Saturday, November 17, 2001,
02:54 p.m.
"The point isn't that the emperor is
unclothed, nor is it that no one dares
acknowledge this. The point is that
people think a naked emperor is sexier."
--The Onion
This makes me think of our 42nd and 43rd presidents, for different reasons.
Thursday, November 15, 2001,
07:17 p.m.
"Children must be taught how to think, not what to think."
--Margaret Mead
Wednesday, November 14, 2001,
02:16 p.m.
Rock the Casbah
Mazar-e-Sharif don't like it...
Saturday, November 10, 2001,
10:14 a.m.
Memento
Finally saw Memento last night, and the jury is still out. I was progessively more enthralled as the film all the way to the end, which felt like a bit of a letdown. But then I spent the next couple hours worrying it to death and trying to put the pieces together, until I fell asleep.
The movie's official Web site is not just advertising (though, of course, it is that too) but a meaningful addition to the movie. The site has many of Leonard's notes and photos from the movie, plus many others not shown. It really does shed light on the movie's mysteries. It's not exactly a spoiler, but I would recommend holding off on the Web site if you haven't seen the movie yet. It's one of the better uses of Flash I've seen, though it did cause an older version of Netscape to freeze up. IE had no problems.
By sheer coincidence or synchronicity, a few days before I saw the movie I was reading Morton Hunt's The Universe Within and came across the story of "H.M.", a patient who has become famous in the psychiatric literature of memory. I am sure that H.M. is the inspiration for Memento.
At age 27, H.M. had surgery on his hippocampus to relieve his extreme epileptic seizures. The surgery was a success, in that the seizures were checked, his I.Q. and attention were intact, and his skills were intact. All but the skill of memory. Like Leonard in the movie, he couldn't make new memories. His memory loss went back about ten years before the accident, and no violence was involved, but the parallels are unmistakable. A fairly detailed summary of the story is available within the MIT Artificial Intelligence Web site.
It also got me to thinking that the blog form is similar to the form of the film. Each entry is in traditional chronological order, but the entries are arranged in reverse order, and often only make sense when one reads an "earlier" entry that appears below.
Tuesday, November 6, 2001,
05:04 p.m.
Earlier today, I added a quote from an interview with Noam Chomsky that a friend sent me. I put it up because it was striking, rather than because I thought it was right, and since then I have been thinking about it.
On one hand, I think Chomsky really does have a point when he compares America bombing Afghanistan to London bombing Boston, because people in Boston fund the IRA. But while there is a certain parallel, I cannot say that these two acts of war, one actual and one hypothetical, would be at all equal.
I think I have found the key to Chomsky's questionable comparison, and for that I thank Morton Hunt. Just before I read the Chomsky interview, I had been reading Hunt's The Universe Within: a New Science Explores the Human Mind. It's really unfortunate that this is out of print, as I am finding it to be a fast-moving and intriguing introduction to the world of cognitive science.
In a chapter entitled "The Practical Cogitator," Hunt tells about how illogical people are in making both big and small decisions. But this is not to put people down. According to Hunt, people are often able to come to the correct answers by illogical reasoning, and so-called logic is, despite what Aristotle told you, not necessarily people's natural mode of thought.
"Do we have difficulty thinking logically because our minds are feeble or flawed -- or because there is something unnatural about the laws of deductive inference? If logic is the model of normal human reasoning, why is most human reasoning abnormal? It would make more sense, and be more in keeping with an evolutionary view of the human intellect, to suppose that logical reasoning is in large part abnormal, unnatural, and not generally applicable to everyday experience and to the problems of survival." (p. 130)
Hunt explores this idea more, and better, than I can quote here, but there is something heartening about his perspective.
Having just read this passage, and others, one word stood out from Chomsky's quote: "logic." Logically speaking, there is a parallel between the real and (as yet) imagined attacks that Chomsky compares. But logic, powerful and useful as it is, is an extreme simplification. Just because one can draw a logical parallel between two acts, this does not mean that they are morally or pragmatically equivalent.
Analogical reasoning is one of the non-logical tools that people use, and despite the fact that it is not foolproof, it often helps us make the right decisions. One reason Hunt gives why analogies can lead us to wrong decisions is ignoring salient factors. Chomsky's statement has elements of both logical and analogical reasoning. One might form the conclusion that Chomsky did about the bombing of Afghanistan, but this ignores the comparative damage -- mortal, physical, and emotional -- of an IRA attack and the attack on the World Trade Center. It also ignores the fact that the government of Boston does not support the IRA, whereas, for practical purposes, the Taliban is the de facto government of much of Afghanistan. A co-worker of mine pointed out that the U.S. government is willing to extradite suspected terrorists to the U.K., whereas Afghanistan has not done the same. All of these are salient factors that Chomsky's provocative but simplistic equation does not include.
Tuesday, November 6, 2001,
01:23 p.m.
"Going by the logic of these imperial powers, the people of London should bomb Boston every time an IRA bomb goes off, because the latter gets its funding from the Boston neighbourhood."
--Noam Chomsky
Sunday, November 4, 2001,
11:54 p.m.
"How can we say that we are a part of the great tradition of the West, the essence of which is that nothing is to be undiscussed, when some of our most representative citizens demand the suppression of freedom of speech in the interest of national security? Now that military power is obsolescent, the national security depends on our understanding of and devotion to such ancient Western liberties as free speech. If we abandon our ideals under pressure, we give away without a fight what we would be fighting for if we went to war. We abandon the sources of our strength."
--Robert M. Hutchins, The Great Conversation: the Basis of Liberal Education.
These words were not written in the aftermath of recent events, but in 1951, in the early days of the cold war. (Even I, not quite thirty, can still feel the chill of that era.)
No one has seriously threatened freedom of speech, though Bill Maher did get his hand slapped for saying that flying a suicide attack was braver than shooting missiles from a distance. But many have raised concerns about other freedoms being threatened, and it has made me wonder what actually are rights that must be defended, as opposed to conveniences to which we have become accustomed.
More later...
Saturday, November 3, 2001,
10:57 p.m.
Just finished reading The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution by C.P. Snow, and I intend to explore the issues in here in greater depth later, but just a few quick notes:
In some ways, it would seem that the encroachment of computer-driven technology in so many areas of our lives, and the celebrity status of technocrats like Bill Gates, have made the "two cultures" split less of a problem than before. Many sorts of people can talk about megs and gigs and databases.
But since the deeper understanding of science and technology are not much better than before, the problem has changed shape and perhaps size but has not gone away. The encroachment of computers without a proportional growth in understanding leads to a greater sense of alienation among many people.
More later.
Friday, November 2, 2001,
06:34 p.m.
Speech
My dad just retired after 34 years as a lawyer and then judge for the state of California, and my mom invited me to say a few words as part of his retirement celebration. My mom should have known better than to ask me to say a few words, because I ended up with closer to 1400 of them.
Monday, October 29, 2001,
02:59 p.m.
"The purpose of art is to lay bare the
questions which have been hidden by the answers."
--James Baldwin
Monday, October 29, 2001,
02:39 p.m.
"That is the essence of science; ask an impertinent question, and you are on your way to the pertinent answer."
--J. Bronowski
Monday, October 29, 2001,
12:53 p.m.
In the current atmosphere of terror and patriotism, I've been thinking a lot about what America is and means. Here are three works that have given me a lot to think about:
- The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen
- Waiting for Guffman
- On the Rez, by Ian Frazier
I could go on and on about The Corrections,and not hit on its essence; if it took Franzen 600+ pages to say what he wanted to say, why should I think I can sum it up in a paragraph? The book tells the story of a midwestern family whose children have all left the heartland for the East Coast, and the tensions that arise between the world of the parents and children. It's about Parkinson's disease and corporate mergers, insider trading and leather pants, sex and drugs and Internet carpetbaggers and that spot in n-dimensional space where Iowa overlaps with Tribeca and Lithuania. Is it, as some have said, the Great American Novel? I'm not convinced that such a creature exists, or should, but this novel is packed with more depth and breadth of America than any I have read in a while.
Waiting for Guffman (VHS and DVD) also explores the Midwest, this time Missouri, which in my mind is occupies a sort of hinterland between the Midwest and the South. It's the mockumentary about a displaced New Yorker (or so he says) putting together a show for the sesquicentennial celebration of fictional Blaine, Missouri. Christopher Guest directed, co-wrote it with Eugene Levy, and the two are joined by most of the gang who later starred in Best of Show. (VHS and DVD) The Blainiacs are just as ridiculous as the people in Best of Show, but where most of the dog owners were mercilessly satirized, Guest and company are kinder to the people of Blaine. They are ridiculous yet sympathetic, and despite their follies are treated with a kind of love and respect that Hollywood comedies rarely pay to small-town America. People are divided about how this film compares to Best in Show. Parker Posey shone more in Best of Show, but Christopher Guest was better in Guffman.
I'm just a little more than halfway through On the Rez, but Ian Frazier's exploration of American Indian life has been engrossing and educational. I have made it through a public school education and most of two degrees without learning very much about the lives and history of Native Americans, and this book has opened windows for me, onto both the way Indians live today and how their influence has shaped American culture.
Sunday, October 28, 2001,
12:57 p.m.
"If only we were fruitful fields, we would at bottom let nothing perish unused and see in every event, thing and man welcome manure."
--Nietzsche
I just finished The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton as I rode to work on the light rail today. It is such a good and admirable book, but not the kind of admirable that stands on a pedestal to be revered from below. It is the kind of admirable that sits at the table with you for coffee, or beer, or chips and salsa, and it is at once serious and whimsical and clever and deeply thought.
Alain (I already feel like I'm on a first-name basis with him) quotes Montaigne on the daring and creativity of original writing, as opposed to the safety and ease of merely writing commentaries on the writings of others. But Alain shows by his own example that commentary and criticism can be arts in their own right, in the right hands. He didn't create the words of the philosophers, but neither did Leonardo create the face of la Gioconda. All art, however creative, can be seen as the interpretation and re-creation of thoughts or images that the artist received from outside.
Friday, October 26, 2001,
02:44 p.m.
Philosophy
Lately, I have turned to philosophy. It may be a way to make sense of a world in which it is still September 11. It is certainly tied to recent work change. It may be another passing phase in my reading habits. But though my reading habits change more frequently than Oregon's weather, the changes in myself don't go away.
I recently moved up from library clerk to library assistant, which means I now answer questions on the reference desk. (In the process, I had to quit a full-time union job with benefits, which also prompted a lot of hard thinking and questions about what I really wanted.)
It occured to me that the art of reference is not so much the art of answering questions as of asking them. One of the first principles of library work is that the questions people ask are usually not the questions they need answered. People are trying to fill gaps in their knowledge, and it can be very hard to express something you don't know. Add to this the fact that people might be sensitive or reticent about certain topics, and that information is often organized in ways that baffle even reference librarians, and the art of questioning assumes supreme importance.
Working reference, one has to ask the patron questions to clarify their needs, and then one must conceive questions in a way that resources -- books, Internet, or experts -- will yield what they hold.
Thinking about questions in this way reminded me of two quotes. James Thurber said: "It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers." I read this a while back and it really stuck with me. One point of it is that whoever thinks he knows the answers really doesn't. Another point is that answers change, and an answer formed at a particular place in time will fade in accuracy and relevance; questions are portable, and can be applied to whatever circumstances arise. One could evoke Heraclitus, who said that you can't step in the same river twice, or Socrates, who said the only thing he knew was his own ignorance.
I read another quote recently, though I don't remember the source. It ran something like: "Science uncovers the questions that have been hidden by the answers." If this is a definition of science, and not just a quality of it, then I feel more comfortable with the term "library science," which I have often felt was a bit of a joke. Not to devalue librarianship and the new information professions, but one doesn't speak of, say, legal science, or literary science. (I could go on quite a bit about the "two cultures" split, but that is for another day.)
So I pulled the dialogues of Plato off the library shelf, and peeked in. I was struck by the modernness of the voice. Socrates' well-mannered conversation seems slightly dated, but less than Dickens or even much twentieth-century writing.
But the book that really hooked me was Socrates Cafe by Christopher Phillips. Phillips decided to take philosophy to the people by convening Socratic dialogs in cafes. schools, nursing homes, prisons, anywhere he could gather people eager to talk and think.
This book really struck a chord with what I had already been thinking, and I returned it to the library, completed, the next day. From there I grabbed The Portable Plato, and started into Protagoras. The next day after that, I picked up The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton, which takes slightly different tacks than Socrates Cafe, but shares the goal of -- I was about to say, making it relevant to everyday life, but it would be better to say making its relevance clear. Academic philosophy has grown progrssively abstruse and abstract, but real philosophy is as relevant as ever.
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