Young Libyan warriors depicted in The Atlantic inspired this Youtube playlist. (I'm also reminded that earlier this year James Parker wrote a great piece on how heavy metal is keeping us sane.)
For Shaka, a young college student who became a revolutionary this spring, music was part of the development of his own identity:
After asking me to sit on his left—firing RPGs had destroyed the hearing in his right ear—Shaka explained that his introduction to pop and rock, and to the English language, came via the Backstreet Boys. As he learned to play the guitar, and broadened his musical horizons through Internet downloads, his taste grew more refined. “Neil Young, Metallica, and Pink Floyd, especially Dark Side of the Moon,” he said. “Iron Maiden and Nirvana too,” Essraity added. “We were just young guys enjoying music, dreaming of freedom.”
As I mentioned in my Harry Potter post, Harold Bloom questions whether students will ever advance from the lowest levels of popular material to "more difficult pleasures," but never tries to answer his own question. The answer, as I'm gradually learning, is, "Yes."
Break the power of current "party bosses," who control the candidates we see in general elections, and make sure those candidates conform to rigid views. "This tendency toward rigidity—and the party system that enables it—is at the root of today’s political dysfunction."
Take redistricting out of the hands of congress and put it into commissions that would decide based on communities, not potential political power. For example, Edwards' own Oklahoma district should have remained centered on the urban area where he started his career, not splayed into a mixture of urban and rural constituencies designed to cage him politically, but not help him serve. (Adam asks: how do we know the commissions will act fairly?)
Allow members of any party to amend a House bill. I can't believe we don't do this already. But it makes sense when you realize that the Congress functions "not as a gathering of America’s chosen leaders to confront, together, the problems we face, but as competing armies—on the floor, in committees, in subcommittees—determined to dominate or destroy."
Make congressional committees more bipartisan: restore the position of minority vice chairman, who can introduce bills and bring forward experts.
Fill committee vacancies by lot, not playing favorites. (I can hear Adam wishing him good luck with that one!)
Staff the committees with experts, not ideologues picked out by party bosses.
As all of America watches its Congress come closer than ever to stabbing its own constituents in the back by failing to raise the debt ceiling, risking a credit rating downgrade and new economic crises, perhaps the tide will turn towards real structural reform again?
Raphael, said hee....
Go...
Converse with Adam...
As may advise him of his happie state,
Happiness in his power left free to will,
Left to his own free Will, his Will though free,
Yet mutable; whence warne him to beware
He swerve not too secure: tell him withall,
His danger, and from whom, what enemie,
Late fall'n himself from Heav'n, is plotting now...
-- Paradise Lost, Book V
Last night finally completed The Brain on Trial, an excerpt from a new book by neuroscientist David Eagleman published in this summer's The Atlantic, "the Ideas issue." The article opens with the revelation that Charles Whitman, still remembered in Texas for going up to the top of the UT Austin tower to shoot dozens of people, for no reason, actually wrote a letter before the act that tells us he thought something was wrong with his brain. An autopsy revealed a tumor.
The article pivots on a renewed look at the existence of "free will," finding that the legal system still assumes we are "practical reasoners" in most cases, but now building in more and more exceptions. The emerging science of brain imaging (see my pro-translation!) will likely be taken up more and more to identify ways to treat criminals and so reform the prisons.
Free will may exist (it may simply be beyond our current science), but one thing seems clear: if free will does exist, it has little room in which to operate. It can at best be a small factor riding on top of vast neural networks shaped by genes and environment [interjection: "mutable" said Milton. Guy knew his stuff!]. In fact, free will may end up being so small that we eventually think about bad decision-making in the same way we think about any physical process, such as diabetes or lung disease.
Adam posted a brief and lurid report on the state of Chinese industrial food practices; most interesting is the investigative journalist who published the accounts that the article describes the LA Times describing. Perhaps it would be worth tracing it back to the source?
A fascinating story from the Guardian recently details the process of gender transitioning, in brief. One point that I found fresh and of interest:
This I had expected, but being "read" as trans in other places raised different problems: venues that welcomed trans women also attracted people interested in trans women sexually, who didn't always understand that, whatever my gender, the usual rules about where they could put their hands (for one) did not change. (I was not alone: 64% of the trans women surveyed by the Equalities Review in 2007 reported experience of public sexual harassment.)
Female friends pointed out my naivety and explained what they'd learned in similar situations years earlier. I knew I'd have to learn fast how to handle myself and which areas of my home town were the most tolerant.
I'm reminded that I haven't yet read Conundrum, a transgender memoir of many years ago.
Over the weekend Adam and I watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and reflected on this huge media franchise and its core in the story by J.K. Rowling. Both of us, in our own way, sort of wanted to see the end of the series on the big screen, and felt there was some kind of good to the whole thing.
We discussed this topic throughout the weekend, as we often do, and it occurred to us to return to Harold Bloom's famous denunciation of the first novel in the series, back in 2001. A liberal punditry site called Opednews.com supplies the text for free. Bloom is at his most insightful near the beginning, though he at once begs a few questions:
The ultimate model for Harry Potter is "Tom Brown's School Days" by Thomas Hughes, published in 1857. The book depicts the Rugby School presided over by the formidable Thomas Arnold, remembered now primarily as the father of Matthew Arnold, the Victorian critic-poet. But Hughes's book, still quite readable, was realism, not fantasy. Rowling has taken "Tom Brown's School Days" and re-seen it in the magical mirror of Tolkien. The resultant blend of a schoolboy ethos with a liberation from the constraints of reality-testing may read oddly to me, but is exactly what millions of children and their parents desire and welcome at this time.
Why bring up Tom Brown's School Days? What is the central weakness of this text? More importantly, what are some good reasons why art need not (should not?) give "millions of children and their parents" what they desire. Adam and I considered these things at some length, and our thoughts include:
The story the mother tells the child in this case is one that encourages exceptionalism, and passes down clichéd models of social relations (your friends are the most important (but don't have sex with them, naturally); your dead will always be with you -- in here (gestures at heart))
Adam says Bloom probably meant that he didn't want to hear a story that did things he'd heard before, and done better the earlier times. The fault here is that the ideas are brittle and tired -- clichés.
It occurred to me, however, that Bloom seems blind to the tradition of women's intimate publics (though he sees this public clear enough when he realizes that readers "sense her wistful sincerity"), and so does not see that the sentimental language of intimacy add as much to the text as any boyish predecessors as Tom Hughes or J.R.R. Tolkien. The character of Hermione, for example, is a major exponent of the female complaint; her actions, such as the escape-by-release of the Gringots dragon in one of the final scenes, show how her sense of the feelings of others give her what she needs to be a more humane person. Harry, too, is little more than a sort of sensing-machine: he hears Horcruxes, and reveals clues by licking, kissing, touching or otherwise making contact with things.
This sort of thing, which deserves a much fuller analysis, adds up to an injection of a distinctly feminine voice into the world of the fantasy-thriller. Rowling is the storytelling mom we all wish we had, and can have now, for the low price of $10 for a movie ticket (or $25 for a book, or some similar amount for a lego game cartoon thing). A necessary cultural studies intervention would inquire whether the Harry franchise makes it more or less likely for parents to tell their children stories after Harry Potter.
Bloom approaches the question, asking "Will they advance from Rowling to more difficult pleasures?" But Bloom does not even attempt to answer this question; he really does not see much of interest in it, because he clearly does not care one whit for "non-readers" or what he probably calls, off the page, "unintelligent children."
I fault him for that. I remember hearing a literature teacher on NPR once speak on one of her girl students who read Twilight, and accepted the teacher's recommendation of Jane Austen or some such thing, and eventually went on to read a good number of stories with female protagonists. The girl returned to Twilight and had to admit to the teacher that she now realized she could see that Twilight was a stilted story with rather horrid characters.
How often does such a marked improvement to a child's reading habits occur? Bloom can't help us answer the question, but we should try. And if we are to be good literature teachers, we should imitate the teacher I heard on the radio in giving over space for children to read popular and "middlebrow" texts, but to make the most use of these. Deathly Hallows, for example, references so many bits of tradition, from Arthurian legend (the Sword of Gryffindor offers itself to Harry or whoever needs it) and English War poets (Neville Longbottom's dialogue in the third act of the final movie). At each of these moments, the teacher has an opportunity to show off how the traditions of folklore, humanism, and so on all have real value in the construction of real art -- and blockbuster stuff, too!
Combination of two brain diagrams in one for comparison. In the left normal brain, in the right brain of a person with Alzheimer's disease (Wikipedia)
My latest pro translation carries me into the field of cognitive neuroscience, specifically the use of magnetic resonance imaging to identify memory disorders like Alzheimer's Disease and something else called "Mild Cognitive Disorder" 輕度認知障礙, or MCI. A few interesting terms from the Chinese:
执行功能 executive functions. "The concept is used by psychologists and neuroscientists to describe a loosely defined collection of brain processes that are responsible for planning, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, rule acquisition, initiating appropriate actions and inhibiting inappropriate actions, and selecting relevant sensory information." - Wikipedia
工具性日常生活活動 instrumental activities of daily living (instrumental ADLs), which "are not necessary for fundamental functioning, but they let an individual live independently in a community: Housework, Taking medications as prescribed, Managing money, etc., etc." -- Wikipedia
聚类和转换 clustering and shifting. Not sure I have this right? These are linguistic processes that become more limited for AD sufferers. In advanced Alzheimer's, "Language is reduced to simple phrases or even single words, eventually leading to complete loss of speech." -- Wikipedia
內側顳葉 the medial temporal lobe.
海馬、內嗅皮質 hippocampal and entorhinal cortex. MRI researchers have discovered that a lower hippocampal volume corresponds to lower performance on tests of cognitive ability. Changes in stimulus patterns to the hippocampus seem to indicate the onset of Alzheimer's.
脑成像的大小与实际脑萎缩的情况成正比. "imaged brain size and actual brain atrophy states are in direct proportion." It's important to be able to say "a and b are in direct proportion." For inverse, it would be 成反比 at the end.
As this interesting set of terms indicates, the study of long-term decline in brain function among older adults is fascinating and heart-breaking. Losing speech completely, especially if some mental function continues inside the brain, must be one of the greatest tragedies any human being can experience. I can't help but sympathize with Adam's proposition that we, or at least he, try to die before such symptoms occur.
So, over the last hour I've been playing around a bit with a "What's in Your Food?" calculator supplied by the USDA. From the point of view of the concerned consumer of food, the basic idea is to better understand the number of calories in food and how many of those calories come from protein, carbohydrates and fat, and as a "fat shredder" for the next thirty days I want to decrease fat and carbohydrates while increasing protein.
First, I took a look at a typical P90x breakfast (p. 20), as recommended for a small person like myself:
By contrast, just now I made some steel-cut oats and had two small bowls, one with maple syrup, and the next with a drizzle of olive oil and a hard-boiled egg from the fridge. Healthy, right? But consider, using the USDA tool (oatmeal + syrup + olive oil + egg):
I've had fewer calories than the p90x omelet breakfast, but I've already take in almost double the carbs recommended, over three times the fat, and less than 1/6 of the protein recommended. So I can see I have a lot of work to do if I want to follow the P90x advice to raise protein intake and lower fat and carbs. This will be quite a challenge!
This summer I've really enjoyed using the P90x workout videos to get myself in shape for an athletic event in September. But it has also caused a spike in my own body image issues.
I'm very small for a male (5'5" and 120 lbs). But that's not the problem -- I like thinking of myself as lean, compact and sexy to other gay males. So of course I think I'm not lean enough. I stare at my tummy, pinch its layer of fat, and think of the six-pack abs that other men and teenage boys have. Why can't I have that too, especially if I'm doing all this exercising?
I'd have to fix my diet.
So I want to get rid of the layer of fat over my tummy; I'm interested in the "Fat Shredder" phase of the P90x Nutrition Plan.
This plan comes with a warning:
Those who are reasonably fit and have more body fat can use this phase more easily than someone who is very fit and doesn’t have a lot of excess body fat to lose. This stage is designed to cut down your body fat percentage, and as this happens, your available energy should also decrease. Therefore, Phase 1 should only be extended if you need to drop more fat and also feel like you have ample energy to push hard during your workouts. Conversely, this phase could be shortened by a week or two if your body fat is already low and you feel like you don’t have the necessary energy to get the most out of your workouts.
This brings me to the first question of health and body-image ethics:
If my body-fat percentage is already at a healthy level (just under 15%), then is it really good for me to attempt to bring it down to 10% or even 5%, the level of trained athletes?
I think the answer is: yes, it's a good idea to try, but let's not get to obsessed about it. It's a good idea to understand more deeply what foods I'm putting into my body, the total calories, the amount of protein, of fat, of carbohydrates, and of the various proportions of these. I won't calculate these obsessively at every meal, or even pay as much attention as I am now for the long term. I just want to take, let's say thirty days, and try to control the intake. I think the feeling of control and knowledge will help me in the long term.
This has become long. I'll post again with a basic calculation I just completed over my late Saturday breakfast (obviously my boyfriend is gone for the day, and I'm enjoying a bit of leisure time.)
Cinéma vérité (French: [sinema veʁite], "truthful cinema"; English: /ˈsɪnɨmə vɛrɨˈteɪ/) is a style of documentary filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects. -- Wikipedia
This is all so thought-provoking. Perhaps teach a class on vérité in film, prose and poetry.
Doing a little research on my problem withaddiction to interest in pornography.
"...It's a kind of education to kids about what sex is like before they have a real education of it." That education involves seeing thousands of explicit sexual images by the time a person reaches his teenage years. Experts say that exposure can make real-life sex a letdown for men driven by porn-style fantasies. -- Newsweek on The Porning of America (Beacon, 2008)
This strikes home, particularly the notion that too much porn makes real-life sex a letdown. I would play the Devil's advocate though, by saying what's called for is a more moderate, ethical consumption of porn. Television also makes real-life life a letdown, right? And as Don Quixote teaches us, stories in general can make life in general intolerable, to the point that we choose the fantasy instead. That doesn't mean we stop reading books or watching television.
Funny, just after watching Please Vote For Me, I came across a Newsweek article detailing American parents' anxiety over not being able to compete with the new global middle class.
I'm feeling oddly unable to concentrate this morning, and so did not read the article very carefully. But it seems to me that American parents have good intentions, but bad strategy.
My friend Beng will leave town soon, a parting that is truly sorrowful. At least we're getting to spend time together at things like the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where the amazing "Facing the Lens" exhibit is still up.
I was learning what translations there were of traditional Chinese stories when I came across a volume called Eastern Shame Girl:
Frontispiece
This gorgeous first edition is even signed by an owner who shares my hometown:
John B. Hawley, Ft. Worth, Texas, 1937 (remember fountain pens with metal nibs!)
Perhaps most striking is an illustration to the title story, "Eastern Shame Girl:"
Gorgeous and attractive line drawing of Miss Du
The subject of course, is Du Shiniang, and this story is much more familiarly known as "The Courtesan's Jewel-Box," after the translation of Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi.
A different edition with fewer pages carries a page just beyond the same frontispiece that says:
NOTE: Previously published as "Eastern Shame Girl," this book was attacked -- and acquitted -- in the courts, with judicial recognition of its exceptional literary merit.
How funny! Such line drawings must have been too much for the American reading public at that time. Here's one more, from "The Monastery of the Esteemed Lotus," p. 126:
terracing on the loess plateau -- I guess this is one solution to the problem of erosion
I'm working on a big assignment to translate the CV of a Chinese land resources ecologist. He works with universities and the government to come up with strategies for development that is sustainable, yet intensive. Such a job must call for a lot of tension between wanting to protect the environment and wanting to help the country build up its economy!
Interesting side note to his CV is that he serves as a party member, and even co-authored a paper on the ideology of the current university students.
The Ode Less Traveled presented a term that stuck in my head:
...awaken the poet that has always lain dormant within. It is never too late. We are all opsimaths. Opsimath, noun: one who learns late in life.
Fry is so inspiring, I've taken to using the term, but as Adam reminds me, at 31 I'm hardly "late in life" (though rather late for an ambitious writer, I reply in my head). Last night in the shower I realized that what is called for is a term meaning "one who learns throughout life." One thinks of the term "lifelong learning" from contemporary university extension schools. So what is the Greek word that means "lifelong" that I can use to replace οψε (opse), which means "late?" When I find the term, I can just tack it on to "μανθανω (manthano)" to produce ___math.
Apparently Cato the Elder learned Greek at age 80. So it's okay that I haven't studied Japanese yet, at age 31!
I'm just now re-reading The Ode Less Traveled, by Stephen Fry, and here is the man himself, tailoring new satire to the most contemporary events. (Though come to think of it, this was likely shot long before the current inquiry into illegal activities in Murdoch's media empire.)
All in all, I must say this is not very good. Doesn't the pacing seem rather slow, and doesn't it hurt the thing that Hugh Laurie dispenses entirely with trying to actually act like Murdoch? Also, I just didn't find it very funny.
Susan Chang did these NPR reports on best cookbooks for summer; I just listened to 2010 and 2011 back to back on my mp3 player, and my tummy is growling, and it's too hot to think of cooking much. Books I hope for solutions with:
My kitchen in 2008; at the end of summer 2011 I'll move to away from it forever. I'll miss you, best-part-of-this-falling-down-apartment
Susan Middleton, Fast, Fresh and Green: More than 90 Delicious Recipes for Veggie Lovers. I need this now! NOW!
Marie Simmons, Fresh & Fast Vegetarian: Recipes That Make a Meal. Clearly a copycat of the above, but still worth a look.
Simon Hopkinson, The Vegetarian Option. Apparently a literary title, as Chang quotes to demonstrate: "When a freshly harvested cauliflower is in the peak of condition I gain great pleasure in running my hand over its creamy white curds, almost completely enclosed by sturdy green leafy ribs, still wet with rainwater or morning dew."
Adam and I read it out loud and thought it over carefully. Adam, ever surprising me, was sympathetic to their cause, but suspicious and even fearful that what essentially amounts to Communism could benefit. I agree, though I point to revolutionary action as the most dangerous thing.
My mind on poetry, I felt mostly a reaction against the grating rhetoric of contemporary Leftism. Why not, I asked the Leftists, work harder on the intimate rhetoric of, say, Wordsworth in "The Old Cumberland Beggar:"
He travels on, a solitary Man,
So helpless in appearance, that for him
The sauntering Horseman throws not with a slack
And careless hand his alms upon the ground,
But stops,--that he may safely lodge the coin
Within the old Man's hat; nor quits him so,
But still, when he has given his horse the rein,
Watches the aged Beggar with a look
Sidelong, and half-reverted.
"We should help those in need as much as we can," is a proposition I think Leftists and Wordsworth can agree on. On the other hand, I thought of Kipling, having just read "If" in Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Traveled:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
Real change is brought about by individuals looking inward, not mobilization of masses. I'm sure such a proposition is less amenable to Leftists; the truth must be somewhere in between, as it always is. Right?
I'd place Luzloca81's statement right at that in-between point. She is the old Cumberland beggar and Kipling's Man ("It doesn't get better. You get stronger") rolled into one. Admittedly, this is a quick thought, but that's what blogs are for, yes?
"The Safecracker" was published in Vice magazine; the website took the story down, but I did see a nice set of polaroids from a skater magazine editor:
