Quimioterapia y Gas Mostaza

Hojeando el libro El cáncer se cura, del doctor José Ramón Germà Lluch (editorial Planeta) me encontré con un dato que desconocía: el primer tratamiento de quimioterapia fue básicamente una versión intravenosa del gas mostaza empleado en las trincheras de la Primera Guerra Mundial.

Al parecer, durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, un grupo de personas fue expuesto accidentalmente a la substancia. Los consiguientes análisis (y autopsias) revelaron que el gas mostaza atacaba sobre todo a las células que crecen más rápidamente, lo que llevó a algunos médicos a conjeturar que podría ser empleado para combatir el cáncer.

2001 and Intelligent Design

I don't understand why proponents of Intelligent Design haven't culturally appropriated 2001: A Space Odyssey for their own ends. Because Kubrick's movie (and even more Clarke's novel) can be understood as the most effective artistic representation of their ideas. Mankind evolving not exclusively by natural means, but receiving periodic visitations from a brick that prompts it to advance to the next level and so on.

Of course, Clarke wouldn't appreciate that interpretation, but that's irrelevant. The book speaks for itself. In fact, science fiction as a whole seems fascinated by Intelligent Design. There are more mysterious "progenitor" races than you can shake a stick at. It's almost as if the plain vanilla conception of darwinian evolution was boring, and you need to have your ADN trampled by some exotic alien race or transcendent being to be considered cool.

Would a strictly Darwin-compliant version of the movie still seem as "deep" and "profound"? We could try. I want my monolith-free cut of 2001, now!

The Children of Hurin Linkorama

Here is an interesting interpretation of The Children of Hurin by an eccentric commentator. Here is a less interesting review from The Washington Post.

And here is the best review ever penned of Peter Jackson's version of Lord of the Rings.

Aural perils of chick flicks

I accompanied my girldfiend to see the movie Music and Lyrics, in an act of retinal immolation for the sake of love. And now, no matter how much I try, I CAN'T GET THIS DAMN SONG OUT OF MY HEAD!!! (Warning: do not go through that link unless you want a good portion of your mental throughput co-opted by that campy yet insidious musical concoction.)

It's driving me crazy. Maybe I should fight fire with fire...

Eight, sir; seven, sir;
Six, sir; five, sir;
Four, sir; three, sir;
Two, sir; one!
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tension, apprehension,
And dissension have begun.

See here.

Dwarf Fortress and the Great War

Dwarf Fortress seems to be a very interesting roguelike game about... dwarfs building a fortress. I can see how planning and slowly expanding your settlement while fending off external threats must be hugely compelling.

I would like to play a variation of this game, in which you don't build fortresses, but WWI-like trenches. In a way, it would be very similar: trenches in the Great War started simple but grew to become extremely complex and expansive constructions over vast areas, warring fortresses separated by half of a kilometer at most, pitted one against the other in a mutual siege.

This base building oriented approach seems to me the only viable way to make a "realistic" game about trench warfare. I don't think a game from the perspective of an individual soldier would work, much more than a game in which you play a lamb going to the slaughter.

I can't wait to watch the Christmas truce reenacted by dwarfs symbolized by ampersands.

Geography Time!

A neat -if extremely basic- flash game to test your knowledge of Geography. Is there a similar one, but with more things included, such as cities, geographic features, and the like?

Narrative Beings

The article I linked to in my last post is fairly interesting:

Once upon a time a philosopher wrote an article called ‘Don Quixote and The Narrative Self’. He commenced by saying: In this essay, I will discuss the question of whether our selves are constituted by narratives, ie stories. Are we like Don Quixote, whose self was created by his reading of medieval romances: are we Homo quixotienses, the narrative self? Or are we rather like the protagonist of Sartre’s novel Nausea, Antonin Roquentin, whose life did not form any narrative unity? Are we in other words rather Homo roquentinenses?

Our identities, created by narratives? That reminds me of a passage from the preface of R. A. Lafferty's The Devil is Dead:

We will not lie to you. This is a do-it-yourself thriller or nightmare. Its present order is only the way it comes out of the box. Arrange it as you will.

Set off the devils and the monsters, the wonderful beauties and the foul murderers, the ships and the oceans of middle space, the corpses and the revenants, set them off in whatever apposition you wish. [...] Build with these colored blocks your own dramas of love and death and degradation. Learn the true topography: the monstruous and wonderful archetypes are not inside you, not in your own unconsciousness; you are inside them, trapped, and howling to get out.

By the way, some people think that Nabokov's Lolita has the best opening for a novel ever, but they're wrong. That honor corresponds to Lafferty's novel.

Travelogues

One of the reasons why I like travel literature is because it offers a delectable tension beteen its supposedly "it really happened!" quality and the unique opportunity for the author to invent a story about far away lands out of whole cloth, with no one in the vincity to contradict him. The classic example in fiction would be Odysseus spinning his tale for the Phaeacians. Giant monobrowed sheperds? Insatiable sex goddesses? Yeah Ody, suuure. Whenever I read a travelogue, ancient or modern, I'm constantly second-guessing the author. This could have happened... this was for self-aggrandizement... this was inserted or altered to resonate with an earlier event... In pure fiction, that tension doesn't quite exist.

For example, in Paul Theroux's excellent The Great Railway Bazaar, there are two running gags. One about people who don't manage to catch the train in time ("duffilled" writes the author) and another a tale told by various travellers about spending a night with a beautiful woman only to discover with the morning that "she" was really a man. There's a story-like progression in those running gags, however simple. At the beginning, a companion of Theroux is duffilled, near the end, he is duffilled himself. He is told the story about the transvestite a first time, and then a second, this second time with the twist that the narrator admits he didn't mind at all.

To what degree the original facts were bent to adopt such a story-like quality? Maybe they weren't bent at all, at least intentionally. Maybe it's just that we tend to remember not simply unrelated factoids, but sequences of events that make sense for us, that seem to go somewhere. Maybe it's not just a tendency, but an absolute requisite for our past experience to become intelligible. See this article.

Another neat thing about travelogues is that the author usually ends up telling us as much about himself -however indirectly- than as about the places he visits, despite the pretense to the contrary. And I like that pretense. In your face "this is going to be about ME ME ME" works, á la Rousseau's Confessions, feel a little too blunt.

Amok, Awaile

Running amok, sometimes referred to as simply amok (also spelled amuck or amuk), is derived from the Malay word mengamuk, meaning "to go mad with rage" (uncontrollable rage). In typical cases, a man who has shown no previous sign of anger and no inclination to resort to violence will take up a weapon in a sudden frenzy and attempt to kill everyone he meets. Amok episodes of this kind normally end with the amok-runner being killed by bystanders. The contrast between what was seen as the normal placid character of Malays and a sudden outburst of frenzied violence played to Western perceptions of the 'irrational' East.

(Wikipedia entry for Amok)

"What is this place?" he asked the driver, who gave him a glance of mild wonder.

"The Circle, site of Pathetic Communion, as you can see. You are a stranger in Settra?"

"Yes."

The driver consulted a yellow cardboard schedule. "The next event is Ivensday, when a nineteen-score comes to clarify his horrible desperation. Nineteen! The most since the twenty-two of Agate Crystal's Lord Wis."

"You mean he killed nineteen?"

"Of course; what else? Four were children, but still a feat these days when folk are wary of awaile. All Settra will come to the expiation. If you're still in town you could hardly do more for your own soul's profit."

(Jack Vance: The Wannek)

Dordolio gave an uneasy laugh. "There is a dark side to humanity, which is like a stone pressed into the mold. The upper side, exposed to sun and air, is clean; tilt it and look below, at the muck and scurrying insects...We of Yao know this well; nothing will put an end to awaile. But enough of such talk!"

(ibid.)

"It was awaile. The refuge from shame."

(ibid.)

A pair of links

The first is Explorion, a digital library full of historical travelogues in the public domain. I particularly recommend the narrative of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.

And, once you have vicariously sated your wanderlust, go to the Hermitary to learn how to retreat from the world.

Come to think of it, are the hikikomori modern hermits? I would say yes. Pornographic anime watching hermits, but hermits nevertheless.

Ports of Call reviewed at sfsignal

A review of Jack Vance's novel Ports of Call has been posted at sfsignal.

The best way to read the novel is in the Science Fiction Book Club volume that contains both Ports of Call and its continuation Lurulu. I found my copy dirt-cheap on Ebay.

Keeping track

Reading long novels in PDF format is a chore. You are tied to your computer and, furthermore, Adobe Reader doesn't allow you to create your own bookmarks. At most, it can reopen a document at the same place you left it the last time, but that's hardly a substitute. Go back a few pages to check something, and you'll need to find your way again. INCONVENIENT!

I had to resort to the crude meatspace practice of writing in a notebook the numbers of the pages at which I stopped reading. This is cumbersome, and besides cumbersome I feel it is inelegant, to track your progress across a complex tapestry of words with something as prosaic and brutally matter-of-fact as a string of numbers.

So now what I do is to copy some singular phrase and later use the search funcion to locate it. It's a bit more work, but if feels right. Plus, now when I finish a novel I get a little dadaist poem as a bonus. The last phrase in my notebook is currently "the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars".

For physical books, the absolute best way to keep track would be to rip and burn each page once you have read it. It's the same for the book of your life: the past exist nowhere, and your memories are just the ashes of burnt days.

And, when dealing with the all-important genre of bathroom literature, already read pages can have other uses. Although that would create an odd link between speed reading and diarrhea.

Un error de traducción

El argumento de la novela de Walter M. Miller Cántico por Leibowitz gira en torno a un monasterio católico situado en unos EEUU que se recuperan lentamente de un apocalipsis nuclear. (Miller quedó traumatizado por su participación en el bombardeo del monasterio de Monte Cassino durante la 2ª Guerra Mundial; posiblemente sea ése el germen de la novela.)

En el comienzo del libro, un novicio está en el desierto realizando su ayuno cuaresmal, cuando se encuentra con un anciano judío que viaja a pie. El monje, que ha hecho voto de silencio, se ve en un aprieto ante las preguntas del anciano. Intenta comunicarse con él escribiendo:

El novicio cogió un pedazo de piedra caliza. Que el viajero supiese leer era estadísticamente improbable, pero decidió probar suerte. Ya que los dialectos vulgares empleados por el populacho no tenían ni alfabeto ni ortografía, escribió en latín: «Penitencia, Soledad y Silencio» sobre una gran piedra plana y las repitió debajo en inglés antiguo. Esperaba, a pesar de su no declarado deseo de tener alguien con quien hablar, que el viejo comprendería y le dejaría en su solitaria vigilia de cuaresma.

El peregrino sonrió burlonamente ante la inscripción. Su risa pareció una mueca fatalista más que otra cosa.

- ¡Vaya, escribiendo aún cosas periclitadas! -dijo, aunque sin condescender a admitir que había comprendido la inscripción.

La versión original en inglés de la última frase es:

"Hmmmm-hnnn! Still writing things backward," he said; but if he understood the inscription, he did not condescend to admit it.

El traductor se equivocó. La palabra "backward" se utiliza aquí no en el sentido de "pasado de moda, periclitado", sino en el sentido de "al revés". El anciano está haciendo referencia a que el Hebreo, al contrario que el Latín, se escribe de derecha a izquierda.

The Lives of Others

This movie was about the conflicts inherent in a monopoly on sexual satisfaction. The handsome dramatist with a magnetic personality manages to sport luscious, neumatic girlfriends in whatever sociopolitical system he finds himself in, while the awkward stasi agent and the porcine minister remain alone and sexually frustrated for the most part, having to resort to methods either pathetic or ignoble to receive their share of smoochies.

I think the movie was also about communism or something like that.

Down with Symbolism and Allegory!

Is there symbolism in Mirror?

No! The images themselves are like symbols, but unlike accepted symbols they cannot be deciphered. the image is like a clot of life, and even the author may not be able to work out what it means, let alone the audience. Pushkin's "My sadness is radian" is not a symbol but a an image. Tolstoy's dying Ivan Ilych feels as if he is confined inside a narrow intestine pipe, and cannot get out. What he feels is what the sick mans says. As long ago as the Middle Ages Japanese writers were decrying the interpretation of symbols in art. And quite rightly! The fewer symbols the better! Symbolism is a sign of decadence.

(Andrei Tarkovsky, in an interview)

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

(J.R.R. Tolkien)

Better never to have been

This book by Oxford University Press looks very interesting. From its Amazon editorial review:

David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one's life make one's life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. [...] The author then argues for the 'anti-natal' view -that it is always wrong to have children- and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yield a 'pro-death' view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct. Although counter-intuitive for many, that implication is defended, not least by showing that it solves many conundrums of moral theory about population.

I suppose the conundrums referred to are things like the Repugnant Conclusion. From the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Christoph Fehige (1998) has suggested, in the tradition of Schopenhauer, that there are no lives with a positive well-being. In his account, only frustrated preferences count, and they count negatively, whereas satisfaction of preferences has no positive value. Since it is possible that a population with very high welfare only involves lives with complete preference satisfaction, the Repugnant Conclusion is avoided since any population with complete preference satisfaction is better than any population involving at least one frustrated preference. More troubling, however, is that this view implies a strong version of the Reversed Repugnant Conclusion: A population with very high positive welfare can be worse than an empty population. Since most lives with very high welfare can be assumed to have at least one frustrated preference, such lives are worse than non-existence according to Fehige's theory. Moreover, a theory about welfare that denies the possibility of lives worth living is quite counter-intuitive (Ryberg 1996a).

The user reviews are not uniformly positive: "A suicide note in book form", "Intergalactic cosmic spam", "You need a PhD to be this stupid". I suspect the adverse reactions come from fanaticised pro-existence zealots. However, members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement should love the book (I used to think the VHEMT was a joke, now I'm not so sure).

The short story Mutation Planet, by Barrington J. Bayley, features an alien race who collectively aspires to never to have been:

"And you," Eliot demanded, "What do you seek?"

"We," answered Zeed with an icy lack of hesitation, "seek NULLITY. Not merely to die [...] but to wipe out the past, never to have been." [...] "On my planet..." Zeed seemed to hesitate, "we regard it as an act of compassion to kill our offspring at birth. The unlucky ones are spared to answer nature's call to perpetuate the species. [...] We believe that ever since the first nervous system developed, the subconscious feeling has been present that it has all been a mistake."

A bit later, the same character declares:

"We all inhabit a vast dark," he repeated, "in which there is neither rhyme nor reason."

300

Si vais a ver 300, dejaos el neocórtex a la entrada: para apreciar esta película basta y sobra el cerebro reptiliano.

La película me ha enseñado una serie de valiosas lecciones. Que matar al mensajero es una buena idea. Que retirarse del campo de batalla para poder luchar otro día es innoble (supongo que Miller prefiere los 300 a los 10000). Que la muerte en dicho campo de batalla es algo a lo que todo hombre que los tenga bien puestos debe aspirar (¡igualito igualito que los terroristas suicidas!). Que el mejor método para desenmascarar un traidor es darle matarile directamente.

Hay una casi constante voz en off que básicamente se limita a narrar lo que ya vemos en la pantalla con nuestros propios ojos. Posiblemente fue incluida a petición de la ONCE, a beneficio de los espectadores ciegos.

Aunque debo reconocer que la peli tiene algunas cosas que valen la pena. La imagen del árbol con los cuerpos ensartados (que recuerda al árbol del Alcaudón en Hyperion). Y la escena en el harén de Jerjes durante la cual Gollum es tentado por mutantes sexuales, deliciosamente decadente.

Lo que me pregunto es: ¿cuál será el próximo paso en la involución mental de Frank Miller? ¿Un vídeo en YouTube donde aparezca jugando con sus madelman, haciendo él mismo los ruiditos, explosiones, y pronunciamientos?

En cuanto a Zack Snyder, su mejor momento como director sigue siendo ese apocalipis suburbano a ritmo de Johnny Cash que es el comienzo de El amanecer de los muertos.

Cherries and kisses

I climbed up the tree, and threw down bunches of fruit, while they threw the stones back at me through the branches. Once Mademoiselle Galley, holding out her apron and throwing back her head, presented herself as a mark so prettily, and I took such accurate aim, that I threw a bunch right into her bosom. How we laughed! I said to myself, If my lips were only cherries, how readily would I throw them into the same place!

(Jean Jacques Rousseau: The Confessions, book four)