Friday, March 31, 2006

Argumentum Ad Verecundiam




In the process of finding a selection of J S Mill reading, came across this fallacy navigator, which in itself is an alluring expression, even if you can't be bothered to trawl through all the permutations!

In The Ethics of Identity Kwame Anthony Appiah:

My focus on Mill isn't by way of argumentum ad verecundiam; I don't suppose (nor did he) that his opinions represented the last word. But none before him-and, I am inclined to add, none since-charted out the terrain as clearly and as carefully as he did. We may cultivate a different garden, but we do so on soil that he fenced in and terraced.






Thursday, March 30, 2006

Some languages do not have a word for emotion




This little post

Linguistics and the Experience of Emotions


in Into the Void, is enlightening and at the same time puzzling. Why one culture can create so many shades of meaning for a word, while another be so restrictive, is not clear. Surely Tahitian has as as rich an emotional life as Englishmen with their massive vocab, and why have Eskimos got many words for snow?


Monday, March 27, 2006

SHOWCASE The Middle Stage






The Middle Stage




is a beautful looking weblog written by Chandras Choudray. Where it has been secreting itself away who knows, but it has many interesting, substantial posts, which anyone interested in literature and the arts would find worthwile reading.

The latest post covers the artist Amrita Sher-Gil. Each post is usually such a cornucopia.

Javier Marias's Written Lives
, written on 12 March 2006, dealing with Marias' Written Lives (and a mention of RLS's essays which is on the list after Travels with a Donkey, itself essayistic and which, half-way through, has me in its spell...), finishes with a subject which I can't get enough of. Three links. [1] Robert Chandler (interviewed by Marke Thwaite, RSB) [2] "Novels Found in Translation" by J. Peder Zane and [3] "The Mysteries of Translation" by Wendy Lesser.



Friday, March 24, 2006

White on Black by Ruben Gallego






white on black


Adam Mars-Jones Guardian review


Complete Review's review plus other review summaries (and links)

Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International literature

Robert Skidelsky in Newstatesman
White on Black belongs to a distinctively Russian genre, with no exact equivalent in the west. It is not reportage, but neither is it fiction. Perhaps the best word for it would be "witness". It is divided up into a series of short stories, each recounting a single incident. These stories make no claim to historical truth. Their target is essential truth - pravda. They are icons of suffering and resilience, cruelty and kindness. This has nothing to do with "literature" in the western sense, with its omnivorous curiosity and surface polish, but it has a beauty of its own. Lovers of the later Tolstoy and of Solzhenitsyn will appreciate its value.
Weblog The Middle Stage review

Willing and Disabled Moscow Times
Book cover photo of young and further down adult

profile of Ruben Gallego by Kate kellaway

profile

In searching for these reviews came across these two chess games:

Joan Fluvia-Poyatos vs. Ruben Gallego

Ruben Gallego vs Gerard Welling

...


In the middle of the night I listened to one episode and was drawn back to "Cancer Ward".

This hits the button for me and is a great help as I read the Marxist stuff.
Rejecting the ideology of his youth, Solzhenitsyn came to believe that the struggle between good and evil cannot be resolved among parties, classes or doctrines, but is waged within the individual human heart. This Tolstoian view and search for Christian morality was considered radical in the ideological atmosphere of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s. Solzhenitsyn assumed the role of an observer as the great 19th-century Russian writers who prided themselves on their truthful depiction of the society. He became a chronicler, witness whose own experiences are part of the way to approach truth and judge. Thus he could shift from a "neutral" third-person narrative to a direct transcription of the unuttered thoughts of his protagonists, use kaleidoscopic sequences of events and numerous personal testimonies, and extrapolate from individual case histories. "Where can I read about us? Will that be only in a hundred years?" says a woman in Cancer Ward.

Also reminds me something Leonard Cheshire said : '..the little things...not the big', though what the exact words were I can't remember.

This on Cancer Ward from a medical perspective




The Philosphy Steamer just out of port




The Philosophy Steamer

By

Leslie Chamberlain


Obviously a must : have been reading a few Trotskyist weblogs of late (Dave's Part,etc.), mostly in connection with Blair's Dosh, which have led me to a series of fascinating historical essays such as one, which was not meant to be published, by Victor Serge.

I have Men in prison (1930) and Birth of our Power (1931), also seriously yellowing on my shelves, but have never gone beyond flicking through them every five years or so, like an expert card shuffler, hoping for a great paragraph or phrase to set me off.

After
Darkness at Noon, you are spoilt: => { 2 } { 3 [wikipedia] } { 4 }

wiki:Victor Serge

Robert Louis Stevenson




A death has meant the acquisition of a few dozen books, among them a school edition of Travels with a Donkey in the Cervennes, edn. James Brodie Denmark Place WC2, undated. It immediatley appealed to me - I knew I had to read it - because its Southern France, which I have a special fondness for, because there is a little map in the back, and because its only 96 pages long including map and glossary (quite funny: not Stevenson's, I guess).

The map here appears to be a simpification of the one that appeared in the 'primary' editions, with stylised topography, which I did find in Google but which I can't find again. The simplified modern version excludes side panel which shows the dates he reached each destination (guess, again, they are 'educational'/'interpretational' additions and not RSL's).

After reading 10-15 pages, living it and being shocked by his cruelty to his donkey, Modestine, which no modern travel writer would admit to. The man who walked across Afghanistan with the dog comes to mind, and several other rather pragmatic approaches to huskies at ends of expeditions, and so forth.

Turned to some research to find a wiki entry (not a spoiler but it does describe the journey in brief), and this e-book for anyone wishing to have a go. Published in 1879 (wiki:1879 in literature)


At the bottom of the wiki:

In the John Steinbeck novel The Pastures of Heaven, one of the characters regards Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes as one of the single greatest works of English literature and eventually names his infant son Robert Louis. Later on, Steinbeck may have been inspired by Stevenson in choosing to title his account of his cross-country voyage with a gray-haired poodle in the 1960's, Travels With Charley: In Search of America.

Though I condemn myself at regular intervals for keeping so many cuttings, one which popped up in a frenzied cull which happened by chance at about the same time as aquiring this RSL's book: a Caroline Moore January 23 2005 Sunday Telegraph review of 'Robert Louis Stevenson' by Claire Harman (Harper Collins, 533pp), helps me put a few questions to bed:

  • Born 1850
  • 'ill health gained stevenson a dispensation from responsibility and a ticket to travel, in search of health' [CMo]
  • 1876 met Fanny Osbourne
  • Married Fanny 1880
Don't read it before the book if you want to keep the fate of Modestine completely in the hands of the orginal author, but James Henderson, in Travel Intelligence, writes about the RSL Cevennes trip, mentioning a few facts which will not spoil reading the story.

P.S. If you have not heard of the transhumance trails wiki:tranhumance
suggests to me how RSL might have ended up chosing this route in particular: a question I asked as soon as I looked at the map.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

12 Books Which Changed The World




Melvyn Bragg 's soon-to-be-aired ITV programme will include


• The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin, 1859)

• The first rule book of the Football Association (1863)

• William Shakespeare's First Folio (1623)

• Principia Mathematica (Isaac Newton, 1687)

• The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith, 1776)

• William Wilberforce's Commons speech, 12 May, 1789

• King James Bible (1611)

• Patent specification for Arkwright's spinning machine (1769)

• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792)

• Experimental Research in Electricity (Michael Faraday, 1855)

• Married Love (Marie Stopes, 1918)

• Magna Carta (1215)


To which I as an Englishman of a certain age am bound to parrot like an imbecile:

Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain? Brave Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and close the boozers at half past ten! Is all this to be forgotton? My friends, it is not John Harrison Peabody who is on trial here today but the fair name of British justice, and I ask you to send that poor boy back to the loving arms of his poor white-haired old mother a free man! I thank you!

Anthony Aloysius St. John Handcock



Hancock's Half Hour No. 41 “twelve Angry Men”


Bless! This person has transcribed the whole C[h]arter but clearly been effected by listening to H-ancock :


I confess to not having read Magna Carta until just now. If indeed that was what I was reading and not something else.

Any mention of its name would probably pass by the minds of the more senior members of the current American Administration, as would the name Thomas Paine, who must be a contender for the 12. I like this Vindication of Thomas Paine by Robert G Ingersoll written in 1877.

One or two, at the mention of angry men in the Galton and Simpson script, might twig the great American film starring Henry Fonda.

Magna Carta probably has had a big effect on people, the world, since its writing, but few realise it.


A commenter in Samizdata, quotes 1066 and All That:


Magna Charter...was invented by the Barons on a desert island in the Thames called Ganymede. By congregating there, armed to the teeth, the Barons compelled John to sign the Magna Charter, which said:

1. That no one should be put to death, save for some reason - (except the Common People).


2. That everyone should be free - (except the Common People).


3. That everything should be of the same weight and measure throughout the realm - (except the Common People).


4. That the Courts should be stationary, instead of following a very tiresome medieval official known as the King's Person all over the country.


5. That 'no person should be fined to his utter ruin' - (except the King's Person).


6. That the Barons should not be tried except by a special jury of other Barons who would understand.

Magna Charter was therefore the chief cause of Democracy in England and was therefore a Good Thing for everyone (except the Common People).



to which - in rebutal of all those who say the interweb is worthless - comes a reproachful comment further down about it being Rumymede not Ganymede ! At least with the telephone there is a chance of sensing a touch of irony. Happily, the mishmash of irreconcilable agendas, incommensurability of values, (i), half-truths, misunderstood jokes and simple confusion which are part of normal life are echoed on the interweb.

If you follow the comment stream to the end there, in essence, it is, I suppose.

...

Is there no work which was originally written in a language other than English which could be included in this list? Or is it to be English books which changed the world? Fair enough.

...

Kins Collins has made what would seem to be an irrefutable point about mathematics :


I consider mathematics to have a unique and superior place among the sciences, it being the sole human intellectual endevor [sic.], whether art, science, or religion, that is truly cumulative, in the sense that what the ancient Greeks discovered is till valid today.




Sunday, March 19, 2006

Nothing sure except death and taxis?





This all started with this post from 3Quarks, which I hope they don't mind me quoting more than is normal – I highlight a few things.

The basics:

Parataxis is a rhetorical and syntactic arrangement in which clauses are strung together in series, without subordination: We ran, we sang, and we told jokes.

Hypotaxis is the syntactic subordination of one clause to another: As we ran, we sang and told jokes.

Syntax

n.
1.
a. The study of the rules whereby words or other elements of sentence structure are combined to form grammatical sentences.
b. A publication, such as a book, that presents such rules.
c. The pattern of formation of sentences or phrases in a language.
d. Such a pattern in a particular sentence or discourse.
2. Computer Science The rules governing the formation of statements in a programming language.
3.A systematic, orderly arrangement.

[French syntaxe, from Late Latin syntaxis, from Greek suntaxis, from suntassein, to put in order : sun-, syn- + tassein, tag-, to arrange.]


Sorry Syntaxis

Well, Well, Well, Well !

You learn something new every day.
Learn something new every day, you!
Something new you learn every day?
Every new day you learn something.



3QD:

The story starts with a character, played by R. Kelly, who wakes up in a woman’s bedroom after a one-night stand and immediately has to hide in the closet as the husband arrives home unexpectedly. From there, the R. Kelly persona morphs into two or maybe three semi-distinct characters: the character in the story, the singer of the song, and the meta-narrator who is sometimes also to be found hanging out in other closets all around town. The story then immediately splits into several more complicated sub-plots, all of which end up being interconnected in various streams of adultery, deceit, sex, and, violence. So, the material is good (I would mention something here about the guy who comes out of the kitchen cabinet but you really need to experience that moment for yourself).
...
Alan Fishbone, who runs the Intensive Latin Program at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York and has often had occasion to think about how language works. He once remarked to me that there is nothing but syntax, only syntax exists. He was in an extreme mood, and the comment has the ring of exaggeration to which Fishbone occasionally succumbs ... The comment, however, stuck with me. He meant, basically, that semantics gets you nowhere. Meaning comes out of the arrangement of words, not out of the individual meanings of individual words. There’s a perfectly respectable school for this type of ‘meaning holism’ among philosophers of language, but it somehow seemed more impressive coming from someone who’d gotten there solely in long, dark nights’ labors with impenetrable sentences in Tacitus that suddenly revealed themselves as if in a magical flash. Syntax is like that, he said, like some weird kind of magic with language.
Pushing this a little bit further (indulge me for a moment), if it’s true that it all comes down to syntax, then you could also say that human thought can be divided into two basic categories, paratactic and hypotactic. They are the two most elemental ways of putting thought together. In paratactic arrangement, you just keep adding something more. The greatest ally to parataxis is the conjunction. Such and such happened and then such and such happened after that, and next was a little episode of this and that, and then it all came to a head with this particular series of events, and then after that a whole new thing started. That’s pretty much how parataxis works. Epic poetry tends to unfold in parataxis and no one did it more paratactically than Homer. It just keeps coming, line after line, thought after thought, event after event. There’s barely a subordinate clause to be found in the Iliad or the Odyssey. Parataxis works, in a sense, in real time. It unfolds as experience unfolds, in a narrative line. It’s thick with the relentless forward push of lived temporality.


And then he ate the apple...

John Mullan analyses Underworld by Don DeLillo. Week two: parataxis


3QD continues:

Hypotactic arrangement, by contrast, nestles thoughts within thoughts, steps to the side, qualifies, alters, and modifies. It has the structure of reflection and argument rather than that of lived experience. It is thus no accident that when one of the earliest Greek philosophers, Parmenides, wanted to appropriate the dactylic hexameter of epic verse for his complicated ontological argument about the necessary logical structure of all that is, he dropped the parataxis. Parmenides’ poem, despite its first-glance resemblance to epic poetry, is a mess of complicated hypotaxis. The thing is, you can’t really choose one over the other; parataxis or hypotaxis. It doesn’t make any sense. That would be like saying that Homer is better than Parmenides or vice versa. They’re both great, they’re both doing amazing things. But when you start analyzing it you realize that they’re doing completely different things. Parmenides is messing around with the very structure of language, going inside of it in order to pull out inferences about the logical structure of Being. Crazy, maybe, but somebody had to see where that would go. Homer is riding on a sea of language, completely comfortable in it, surrounded by it, happily willfully drowning inside it. Homer doesn’t even say things like “I ask the Muse to help me sing such and such” like some of the later epic poets do. He just says “Muse, sing,” as if the difference between Homer, the Muse, and language itself is swallowed up in the great gush of the telling. By the end of the first few lines of the Iliad you are so much inside the narrative that there is no time to sort anything out. You just have to keep moving forward, adding more and more layers of experience. I always thought that Matthew Arnold got it right when he advised those attempting to translate Homer that, "he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas."

Now, I'm not saying that R. Kelly is Homer. Trapped in the Closet will not be studied and revered by armies of scholars three thousand years from now (though you never know). But I am trying to say something about the power of parataxis. In that, at least, Homer and R. Kelly share something. There's an amazing feature to the Trapped in the Closet DVD where R. Kelly gives his commentary to the episodes as he's watching them. This should be the hypotactic moment where Kelly busts open the immediacy of the narrative and analyzes it, breaks it down, fills it with parenthesis and reflection, etc. But he can't do it. He doesn't think that way. So, basically, he simply ends up telling you the exact same story he is singing on the screen. He's paratactic all the way, baby. It's his only register. He has nothing to say about the story whatsoever except to reiterate it. That is goddamn amazing to me. It's like he's a traveling Rhetor from the sixth century BC to whom the very idea of 'commentary' as we generally think of it is completely foreign. When I watched that DVD commentary I was truly sold. People like R. Kelly don't get produced all that often. I'm a changed man.



Definitions

Parataxis: Dictionary.com {1} What is parataxis? {2} Wiki : parataxis {3} {4}

Two examples in the wiki, one from The Pickwick Papers, the other from Beckett.


Richard Lanham

"placing side by side," or "clauses or phrases [or lexias] arranged independently (a coordinate, rather than a subordinate, construction), sometimes without... the customary connectives"

Everything2.com
When one subject phrase refers back to another one, without any grammatical indication that it does so. Similar to apposition. Example: "The lamb of God, the saviour, died."
In the above sentence, it is clear by their position in the sentence that "the lamb of God," and 'the saviour" refer to the same person.

Parataxis vs. Hypotaxis

Ref.

The Latin terms coordination and subordination are calques on the Greek terms parataxis and hypotaxis.


Syntax {1} {2}



Juxtaposing paratactic and syntactic

Hypotaxis & parataxis: Image-based and narrative-based poetry

Ezra Pound:

Gentildonna
She passed and left no quiver in the veins, who now
Moving among the trees, and clinging in the air she severed,
Fanning the grass she walked on then, endures:
Grey olive leaves beneath a rain-cold sky.



Poetry, parataxis, syntaxis

essay : From the Pens of “Leaping” Poets: Parataxis as a “Leap” Between Robert Bly and Wallace Stevens

Patricia Rae, in her essay “Bloody Battle-Flags and Cloudy Days: The Experience of Metaphor in Pound and Stevens,” introduces parataxis, the “method of ‘presenting’ materials, side-by-side, without commenting definitively on their relation to one another,” as a foundational element in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Rae quotes Stevens in saying that parataxis offers an “ambiguity that is so favorable to the poetic mind.” The poet Robert Bly is likewise interested in ambiguous associations in poetry and makes this known in his book, Leaping Poetry. He develops the idea of “leaping,” a quick and imaginative form of association that “increases the excitement of the poetry” (Leaping Poetry 4, hereafter LP). The idea in this essay is that Rae’s notion of parataxis in Stevens’ poetry is similar to, if not the same as, Bly’s notion of “leaping.” The difference between the two theories is one of perspective; it is the difference between writing about poetry as a poet and writing about poetry as a critic.

Armdeep Singh blogs Notes on Parataxis








Quot homines, tot sententiae




Please stop trying to raise my awareness, by Sam Leith in the Telegraph caught my attention because of attempts to tease out the differences between character and personality. This has become important in writing a character I was creating. I'm not the only one trying to separate the two:

We often use the words personality and character interchangeably to describe ourselves and others. However, these words are not synonymous; rather they indicate two distinct, yet related attributes of being. Webster defines personality as ‘the quality or state of being a person,’ and character as ‘the complex of mental and ethical traits marking and often individualizing a person.’ According to Webster, personality is merely the state of existing! Though we often use the word to indicate specific behavioral traits and preferences of a person, personality itself is inherent to being alive and conscious. What follows is that character is the manifestation of these traits. In other words, we have personality by virtue of being, but we understand ourselves and others as individual conscious persons through character. That means that character can influence personality, but personality is unchanging.

Dictionary definition number 2 exemplifies the problem.

My yellowing copy of Derek Wright's The Psychology of Moral Behaviour, highlights the problem of everyday usage vs. technical.

Wright explains:

The concept of character overlaps so much with that of personality that the two are often used interchangeably. They are both equally abstract and general...character can be defined as those attitudes and dispositions within an individual which relate to the behaviour that is the subject of moral evaluation in his society. It is personality viewed from the point of view of moral rules.


Character is defined not so much through an inventry of actions performed, as by a description of the principles that give coherence and meaning to an individual's behaviour, and of the relatively enduring dispositions and motivations that underly it.
....

Leith uses the word sententiae. Another word which is explicable (if you lack Latin) through context and a partial etymology. Sententiae has its roots in sentence but actually means adage or aphorism.

Sentence has four meanings as a noun including (arch.) : a maxim.

So Leith could have thoroughly confused us by writing, And though Mr Hu's little list of sentances may seem quaint at first, rather than, And, though Mr Hu's little list of sententiae may seem quaint at first.

Websters-on-line puts sententiae's useage frequency at 9:100,000,000

I didn't have this one to hand, but I expect (this is the one that pops up repeatedly in search engines) he was alluding to: Quot homines, tot sententiae: Many men, many minds. Translated less tersely as: there are as many opinions as there are men.

...

My fascination with etymology is at odds with my great ignorance of the niceties of grammer. Only yesterday I was taking a worthwhile and rewarding lesson from Language Log on adjectives and adverbs. I shall be going back for more.


Remember those diagrams that teachers used to help association? Two columns of words which you were expected to connect by joining pairs, and on which the scallywag of the class would always draw a series of lines criss-crossing the no man's land between making sure they never quite touched any of the words !



Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Celestine by Gillian Tindall



As a biology student I became fond of mosses and leafy liverworts. The fun bit: finding a rare species in some rocky crevice. These plants have an uncanny ability to revivify from dry. The usual procedure is to build up a reference set by putting identified samples in paper envelopes made of a specially folded sheet of paper. If a rather difficult to identify specimen crops up this collection is used for comparison. A few shreads of a dessicated specimen dropped into a spot of water under a microscope will twist and turn back into life, pretty much in the state it had been when first found.

Gillian Tindall has in some ways achieved this with Celestine. It was not for me, however, the woman and her relatives who sprang to life so much as the sense of place and time and the detailed social history. The tough, poor, rural existence. The coming of the railways. The looming war. The inexorability of change.
Chassignoles’s progress from almost medieval isolation in the 19th century to assimilation with the outside world in the 20th.

What would make you pick up this book and what would make you keep reading it?
Would you need to be interested in rural France between 1850 and the First World war?

.....

Echoes from experiences and other books when you read a new one. Things in the bag before reading Celestine: tramping about places just like this in the Never area in the early 70s while staying with the family of my French girlfriend ; camping in the Loire valley; previously reading Le Grand Meaulnes; already knowing something about George Sand, Chopin and Nohant.

One thing I can recall from reading Celestine is descriptions of the cart-tracks, muddy in winter, which meant someone walking from another village (Celestine's suitor, par example) would be splattered in mud when they arrived at the door.

New York Times review by poet and translator W. S. Merwin:

Ms. Tindall's own life and sympathies led her to the village of Chassignolles, south of the Loire in the region known as the Berry, one summer evening ''of unearthly light'' in the 1960's. She ''arrived here by chance, with my husband and our then small son, driving south on minor roads, hesitating before obscure signposts by fields where white Charolais cattle drifted in ghostly herds and mistletoe hung in swags from the trees.'' The village where they stayed that evening lured them back repeatedly, and in 1972 they acquired a cottage there from one Georges Bernadet, who insisted on cultivating the vegetable garden for them for the next 16 years and whose portrait and place in the weave of the village are part of the whole story.

In the village the family became friends with an Australian painter who had come to France as a soldier near the end of World War I and in the days of the liberation after World War II had met a secretary of more or less his own age in Paris, and had begun spending his summers with her in the house her parents had left her in Chassignolles (he spent the rest of the year in England with his wife). The secretary, Zenaide, died before he did, leaving the house to him for his lifetime. When he had closed it up and left for the last time and Zenaide's cousins, her heirs, had taken the contents and sold the place, Ms. Tindall went there to pick up an object that had been promised to her, a footstool with a cat embroidered on it in gros point by Zenaide's grandmother, Celestine. Nothing else in the house was wanted any longer, and the cousins had ''left behind, on a corner of the mantel shelf in the darkened, empty room behind the shutters, a small cardboard case meant to contain those cards that are distributed in pious families to commemorate baptisms, first communions and Masses said for the dead. Perhaps they assumed that cards were what was still in it and therefore, with some half-formed sense of respect or superstition, refrained from putting it on the great garden bonfire which had already consumed so many long-paid bills, so many mildewed cushions, wormy chairs, quilts sticky with moths' eggs and mouse-wrecked packets of sugar.''
....

Chassignolles is situated in the part of France where George Sand lived and wrote, and Sand's evocations of the region are recurring presences in Ms. Tindall's story. The Berry is also the landscape of ''Le Grand Meaulnes,'' by Alain-Fournier, and the schoolmaster of that novel is a faraway colleague of one of Celestine's suitors. The history, as Ms. Tindall has revived it, reminded me of Marguerite Yourcenar's magisterial reconstructions in ''Les Archives du Nord.''


Nohant

Nohant: Department

Chopin at Nohant


"La Mare du Diable", Sand's novel


Sunday, March 12, 2006

neuropschoevolovoblogs

Had kept neuroscience and psychology links in another blog, but this morning, checking mindhacks, it seemed silly not to put them here too. One reason: listening to Radio 4, a piece on mirror cells, which have been a of constant interest to me since learning about them 3-4 years ago, since connected to another subject I read about a lot: empathy.

Mirror cells, as the programme briefly retold, (1) fire when you act or see the action done, (2) are not connected directly to muscles (i.e. there is an inhibition on re-enacting what you see done).

In evolutionary psychological terms, someone posited the individual who had a mutation which giving him or her a mirror cell or cells, having such a distinct advantage over others because of his ability to empathise (N.B. the discovery of mirror cells provided a mechanism for empathy hitherto lacking). Sure enough, within (who knows how many generations) everyone had mirror cells.

One of the philosphers roped in on R4 to discuss mirror cells pointed out the information received from them should be treated as morally neutral. In other words: just like all the other information the brain recieves.

You're there ahead of me: has any research been done on the effect on the mirror cells of reading a good book?

Being made aware of mirror cells {2 } and knowing what we do about language and communication, it is hard to prevent the idea that, how can it be put, there is a society of minds by default. Things can't help spilling out of one brain into another. In other words the sum total of all minds is tending toward a super-mind, which just happens to have the the total set of facts and ideas stored in separate brains, with information being constantly passed back and forwards. Though this would only apply to the basics : you only have to think Chinese Whispers to realise this cannot be applied universally.

The whole idea of individuality (part of which is having a unique mind) militates against this default mode. People are both individually different in personality, aptitudes, character, preferences, propensities, etc, but also in what they find worth storing away in their brains, as exemplified by what books they might chose to read.


An analogy: the counter-intuitivess of genetics with its ability to maintain integrity while at the same time allowing for change through the evolutionary mechanism.

...



What Do We Know
evolutionary basis of deception

Audio from Robert Trivers. Prof. Anthropology and Biology, Rutgers U.

Monday, March 06, 2006

Friendship




In Our Time

Radio 4


Occulted etymology



In the summer of 1993 a very impressive manoeuvre was put in place to occult the documents.....
SFO report on David Mills

Having never heard this use of the word before it was interesting to etymologise a tad:

occulted

Nota bene:

Latin occultus, secret and past participle of occulere, to cover over


v.intr.

To become concealed or extinguished at regular intervals: a lighthouse beacon that occults every 45 seconds.

Makes the use of the word even more interesting in the current financial/political embroglio

Running with this a little: there are words which, despite their various meanings, hold the reader on the page momentarily. No matter how many times meaning is checked, one seems to override others. As I re-read this phrase I get a faint whiff of Aleister Crowley. Images of documents laid out on ground being circled by naked forms in the dead of night.

Now I've come across it in text I will make a small survey to see if occulted pops up anywhere else. I am expecting to find it in academic texts, but this usage smacks of doctors notes. In fact the medical definitions are:

1. Hidden; concealed
2. Detectable only by microscopic examination or chemical analysis
3. Not accompanied by readily detectable signs or symptoms


Not surprising to find it in a SFO report, then, what with all the Latin jargon of ages in law. Expecting a simple 'hide' would be too much. Here hiding a simpler meaning behind a more obscure word is the norm.

Later:

The first two or three pages of occluded in Google were astronomy and science related:

The Astronomy of occultations, etc.

The first ordinary headline with occluded:

The 90th Commemoration of a Denied and Occulted Genocide!


The 'occluded character' pops up once. This is much better than hidden. This word is growing on me.

Occulted power transforms and deconstructs the violent heterosexual yoking comprising patriarchal dominance.
Shakespeare's Celtic Imaginary

And:

http://www.brynmawr.edu/visualculture/journal/p_derrida.shtml


which is a completely shut door to me, but the paragraph:

The trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility in the entire field of the entity, which metaphysics has defined as the being-present starting from the occulted movement of the trace. The trace must be thought before the entity. But the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted, it produces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces itself as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself.


makes me suspect this is the sort of source for the spread of the use outside technical writing.


The Seventeenth Century of Occultation & Surface
(1) .....belonging to an occulted time.

(2) As such there are no signifiers in circulation, as in the familiar Freudian theory of the unconscious, in which connections are made in the hid­den or occulted psychical paths of the un­conscious.


Thursday, March 02, 2006

SHOWCASE BelieverMag.com





Courtesy of the ever wonderful 3Quarks - long 'un on Colin MacInnes.

Seems to be the whole article., though a subscribe site, based on another page on Kafka:
The man who could not disappear (why do we need to know the detail's of Kafkas life?). Nothing worse than wondering what the rest said.

Perhaps someone will write a novel with certain pages partially torn out. That reminds me: TomCat Murr is proving more difficult in the reading than the idea. Must persist from structure point of view, in order to see what Andrew Crumley took from it for Mobius Dick.



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