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.