waste

This is stupid stuff

Mill, in the third chapter of On Liberty:

It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; the exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.

Man, that's a lot of colons, isn't it?  The substance of the passage, which clearly grows out of the arguments regarding toleration of opinion in the preceding chapter, though he does not make that connection himself, reminds me in some respects of the one quoted here.  He goes on to discuss, in a very even-handed fashion, I think, Calvinism: According to that, the one great offence of man is self-will … You have no choice; thus you must do, and no otherwise: whatever is not a duty, is a sin. Human nature being radically corrupt, there is no redemption for any one until human nature is killed within him.. For whatever reason there recently popped in my head the oft-quoted saying from Terence, homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto (there seems to be some disagreement on the internet as to whether the fourth word is nihil or nil).  Now, before reading the languagelog post linked in the previous sentence, I had all sorts of apparently incorrect thoughts regarding this little tag.  I did not know that it was from a play, but thought it came from someone speaking in propria persona and in real life, and thought it was a defense for entertaining licentious or even concupiscent thoughts—sort of like this one, except more elegantly expressed and with that nice dark sheen of age described in In Praise of Shadows.  The sort of tag one might think expressed a position opposed to the Calvinistic one adumbrated by Mill, and, on some uncharitable* interpretations of his moral philosophy, Kantian positions, that hive off some obviously human capacities/experiences/thingummies (new preferred philosophical term for just about anything—100% guaranteed not to pump any illegitimate intuitions) as impediments or at least needing to be granted permission to exert an influence by a more-human capacity.  Even the willingness of more Humean sorts to talk about external desires and whatnot—though I should look it up again, I'm pretty sure both Bratman and Frankfurt are willing to talk in something like this way; I should look it up again anyway to see who exactly deploys examples of drunkenness talking, not me (Nomy Arpaly mentions the obvious follow-up question: so who was talking, drunkenness not being able to actually speak?)—kind of bugs me.  It's all you, dude.  As one might say: homo es; humani nihil a te alienum putare debes.  Mill, anyway, would be amenable to such a position, I think; having desires, even strong ones, is part of what being human is, and should be developed just like anything else.  (Though those strong feelings ought still be "controlled by a conscientious will", they aren't, like, invaders, man.)

But, instead it expresses a busybody's willingness to interfere with anything at all.  Some won; some lost.

Mill, it turns out, is extremely interesting.  I read On Liberty as an undergrad but did not, I think, appreciate it nearly as much then as I do now.  It's almost as if the classic works of philosophy that get assigned in intro courses are worthy of study even after one stops taking intro classes.

*I include "uncharitable" not because I have reason to think that my incredibly nonspecific reference actually is uncharitable, but because I assume that, the range of Kantianish positions being fairly broad and especially the amount of text available to a determined interpreter to contort into support for some position being what it is, there is probably a Kant scholar who would be willing to call it uncharitable.  Anyway, here is an image for you to look at.

Der in erweiternden Kreisen umdrehende und umdrehende Falke kann den Falkner nicht hören

It is I, Captain Zarathustra, with my eagle and my serpent; I accompany them because they are my demise.

Call me Hermoso Hermoso

Teliot, top bard, no tespu trid tang: eman a ti ngissa di. Das si, gnitaname gnat dirtup seton, drab pot, toile t.

Argle bargle

Interpretation as Davidson concieves it in the essays in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation is a version of the inverse problem.  I realized this today.

I also noticed that the Davidson looks a lot jollier on the cover of Truth, Language and History than he does on the cover of Essays on Actions and Events.  On the cover of Inquiries he looks sort of ataractic.  Those are all the books of his that I have so I can't make a general survey.  One can only speculate as to the possible significance of these photos and the attitudes seemingly expressed therein.

This may well be the dorkiest thing I've ever written here.

Conceptual analysis

I posed a question to most of a seminar: can Stephen Hawking express oral consent?  Some said clearly no, others clearly yes; many abstained.  I invite your thoughts.

Ein Fleisch! Ein Blut!

n + 1, as we all know, early in its career sounded a BLAST! against The Believer, a BLAST! against Timothy McSweeney's various Tendencies (though I think he only had an Internet Tendency and the magazine was given some other denomination? perhaps?), a BLAST! against what they were pleased to call the "Eggersards", for some reason, a BLAST! against dishonest tone (McSweeney's was wide-eyed, juvenile, faux-naif—true enough as it goes (and true enough is about what we should expect here), and quite annoying when done without skill, as, in the main, it is), and basically seemed to have set itself up as the Criterion to the Eggersy Reader's Digest, some serious intellectual undertaking for those who found Eggers and his crew too superficial, too facile, too willing to go for some easy effect, without skill.  Harder-edged: the justified successor to the former, for those willing to think like adults and be serious.

It should now be easy to see that the ns+1 are just the obverse of the Believers, especially in the realm about which I am surprisingly moralistic, the rhetorical.  Yeah, sure, they're willing to be negative, and to pontificate on suitably intellectual-seeming themes.  But the style in which so many of the shorter squibs, and the Intellectual Situations (sections whose title shows characteristic ambition and presumption) that constitute the prefaces to the print issues, are written, is just as facile and false as anything done by the party of Eggers.  Seen-it-all, portentous, faux-sophisticate: if the Believers are obsessed with the wisdom of children and white-haired philosophers, the ns + 1 are obsessed with the wisdom of themselves.

Oh my god how portentous, how supercilious, how … I have not the words (this owes to my own poor expressive powers, and is not hyperbole).  Let's look at the article linked above, shall we?  (Let's first, however, acknowledge that it wasn't published in n + 1, but rather an offshoot, Paper Monument, and following, in the issue in which it appears, an equally enraging article loosely having to do with New York but mostly, I think, caused by omphaloskepsis; however, the ns + 1 did decide to put it on their webbage, after all, as a piece in promotion of their new venture, and the last issue of n + 1 itself that I have is #4, which is, like, so old by now.)  Let's look at the third paragraph.

Now ask Mister Brown what sex is really like. Nothing could allude less to the time-bending freedom of sex than the hyperexperience of subdivided time: boom, bat, boom, bat. We are right to fear sex and its mystery, but we are wrong not to conjure our courage against that fear. Rock and roll tries to lock fucking’s magic door.

Let's now count the idiocies.  First, the essay pretends to be about rock and roll, but James Brown is a funk musician, apparently dragooned into the article on the grounds that he once sang about being a sex machine, and, like, isn't rock so mechanistic, man, like, totally ruining the magick of sex? Oh to be a pagan! Brown's being in the article despite the whacking great style trouble is somewhat forgivable, though, since apparently the author has never actually heard any funk music, else he wouldn't have said anything so monstrously stupid about rhythm therein.  About the last two sentences I doubt anything needs actually to be written.  I doubt anything can be written about them that would be more effective than simply letting someone with penny's worth of sense or taste read it (and if you've not got that much sense or taste, there's not much to be done)—about the next paragraph, too, and really much of it.  When it comes to the way this tripe is written all I can really say is: but can't you see that it's shit?  (Is it actually facetious? Is Paper Monument a twice-yearly journal "about" the contemporary art scene in that its creators feel that that scene is corrupt through and through, a failed endeavor that hasn't recognized its failure, and thus they have created a similarly awful journal which displays and "comments on" that transcendent (in the sense that it forever transcends any one attempt to comprehend it) idiocy by paralleling it in a more perspicuous fashion? That would be a sort of charitable explanation, I suppose, but it seems a lot of effort to go through.)  Fortunately there are some more tractable passages:

We need a music worth our time. What would that different music be like? And how would the culture itself have to change before conditions might arise to make such a music significant or even possible? Contemporary music is just one part of a none-too-subtly militarized culture—boom, bat, hup, two—in which technologies bear us aloft, or back us against the wall. If your favorite band exists, it is already part of the problem.

I never ever want to hear anyone telling me what kind of music (art, literature, sport, revolver) we need.  If it's not too much to ask.  Especially prefaced with the indefinite article, such claims are nearly always the mark, these days, of self-obsessed, self-important ruminations without which one can really get by just fine.  I pass over in silence the bits that follow, because, of course, it should take nothing more than an accurate transcription to show how stupid they are, and instead mention here that it's the teeniest bit ironic that the criticizes exactly two musicians in the course of the article, James Brown and John Lennon, and what he says about neither of them is accurate.  This is, if you recall, an article about contemporary music (or maybe just rock, or maybe that just is contemporary music).  (He also mentions Bach, Mingus, Kelly Clarkson, and Black Flag, the latter two for basically no reason, except perhaps to establish that he listened to punk and doesn't like pop (JUST LIKE ME!!!!), the first to establish that his rejection of so-called classical music stands on the firm footing of a dude who once took piano lessons, and the second to praise him, apparently unaware that, since his band existed, it was once part of the problem.  How soon they forget.  Maybe it gets a pass because it was jazz, a style which apparently doesn't exist anymore.)  Here's the bit about Lennon:

File under Dionysus the feelings a rock concert aims to induce: careless ecstasy and careless unity, dissolving in the careless crowd. Is Dionysus all-embracing, or is he instead all-consuming, all-digesting, reducing all to homogenous shit-stink? Why has no one mentioned that John Lennon’s “I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will live as one” is a sentiment suitable for chanting at a Nuremberg rally?

Gosh, I have no idea.  Ok, that's actually a translation of a Queen song, "One Vision", but it's probably safe to say that the realization that a pounding beat can be put to militaristic ends is not exactly a new one.  (Einer wie Adorno hätte das alle sofort durchschaut, wenn er es in Betracht gezogen hätte—though actually he does make the point about homogenization there)  But actually, while the world living as one might fit with a racist rally, under the peace in our time or we wipe you out principle, I hope someday you'll join us doesn't, really.

The bizarre generalization about contemporary music is, well, bizarre.  Somewhat amusing that this lamentation on the all-pervading four-four is out at the same time as Sasha Frere-Jones' lamentation about lack of rhythmic interest in contemporary indie rock, since SF/J does at least manage to find some areas of contemporary music whose rhythm doesn't merely plod, a feat that is not, it must be owned, even slightly impressive.  J. D. Daniels' ability to make completely unfounded generalizations about contemporary music is more impressive, and that's a pretty easy thing to do. Rock, if you recall, was "the tyranny of the backbeat", and he can't find any music that escapes it.  I gather that n + 1 is based in New York City?  If Daniels were to stroll into Other Music and ask for some music without a tyrannical backbeat, I am willing to give good odds that they'd be able to accomodate him.  I could accomodate him, if that's what he actually wants.  (In particular, if what he wants is music that encourages a sense of timelessness, I would recommend Tony Conrad & Faust, Outside the Dream Syndicate Alive and Orthrelm, OV, two albums which accomplish the same end through opposite means (though both share length), or perhaps Anthony Moore's Reeds, Whistle and Sticks.  Or endless other things.  Does he just want music for screwing?  Eyvind Kang's Live Low to the Earth, in the Iron Age might suit his apparently delicate sensibilities. In none of these will one find an oppressive boom-bap backbeat [actually that isn't true; the Conrad & Faust contains about 40 minutes (out of a total length of 50-55) of a nonstop duh-rock beat. Nevertheless it manages to create a sense of timelessness as it wears on stamping endlessly under the string drones.  Quite a remarkable performance, really. It also ocurred to me that the last movement (heard in context of course) of the Quartet for the End of Time could fit the bill, but it's a bit of a gimme].  Kyle Gann seems like an approachable fellow: maybe Daniels should email him for recommendations.)

I fear that if I continue in this little exercise I'll be reduced to simply quoting paragraphs or sentences and being dumbstruck, and my being dumbstruck will not, I think, translate very well onto the page (or page metaphor).  So I'll just recommend the one mentioning Kelly Clarkson as good for a laugh, and quote this one, and be off:

Many writers on rock, by now the boringest of all possible musics, attempt to enliven things with a bit of proctological egotism: that headfirst disappearance up the asshole of lyricism, that display of the self—if that’s your idea of a self—in excruciating prose poetry, or pose. It’s the 21st century, so tell me, dear, why is it so Romantic?

Quite.

But do read the article for yourself.  It's really quite impressive. The bits about Dionysus and Apollo are works of art. (Come to think of it I'm surprised that no mention of Plato banning certain modes from the music of his republic is made.) I don't doubt that you will all see that it is shit. (How could anyone not have seen it?) The New York article was similar. I see that someone has voiced a similar complaint to mine about the main rag proper.

Bellum a non bello

How fitting that a book called Unprincipled Virtue should have been written by a person named "Nomy".

scp/peaceful

As I mentioned earlier, though not in so many words, I'm reading Freedom and Responsibility.  RIGHT NOW.  In fact I just read the paragraph beginning thus:

Any claim that is justified by the practical point of view would have to involve a concept that any attempt to engage in practical reasoning gives us reason to employ. But not all such concepts can allow us to justify such claims.  For instance, because I have defined practical reasoning as reasoning that attempts to determine what we have most reason to do, the concept of `the act we have most reason to perform' is

and then the sentence ends "one that any attempt to engage in practical reasoning gives us reason to employ." (pp 72–3), but I thought it would end by concluding that that concept is not justified by the practical point of view.  Obviously if practical reasoning is the attempt to determine what one has most reason to do, someone engaging in practical reasoning has an instrumental reason to employ that concept in his actual deliberations, and maybe that's what's meant.  But I suppose I want to make an analogy to the old line about how, back in the good old days when the meter was defined with reference to the meter bar, it neither was nor wasn't a meter long.  It seems odd to say that, not only is practical reasoning defined in terms of a particular concept, it also gives you reason to use that concept.  This is mostly irrelevant, though, so I'm free to be totally wrong here.

From those who dine at the same restaurant, different and different again excretions flow

There is a restaurant in North Beach called "Panta Rei".  The name hardly seems advisable.

A review of it in the SF Weekly includes the sentence An everyday menu of appetizers, panini, and pastas -- none priced higher then $10 -- is supplemented by a handful of daily specials..  I don't know which is worse: the "then", or the use of two hyphens, with spaces on either side, for proper em dashes, without spaces at all.

Verschiedene Annäherungen

Is a swell tune which you can audit here.

I am a great fan of ceramics, and in fact recently purchased three ceramic pieces (one of them in a silent auction which I thought I wouldn't get, nor was I upset on that score, because someone else had bid above me: but he or she was not present at the time to claim the object, so it went home with me, and now sits, dutiful as any bone, containing pens of various description but not, shockingly, a pewter letter opener): the object described parenthetically, a tea cup and dish, and a vase.  Now, one of the reasons I like ceramics is that, for the most part, most ceramic objects are made to be used, funerary urns notwithstanding (oo oo! a chance to quote Lichtenberg!: It is so very modern to place a funeral urn on top of a grave while the body rots in a box underneath. And this funeral urn is in turn a mere symbol of a funeral urn: it is merely the tombstone of a funeral urn., which quote was deployed, in a manner not entirely justified by the context, in a short paper written about a white urn in the Benaki museum in Athens, of which paper the TA said that my prose was, if not constipated, something similar—and I agreed, but what of it? What can you do to me now, R-b G-rm-ny?), so it was somewhat ironic that I got the tea thing, since I don't, as a rule, drink tea.  I couldn't even put the vase to the use I had planned, wanting to nestle in it some of those irregularly branching, uh, branches with tufty nubbins at each change of direction, which I thought I could get from my mother, remembering that she had some, though they have now been replaced with some less interesting things, or perhaps at Paxton Gate: bootless.  There were some such branches at Applewood, and I could have asked what they were called, at least, but I didn't.  So now it contains only some wood strips that are the last remnants of the side table I got from two of these people (see if you can guess which!) when one got a job and left, a cane, and a slightly rusty two-foot piece of rebar.

But I was talking about tea, and how this very day I used the cup twice: once for drinking tea, and now for drinking a mixture of whisky, cinnamon, lemon peel, and once-boiling water.  If drunk in sufficient quantity, guaranteed to be good for what ails you.

I also, at Applewood, got to watch the butcher-type dude, Guillermo, break down a pig.  (Obviously this happened before they opened for service.)  After muffing the rear knees a bit, he made my sister, looking on, leave, after which he neatly severed the tendons and twisted them off.  The front legs came off much more easily, and from that point on he was extremely quick, moving in time to the head of the line symphony and striking in the big gaps.  The head took a bit of doing, but severing some tendons, then twisting the head off, tossing it a bucket so as to use it later for headcheese worked.  By this time my sister had returned and they made me break the spine, which was only slightly risible.

I mention this because today I got a bone-in pork loin, which I wanted to debone: it's not  the simplest task in the world.  I succeeded in the end, but not very elegantly, and in fact one bone remained attached.  On the other hand, I got both the loin proper and the tenderloin, and a whole lot of fat, stashed for future rendering in the freezer (I will make deep-fried pork belly confit if it kills me).  I wonder what my cohabitants will make of that.

Notice

I would like to recommend David Slusser's album Trouble in Tiretown and Blue Cranes' album Lift Music! Flown Music!, home of

this tuneful tune.

Do what thou wilted greens shall be the only slaw

The sitch: there's a fucking gigantic grid implementing a universal turing machine using Conway's Game of Life, and it's been set up to play chess against itself.  So we've got: (a) the Life game, probably featuring (b) various slider-like things, some of which represent (c) the Turing machine and some its tape, which being run is (d) storing chess-related data and running chess-related algorithms.  And more such things, no doubt.

The scale of compression when one adopts the intentional stance toward the two-dimensional chess-playing computer galaxy is stupendous: it is the difference between figuring out in your head what white's most likely (best) move is versus calculating the state of a few trillion pixels through a few hundred thousand generations.

Furthermore, "from the perspective of one who had the hypothesis that this huge array of black dots was a chess-playing computer, enormously efficient ways of predicting the future of that configuration are made available"—that is, not only can you figure out some description of what's going to happen more quickly than the person who's going through updating each cell in accordance with the rules of Life, you can also translate that description back into Life terms.  And, apparently, this is comparatively, well, I don't know if easy is right, since updating a few trillion Life cells is more time-consuming than difficult (why one has to do this in one's head is not really clear to me, unless it's to make it impossible to carry out) but simple, or fast, or efficient, or something.

The claim seems wildly implausible to me.  Suppose you're confronted with the Life/UTM/chess-playing grid, and you know only that it implements Life.  You can't adopt the intentional stance towards it until you have some idea what it's doing beyond just playing Life.  I don't see any real reason to grant this, but even if you grant that someone comes along and tells you "oh, that implements a universal Turing machine and it's playing chess with itself", you still can't do anything with that information to predict what the move will be until you know the state of the board. And how are you going to determine that?  You don't have any predictions yet, you have some massive puzzles.   You'll have to figure out which the program and which parts are the data (and there's no guarantee that the "tape" part of the UTM will be contiguous or at all tape-like or anything like that, of course), how it works, and simply figuring whose move it is is likely to be extraordinarily difficult.  Consider how many moves of Life might correspond to advancing the UTM tape one cell, and how many tape manipulations might correspond to a single move in the game, and how complicated data structures representing the state of the board might be stored by a Turing machine (I have no idea myself, but I assume the method is not perspicuous).  Even if someone came along and told the observer not only that it's playing chess with itself, and then also told h/h what the current state of the board is (in which case it's hard to see what the program itself has to do with anything anymore), he's still not in much of a position to predict future configurations of the Life board—not even those extremely few that do nothing but represent the state of play immediately after the move.  (Think of how many moves, how far into the future of the game, the average chess algorithm considers, and the scoring algorithm used, how everything's updated, processed, etc.; then think of how many different Life-board configurations it will take to go through all that.  Knowing that White will end up castling queenside does absolutely no good in predicting any of those configurations.)

It's sort of like if I told you that this is how Emacs represents some compressed data and expected you to tell me what it is (I've taken off a few characters in the beginning that would identify immediately the compression algorithm used):

h91AY&SYÀ\237^K§^@^@^M^?ÿb^PH@QÁd pBHt^@@^P\200@^H^@^L^@!^@ ^@^B^@^P^@ ^@Tai\223 db^LL\232^Z`À^Z^L\206\215^CG¨^G\210\235\2342A-ìBþI^@-\203å\215?M @\206ì^[òÞ\236"BZf*79ëtÅÜ\221N^T$0'ÂéÀ

Easy-peasy, right?  Or like arguing that we can predict behavior on the basis of a complete neurophysiological description of a person, and translate behavior back into such descriptions.  Of course we aren't normally confronted with such information; we aren't normally even confronted with uninterpreted movements (what a puzzle that would be! Then we would really have to try to interpret such things as behavior of such and such a kind).  We see people behaving certain ways and want to predict other ways in which they might behave.  (I think it's interesting that when Haugeland in Pattern and Being changes the example to allow for interactivity, he also changes it from a cellular automaton to a more congenial system, such as a computer that accepts opponents' moves via keyboard input, and continuously displays the current position on a screen (p 61 in Dennett and His Critics).  That is a huge change!  Even allowing, as Haugeland does, that the representations on the screen may not look like conventional chess pieces, they have the advantage that they'll be stable: you want to know where the black king is, there's a representation of it, there—you can point at it, and the representation is on the board, and its position relative to other pieces can be taken in relatively easily, etc: in fact the way these representations are positioned and move is constitutive of their being chess pieces.  There is no reason to imagine that anything of that sort will be true of the Life board.  What counts as "the black king"?  I don't really see any reason to suppose that anything will, to be honest; certainly not any one thing (where "thing" might be geographical region of the Life board, higher-level construct on the board like sliders, region of whatever it is that counts as the tape, pattern on the tape, whatever).  The change Haugeland makes might make the example more plausible, and also a closer parallel to the situation with people, but it also seems to make it basically different.  The design and physical stances don't really make sense with Haugeland's example, or anyway it seems that the physical stance would be the creation of the pixels via the monitor, and while then it really is easier to predict what will happen on the monitor via the intentional stance, the physical layer has changed dramatically.  The monitor, after all, isn't playing chess.  Uh, or something: this part of this post is obviously not really thought through very well.  But I do think that something's fishy about that change.)

Haugeland also says in a footnote that whether anyone could, inf act, recognize them [chess pieces, locations, etc] as implemented in the Life plane is a separate question; but the essential point could be made as well with a less formidable implementation (p 68 n 8), and that may well be true, but given that the example was introduced as one in which this stance stuff is supposed to reap big benefits, that is certainly an odd proviso to note.  It is anyway desirable if the examples you introduce in service of a point actually seem plausibly to make that point.

I don't dig on crystal palaces, man

Hypothetical imperatives can be a bitch sometimes.

I would exchange my nuts for a piece of metal

Nancy Franklin, on why Friday Night Lights is good: [a]lthough the show's particulars are distinctive and special, it seems not to be made up of parts at all—to just be an organic whole.  In short, it feels like life.  It's just like Wilhelm Meister!:

The development within the individual sections ensures the overall coherence, and in pulling them together, the poet confirms their variety.  And in this way each essential part of the single and indivisible novel becomes a system in itself.

The innate drive of the necessarily organized and organizing work, in order to build itself to a whole, expresses itself alike in the larger and in the smaller masses.

I figure it'll be at least a year before encountering the word "organic" in an art-critical context makes me want to invoke Schlegel.

A metaphysics of David Torn

Reading the book on Gaddis available from a site devoted to him has confirmed beyond my wildest dreams that I missed incomprehensibly much in reading it, and now I turn to more tractable material, to wit, Russell Hoban's Linger Awhile.

There's a bit of Kenner's The Counterfeiters wherein he talks about poetry written with too much attention to scientific details lately revealed, with unappealing consequences (some of what he quotes is pretty dire).  Something similar is there to be said about the initial Fallok chapters of LA. (Also, I don't really find the pun on "suspension" in "suspension of disbelief", you know, like a colloid, particularly charming.)

What means that, traveller?

In accord with the wishes of my advisor I am reading a book about Davidson by a fellow named Someone Evnine.  I have, I assure you, ever so many delightful thoughts about it, but of the truth of the one recorded herein I am at least moderately confident.  At various places Evnine observes that there is a problem, or are problems, with attempting to give a theory of meaning using sentences of the form

s means that p

Where s is the name of a sentence in the object language and p is a sentence in the metalanguage.  And indeed, it seems to me that there is a problem with attempting to do that, but the problem is not what Evnine following Davidson brings up.  The problem is that all such sentences are false. (Maybe one should except certain divine languages, such as mystics are said to have mastered in bygone days, but I'm not even sure of that.)  How could "la neige est blanche" possibly mean that snow is white?

Not at all in accord with his wishes, or at least his explicitly stated wishes, I am also reading "Real Patterns" and "Pattern and Being", about which one can expect an utterly pettifogging post either by the end of the day tomorrow or sometime before next week today, depending on how things go on the weekend.