CHAOS, COINCIDENCE, CORRELATION, CONSPIRACY

Daily life is a tissue of loose ends, shot through with snarls and dropped stitches. That society nevertheless does not unravel, seems due to the fact that most people, though in detail unpredictable, are essentially similar and basically sane; due additionally to conservative/equilibrating structures evolved over the centuries; and perhaps to some further, anti-entropic factor, still obscure  but whose presence we may suspect (guardian angels would be the simplest explanation; something equally speculative though less intuitive, concerning negentropy or self-organizing systems, could also be alluded to).  Things pretty much jog along and usually eventually work out; but the details of any particular transaction  often may not bear looking into.

            One gets a glimpse of this  whenever, by some chance, a particular circumstance must be looked into further – something went a lot or a little bit wrong,  that, for some reason, this time, needs to be corrected or explained  and not just brushed aside as usual.  One often finds, upon turning over a rock long left undisturbed, a welter of wriggling vermin: errors previously unsuspected, data missing or misfiled, notes contradicting what one had previously believed (while their author has since left the company, or died prematurely).  Normally, none of this is sinister, but simply shows, on the human level, an analog (not an effect;  a metaphor, merely) of the underlying quantum uncertainty and atomic chaos  which nevertheless  ultimately manages to cohere in this coffee cup or that paperweight  sitting placidly, bien sage, on your desk.  If, however, the original affair is shady, the unexplained details which investigation unearths  lie in its shadow.  Let one instance stand for all: the celebrated “18-minute gap” in that tape, during Watergate.  Personally I find it utterly plausible that the gap resulted from the same gremlins that hide our spectacles, lose our umbrellas, and eat óne out of each pair of laundered socks.  But in context, it did look suspicious.

            An instinct not to let go of such suspicions  is buttressed by cases in which investigation of some misdeed,  severe enough to catch the atte.ntion of the media or the D.A.,  reveals a pot-pourri of previously unreported malfeasance, as in the Watergate affair.  Novelists and cineasts take the trend a satisfying step further with variations on the “Blow-Up” motif, in which a chance following-up of some minor discrepancy, out of mere curiosity, leads to a Vast Conspiracy. 

            The problem becomes acute when the stakes are high, the affair complex, and the discrepancies numerous (as they inevitably will be in any far-reaching affair, even absent any sinister underpinnings).  As, the Kennedy Assassination, or 9/11.

            We are currently witnessing a whole industry, tying our current President and his associates – both laterally (the present Administration) and longitudinally (the Bush family, going back to Prescott) – to all manner of skullduggery.  At the far fringe are the conspiracy theorists (stronger in Europe than here) who initially maintained, and some still maintain, that 9/11 was actually planned and carried out by a U.S. cabal, the airplanes being remotely controlled from the ground. A tad less extreme is the allegation, popular among some less reflective Arabs, that Israel did it.  Another tad, the position that,  while the op was indeed al-Qaeda’s, the Administration knew (sub-position 1, more florid) that that attack was due on that day, or (subposition 2, more reality-based, pointing to the August 6 memo) knew in a general way that such a thing might happen, and deliberately did nothing, so that they could use it as an excuse to proceed with their nefarious plans.  Certainly there have been agents provocateurs in history; but I tend to disbelieve in any gross such allegation concerning a present-day American administration, since every potential conspirator must be aware that, the way things stand in America today, no conspiracy broader than two twins in a cave  can stay secret for long – people write books and go on talk shows  to expose much milder grievances. 

            More centrist – if only with respect to such as these – is the new movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11”.  To his credit, Michael Moore does not even allude to such darker fantasies – indeed he indirectly exonerates the Administration, or at least Bush himself, of complicity,  if only through imputation of cluelessness. Bush’s blank look while the WTC attack vied for his attention with the Pet Goat, is itself a piece of evidence against all but a watered-down version of the last of the above-listed positions.  (Moore himself voiceovers a plausible thought-balloon in keeping with the last one, along the lines of: “Dang, wasn’t there some memo about something like this? Maybe I should have spent more time at the office and less on the golf course.”)  In one of his books, Moore hints at something more conspiratorial, but there fingers the Saudis (he really doesn’t like the Saudis), not the Illuminati or the Carlyle Group. And in the film, he does raise a number of other serious suspicions, none – again to his credit – original with himself, but dramatizations of charges explored at length by serious journalists in books. 

            It has been correctly observed that the basic motivation behind some of the most persistent of conspiracy theorists  is not mere irrationalism, but a perhaps excessive penchant for rationality – demanding to make sense of things that, well, don’t.  The distinction is hard to spot, since any empirically competent, level-headed investigator  tends to get swallowed up in a crowd of crazies.

            Another possible determinant, perhaps less often observed: in ascribing a pattern to the welter of events, as deriving from a plot, the theorizer may be acquiescing in a demand for personalization.  For, the confusing flux of the world  often lacks palpable causes.  Surely it can’t just all be random – one suspects deep dark forces at work. A plot puts a face on it.  But usually this is an explanatory short-circuit. For indeed there are forces, as deep and dark as those of hydrodynamics, but they are not even rational, let alone personal.

Empirical question: Does a tendancy towards florid conspiracy-mongering  correlate negatively with religious belief?  It is an observation  due perhaps to many, but prominently expressed in many a delightful story of Father Brown, that superstition tends to flow into the vacuum left by an absence of faith.  Perhaps belief in a heavenly Father – however distant, however inscrutable – leaves one less likely to imagine that the world’s workings may be ascribed to some shave-pate villain in a bunker somewhere, stroking a cat.

Against this, however:  the observed fixation of Book-of-Revelation-style evangelicals  on the Antichrist, working through the New World Order.  They do, so they say, believe in God;  a lot of good it’s done them.

            There is a healthy kernel to the epistemological attitude which, in its pathological exfoliation, becomes conspiracy-mindedness: a simple stance of “Wait a minute.”  For as Locke observed, and as subsequent scientific and historical discoveries  retrospectively further buttress: that “some (and those the most) taking things upon trust, misemploy their power of assent, by lazily enslaving their minds, to the dictates and dominion of others, in doctrines, which it is their duty  carefully to examine.”  (Essay I.iv.22)

            In an unhealthy development, skepticism becomes  not a key to inquiry, but a pose of imperviousness in the face of counter-evidence.  Michael Rutschky, in a recent contribution to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, described the situation in Germany, where “Ich bleibe skeptisch” has become a slogan – not, like that of the fabled Missouran (“You’ll have to show me”) inviting actual demonstration, but issuing a warning that, whatever evidence you may bring, it will be dismissed as smoke and mirrors. This sclerotic ‘tough-mindedness’ in the face of empricism  is often coupled with a soft side for Verschwörungstheorie.  At an extreme, this leads to political infantilization.  That the phenomenon seems more to be met with in Europe (at least, comparing their educated reading public with that of America, and setting aside the seething cauldron of the Web sites and talk shows) may cohere  with an objective semi-infantilization or anyhow sidelining  of Europe itself, in the age of the unilateral hyperpower.

*

The detective versus an unnamed evil thing:

A tale of madness, and of the uncanny --

Murphy Calls-in a Specialist

Available for Kindle or Nook

*

[Footnote May 2013: 

The above was written ca. 2005;  since that time, the fragile cortices of many of our countrymen have cracked, while paranoid fantasies sprout like weeds.  Yet the circumstances tend to reinforce the conjecture above, that hands far from the tillers of power  are freed for idle mischief.   When in office, Republicans are crafty and cynical; when out, they lose their moorings.]

[Sidenote]  There is a quite respectable practice of trying-to-see-hidden-patterns everywhere:  it's called Science.  For which see:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/consilience.html

That practice too  has its pathologies, which perhaps someday time will allow us to notice in this place.

We find both kinds of nisus united  in the figure of Newton.  On the one hand, his scientific Principia side; on the other, his esoteric researches (alchemical and theological), which bulked equally large in his life.  Re the latter, David Berlinski remarks (Newton’s Gift (2000), p. 68):  “Secretive natures are quite prepared to believe that the history of human affairs  is largely the history of a great many secrets."

Outrageous hacking-attack

So it has come to this:  Not only Saudi Intel and the Associated Press are being hacked, but even … America’s Finest News Source ™  … The Onion.

As a result of this despicable and cowardly act, the revered site, whose founding reaches back to the early days before certain babies were born, has been reduced to publishing news items that are both true and unfunny.

Zoögraphia universalis, ad usum delphini

 

Bunnies are fluffy.

Piggies are playful.

Bears like to lumber.

Teddies are friendly.

[Note:  The title is Latin, and means “Facts about animals, for girls and boys”.

The poem contains, in a nutshell, most of what you need to know about the natural world;
the details can be filled in  in graduate school.
For a pithier appreciation of the first line, click here.]

Der Wortwitz und seine Beziehung zum Halbbewußten

.

Die Spielerei mit Namen und Silben, die ich hier treibe, enthält aber noch einen weiteren Sinn.

-- Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1900)

Yesterday a handyman was at our home to do some work.   I always like these guys -- capable and straightforward, a refreshing contrast to the mall-and-media meshugaas.   (For more on union men as the pillar of our remaining civilization, cf. this:  Adult supervision.)  And one thing I’ve noticed is, they are always quite conscientious about cleaning up after their work, meticulously sweeping and setting things back in place.  So I was not surprised when, his task finished at last, he came in off the deck (where he had fashioned a wire screen to keep the birds from nesting in the dryer-vent) with a few tiny leftover metal scraps in his palm:   but somewhat surprised, and impressed, when, instead of dumping these into the nearby waste-basket, he held them out to me, as though apologetically, saying “recyclables”, for me to dispose of  as I saw fit.

And indeed they were, technically, recyclable:  shiny fresh metal, cleanly cut.  And if you happened to have a warehouse containing perhaps a million or so identical samples, you might have enough to make an automobile -- for a mouse.  (Vide Stuart Little.) I smiled and murmured to myself, “Yes, the recylabobbles.” -- and tossed them in the trash.

And then this morning, the early rays of Sunday  streaming through the bedroom window, new-brewed coffee  steaming on the nightstand,  I sipped and meditated upon that casual word:  recyclabobbles.  Such weekend early mornings, before consciousness has quite resumed her throne, and while stray streamers of dreams still waft through half-slumbering tissues, reliably prove fruitful  as a source of half-glimpsed welling insights.  And so it was to prove today.

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

Like dream-images, informal word-coinings tend to have multiple origins -- they are “overdetermined”, in the jargon (überdeterminiert).   And in this case, what we might call the labio-ludic moment  lies ready to view (or to audition):  Recyclabobbles is simply fun to say.  (Try it.  Above all, try it on your little kids.  They’ll think you’re the wittiest guy alive.)   But then, nothing is simply “simply”.  And so, digging down  or rather just scratching the surface a bit, under the smiling approbatory aegis of Father Freud (a passage from whose Traumdeutung proved the last thing I read before retiring for the night), we notice that the bilabial consonant b (a fun sound all in itself -- ask any babbling baby) is here redoubled, forming a kind of labial “bubble” at the end of the word -- like that last bloom of blissful milk upon the lips of the satisfied suckling.

Secundo:   There  is a purely adult, socio-ironic moment here in play:  namely, that coinage represents a very gentle ribbing of the solemnity with which the Ethos of Recycling -- the Recycling Way of Life -- is treated in bobo/googoo/goodthink communities.  In some, like Longmeadow (MA), it was sheer tyranny, l’arbitraire de l’indigne.  There, some weeks, for inscrutable reasons, apparently detecting some scrap of contraband among the piled-up glass and plastic, the trashmen or rather Disposal Professionals (picky princesses) would disdain to pick up any of the recyclables you had painstakingly collected and set out on the curb on the appointed day.  -- In other towns, like Princeton, it becomes a truly irksome fetish, with this container for clear glass  and that container for tinted glass, and the other container for plain paper, and another for cardboard, and -- no, that we classify as “building material”, and you may neither recycle it nor discard it in the trash, but must take it yourself to a special facility in a distant part of town, open on alternate Saturdays from seven to nine…

The lack of any sour note in that gently chiding recyclabobbles  is due to the fact that we now live, here in  Elkhornia, under a considerably more latitudinarian regime.  Not only do the municipal authorites not insist (unlike some places where we have resided) that we pre-wash, pasteurize, and sterilize  each item  before placing into the approved container;  they explicitly invite us to dump all recyclables, regardless and irrespective of their cleanliness, chemical composition, race, creed, or national origin, into the same huge heavy wheeled blue unbreakable containers supplied by the town.  Such license, actually, sits ill with the by-now-ingrown sense of the necessity for recyclables to be sauber getrennt, absorbed during previous stretches in various outposts of Recyclestan;  so that I actually cannot bear to mix the bottle milchig with the newspaper fleischig, and regularly set them out in two separate containers.  This accomplishes exactly nothing, since all containers are indiscriminately dumped by our sturdy dustman (knights of labor, no princesses, they) into the wide maw of the garbage-truck.

Well.  Not bad for a bit of morning musing.  Here we might comfortably lay aside our lyre, and turn to the comics section of the Sunday newspapers.  -- Yet the Austrian physician raises an admonitory finger  and murmurs:   There is more.

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(Ich bin Sigmund Freud, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

This throwaway coinage recyclabobbles, which  in the normal course of things  I should have forgotten  so soon as said,  has  in fact  a precursor  in the boyhood years of my brother and me.  To wit (to be witty):  végetebobbles, a word with which we occasionally amused ourselves. 

At the simplest level (the labio-ludic), this was just playing with the word -- bandying it about the way one might a ball;  specifically, by humorously and alliteratively extending it, the way we extended the name of Piglet’s notorious nemesis, the heffalump, into a vague category of amusing monsters,  heffalumps and huggamagoos.  (Notable note:  As a child, I did not realize that “heffalump” was little Piglet’s attempt to pronounce the word elephant:  this, despite an E.H. Shepherd illustration that clearly depicted the latter beast, haunting Piglet’s dreams.  More anon.)  The marketing industry caters to this penchant for verbally “playing with your food”, by coining such product-names as Rice-a-Roni (echoing the colloquial suffixal extension -aroony, popular in our grandfather’s day).

At the next level (the socio-ironic), it (self-)satirizes childish mispronunciation of long words,  like basketti for spaghetti.   There is a depth-psychological aspect to the latter, which is quickly forgotten by children, but which once was conscious:  indeed we can see it in statu nascendi, in the following remarkable incident recorded in my language notebook of our child’s early years.

After two years of Canadian exile, our young family had returned stateside.  We were living in one half of an almost Colonial-era bungalow, on Longmeadow Street in the eponymous town of Massachusetts, which (despite its historic status) had been bisected into a duplex (an elderly widow occupied the other half).   The wooden floors were picturesquely wonky; and it was upon the kitchen section of these that our heir and scion was rug-ratting around (sans rug), being on the brink of attaining his second year.   His mother was preparing some raw fresh vegetables (you see, I can use the grown-up word when I so choose).  After having served our sentence amid the waste-plains of northern Alberta, it was a treat, this summer, to move to an area where you could obtain   some actual local produce;  and it was with this fact in mind that she had been referring to the blushing spheroids of our desire, not merely as “tomatoes”, but as fresh tomatoes. 

This fact did not go unnoticed by the insatiably linguisorbent hatchling  amusing himself beneath the kitchen table.   We heard him say (speaking to himself, as children do at that age): besh ma-NAY-to.

Besh manato.   How cute, we thought, lisping his syllables as he attempts to acquire the tongue (you use besh manatoes to make basketti, you see).  But he continued, sotto voce, with a phrase that has etched itself in memory:

   Mommy say:  Fresh tomato.  Steven say:  besh ma-NAY-to.

(Later we may draw some lessons from this.)

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Nook lovers are book lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

~

To return to our leafy friends, the humble vegetables.

Rather later in life than that rolicking, frolicking time of vegetabobbles and hugamagoos, I coined (and recall coining) another alternative to the bare unsavory lexeme  bequeathed us by our elders: vegétables (pron. veh-JET-a-bles). 

The origin of this one is interesting.  The word as normally pronounced by Americans  both child and grown-up, is trisyllablic:  VEJ-ta-bles.  Yet the spelling perplexingly inserts an “e” between the clustered consonants.  Nor is this a mere orthographic indication of the “softness” of the g, for a vowel appears unambiguously in such (post-little-kid) words as ve-ji-TA-tion, not to mention (older) French végétables.  And indeed, our trans-Atlantic cousins (our former colonial masters, and long our orthoëpic exemplars) to this day pronounce vegetables as tetrasyllabic.   This ironically overcompensating veh-JET-a-bles was my response to these unwelcome strictures, by one who only recently had left off analphabetic prattling  and had learned to spell.  
So much for the intellectual (socio-ironic) aspect.  But there underlies yet another, depth-psychological:  for here the adolescing child is poised upon the cusp between pre-literate bliss and orthographic regimentation:  the schoolbench contribution to that shaping, shaving, repressive process that gives rise to Civilization, with all its Discontents.

And once coined, this further glossoplastic confection, veh-JET-ables, could give rise to yet another dysphemism for those unappealing greens:  regrettables, a word with which it rhymes, and which I was pleased to use  even so late as a teenager.   Once again, the socio-ironic aspect is obvious and prominent.  
But once again, there is a psychotropic undercurrent.   First, in the recognition (or premonition) that, for the immature stomachs of little children,  vegetables are literally poison:  unlike fruit, which is ‘intended’ to be eaten (to spread the seeds), vegetable matter is structural material and contains toxins so that the plant might survive.  Second, the … regrets (in the French sense: “Je regrette ces jours-là”: ‘I miss those times’), for the hazy pre-broccoli days of (mother’s) milk and (Poohbear’s) honey.

~

Another linguistically revealing anecdote from the nursery.  At some point it came into my head to refer to my brother Alan as “Aunin” (pron. OW-nin).

The labio-ludic element is obvious: as in the case of vegetebobbles, we note here an element of sensuous labial orality.  Instead of the short and acid vowel of Alan, we replace it with a rounding diphthong -- lips lingering then closing, as though over a grape.   There was also an element of the socio-ironic:  it was a way of making (rather fond) fun of my little brother.   Contributing phonetically to its confection was the influence of the rather odd name of one of my girl-cousins, Cousin Annan.   And somehow tied up with the word was the image, seen repeatedly, from the standard inside-covers of the Golden Books series, of a circus seal, balancing a ball.

~

But our labors are not over, with these linguistic observations.  There remains the psychodynamics of the thing.

Freud was well aware of the sort of forces that might be in play  in a case of this kind:

Die Sprachkünste der Kinder, die zu gewissen Zeiten die Worte tatsächlich wie Objecte behandeln, auch neue Sprachen und artefizielle Wortfügungen erfinden, sind für den Traum  wie für die Psychoneurosen  hier die gemeinsame Quelle.

-- Die Traumdeutung, p. 362

Now:  The crucial point about the “Aunin” example is that, whatever the element of phonetic wordplay (and this is not even a necessary feature to the real purpose of the thing), it was fundamentally an act of naming, of bestowing a name upon an object (here, a human being).  As such it recalls the Great Ur-christening, when Adam gave names to all the creatures that were paraded before him.   By naming my little brother, I framed him, boxed him in.  He was felt as a threat, since, prior to his arrival, I had had the mommy-mountain  all to myself.  Then he had to go and horn in … -- Oddly enough, he didn’t mind the name, and still occasionally uses it in his correspondence with me, whom he similarly sometimes addresses as “Wavey-Davey”  (a monicker from the same nursery years, bestowed -- this one, by an adult -- on the basis of some anecdote, probably in reference to my propensity of swinging my Mickey Mouse stuffed-toy  round and round by his tail).

This is potent stuff.  And (I now  somewhat blush  to recall)  I persisted in this whim of improvised christening, well into late adolescence.  As, meeting the German host-family with whom I dwelt in the summer of 1966, it struck me that the younger brother, Ludwig, had a doofus name;  I promptly re-dubbed him with a cool name,  “Kurt”.   The name stuck, at least for the duration of my stay.   -- And, later, in college, a rather artistic and sensitive friend, Michael by name, I took to addressing -- playfully/imperiously --  as “Stephen” (after Stephen Daedelus);  this lasted until, one day, he confessed that, though that was o-kay-y, it was kind of weird for him, since his elder brother, with whom he had complicated relations, was named Stephen ..

Parents, ex officio, bestow the birth-certificate name: already an awesome responsibility.  But some of them, gilding the lily, go on to think up nicknames for their kids -- whimsical things, usually, like “Peanut”, “Popcorn”, “Ouchie”.   One pair of parents of my acquaintance, having bestowed upon their (non-Slavic) daughter  the dubious distinction of the name Sasha (originally a mostly masculine nickname for Alexander), took to calling her, ridiculously, Salsa.   That is the sort of parody best left to mean kids in the playground, not your own parents.

~

With this much under our belt, we can return to the example of besh manáto.  Like Aunan, it is no mere childish mispronunciation, since the speaker  in either case  was quite capable of saying the thing correctly.  It is rather (combining the levels of the labio-ludic and the socio-satiric) a (self-)satire on articulatory immaturity, in a spirit of amused tolerance at our own babbling past, now being progressively put behind us.  Yet more grandly (here, the psychodynamics, though basically conscious) it is an exercise after the pattern of Adam, naming things quite as it suits you.

-- Another nursery footnote, anent Freud’s remark quoted above, to the effect that children sometimes (man)handle words  quite as though they were objects.   Our son, again,  aet. su. barely two, speaking contemplatively to himself as he slowly descended the steep stairs, hand prudently on the bannister:

I have something in my diaper.  It’s a nim-dum-dum. -- No, that’s not a word.

Here we see poignantly, more starkly expressed than is usual (since the speaker in question was linguistically almost a prodigy, while developing otherwise at a normal pace) a consciousness reluctantly taking leave of the pleasures of playing with one’s poop, along with the wordplay that metaphorically reflects it.

-- The appropriative moment of wordplay-naming (laid bare in the Aunan example) appears in the very title of this post, which takes a venerable book of Freud, and makes it mine, by tweaking it to my liking.

~

These homo ludens wordsmithery phenomena  lie in the twilight between conscious joke-making, and sleeping dreams (which may well be wordless),  to each of which  Freud  devoted a stout volume.   His Traumdeutung, however,  is verbally focused to a remarkable extent, so that he extensively explores this linguistic middle-territory, performing etymological and motivational dissection of what he calls Wortklumpen -- the multimorphemic wordclump mimicking the “Knäuel von Gedanken” (ideational complexus).

For example, a phrase appearing in a dream:  “Das wird in einen allgemeinen Maistollmütz ausgehen” -- a wordstew to which half a dozen cooks  each contributes an etymon.  Or again, in a really impressive feat of onomastic sleuthing:  “Nun zerlegt sich Autodidasker  leicht in Autor, Autodidakt, und Lasker, an den sich der Name Lasalle schließt.”

That latter surname seems a bit of a ringer, not phonetically in close company:  but the link is semantic:  “Lasker starb an progressiver Paralyse, also an den Folgen der beim Weib erworbenen Infektion (Lues);  Lasalle, wie bekannt, im Duel wegen einer Dame.”   And this connection proves fruitful, both to unearthing the unconscious content of the dream, and to tossing up yet further lexical connections:  “Das » Cherchez la femme «, in dem sich diese Gedanken zusammenfassen lassen, bringt mich  auf meinen noch unverheirateten Bruder, der Alexander heißt.  Nun merke ich, daß Alex … fast wie eine Umstellung von Lasker klingt ….”  (Wheels within wheels …)

Feminarcissism

Consider the following series of softball questions:

* Which authors do you most admire?

* When and where do you like to read?

* What kinds of stories are you drawn to? Are there any you steer clear of?

* What were your favorite books as a child? Do you have a favorite character or hero from those books? 

* What do you plan to read next?

In what circumstances might such a series of patiently deferential questions be posed?  Well, perhaps by a remedial reading specialist, to a child with learning disabilities whom we are trying to encourage.   Also posed was the following question,

*If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

which would seem to be going a bit too far in the fad for flattery of the child’s self-esteem, but such are the times in which we live.

However, this bucket of glurge did not appear in a Special Ed handbook, nor in a newsletter to parents -- but in the Book Review section of this morning’s New York Times, taking up most of a page:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/books/review/amanda-knox-by-the-book.html?ref=books

The interview is surmounted by no identification whatsoever of the interviewee, aside from a soft-tone flattering sketched portrait.  Now, the only way in which her responses could possibly be of interest to literate adult readers would be the person thus polled were a noted literary critic nearing the end of a long and productive career.   But it turns out that the interviewee thus fawned over was someone called “Amanda Knox”.    I had heard the name somewhere, but had the impression it referred to a television actress, or perhaps a lingerie model or pop star.    And so I looked the wench up in Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Knox

Her only claim to fame, it turns out,  is to have been an exchange student and barmaid in Italy, whose roommate was then murdered.   The circumstances involved astonishingly grotesque details.  She was accused and convicted of the murder;  accused and convicted of slander for having falsely accused a certain man of the crime.  The latter conviction stood;  the former was overturned, then turned upright again, with an order for a new trial, which now (the accused being safely back in the US)  will never take place.   Ms Knox (or her ghostwriter) then penned a memoir of this sordid affair, for which she received an advance of several million dollars.

Where actual guilt lies in all this, I have no idea, though a perusal of this detaled account

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Meredith_Kercher

will likely leave you thinking that, whether or not Ms. Knox personally wielded the knife, she is not the sort of person you would want as a baby-sitter for your child, nor even a member of your bookclub.  And certainly not someone to whose superior wisdom the President should defer, on the subject of his required reading.

And with that, the New York Times Book Review -- a frequent offender in this regard -- sinks yet another level in its fawning.

The author, greeting her admirers

Βαβυλὼν ἡ μεγάλη, ἡ μήτηρ τῶν πορνῶν καὶ τῶν βδελυγμάτων τῆς γῆς

~

[Update 19 May 2013]  The very next issue of the NYT Book Review  continues the sodden trend, with a full-page review of two new books by Elinor Lipman.

I actually knew Mrs. Lipman back in Longmeadow -- her son and mine played together (not very nicely);  I attended one of her readings, and was much taken with her charm, and with her story collection Into Love and Out Again.    It may be that the new books are also good -- but the review is a glop of goo.  (Any single quoted phrase would damn it;  but instead of wasting pixels, I shall donate them to the poor.)  No-one with a functioning Y chromosome would wish to go anywhere near books praised in such terms.   Whether Mrs. Lipman has become more gynecocentric, or whether the NYTBR has simply settled dreamily into a pool of its own warm piss, is for others to discern.

For a possibly partly parallel feminine literary trajectory (again, a beautiful and charming author, whose early work I greatly enjoyed):
     Rebecca Goldstein meets the Schroedinger Equation

[Update 26 May 2013]  The NYTBR partly redeems itself this week  by printing an actual review (as opposed to puff-piece lapdog colpoglossia) of the (ghost-written) Knox book -- and by a male, no less (Sam Tanenhaus)!

The review begins (and this is nothing to the discredit of Ms. Knox, but rather to the balloon-boy-addicted American public):

The dubiously accused  almost always disappoint, once their full stories are told.  It is the crime that magnetizes our attention.  Remove the stain of guilt … and what’s left?

As for the claim of the (at-one-remove) author to guru-status:

Her candid summaries of flings and one-night stands  exude triumphalism …For today’s young women … the ideal of sexual freedom seems to derive  more from Helen Gurley Brown  than from Susan Brownmiller.

Better yet:   The review shifts the focus away from the contingent individual caught willy-nilly in the net, to the Gomorric landscape of Italy under that preening malfaiteur Berlusconi, which formed the background to her sad flings.   (I almost spelled it "Gomorrhic" -- but no, that's gonorrhea.)

[Update 15 March 2014]  The chancre of Amanda Knox  continues to ooze its luetic effluvia.  Well observed by Ruth Marcus:

Read Belle Knox, the freshman’s nom de porn, on her decision to pay tuition bills by performing in adult films, and you see the vulnerability underlying the faux-feminist, hear-me-roar bravado about rejecting slut-shaming:

“My experience in porn has been nothing but supportive, exciting, thrilling, and empowering,” Knox — she chose the last name in a weird homage to Amanda Knox, the college student accused of murdering her roommate in Italy — wrote on the Web site xojane.com. “For me, shooting pornography brings me unimaginable joy.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-the-duke-porn-star-students-degrading-plan-to-pay-tuition/2014/03/11/b70c96a4-a940-11e3-b61e-8051b8b52d06_story.html

[Update 4 June 2013]  The latest item from the literary front

Note:   There are so many anecdotes, swirling about like dust-motes, that it were pointless to highlight this or that one.  We need to focus on Big Game.  And the biggest game in town these days, for short fiction, is The New Yorker -- this is no straw-man (ahem, pardon, strawperson … American with straw …).   And their premier showcase for American fiction is their annual fiction issue, which just came out (a double one, dated June 10 & 17, 2013).   And the premier publicity slot is the outside cover, taken up this issue with a full-page color ad from Amazon.

The ad is for the “Kindle Paperwhite”, boasting “Read in Bright Sunlight”.   This, if true, is indeed a noteworthy engineering achievement;  back in the days when I was editor-in-chief of Franklin Electronic publishers, our would-be flagship proto-Kindle, the ill-fated “e-Bookman” (many years before its time, alas) was notably deficient as regards the display.

But that engineering detail -- the real reason you might want to buy this model  as opposed to earlier ones -- is buried in small print at the very bottom of the page.  What grabs the eye -- being, indeed, a stark paperwhite agains the background of color -- is a bit of fiction that begins thus:

I don’t have to look up to know Mom is making another surprise visit.  Her toenails are always pink during the summer…

Once again, Mother has found me in my bathrobe….

Now think about this.  Ostensibly, Amazon is selling a piece of newly-engineered hardware -- both gender- and genre-neutral.   Yet of all the prose they could have chosen, they picked something that might have fallen out of some ditz-head’s FaceBook page.   Not merely does it make no attempt to appeal to both men and women:  it features the sort of trivial female narcissism that would send any normal male streaking to the vomitorium.

All in all, it’s a helluva time for a straight guy to be trying to sell books.   But for what it’s worth, you can check these out:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

[Neubemerkung  23 III 14]  Gar nachdenkenerregend, diese Geraetswerbung. Heutmorgens im NYTBuecherblatt gab’s ‘ne faustdicke Amazone die mannekinweise das Kindle hochhielt.

An Old Chestnut, re-roasted

… the familiar example that ‘Virtue is triangular’  is neither true nor false, but meaningless.

-- Hao Wang, From Mathematics to Philosophy  (1974), p. 105

This has been the unanimous opinion of philosophers, for at least the last hundred years.  But let us give it a second look.

‘Tis a truth universally acknowledged, that

=> There are two sides to every question. <=

Now:  Here it is Virtue that is in question;  and as such, it has -- like every other question -- two sides.

But:  Triangles have three sides.

Therefore:  Virtue is not triangular.    QED.

Souvenirs d’apprentissage (bis)

I am currently reading the memoirs of André Weil, doyen of algebraic geometry, Souvenirs d’apprentissage.  Herewith a couple of notes.

The first thing you notice is that he is a very graceful writer when he so chooses.  You do not see this in his mathematical writings, which are straightforward and businesslike, when not (very occasionally) interrupted  by some dyspeptic outburst (we quoted one of them here).   And as he stresses the importance of hewing to original languages whenever possible (he himself was an admirable polyglot), we shall so hew here.

~

Weil prefaces his book with a tribute to his late wife:

Notre mariage a été de ceux qui font mentir La Rochefoucauld.  Fulsere vere candidi mihi soles…

For an elucidation of that Latin tag, I naturally turned to that fons sapientiae, Dr. Massey, who replied by return of post:

"Bright suns truly shone for me"

It's from Catullus Carmina 8, in which the poet is depressed after being dumped by his lover Lesbia.

~

Since Weil was born in 1906 (and ripened early), and the memoirs were not published until 1991, we sometimes get the benefit of the long view.   Alluding to the current Lake-Wobegone system of American puericulture, he remarks:

N’est-il pas étrange que l’émulation se trouve honnie à présent  comme ressort pédagogique, alors que l’esprit de compétition, dans presque tout les domaines, n’a peut-être jamais été si âpre qu’il l’est aujourd’hui ?

He also speaks somewhat dismissively of “the New Math” fad in schools, counterposing the value of a traditional grammatical education for training the mind:

Est-ce pure coïncidence  que l’Inde, avec Pânini, ait inventé la grammaire  avant d’inventer la numération décimale  et les nombres négatifs,  et que  par la suite  grammaire et algèbre aient pris  toutes deux  dans la civilisation médiévale de langue arabe  l’essor que l’on sait ?  Naguère on a cru préparer les petits enfants à l’étude des mathématiques  en les forçant à parler d’ensembles, de bijections, de nombres cardinaux  et de l’ensemble vide.  Peut-être n’y étais-je pas moins bien préparé par l’étude de l’analyse grammatical …

Later in the volume (p. 120) we read of another glancing yet important brush between linguistics and pure mathematics :  the ushering of structure, rather than number, to center stage:

Quant au choix du mot de structure, mes souvenirs sont en défaut;  mais à cette époque  il était déjà entré … dans le vocabulaire des linguistes, et je conservais des contacts avec ce milieu, et tout particulièrement avec Emile Benveniste …

*

Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

*

~

André Weil was the brother of the better-known Simone Weil.  In the preface, he excuses himself for alluding to her but little, pleading that he has already said what he has to say, to her biographer.  But, recounting a stroll with some monks at Santo Domingo de Silos, he writes:

De leur conversation, au cours de la promenade rituelle dans le cloître, il m’est resté une phrase.  Comme il était question d’un saint au comportement quelque peu excentrique, l’un d’eux fit observer doucement, «Mais le christianisme est une folie» («el cristianismo es una locura»); ce propos, parfaitement orthodoxe, m’est souvent revenu à l’esprit au sujet de la vie de ma sœur.

~

Weil’s 1938 cri de cœur, “Science française”, which begins "J'en ai assez!", and which was refused publication at the time, is reprinted in the Œuvres scientifiques,  as was its eventual post-war airing.  But since neither version names names, nor does Wikipedia mention the incidents in question s.v. Jean Perrin,  here is a tidbit (p. 126):

L’une des cliques en question, et sans doute la plus puissante, avait  à sa tête  le physicien Jean Perrin, prix Nobel, … inventeur du C.N.R.S.  Non content des moyens importants dont il disposait déjà, il imagina de créer toute une hiérarchie de médailles  assorties de récompenses pécuniaires,  depuis la grande médaille d’or  jusqu’aux médaillettes … Il n’était pas difficile de soupçonner que la devise en serait:
«Nul n’aura de l’esprit   que nous  et nos amis.»

*

Pour d’autres friandises

de la confiserie 

du docteur Justice,

consultez:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

I am reminded of a comment one writer made  on the much-ballyhoo’d creation of some new honor or other (it may have been the MacArthur):  “another lap in the meritocratic rat-race”.

~

All told, the book is mathematically disappointing.  I don’t mean that it should have been stuffed with equations.   But we do hope for some insight into mathematical ideation, such as is furnished by the memoirs of Hardy or of Hadamard.   For one thing, the field he helped to found, algebraic geometry, has the reputation of being one of the most ferociously abstract of all human endeavors.   It must be very different working in that field, or in topos theory, from solving the four-color problem or classifying finite simple groups.  But of this we get not an inkling. 

Above all,  Weil was long a core member of one of the most sociologically remarkable mathematical activities of all time:  the Bourbaki group, which labored collectively and published anonymously.   What was that like ?  

Apart from the pranks and in-jokes  characteristic of any working group, we are not given a glimpse.

So, frustrated at the reticence of one of its founding members,  I have no recourse but to quote the following satirical evaluation:

Named after a French general of widely admired stupidity, the Bourbaki was founded in the 1930’s  .. A committee was formed  and pedagogical improvements discussed.

This is the myth.  In all of French history, no mathematician of standing has ever concerned himself with the welfare of his students.  The Bourbaki was founded to amused the members of the Bourbaki.

To a man, these mathematicians believed that their first order of business was to correct, and, if possible, eliminate, the work of other mathematicians.

-- David Berlinski, Infinite Ascent (2005)

~

En fin de compte … Our attempt to experience mathematics more richly  by reading the memoirs of its practitioners, is like that of the gum-snapping beautician devouring the latest tabloids for the off-screen escapades of her favorite stars.  In both cases, we court a simulacrum of what is ultimately inaccessible.  Indeed, the beautician is  if anything  launched upon a more reasonable quest.   If you think that Lindsay Lohan is an interesting person, then her antics in the National Equirer should be satisfying, since that shallow cipher is little more than the sum of her antics.   Whereas the well-written, travelogue-y accounts of André Weil  gave no sense of what it is like to have his sort of towering mathematical mind -- they might have been written by anyone.  (Quine’s memoir, The Time of my Life, was disappointing in the same way.)

~

For another not-so-close encounter with algebraic geometry, via the man and not the math, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/12/adventures-in-algebraic-geometry.html

~

André Weil’s teacher Jaques Hadamard, a major figure of number theory and cryptography, is best known to the lay public for his booklet Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field;  my father, no mathematician, but a typical subscriber to Eisenhower-era Scientific American, had it on his shelves, where I made its acquaintance in high school.  Spurred yet disappointed by Weil’s memoir, I ordered what I presumed to be the French original of this book, via InterLibrary Loan;  and in due course  it arrived at our local library.

Mais encore -- quelle déception !  For much the same reasons as Weil, Hadamard had fled (in 1940) to the United States, and indeed specifically to Princeton.  And it was there that he wrote that memoir, in English, which Princeton University Press brought out in 1945.

France just doesn’t know how to hold onto its mathematicians -- as Weil was already complaining in 1938.   And it was at Princeton that I made the acquaintance of the likewise-exiled French mathematician who earned a Fields medal for proving the Weil Conjectures, Pierre Deligne (we were fellow parents at the Princeton Friends School, and met to plan-out Math Day).   A distinguished intellectual genealogy, all very baronial -- but abroad.

~

For more from this pen, including a soon-to-be-released new title:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

~ Afterword ~

I have from time to time -- fitfully, fretfully -- pecked away at some of the works of that French collectivity Bourbaki, without profit or enjoyment.   There is, then, a certain wry comfort in this assessment by their celebrated countryman René Thom:

No new theorem of any importance came out of the immese effort at systematization of Nicolas Bourbaki -- which in itself is not a true formalization, because Bourbaki uses a nonformalized metalanguage.

-- René Thom, “’Modern’ Mathematics (1971), repr. in Thomas Tymoczko, ed., New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics (1986, rev. 1998), p. 73

[Update]  The slim pickings of mathematical morsels in Weil’s memoir  are slightly supplemented by an anecdote in a book I just finished reading, the highly entertaining Genius in my Basement (2011), by Alex Masters.   (The genius alluded to  is not Weil  but group-theorist Simon Norton;  more elsewhere anon.)  The anthropologist Lévi-Srauss, he relates, baffled at what structure underlay Australian marriage taboos 

… went around New York … banging on the doors of mathematicians.  The first was dismissive:  “Mathematics has four operations, and marriage is not one of them.”  But the second was the young and brilliant André Weil… “When in doubt,” cried Mr. Weil, “look for the group!” and he bustled Lévi-Strauss off the street  into his study.  Within a few days, Weil had solved the problem.

(“Group” in the sense of Group Theory, of course;  though indeed sibs and clans can be relevant.)