Messages from the Ether

A History of Writing; Steven Roger Fischer

Schroedenberging (definition)

v. intr. 1. erroneously referencing Schroedinger's cat or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or both within unrelated domains, 2. combining the two into a hybrid that expresses neither: The rattle in my car is like Schroedinger's Cat as soon as a mechanic looks for it.

e-dundancy (definition)

n. Using one medium to prepare the recipient for a message via another medium. E.g. Calling someone to tell them you're sending them an email, IMing that you will be calling, etc.

Extras; Scott Westerfeld

Two graphic novels

Finished reading the Ghost in the Shell GN and Palestine by Joe Sacco.

GitS was well-drawn if a bit dense at times. In contrast to the spare clarity of the Star Wars Manga (unfairly compared with Chaykin's Marvel version), GitS's pages are crowded with imagery, image styles, and meta-textual references. Although arguably appropriate for seminal cyberpunk, when paired with the alienating foreigness of face faults it feels uneven. It may require a re-read. I was also swimming in an effort to discern what parts made it to the movie, what made it to Stand Alone Complex, and what made it to 2nd GIG. That was an unnecessary exercise on my part, and only added to the chaos since references had no thematic or temporal organization.

Palestine had a similar flaw with frequent "meta" comments from the author examining his impulse to examine the Palestinian's occupation. Although the stories were fascinating, his over-examination of self was nothing more that increased self-absorbtion. Still, it's shocking to see what those people go through and are put through. The capacity for man to inflict suffering on his fellow man, etc. Palestine looks like, I'm sorry, a German prison camp.

Books, movies

Lisa and I were bemoaning the great novels out there that haven't been made into movies. People bitch and bitch about themovienotbeingasgoodasthebook, but that's always been a dead arguement for me. A movie is different from the book. Period. Anyway, I think I started with how great Chabon's books would be on film or maybe she brought up the McCarthy she's read and wanted to see.

There are a surplus of good-to-great directors out there, a surplus of actors, and a surplus of script writers, so these fictions should be rich territory to mine for film. The sad truth is that the system hinders development when it should be facilitating it. Production companies buy the rights and sit on them. Executives haggle over scripts and dumb down rewrites. Directors demand expensive techniques. Studios demand blockbusters. What we need is some sort of low-budget, Playhouse 90 sort of system. That series showed weekly live and filmed dramas often adapted from books, each running 90 minutes. George Clooney did something similar in 2000 with a live broadcast of Fail Safe.

This would be a wonderful series to revive, but it'd probably end up on HBO or some other cable channel we don't subscribe to.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union; Michael Chabon

Uglies, Pretties, Specials (Boxed Set); Scott Westerfeld

I'd heard about this set from Boing Boing and was intrigued but wanted to avoid it for the idiot reason that it felt too much like buying an Oprah book: the heavy weight of a Boing Boing recommendation makes it more "marketing" than "recommending." Anyway, I picked up the boxed set during the recent Amazon sci-fi sale (along with complete Space: 1999 DVDs, complete Aeon Flux series, and two experimental films by Shozin Fukui) and just finished the first book, Uglies. It's teen fiction, but I've been completely engrossed with the characters, story, and ideas contained. Anti-future where everyone gets extreme plastic surgery at 16 to make them super-super-model beautiful. Our very much flawed female protagonist is drawn into a resistance group. Reluctantly, at first, then heroically. The clever concepts make up for the limited, teen-directed vocabulary and short (< 5-page) chapters. You'll burn through it quickly because of both this and it's compelling drama.

Damn

Swearing is the bodily functions of language. Though vulgar, it can confer a familiarity to the listener.

Genius idea

Coworker went to Japan recently and got a local to guide and translate for free. The local did it so that they could practice their (already perfect) English. Coworker gets a free guide/translator, local gets exposure to idioms and accent. Win, meet win.

As soon as she told me about this, I had the genius idea to create a web site connecting travellers to language students. What a wonderful project! Imagine that you're going to Stockholm and all you have to do is browse for someone available in that time period to hang out with you a few hours a day and help you around the city.

More genius ideas...

Irreligion; John Allen Paulos

I'd read his books on innumeracy and thought that this would be a nice, quick entry into the recent atheist-lit. He used to have a fun column on ABC's web site. Check out his (slightly ill-formatted) web site for more fun facts.

Wikipedia: size doesn't matter

Pullum over at Language Log gives a more cogent dismissal of word count metrics in Wikipedia articles than I could express. He's responding to a snotty put-down of Wikipedia by of all people a professor of media studies, citing the comparative word counts of Klingon and Latin language entries (imperfectly counted, no less) as proof of Wikipedia's worthlessness. The counter-argument? First, when an encyclopedia isn't bound by paper, articles of lesser importance (however that is determined) no longer need to be edited for size. As I've often argued when people say that boring blogs are somehow useless (ahem), the internet you don't approve of can easily be ignored without diminishing the experience. Second, if an important article is too small, where're the fucking specialists interested enough to add content and help millions of others understand their specialty? If you don't have enough passion on your specialty to communicate it to others, maybe that's a more useful metric of the importance of a subject.

29 Feb

This free day reminds me of the infamous 11 missing days from Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (OK, he didn't invent the 11missingdays but he put his own little twist on it). During the Julian-to-Gregorian switch in England, September 2nd 1752 was followed by September 14th. During this period, one of the novel's characters got lost alone in some alternate dimension England, waiting to catch up to the rest of the England that had already jumped ahead.

Oddly, the calendar switch happened across a wide span of time throughout the world. It's amazing history books get any dates right.

With 29 Feb, instead of losing time (something many of 1700s England railed against, superstitiously) all of us have this added day scrunched in between our days. I'm not sure how Pynchon would dramatize this. I can understand the filling-in-of the missing time with a cold, missing space, but how would you represent the freeby that comes with the leap year?

Sherlock footnotes

Many Britons think that Gandhi and Churchill were fictional and that Sherlock Holmes and King Arthur were not. Ignoring the gee-they're-as-dumb-as-us aspect, I was reminded of the Sherlock scholars' concept of "the game". I had encountered the game before I knew what it was, and was pleasantly baffled. When I got the new Leslie S. Klinger editions, I was entertained by the footnotes that puzzled over dramatic gaffes in the text (e.g. "How could Holmes have missed that clue? Surely Watson was remembering wrong when he wrote of these events..."). "Why are they being silly" was quickly replaced by "hey, this is kinda neat!"

I wonder if this exists in other scholarship.

A History of Language; Steven Roger Fischer

Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure; Michael Chabon

A mix of Scheherazade (with its story begetting story begetting story format) and adventure yarn, Chabon provides a short, swift tale of virtuoso prose and enlightening history, but never too heavy. You don't have to turn to trash to turn off your brain and enjoy an adventure. (read several months back...)

albatar (definition)

n. An avatar you create that accumulates bad karma and/or associations, but that is indelibly linked to you and so unavoidable

[Origin: 2008; overheard from a friend who had just learned about avatars but was not familiar with the word]

Quote from GitS:2ndGIG

When the masses come across information they agree with, the immediately internalize it.

Quote from GitS:SAC

People entrust their memories to external devices because they want to set down solid physical proof that can distinguish them as unique individuals.

Heroes

Hearing an excerpt from The Who's Tommy last week, I wondered if there were any stories that transformed the hero myth for female heros. I'm sure feminist studies has tackled this many times over, but it's new to me. I suspected that the whole framework would need to change (and not just replace Mr's with Ms's), but I couldn't imagine how that change would be manifest. From A Historical Overview Of Heroes In Contemporary Works Of Fantasy Literature:

Although Joseph Campbell's book and many other works of mainstream literature have assumed that the hero is almost always male and that women play a part in heroism as either the goddess or the temptress archetype,9 the development of "heroic fantasy" in Weird Tales (and other pulp magazines) challenged many of those out-dated notions. In fact, C. L. Moore introduced the first female hero less than two years after Conan with "Jirel of Joiry," in a 1934 issue of Weird Tales. Six other highly colorful, romantic tales followed, firmly establishing the archetype of the female hero. Today, many other women writers, like Ursula Le Guin, Katherine Kurtz, Jane Gaskell, Janet Morris, Tanith Lee, and C.J. Cherryh, have been attracted to heroic fiction, and have created heroines that easily rival their male counterparts. Jean Auel's Ayla from Clan of the Cave Bear (1980) and Sharon Green's Jalav (1985) represent two of the more popular characters, while Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon is memorable for its revisionist portraits of the women of Camelot.

Somewhat of a narrow overview.

The Wikipedia entry for Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces echoes the accusation of sexism: Pearson and Pope (1981) claim that Campbell's model discounts the possibility of female heroes: "The great works on the hero--such as Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces...all begin with the assumption that the hero is male" (p. vii). The Pearson and Pope referenced are Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope in their book The Female Hero in American and British Literature. That seems to hit the nail on the head with this description: A female-oriented version of Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces which chronicles the archetypal patterns of the female quest in literature; references to an immense variety of canonical and non-canonical texts -- very rich and enjoyable. And this lone review from Amazon: Thought provoking study of personal growth potential using female literary protagonists as examples. Similar to style of heroic studies by Joseph Campbell. Bit academic, but well worth effort to read and digest. Was used as a text in local college lit. class at my suggestion. Interesting as a very personal read OR as study of contemporary literature, provoking lively discussion.

The introduction to a book called The Sound of a Silver Horn, by Dr. Kathleen Noble, is available online, ending with this somewhat declamatory quote: I am convinced we need a female hero myth that teaches us to claim, not suppress, the power of our femininity and to perceive ourselves as the heroes of our own lives and the authors of our own stories. The difference here is that Dr. Noble views the female hero as an example of expansion of self but not so much an expansion of society. This is described by Campbell as a return to the ordinary world after the hero has transcended himself, and a subsequent bestowing of new knowledge to society. Another quote from here: [E]ach quester who wins her way through to the portal of transformation must discard some part of herself in order to create a larger self and give birth to her own possibilities.

Pervert Lust Spy

Years ago when I was working customer service, a friend--Steve Baker--had bought this paperback used. He described its publishing history as that of a group of books that were naively titillating (like "racy" photos from the 1920s) and printed without copyright or publisher information. The first page was the first page. The story was the most hilarious thing I had every read. It exists with only one hit on Google as a bare-bones entry at Amazon.com.

One hit, that is, until now.

Bacos (definition)

The cool kids have decided we need a new word (bacn) that's so web 2.0 you're sure to hate it in a week. I, however, will begin hating it now by mocking the impulse that it takes to fabricate such a useless word and, non-ironically, invent my own word: bacos (n.) an idea that sounds good at first but once examined is revealed as contrived and unnecessary.

Oberon

Oberon/Auberon, the King of Fairies from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, is related to the character Alberich, lit. elf king from elbe and reix (Old Frankish?), from Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen, based on Norse mythology. Probably also related to the character in Schubert's song "Der Erlkoenig" (Ger.), erl being a mistranslation from the Dutch eller or elver.

Inconceivable!

So, I come across "discursive" in a Lingua Franca article and it's used in a manner that makes me question my internal dictionary ("leading to a logical explanation"), so I natuerlich look it up:

1. passing aimlessly from one subject to another; digressive; rambling.
2. proceeding by reasoning or argument rather than intuition.

Holy fuck I love this word. It's its own antonym. (Although some might consider it an abomination...)

Hapax legomenon

Awesome word. How is it that I've never heard of this before? A hapax legomenon (ἅπαξ λεγόμενον) is a word that occurs only once in a corpus (a book, an author's works, a written language, etc.). An example from Wikipedia:

Autoguos (αυτογυος), an ancient Greek word for a sort of plough, is found once (and exclusively) in Hesiod, the precise meaning remaining obscure.

That entry also points to nonce word. A nonce word is made up on the spot and probably won't be used again (think "debigulator" from The Simpsons). I only knew of "nonce" from a wacky British show called Brass Eye. They had a fake documentary in 2001 (hilarious transcript here) mocking the overblown fear of pedophiles at the time. Nonce is a British term for pedophile. A sample of the wackiness:

KATE THORNTON (Broadcaster/Journalist) : We even have footage that would be too alarming to show you of a little boy being interfered with by a penis shaped sound wave generated by an online paedophile.

SYD RAPSON (MP Labour) : We believe that paedophiles are using an area of the internet the size of Ireland and through this they can control keyboards.

RICHARD BLACKWOOD (comedian/musician) : Online paedophiles can actually make your keyboard release toxic vapours that make you suggestible. (sniffs keyboard) You know I must say I actually feel more suggestible and that's just from one sniff.

Heh-heh. An area of the internet the size of Ireland. That still makes me laugh. Phil Collins got spoofed into being interviewed for the show and later tried to sue them.

Quick studies

A quick dive into Quick Studies, a collection of articles from the defunct-yet-wonderful magazine Lingua Franca, and I'm immediately reminded of why it was so good. The first article I read is called "The Candidate" and was written by the head of a university's hiring committee that was directed by the dean to hire a minority. All names were changed. The second article is called "The Candidate's Story" and was written by a black assistant-professor who was surprised to find his interview published in Lingua Franca. Hilarity ensues.

Words

The story of the 20-plus students dead in Virginia dominates the news, but the barrage of Iraqi civilians that died (or even just the 60 Iraqi students killed a month ago) are all but ignored. Bush visited the school and yet he hadn't attended any funerals of US soldiers killed in Iraq. Reddit recently had a lengthy discussion on the injustice of the word-count of Wikipedia articles dedicated to styles of light-saber fighting compared to those dedicated to Shakespeare. I was in a similar discussion a while back comparing Wikipedia word counts for The Matrix movies and matrices in mathematics. Noam Chomsky compared the line inches of news stories on the massacres in East Timor with lesser events and found unfortunately expected results. A whole cottage industry could-be-and-probably-has-been created on the discrepancies between representation of like subjects.

Looking at my own blog entries, I see that word count does not translate to a metric of importance. Certainly I've cared enough to take the time to write about my recent purchase of the Prokofiev Piano Sonatas and the idiot history contained in that 300 movie, but those were random interests that hit while I was near the computer. And neither were censored beforehand for being too personal or too involved to research fully (who has time for research these days?!?). But then, my blog is hardly the ideal model for misapplying metrics.

I also think about Schneier's constant warnings on misapplying security (More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.) This is sort of the reverse of a counting error. In certain situations, we respond to a false perception of how many or how much. In others, we may force a commonality to compare.

Truer words

And so, of course, I impulse ordered Hoffer's The True Believer along with the Lingua Franca compilation. That magazine was the equivalent to People or Us for university news and is a subscription I would still have today if it hadn't folded in 2001. I'll probably have to kill this evening combing through my back issues.

Eric Hoffer

Got a recommendation from a co-worker to read Hoffer's The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Just reading the quotes from it and it sounds fascinating.

Against the Day; Thomas Pynchon

Web browsers and language

I'm continually amazed at how forgiving web browsers are in allowing access to malformed information. HTML can contain unclosed elements or a mix of valid and invalid elements and attributes yet browsers will still display the page for the most part correct. This puts web browsers further from programming language interpreters and closer to natural language interpreters. For programming languages, as soon as any syntactic error is encountered, the program and remaining commands are abandoned. An interpreter can't degrade gracefully from division-by-zero or adding two numbers using the smiley-face character. In contrast, natural languages and its users are adept at eliding semantic and syntactic gaffes without completely abandoning the message. I can "don't want no ketchup" or ask "how many bottle should I buy?" and still be understood. For the most part.

boolshit (definition)

adj. -tier, -tiest

1. code that performs a conditional test for true or false in order to set a Boolean value: if (isActive == true) {doProcessing = true} else if (isActive == false) {doProcessing = false}, cf. doProcessing = isActive
2. a programmer who writes such code
3. what you say under your breath when you encounter boolshit code in anticipation of the subsequent gaffes you will have to deal with and debug

The Crying of Lot 49; Thomas Pynchon

Books Dot Google Dot Com

Holy Dot Crap.

Subtle, but different

A many-months-old analysis of the unfortunate political abuse of the translation of Ahmadinejad's statement against Israel is getting passed around. What appears to be a more studied and precise translation is: The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time. What gets passed around by war-mongers (pleasantly called "hawks") is: The regime occupying Jerusalem must be wiped off the map. Slightly different, huh?

(Jonathan Steele's analysis has a nice overview of the difficulties, but I would have liked to have seen the source material with transliterations. Language Log has several references to the Iranian president, but unfortunately nothing on this.)

H. Lee

Got this from the wife: Reclusive 'Mockingbird' author attends show. How great that Harper Lee is still alive and visiting kids. (I'm sure she's particularly happy about still being alive.) That book's really stayed with me since I finished it. I know it's stupid to recommend a classic--it's a classic, duh--but I am. What brings an author to write only one (or only one notable) book? What are some other examples in the arts?

To Kill a Mockingbird; Harper Lee

Picked this up in the airport on the way to NYC and am now just finishing it. It's as great as you would expect.

John Henry Days; Whitehead, Colson

I was introduced to Whitehead through a short story from Harper's a year or so ago. This novel came mildly recommended by others.

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest; Burn, Stephen

A quick read (< 100 pages) with some notable insight into IJ. He points out mythological references, storyline intersections, and major themes. I would've liked to have seen a concise character outline to match the 11-page timeline of major events he provides in an appendix.

One problem with analyzing maximalist novel (Burn calls them encyclopedia novels) is that the abundance of detail offers itself up to the adoption of many different templates of intent. Still, some are stronger (and more intent-full) than others. A couple of Burn's ideas felt too fine-grained but most were a welcome insight, and he presented his reasoning with the transparent honesty of dead-ends and alternate possibilities.

It's been several years since I had read IJ, but this analysis helped bring back and organize the story as a whole.

Contrast

As Frank Miller interleaves genius with idiocy (re the embarrasingly inept concept Holy Terror, Batman), Moore is unflinching in transgressively original art. I don't really have an interest in erotic fiction (too distracting), but I think I need to purchase this just to see what Alan Moore has done with the themes. He's a master of repurposing.

Someone had recently posted on the Batman v. Usama story that Miller promised earlier this year, and I could hardly believe it. I've done the cursory search and it doesn't appear to be a joke. Despite all of the bloody-jawed fights and shapely women in his work, I would have never accused Miller of being simple or simplistic in his approach to story or character. With his only defense of this continued raping of the Dark Knight storyline being something along the lines of "Cptn. America punched Hitler," I have to re-evaluate his sanity.

Genesis; Anderson, Poul

Read this over the past few days. I had wanted a quick read, and this was one of those books sitting on the shelf for years after an impulse, discount purchase. I quickly got hooked on the epic story spanning millions of years in the future, although the affected scifi lingo felt overrefined and cringe-worthy. "Well-nigh" and "yonder" aren't words that generally come up in conversation. The ideas however were interesting, and the story presented a likely distant future of human consciousness merged with machines. Throughout, there was a dread of inevitability. Overall a ripping good yarn.

Grass

This is demoralizing.

Here's Lech Walesa on Grass's honorary Gdansk citizenship:

Who will talk to him here now or invite him? I am happy we never met, that I never had to shake his hand. I lost my father in the war and Grass was in the SS.

- from Reuters

Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond; Krauss, Lawrence M.

I heard about this book back in October of last year when Krauss spoke on TotN:SF.

I meant to do that

Go read about Geoffrey K. Pullam's experience on Talk of the Nation. It's sad but true (a caller mentioned hearing a student say "OMG" instead of "oh, my god", and everyone other than me thought that was fascinating) not everyone...). This is how snobbery goes so horribly wrong. One man's split infinitive, etc. Has it come to the point that even intellectual snobbery is suspect?!? Think of all of the Baby Geniuses and Mozart Children (TM)!

ToTN is an enjoyable and enjoyably informed show and yet it attracts snobs of the sort than get their cause for snobbery wrong. Is there any hope for this world?!?

Short rant on "what you're supposed to like"

Overheard from an interview with a Catholic priest (paraphrased): "And don't try to tell me that The Da Vinci Code will at least get people interested in religion and the history of religion. People who read that won't be picking up [insert definitive tome on church history], they'll be picking up another Dan Brown book."

This is the same problem I had with "pops" versions of classical pieces. They don't introduce new listeners to the style and certainly don't act as a stepping stone to understanding how to listen to different styles of music. Ubiquitous music has created music wallpaper; converting classical music to wallpaper does not mean that you've brought it to the masses. If the masses wanted classical music, it wouldn't need to be bastardized.

This is similar-but-different from Scott Spiegelberg's defense of classical neophytes. Exposing a different style to others who are, or may be, interested is always a noble effort. Watering down or mutating the style--whether it's art or music or theater--and saying that it represents the original is just bad form.

I think that this is where much of the conflict occurs. Priests are getting pelted with questions based on an inane theory that an uneducated public falls for, despite the fact that the theory is present in a work of fiction. You can't blame the priests (or anyone interested in history for that matter) for being frustrated. And when someone says Unsteady volume = Most annoying thing about classical music, they're asking classical music to be something it's not. It's sort of like wanting to look at Rembrandt painting's only if they have red in them. Sure, some do, but does that request have anything to do with looking at art? The volume "problem" could be solved by listening to some Baroque music--which the listener would then allow to drop into the background and they might as well just be listening to white noise. Is that really introducing them to the music? The art "problem" could be solved by simply purchasing some crap corporate art, designed as decoration, that fits a color scheme.

Ultimately, Art is larger than one person's opinion; and yet it can't be all things to all people. Those who want to restrict Art will invariably yell "relativists!" and "postmodernists!" when confronted by a more encompassing definition. Conversely, those who try to open all Art to all people will invariably yell "elitist!" when confronted with a more narrow definition. Conveniently, I'll put myself on the side that fits best whatever my current argument is. I'm a postmodern elitist.

'Madding' is an adjective? Really?!?

Our favorite linguistetitians, the purveyors of Language Log, have produced a book (announced on the 17th, but I've been notoriously behind-the-times). Far from the Madding Gerund will be available the beginning of March and is sure to pleeze (the cover depicts, gratuitously, an acorn). Although I generally think of LL as a singular "they," they are in this instance the contributors Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum, and contents are pulled from the best of Language Log. Now you may ask, "why pay for the book when I can get the blog for free?" I have no answer, but 22 bucks ain't too bad for, at the very least, a veritable Strunk and White on the infelicities of Dan Brown's offenses.

As has been said by wiser than me: Go forth unto your bookstore, and choose wisely. Word.

Limits

Expletives are useful for their function as manifestations of the boundaries of language. Although it's usually blamed on a paucity of vocabulary, cursing will never diminish to zero as vocabulary extends. Smash William F. Buckley's foot with a sledgehammer and his first verbal expression won't be G-rated. Wait a few days and he will have time to form a more expressive anecdote about the event, but language is a poor medium for a real-time articulation of anguish. There are times when what we're feeling inside has no appropriate surrogate when mediated to the outside.

The often quoted remark writing about music is like dancing about architecture touches on a similar limit. Although it's somewhat overly didactic, it does illustrate assumptions we have about language. We forget that language is only a mediator for our subjective experiences. A great deal of those experiences that we communicate are trivially equivalent when transferred by language (e.g. "daytime" or "pencil box"), so we can forget the limits of it as a transfer system. Some possess varying degrees of differences in meaning ("beautiful music" or "poor selection"). Because music is also a symbol system of a completely different domain, music criticism involves people using one language to discuss the quality of "speech" in another language. Translation errors are inevitable, and that's what the quote was pointing out.

On the other hand, our primary means of communication is language, so criticizing the limits of language as absurd is a little unfair. No one would seriously use an art form to communicate quotidian concepts. You wouldn't make a shopping list with dance. You just wouldn't. Language--as opposed to music, art, or dance--can be more precise in representing the physical world and so becomes the lingua franca to discuss anything that resides in the physical world (such as music, art, or dance). The limits are accepted simply because there's not a better choice.

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam; Aslan, Reza

Finally getting around to reading this. I just received it after a rash of impulse-purchases (mostly CDs). The opening caught my attention as he describes his chance meeting with missionaries in the post-9/11 Middle East. He wonders how to respond to such spiritual profiteers when, also post-9/11, Franklin Graham calls Islam an evil and wicked religion, Ann Coulter encourages countries to kill Muslim leaders and convert [their people] to Christianity, and a past president of the SBC calls Muhammad a demon-possessed pedophile. With these unfortunate examples, he introduces what he calls a clash of monotheisms in contrast to the less-precise class of civilizations.

How We Are Hungry; Eggers, Dave

Finished this a couple of days ago (very slow in updating lately).

The stories have a narrow and somewhat monotonous tonal range. There are good moments (it's unimportant that we can look behind the stories and see where the author has travelled) presented with a tell-all honesty that at its best is rewarding enough, even though there are few of those moments. A quick and satisfying read.

Shallow lit

I recently heard someone praise Robert Heinlein's novels, specifically The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, as IIRC really deep during a tangent in a Libertarian rant in which he--get this--praised the President. You know the type. I loved reading Heinlein growing up; partly for the sexual content so desparately needed by the junior high school sci-fi reader, and partly for an expansive palette--considering the genre--that includes political and social commentary along with neat-o technical stuff. At the same time or earlier I was reading Frank Herbert and knew well who had the more incisive eye. Where Heinlein had one simple axe to grind, Herbert wrote as a student of history who could see tendencies and cycles without dogma.

This memory, and the Heinlein comment, dovetailed for me into the recent clarification presented by Mark Liberman on Language Log about the casual liguistic dogma that that ur-dogmatist, Ayn Rand, had put forth in Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand, loved by all Libertarians, stated (albeit through one of her characters) that the phrase "to make money," as if it were create-able as opposed to transfer-able, only exists in American english. In a later Language Log post, Paul Kay continues illuminating the absurdity of Rand's linguistic offense.

I'd read both authors with enjoyment and some passion, yet it pains me now to hear that people actually still cling to those narrow ideas. Grown people. I'm overstating the limits of both authors from these simple examples and art is always a simplification (from V for Vendetta: Politicians lie to hide the truth, artists tell lies to reveal it.), yet flaws in those simplifications can still flaw the art. Too often, big ideas are more cunning than insightful.

Sounds right to me

Language Log's recent entry on Engrish reports on an exegesis of a borderline offensive Chinese menu (Benumbed hot vegetables fries fuck silk) and correctly chastises the borderline tasteless practice of dialect humor.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a Vietnamese coworker recently. He was struggling over the excessive amount of dental fricatives ("th"s) in speech and writing. He was reading a document lousy with "the"s and was struggling over the constant need to pronounce this unpronounceable and non-Vietnamese consonant ("Start THE server with THE settings found in THE config file...") in his head. We talked about how the sound is often elided in conversation and I tried to get him to skip the sound and just keep the voiceless part, sort of, but I ended up adopting his confusion by repeating it so much. It does sound weird. He traded me a nasal N sound (palatal nasal?) in Vietnamese for my English TH, so I think he's getting the better end of the deal. Oh, and their tonal shifts aren't that easy either.

The list

British librarians come clean on what books are a must read. The Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (you mean there's another MLA?!?) have thusly spoke, yet I'm left a little wanting. The Lord of the Rings is #3. 1984 is #4. All good, but so highly ranked? I'm not so sure. I can't speak of their #1--To Kill a Mockingbird--because I haven't read it (resisting the urge to say "it was a great movie though!"). And the bible at #2? I've read many sections of it (not just browsed, actually read), and have heard other lit-heads place it similarly high, yet I still don't see the literary merit. It's a monument of literary history but not a monument of skill. I may be prejudiced.

So the modern is amply represented--Life of Pi, A Clockwork Orange--but it still feels such an odd list. Gone With the Wind? Again, I haven't read it, but I've heard only mediocre opinions on it. Same with Gibran's The Prophet. What's up with that?

And so, I must publicly ask a librarian a very public question: what do you think of this list? And is any canon acceptable ... ignoring Harold Bloom's opinion? Maybe it just runs afoul in the same manner than any list might. And the inclusion of Wuthering Heights?!? Nice, but is it really the #16 must read?

Paradise

Finally reading up on the "lost world" discovered in Papua New Guinea. One point, that I'm sure the language blogs will be discussing, is the relationship of this discovery to the large number of languages in that country. I think I first read about this in Guns, Germs, and Steel where the author was contrasting the disparate tribes and languages in New Guinea with the relative homogeneity of China. New Guinea's landscape is dense and mountainous and therefore difficult to traverse. Societies formed and seldom mixed because of this, and it promoted the development of distinct groups and cultures. In areas where there are no people, there are probably many more lost worlds to be found.

Today's reading list

Mark Liberman at Language Log discusses the absurd Cingular patent on hot keys for emoticons. In it, he links to Geoff Nunberg's piece from 1997 called "A Wink is as Good as a Nod," in which he trashes those silly things. I hate emoticons and only use them rarely (if you're too dim-witted to realise when I'm joking or being sarcastic, no collection of punctuation will help), but it was only recently that I realised exactly why I hate them. Whenever someone types a :-) or a <:-o I imagine them actually making that face. And it just looks ridiculous. Even Bazooka Joe doesn't over-emphasize what he's saying that much. Please, enough with the emoticons.

Semantic Compositions had a couple of recent classics. First, a discussion on the WSJ article about the death metal singing style called Cookie Monster singing or Cookie Monster vocals. Fascinating and funny. And now I may have to start listening to Fear Factory's 1999 opus Obsolete. It tells a story about machines taking over the world in the future and the rebels trying to fight back! Wacky!! I've got a passing familiarity with punk but haven't really listened to hardcore metal (although the movie Some Kind of Monster is very good, Metallica really ain't that hardcore).

The other SC article was on the frequency and variation in the 800-pound gorilla metaphor. 800 is the most common gorilla weight with 500 a distant second.

A /. discussion links to a review of search engines and privacy (which in turn links to, among other things, a more detailed article from Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineWatch). One poster hypothesized that although Google emphasizes the importance of complying with China's censorship, they would probably attempt to skirt the legal issues of data privacy addressed in most EU countries. The lesson: only obey local rules when it benefits you.

The Arabian Nights

Impulse buy from a weekend viewing of a couple of Sinbad movies.

Schopenhauer's will

Quoted in The Recording Angel:

Therefore, if we refer the concept of force to that of will, we have in fact referred something more unknown to something infinitely better known, indeed to the one thing really known to us immediately and completely; and we have very greatly extended our knowledge.

...

Spinoza says that if a stone projected through the air had consciousness, it would imagine it was flying of its own will. I add merely that the stone would be right.

Evan Eisenberg, the author, replies shortly after:

Why are we moved at the sight of a fountain, at the water's yearning rise and dying fall? ... The fountain moves us not because it reminds us of how we sometimes feel, but because we know just how it feels.

Fallacies new and old

I was all ready to write about the dispeptic logic of how New Concepts are driving our current culture when I read a Language Log post (with a nice addendum) taking apart an extremely lazy Joel Splosky article in which he brings up the In-My-Day argument.

My argument is in contrast to the LL article. I too-often read from a new technology pundit that, for instance, hypertext is changing how we consider the world or that search engines are making us lazy readers. In effect, new technology is so different from what we are used to that it is changing us into something different. Variations on the hypertext concept is what I hear mostly, so it became the model of my internal argument. One premise in particular (to risk erecting a straw man) has bothered me: HTML links change text from a static domain to a more spatial one. All knowledge gets immediately linked to other knowledge and makes it more visceral. Well, yeah, but what about footnotes? Or indicies? Didn't they, and the TOCs as they were created in the ~1400s [?] create these links and create them as a model for Tim Berners-Lee and probably as a model of how we internalize text? Or perhaps they were a result of how we as humans internalize ideas.

The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa

Originally heard about this back around June or so.

Post Christmas chi

Two from Language Hat: first, the long history of X-mas (dating back to the 1500s), and second, the difficult pragmatics of the New Testament (wherein a rearranging of commas and quotes presents distinct possibilities for interpretation). Both subjects are coincident with the subject of the Bart Ehrman book that found its way to my wish list. As always, the comments are as important as the article itself.

Today's comments

THE SHARED JARGON OF SF. concerning the unique aspects of science fiction literature.

Allowing chaos

One of my cube neighbors, a new-ish employee, said that he didn't want to keep his desk clean because he did not yet have a clear understanding of the product he's working on. I understood what he meant, and I think it's important. Only after he understands the system can he organize his environment to fit that system. My note-taking process begins on a small stack of paper-to-be-recycled, white side up, sitting in front of my keyboard. I scribble notes and drawings and UML diagrams as needed. From there, if they're valuable and not just scribbles, I move them to my development wiki in the appropriate location and HTML-ify them with wiki links and external links. Eventually, I may add further notes, link other articles to them, or move them into a more appropriate location as I get a better understanding of the domain...

Today's reading list

• The Wilson-Plame-Novak-Rove Blame Game [ via FactCheck.org ]

Painfully detailed and dispassionate timeline of what-happened-and-when. Worth several readings.

• So I says to myself, "Self, what's up with these Googlecounts?"

Whilst researching a snowclone, Benjamin Zimmer points out some interesting inconsistencies with Google searches when used to research statistics of language use. For example: the search count for "A" should be equal to the sum of the search counts for "A" "B" and "A" -"B". Instead, the numbers are wildly different. The first search can return thousands more results than the sum of the other two.

• Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse [via Wikipedia ]

I recently had heard several comments suggesting that America did not torture its prisoners. Some people apparently still believe that. With Bush and Cheney double-speaking their way around questions on the military's policy, was I missing something? I don't think so. Major General Antonio Taguba's report from April 2004 states that we committed egregious acts and grave breaches of international law. It also states that 60% of the Abu Ghraib prisoners were not a threat (a point I noted back in June 2004). Why is this forgotten?

Book numbers

To me, Amazon's SIPs always seemed linguistically interesting but demotically useless. Reading languagehat's passing along of the concept of using SIPs as book summaries, I decided to try it on a book that has increased in value since I'd read it: Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I'm still ambivalent about their usefulness.

However, while revisiting them, I found that Amazon has added--I believe relatively recently--two additional metrics. Along with SIPs, entries have CAPs: capitalized phrases. To these, a Concordance and Text Stats have been added. The Concordance contains the 100 most frequently used words using that recently popular technique of varying font size with importance. The Text Stats contains measures of relative complexity, readability, and various counts and "fun stats." According to Amazon's measurements, Cryptonomicon is easy to read and not all that complex, but you get over 50,000 words per dollar! This is ideal for anyone who has obsessively checked the text stats of their writing in MS Word.

Clause trophy

A week or so ago, Sound & Fury returned to the music blogging scene (furiously) with an entry that contained amazingly long sentences on the verge of un-understandability (89 words). I loved it. I had written an entry on it. Then I deleted the entry because my praise and rambling was directionless, even though what drew me to it (although much draws me to the S&F blog, as it acts the counter-weight to the permissive newness and, as he likes to label it, postmodernism of modern aesthetics and those ideas that I both champion and challenge) was the artful and almost impenetrable overlong sentences. Who likes those run-on tight-rope walks of grammatical daring? I do. Almost as much as hyphens.

Anyway, one of my other favorite blogs-who-serve-to-take-me-to-school is of course Language Log. I had apparently missed their (singular "they") post on the sad demise of embedded clauses in our presidents' speeches only to catch up when Trent Reznor is referenced.

And I realize the appreciation, or at least my appreciation, may have come in part from that of David Foster Wallace's writing (ignoring whether I was drawn to it from appreciation or whether I'm drawn back from learned appreciation). Although who doesn't love a good discussion of semantic complexity?

Connected roots

Lady Crumpet's recent rant re the New York Times and J.M. reminded me of a Language Log exegesis from earlier this week examining the syntax of the source materials.

If Miller was unaware that there was a campaign to discredit Joe Wilson, then how would she be able to think one way or the other about whether she was a target of a campaign of which she was not aware? There are Zen koans that are easier to decipher.

Well, I never said they found any answers, they just expounded on some of the non-answers.

The Scientist, The Madman, The Thief and Their Lightbulb : The Search for Free Energy

An (even-handed) history of the quest for free energy: energy that doesn't consume matter and doesn't produce waste. Much of the hope rides on electricity and magnetism and the research is as old as our modern study of electromagnetism.

[The theories] are not creating any new energy. The systems are doing at least one of two things: they have either found--as in the case of some cold fusion cells--a new way of accessing chemical, nuclear or other forms of energy locked up in the system's components parts; the other possibility is that they are getting their energy from the 'zero-point fluctuations of the vacuum'. This zero-point energy is the 'background' or 'ether' energy of the universe, and is also called vacuum energy, or the 'quantum fluctuations of the vacuum'.

So the hope is that we can tap into the larger machinery of the Earth and the universe itself and convert its fundamental processes into useful energy. There are many quack-y stories in here but some fascinating all the same. I was astounded that even in the earliest days of fossil fuel use, many scientists were warning that we shouldn't become dependent on it. In 1900, Nikola Tesla says:

In some countries, as in Great Britain, the hurtful effects of this squandering of fuel are beginning to be felt. The price of coal is constantly rising, and the poor are made to suffer more and more. Though we are still far from the dreaded 'exhaustion of the coal fields', ... it is our duty to coming generations to leave this store of energy intact for them, or at least not to touch it until we shall have perfected processes for burning coal more efficiently. Those who are to come after us will need fuel more than we do.

wartuning (definition)

v. intr. To scan the FM frequencies from 88.1 through 89.5 in heavy traffic in order to find another driver with an FM transmitter connected to an MP3 player. See also wardriving.

The Seven Friend

A story by my niece, written around a year ago, which was the result of an impulse expressed upon returning home from school and declared simply as "I need to write a story":

Brown Friday

For some fun, I've been reading through Language Log's various posts skewering Dan Brown, in which Brown is described as one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature (with numerous examples). The criticisms seem ultimately to question how such pulply trash had become the most widely read book in the English-speaking world (...at least four people [in the world] have not read it. I just wish one of them was me). Some of the quotes from the book are classic.

Languages, cliches, and my favorite swear word

I once had a co-worker tell me that Arabic was the perfect language because it was impossible to state something ambiguously. He's a Muslim, so the bias was obvious and offensive in its arrogance--the same goes for any Catholics boasting about Latin or Jews about Hebrew (closely related to Arabic, so wrestle with that one). When I challenged him on the absurdity of any language being this-er than that or more something than whatever, he huffed that he "has travelled all over the world" and therefore had more experience than me.

Needless to say, I lost most of my respect for him. I'm not a language wiz, but jackassed statements such as that push my buttons.

Slang and reverse dictionary

Two items of fun from languagehat:

First, an interview with J.L. Lighter of UT on slang and his work on the much-anticipated final volumes of his "Historical Dictionary of American Slang" [ via languagehat -> Wordorigins -> Oxford University Press ]. And who doesn't love slang? It's the most ut. Interesting facts: no one knows the origin of "yankee," "dixie," or "jazz" (how can we not know the origin of such recent words?). "Spondulix" is slang for money (man, I'm using that one the first chance I get). No one ever uses the phrase "twenty-three skidoo" anymore, but everyone recognizes it (what's up with that?). In the 1600s and 1700s, "occupy" was a euphemism for sex (such ribaldry). Slang is interesting because it illustrates the slippery, changeability of language. These words are under the radar of standard English, so their origins and lives are more organic and volatile.

Second, a a reverse dictionary search [ via languagehat -> MonkeyFilter ]. This is one of those man-what-a-cool-tool things that will probably/unfortunately get lost in my bookmarks and forgotten for its infrequent need. Then again, I daily hit the dictionary and thesaurus for one reason or another. This might become an equally frequented site.

Djew know what I'm saying?

A few days ago, languagehat dropped an article on the recent debates about changing the Chinese characters for "Jew." The current characters could have pejorative connotations (from the original transliteration by Christian missionaries). The commentary, still going strong today, has been fascinating and has had the breadth of contribution and considered opinions that you'll see in many of the languagehat discussions. The "Jew" issue brings up not only the complexities of Chinese writing in relation to speech, but also the historic influence and questions (true or false) of veiled racism. Good stuff.

Everything Is Illuminated; Foer, Jonathan Safran

How did I hear about this book? I'm not sure, but a KQED interview of the author reminded of it back in April and I ordered it not long after. Many sections consist of a sort of dialect writing, with a Ukrainian narrator writing in thesaurus-laden English (as he explains: Like you know, I am not first rate with English. In Russian my ideas are asserted abnormally well, but my second tongue is not so premium. I undertaked to input the things you counseled me to, and I fatigued the thesaurus you presented me, as you counseled me to, when my words appeared too petite, or not befitting). I thought it would get old, but it quickly dropped into the background, and now--at least in my head--I'm calling everything "premium."

Anxious to see the movie [IMDB] with Elijah Wood and written by Liev Schreiber.

Radio On: A Listener's Diary; Vowell, Sarah

I've been picking through this whilst finishing up the Sherlock Holmes collection (see "Sarah Vowell, NPR, and Coldplay" and "Publishing and tuning out"). It's grown on me in a minor way--she's alternately honest and opinionated, although others might reverse just where those labels would be placed. She's the type of rock snob that appreciates only street-wise sincerety and a clear lineage to rock's roots. I agree with her on many points (e.g. the hate-inducing and insipid Grateful Dead) but I'm staunchly anti-originalist when it comes to rock. I feel that the quicker the tyranny of the blues is overthrown, the better. She likes Sonic Youth and Courtney Love (agreed), but hates Stereolab (huh?). I guess difference are good.

And many scarey/familiar observations on conservative idiocy (e.g. Rush's absolutist rants based on lies, or Dole's plea to "ignore the details" of a very detail-laden tax package that benefits the rich) that could be observed unchanged today.

Pseudolanguage and its discontents

A lessthaninteresting /. thread recently discussed the banality of corporate speak--yeah, I know, it's like pointing out that Charlie Brown said "good grief" in today's strip--but the interesting part was a poster's link to a George Orwell essay titled "Politics and the English Language". Like Chomsky, Orwell is a linguist with a passion for its role in politics. The advice in "Politics" is, simply, to simplify your language and think about what you're saying. Fewer words are generally better and dead metaphors reveal a lack of thought. These rules are easy to understand but difficult to adhere to, so it's always good to re-read good writers as they tear apart bad language.

Mental representations

A recent Cornell study moves further towards a weakening of the computational model of the mind. My most in-depth study of this subject was from May 2003 while reading Stephen W. Horst's Symbols, Computation, and Intentionality. The book was published in 1996 and in it he criticized the computational model. I'm certainly not in the scene, but I really didn't think that the computational model had that strong a following anymore.

Anyway, the Cornell methods reminded me of some recent observations of my own behaviour. In their study, students were given the name of an object and had to point to it from a pair of images. Sometimes the non-correct object would have a name that sounded distinct from the correct object; sometimes the names would sound similar. The study found that students took a measurably longer time to point to the correct object when the names sounded similar ('candle' and 'candy' were more difficult to differentiate than 'candle' and 'jacket'). Over the past several months, I've noticed an odd pattern in how I mistype letters on the keyboard. While my mistypes will often be from swapped letters ('teh'), there are a considerable number of occations when I'll mistype similar looking letters. So, I'd type 'q' for 'g' or 'p' for 'b'. The mistakes involve different fingers and/or different hands and so have nothing to do with the mechanics of typing.

This is all very unscientific (how many times do I mistype unrelated, non-similar keys?), but interesting w/r/t the Cornell study. The arbitrary linguistic label for an object can affect our visual recognition of that object, just as the arbitrary visual representation of a letter/sound can affect our recognition of it. Equally interesting: the Cornell study may support similar linguistic games used in the analysis of dreams.

The author of the study is Michael J. Spivey. I swear I've heard that name before but can't find the reference right now.

Pynchon misc

Language hat has begun Mason & Dixon, so has had a few entries of interest (and will probably continue to) for Pynchon fans. First, an odd examination into some of the more obscure words in the book. An interesting discussion followed in the comments, along with a tangential link to Zak Smith's illustrations for every page of Gravity's Rainbow. Today, he points to a Bookforum article regarding the release of GR in 1974.

Even reading about Pynchon can be a daunting task. Phew.

Expletive

I keep going back to this essay [via language hat] examining the possible grammatic structure of the sentence "fuck you." Good stuff. More baffling than funny unless you're a language geek.

The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories

Beautiful two-volume hardback edition of Conan Doyle's [Wikipedia] short stories of Sherlock Holmes [Wikipedia] edited by Leslie S. Klinger. A third volume from the same editor containing the four novels is coming out later this year. There is some discussion on Amazon that the binding quality and content is somewhat below what editor William Stuart Baring-Gould offered in his edition. The arguments seemed more of a dispute over originality than over flawed research, so it shouldn't affect my enjoyment.

I became interested in Sherlock Holmes from the references to Moriarty [Wikipedia] and their confrontation at Reichenback Falls in Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Then, last Sunday, Lisa and I lucked upon The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes [IMDB] and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution [IMDB]. Both well-done movies from 1970 and 1976 respectively. I'm overdue to read the source material for this famous literary character.

"Hey baby, wanna create a quadrilabial implosive?"

CHOMSKY: THE MOTION PICTURE [via language hat]. I really don't know what to say about this. It's baffling. I think it broke my brain with all of its references. I may have caught most of the grammar and lit references--along with a quote from Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach--but the rest I'll just have to accept as nonsense.

(Or maybe it needs a Cliff Notes.)

Οξύρυγχος πάλιν

Hannibal over at Ars Technica seems to be in the know, and seems to know that the news of the recent papyrus breakthroughs is greatly exaggerated.

As an aside: I tried to update the Wikipedia entry with this new information and found out that my IP has been blocked!! Apparently, it somehow got on the SORBS list. Even though it could be a mistake, how embarassing. I scanned everything a few weeks ago (at the beginning of every month), but I guess it's time to scan the network machines again...

More connections

Colson Whitehead provided the introduction to David Rees's Get Your War On [Amazon] (of mnftiu fame).

OK, so I just need a little extra time to catch up with the rest of you.

Connections

Jonathan Safran Foer on KQED's Forum recommending Colson Whitehead via Whitehead's entry in The Future Dictionary of America [Amazon]. Foer is the author of the often recommended book Everything Is Illuminated [Amazon] and more recently, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close [Amazon]. A few weeks back, I blogged a Whitehead short story that I had originally read from Harper's and eventually found online. Several months ago, Harper's had some humorous excerpts from The Future Dictionary of America in its Readings section.

I have some new authors to pick up.

Οξύρυγχος

Big news in the world of classical literature. A collection of 400,000 document fragments from the trash-heaps of an ancient town in central Egypt can finally be translated. All of the source languages are known (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, Nubian, and early Persian), but the papyri were unreadable from decay. Oxford University scientists have now used infra-red imaging to successfully reveal the text. Expect new material from Sophocles, Lucian, Euripides, Parthenios, Hesiod, and Archilochos. Holy crap.

Check out more info in Wikipedia's entry for the city of Oxyrhynchus (and marvel that it's already been updated with the news article).

And definitely spend a few hours or months combing through the wonderful resource of classical texts over at The Perseus Project. It was an invaluable complement to the Pharr book [Amazon] when I was learning (yet have now forgotten) Homeric Greek.

Slam

A comment made on WNYC by John Ashbery [Wikipedia], the Poet Laureate of New York, regarding poetry "slams" [Wikipedia]: They suffer from a lack of modulation. I've never been to a slam, but I can understand the argument that the expressive potential of a medium might narrow with a narrower set of parameters. The interviewer then suggested that even a flawed poetry experience should be praised for the interest it creates in the more accepted forms.

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