals. But somehow their food got strung up. It might be nicer to hike where there aren't other people - or at least people I can beat up.

So of course, after enjoying the outdoors, rapidly getting in great shape, and working up a great amount of positive energy, I've spent the last three days sitting at home doing nothing. Not even drinking. Sigh.

off to the mountains

for my first real vacation in ages. Rain, raw skin, little contact with other people. I don't understand why I'm meant to enjoy a job when I can be miserable in a more fundamental, pared-down manner.

If you want something to think about, try this pretty good take on creationism vs science. Fair and balanced, as they say (I especially liked the "converted in the Himalayas with help from bible of pilot, whom he married" and "former Milwaukee seminarian turned atheist advocate" bits), which is why I have to throw my two cents in.

Now, I'm no Hebrew scholar, but this little conundrum doesn't need that. (Literal creationism relies on the English text of the King James Bible, anyhow; if the Hebrew words involved have subtle meanings requiring nuanced interpretation, then they probably aren't welcome in creationist circles, unless by invitation.)

What is the single most important word for creationism in Genesis 1? No, it's not 'God', for some reason, but day. And that's Day as in "a 24-hour time period with sunrise and sunset", ie a "literal" day, such that six of them were used for creating and one for resting. Total = 7 days = 1 week. So what happens when you flip the page and get to Genesis 2:4, and the oft-forgotten second creation narrative? My goodness! There's that word 'day' again*, and so we have to take it literally, of course, and — oh my goodness! — the earth and the heavens were made in one day? And Genesis 1 took seven days? WTF? Which literal truth is the literal truth? At this point the creationism robot should blow up spectacularly, spewing chunks of Hebrew letters, picked nits, and bad logic as far as the eye can see (literally, of course), but as far as I could tell, the usual suspects just do a good job of never bringing this up directly.

* My quick survey of English translations finds this to be true from Wycliffe to Geneva, across the KJV family. (The Vulgate uses die also). The NIV, for the record, does not use the word "day" in Genesis 2:4 — whether you want to ascribe that choice to fear of evolution or bad translation is up to you.

what I wrote

reason for the season