Lovecraft, Muhammad, and kittens

The famous anecdote about Lovecraft and the kitten is from this period: Lovecraft was staying in the house of some correspondent of his who wanted him to write an article for his fanzine. So before going to bed, he left Lovecraft in a comfortable chair with plenty of writing materials to hand, and, on the way out, dropped a kitten in Lovecraft's lap to keep him company (Lovecraft famously loved cats, cats and ice-cream--although hopefully not both together). When the fan came back downstairs in the morning, Lovecraft was still sitting in the chair, the kitten asleep in his lap, and hadn't written a word. When asked why he hadn't written the article, Lovecraft replied "I didn't want to disturb kitty."

(Gardner Dozois, in Asimov's Message Board)

Other science fiction and fantasy writers who liked cats were Fritz Leiber and Cordwainer Smith.

Muezza is said to have been the Islamic prophet Muhammad's favorite cat. The most famous story about Muezza recounts how the call to prayer was given, and as Muhammad went to put on one of his robes, he found his cat sleeping on one of the sleeves, and instead of disturbing the cat he cut off the sleeve and let him sleep.

(Wikipedia page for Muezza)

The Golden Fleecing

There are three theories on how prices are set, he says. Is the bribe purely the product of cultural norms, influenced by customs specific to the region? Is the bribe simply an individual transaction, not affected by culture? Or is the bribe economy embedded within a bigger mar­ket? “Just as if there was a firm running a toll booth,” Olken says, “the firm would balance off how much revenue they are getting from the tolls, versus the fact that if they were charging more for the tolls there would be fewer cars driving through; they’ll be making an optimal trade-off. So, in fact, that bribe is the equi­librium of a firm’s price-setting decision.”

(Michael Moynihan: Graft Paper. The American.)

Successful rulers within this belt of semi-desert lands [the Silk Road] were either steppe nomads themselves or but recently descended from such folk. [...] For a long time the resulting symbiosis [with caravan merchants] was delicate and liable to frequent upset. By taking too much from caravan personnel, merchant's incentive to undertake the risks of travel could be snuffed out. Yet by not paying enough to support a superior military establishment along the trade route, merchants invited more distant nomad groups to push southward from the open steppe and try to seize as booty what they were not yet in a position to tax as rulers.

(William H. McNeill: Plagues and Peoples)

Playtesting and Test Screenings

I wonder why playtesting is uniformly seen as a good thing in videogames, while in the world of film the analogous practice of performing test screenings is usually frowned upon, as a sign of a director willing to compromise his art, to sacrifice his vision to Moloch, and so on.

Aren't they basically the same thing, namely using the advanced feedback provided by group of consumers to retool a cultural product? So why then they are regarded differently?

Perhaps the reason is that videogames are inherently interactive, so requesting players' opinions during development seems more natural.

He may have been talking about Facebook

Unless we are careful, individual men and women may soon be reduced to little more than numbers in some immense and terrifying data bank.

(Georges Duby: A History of Private Life, Vol 1)

Well, back to updating my profile.

Archive.org

Archive.org is a great site. I use it mainly to find videos, but it also has a great collection of digitized books, some of them unavailable from Google Books and Project Gutenberg.

A particularly interesting find is Yitzhak Baer's A History Of The Jews In Christian Spain Volume II - From The Fourteenth Century To The Expulsion. But the book was published in 1961. Has the copyright really expired?

I also downloaded George Borrow's The Bible in Spain. It promises to be a very interesting travelogue. The version from Archive.org is much more legible than the one available from Google Books.

It won't be the bad news what kills you

You were very ill in the past, but you survived. Since that time, you have to undergo periodic (say, every six months) medical tests to ensure than the bug hasn't come back. You are wedded to the ghost of your illness.

Most of the time, you don't remember you past sufferings. It's almost as if they had happened to a different person. But as the date for a new test approaches, you become more and more nervous. You haven't noticed any suspicious symptoms (you noticed a lot of them in the first few revisions, when the hypochondria of the survivor was still in full force) but you fear what the tests may reveal: that the illness has come back and is hidden in your innards, like some ugly beast silently stalking his prey, ready to strike.

You try to hide your growing unease from your loved ones. Your parents, your fiancé, may become ever more distressed than you are. You enter the doctor's room in a state of near panic, intently observing his face, his posture, every little movement or grimace he makes. They will reveal the bad news even before his words do.

The doctor tells you everything is all right, bringing immense relief. You call everybody to share the good news, and exit the hospital real quick. An hour later, your are back to your normal routine and barely remember the anguish of the last few days.

Is it rational to "allocate" your fear in such a manner between consecutive tests? Either you are already sick, or you aren't. The news themselves can't harm you, so why then your fear increases as the test approaches? It's not as if the doctor is waiting to pummel you with baseball bat or anything.

O sancta simplicitas

O sancta simplicitas es la frase que se dice pronunciada por Juan Hus (1369-1415) cuando, encontrándose sobre la hogera a que se le había condenado por hereje, vio cómo una viejecilla, movida por su celo religioso, arrojaba más leña a las llamas en que aquél ardía.

(Nota número 106 en la edición de Así habló Zaratustra de Alianza Editorial)

How scientists write

Scientists are also criticized for having little facility with the language, for disregarding the genius of the language, and for lacking imagination, taste, grace, and so on, for example:

Most of the students who have signed up for your course will have done so because they are afraid of and dislike writing: they have no instinctive feeling for the power and beauty of words and no gift for putting them together tellingly. They like science because it is full of experimental action and definite, verifiable facts; writing, on the contrary, seems to be a less exciting activity requiring intuition, for which they have very small use, and taste, for which they have no use at all.

[Woodward, 1980, p. 3]

(Antoinette M. Wilkinson: The Scientist's Handbook for Writing Papers and Dissertations)

The book goes on to point out that scientists, at the very least, do use intuition when formulating their hypotheses. And that the lack of linguistic creativity in scientific papers is mostly a product of the rethorical setting.

Are there any science fiction stories written in the form of a scientific paper? Stanislaw Lem was fond of summarizing imaginary research in his novels. And then there's "The Discovery of the Nullitron", an early collaboration between John Sladek and Thomas M. Disch. A very slight story, midly entertaining at best.

Tocinamiento Global

Viven en tus entrañas -que para ellos son montañas- y te ven de dentro a fuera. El mundo exterior es para ellos el interior de la Tierra.

Que baje tu nivel de colesterol en sangre debe parecerles una especie de primavera arterial. Por fin las carreteras se despejan, después de las intensas precipitaciones de de nata y azúcar glaseado del pasado Invierno.

Se discute la conveniencia de reducir las emisiones de grasa, como método de atajar el "tocinamiento global".

Invisible except to teenager eyes

The Mosquito anti-teen device is a wonderful invention, that punishes those unruly creatures with shrill and unpleasant sounds while leaving people over twenty unscathed.

It is almost as good as the Invisible Teenager, a piece of technology dreamed up by R. A. Lafferty in one of his stories. Like the Mosquito, it is explicitly designed to target teenagers:

You remember that once there was a teenager problem? You remember when those little buggers used to be mean? Albert got enough of them. There was something ungainly about them that reminded him too much of himself. He made a teenager of his own. It was rough. To the others it looked like one of themselves, the ring in the left ear, the dangling side-locks, the brass knucks and the long knife, the guitar pluck to jab in the eye. But it was incomparably rougher than the human teenagers. It terrorized all in the neighborhood and made them behave, and dress like real people. There was one thing about the teenage machine that Albert made. It was made of such polarized metal and glass that it was invisible except to teenager eyes.

"Why is your neighborhood different?" the people asked him. "Why are there such good and polite teenagers in your neighborhood and such mean ones everywhere else? It's as though something had spooked all those right around here."

(R. A. Lafferty: Eurema's Dam)

"Invisible except to teenager eyes" may be a little harder to achieve than "inaudible except to teenager ears", but we should stay hopeful. Until then, the Mosquito will be a good enough substitute.

Mechanical mass

"I wonder what time is the next mass." Thomas said. "Or the mass that is not quite a mass. I'm not sure that I understand you on it."

"Oh, put in a stoimenof d'or in the slot, and push the button. Then the mass will begin."

Thomas did. And it did.

The priest came up out of the floor. He was not human, unless he was a zombie human. He was probably not even a programmed person. He may have been a mechanical device. He wore a pearl-gray derby hat, swish-boy sideburns, and common green shorts or breechcloth. His depilated torso was hermaphroditic. He or it smoked a log weedjy-weed cigarette in a period holder. He began to jerk and to intone with dreadful dissonance.

Then a number of other contrivances arrived from somewhere, intoning mock chorus to the priest, and twanging instruments.

[...]

At the Consecration, a sign lit up:

"Brought to you Courtesy of Grailo Grape-Ape, the Finest of the Bogus Wines"

(R. A. Lafferty: Past Master)

Mmmm... I wonder what was Lafferty's opinion on the changes to the mass after Vatican II. Maybe not very positive. Anyway, this is a great depiction of a debauched religious ceremony. A black mass, in a sense. The book goes on to mention that the wafers were "ancient-style hot-dog rolls".

The "Thomas" in the quoted passage is none other than Thomas More, or at least Lafferty's interpretation of him.

The effects of war on birds

The shells with black smoke, which the old-timers called "Americans" or "coal boxes", ripped with incredible violence. [...] The odd thing was that the little birds in the forest seemed quite untroubled by the myriad noise; they sat peaceably over the smoke in their battered boughs. In the short intervals of firing, we could hear them singing happily or ardently to one another, if anything even inspired or encouraged by the dreadful noise on all sides.

(Ernst Junger: Storm of Steel. Translated by Michael Hofmann)

At the corner of a stricken wood [...] at a moment when lyddite and shrapnel and machine-gun fire swept and raked and bespattered that devoted spot as though the artillery of an entire Division had suddenly concentrated on it, a wee hen-chaffinch flitted wistfully to and fro, amid splintered and falling branches that had never a green bough left on them. [...] There was a battered orchard alongside the stricken wood, and the probable explanation of the bird's presence was that it had a nest of young ones whom it was too scared to fed, too loyal to desert.

(Hector Hugh Munro "Saki": Birds on the Western Front)

Saki did not survive the war.

Mejorando mi calidad de vida

Recientemente he adoptado algunos cambios en mi rutina diaria que han contribuido a mejorar mi calidad de vida.

El primero consistió en deshacerme de mi despertador y pasar a depender de la alarma del móvil. El despertador era un artefacto infernal, con una alarma estridente que sólo sería apropiada para avisar de una invasión alienígena. De hecho, quizás el artefacto mismo fuese de origen extraterrestre, porque sus extremadamente crípticos controles a duras penas conseguía manipularlos.

Lo peor de todo es que, una vez que la alarma comenzaba a sonar, me veía obligado a levantarme inmediatamente para apagarla. El despertador se encontraba al otro lado del dormitorio, único lugar próximo a un enchufe. Y la alarma no se detenía por sí sola al cabo de un tiempo, al contrario: aumentaba progresivamente de volumen hasta amenazar con reventarme los tímpanos. Me estremezco al recordar los ¿mil? ¿mil quinientos? peregrinajes urgentes pero somnolientos al otro lado de mi habitación. ¡Cuánto sufrimiento innecesario! Si se concentrase en un sólo día, equivaldría al de romperse una pierna, como mínimo.

El otro cambio es utilizar el metabuscador de la red de bibliotecas de Galicia antes de pasarme por el Fórum Metropolitano o la González Garcés. Hasta ahora, cuando iba a una biblioteca sucedía algo de lo siguiente: o bien los puestos de consulta estaban ocupados, o si estaban libres no había traido bolígrafo para apuntar la signatura, o si lo había traído no tenía papel en el que apuntar. Y no queda bien mostrar a la bibliotecaria una signatura que te has escrito en la mano.

Calculo que estos dos cambios me han hecho un 1.7 por ciento más feliz.

R. A. Lafferty in the New York Times

I didn't expect to see Lafferty mentioned in the New York Times; I was pleasantly surprised. Quoting from Bill Hader's recommendation of the story collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers:

You get the feeling like it’s a guy just writing to amuse himself: “I don’t care if any of this makes sense, but I want to see weird stuff happen.” One of his stories starts off, “He began by breaking things that morning.” There’s a short story called “Ginny Wrapped in the Sun,” and it’s just about this little girl who’s super strong, running around, picking things up. You get such a sense of joy and boundless imagination in every sentence – even if the story doesn’t totally cohere, you feel like it’s about something.

Actually, beneath his crazy brilliant ebullient prose Lafferty is often dead serious. See for example stories like "The World as Will and Wallpaper" or "You can't go back".

By the way, "Ginny Wrapped in the Sun" is an apocalyptic tale full of allusions to the Book of Revelation. The title refers to the "woman clothed in the sun" of Revelation 12:1-10, who was the subject of a famous painting by William Blake. One character is called Krios, which is greek for "lamb". He is killed at the end. Ginny is going to "stay in a cave for twelve hundred and sixty days". That is reminiscent of:

And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.

(The Bible, King James Version. Revelations 12:6)

I suppose there are more biblical references, but I didn't catch them. I'm also puzzled about the overall meaning of the story. Because it seems to have a meaning, only I can't make head nor tail of it.

Anyway, if only this were the beginning of some kind of RAL revival! A chance to get some of his more elusive volumes back in print. Or printed for the first time...