Every profession has its crosses to bear, and I think that academic philosophy has a particular burden of attracting guys who want nothing more from life than to win arguments.
I remember one particular philosophy lecture I once heard, where the guy was talking about the problems of artificial intelligence, specifically, how would one know if one succeeded? By one measure, this is just an extension of the old conundrum of how does one tell that other people are actually feeling, thinking, existing as conscious beings. Since we can only experience our own consciousness directly, we have to infer that others have it, etc. etc. BFD.
But the “artificial” part of artificial intelligence had the guy going. He’d read a paper by someone who had suggested that what you could do was build a robot that could only tell the truth and then ask it if it was conscious. Ha! Problem solved.
I observed that while we had pretty good evidence that it was possible to create beings that were conscious (I’m willing to offer myself as an example), we’ve never, ever encountered a being who could only tell the truth. Actually, it’s worse than that, since Gödel’s proof insists that such a thing is a logical impossibility, but I was just offering the sort of argument that can be followed by a bright high school student, which apparently ruled out its use by editors of whatever journal my professor had read.
Well, maybe he was just “trying to get us to think.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.
In moral philosophy you regularly run into the “lifeboat model,” where various groups of people are put into a lifeboat with limited food, or that will sink with too many people in it, etc. and you’re supposed to figure out what the ethical and moral choices are. The unreality of the model tends to make for unreal arguments, with people actually mapping the artificial situation into something more familiar and realistic, thereby confusing the issue sufficiently that the professor can win the argument. (That last part is me being snarky, of course).
There’s a much more meaningful question that I’ve been thinking about lately; one that I think clarifies matters rather than obscures them. The question is, “What would or wouldn’t you do to keep your children from starving?”
This isn’t an artificial question at all; throughout history, people have had to answer it on a regular basis, and we have some pretty reliable answers. Would you steal? Of course. Lie, cheat, break the law, poach the King’s game, kill a fellow human being? All of these have been done (sometimes for less worthy cause than feeding children, too, but we’re working at the margins here).
In times of dire privation, the real questions are about what won’t/can’t/shouldn’t be done. You shouldn’t eat your seed corn, for example, because that just insures greater privation later. According to Marvin Harris, you shouldn’t kill the sacred cows, because they are the equivalent of seed corn, without them, no next generation of oxen and no way to plow the fields. So you get the grand taboos, the ones that will kill your society if you break them. But absent the grand taboo, all bets are off.
In the recent North Korean famine, grandparents stopped eating to give their grandchildren enough food to live, slowly starving themselves in order to allow life to continue. The Inuit supposedly took the grandparents out onto an ice floe and left them there, to exactly the same purpose. In other times and places, some of the babies were taken to the hilltop and left to die of exposure.
I’ve seen commentary on the movie version of The Cider House Rules that indicated that pro-life conservatives found its morality acceptable, because the abortions weren’t just for “convenience” but rather out of necessity. Privation morality is part of the well-spring of the conservative world view, and the desperation narrative is one that conservative know well.
And realize this. If you must rob, and loot, and kill for your children’s lives, then it’s best not to do the deeds near to home, and not to take from your own family or tribe. Best to go farther afield, where the “others” live, those who don’t look like you, or speak the same language, or follow your customs. So privation morality makes sense of racism in that way. It also informs the blood feud, the vendetta, the holy war.
It’s the men who leave home in the desperate attempt to gather enough to feed their families, and it’s the women who stay behind, to tend the young, to make whatever compromises and sacrifices that are made in the near field. Privation morality is thus both patriarchal and matriarchal; patriarchal when the men have found the bounty, after the hunt, after the war, after the pillage, but matriarchal when the men are gone, when the times are toughest, holding together what must be held together if the family – and society – is to survive.
I’ve watched privation morality at work, in rural America, in low rent urban districts, and at a distance, by reportage, in parts of the world where grinding poverty is the norm. I recognize that the sheer opulence of our land allows us to at least contemplate such things as generosity, kindness, and the fellowship of all men. And I sometimes despair that, despite the immense wealth that has been created in the last three centuries, despite the vast riches of a continent that we occupy, there are still many among us who feel that privation morality is an absolute law, and that even too much is never enough.
And the agricultural fertility of the land in the Middle East has been in decline for the last three thousand years.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Father of On the Road
In 1960, I read my first issue of Mad Magazine, a bit late in the game actually, as I was 9 and many people discover Mad even younger. I think it had been described to me earlier, specifically the Dave Garraway Today Show parody that featured the famous "Vootie!" That came from 1955, but since Mad readers were avid collectors, that could have been from almost anytime afterwards.
The piece that sticks was "My Fair Ad-Man," a My Fair Lady parody, where a couple of Madison Avenue types make a bet as to whether or not one of them can turn a Beatnik into an advertising man. A couple of recent episodes of Mad Men, a truly fine show on AMC, had encounters between the advertising executive protagonist Don Draper and several bohemians (owing to Draper's affair with a painter) touches on the same dynamic, albeit for dramatic rather than comic purposes. But the contrasts are still there.
The two ad men in the Mad parody find a suitable scruffy beat, and convince him to join in the experiment by promising to get his manuscript published. They then clean him up, to the song parody "With a Little Bit of Soap" (to the tune of "With a Little Bit of Luck), and set him loose on the advertising world. The experiment is highly successful, to such an extent that the beatnik decides he like the ad world ("I've Grown Accustomed to the Pace"). When asked about his manuscript, he tells them "Burn it."
The manuscript was a sequel to On the Road, entitled, Son of On the Road. You also see other beatniks carrying similar manuscripts, On the Road Returns, Daughter of On the Road, Again with the On the Road, etc.
The so-called Beat Generation was a dramatically small group of writers and poets, with only a few of those becoming really famous. The nucleation site was clearly Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl, first performed in 1955 and published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Booksellers and Publishers (it helps to have a publisher who has a bookstore) in 1955. Ginsberg was also instrumental in getting Kerouac's On the Road published, and assisted in the compilation of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Ginsberg and Kerouac are sometimes called the Beat Movement's "leaders," a label that neither of them ever accepted. There was also apparently a joke amongst the group about the term "Beat Generation": "Three friends does not make a generation." Among the group that self-identified as Beats, writers like Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky are largely unread, outside of college courses.
I'll also interject my own minority opinion that Burroughs is outside of any category except possibly the grand sweep of Surrealism in the 20th Century. It was certainly convenient for him to know Ginsberg, and the Naked Lunch obscenity trial did his reputation as much good as the earlier, similar trial did for Ginsberg's Howl, but if you try to read Naked Lunch back to back with On the Road, you run the risk of explosive decompression.
The other nucleation site for the Beat crew (re-labeled "Beatniks" by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen in the wake of the –nik-ification of all things post-Sputnik), was Neal Cassady. Cassady was a failed writer; his most available work is his posthumously published autobiography, and there are two collections of his letters, also published posthumously.
Cassady has, on the other hand, appeared in at least 12 books, sometimes as a roman a clef character (without Cassady there is some question as to whether or not Kerouac would have had anything to write about), other times as himself. Additionally, there are 4 biographies (one in two parts), plus short stories, articles, and mentions in poetry. And Nick Nolte has played Cassady twice, once in "Who'll Stop the Rain?" based on Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers and "Heartbeat," based on Carolyn Cassady's bio of Neal.
All for a guy who died at 42, from causes that were never fully disclosed. But let's say that it's not a good idea to do massive amounts of amphetamine for years, then take some barbituate, drink a wedding toast, then go for a walk on the railroad tracks and lie down in the cold night when you get tired and sleepy.
Alan Harrington once wrote an article for Playboy, later expanded into a book, Psychopaths, where he used Cassady as an exemplar of the beast, a psychopath, or, as would be said today, a sociopath. My reaction at the time was "Huh? Then what was Charles Manson?"
Cassady was certainly a thrill seeker, a con artist, and a tweaker, more or less addicted to speed, both the drug and bodies-in-motion. Trickster gods are not trustworthy, after all. But I don't see much evidence that he lacked empathy; his behavior was more a matter of always feeling like he was just passing through. There's a reason for traveling salesmen jokes, and there's a reason why kids want to run away to join the circus, whatever the current version of the circus might be.
Cassady certainly joined the circus. He inspired novels, poetry, short stories and movies. He not only hung out with the Beats, he was a major source of inspiration. By all reports, his most significant artistic talent, the speed rap monologue, was lightning that could only be partly bottled. Later, when his attempts at straight life fell apart completely, he joined the next circus to come by, the Ken Kesey's Acid Bus, Further, as driver, mechanic, and whatever else was needed, including, yet again, serving as a character template for others' fictions. Ye gods what a burden to bear.
Cassady appears in the Grateful Dead video that I recently posted, which is obviously why I've been ruminating here. There's a web site from the Cassady family, which claims to be trying to recapture the man from the cage of myth that's been constructed around him.
I wish them all the luck.
The piece that sticks was "My Fair Ad-Man," a My Fair Lady parody, where a couple of Madison Avenue types make a bet as to whether or not one of them can turn a Beatnik into an advertising man. A couple of recent episodes of Mad Men, a truly fine show on AMC, had encounters between the advertising executive protagonist Don Draper and several bohemians (owing to Draper's affair with a painter) touches on the same dynamic, albeit for dramatic rather than comic purposes. But the contrasts are still there.
The two ad men in the Mad parody find a suitable scruffy beat, and convince him to join in the experiment by promising to get his manuscript published. They then clean him up, to the song parody "With a Little Bit of Soap" (to the tune of "With a Little Bit of Luck), and set him loose on the advertising world. The experiment is highly successful, to such an extent that the beatnik decides he like the ad world ("I've Grown Accustomed to the Pace"). When asked about his manuscript, he tells them "Burn it."
The manuscript was a sequel to On the Road, entitled, Son of On the Road. You also see other beatniks carrying similar manuscripts, On the Road Returns, Daughter of On the Road, Again with the On the Road, etc.
The so-called Beat Generation was a dramatically small group of writers and poets, with only a few of those becoming really famous. The nucleation site was clearly Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl, first performed in 1955 and published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Booksellers and Publishers (it helps to have a publisher who has a bookstore) in 1955. Ginsberg was also instrumental in getting Kerouac's On the Road published, and assisted in the compilation of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Ginsberg and Kerouac are sometimes called the Beat Movement's "leaders," a label that neither of them ever accepted. There was also apparently a joke amongst the group about the term "Beat Generation": "Three friends does not make a generation." Among the group that self-identified as Beats, writers like Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky are largely unread, outside of college courses.
I'll also interject my own minority opinion that Burroughs is outside of any category except possibly the grand sweep of Surrealism in the 20th Century. It was certainly convenient for him to know Ginsberg, and the Naked Lunch obscenity trial did his reputation as much good as the earlier, similar trial did for Ginsberg's Howl, but if you try to read Naked Lunch back to back with On the Road, you run the risk of explosive decompression.
The other nucleation site for the Beat crew (re-labeled "Beatniks" by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen in the wake of the –nik-ification of all things post-Sputnik), was Neal Cassady. Cassady was a failed writer; his most available work is his posthumously published autobiography, and there are two collections of his letters, also published posthumously.
Cassady has, on the other hand, appeared in at least 12 books, sometimes as a roman a clef character (without Cassady there is some question as to whether or not Kerouac would have had anything to write about), other times as himself. Additionally, there are 4 biographies (one in two parts), plus short stories, articles, and mentions in poetry. And Nick Nolte has played Cassady twice, once in "Who'll Stop the Rain?" based on Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers and "Heartbeat," based on Carolyn Cassady's bio of Neal.
All for a guy who died at 42, from causes that were never fully disclosed. But let's say that it's not a good idea to do massive amounts of amphetamine for years, then take some barbituate, drink a wedding toast, then go for a walk on the railroad tracks and lie down in the cold night when you get tired and sleepy.
Alan Harrington once wrote an article for Playboy, later expanded into a book, Psychopaths, where he used Cassady as an exemplar of the beast, a psychopath, or, as would be said today, a sociopath. My reaction at the time was "Huh? Then what was Charles Manson?"
Cassady was certainly a thrill seeker, a con artist, and a tweaker, more or less addicted to speed, both the drug and bodies-in-motion. Trickster gods are not trustworthy, after all. But I don't see much evidence that he lacked empathy; his behavior was more a matter of always feeling like he was just passing through. There's a reason for traveling salesmen jokes, and there's a reason why kids want to run away to join the circus, whatever the current version of the circus might be.
Cassady certainly joined the circus. He inspired novels, poetry, short stories and movies. He not only hung out with the Beats, he was a major source of inspiration. By all reports, his most significant artistic talent, the speed rap monologue, was lightning that could only be partly bottled. Later, when his attempts at straight life fell apart completely, he joined the next circus to come by, the Ken Kesey's Acid Bus, Further, as driver, mechanic, and whatever else was needed, including, yet again, serving as a character template for others' fictions. Ye gods what a burden to bear.
Cassady appears in the Grateful Dead video that I recently posted, which is obviously why I've been ruminating here. There's a web site from the Cassady family, which claims to be trying to recapture the man from the cage of myth that's been constructed around him.
I wish them all the luck.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe was a major figure in 20th Century photography, in the same league as Diane Arbus, Ansel Adams, and others who transformed photography from a bastard child into an acknowledged venue for fine art. That Mapplethorpe’s lover, Sam Wagstaff was also a major patron and advocate of photography as fine art helped to accelerate the speed of the transition, and amplified Mapplethorpe’s influence, as did his friendship with such icons as Patti Smith.
Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe came of age during the first flowering of “gay culture” as a publicly acknowledged and accepted part of American society and the arts. Prior to the late sixties, and seventies, it was generally understood that some areas of the arts and culture had a substantial homosexual representation (fashion, theater, and dance especially, plus those parts of pop culture that were called “camp”) but since homosexuality was usually illegal, and generally frowned upon as such, pretense and appearances were maintained and closet doors remained closed.
But after such things as the infamous “Stonewall Riots,” in New York, and a general softening of strictures about sex generally, part and parcel of “The Sixties” and “The Counterculture,” the “love that dare not speak its name” took to shouting its name into bullhorns for a while, at least in certain safe venues such as New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s Castro District.
Some of Mapplethorpe’s most famous (perhaps notorious would be a better word) photographs, was his “X, Y, and Z Portfolios”, quasi-documentary records of the time and its practices, the most infamous probably being the self-portrait with a bull whip in his anus. Other photos of the time are less shocking, but still charged with homoeroticism.
Then came Lady, Mapplethorpe’s photographic study of the body builder Lisa Lyons. This work may have single handedly created a new cultural image of feminine beauty. Previously, two female body types dominated the public imagination, the “never too rich or too thin” ideal of the fashion model, and the soft curvaceousness of Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield, or Bridget Bardot.
Lisa Lyons
Lyons fit neither of those patterns; she was neither thin nor soft. Suddenly, the “hard bodied” female burned itself into the public eye. And with Mapplethorpe’s eye for light and shadow, that body became Hellenic, even Olympian. The Battle Babe was finally given the body whose form fit the function: that of challenging men physically as well as in other areas of endeavor. Lyons’ legs looked strong enough to kick a door down, and her arms looked like they could throw you across the room. The only question was how much you’d enjoy it.
I saw the traveling Mapplethorpe show when it came to the U.C. Art Museum some years back. This was the show that wound up being tried for obscenity in Ohio in 1990 as another battle in the Culture Wars. It also came just a year after Mapplethorpe himself died of AIDS. One of the most striking photographs in the show was another self portrait, Mapplethorpe facing the camera holding tightly to a cane with a death’s head skull at its top.
Self Portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe
But there was another aspect of the show that I found quite ironic. Between the sex of the earlier period and the death images taken when he knew he was dying, there was a period when he seemed to have photographed flowers almost obsessively. The irony is multi-layered. Those who brought the obscenity charges against the show confined themselves to just five photographs, no doubt because they knew that the rest of the exhibit was uncontroversial; even the nude photos of Lisa Lyons, well dang, she’s a woman, and naked women are part of what art galleries are supposed to be about. The flowers would have just confused everything.
But within the chronology of the Mapplethorpe’s life’s work, it seemed as if he became tired of the obvious and the raw, just as adolescents and young adults (most of us anyway) eventually become tired of the hunt and the frenzy and eventually settle down to a quieter existence. The Amish even plan for it, with Rumspringa, the time for sowing the wild oats. Contrariwise, the strictest upbringings produce the wildest breakouts; Mapplethorpe himself was raised Catholic, and observed that he turned every still life into an altar. Even a dolt of a preacher could use the example of Mapplethorpe as a metaphor for trying to return to grace through the natural beauty of the flower portraits.
Or maybe not, because it’s equally easy to see through that ruse. Mapplethorpe’s flowers were voluptuous and erotic, their beauty fleeting, captured in the single eternal moment of the camera click. Like all Romantics, Mapplethorpe’s work was always about sex and death, from beginning to its premature end, with even the flowers serving both bower and wake.
Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe came of age during the first flowering of “gay culture” as a publicly acknowledged and accepted part of American society and the arts. Prior to the late sixties, and seventies, it was generally understood that some areas of the arts and culture had a substantial homosexual representation (fashion, theater, and dance especially, plus those parts of pop culture that were called “camp”) but since homosexuality was usually illegal, and generally frowned upon as such, pretense and appearances were maintained and closet doors remained closed.
But after such things as the infamous “Stonewall Riots,” in New York, and a general softening of strictures about sex generally, part and parcel of “The Sixties” and “The Counterculture,” the “love that dare not speak its name” took to shouting its name into bullhorns for a while, at least in certain safe venues such as New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s Castro District.
Some of Mapplethorpe’s most famous (perhaps notorious would be a better word) photographs, was his “X, Y, and Z Portfolios”, quasi-documentary records of the time and its practices, the most infamous probably being the self-portrait with a bull whip in his anus. Other photos of the time are less shocking, but still charged with homoeroticism.
Then came Lady, Mapplethorpe’s photographic study of the body builder Lisa Lyons. This work may have single handedly created a new cultural image of feminine beauty. Previously, two female body types dominated the public imagination, the “never too rich or too thin” ideal of the fashion model, and the soft curvaceousness of Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield, or Bridget Bardot.
Lisa Lyons
Lyons fit neither of those patterns; she was neither thin nor soft. Suddenly, the “hard bodied” female burned itself into the public eye. And with Mapplethorpe’s eye for light and shadow, that body became Hellenic, even Olympian. The Battle Babe was finally given the body whose form fit the function: that of challenging men physically as well as in other areas of endeavor. Lyons’ legs looked strong enough to kick a door down, and her arms looked like they could throw you across the room. The only question was how much you’d enjoy it.
I saw the traveling Mapplethorpe show when it came to the U.C. Art Museum some years back. This was the show that wound up being tried for obscenity in Ohio in 1990 as another battle in the Culture Wars. It also came just a year after Mapplethorpe himself died of AIDS. One of the most striking photographs in the show was another self portrait, Mapplethorpe facing the camera holding tightly to a cane with a death’s head skull at its top.
Self Portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe
But there was another aspect of the show that I found quite ironic. Between the sex of the earlier period and the death images taken when he knew he was dying, there was a period when he seemed to have photographed flowers almost obsessively. The irony is multi-layered. Those who brought the obscenity charges against the show confined themselves to just five photographs, no doubt because they knew that the rest of the exhibit was uncontroversial; even the nude photos of Lisa Lyons, well dang, she’s a woman, and naked women are part of what art galleries are supposed to be about. The flowers would have just confused everything.
But within the chronology of the Mapplethorpe’s life’s work, it seemed as if he became tired of the obvious and the raw, just as adolescents and young adults (most of us anyway) eventually become tired of the hunt and the frenzy and eventually settle down to a quieter existence. The Amish even plan for it, with Rumspringa, the time for sowing the wild oats. Contrariwise, the strictest upbringings produce the wildest breakouts; Mapplethorpe himself was raised Catholic, and observed that he turned every still life into an altar. Even a dolt of a preacher could use the example of Mapplethorpe as a metaphor for trying to return to grace through the natural beauty of the flower portraits.
Or maybe not, because it’s equally easy to see through that ruse. Mapplethorpe’s flowers were voluptuous and erotic, their beauty fleeting, captured in the single eternal moment of the camera click. Like all Romantics, Mapplethorpe’s work was always about sex and death, from beginning to its premature end, with even the flowers serving both bower and wake.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Thursday, October 4, 2007
VERTKRIEG
(Journal Entries from the War of Words)
The attack came upon us at night. Our enemy gave no warning; the weapon was terrible and malicious: a fungus that spread upon our land, destroyed our similes, and left our metaphors stunted and gnarled. We awoke to a morning that was honey in an old boot and we all felt like we didn't know what.
# #
I had enlisted at the first rumblings of hostilities. I was in training at the time of the declaration of war. I joined my fellows on the parade grounds to hear the words of our famous general, who would lead us in the conflict to come.
The general said to us, "The enemy has us on the spaghetti but we are not yet down for bunting. The enemy is a rancid bar of soap; the enemy is a vile turnip. Against all conventions of modern warfare he has resorted to LMW, linguistic and metalogical warfare. The simile fungus is only the first bald attack on our very principles of thought. But we must persevere, for we are the tassels of freedom and the kernels in the jam of liberty. We will crush the enemy like...like..." He paused, a tear rolled down his cheek. "...like we were meant to do," he finished.
Our eyes also glistened at the valor of his speech. We rose to attend to our tasks. We would give the enemy what for.
# #
The enemy enjoyed a natural advantage over us: we had never been good at manipulating languages other than our own. Therefore our initial attempts to retaliate lacked sophistication. Still, we counterattacked with vigor. We seeded enemy nouns with virus. We devised chemicals to defoliate adjectives. Soon our enemies' language became blunt, yet ambiguous.
My own first task is ordinance and supply. In previous wars we hoarded scrap metal and string; we rationed gasoline. Saboteurs attacked our production lines. Radicals attempted to induce terror with bombs in public places. Now we lose whole portions of our syntax. Our metaphysics suffers. Citizens fear the increased entropy of language. Depression often follows aphasia. Some of our people will suicide. My task is to alleviate this. We must find new sources of language, new stores of rhetorical construction. Our linguogeneticists crossbreed languages, in hopes of finding resistant idioms. A Spanish-Yiddish hybrid seems very hardy. Limericks in Urdu are immune to all of the enemies' weapons but prove difficult to work into conversation.
An excited phone call informs me of an important breakthrough. Old pulp detective novels may be processed to yield emergency stocks of simile and metaphor cuttings for grafting purposes. Production can begin immediately.
# #
The war of nerves continues, here far behind the front lines. I watched a scene of heroism this morning. An unexploded anagram bomb was defused by a rookie whose sole past experience consisted of doing double acrostics in the Sunday Times. Above the scene a billboard inveighed, "Destroy all puns! They are the first wedges in an invidious enemy assault!"
I have heard that several virulent rumors have escaped from a special P-4 containment laboratory. The word is that the religious fanatics have infiltrated the telecommunications industry. Telephone stocks plummets. There are claims that subliminal receivers have been found in Mickey Mouse telephones. The Disney Company denies involvement, but is later victim of a stock takeover that is itself a byproduct of complex bargaining between Unisys and BurgerQuick. Telephone repairmen in fast food restaurants come under suspicion for a time, but emergency supplies of anti-fiction and fact substitutes reduce the epidemic to manageable proportions.
# #
I have been transferred to military intelligence. My first assignment (about which I can say little) involved the investigation of a suspected sabotage in the secret ablative dreadnought project. For reasons which are still classified, all work on the dreadnought was to be in Latin. Older Catholics formed the bulk of the workforce. Suspicion has fallen upon a Greek.
# #
This observer is now reporting from the front lines. Conditions have deteriorated baldly. Things are not going well. A new anti-personnel gas has been used; the effect is one involving the destruction of personal initiative and self image. This is accomplished by means of an insidious attack on mood. One of the first symptoms is a loss of the active voice and an over-reliance on transitive verbs. Personal pronouns may slip unnoticed from one's vocabulary. This observer has been temporarily afflicted. One's thoughts and words soon begin to sound like technical reports and bureaucratese, all remnants of humanity deleted, all personality expunged. It is enough to give one the creeps.
# #
The limerick mercenaries have been mobilized. The Gertrude Stein Brigade has returned to active duty. Each new infusion of personnel is but a temporary respite. Casualties are heavy; many are walking wounded unable to speak save word salad and reshuffling of the last words of Dutch Schultz. How much longer must we hold out?
# #
In the dark of night
The haiku commandos came
To light our spirits.
# #
The enemy attacked with metric prose. With anapest and dactyls. They attacked us with rhyme. They attacked us with allusion and alliteration.
Our courage met the challenge. We withstood their short choppy sentences. Our lines held firm even during the attack of the subordinate clauses. We advanced. Their secondary defenses, long involved syntactical constructs, dense, repetitive and redundant (armored with parenthetical commentary) were used in a pincer movement along with a battalion of subjunctive verbs, to protect their exposed flanks and to give their artillery a chance to retreat, during which maneuver numerous booby traps and ambushes were prepared, traps with tempting bait to ensnare the more adventurous and foolhardy of our commanders.
Far too may of these traps found prey. The carnage was appalling.
# #
Into the valley of anastrophe rode the six hundred.
# #
At one point a bee flew by. I could not name its sound. All our precious onomatopoeia had gone for the production of artillery shells and bombs.
"Whoom!" came the sound of shelling in the distance. "Keewang! Rattatatat, Kerblow!" Concussions from the fighting reached my ears like cement blocks in a mixmaster, to use the best simile available to me.
# #
The war may be over soon. We have unleashed a secret weapon, which creates a zone of complete linguistic nothingness. The key element of the weapon is a distillate known as Babel-toxin.
We have commissioned an elite corps of commandos, who think visually rather than verbally. These brave and lonely soldiers are capable of functioning in the Zone: chess players, theoretical physicists and comic book readers. They have penetrated deep into enemy territory. We have severed their supply lines. The enemy is speechless.
# #
With no small joy we have observed the litotes bushes, once more in flower down by the littoral shores of our literal sea.
The attack came upon us at night. Our enemy gave no warning; the weapon was terrible and malicious: a fungus that spread upon our land, destroyed our similes, and left our metaphors stunted and gnarled. We awoke to a morning that was honey in an old boot and we all felt like we didn't know what.
# #
I had enlisted at the first rumblings of hostilities. I was in training at the time of the declaration of war. I joined my fellows on the parade grounds to hear the words of our famous general, who would lead us in the conflict to come.
The general said to us, "The enemy has us on the spaghetti but we are not yet down for bunting. The enemy is a rancid bar of soap; the enemy is a vile turnip. Against all conventions of modern warfare he has resorted to LMW, linguistic and metalogical warfare. The simile fungus is only the first bald attack on our very principles of thought. But we must persevere, for we are the tassels of freedom and the kernels in the jam of liberty. We will crush the enemy like...like..." He paused, a tear rolled down his cheek. "...like we were meant to do," he finished.
Our eyes also glistened at the valor of his speech. We rose to attend to our tasks. We would give the enemy what for.
# #
The enemy enjoyed a natural advantage over us: we had never been good at manipulating languages other than our own. Therefore our initial attempts to retaliate lacked sophistication. Still, we counterattacked with vigor. We seeded enemy nouns with virus. We devised chemicals to defoliate adjectives. Soon our enemies' language became blunt, yet ambiguous.
My own first task is ordinance and supply. In previous wars we hoarded scrap metal and string; we rationed gasoline. Saboteurs attacked our production lines. Radicals attempted to induce terror with bombs in public places. Now we lose whole portions of our syntax. Our metaphysics suffers. Citizens fear the increased entropy of language. Depression often follows aphasia. Some of our people will suicide. My task is to alleviate this. We must find new sources of language, new stores of rhetorical construction. Our linguogeneticists crossbreed languages, in hopes of finding resistant idioms. A Spanish-Yiddish hybrid seems very hardy. Limericks in Urdu are immune to all of the enemies' weapons but prove difficult to work into conversation.
An excited phone call informs me of an important breakthrough. Old pulp detective novels may be processed to yield emergency stocks of simile and metaphor cuttings for grafting purposes. Production can begin immediately.
# #
The war of nerves continues, here far behind the front lines. I watched a scene of heroism this morning. An unexploded anagram bomb was defused by a rookie whose sole past experience consisted of doing double acrostics in the Sunday Times. Above the scene a billboard inveighed, "Destroy all puns! They are the first wedges in an invidious enemy assault!"
I have heard that several virulent rumors have escaped from a special P-4 containment laboratory. The word is that the religious fanatics have infiltrated the telecommunications industry. Telephone stocks plummets. There are claims that subliminal receivers have been found in Mickey Mouse telephones. The Disney Company denies involvement, but is later victim of a stock takeover that is itself a byproduct of complex bargaining between Unisys and BurgerQuick. Telephone repairmen in fast food restaurants come under suspicion for a time, but emergency supplies of anti-fiction and fact substitutes reduce the epidemic to manageable proportions.
# #
I have been transferred to military intelligence. My first assignment (about which I can say little) involved the investigation of a suspected sabotage in the secret ablative dreadnought project. For reasons which are still classified, all work on the dreadnought was to be in Latin. Older Catholics formed the bulk of the workforce. Suspicion has fallen upon a Greek.
# #
This observer is now reporting from the front lines. Conditions have deteriorated baldly. Things are not going well. A new anti-personnel gas has been used; the effect is one involving the destruction of personal initiative and self image. This is accomplished by means of an insidious attack on mood. One of the first symptoms is a loss of the active voice and an over-reliance on transitive verbs. Personal pronouns may slip unnoticed from one's vocabulary. This observer has been temporarily afflicted. One's thoughts and words soon begin to sound like technical reports and bureaucratese, all remnants of humanity deleted, all personality expunged. It is enough to give one the creeps.
# #
The limerick mercenaries have been mobilized. The Gertrude Stein Brigade has returned to active duty. Each new infusion of personnel is but a temporary respite. Casualties are heavy; many are walking wounded unable to speak save word salad and reshuffling of the last words of Dutch Schultz. How much longer must we hold out?
# #
In the dark of night
The haiku commandos came
To light our spirits.
# #
The enemy attacked with metric prose. With anapest and dactyls. They attacked us with rhyme. They attacked us with allusion and alliteration.
Our courage met the challenge. We withstood their short choppy sentences. Our lines held firm even during the attack of the subordinate clauses. We advanced. Their secondary defenses, long involved syntactical constructs, dense, repetitive and redundant (armored with parenthetical commentary) were used in a pincer movement along with a battalion of subjunctive verbs, to protect their exposed flanks and to give their artillery a chance to retreat, during which maneuver numerous booby traps and ambushes were prepared, traps with tempting bait to ensnare the more adventurous and foolhardy of our commanders.
Far too may of these traps found prey. The carnage was appalling.
# #
Into the valley of anastrophe rode the six hundred.
# #
At one point a bee flew by. I could not name its sound. All our precious onomatopoeia had gone for the production of artillery shells and bombs.
"Whoom!" came the sound of shelling in the distance. "Keewang! Rattatatat, Kerblow!" Concussions from the fighting reached my ears like cement blocks in a mixmaster, to use the best simile available to me.
# #
The war may be over soon. We have unleashed a secret weapon, which creates a zone of complete linguistic nothingness. The key element of the weapon is a distillate known as Babel-toxin.
We have commissioned an elite corps of commandos, who think visually rather than verbally. These brave and lonely soldiers are capable of functioning in the Zone: chess players, theoretical physicists and comic book readers. They have penetrated deep into enemy territory. We have severed their supply lines. The enemy is speechless.
# #
With no small joy we have observed the litotes bushes, once more in flower down by the littoral shores of our literal sea.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Hypermodern
When I was nine I won a friendly chess game at the downtown Nashville YMCA with a guy I was told had once placed second in the city chess tournament. I have no idea if that was true; certainly he shouldn’t have fallen for my strategy, which was a variation of a fool’s mate (and not nearly as quick as one). Assuming that the whole thing was as advertised, I assume that he just wasn’t paying attention to a minor game with a young kid. I will say that afterwards he was surprised and annoyed enough for me to doubt he purposefully threw the game.
Hypermodernism was a chess movement that came to prominence after the end of the first World War. It would probably have been called Modernism (as was so much around that time) except for the fact that its predecessor, a set of rules based on the ideas of the great chess pioneer Wilhelm Steinitz and popularized by the German Siegbert Tarrasch, was called both Classical and Modern chess, thereby really hogging the central real estate in the name department.
That’s what Steinitz’s ideas were all about, as it happens: hogging real estate, most specifically the center of the chess board. Pawns advance down the center, protected by knights and bishops in strong positions. Grind it out, don’t make mistakes, and win by not losing. If Vince Lombardi had played chess, that’s the kind he would have played. Also, if you happened to be stuck with Black, you were pretty much doomed to playing defense.
The Hypermodernists were full of the revolutionary spirit of the times, guys like Richard Réti, Aron Nimzowitsch, Ksawery Tartakower, and Gyula Breyer, all hailing from central Europe (where the aliens landed, to judge by the impact other Hungarians, Austrians, etc. had on the sciences at about the same time). They thought that chess had become boring and they were going to shake it up.
They didn’t dispute that the center of the board was important; they just thought you could control it by some method other than stomping all over it. So they inventing asymmetrical strategies with cool names like the Bogo-Indian defense and the King’s Indian attack, many of which involved deliberate trades of knight/bishop. All the while, the idea was to allow the attacker (generally White) to grab territory, but with a weakness in the attack structure that could be exploited by the more wide ranging pieces.
Part of the reason why it worked was because it was new. When you follow a strategy that is unfamiliar to your opponent, you start with a leg up. In fact, in the 1930s, the Russian chess clique expanded this idea to a more or less deliberate strategy. They played with an eye toward tipping the game into some unusual position that they’d previously studied intensively, but which their opponents almost certainly had not.
It’s sometimes said that chess was designed to sharpen the wits for the battlefield, and the analogies are certainly there. Prior to the Classical/Modern style was the Romantic, which I’ve seen referred to as “swashbuckling,” more than a bit like forms of warfare before it got all tech-y. So grind-it-out Classical is like trench warfare, and you can stretch the metaphor to even include Hypermodern, with the power pieces like tanks and air power.
I’m sure it’s a crappy analogy. I haven’t played serious chess in years, and never at anything like an advanced level. But the more general analogy bears some further thought. It’s easy for any “revolutionary” or “radical” in the early stages, where none of his opponents are expecting his strategies. So he rolls right over the opposition, who blink a few times and try to figure out what hit them. Then, as the victories mount, the opposition builds, but more importantly, it adapts, and analyzes, and waits for an opportunity.
Hitler frequently overruled his generals, and at the beginning, it looked like genius, partly because no one was expecting it, and partly because the nature of warfare had changed with the new weaponry. But eventually he got himself locked into a grind-it-out bloodbath with the Russians, and that was the end of him. The new weapons didn’t help much at all when it came down to just swapping men, even at premium exchange rates.
Politics is war carried out by other means and the same rules apply. You can break the rules and win for a while just because you’ve broken them. But eventually, either the reasons for the old rules present themselves, or the new thing becomes the new rules. Either way, you don’t take anyone by surprise any more.
Hypermodernism was a chess movement that came to prominence after the end of the first World War. It would probably have been called Modernism (as was so much around that time) except for the fact that its predecessor, a set of rules based on the ideas of the great chess pioneer Wilhelm Steinitz and popularized by the German Siegbert Tarrasch, was called both Classical and Modern chess, thereby really hogging the central real estate in the name department.
That’s what Steinitz’s ideas were all about, as it happens: hogging real estate, most specifically the center of the chess board. Pawns advance down the center, protected by knights and bishops in strong positions. Grind it out, don’t make mistakes, and win by not losing. If Vince Lombardi had played chess, that’s the kind he would have played. Also, if you happened to be stuck with Black, you were pretty much doomed to playing defense.
The Hypermodernists were full of the revolutionary spirit of the times, guys like Richard Réti, Aron Nimzowitsch, Ksawery Tartakower, and Gyula Breyer, all hailing from central Europe (where the aliens landed, to judge by the impact other Hungarians, Austrians, etc. had on the sciences at about the same time). They thought that chess had become boring and they were going to shake it up.
They didn’t dispute that the center of the board was important; they just thought you could control it by some method other than stomping all over it. So they inventing asymmetrical strategies with cool names like the Bogo-Indian defense and the King’s Indian attack, many of which involved deliberate trades of knight/bishop. All the while, the idea was to allow the attacker (generally White) to grab territory, but with a weakness in the attack structure that could be exploited by the more wide ranging pieces.
Part of the reason why it worked was because it was new. When you follow a strategy that is unfamiliar to your opponent, you start with a leg up. In fact, in the 1930s, the Russian chess clique expanded this idea to a more or less deliberate strategy. They played with an eye toward tipping the game into some unusual position that they’d previously studied intensively, but which their opponents almost certainly had not.
It’s sometimes said that chess was designed to sharpen the wits for the battlefield, and the analogies are certainly there. Prior to the Classical/Modern style was the Romantic, which I’ve seen referred to as “swashbuckling,” more than a bit like forms of warfare before it got all tech-y. So grind-it-out Classical is like trench warfare, and you can stretch the metaphor to even include Hypermodern, with the power pieces like tanks and air power.
I’m sure it’s a crappy analogy. I haven’t played serious chess in years, and never at anything like an advanced level. But the more general analogy bears some further thought. It’s easy for any “revolutionary” or “radical” in the early stages, where none of his opponents are expecting his strategies. So he rolls right over the opposition, who blink a few times and try to figure out what hit them. Then, as the victories mount, the opposition builds, but more importantly, it adapts, and analyzes, and waits for an opportunity.
Hitler frequently overruled his generals, and at the beginning, it looked like genius, partly because no one was expecting it, and partly because the nature of warfare had changed with the new weaponry. But eventually he got himself locked into a grind-it-out bloodbath with the Russians, and that was the end of him. The new weapons didn’t help much at all when it came down to just swapping men, even at premium exchange rates.
Politics is war carried out by other means and the same rules apply. You can break the rules and win for a while just because you’ve broken them. But eventually, either the reasons for the old rules present themselves, or the new thing becomes the new rules. Either way, you don’t take anyone by surprise any more.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Electric Cars
I haven’t seen “Who Killed the Electric Car?” a documentary directed by Chris Paine about the EV1, a General Motors electric automobile that was withdrawn from (limited) production in the late 1990s, after a California Air Resources Board rule mandating some “zero emission vehicles” was rescinded. That doesn't mean I don't have opinions about the matter, of course.
There’s been a fair amount written about the entire affair, and I’ll only add the point that I suspect that one major factor was never addressed by the filmmakers or anyone else. In every large organization, the major decisions at the top have more to do with personal infighting amongst the managers than anything external. There were people pushing the project, for a variety of reasons, including some who wanted it sabotaged from the beginning, and they got their way. To whatever extent it was a con job designed to demonstrate that there was no market for electric vehicles only underscores the point. The GM divisions that were making big bucks selling gas guzzlers were never going to let an alternative vision get a fair hearing; the eventual fate of the Saturn is a good demonstration of the phenomenon.
Nevertheless, we do have some electric cars on the road now, though they are called “hybrids” and they burn gasoline in a motor to generate electricity that then runs electric motors to power the drive train. Some versions of the hybrid have the gasoline engine connected directly to the drive train and use the electric motors to add power when needed, and to recharge the batteries when the drive demands are less than the gasoline engine output.
A major part of the deal with hybrids is to greatly narrow the operating conditions of the gasoline engine. Under constant, optimized load conditions, you can finely tune the engine performance to maximize fuel economy and minimize emissions of pollutants. The other secret of any electric engine is that it can use “regenerative braking,” i.e., when the car slows (or if you’re going downhill), the electric motors become electric generators and you can recapture and store a substantial amount of the vehicle’s kinetic energy back into the batteries.
Having the internal combustion (IC) motor available finesses the major drawback of electric vehicles, limited range. Typically, EVs only manage less than 100 miles on a full charge, and take substantial time to recharge (1-15 hrs). Hybrids have the full range of gasoline powered vehicles.
The next obvious step in the development pathway is the “pluggable” hybrid, which allows the vehicle to be brought up to full charge from an external electrical source (and there would be a larger battery pack, bringing the thing closer to the true electric vehicle in electric storage). For a substantial number of commuters, the IC engine would seldom need to be engaged; one fellow who has “hacked” his Japanese hybrid claims that his overall fuel efficiency is over 100 MPG, though that doesn’t take into account the fuel burned to produce the pluggable power. (Actually, I seem to recall that he has home solar power panels, so he’s just the greenest of the green, isn’t he?).
Some environmentalists (and some fake environmentalists who carry water for the energy industry status quo), argue that electric vehicles merely shift the power generation (and pollution) elsewhere. That ignores the fact that IC engines operate at a pretty low thermodynamic fuel efficiency (the efficiency of converting the heat of combustion of the fuel to motive force, ignoring losses in the drive train), generally around 25%, though highly optimized, high compression engines can exceed 30%. By contrast, ordinary steam turbines generally start at 40% efficiency, and combined cycle and other tricks make more modern large stationary plants as much as 55% efficient.
It’s also considerably easier to manage pollution control from a single, large point source (whether the regulatory process manages to accomplish this is another story), and there is some hope that such things as geological sequestration of combustion CO2 might reduce the greenhouse gas emission from such facilities as well. Such tricks are pretty well out of the question for mobile vehicles.
Then there is the matter of the impending changeover from fossil fuel driven electric power generation to renewable sources. Wind power is already economically competitive to fossil fuels in many circumstances, and will become more so as the greenhouse gas "externalities” (economist-speak for “beggar thy neighbor”), are rationalized. As a scientist and engineer, I’m also a fan of nuclear power; I just don’t trust our current industrial oligarchy to do it in anything like a safe and sane manner.
There is also the photovoltaic option. The overall field and the statistics behind it are pretty slippery, but it looks like the cost per peak watt for photovoltaics have been halving at something like 5-10 year intervals, while the install capacity has been going up more dramatically, as each price reduction opens up a larger market. Also, in contrast to the U.S., Europe and Japan have been using regulatory action, subsidies, and guaranteed market tactics to encourage alternative energy, rather than discourage them. (In the U.S., a giant game of “crack the whip” has some governmental entities attempting to encourage alternate energy sources, while other entities penalize them, which is a good way to generate paralysis and wasted development efforts).
If you put photovoltaic cells on an automobile, you don’t get a “solar car” in the sense of being able to run on sunlight alone, but (the last time I did the calcs anyway), you do get the equivalent of about 10-20 miles per day of solar driving in the sunbelt areas of the country. That’s not trivial in terms of oil consumption; on average, it could reduce the fuel consumption of a hybrid by around 15-25%. If you’re already driving to work on the charge you got the night before, you’re down to needing maybe a half-gallon of gasoline per day on your daily commute.
That looks like the natural channel for the technology to follow, but there are plenty of things that can screw up a lovely vision of the future, including those who just plain want to keep everything “under control.”
There’s been a fair amount written about the entire affair, and I’ll only add the point that I suspect that one major factor was never addressed by the filmmakers or anyone else. In every large organization, the major decisions at the top have more to do with personal infighting amongst the managers than anything external. There were people pushing the project, for a variety of reasons, including some who wanted it sabotaged from the beginning, and they got their way. To whatever extent it was a con job designed to demonstrate that there was no market for electric vehicles only underscores the point. The GM divisions that were making big bucks selling gas guzzlers were never going to let an alternative vision get a fair hearing; the eventual fate of the Saturn is a good demonstration of the phenomenon.
Nevertheless, we do have some electric cars on the road now, though they are called “hybrids” and they burn gasoline in a motor to generate electricity that then runs electric motors to power the drive train. Some versions of the hybrid have the gasoline engine connected directly to the drive train and use the electric motors to add power when needed, and to recharge the batteries when the drive demands are less than the gasoline engine output.
A major part of the deal with hybrids is to greatly narrow the operating conditions of the gasoline engine. Under constant, optimized load conditions, you can finely tune the engine performance to maximize fuel economy and minimize emissions of pollutants. The other secret of any electric engine is that it can use “regenerative braking,” i.e., when the car slows (or if you’re going downhill), the electric motors become electric generators and you can recapture and store a substantial amount of the vehicle’s kinetic energy back into the batteries.
Having the internal combustion (IC) motor available finesses the major drawback of electric vehicles, limited range. Typically, EVs only manage less than 100 miles on a full charge, and take substantial time to recharge (1-15 hrs). Hybrids have the full range of gasoline powered vehicles.
The next obvious step in the development pathway is the “pluggable” hybrid, which allows the vehicle to be brought up to full charge from an external electrical source (and there would be a larger battery pack, bringing the thing closer to the true electric vehicle in electric storage). For a substantial number of commuters, the IC engine would seldom need to be engaged; one fellow who has “hacked” his Japanese hybrid claims that his overall fuel efficiency is over 100 MPG, though that doesn’t take into account the fuel burned to produce the pluggable power. (Actually, I seem to recall that he has home solar power panels, so he’s just the greenest of the green, isn’t he?).
Some environmentalists (and some fake environmentalists who carry water for the energy industry status quo), argue that electric vehicles merely shift the power generation (and pollution) elsewhere. That ignores the fact that IC engines operate at a pretty low thermodynamic fuel efficiency (the efficiency of converting the heat of combustion of the fuel to motive force, ignoring losses in the drive train), generally around 25%, though highly optimized, high compression engines can exceed 30%. By contrast, ordinary steam turbines generally start at 40% efficiency, and combined cycle and other tricks make more modern large stationary plants as much as 55% efficient.
It’s also considerably easier to manage pollution control from a single, large point source (whether the regulatory process manages to accomplish this is another story), and there is some hope that such things as geological sequestration of combustion CO2 might reduce the greenhouse gas emission from such facilities as well. Such tricks are pretty well out of the question for mobile vehicles.
Then there is the matter of the impending changeover from fossil fuel driven electric power generation to renewable sources. Wind power is already economically competitive to fossil fuels in many circumstances, and will become more so as the greenhouse gas "externalities” (economist-speak for “beggar thy neighbor”), are rationalized. As a scientist and engineer, I’m also a fan of nuclear power; I just don’t trust our current industrial oligarchy to do it in anything like a safe and sane manner.
There is also the photovoltaic option. The overall field and the statistics behind it are pretty slippery, but it looks like the cost per peak watt for photovoltaics have been halving at something like 5-10 year intervals, while the install capacity has been going up more dramatically, as each price reduction opens up a larger market. Also, in contrast to the U.S., Europe and Japan have been using regulatory action, subsidies, and guaranteed market tactics to encourage alternative energy, rather than discourage them. (In the U.S., a giant game of “crack the whip” has some governmental entities attempting to encourage alternate energy sources, while other entities penalize them, which is a good way to generate paralysis and wasted development efforts).
If you put photovoltaic cells on an automobile, you don’t get a “solar car” in the sense of being able to run on sunlight alone, but (the last time I did the calcs anyway), you do get the equivalent of about 10-20 miles per day of solar driving in the sunbelt areas of the country. That’s not trivial in terms of oil consumption; on average, it could reduce the fuel consumption of a hybrid by around 15-25%. If you’re already driving to work on the charge you got the night before, you’re down to needing maybe a half-gallon of gasoline per day on your daily commute.
That looks like the natural channel for the technology to follow, but there are plenty of things that can screw up a lovely vision of the future, including those who just plain want to keep everything “under control.”
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