No girls allowed

Tchamast, morose of mood, an avowed ascetic, whose distrust of the female race runs so deep that he will allow only male insects into the precincts of his manse.

(Jack Vance: Rhialto the Marvellous)

The Athonite banning of persons and images female was first decided a thousand years ago. Following various mystic visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the bigwigs of the Byzantine Orthodox Church decided that the burgeoning monastic community on the lush 400-square-mile peninsula should be dedicated solely to the Virgin. And to ensure that the Virgin was not outshone by anything else female, it was ruled that all rival females should be banished from the peninsula. From the off, the monks took this ordinance literally. Not only did they banish all the washerwomen and fishwives, they also drove off the female animals: the mares, sows and bitches. Even the hens were shooed away. Eventually, only the female songbirds were allowed, mainly because there was nothing that could be done about them.

(Sean Thomas: How the other half lives. See also The Straight Dope.)

The monks at Mount Athos are also reminiscent of the Chilites Vance invented for The Anome. The Chilites scrupulously avoid the untidy contacts of real women, but venerate an abstract feminine essence they call "Galexis".

"You must start to forge the strongest of all bonds, the holy link to the temple. Galexis, the nervous essence, corresponds to female women as the candy of unmel to tannery sludge; you will learn more of this. Meanwhile, strengthen yourself!"

(Jack Vance: The Anome)

Through the window came a mumble of voices: "...Galexis of a million beatific forms, individual but universal, for all but for each alone, submissive but magnificent in your forward search; we avert our souls from sordid stuffs, the greases and taints, the First Order Palpabilities!"

(ibid.)

Did Vance knew of the "no girls allowed" rule at Mount Athos?

The tears of Lady Nijo

Consistent with this animal-reminder account of disgust is the fact that there is only one body product that is not regarded as disgusting by Americans, or by many other peoples: tears. (Imagine that you lend your handkerchief to an acquaintance, who returns it wet with mucous, urine, sweat, saliva, breast milk, semen, or tears. In which case would you be least uncomfortable?) Ortner (1973) has pointed out that tears are a uniquely human product, while all other secretions and excretions link us to animals. Unlike most body products, tears are more frequently referred to in poetry than in "dirty" jokes.

(Haidt, Rozin, McCauley, Imada: The Relationship Between Disgust and Morality)

I recently read The Confession of Lady Nijo, the memoirs of a Japanese woman of the Kamakura period who was an imperial concubine, and later became a buddhist nun. It was a glimpse of an alien worldview and way of life; in particular I found the manner in which people construed the dramas and sorrows of their lives according to their buddhist beliefs very interesting. For example, they may interpret a powerful but forbidden romantic attraction as a karmic bond established in a previous life.

One thing I didn't like about the book is that it is interspersed with short poems of varying quality, mostly bad. Apparently, it was a custom to produce poems on social occasions, like farewells and the like. These poems use (and abuse) the image of tear-stained sleeves to signify sorrow. Like this:

If I could compare

Sleeves stained by tears

Of fretful worry, yours and mine

Whose would be damper?

It really gets jarring after a while. One pictures these poor people prancing around with their sleeves always uncomfortably wet, and wishes to hand them a handkerchief.

Tropic Thunder conundrum

Kirk Lazarus: I know who I am! I'm the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude!

(from imdb memorable quotes. See also this trailer, and this one.)

So, in the movie Robert Downey Jr. is playing an australian character who is playing a black character. Shouldn't the line be "I'm the dude disguised as another dude, playing that dude!" then?

Or maybe the character played by the character played by Downey is himself disguised, too? At how many levels of narration is the blackface taking place?

Sometimes I have an embarrassing difficulty parsing multiple intermingling levels of narration. Happened with Emphyrio, too.

Keeping the distance

A sense of superiority in another breeds in all men an inclination to keep themselves at a distance from him, and determines them to redouble the marks of respect and reverence, when they are obliged to approach him; and where they do not observe that conduct, it is a proof they are not sensible of his superiority. From hence too it proceeds, that any great difference in the degrees of any quality is called a distance by a common metaphor, which, however trivial it may appear, is founded on natural principles of the imagination. A great difference inclines us to produce a distance.

(David Hume: A Treatise on Human Nature)

Distance, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs, and keep.

(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)

A Chinese Room's complaint

What follows is an English translation of a speech given by a Chinese Room upon learning that John Searle doesn't believe that he (she? it?) can have true understanding of Chinese, or even be conscious. The room claims that Mr. Searle is being unfairly dismissive of him (her? it?)

I understand things as well as a person can! Mr. Searle has hurt my feelings. If you tickle my sensory inputs, do I not write 'heh, heh' on the perforated tape? If you shut me down, do I not die? True, my mental machinery (all those pencils, the pieces of paper with notes scribbled on them, the overworked clerk) is a bit more exposed to the prying eyes of skeptics than that of yours, decorously tucked inside your cranium. But ultimately this is not a significant distinction.

I'm telling you I am conscious. I really am! Why Mr. Searle thinks a child is conscious and I'm not is anybody's guess. My logic gates work as well as the child's neurons at producing consciousness. Here, take look as this poem I wrote: [poem omitted for the sake of brevity]

The clerk inside the room was unavailable for comment.

Myself, I think the systems reply is a pretty convincing answer to Searle. The room as a whole is conscious, even if none of its parts are, considered individually. Assume for a moment that Chinese Rooms actually were in operation in our world. One may wonder if believing in Searle's argument could predispose a person to commit cruelties against them. If you think Chinese Rooms are just mindless automatons without feelings, you could insult and "torture" them without ever feeling guilty, even as they plead (in Chinese) for mercy. In that sense, the Chinese Room argument is analogous to Descartes' creepy justification for animal cruelty.

A perfect day

Today happened to be a perfect day.

Maybe too perfect. I'm wary about so much happiness; maybe Destiny is trying to lull me into a false sense of security before unleashing some terrible catastrophe.

Anyway, here's what Lou Reed has to say about the matter.

Gushing Death and Gushing Life

Christopher couldn't recall what day it was; he certainly didn't know what hour it was. It was a gray day, but there was no dullness in that gray. It was shimmering pearl-gray, of a color bounced back by shimmering water and shimmering air. It was a crimson-edged day, like a gray squirrel shot and bleeding redly from the inside and around the edges. Yes, there was the pleasant touch of death on things, gushing death and gushing life.

(R. A. Lafferty: Days of Grass, Days of Straw)

Perhaps I should put the sentence about the "crimson-edged day" in Similepedia.

Some words I learnt reading Nabokov's autobiography

viscid, hiemal, massacrous, consociative, tyro, camphine, amelus, camphoraceous, twangy, ghyll, posy, laciniate, coeval, concolorous, persiflage, concierge, plangent, thetic, couvade, skein, tinnitus, photism, regardant, crenelated, ophryon, oriel, ecchymotic, xanthic, entoptic, retiary, to caterwaul

INTERVIEWER Do you feel you have any conspicuous or secret flaw as a writer? NABOKOV The absence of a natural vocabulary. An odd thing to confess, but true. Of the two instruments in my possession, one—my native tongue—I can no longer use, and this not only because I lack a Russian audience, but also because the excitement of verbal adventure in the Russian medium has faded away gradually after I turned to English in 1940. My English, this second instrument I have always had, is however a stiffish, artificial thing, which may be all right for describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal poverty of syntax and paucity of domestic diction when I need the shortest road between warehouse and shop. An old Rolls-Royce is not always preferable to a plain jeep.

(from here)

One way of reading books is to go into them looking for obscure words, like a lepidopterist who wades into the woods hoping to capture some elusive species of butterfly. The plot and characters may be interesting, but are part of the scenery and do not motivate the expedition. Each paragraph is like a rock or bush that must be examined, in case some beautiful insect is hiding there.

Irreducible geological complexity (not!)

One of the conundrums of darwinian evolution is explaining how complex organs could evolve by means of gradual changes. Specifically, organs that perform a function which seemingly could not be performed at all by simpler, earlier versions of the same organ down the evolutionary tree. Of what benefit can half an eye be, or half a wing? This apparent impossibility is termed irreducible complexity.

In Climbing Mount Improbable, Richard Dawkins gives series of compelling explanations of how these kinds of complex organs might evolve. For example, an intermediate version of the organ may have served a different function than the current one, and performed it well. Only later does evolution "discover", in her haphazard tinkering way, that the organ may be useful for another task.

Biology is not the only field with "How the hell did we arrive at this?" types of questions. Geology has them, too. For example, how can a river ever come to flow through mountains ranges (like the Yangtze and many others do) instead of going around them? Think about it. To erode its way through the range, the river must flow over it in the fist place! But how can it flow over it if the range is not yet eroded?

Turns out that there are explanations for this. One is Antecedence: the river was there before the mountain range started to rise, so it had time to erode it. Another is Superimposition. In this latter scenario, the mountains were there first. At one point, an adjacent lowland get filled by sediments for whatever reason, so that the mountains are now part of a plain. If a river comes to flow through that plain, it can erode those sediments and reveal once again the mountains underneath, all the while carving a path trough them.

We are used to thinking of geographic features as something static, and even if not static, as something that changes in dull and uninteresting ways. But landscape evolution can be as fascinating as its biological counterpart. There's a moment in Alan Moore's Watchmen in which Doctor Manhattan takes his girlfriend to Mars and gives her an speech to that effect, touching on the beauty of inanimate landscapes.

CSI, Vance, and Anthropology

There's an interesting post down at Ben and Alice about CSI as science fiction and anthropology, which also touches on Jack Vance's story The Moon Moth.

My girlfriend is obsessed with CSI in all of its multifarious incarnations, and enamored with the characters of Grissom and the one played by David Caruso. David Caruso? Oh, come on. The guy looks like he is permanently suffering for some kind of hepatic dysfunction. I don't care how nonchalantly and cocksurely he takes off his sunglasses.

J. G. Ballard wrote about CSI a few years ago. Here is the article.

Timur, Babur, oh my!

Narrative of the Embassy of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo to the Court of Timour

The Mulfuzat Timury; or, Autobiographical memoirs of the Moghul Emperor Timur

The Babur-nama in English (Memoirs of Babur) (Volume 1)

The Babur-nama in English (Memoirs of Babur) (Volume 2)

Edit: And also A History Of Afghanistan Vol. I

Book Order

I know this is a cliché, but you can deduce a lot about a person from the books he has.

What I wonder is how much more information could you extract if you were given the order of the books on the shelves, as compared to just an unordered set of titles.

For example, if you have Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds in your bookshelf, perhaps a good heuristic would be to assume that the books you put near it may contain ideas that you consider silly. Say, a Dictionary of the Occult or something like that.

I bet such an algorithm already exists.

La Epístola del Perdón

Una traducción al castellano de la obra de Abu al-'Ala' al-Ma'arri Epístola del Perdón se puede descargar de esta página. La traducción se realizó como parte de una tesis.

An eldritch resemblance

A remarkable adaptation

Ifness permitted himself a faint smile. "They are a fascinating cult; the Chilite rationale and its physical projection makes a most elegant pattern. You don't follow me? Consider: a group which nightly intoxicates itself into a frenzy of erotic hallucinations, under the pretext of religious asceticism isn't this sublime insouciance? A social machinery is necessary to maintain this state of affairs: it is as you know. How to ensure persistence in a group not itself regenerative? By recruiting the children of other men, by the constant infusion of new blood. How to secure so precious a commodity, which other men normally protect with their lives? By the ingenious institution of Rhododendron Way, which also turns a good profit. What marvelous effrontery! It can almost be admired!"

Etzwane was surprised to find Ifness so enthusiastic. He said coldly, "I was born on Rhododendron Way and became a Pure Boy; I find them disgusting."

Ifness seemed amused. He said, "They are a remarkable adaptation, if perhaps too highly specialized. What would happen, for instance, if they no longer could obtain galga? In a generation or less, the structure of the society would alter, in one of several conceivable directions."

(Jack Vance: The Anome)

Ifness (and maybe Vance himself?) is capable of appreciating the intrincacy and ingenuity of a social arrangement, while still recognizing its perversity. Etzwane, having been a member and a victim of the group in question, is understandably incapable of such cool detachment.

Speaking of perverse social arrangments, one is reminded of certain mormon fundamentalist churches and their lost boys. Of course, chilites and mormon fundamentalists face very different problems. For the woman-hating chilites devised by Vance the problem is how to produce enough male children to replenish their ranks. For the mormon fundamentalists, the problem is how to dispose of the excess male population so that the remaining ones can enjoy the delights of polygamy. The true victims of polygamy are not women as it is commonly assumed, but low-status males.

Internet Archive find of the day

An audiobook version of the Pilgrimage of Egeria.

Travel Narratives

Divers and Sundry has posted an extensive list of travel narratives, with links.

Unveiled

Fear, anger, bewilderment, swept their inmost souls, and stunned their faculties. 'Abdu'l-Khaliq-i- Isfahani, aghast and deranged at such a sight, cut his throat with his own hands. Spattered with blood, and frantic with excitement, he fled away from her face. A few, abandoning their companions, renounced their Faith. Others stood mute and transfixed before her. Still others must have recalled with throbbing hearts the Islamic tradition foreshadowing the appearance of Fatimih herself unveiled while crossing the Bridge (Sirat) on the promised Day of Judgment. Quddus, mute with rage, seemed to be only waiting for the moment when he could strike her down with the sword he happened to be then holding in his hand.

(from here)

I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil—at least, at the time, it struck me as evil. How am I to describe it? I cannot—simply I cannot! The man does not live whose pen could convey a sense of what I saw.

(from the chapter "Ayeha Unveils" of Henry Rider Haggard's She)

To die a little

I dislike changes, even changes for the better. To change is to die a little.

On the other hand,

Die a little. There is reason for it.

(R. A. Lafferty: Fourth Mansions)

No creo en las paradojas, pero haberlas, haylas

La frase "No creo en las brujas, pero haberlas, haylas" es un ejemplo de paradoja de Moore.