Library thoughts

It's mindblowing how much you have to read just to avoid writing something barfingly stupid.

Pullman on free speech

The wonderful Phillip Pullman, confronted with an insufferably English question about the title of his new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, fires off a pithy, powerful defense of free speech.



Phillip Pullman wrote the books that got me through middle school in one piece. His Dark Materials forms part of my personal scripture, along with Hitchhiker's Guide and a few other formative books and movies. I wanted to be Lyra and then, even more, I wanted to be Will. Maybe after reading them I am, a little bit. They're that good.

In addition to writing fiction, Pullman is one of those rare public intellectuals who actually has something useful to say. He has strong convictions about free speech, civil liberties, and religion, and isn't afraid to speak his mind. A final Pullman quote, from an article he wrote for Banned Books Week:

My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true. It's that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

Oh so sweet

Sweet vindication:

• The Cove won Best Documentary at the Oscars!
• Homophobic state senator comes out as gay, surprising only the very naive. 
  
  
  

  Last year, Mr Ashburn opposed a bill to establish a day of recognition to honour murdered gay rights activist Harvey Milk. He has also voted in the statehouse against efforts to expand anti-discrimination laws and recognise out-of-state gay marriages. Mr Ashburn, who represents California's 18th district, said he does not plan to run for any public office after his term ends later this year.

  No, I don't imagine he does. See also:

  
  
  
  • Ted Haggard 
  • This wonderful study from 1996 in Journal of Abnormal Psychology:

The authors investigated the role of homosexual arousal in exclusively heterosexual men who admitted negative affect toward homosexual individuals. Participants consisted of a group of homophobic men (n = 35) and a group of nonhomophobic men (n = 29); they were assigned to groups on the basis of their scores on the Index of Homophobia (W. W. Hudson & W. A. Ricketts, 1980). The men were exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian videotapes, and changes in penile circumference were monitored. They also completed an Aggression Questionnaire (A. H. Buss & M. Perry, 1992). Both groups exhibited increases in penile circumference to the heterosexual and female homosexual videos. Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli. The groups did not differ in aggression. Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.

Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal?

By Adams, Henry E.; Wright, Lester W.; Lohr, Bethany A.

Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Vol 105(3), Aug 1996, 440-445.

Yet more whales

Slate has another thoughtful, well-written meditation today on whales, humans, and our conflicted relationship over the course of history. Whales have played many roles. First they were sea monsters: Leviathans, lurking in the places on the map you didn't go. Then to some they became sustenance. Then they became the illumination, the perfume, and the corsets of the 19th century. They have been myth, food, money and light, but we still know very little about them. As the piece notes, we knew what the Earth looked like from space before we knew what a sperm whale looked like underwater.

Whales are something different now. They've always been objects of curiosity, but now they are the subjects of intense research and the darlings of an adoring public (Save The Whales!). The piece ends:

The truth is now, as it's ever been: We need whales more than they need us. Once we hunted them for their industrial resources. Now we demand to be entertained by them. What they want, most probably, is to be left alone.

In other news, one dolphin and possibly two swam up Newtown Creek in Brooklyn today. The creek is one of the most polluted industrial dead zones you can imagine, swamped with factory waste and raw sewage. No word on what's going to happen, but it doesn't look good.

More on whales

Slate has an article today on whaling... did we save the whales or what?

It's a summary of current whaling policy, new developments on same, and what they've actually done since the Save the Whales movement got going. From the article:

"...the sperm whale is considered vulnerable (the level below endangered), while five others—including that 1970s singing sensation, the humpback whale—are of least concern, meaning they're not going extinct anytime soon, even though they might not have returned to their pre-whaling levels. Most hunters nowadays pursue the common minke whale, which is also doing pretty well, all things considered. For a few other large whale species, there aren't enough data to make calls in either direction.

Things get more complicated, though, when you drill down and look at subpopulations. For example, humpback whales may doing fine as a general rule, but the ones that live in the Arabian Sea are considered endangered, as are those around Australia and the South Pacific. And then there are the humpbacks around South Georgia, which were mostly wiped out between 1904 and 1915 and have yet to come back.

What if, somehow, we could return the world's whales to some kind of pristine, pre-human state? If it could be proven that the hunts wouldn't push any populations into the danger zone, would environmentalists in countries besides Japan, Norway, and Iceland ever support sustainable, commercial whaling? The Lantern has her doubts. In America, at least, our belief in the essential dignity of these big, beautiful mammals seems just too ingrained to allow for their use as a food source. In the end, that may be the greatest legacy of the "Save the whales" movement."

The Cove has an interesting segment on what has happened to whaling since the movement began. Needless (almost) to say, it draws a slightly more pessimistic conclusion. In the film, key figures of the movement lament the passing of the enthusiasm that fired the cause, and call for a revival of the activism that brought it into public view. Things have stalled. In the 80s, there used to be marchers on the Mall, singing and holding signs, demanding an end to the slaughter. In the cloudy early reaches of my memory, I remember Save the Whales! t-shirts, posters, and shopping bags being everywhere. They were nearly as ubiquitous as those D.A.R.E t-shirts were before they were retro and ironic.
 Sure, the situation has gotten better, but it's still not great. We've left the task unfinished. Given the current pace of things, it's going to remain unfinished for a long time.

Morally perfect

I haven't been posting that regularly. The internet's been a bit of a sterile promontory recently, and I haven't found anything to get that worked up about.


In fact, that's sort of the problem. There are a great many social things I probably should be actively involved in, fighting against, agitating for, etc. But I'm not. I have good friends who are very much invested in society and politics and injustice, but I can't even get it up for international news. There's a distinct sense of unworthiness that comes of hanging out with feminist vegans, a kind of realization that my morality perhaps doesn't extend as far as it should.

Guilt and rationalizations after the jump.

Blueshift

So, it looks like I've got a job next year. And a PhD program lined up after that. That's six years. 2016. That's the future... they'll have flying cars by then. I'll be 28.

This is ridiculous and scary and perhaps the best, most meaningful opportunity I've ever had. I've got so much work to do on myself before I can even contemplate becoming the sort of person who is knowledgeable/educated/going places/self-sufficient/in charge/responsible for things and yet it seems that I already am?

The future is here. It's rushing up at me in an alarming, delicious way. Everything is suddenly blue-shifted. And blue is my favorite color.

Tips from Jack Keroac

Words to live by (or at least puzzle over), taken from his Belief and Technique in Modern Prose. They're really more writing tips than New Year's resolutions, but whatever. Living well and writing well require the same things. They may even be the same thing.

I'm writing now about whether thought requires language. The mind boggles. Are we alive or conscious if we don't encode our thoughts in words? Will we have been alive if these external brains of ours were to disappear? There's always wordless memory, I suppose. But that fades so quickly. Vanity demands something longer lasting.

Anyway, here they be:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Happy new decade, everyone. 

There is grandeur in this view of life

This is kind of a follow-up to a previous post in which I ranted about Meaning, and how looking for it is a waste of time. Rereading it, it comes across as slightly nihilistic, which doesn't represent my feelings about the matter at all. Or maybe it does, and I'm twisting "nihilistic" to my own purposes.

Anyway, here are two essays that seemed pertinent. The first is a lovely NYT piece on why science is actually wonderful and meaningful and fulfilling. The second is my favorite essay from Daylight Atheism on how the Enlightenment and all that rationalism stands for is responsible for most of the progress we've made as a species since then. There is incredible grandeur in this view of life. It's the view that has always seemed most natural to me, and the one, barring anything truly catastrophic, that I hope to stick to.

Dogma (and to all a good night)

Merry Christmas!

I love Christmas. I really do. Lights in snowy darkness, and music and parties and a tree (a tree!) inside your house, just dripping with baubles. Oh, and presents. I love giving presents. Receiving them is nice too, but there's a very ingratiating part of my personality that makes me warm and fuzzy when someone reacts happily to something I've given them.

As secular as Christmas has become (thank goodness), it becomes impossible to escape the presence of tradition around this time of year. We take comfort in ritual as we try to assess what's going on, and how another year could have possibly passed so quickly.

At the dark end of the year, we try to sum up what's past into a coherent package and charge it with meaning. Maybe you'll use it to inform how we live the next year. Or maybe this is the sort of package you can't wait to get rid of.

More packages (and modules!) after the jump.

No sooner said than gratified

As previously noted, I have been lusting after a rosemary bush for some time. The boy, being lovely, just got me one. It's sitting in my room, smelling wonderful, and I couldn't help decking it out with a few Christmas ornaments. Happiness.

I spent last night making 70+ cookies for a bake sale for Linguistics Society instead of studying for a class I have not attended since the midterm. The textbook is 500 pages long and denser than a fruitcake, and I've got tonight and tomorrow to get through the thing. Most of the theorists featured in the text are fruitcakes too.

So far I'm averaging 9 pages of font size 10 notes per unit. Just a few more to go, then I'll actually start reading the notes. Feh.

Notes, thoughts, and a rant after the jump. Today's special: I think "Meaning" is meaningless.