Rereading Vance

Jeff VanderMeer recently reread Jack Vance's The Dying Earth. A few months ago, Robert Silverberg did the same.

Elizabeth, The Golden Age

The storm threatens the Spanish Armada; the spaniards, fearful, turn to prayer. And to whom they pray? Well, to the Virgin Mary, of course! They are catholic, you see. (Also pay attention to the rosary sinking into the depths. SYMBOLISM!)

That got me thinking. I realized that Elizabeth was being portrayed as another Virgin Mary, in a way. Consider the repeated emphasis on her virginity, or the light that bathes her during the failed assassination attempt, which can only be described as a saintly aura... or maybe the glow was a just a toned-down version of The Power of Love?

Anyway, Cate Blanchett looks better as a warrior queen in armor than as a bipolar Virgin Mary, in my opinion. Someone make a Boudica movie and give her the part, please.

The spaniards are depicted as the bad guys through and through, no doubt about that. I was puzzled mid-movie because torture against members of a religiously motivated insurgency was being portrayed as neccessary for the safety of the kingdom. In our post-Guantanamo days, this is a complete no-no for movies. But near the end, the film pulls an unconvincing (and unhistorical, though I may be wrong) plot twist that shows all the torturin' to be ultimately counterproductive.

All things considered, the movie is more than just anti-catholic: it is anti-religion in general. Protestantism seems to be used as a mere placeholder for our enlightened modern ideals of toleration. Not a lot of protestant religious fervor is shown.

The best way to enjoy the film is to accept its outrageousness and embrace it as a camp masterpiece. Revel in the pretty images that come by every now and then, and improve the dreadful dialogues in your head as they are being perpetrated.

The moment when Elizabeth asks John Dee about the battle, and he prophetizes that one great kingdom will end but doesn't make clear which one, is reminiscent of the Delphic oracle's answer to Croesus.

Lastly, I really liked the figure of the jesuit assassin, though he was woefully underutilized. Jesuit assassins are the most entertaining part of the black legend's imaginarium, in my opinion. More movies should feature them (the albino killer in "The Da Vinci Code" was the only remotely sympathetic character in that cinematrocity). Another jesuit assassin appears in the comic Heart of Empire by Bryan Talbot. What are some other examples?

Doorlocks and the Theory of Everything

When arriving home the other day, I met a neighbour who was having problems opening the front door to the building. "The lock's broken again", she complained. Actually, it wasn't. She just had been turning the key in the wrong direction. For two minutes.

I, too, sometimes forget which way to turn the key. Fortunately, there are only two possible ways. As part of their work, theoretical physicists have to deal with rotations in many dimensions of mind-bogglingly complex mathematical structures, like E8. So perhaps I wouldn't do too well at theoretical physics.

Southland Tales

"I'm making fun of myself, the angry liberal," Kelly said. "The joke is that things have gotten so bad that even neo-Marxists have been forced to bear arms."

(Richard Kelly, talking about Southland Tales)

Marxists, bearing arms? What an unlikely idea! This Richard Kelly guy has quite an imagination.

Avestruz versus Cerdo

Esta mañana mi padre vio a un avestruz importunar a un cerdo. El puerco estaba tan feliz retozando en su barrizal cuando el avestruz se le acercó y comenzó a asestarle picotazos. Y los picotazos de avestruz no son moco de pavo.

En vez de la reacción furiosa que cabría esperar, la víctima se limitó a emitir sin demasiada convicción periódicos gruñidos lastimeros. Y nada más, ya que la molicie del puerco se impuso a su incomodidad y le llevó a permanecer, estoico, en su barrizal, que otrora fuese Edén.

Al parecer la escena resultaba tan hilarante que mi padre y la demás gente que le acompañaba no pudieron contener las carcajadas. Todo el mundo que pasaba por el lugar se detenía un buen rato a contemplar el espectáculo.

Aunque me hubiese gustado estar allí, la hilaridad animal tiene sus peligros. Recordemos que, según la leyenda, el filósofo estoico Crísifo murió de risa mientras contemplaba a un burro borracho que intentaba comer unos higos.

Ojalá ningún avestruz furioso se entrometa en nuestros lodazales particulares. Y si lo hace, al menos que no haya testigos.

¡Chúpate esa, Descartes!

Lichtenberg afirmó que Descartes se equivocó justo en lo que pensaba que era lo más cierto. No debería haber afirmado que un pensador tiene que ser una entidad que existe separadamente. Su famoso Cogito no justificaba esa creencia. No debería haber afirmado, "Pienso, luego existo". Aunque esto es verdadero, resulta engañoso. Descartes podría haber dicho en vez de eso, "Se piensa: el pensamiento tiene lugar". O también: "Esto es un pensamiento, por tanto, como mínimo, se piensa un pensamiento".

(Derek Parfit: Razones y Personas. Antonio Machado Libros, Colección Teoría y Crítica)

Mereological nihilism and its activists

Mereological nihilism [...] is the position that objects with proper parts do not exist (not only objects in space, but also objects existing in time do not have any temporal parts), and only basic building blocks without parts exist (e.g., electrons, quarks), and thus the world we see and experience full of objects with parts is a product of human misperception (if we could see clearly, we'd not see compositive objects).

(Wikipedia entry for Mereological nihilism)

The Null-Os in Philip K. Dick's eponymous short story could be thought of as active (and enthusiastic!) followers of mereological nihilism:

Null-O is a 1958 science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick. This rather brief story examines the concept of totally unempathic and 'logical' humans. These beings view individual collections of matter, i.e. any object, as subjective structures and see the true state of reality as an 'undifferentiated world of pure energy'. After attaining positions of power they proceed with a plan to ultimately return everything in the universe to this state. This is to be done by the construction of successively more powerful bombs, ultimately resulting in the rather improbable 'U-bomb' that will homogenise the whole universe.

(Wikipedia entry for Null-O)

It's a really wacky story, and not exactly a literary masterpiece I guess, but nevertheless it is among my favorite PKD works. I have already quoted from the story in an older post.

Is "Null-O" a satire of A. E. van Vogt's "The World of Null-A"? Possibly. Dick wasn't very keen of the idea of superpowered, superintelligent, omnicompetent mutants coming to save the day. See also: The Golden Man.

War, Altruism, Genes, Morality

Throughout history it has been almost axiomatic that a nation seeking to avoid subjection to a foreign overlord must itself achieve and exercise the powers of an overlord, and will succeed in doing so only by having at its disposal substantial military capabilities—and using them. One must rule or be ruled; there is no middle course.

(Trevor Bryce: Life and Society in the Hittite World)

Altruism—benefiting fellow group members at a cost to oneself—and parochialism—hostility toward individuals not of one's own ethnic, racial, or other group—are common human behaviors. [...] Our game-theoretic analysis and agent-based simulations show that under conditions likely to have been experienced by late Pleistocene and early Holocene humans, neither parochialism nor altruism would have been viable singly, but by promoting group conflict, they could have evolved jointly.

(a scientific paper quoted in this post at Dienekes' Anthropology Blog)

Once we see that our moral beliefs are simply an adaptation put in place by natural selection, that is an end to it. Morality is no more than a collective illusion fobbed off on us by our genes for reproductive ends.

(Michael Ruse)

Each of the quotes is unsettling enough by itself, when taken together the picture becomes almost unbearably grim. Not only war is an inescapable evil but, ironically, our nobler instincts are mere byproducts of it, arrived at through a blind process of natural selection that has nothing to do with any kind of objective moral facts, which indeed may not exist.

On the other hand, consider puppies. Puppies are cute.

Google Hollow Earth

There are other worlds, but they're all in the mind of D&D nerds and they're full of sissy elves.

(Paul Eluard)

Sometimes, when I wallow in my abject nerdom and my already tenuous link with reality gets streched even further, I ponder that versions of Google Earth for imaginary worlds would be mightly cool, and useful to boot. For example, Google Tschai would be an invaluable tool for planning your incursions into the Carabas in search of sequins. And in some cases, the very fate of the world depends on a properly planned quest. One does not simply walk into Mordor, but consults Google Middle Earth first (Galadriel's mirror has a really cool interface, by the way, even if the search results are a bit erratic).

However, such projects would be fraught with technical difficulties. Our world is pretty simple: emerged bidimensional surfaces (save for some slight bump here and there, like the Himalayas) which are easily observed by the prying eyes of satellites. Fantasy worlds are more complicated. What about underground kingdoms, like the Underdark or Foreverness? Satellites won't be of much use in those cases; we would need something like Barrington Bailey's "antronoscope":

A more detailed exercise in alternative cosmology is found in "Me and My Antronoscope'' (1973), which is set in a rigid universe where life exists in bubblelike lacunae. A rebellious individual in one such lacuna challenges the reigning orthodoxy with his notion that the continuum contains other worlds, and sets off defiantly in his solidity ship in order to search for them. After a long journey he breaks through into a new cavity, and, though it is empty and lifeless, he feels that its existence vindicates his theory. He perishes, convinced that he has been the pioneer who will lead his race to the conquest of the universe. This little drama is perceived by the inhabitants of another world by means of an antronoscope, and their activities form a frame narrative offering the merest glimpse of the other wonders of the infinite universe which this marvelous device exposes to their eyes.

(Brian Stableford's review of Barrington J. Bayley's The Knights of the Limits)

And let's not forget underwater kingdoms, and cloud kingdoms. The latter ones may change position -or even form, or dissolve- in a matter of days according to the prevailing winds. The map may quickly become obsolete unless it is frequently updated.

From the shelf Gersen took down an untidy portfolio, containing ballads, odes, dithyrambs: A Growl for Gruel, The Juices I Have Tramped, I Am a Darting Minstrel, They Pass!, Drusilla's Dream, Castles in the Clouds and the Anxieties of Those Who Live Directly Below by Reason of Falling Objects and Wastes.

(Jack Vance: The Palace of Love)

Besides the difficulties with data acquisition, the layer functionality of Google Earth would have to be greatly extended to allow switching between all those superimposed realms. And I'm not even going to discuss the possibility of alternate versions of the same world in parallel dimensions, or lovecraftian Dreamlands. No doubt those at Google were aware of all the hurdles I mentioned. That's why they decided to tackle the simplest case -the real world- first.

One last thing: what type of map projection is the one best suited to hollow earths, in particular those hollow earths open at the poles, in which the external and internal surfaces communicate? And for worlds in the shape of mobious strips, or klein bottles? These are pressing questions, in my opinion.

In general, the concept of GIS for fantasy worlds offers untapped, if challenging, possibilities.

Edit: How naive of me. Apparently, Google Middle Earth already exists.

Hola, soy yo

Cando llames al portero automático de tu casa y pregunten "¿Quién es?" no respondas "Soy yo". ¡Por supuesto que tú eres tú! ¿Quién ibas a ser, si no? Esa afirmación es siempre cierta, quienquiera que la diga. Por lo tanto, no le sirve a la persona en el piso para determinar quién es el que está en el portal. En todo caso, lo hará basándose en el tono de tu voz u otros aspectos ajenos al contenido proposicional de tu afirmación.

Deja de decir "Soy yo". Intenta comunicar algún pequeño dato fácilmente obtenible que pueda resultar marginalmente útil a la persona en el piso, como por ejemplo la hora, el tiempo que hace fuera, o si al venir has visto un gato.

Lost books, imaginary books

Lost books -see this post at Memorabilia Antonina- fascinate me. So do imaginary books. They're both a tease, suggesting unexplored literary landscapes while reminding us of that they're out of our reach.

I'm trying to remember examples of fantasy works wherein an imaginary book is regarded as lost. Right now I can't come up with anything, but they exist for sure. Conversely, I wonder if some of the works which we now regard as lost in truth never existed; a joke played on posterity by our ancestors.

Has any fearless classicist ever tried rewrite a lost work? To provide plausible, if fanciful, reconstructions the two missing parts of Aeschylus' Prometheus trilogy for example? The techniques pioneered by Pierre Menard could be of use...

Perhaps we should consider these two conditions, being lost and being imaginary, as part of the natural lifecycle of books. Because every book starts as an imaginary, unbirthed entity in the mind of its author. And every book will eventually be lost and forgotten at some point; entropy will take care of that.

Horses and Mules Exempted

The imposition of the death penalty (otherwise extremely rare in The Laws) for intercourse with pigs, dogs, and sheep might reflect Hittite society’s repugnance at bestiality. But that seems to be negated by a clause (200-a) which explicitly exempts from punishment those who indulge in sexual relations with a horse or a mule. Speculation on why one may have sex with such animals but none others has led to a number of explanations in the scholarly literature which are ultimately inconclusive, even if they have the merit of being ingenious and entertaining.

(Trevor Bryce: Life and Society in the Hittite World)

Glandular Apostasy

I wonder if some people are temperamentally "programmed" to completely change their convictions at one point in their lives, whatever those convictions happen to be. Such a change would be fueled by an inner pulsion, to be rationalized only afterwards with more or less convincing explanations.

Every worldview holds a paradox at its core, gnawing at it like the proverbial worm in the apple. Every movement has its share of irksome members and vociferous blowhards. When a prospective apostate of the type I have hypothesized arrives at a particular stage in life (say, full maturity) his disillusion gland stars pumping chagrinine into his bloodstream. He becomes hypersensitive. What yesterday seemed like slight cracks in his intellectual edifice now become gaping holes that threaten to tear it down. The other tenants go from friendly neighbors to obnoxious bores, or worse. He begins to consider moving house. He finally does and, just before he arrives to his new mental home, the disillusion gland stops secreting and withers, not to work ever again. What a sturdy, solid house, unlike the old one! How friendly the neighbours! And yet, had he started there, he would have travelled the other way.

Mad Max in the Bronze Age

Yet the actual nature, extent, and duration of their activities [of the Sea Peoples] leave much room for doubt. The view that they were participant in a carefully planned military operation is not sustainable. Rather, they were a largely disorganized array of groups, who banded together from time to time in their wanderings and sometimes joined forces for raids and, on occasions, more extensive military operations. They may have had much of the character of the roving, marauding bands that are frequently depicted by science fiction writers in a post nuclear war environment.

(Trevor Bryce: Kingdom of the Hittites)

Quote spotted at Google Books. The amount of content avaliable there is surprising.

The Power of Love

Warning: spoilers for Stardust.

There are good fantasy movies, mediocre fantasy movies, and bad fantasy movies. Then there is a special brand of bad fantasy movie, which is truly the bottom of the barrel, the dregs of the cup, the worst of the worst.

I'm referring to those where Evil is defeated at the end through the POWER OF LOVE. During the final confrontation with the bad guy, the protagonist, who has a big warm heart full of loving-kindness towards his parents, his lady friend, or his pet hamster, somehow externalizes those feelings as colored death-rays which affect only evil people, thus killing the bad guy. That's what quality fantasy consists in, the scriptwriters seem to believe: representing human feelings as colored death-rays.

The first Harry Potter movie belonged to that wretched company. Now you can add Stardust the movie to the list (did the original Neil Gaiman story have such a crappy ending?).

Edit: Here is tedg's review of the movie.

Parfit and The Prestige

I was going to make a post about how a scene in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige perfectly illustrates a philosophical point about identity made by Derek Parfit in his work Reasons and Persons, but after a brief search I discovered that a similar post already exists elsewhere. So read it, and this follow-up too.

Lafferty on shooting and being shot at

Here is a quote by R. A. Lafferty about shooting people.

Here's another about being shot at:

When a man shoots at you once it can be an accident. When he shoots at you a second time he is still entitled to the doubt. But when he keeps it up the doubt gradually fades, and a certainty develops.

(R. A. Lafferty: The Devil is Dead)

Speaking of Lafferty, sfsignal has recently posted a link to a short story by him in Gutenberg titled "Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas".

Peril from the Provinces

The post Which leaders make history? at Marginal Revolution quotes the book Arsenals of Folly:

Leaders who make history are often provincials: Provincials attempt what sophisticates consider naive.

(Richard Rhodes: Arsenals of Folly: the Making of the Nuclear Arms Race.)

I was reminded of:

Judge, Sir, of my surprise, when I found that a very great proportion of the assembly (a majority, I believe, of the members who attended) was composed of practitioners in the law. It was composed, not of distinguished magistrates, who had given pledges to their country of their science, prudence, and integrity; not of leading advocates, the glory of the bar; not of renowned professors in universities;—but for the far greater part, as it must in such a number, of the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession. There were distinguished exceptions; but the general composition was of obscure provincial advocates, of stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attornies, notaries, and the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation, the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation. From the moment I read the list, I saw distinctly, and very nearly as it has happened, all that was to follow.

(Edmund Burke: Reflections on the French Revolution.)

Wasn't Robespierre from the provinces, too?

Hubbard, Malzberg, and other things

The blog Sans Everything has a post arguing that science fiction is at its core a religious genre, and establishing a dichotomy beween L. Ron Hubbard, who became a messiah, and Philp K. Dick, who could have done so but chose not to.

Theres's also a post on Barry N. Malzberg. The blog's non-sf related entries are interesting, too.

"and the dirt came out"

Say you were some dashing gentleman who offended some other dashing idiot, grabbed his favorite prostitute off him or whatever, and you had a duel. Even if he only got in one belly thrust before your seconds called a halt, which they usually did very fast once claret was poured, you were gone. Once that knife or sword sliced into the peritoneum, it would pierce your intestines and spray a lot of shit, literally, through the bowel.

(The War Nerd: Shank you very much)

And Ehud came unto him; and he was sitting in a summer parlour, which he had for himself alone. And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee. And he arose out of his seat.

And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly:

And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out.

(The Bible, King James Version. Judges 3:20-22)

When is the best time to blog?

When you have other things to do, urgently.

When is the best time to live?

To the theatre!

Last friday, my girldfriend and I went to the Rosalía theatre in A Coruña to watch a representation of Romeo and Juliet by the young talents of the Teatro do Noroeste company.

At two moments during the play both leads went naked; I was attentively scandalized. Juliet had beautiful feet. Afterwards my girlfriend assured me, to my relief, that she never glanced at Romeo with anything other than a cold and detached critical appreciation.

What I'm trying to say is, I think I'm starting to appreciate Shakespeare.

I found that one feels more compelled to write about the plays he attends than about the movies he watches. A movie is nothing more than a faint echo of things that happened elsewhere. With plays, you were there.

The Neolithic Revolution and the Repugnant Conclusion

The Repugnant Conclusion is a result in population ethics which the man who came up with it (philosopher Derek Parfit) finds distasteful, but difficult to avoid. Basically, it states that for any given population with a high quality of life, there's a much larger population whose existence, if other things were equal, would be better even if its members have lives barely worth living. That is, the aggregate quality of life of the larger population dwarfs that of the smaller population by reason of its numbers alone.

An interesting and disturbing concept, but somewhat theoretical, isn't it? Well, the fact is that the scenario used to illustrate the Repugnant Conclusion closely resembles an aspect of the Neolithic Revolution mentioned in places like Jared Diamond's essay Humanity's Greatest Mistake.

Apparently, hunter-gatherers lived longer and healthier lives than agriculturalists, with more leisure time. However, their way of life did not support high population densities (that is, they correspond to the high-quality-of-life-but-small-size population in the Repugnant Conclusion). Hunter-gatherers were nevertheless displaced by the agriculturalists, who were worse fed, suffered from more diseases, lived less, and had to work more. Why, then, the latter prevailed? Because agriculture supports greater population densities. Thus, farmers will end up overwhelming hunter-gatherers. (Are the various myths of a past Golden Age a dimmed cultural memory of the hunter-gatherer epoch of human history? Or is that benevolent conception of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle the newest iteration of the myth of a Golden age?)

It is often argued that agriculture gave humans more control over their food supply, but this has been disputed by the finding that nutritional standards of Neolithic populations were generally inferior to that of hunter gatherers, and life expectancy may in fact have been shorter (see "Disease" below). In actual fact, by reducing the necessity for the carrying of children, Neolithic societies had a major impact upon the spacing of children (carrying more than one child at a time is impossible for hunter-gatherers, which leads to children being spaced four or more years apart). This increase in the birth rate was required to offset increases in death rates and required settled occupation of territory and encouraged larger social groups.

(Wikipedia article on the Neolithic Revolution. And here is a dissenting view critical of Diamond.)

From the vantage point of our modern society, in which we are far better off than any hunther-gatherers (though some may disagree) the transition to civilization may have been worth it after all. But suppose for a moment that, for whatever season, the development of human societies had stopped at the level of the Ancient Near East, of even the Middle Ages, and had stayed at that level forever. Would the transition have been worth it in that case?

Lets remember that, until relatively recently, the vast majority of humans were farmers who did not receive any significant benefit from civilization, which was the prerogative of a tiny elite (the governing and priestly classes, city dwellers in general). In fact, that elite ruthlessly exploited farmers for its own benefit. They were what historian William H. McNeill calls macroparasites in his book Plagues and Peoples.

Many of the greatest cities of classical times were placed within sight of forbidding highlands. Every year their inhabitants ransacked the surrounding countryside to feed themselves. Describing the symptoms of widespread malnutrition in the countryside in the middle of the second century, the doctor Galen observed: "The city-dwellers, as was their practice, collected and stored enough corn for all the coming year immediately after the harvest. They carried off the wheat, the barley, the beans and the lentils and left what remained to the country folk." Seen in this light, the history of the Roman empire is the history of the ways in which the 10 per cent of the population, who lived in the town and have left their mark on the course of European civilization, fed themselves, in the summary manner described by Galen, from the labours of the remaining 90 per cent who worked the land.

(Peter Brown: The World of Late Antiquity)

The typical Middle Ages farmer didn't give a fig that Plato ever existed. The pressures of rapacious nobles and tax collectors were much more real to him. Not that city dwellers fared better in all respects, either. Until relatively recently, cities were demographic sinks ravaged by disease who needed a constant influx of people from the countryside to maintain their population level.

La Llave de Cristal

Una cerrajería/ferretería situada en la Calle de la Merced de A Coruña tiene el bonito nombre de La Llave de Cristal, supongo que inspirado por la novela de Dashiell Hammett. Creo que la leí hace tiempo, pero no me acuerdo de mucho.

Otros posibles nombres de inspiración literaria para una ferretería: El Tambor de Hojalata, El Soldadito de Plomo, El Talón de Hierro.

Edit: Parece que se trata no de una cerrajería/ferretería, sino de una cerrajería/cristalería. Así que el nombre es perfectamente apropiado.

Dragon Wars and Dragon Masters

This is a poster for D-War (Dragon Wars) a movie so bad watching it will give you eye cancer. The poster is reminiscent of one classic cover for Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters, a novella so good that its reading sets cross-eyes straight and allows you to perceive three extra colors of the spectrum*.

* hyperbole.

Slow Tuesday Night

The breakneck pace of catchphrase evolution suggested by this strip at Language Log ("ultra-hip nostalgic retro-phrase, ironically evoking the earlier era of ten days earlier") reminds me of a Lafferty story, which also deals with compressed timelines and is avaliable online: Slow Tuesday Night.

The panhandler was Basil Bagelbaker, who would be the richest man in the world within an hour and a half. He would make and lose four fortunes within eight hours; and these not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things.

(R. A. Lafferty: Slow Tuesday Night)

Catchphrases are not a new phenomenon. How far back in history they go? Is there any study that deals with that question? I suppose the population density provided by cities is necessary for catchphrase spreading.

Vista al suelo, vista al cielo.

Si nos viésemos forzados a elegir entre caminar mirando siempre al suelo y caminar mirando siempre al cielo, ¿cómo deberíamos escoger?

Es cierto que la primera opción expondrá a nuestra mirada dolorosos testimonios de la corrupción de este mundo sublunar, como por ejemplo las cagadas de perro. Pero no es menos cierto que precisamente tales visiones desagradables son las que nos evitan en gran medida contactos más bruscos y directos con lo indeseable. El contemplador del infinito pisa más mierda.

La vista al suelo ofrece otras ventajas. Calculo que a lo largo de mi vida han sido alrededor de ocho con cincuenta los euros que me he encontrado tirados en la acera. ¿Compensa ese dinero la pérdida del cielo estrellado, de las nubes algodonosas? ¡SÍ!

No niego que la bóveda celeste sea una visión inspiradora, ennoblecedora incluso. Pero a veces está nublado. ¿Y qué impresión se da a la gente? Cuando nos cruzamos con un mirasuelos, pensamos que está enfadado o triste, algo para lo cual casi todo el mundo tiene motivos. Los miracielos en cambio parecen ingenuos, y hasta bobos.

Undead commentary

We have now discovered a motive which can explain the idea that the souls of those who have just died are transformed into demons and the necessity felt by survivors to protect themselves against their hostility.

(Sigmund Freud: Totem and Taboo)

- They were chasing me... screaming... I was scared.

- Who were chasing you?

- My mom... my dad... They were trying to kill me. There were others, too.

(a bit of dialogue from 28 Weeks Later)

Roger: You'll take care of me when I go, won't you, Peter?

Peter: Just rest, man. Save your strength.

Roger: I don't want to be walkin' around... like THAT!... Peter... PETER?

Peter: I'm here, man!

Roger: Don't do it until you are sure I *am* coming back! I'm gonna try... not to... I'm gonna try... not to... come back. I'm gonna try... not to...

(a bit of dialogue from Dawn of the Dead [1978])

Having a loved one turn into an inhuman (but still recognizable) monster who seeks to harm you is a primal fear. The modern remake of Dawn of the Dead knows this and exploits it to the maximum. From sleeping happily in her husband's arms, in a matter of seconds the protagonist finds herself being chased by that same husband, now suitably zombified. Meanwhile, the Apocalypse rages around her.

This review of the movie in Cinematical states that the film (especially the terrifying beginning set to Johnny Cash's "The man comes around") manages to evoke the feeling of horror and disorientation of 9/11, at least for the reviewer.

I would also say that the underrated 28 Weeks Later is a perfect metaphor for some aspects of the situation in Iraq, and for our current climate of fear in general. The first three minutes of the movie are here. Zombie films: great sources for sociopolitical commentary.

Poets and Publicists

This post on The Mumpisums reminded me of...

"Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time-"

That's the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down. There are only so many people capable of putting together words that stir and move and sing. When it became possible to earn a very good living in advertising by exercising this capability, lyric poetry was left to untalented screwballs who had to shriek for attention and compete by eccentricity."

(Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth: The Space Merchants [1953])

Bothered by Buddha

(WARNING: Massively ignorant opinions in this post about a religion I don't know well.)

Spotted at The Toynbee convector:

Buddhists do not admit the existence of “selves” or “souls”

This is one thing I don't understand about Buddhism. Buddhists affirm that there are no selves, that identity is an illusion. And yet, they (most of them, at least) believe in samsara, the infinite (if you don't manage to break it) cycle of deaths and rebirths. But if there are no selves, then what gets reincarnated, exactly? In what sense can you say that newborn person A is "the same as" recently deceased person B? You can't! Belief in reincarnation and belief in the illusionary nature of the self are incompatible in my view. I seem to recall that Max Weber briefly commented on this problem in his The Religion of India, but I don't have the volume handy to quote from it.

Well, it's not like logical consistency is the primary characteristic of religions. But still, how that contradiction came about? Maybe reincarnation is a leftover from Hinduism too fundamental to leave behind?

Or maybe there is another explanation. A religion must give something to its followers. It must state that there is a problem and then offer itself as the solution. Otherwise, why convert to it, why practice it? But if reincarnation doesn't happen, then there is no "problem". Everybody would automatically achieve Nirvana (if you understand Nirvana as nonexistence) upon death, even if they ignored Buddhist teachings altogether. Buddhism without reincarnation is a pointless doctrine. There is no incentive to preach it and there is no incentive to learn it, unless it offers something for the here-and-now, like a method for relaxation, a way to gain self-control, cool martial arts moves, or whatever.

Corrections and explanations are welcome. By the way, what is the best book to read if one is interested in an account of how the old Vedic religion evolved into Hinduism? The Axial Age and all that stuff.

Affordable, universal beauty

When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect.

(Arthur C. Clarke: The City and the Stars. Is Clarke saying that beauty is a kind of positional good?)

The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.

(William Gibson: Neuromancer)

What's more, beauty is now a mass phenomenon, almost as ubiquitous as electricity or water. Hard to remember, but high-speed, high-quality color printing is only about 50 years old (the same is true for color television). Our world, in which ordinary people view hundreds of lifelike, full-color, drop-dead gorgeous images daily, is entirely the product of that brief period. For most of history, ordinary people saw few, if any, deliberately beautiful images in their entire lives. Paintings and sculptures were for palaces and cathedrals; most human beings until recently lived on farms or in isolated villages. If they visited town and saw a beautiful statue in the square, the sheer rarity of that experience would heighten the sense that this beauty was in no way related to their common lives.

(David Von Drehle: Looking good. The Washington Post)

Timeline

Recently I was thinking to myself: "Wouldn't it be great if something like Google Earth existed, but for temporal, instead of spatial, information?" Well, turns out that such a thing already exists and it's called Timeline. A related project called Exhibit allows you to easily create your own timelines (and maps). Timeplot also looks interesting.

"the Castile of the Near East"

The austere, arid plateau of Iran -the Castile of the Near East- was the traditional heart of the Persian Empire.

(Peter Brown: The World of Late Antiquity)

Things to Come

December l0. Stanley calls after screening H. G. Wells' Things to Come, and says he'll never see another movie I recommend.

(Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 Diary at The Kubrick Site)

sfsignal has posted the video of the movie.

A useful social function

So then: these were Srenki, men whose virtue was the excess of vice, who with leaden zest performed quintessential evil and so redeemed their fellows from turpitude.

(Jack Vance: The Gray Prince)

Three empty seats

In the palace of Khusro I Anoshirwan at Ctesiphon [...] three empty seats stood beneath the royal throne. These were for the emperor of China, for the great khagan (the ruler of the nomads of central Asia), and for the Roman emperor, in case these rulers came, as vassals, to the court of the king of kings. The three thrones summed up the vast horizons of the Sassanian empire.

(Peter Brown: The World of Late Antiquity)

There's a pair of posts about sassanian stuff down at Zenobia, Empress of the East. And here is a history of the Sassanian empire on Project Gutenberg.

Speaking about Late Antiquity, Avram Davidson wrote a series of novels set in that time period, sprinkled with touches of fantasy and humor: the Peregrine books.

No son tantos los muertos

En este post de Edad de Oro se cita a Flannery O'Connor diciendo que "los muertos son un millón de veces más que los vivos".

La señorita O'Connor (o el personaje en cuya boca pone esas palabras) exagera un poco. En el número de Septiembre de Investigación y Ciencia, se comenta que en 2002 la población mundial representaba aproximadamente el 6% del total de la gente que haya nacido hasta esa fecha. O sea, que los muertos son sólo unas 17 veces más que los vivos. Más información, aquí.

Aún así, está claro que si los muertos votasen, ganarían siempre por mayoría absoluta. ¿Cuántas historias de fantasía habrán literalizado la frase de Chesterton de que la tradición es la "democracia de los muertos"?

Ozimandias en A Coruña

En general, lo nuevo -ya se trate de un objeto o de una idea- posee una cualidad abrasiva sumamente desagradable. Sólo una vez que sus aristas han sido pulidas por el roce del Tiempo, lo nuevo pasa a ser medianamente aceptable y podemos tolerar su presencia sin fruncir el ceño. (Ya sé que existen fetichistas de lo nuevo, pero pervertidos los hubo en todas las épocas.)

De ello se deduce que todo acto de creación es de mal gusto. Pero si uno, empujado por el orgullo o la imprudencia, se empeña en crear algo, ¿cómo hacerlo con la mayor delicadeza posible, para minimizar la irritación causada al tejido de nuestro cosmos exangüe? La solución obvia es hacer pasar lo nuevo por antiguo.

Así pues, tu radical e innovador movimiento político-social debe presentarse como la largamente demorada recuperación de alguna Edad de Oro situada en el pasado, real o imaginaria. Si eres arquitecto, que tus edificios semejen ruinas, y pasen a estar abandonados desde su misma inauguración. En ese aspecto, La Cidade da Cultura me parece injustamente denostada. Sospecho que, en el fondo, el estímulo cultural que se pretendía es el que las ruinas suscitan en la imaginación romántica.

Y si eres escultor, que tus novísimas estatuas parezcan provenir del saqueo de alguna capital antiquísima. Se diría que ésta es la aproximación de Igor Mitoraj, cuya obra puede contemplarse en la la plaza de María Pita:

(foto sacada de este artículo en Galicia-Hoxe.com)

Las figuras esculpidas por Mitoraj a veces parecen estar envueltas en sudarios o vendajes, lo que refuerza el efecto.

Edit: "El roce del Tiempo" (Time's rub) es el título de un relato de Gregory Benford sobre la entropía, la inmortalidad, la identidad, y la paradoja de Newcomb.

R. A. Lafferty on Lulu

Reading the message board of the R. A. Lafferty Devotional Page, I learnt that More Than Melchisedech, a very hard to find book by Lafferty, can now be bought from the print-on-demand company Lulu. Here is the link.

More Than Melchisedech appears to be tied in some manner with The Devil is Dead, one of Lafferty's "difficult" novels. This later book has the best preface (Lafferty uses the word "promantia") for a novel, ever. In it, we are promised many things, among them...

Given here, for the first time anywhere, are the bearings and correct location of the Terrestrial Paradise, down to the last second of longitude. You may follow them. You may go there.

(R. A. Lafferty: The Devil is Dead)

Is this the beginning of a trend, in which we see previously unavaliable works by Lafferty start surfacing? We can only hope.

Edit: Apparently, the word "promantia" means something like "the preferential right to consult an oracle."

Academic conferences

It is common knowledge that there are two kinds of scholar these days: the stationary and the peripatetic. The stationaries pursue their studies in the traditional way, while their restless colleagues participate in every sort of international seminar and symposium imaginable. The scholar of this second type may be readily identified: in his lapel he wears a card bearing his name, rank, and home university, in his pocket sticks a flight schedule of arrivals and depatures, and the buckle of his belt -as well the snaps on his briefcase- are plastic, never metal, so as not to trigger unnecessarily the alarms of airport scanners that search boarding passengers for weapons. Our peripatetic scholar keeps up with the literature of his field by studying in buses, waiting rooms, planes, and hotel bars.

(Stanislaw Lem: The Futurological Congress [1971])

On the following day Laurz Mur called the conclave of xenologists to order. Standing on the speaker's podium, he swept the audience with an appraising eye. Five hundred xenologists came under his purview: every sort of philosopher, explorer, biologist, anthropologist, historian, cultural psychologist, linguist, analytical aesthetician, philologer, dendrologist, lexicographer, cartologist, and a dozen other more recondite professions. Some were scheduled speakers; others would listen and engage in the important work of intellectual cross-fertilization. Still others had brought papers they intended to read, if the opportunity offered, or even if not: somehow, by hook or by crook, the precious paper with its carefully honed phrases and engaging new ideas must be heard!

(Jack Vance: Night Lamp. By the way, "cartologist" seems to be a real word. Is it a mere synonym for "cartographer", or has it some particular shade of meaning?)

One possible way to enliven the closing ceremonies of academic conferences would be to arrange a "PowerPoint collage" by taking one slide from each of the transpired presentations, and then forcing one unfortunate attendant chosen at random to defend it as if it were his own paper. If he didn't make a convincing case, he would be erased from the proceedings. Fun for everyone, except one! (If the congress is about Moral Philosophy, the utilitarian guy should be chosen.)

No one around

If humanity suddenly dissapeared, for how long would traces of our existence remain? The World Without Us by Alan Weisman explores that question.

Poul Anderson's haunting short story "In Memoriam" does the same, in a more fictionalized form. It begins like this:

Against the inexorable forces of time, will humanity leave any lasting mark?

The last man on Earth knew not that he was. Nor would he have cared. He had met very few other humans in his life, and none since his woman coughed herself into silence.

Roleplaying in the Dying Earth

In the essay "Rules to Mock Your Vain Ambitions", noted RPG designer Robin D. Laws describes what were his aims when adapting Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" setting to a Role-Playing Game.

I find fascinating the discussion of how the game mechanics were carefully tailored to achieve a proper "Dying Earth" feeling during play. Besides design artistry, it required a deep knowlege of Vance's stories: the identification of their recurring themes, motifs, an character archetypes, not to mention an ear for his use of language (the players are encouraged to speak in the rarefied dialogue peculiar to the series, and the rules themselves are written "in voice".) It's no wonder then that the essay doubles as an interesting commentary on Vance's work.

The bit about the different dice "personalities" is amusing:

Maybe I'm crazy, but I've always found that the different dice used in RPGs all carry different emotional temperatures. The d4 is primal, parsimonious, and, as anyone who has ever stepped on one knows, hostile. The d12 is your goofy uncle, the one who tells you stories aren't supposed to hear and asks you to pull his finger. The d20 is a serious-minded juggernaut of decimal regularity. The six-sider, on the other hand, is a Dying Earth die all the way. A cube, it is elegant, spare, and classical. As the die used by normal civilians, the d6 offers a kind of bridge out from the world of RPGs, just as the Dying Earth stories straddle the boundaries between genre fiction and literature.

Léon Bloy lee a H. G. Wells

6 DE NOVIEMBRE. He acabado la nueva novela de Wells, Los primeros hombres en la Luna. Es un Julio Verne escritor, es decir, un monstruo. Ateísmo anglosajón. Este hombre da la sensación de que escribe desde el fondo de un pozo. De todos modos, como invención es un libro muy inferior a La guerra de los mundos, pero no tiene nada de la abominación capital, primigenia y transcendental de La isla del doctor Moreau, libro negro entre los atroces, donde hasta el propio Demonio parece salir difamado.

(Léon Bloy: Diarios. Editorial Acantilado.)

"abominación capital, primigenia y transcendental" tiene un aire a frase lovecraftiana...

The Immortalists

In an earlier post, I mentioned Alexander Bogdanov's pursuit of immortality. Not fairytales like the persistence of the soul, or flimsy, metaphorical substitutes like enduring fame, but honest to God physical rejuvenation.

Turns out that, a few years after his death, he had counterparts in the US attempting the same thing. In both cases the plan was to bestow eternal life on a restricted elite: the party leadership in the case of Bogdanov, some kind of eugenic camarilla in the case of Lindbergh and Carrel.

Pesadilla de un torero

Visto en CoverBrowser. En el sitio, aparte de infinidad de portadas de comics, se puede encontrar una interesante galería de las peores carátulas de discos.

Siento debilidad por las portadas de Heavy Metal y revistas afines. ¿Existe alguna página que recopile las de Zona 84?

Flatland

R. A. Lafferty didn't like modern society. He used the term "Flatland" (possibly inspired by Edwin Abbott's novel) to characterise a world which he he saw as unstructured and bereft of an spiritual dimension. Furthermore, Lafferty believed that the ability to remember the previous -more wholesome- state, and to perceive the degradation of the current one, was lost in the transition.

I am speaking literally about a real happening, the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years. The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as 'Western Civilization' or 'Modern Civilization', happened suddenly, some time in the half century between 1912 and 1962. That world, which was 'The World' for a few centuries, is gone. Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general. Several historiographers have given the opinion that these amnesias are features common to all 'ends of worlds'. Nobody now remembers our late world very clearly, and nobody will ever remember it clearly in the natural order of things. It can't be recollected because recollection is one of the things it took with it when it went...

(R. A. Lafferty: The Day After the World Ended. Collected in his essay volume It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs)

Maybe Lafferty selected the year 1962 as the "upper bound" of the End of the World because of Vatican II?

There is a vage memory that this late world had a large and intrincate superstructure on it, and that this came crashing down. There is some dispute as to whether we gained by the sweeping away of the trashy construction, or whether we lost a true and valid dimension in the unstructuring of our Old World, and wether we do not now live in "Flatland." There is no way to settle this dispute since the old structure cannot be recaptured or analyzed.

There is even some evidence that "Flatlands" are the more usual conditions, and that the worlds with heights and structures are the exceptions. Even if we could go back there, a Time Machine from Flatland and eyes from Flatland would not be able to see a dimension not contained in Flatland.

(ibid.)

The fourth (as yet unpublished) volume in Laffety's autobiographical series In a Green Tree is titled Incidents of Travel in Flatland. It covers the sixties and the seventies. I would love to take a look at it.

The idea that "it sucks, you just don't realize it sucks" is interesting, but the catch is that it can be used to argue that anything sucks. It's not that different from the approach taken by the Frankfurt school when they, too, tried to show that "it sucks". (Not that Lafferty would agree on anything with that bunch of pinkos, mind you.) On the other hand, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle".

This concern of Lafferty shows in many of his works, most of the time in a veiled manner. Which is probably good, because I suspect I wouldn't like his philosophy if he had made it completely explicit. Instead, we have his stories and novels.

Predicando

Y Paul Le Jeune se quejaba en 1635 desde Nueva Francia porque un chamán local, viendo comprometida su propia reputación como sanador milagrero y hacedor de la lluvia, solía "divertirse a mis expensas, sugiriéndome palabras indecentes en su idioma [para que] tomase nota de ellas y asegurándome que no hay nada malo en las mismas, a fin de conseguir que yo pronuncie esas palabras soeces en presencia de los salvajes".

(Jonathan Wright: Los Jesuitas)

El episodio recuerda un poco al sketch "El diccionario de húngaro" de los Monty Phyton:

No es prudente aprender la lengua local precisamente de la persona a la que pretendes dejar sin trabajo, y que se encuentra comprensiblemente preocupada por tu intrusismo laboral. Me pregunto si serían posibles versiones más sofisticadas de la treta, por ejemplo: en vez de hacer decir palabrotas al pobre jesuita, construir cuidadosamente el "diccionario" de manera que lo que predique resulte herético para su propia doctrina.

First seen in science fiction?

The narrative device of having one character annotate a work written by another character, grossly misinterpreting it to suit his own cynical ends and/or delusional worldview, is most famously used in Nabokov's Pale Fire where, in fact, the anotations to an (intentionally) dreadful poem constitute the bulk of the novel. Gene Wolfe has mentioned his admiration for Pale Fire in one interview, and it's easy to see how the book influenced Wolfe's own oblique style and penchant for unreliable narrators.

A previous, more limited use of that device can be found Bernard Wolfe's Limbo, published ten years before Pale Fire. One section of the book consists in the old diaries of the main character, written amidst the horrors of World War III. In them, he expounds a demented program for achieving world peace that involves the mass voluntary amputation of limbs as a way to curb the aggresive instincts of the human race.

The plan was clearly intended as satire by the protagonist, in the "Irish people should eat their children" manner. However, a former colleage of his got hold of the diaries, and took them literally. In fact, he goes on to become the leader of a post-apocalyptic US on a pro-amputation platform. The diaries are published as a kind of seminal political manifesto, conveniently and obtusely annotated to justify a literal interpretation.

Are there other uses of the "misguided commentary" device that predate both Pale Fire and Limbo? Or is Limbo the first novel to feature it, even if it is circumscribed to one part of the book and does not overwhelm the "main" text?

Anyway, Wolfe's novel is unjustly forgotten, and worth a read despite its misogyny and overuse of freudian jargon. Some (not misguided!) commentary on the book here.

Impotencia selectiva

el 11 de mayo de 1453 el arcediano de Segovia, sede vacante a la sazón, leía un sentencia de divorcio por él pronunciada, declarando nulo en matrimonio entre Enrique y Blanca a los trece años de contraído. [...] La causa de nulidad alegada era la impotencia de Enrique, aunque sólo en relación con Blanca, puesto que el arcediano había recurrido al testimonio de ciertas mujeres públicas de Segovia, las cuales estaban dispuestas a jurar que, con ellas, había tenido "trato y conocimiento de hombre con mujer".

(Luis Suárez Fernández: Nobleza y Monarquía)

Calabresas, Islandesas

Las mujeres tienen en la Ndrangheta un papel importante. [...] Las mujeres también son las que mantienen vivas las faidas, las venganzas, además de organizar matrimonios de conveniencia entre las familias amigas. "No os he criado para pagar las facturas de la luz y el agua", se escucha en una interceptación a Saveria Strangio, viuda de un capo, durante las escuchas que la policía realizó en la casa milanesa de uno de sus hijos.

(María Signo: El poder de la mafia calabresa. En La Voz de Galicia del Domingo 26 de Agosto)

"Cold are the councils of women" reads a famous line from Njáls Saga, and in times of feud women are repeatedly portrayed in the sagas as demanding blood vengeance. Demanding and getting are not the same, and the self-willed women of Njáls Saga at times found it difficult to goad their men into action.

(Jesse Byock: Viking Age Iceland)

"Bolli, your brother's killer, lives there. You have certanly turned out very different from your noble kinsmen if you don't want to avenge a brother like Kjartan. [...] It's a sad thing to have shirkers for sons. [...] Olaf's worst misfortune, that he was cheated when it came to the kind of sons he got."

(Laxdaela saga, quoted in Jesse Byock's Viking Age Iceland)

Zibarro

I have just finished All-Star Superman #8 and enjoyed it a lot, especially the character Zibarro.

Despite superficial appearances and Zibarro's own proclamations, I think he is an opposite of Superman like regular Bizarro, only in subtler ways. He gives up easily while Superman perseveres, he despises the other bizarros while Superman -basically an alien god- loves and appreciates normal Earth people, and so on.

Finally (this might sound far-fetched, but let's remember that Morrison has a penchant for playing with the fourth wall) while Superman is a character in a story, Zibarro is himself an author of stories. At the end of the issue, he is tasked by Superman with writing the events that have just transpired! Maybe the whole issue has been written by Zibarro?

Una nueva y excitante tecnología

El explorador de hipertexto no lee, no escucha, no ve televisión. El explorador de hipertexto navega en un vasto océano de información textual, sonora y visual, buscando sus propios caminos de conocimiento a medida que se adentra en niveles cada vez más profundos del libro absoluto.

(Muy Interesante, Especial Comunicación. Verano de 1990. 350 ptas.)

En el hipertexto, la información se organiza de la misma forma como lo hace la mente humana. Y el sistema de recuperación funciona de manera muy parecida al cerebro cuando quiere acceder a los datos almacenados en la memoria: por asociaciones de ideas y por el contexto en que se producen. [...] Sólo que en el hipertexto, en lugar de un desencadenante neuroquímico, como ocurre con los mecanismos de la memoria, utilizamos una herramienta electrónica: el ratón o la pantalla táctil.

(íbid.)

Para explicar estos conceptos, se usa como analogía el libro poliédrico. Imaginemos un libro en forma de cubo que se pueda abrir por cualquiera de sus seis caras. Cada una de ellas representa el comienzo de un camino distinto para recorrer el contenido de todo el libro. Se empiece por donde se empiece, al final hemos alcanzado toda la información, aunque por caminos diferentes. Los jóvenes lectores de novelas interactivas tal vez estén más preparados para comprenderlo. En el hipertexto, cada portadda del libro poliédrico -que no hace falta que tenga únicamente seis caras- simboliza un bucle de presentación a partir del cual parten, hacia dentro, decenas, centenares o miles de otros bucles interconectados. Y por ellos navega el lector-explorador.

(íbid.)

En el horizonte: la megapedia universal que reúna los archivos históricos de toda la humanidad. [...] Cualquier ciudadano, desde su propia casa, tendrá la oportunidad de conectar su terminal doméstico al gran conocedor, un superodenador central con billones y billones de fichas-bucle.

(íbid.)

Suena excitante, casi como un salto a un estado superior de conciencia. (Supongo que no se estará hablando de una simple evolución de las referencias, índices, y notas a pie de página de toda la vida, ¿no? Eso sería tan prosaico....)

Las "novelas interactivas" que leen los jóvenes supongo que serán aquellas de "elige tu propia aventura". Ah, tiempos...

Aprovecho para mencionar el excelente blog Paleo-Future, dedicado a cartografiar cómo era antes el porvenir.

"Glassy-eyed zest"

This blog post comments on a felicitous turn of phrase by Jack Vance: "spasm of zeal".

For my part, I want to mention another one I like very much: "glassy-eyed zest". It appears in the first chapter of The Green Pearl (freely avaliable here in PDF form for you to sample, dear reader.)

The expression is used in the context of some erotic exertions on the part of one of the characters, performed with a certain lack of genuine enthusiasm.

Dead Brothers

Dick’s early history is at once tormented, hustling, and oddly lit by the bright California sunshine of the late fifties. Born in 1928, he had a twin, a sister named Jane, who died when she was only a month old; like Elvis Presley, who also had a twin sibling who died, Dick seems to have been haunted for the rest of his life by his missing Other.

(Adam Gopnik: Blows Against the Empire)

Another insane/weird genius haunted by a lost brother (although not a twin) was Salvador Dalí:

When he was five, Dalí was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation,[8] which he came to believe.[9] Of his brother, Dalí said: "… [we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections."[10] He "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute."[11]

(Wikipedia entry on Salvador Dalí)

Calle Amargura

A ver si alguien más puesto que yo en toponimia urbana me puede resolver la siguiente duda...

Existe una Calle Amargura en el casco viejo de A Coruña. En ella se encuentra una librería de segunda mano que suelo frecuentar.

Hay calles con el mismo nombre en Pontevedra, Sevilla, y Cáceres. Para la de esta última ciudad, al parecer existe una leyenda que atribuye el origen del nombre a ciertos eventos trágicos que sucedieron en ella. Pero entonces, ¿cómo se explica que otras calles en otras ciudades se llamen igual? ¿Cuál es el verdadero origen del nombre?

Edit: También hay una Calle Amargura en Tarifa. Y en Málaga.

Edit#2: Y en este otro sitio.

Edit#3: Resulta que existe una Virgen de la Amargura. Más información, aquí. Imágenes, aquí. ¿Relacionado?

"Al agote garrotazo en el cogote"

Nunca había oído hablar de este grupo étnico.

Inhumanity makes us human

Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.

(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)

I posit a theory: the privileged being which we call human is distinguished from other animals only by certain double-edged manifestations which in charity we can only call "inhuman."

(R. A. Lafferty: Arrive at Easterwine)

A barrage of divine truths

Like the Marinids, the Mamluks, and other crude conquerors fresh from the steppe, the Ilkhans were quick to surrender to the sophisticathed civilization that enveloped them. Indeed the mind of the Mongol warrior was so culturally deprived that it presented a vast blank on which all sorts of refined and humane influences could be written.

(Ross E. Dunn: The Adventures of Ibn Battuta)

Genghis had set a policy of toleration for all religions within the empire, and ultimately the formless tribal shamanism to which he remained loyal withered under a barrage of divine truths which missionaries of all the world-universalist faiths fired at his various successors.

(íbid.)

Oh Lord, give me chastity, but do not give it yet

The Principle of Diachronic Integrity

Profundando

Era un barbeiro de sábado que amaba os libros que non entendía e gustaba de lélos todos enteiros. Unha vez atopéino coa testa pousada nas mans, ó xeito dun pensador, e díxome:

- Estou profundando.

(Castelao: Cousas)

Un día pousóu os ollos no mar -endexamáis reparaba en cousas miúdas- e dispóis de ter profundado un bo retrinco de tempo deitóu na orella do seu compañeiro ísta frase:

- O mar ¿sabes? O mar... ¡é un fenómeno!

(íbid.)

Simpatizo con el barbero, a pesar del retrato satírico que de él hace Castelao. ¿Qué tiene de reprobable, o de risible, entrar en comunión con el misterio numinoso del océano?

I knew it

From here:

"There's a lot of hype around the alleged harm that people do to themselves" with enhancements, Hughes says. "But in head-pounding sports, you face a lifetime of disability. In soccer, heading the ball often enough lowers your IQ".

Myself, I have always been wary of heading the ball. I surmised the practice wasn't doing any favors to my beleaguered neurons. Thank God I no longer play that brutish sport.

SFnal Titles

I think it was Samuel R. Delany who said that science fiction is better understood as way of reading than as a property of the texts themselves. For example, consider the sentence: "Her world exploded". It could simply refer to a woman undergoing psychological trauma, or... to an actual planet exploding (I suppose the woman in question would suffer psychological trauma in that case too). See here.

It also happens with titles. In fact, some mainstream book titles would be perfect for science fiction novels! I have no idea what A Thousand Splendid Suns is really about, but to me it conjures visions of an epic voyage of space exploration.

In Search of Lost Time? What better title for a time-travel story?

One Hundred Years of Solitude is obviously the tale of posthuman astronaut marooned on an unhabited planet.

And, of course, there's Invisible Man:

Mr. Ellison said, ''Once the book was done, it was suggested that the title would be confused with H.G. Wells's old novel, 'The Invisible Man,' but I fought to keep my title because that's what the book was about.'' Mr. Erskine recalled, ''His novel doesn't have the article in its title, although the mistake keeps cropping up, and I've been telling people to drop the word 'the' ever since the book came out.''

(Ralph Ellison, quoted in this article)

On the other hand, Nabokov's Pale Fire sounds like part 1 of 5 of a trashy fantasy series. Ditto for Heart of Darkness and The Magic Mountain.

Talking about movies, it's simply criminal that Last Life in the Universe is not a piece of far-future sf. And Till Human Voices Wake Us (beautiful title!) should be about a couple that enters suspended animation shortly after a cataclysmic event, and awakes to a drastically changed future.

The trouble with AI

This article (spotted at Brains) is an excellent reminder of the problems with Artificial Intelligence, a welcome dose of reality against the naive triumphalism of people like Ray Kurzweil.

When the author discusses the connectionist approach, he touches on the intractable complexity that would plague the development process of a connectionist brain:

If each synapse were handled by the equivalent of only a single line of code, the program to simulate the cerebral cortex would be roughly 25 million times larger than what’s probably the largest software product ever written, Microsoft Windows, said to be about 40 million lines of code.31 As a software project grows in size, the probability of failure increases.32 The probability of successfully completing a project 25 million times more complex than Windows is effectively zero.

He doesn't mention potential ways to sidestep that problem. For example: evolving a population of complex artificial brains from a population of much simpler ones, through the use of random mutations and artificial selection. Conceivably, AI could be achieved by that method without the need for humans to understand in every detail how the evolved brains work, or how to design them explicitly.

Of course, that approach would face severe problems of their own. As the article mentions, simulating a single human brain would require a humongous amount of computing power. Simulating vast populations of them through innumerable generations would require much, much more. And then there are the problems of finding the proper encoding of the "genomes", the proper mapping between "genotypes" and "phenotypes", how to measure fitness, and so on.

Interestingly, the author does not claim that AI is impossible in principle. He never mentions arguments like Searle's The Chinese Room, or the ones spoused by Penrose involving non-computability. (Myself, I think the virtual mind/systems reply is a very convincing answer to Searle. I don't fully understand Penrose's argument, but I suspect the non-computable, Gödel's Theorem-defying aspects of the human mind he talks about are not really there.)

Edit: See also this post on Gene Expression.

Recursive Science Fiction

This is an interesting site about science fiction works... that are about science fiction. (Spotted at Tim R. Mortiss' blog, La Explanada de Avente.)

Polygamy

In societies where rich men are much richer than poor men, women (and their children) are better off sharing the few wealthy men; one-half, one-quarter, or even one-tenth of a wealthy man is still better than an entire poor man. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, "The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one."

(Psychology Today: Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature)

In some instances concubines had wider latitude to act in their own interests than they might have had in poor marriages. An Icelandic folk saying of uncertain age goes, "Better a good man's frilla [a kind of concubine] than married badly."

(Jesse Byock: Viking Age Iceland)

Since some icelanders had more than one woman, others must have felt very cold indeed, alone in bed during those icy icelandic nights. The disadvantages of polygamy for non-elite males should be evident to anyone who was taught New Math at school:

Non-injective and non-surjective: BAD (unless you are lucky A, that is)

Bijective: kind of OK for everybody I guess. Surely better than this.

Nineteenth Century LOLCats

London is peculiarly fertile in this sort of phrases, which spring up suddenly, no one knows exactly in what spot, and pervade the whole population in a few hours, no one knows how. Many years ago the favourite phrase (for, though but a monosyllable, it was a phrase in itself) was Quoz. This odd word took the fancy of the multitude in an extraordinary degree, and very soon acquired an almost boundless meaning. When vulgar wit wished to mark its incredulity and raise a laugh at the same time, there was no resource so sure as this popular piece of slang. When a man was asked a favour which he did not choose to grant, he marked his sense of the suitor's unparalleled presumption by exclaiming Quoz! When a mischievous urchin wished to annoy a passenger, and create mirth for his chums, he looked him in the face, and cried out Quoz! and the exclamation never failed in its object. When a disputant was desirous of throwing a doubt upon the veracity of his opponent, and getting summarily rid of an argument which he could not overturn, he uttered the word Quoz, with a contemptuous curl of his lip and an impatient shrug of his shoulders. The universal monosyllable conveyed all his meaning, and not only told his opponent that he lied, but that he erred egregiously if he thought that any one was such a nincompoop as to believe him. Every alehouse resounded with Quoz; every street corner was noisy with it, and every wall for miles around was chalked with it.

But, like all other earthly things, Quoz had its season, and passed away as suddenly as it arose, never again to be the pet and the idol of the populace. A new claimant drove it from its place, and held undisputed sway till, in its turn, it was hurled from its pre-eminence, and a successor appointed in its stead.

(Charles Mackay: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds)

They break; you can see through them

Six months did Thomas remain confined to his bed; and during that time he not only became reduced to a skeleton, but seemed also to have lost the use of his faculties. Every remedy that could be thought of was tried in his behalf; but although the physicians succeeded in curing the physical malady, they could not remove that of the mind; so that when he was at last pronounced cured, he was still afflicted with the strangest madness that was ever heard of among the many kinds by which humanity has been assailed. The unhappy man imagined that he was entirely made of glass; and, possessed with this idea, when any one approached him he would utter the most terrible outcries, begging and beseeching them not to come near him, or they would assuredly break him to pieces, as he was not like other men but entirely of glass from head to foot.

(Miguel de Cervantes: The Licenciate Vidriera. See also this post on Claw of the Conciliator.)

The bank had been modernized. It was a transparent young lady who waited on him. It wouldn't have startled him in any of the other worlds, but it did at home.

"I am unsure," he said. "Are you people?"

"I also am unsure," said the young lady, "since our position is presently under litigation. Actually we are the newest thing in people. Soon there will be none produced in the old manner. You will have to admit that it was a very grotesque arrangement."

(R. A. Lafferty: Space Chantey)

Plants and minerals, seas and athmospheric vapors here enjoy an absolute transparecy. Only the humans and higher animals stand out clearly above that whole by the opaline transparency of their bodies. Only their eyes, constructed like ours, are of an entirely opaque white. The muscles of that human race have the appereance of fibrous fasciculus, or amianthus. The blood which flows through their arteries is similar to lymph; the veinous blood seems to be of chyle or milk.

Despite a complexion offering in all its parts the vitreous appearance of a milky opal, the men of Élier are large, agile, and well proportioned. The women, a little smaller, are delicate and slightly diaphanous.

(C. I. Defontenay: Star)

The first symptom is a scaliness of the skin; itch, flakes upon the clothing, inflammation. There follows a weakness in the bones as the calcium is dissolved. One grows limp and rubbery, but this is still an early phase. Soon the outer tissues harden. Thick, opaque membranes form on the surface of the eyes; the nostrils may close and seal; the skin grows coarse and pebbled. In this phase prophecy is common. The sufferer partakes of the skills of a Somnambulist, and utters oracles. The soul may wander, separating from the body for hours at a time, although the life-processes continue. Next, within twenty days after the onset of the disease, the crystallization occurs. While the skeletal structure dissolves, the skin splits and cracks, forming shining crystals in rigid geometrical patterns. The victim is quite beautiful at this time and takes on the appearance of a replica of himself in precious gems. The crystals glow with rich inner lights, violet and green and red; their sharp facets adopt new alignments from hour to hour; the slightest illumination in the room causes the sufferer to give off brilliant glittering reflections that dazzle and delight the eye.

(Robert Silverberg: Nightwings)

I suppose a quote from Ballard's The Crystal World would belong in this post, but I haven't read that book yet.

Wikipedia Religion Links Smorgasbord

Some pages I found interesting:

Mandaeism. One religion I didn't knew about. Yazidi. Another one.

Tondrakians. Christian heretics of medieval Armenia.

Beguines. A female religious movement of the Middle Ages.

Kuzari Principle. A proof of the existence of God, specially suited to the Jewish religion.

Donmeh. Purported descendants of the followers of Sabattai Zevi.

Also, one shouldn't rely too much on Wikipedia. Or blogs.

¿Está A Coruña preparada para una epidemia zombi?

Mucho me temo que no. El principal problema es el cuello de botella a la salida, que haría muy difícil la evacuación:

El tema no fue mencionado por ninguno de los partidos durante las recientes elecciones municipales. Una triste muestra de la indiferencia de los políticos por las verdaderas preocupaciones de los ciudadanos.

Quizás las mejor estrategia en caso de epidemia zombi sería atrincherarse en la Torre de Hércules. O mejor aún: en el depauperado Centro de Ocio del puerto (que ya tiene un aire post-apocalíptico, todo sea dicho). Víveres no faltarían, porque la mayor parte de los locales son de comidas. El problema es que, al contrario que en los centros comerciales estadounidenses (al menos los que salen en las películas), no existiría una tienda de armas de fuego que poder saquear para defenderse de las hordas zombi. Pero quizás la tienda de comics y demás frikadas tenga una katana de pega (posiblemente de Naruto). La gran cantidad de locales vacíos haría sencillo alojar a los supervivientes.

Alternativamente, podría montarse uno en la Arielita y confiar en que, como suele pasar, quede averiada a medio camino, felizmente inaccesible.

Si algún coruñés previsor ha concebido un plan mejor, estaría interesado en escucharlo.

Edit: Una ventaja del apocalipsis zombi sería que la eterna polémica A Coruña/La Coruña quedaría obsoleta al pasar la ciudad a denominarse "Zona de Infestación X-7013".

It kinda looks like NY

Bologna in the Middle Ages.

Another city rife with with towers is Sharn. It has the disadvantage of being imaginary. (Is Bologna real? I haven't been there so I can't tell.)

Evangelistic Atheism

For a long time I have thought that modern evangelistic atheism (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennet, et al.) is very close to the mindset of the early christians. Let's remember that those early christians were considered "atheists" by the pagans, and that they showed a pronounced skeptical streak. See the post The Original Atheists at Crooked Timber, and also the comments.

Going a little further back, Elijah's questioning of Baal's priests is almost scientific. He repeatedly asks for proof of their claims, derides them when that proof is not forthcoming, and then provides proof for the power of his own god. Some christians resent the snarkiness of the evangelistic atheists, but that snarkiness is nothing compared to that of Elijah (even without the ensuing massacre). Also, many of the arguments against idolatry in the Bible are pretty cogent and subscribable by modern atheists, who only carry them a little further. For the atheists, only Reason should be worshipped.

The book Black Mass by philosopher John Gray seems to make similar points, at least judging from the reviews.

The Ethical Treatment of Books

Books are kept not on open shelves but in locked chests. Students who borrow are cautioned not to scratch grooves in the margin with their fingernails or to use straws from the lecture floor as placemarks. A Jewish ethical treatise warns that a man must not express his anger by pounding on a book or by hitting people with it. The angry teacher must not hit the bad student with a book, nor should the student use a book to ward off blows.

(Joseph and Frances Gies: Life in a Medieval City)

Used books from overseas

When buying used books from online bookstores, overseas shipping rates tend to end up surpassing the cost of the books themselves, frequently disuading me from the purchase.

BetterWorld.com delivers books to anywhere in the world for a mere $2.97, which is nice if you don't mind waiting a bit for your order (I don't). Some good deals there. They also sell through AbeBooks.

An excellent online bookstore for non-used books is The Book Depository. Free delivery, and the books tend to be cheaper than their Amazon equivalents once shipping is included.

Hell is the absence of Blog

I post again, and sooner than forever!

Actually, the absence of Blog is not really Hell. It's more like a slight, liminal itch that you scratch by typing.