Posting stops here

For a long time. Maybe forever.

Why...

..."filmed theatre" is a derogatory expression when applied to cinema, while "graphic novel" is supposed to dignify comic books?

Robert Aickman

“I found that I was thinking many deep thoughts. And then I noticed that a small tear was slowly falling down the Contessa's face. Without thinking, I sprang up; but then the Contessa smiled, and I sat down. One of my deep thoughts was that it is not so much particular disasters that make people cry, but something always there in life itself, something that a light falls on when we are trying to enjoy ourselves in the company of others.”

(Robert Aickman: Pages from a Young Girl's Journal)

Antinatural Aesthetics

The tribal disdain for nature extended into its active denigration of hair, agriculture, childbirth and even, perhaps, representational art.

In all of this the tribe was proclaiming that while its dominance derived from nature and was beyond question, its superiority meant that nature had no further claim on it. Everything else was created by the tribe itself, particularly the ornate and elaborate tattoos and paintings on members’ bodies.

(Edward Rothstein: Postmodern Thoughts, Illuminated by the Practices of a Premodern Tribe)

Silence was absolute, save for the purl of water under the hull. At night a pair of large moons cast a serene light through the foliage in a manner which Maihac found almost dreamlike in its effect. He said as much to Bariano, who responded with a condescending shrug. "I am surprised to find you so enthusiastic. It is, after all, a mere trick of nature." [...] "It is simply that your aesthetic judgments are amorphous. It is naive to detect beauty where none has been specifically intended. The subject is large. Often you will notice an agreeable aspect of nature, effected by random or mathematical processes. It may be serene and congenial, but it is the work of chance and lacks the human afflatus. There is no pulse of positive creativity to infuse it with true beauty."

(Jack Vance: Night Lamp)

Watch empires fall

I have been searching for software that provides the kind of information historical atlases do, but in animated form. The idea is to watch empires fall and frontiers fluctuate as years go by. Something like this flash animation of Middle East history, but more detailed and with some degree of user control over how the information is displayed.

I have found a commercial program called Centennia, which does just that:

CENTENNIA is a map-based guide to the history of Europe and the Middle East from the beginning of the 11th century to the present. It is a dynamic, animated historical atlas including over 9,000 border changes. The map controls evolve the map forward or backward in time bringing the static map to life. Our maps display every major war and territorial conflict displaying the status of each region at intervals of a tenth of a year. The maps reflect actual "power on the ground" rather than internationally-sanctioned or "recognized" borders.

You can download it and try it for free, although the trial version is circumscribed in time to the years between 1789 and 1819.

Then there's AtlasOfWorldHistory.com, which I haven't tried yet. Also, games like Europa Universalis may offer similar functionality, although it would be constrained to the level of detail of the gamemap.

Anyone knows of more programs like these?

Edit: I found another one, from the BBC.

¿Qué es poesía? (2)

"¿Qué es poética? El arte de hacer coplas. ¿Qué son coplas? Unos montoncitos de líneas desiguales, llamadas versos. ¿Qué es un verso? Un número determinado de sílabas. ¿Qué dificultad ofrece su composición? Los consonantes. ¿Cómo se adquieren estos consonantes? Comprando un Rengifo por tres pesetas. ¿Qué otra cosa es necesaria además de esto para hacer cualquiera obra poética digna de la luz pública? Un poco de práctica, y otro poco de poca vergüenza."

(Leandro Fernández de Moratín: La derrota de los pedantes)

808.1 D543. Diaz Rengife, Juan. Arte poetica espanola, con una fertilissima silva de consonantes comunes, prepios, esdruxulos y reflexos, y una divino estimulo del amor de Dios. Madrid, 1644.

(de aquí)

The Penis is Evil

"The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth and kill!" Why oh why there can't be more science fiction movies like Zardoz?

I think Borges would agree with Zardoz, about penises if not about guns. "Mirrors and copulation are abominable." Come to think of it, wasn't a long mirror scene of some kind in Zardoz?

Wikipedia has a list of fictional depictions of immortality, including Zardoz and Borges' The Immortal. But, no Jack Vance's To Live Forever!

A remake of Zardoz could tap into modern blue state / red state anxieties in the US. The problem is, where to find an actor as hairy as Connery? Because Zed must be hairy, to make him stand out from the effete, metrosexual immortals. And yet, I don't think Robin Williams would be good for the part.

El Lobo y el Cordero

Traduzco un pasaje de Gene Wolfe sobre Jesucristo. La cita original se puede encontrar en este artículo sobre Wolfe en First Things (recomiendo leer el original, porque mis habilidades de traductor no son para tirar cohetes.)

Ha sido dicho miles de veces que Cristo murió bajo tortura. Muchos the nosotros hemos leído tantas veces que él fue "un humilde carpintero" que sentimos un atisbo de náusea al ver esas palabras de nuevo. Pero nadie parece darse cuenta de que los instrumentos de tortura fueron madera, clavos, y martillo; que el hombre que construyó la Cruz fue indudablemente un carpintero también; que el hombre que clavó los clavos fue tanto un carpintero como un soldado, tanto un carpintero como un torturador. Muy pocos han percibido incluso que aunque Cristo fue un "humilde carpintero", el único objeto que se nos dice específicamente que contruyó no fue una mesa o una silla, sino un látigo.

Y ya que estamos hablado del aspecto más, digamos, "severo" de Jesús, aprovecho para enlazar al post Did Christ Ever Laugh? de Laudator Temporis Acti.
Wolfe es un católico con una teología un tanto particular. En una de sus entrevistas, menciona lo siguiente:

Uno de los lugares donde me diferencio de la doctrina Católica convencional es en que creo que los dioses del paganismo eran reales. No creo que fuesen merecedores de la adoración que recibían de los paganos. Creo que lo que muchos de los autores bíblicos están diciendo es: "Sí, esos son poderes verdaderos, pero es equivocado que les des los honores que son debidos solamente a Dios." Y creo que eso es exactamente correcto.

O sea, que Wolfe es un henoteísta, al menos en lo que respecta a los antiguos dioses olímpicos.

Todo lo anterior se refleja en su obra. El protagonista de El Libro del Sol Nuevo es una figura mesiánica, y un torturador de profesión (aunque esto último no se retrata de manera especialmente positiva). El Latro de Soldado de la Niebla es un mercenario romano utilizado como peón por los dioses griegos (su nombre es apropiado: "Latro" significa tanto "mercenario" como "peón" en latín). Y en El Libro del Sol Largo (del que sólo he leído el primer volumen), un sacerdote abandona progresivamente su culto politeísta para abrazar al dios "verdadero".

Did you know...

...that there is such a thing as metametaphysics? (Spotted at David Chalmer's blog, fragments of consciousness)

Then there's Conscious Entities, a blog about the mystery of consciousness. The entry titled Strange ideas (or, "Dead ends") is especially informative, and amusing.

The post Should Ethicists Behave Better? Should Epistemologists Think More Rationally? at The Splintered Mind is also very interesting.

Edit: Here is a review of David Benatar's Better Never to Have Been. And here is more commentary on the book.

The Limbo of Philistinism, the Hells of Nerdom

Oh boy. I hate those "1000 books/albums/movies you must read/listen to/watch before you die" tomes with the burning intensity of a thousand torrid suns. Not only they have the gall of insinuating my current status as a semi-cultured lummox, but very impolitely force me to confront my own mortality. Screw them.

As The Man Who is Thursday has mentioned, life is short and art is long. I mean, just estimate the number of weeks you expect to live. It's surprisingly small. You trudge your way across the canon in a race against time, lest the Grim Reaper makes you a visit and you are still halfway through War and Peace. How embarrassing that would be! At your deathbed, in presence of your mourning family, you must be able to declare proudly: "I have read every damned book in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon. I really did. A Voyage To Arcturus included." And then you die.

The calvinist fear of not being among the chosen is nothing compared to the cultured person's fear of not reading enough of the canon. And How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read cannot help you because, deep inside, you would still feel guilty about cheating. (War and Peace was about Russia, btw.)

Literalizing things a little too much, one could imagine a phildickian religion whose soteriology required plowing through a humongous reading list of great literature, as the only way to achieve salvation. Its adherents would picture the Judgement of Souls as a cocktail party with Radamanthus, in which they must appear knowledgeable and respond smartly to Raddy's cultured conversation.

There could be heresies, and even religious wars about the precise composition of the Canon, because an incorrectly selected one will damn you to the Limbo of Philistinism or, even worse, the Hells of Nerdom. (Does The Left Hand of Darkness really belong in Bloom's selection? Why not a more muscular planetary romance?)

Edit: this exists.

Mirror, mirror

(NOTE: This is an old post from February 23, 2007 that mysteriously dissapeared when I upgraded to the new version of Blogger. Exhumed from the Google cache.)

This post on Centauri Dreams describes an extremely interesting propulsion technology called "Photonic Laser Thrusters". It works by bouncing photons betweeen two confronted mirrors thousands of times, so that the mirrors are pulled apart by radiation pressure.

It reminded me of a rather more fanciful method of transport involving confronted mirrors, imagined by Gene Wolfe in The Shadow of the Torturer:

Father Inire drew the wall of the octagon closed behind them. It was a mirror in which she could see his face and his arm and shining infinite robes reflected. Her own form too [...] but there seemed to be another girl -her own face peering over her shoulder; then another and another and another, each with a smaller face behind it. And so on ad infinitum, an endless chain of fainter Domnina-faces.

She realized when she saw them that the hall of the octogonal enclosure through which she had pased faced another mirror. The light of the blue-light lamp was caught by them all and reflected from one to another as boys might pass silver balls, interlacing and intertwining in an interminable dance.

A bit of technobabble follows, explaining how the mirrors work as a teletransporter (there's also a homage to Borges). Quite enchanting, really; though I hope the theory behind the "Photonic Laser Thrusters" is a bit more solid...

Alexander Bogdanov

In 1924, Bogdanov started his blood transfusion experiments, apparently hoping to achieve eternal youth or at least partial rejuvenation. Lenin's sister Maria Ulianova was among many who volunteered to take part in Bogdanov's experiments. After undergoing 11 transfusions, he remarked with satisfaction on the improvement of his eyesight, suspension of balding, and other positive symptoms. The fellow revolutionary Leonid Krasin wrote to his wife that "Bogdanov seems to have become 7, no, 10 years younger after the operation".

In 1925-1926, Bogdanov founded Institute for Haemotology and Blood Transfusions, which was later named after him. After Lenin's death, he was commissioned to study Lenin's brain and, if possible, to resuscitate his body. In his letters to the Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Bukharin he dreamed of physically rejuvenating the Bolshevik party leadership.

(Wikipedia entry for Alexander Bogdanov)

The totalitarian ruler who seeks to extend his lifespan through artificial means is a staple of the science fiction genre. The most notable example would be Robert Silverberg's Shadrach in the Furnace, but there's also Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire, the Emperor from Warhammer 40K, and so on.

Imagine Bogdanov's loony experiments actually worked, conferring immortality or a greatly extended lifespan to the members of the soviet nomenklatura. There you have a really intriguing premise for an alternate history novel. A world where the term "gerontocracy" would take an altogether creepier meaning... You could even throw in some allusions to Koshei the Deathless for good measure.

Bogdanov's Red Star appears in China Mieville's list of Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read. It also was one of the inspirations for Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (a book which, I confess, I didn't manage to finish).

Literature of Travel and Exploration, an Encyclopedia

Here is the site for Routledge's Literature of Travel and Exploration, an Encyclopedia. If features all the entries, without the accompanying text of course. However, the suggestions for further reading are included, which is very helpful.

Looking for some of those entries in Wikipedia, I found interesting things like the page for Benjamin of Tudela. His "Itinerary" is now on my to-read list.

El Libro de Oro

Al parecer, la Fundación Paul Allen posee un cierto número de Ediciones Integrales de Vance, que está dispuesta a donar sin coste alguno para los recipientes. Detalles aquí.

Creo que la Biblioteca Nacional de Argentina debería solicitar esa donación. El por qué es evidente...

En un capítulo de La Sombra del Torturador de Gene Wolfe, se narra el encuentro del protagonista con un bibliotecario ciego y anciano llamado Ultan, responsable de la biblioteca real en la ciudad de Nessus. El bibliotecario le habla de un método para reclutar aprendices propio del gremio: El Libro de Oro. Es éste un volumen tan absolutamente fascinante que, cuando se lo presentan a un niño, queda totalmente embelesado por él, y a partir de entonces orienta su vida al servicio de los libros.

Ultan es claramente Jorge Luis Borges; la inmensa biblioteca que supervisa se podría considerar un trasunto de Biblioteca Nacional Argentina en Buenos Aires, de la que Borges fue director durante 18 años. (Al parecer, Wolfe da indicios en su novela de que la ciudad de Nessus es una versión futura de Buenos Aires. Aunque a mí se me escaparon, la verdad.)

Ahora bien: Gene Wolfe ha mencionado en entrevistas que, para él, el Libro de Oro que leyó en su adolescencia fue... La Tierra Moribunda de Jack Vance. Por lo tanto, ¿qué mejor método de asegurar que el Libro de Oro se encuentre en la biblioteca de Ultan que solicitando la donación?

Obvio, ¿no?

To betray the future

The critical reception of Brave New World was largely chilly. Most reviewers were disgruntled or disgusted with what they saw as unjustified alarmism. H. G. Wells was downright offended. “A writer of the standing of Aldous Huxley has no right to betray the future as he did in that book,” Wells said.

(Caitrin Nicol, Brave New World at 75)

In the end [H. G. Wells'] contemporary political impact was limited. His efforts to help form the League of Nations became a disappointment as the organisation turned out to be a weak one unable to prevent World War II. The war itself increased the pessimistic side of his nature. In his last book Mind at the End of its Tether (1945) he considered the idea that humanity being replaced by another species might not be a bad idea. He also came to call the era "The age of frustration." He spent his final years venting this frustration at various targets which included a neighbour who erected a large sign to a servicemen's club.

(Wikipedia entry for H. G. Wells)

Mind at the End of its Tether looks like an interesting book.

More sunny philosophizing in this previous post.

¿Qué es poesía?

¿Qué es poesía?, dices mientras clavas en mi pupila tu pupila azul.

¡Qué es poesía! ¿Y tú me lo preguntas? Poesía... eres tú.

(Gustavo Adolfo Béquer)

¿Qué es poesía?, dices mientras clavas en mi pupila tu pupila atroz.

¡Qué es poesía! ¿Y tú me lo preguntas? Poesía... soy yo.

(José Agustín Goytisolo)

Gracias, amor

Gracias, amor
por tu imbécil comportamiento
me hiciste saber que no era verdad eso de
"poesía eres tú"
¡Poesía soy yo!

(Gloria Fuertes)

¿Qué es poesía?, dices mientras clavas en mi pupila tu pupila azul.

¡Qué es poesía! ¿Y tú me lo preguntas? Poesía... es lo que diga el Ministerio de Cultura.

(Chumy Chúmez)

The Amazing Dostoevsky Machine

This is actually rather helpful. A site that allows you to replace those unpronunceable, indistinguishable, unrememberable russian names in Crime and Punishment with more reader-friendly ones.

In fact, there should be more of those amazing machines, with extended capabilities not limited to name substitution. In epics, for example, references to dusty old gods nobody cares about could be replaced by appereances of modern comic-book heroes. Superman is Apollo (he receives his power fron the Sun, after all) and Batman could be Hades. Also, boring Bronze Age technology should be replaced by shiny spaceships and laserguns. As for now, those welcome changes must be implemented manually.

What? Disrespectful, you say? Bah. You are trying to sacralize one of the severe limitations of the printed word: its static, fixed nature. Do you really believe those ancient bards (blind or not) didn't adapt his yarns for each particular audience? Since in our mass society it would be impractical to have all those bards prancing around, we should prompt writers to create, instead of those monolithic strings of words they call "novels", algorithms that generate particularized texts based on each reader's set of cultural references and archetypes. Or, they could just stop writing and get into videogames.

Muslim astronauts

How would a muslim astronaut orient himself towards Mecca?

I'm not being snarky here, I'm genuinely interested. And it's not as if there wasn't a great tradition of muslim travellers... why not extend it into the Space Age?

On a related note, what happens when a muslim finds himself in the exact antipodes of Mecca?

The problem of organizing prayer in strange new environments is not new:

During this march, Timur's army got far enough north to be in a region of very long summer days, causing complaints by his Muslim soldiers about keeping a long schedule of prayers in such northern regions.

(Wikipedia entry for Tamerlane)

Edit: I have searched Google for "muslim astronaut", and apparently the problem of space prayer has already been worked out:

Malaysian scientists and religious scholars are trying to determine how Muslims should behave in space, as the predominantly Islamic country prepares to dispatch its first astronaut next year.

More than 150 delegates attended a seminar to consider how to pray in space given the difficulties of locating Mecca and holding the prayer position in zero gravity; as well as other questions such as halal food and washing.