waste

Pretending to think

A reencounter, brought about by a class, with Walton and make-believe in aesthetics leads me to wonder if one of the primary reasons I find such talk so frustrating is strictly terminological.  A bit from a handout:

So when he says to himself "What light through yonder window breaks?" he isn't really asking himself what light this is.  To be sure, he goes through the motions of asking that question … He makes as if to ask.  But he isn't really asking.  He is only pretending to ask.

But surely (surely!) our only options aren't "is really asking" and "is pretending to ask".  I'm ready to be persuaded that he's not really asking the question, not even of himself in wonderment or surprise, but not that he's pretending to do so.  To whom would the pretense be directed, how do his actions constitute pretense?—Austin on pretending was assigned for the next meeting; presumably the professor finds his analysis wanting in some way.

If, however, instead of saying that Romeo is pretending to ask, it were said that Romeo plays at asking, or is posing to himself in the question the task in a strictly imaginative game, one of verbal ingenuity, then, though I would be inclined to doubt Romeo's sincerity, I would be far more inclined to accept the analysis.  (Though then it looks similar to sustained bullshitting (such as, though that's really not the best example) or the process by which one is supposed (they say) to answer interview questions along the lines of "how many piano tuners are there in Boca Raton?".)

Unfortunately I can't remember if some fleshed-out concept of what pretending is at hand in Mimesis as Make-Believe.  Possibly "pretend that" is just shorthand for "participate in a game of make-believe in which" (though that would leave deceptive pretense out in the cold, so I hope not).

This is all happening in the context of metaphor and the application of make-believery thereto, so y'all get to read some incredibly inchoate ramblings on that subject.

Basically, I'm just not sure where it's is supposed to come from here.  What stimulates Romeo to pretend, if he's pretending, to make believe, and why in those terms?  There's a bit in this handout (for whatever reason, I'm reluctant to quote it, or even name people, not just the professor (whose identity probably anyone could determine) but the other people we've read)—though honestly I think I'm just misunderstanding it—that seems to suggest that, first, Romeo has noticed or has on his mind a bunch of things about Juliet and from this (pretends that she is?  plays at her being?  imagines her as?  makes believe she is?) the sun (perhaps he's been prompted so to organize those thoughts because he sees the light in her window—perhaps this sight also leads those thoughts suddenly to occur to him in that particular shape in the first place).  Something like the paraphrase comes first, organized (but how?) in such a thematic way that the metaphorical likening suggests itself (or something like that).  But in that case, or something like that, isn't the prompting by the light to play this game in this way the really interesting part?  All the rest could be done by anyone, once that identification is in place, and that identification, since it grounds the make-believe, couldn't itself be prompted by it.

Of course this moves the consideration from the audience's reception of a made metaphor to the maker's mind in making it, but that move seems already to have been at least partly undertaken.—I just had a terrible premonition of reading up on aspect perception, and it's all John Crowley's fault:

"It's easy, really," Rose said, her hand at a stoplight resting lightly on the little trembling herm.

I'm also not certain, it just occurred to me, why one would resort to metaphor on this sort of account.  If it has to do with getting an audience to see the object as the speaker sees it (play the same game; it might amount to the same thing), then it could have weird interactions with Walton on emotions.

*I have always liked the definition of "inchoate" as "half-unformed", which doesn't really admit of intensification, but.

Phwoarg!

Awesomeness.  Also, it appears that almost the entire Tzadik catalog is now available on eMusic.

tene bris tenebris

The many things that the fox knows: the hedgehog's quills.
The one big thing that the hedgehog knows: the fox's bite.

How can I get Ted Rall's number?

I had an idea for the most incredibly tasteless anti-torture political cartoon conceivable by sublunar minds.

JHWH helps me trick people

Interesting interpretation of who the "first born" who got axed those many years ago in Egypt land were.

I suppose that if there were a system of primogeniture in place, then offing those born first would also off those "born first", but you're still going to have a lot of false positives.

A picture of the noumenal self

Can be found here.  It's fairly great.

Perverted mind

Listening by random shuffle to "When Your Lover Has Gone" while reading, the line "when you're alone, who cares for starlit skies?" jumped out at me, and I thought, "ah yes, Kant says something like that in the third Critique".  ("The beautiful interests empirically only in society; … For himself alone a human being abandoned on a desert island would not adorn either his hut or himself, nor seek out or still less plant flowers in order to decorate himself…", §41.)

Confusing heritage

Several characters in Ægypt have had cause to refer to what is claimed to be a Greek word, heimarmene, meaning, variously, fate, destiny, prison, &c.  But I always read it as an extrasyllabic German adjective: ein heimarmer Mann, a man with little home, or something like that.

And later: En ciel un dieu, en terre une déesse, attributed to nameless Provençal poets, clearly means "in heaven a god, on earth an absence" (or failure).

I'm totally enjoying Crowley's vocabulary.  Best word yet: cicisbeo.  How civilized.

Buyer's remorse

I got one of those hip Moleskine notebooks, but whenever I try to write on one of the pages the pen just slides across frictionlessly without leaving a mark.

I suppose it's a bit of a stretch…

A hunter from an animistic society one day went out in search of some deer, knowing that he'd only need to capture one to secure a supply of meat for his family, whose store was running low—even their supply of cured meat saved for emergencies was dwindling.  Before setting out, he made with unusual diligence his prayers to the various spirits that would be involved in the expedition, were it to be successful, taking extra care when addressing the spirit of the deer he'd be hunting, stressing the seriousness of his need and eloquently requesting that one choose to lay down its life for his family's sake.  This done, he shouldered his supplies and trekked woodwards.  Thanks to luck and skill, and why not? perhaps even as a result of his spiritual preparations, he succeeded in killing a young punkbuck and returned with it a few days later.  Before tucking into the first meal prepared with the animal's meat, he and his family of course directed a prayer of gratitude to its spirit in particular, promising to aid the deer that remained and maintain the land they held in common, and thanking the deer for granting them their much-desired venison.

Things done since the beginning of a few days ago

Not only did I see a bass clarinet quartet, who closed with an arrangement of some boogie-woogie piano, covered Black Sabbath, and played originals in a vaguely Cro Magnon–but–heavier/Arthur Jarvinen/urban chamber music mode, but the following day, finding myself Shanghaied into Santa Cruz in the company of my good friend, N---, by a lousy stoat of our acquaintance, C---, I participated along with the abovementioned in the construction of a mighty sand castle!  It had a moat and a keep and everything, man, it was so cool.  Even a seaweed flag that resembled a fleur de lis if you squinted just right while poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick.  Afterwards, we amused ourselves by watching a gaggle of small children (one naked) attempt to engage in sand castle construction–like behavior, acting apparently in accord with neither goal nor plan, and generally making a mess of things.  Dumb kids!  They were attempting their construction on much too large a scale, and with so many people inolved they really ought to have engaged the services of a foreman, or at least tried to have had a little self-discipline.  Our structure, while more diminutive in scale, was at least complete, and nobler for its unprepossessing modesty.

Then, continuing the "I am pressganged" theme of recent days, I was pressganged into seeing the new Harry Potter movie, even though I am plug ignorant of the series.  I have posed the following question to a few persons who agree with my assessment, but want to state it for the record: was not the entire tri-wizard tournament a gigantic MacGuffin?  Couldn't the dude who was orchestrating the whole thing simply have enchanted any old object Harry was likely to touch to cause him to be transported to the graveyard, or otherwise compel him in a more straightforward way?  Granted: the tournament provided a means for Harry to show off his skillz, and get a little artificial conflict between him and wossname.  But it could have been so much simpler.

The events of today, in which I was dragooned by that manipulative little troll C--- into eating donuts and participating in a forced march in a circuit, I pass over in silence, except to mention that we were first mistaken for people not from America (because, in the previous night, we read in the hostel-cottage-structure's antechamber, instead of turning the lights on in the room where someone was already sleeping) and then drama students (because of our histrionic bickering).

Paper titles

The Determinable Mr. X: A Phenomenological Interpretation of the Residents' God in Three Persons
World Enough, and Time: Heidegger and the Carpe Diem Tradition

This be close reading

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

This line, which begins Larkin's poem, "This Be the Verse", so forcefully, has long been a puzzlement to scholars, who have debated amongst themselves since its publication what the meaning of "fuck you up" might be.  I believe that the key to understanding the line, which recapitulated and varied in the other quatrains (thus giving the poem the structure of a partially-deranged sonata), lies in the preposition, "up".  If the speaker of the poem were to have averred that "your mum and dad" merely "fuck you", then the meaning would be clear: the poet would be decrying, or at least pointing out, the incestuous foundations of Western societies since the Greeks.  However, as so often happens with words of Germanic origin, here the "up" has the effect of transforming the meaning of the main verb: rather than be a commentary on the direction of fucking, we must recognize that fucking itself has changed.  How, one might ask?  We look to that most prototypical of "up"-modified verbs: conjure.  To fuck something up is to conjure up, or cause to come into existence, by means of fucking.  An example with another common verb will put to rest any doubt: for do we not say that one can whip up a PowerPoint presentation, cookies, or military intelligence, meaning thereby that we will create them by means of whipping, respectively, generic business cliches, eggs & flour, or hapless innocents?  Thus we see that Larkin here refers to nothing more than biological processes at their most crude: they fuck you up, they beget you.  Fuck up a kid or two if you're lamenting your own now-vanished youth.

They may not mean to, but they do.

Larkin here comments on the sad truth: many children are unwanted.  Some parents, it is true, make a conscious decision to fuck up kids, and take means to prevent fucking up until they have so decided: they are to be commended.  However, others, whether through carelessness, lack of contraceptives or ignorance of their use, religious upbringing, or what-have-you, fuck their kids up willy-nilly, without necessarily even knowing that that's what they're doing.

They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

The poet's meaning is opaque here.  At first, one is tempted to think of cell division in the fertilized egg ("the faults they had"); however, it is difficult to reconcile this with the statement that "some extra" faults are exhibited in the gamete.  Indeed, the poem appears to be paradoxical at this point, for how can one be "filled" with a "fault", when a fault is specifically a gap, a that-which-is-unfilled?  However, this too can be explained, if we look past the birth: for infants have many more bones, and therefore more "faults", if you will, than an adult, and these bones are created and grow only as the baby takes in calcium from its mother's milk—that is to say, the baby is not so much filled with faults as filled up with faults: faults are created (and then, note, filled, as the baby grows) by means of a filling with milk.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

The first two lines of this quatrain are nothing more than the aforementioned recapitulation of what might be called the main theme, biological reproduction.  Note, however, that although it is a recapitulation, that which it describes properly speaking happens before what is described in the first quatrain, thus demonstrating the defamiliarizing uses to which Larkin puts the flow of time.  (Much interesting work remains to be done in this area.)

The final two lines, I'm pretty sure, are oral sex references of various sorts.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Here we see an instance of Larkin's fondness for employing common words in uncommon senses.  "Misery" here refers, of course, to the sixth definition in the OED, "bodily pain or discomfort"; notably, one of the illustrative quotations is "Lizy's took bad with a misery in her stomach"—that is, Lizy's pregnant.  "Man hands on misery to man" calls attention to that which is not present, the pregnant woman, whose belly "deepens" as the gamete grows, just as does the tree of sexual reproduction, leading all the way back into the sea, whence our first ancestors emerged (thus showing the aptness of the simile).

Interestingly, manuscript drafts reveal that the original of the first line of this quatrain was to have been "Man hands inhumanity to man", showing that, for all that this poem is deeply concerned with biology, for a good while Larkin himself was ironically uninformed on the subject, and hewed to an outmoded homuncular theory of reproduction, "in-humanity" here being synecdochic for "sperm", on the principle that it is the little human living in the sperm that gives it its vital force.

Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

The variation on the theme, coming after the statement and recapitulation, is meant to show the derangement of those who would issue such a call.

Catullus 63 has never seemed more plausible

A dude was so moved by a rugby team's victory that he cut off his balls.

Hybrid vigor

It's a Child Ballad spliced with a klezmer tune, complete with clarinet solo and Sandy Denny–clear vocals (well, at times).

To him who doesn't like this song, I say: you have got no soul.

Why yes, I am an unreconstructed ass; how could you tell?

I just went all Comic Book Guy on a dude from KZSU's music mailing list.  ("Oh yeah? Well I have twelve to eighteen of their albums, depending on how you count it!"—I didn't literally say that, though I might have literally said a substring of that.)  This was in a discussion concerning whether or not a certain band can accurately be said to kick one's ass, or rather, to be in the business of kicking ass, such that a particular release might relevantly be noted not to kick ass, or at least, not enough.

I acted almost before I realized what I was doing—he had unleashed the fuckin' fury, you see—I wasn't myself.  Nevertheless, I request absolution.  I don't think this can wait until Friday.

Miraculous capture of yeggs

Compare the "screaming" dude in this ridiculous music video to the following picture of everyone's favorite drumming Gallic nutcase, Christian Vander.

Unexpected

My sister has gone and gotten herself engaged.

Green dude has green fairy

Such is my perhaps loose translation.

A penny for the old guy

While it is useful for certain low-stress applications, owing to its brittleness, it's better, for all intensive purposes, to use a different material.

Bigmouth strikes again

I really don't like being required to title things.  (One might never have guessed.)  Especially essays for classes.  I get the sense that "Off the Railtons!" would not be an appropriate effort.

Xenonomy

I quote to you from the table of contents from the March, 2005 issue of San Francisco, which I was perusing the other day in the orthopod's office (and which page I ripped out of the magazine):

How Not to Raise a Social Pariah               78
Is your Sophie or Trent a bit of an outcast?  Then get ready for a social skills class, the buzzed-over group therapy for kids that Bay Area parents are starting to treat like the second coming of Ritalin.

Now, I know (if "know" isn't too strong a word to apply to someone who, the last time I saw her, had not yet attained to the age of two) a young person named "Sophie", even spelled that way, and I even defended the choice of name against notional pooh-poohers, so I feel a little bad scoffing here, but come on.  I had forgotten about the "second coming of Ritalin" part, but let's face it, the first sentence is bad enough.

Question: would any such sentence, with two given names instead of "daughter or son", be as offensive?  Is it the suggestion not just that the magazine is targeted strongly to a specific demographic, and knows it, but that that demographic is homogenous enough that characteristic names are so easily divined, or is it something about this particular demographic?  It's entirely possible that my distaste owes something to the general distastefulness of these metropolitan magazines (Chicago has the same flaw).  But the air of self-satisfaction seems especially strong here.