idiolect

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there

Anton Chekhov, from Gurlyand’s “Reminiscences of A. P. Chekhov”, in Teatr i iskusstvo 1904, No. 28, 11 July, p. 521

If people are clamping their body together as if it might fall apart, perhaps the same is true of the mind. Could it be that our instructions on how to use our consciousness are as a damaging as our advice about posture? Should we really be told to ‘Think!’ and ‘Try to concentrate!’ and ‘Be original!’ as if thought required effort, and as if originality lay somewhere outside of ourselves? Should we really think of ourselves as ‘one consciousness’ and force our imagination to confirm this?

It’s not easy to kill the curiosity of an ape, but sitting at a desk for year after year of organised boredom might do the trick. Our preoccupation with trivia suggests that the urge to learn is intact, but that learning anything of significance has become stressful. The Executive producer of the David Letterman show, Robert Morton, said ‘If you walk away from this show learning something, then we haven’t done our job’. If entertainment is designed to pass the time without teaching us anything, then I have to presume that it’s a spin-off of our education system. Other cultures have feasts, celebrations and morality plays, and they may tear out hearts to ensure that the sun comes up, but I think that entertainment is peculiar to us, and many of us are entertained for most of our waking hours

Keith Johnstone, in Impro for Storytellers (1999, p338)

You know well enough that we are exploiters. You know too that we have laid hands on first the gold and metals, then the petroleum of the ‘new continents’, and that we have brought them back to the old countries. This was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces, our cathedrals and our great industrial cities; and then when there was the threat of a slump, the colonial markets were there to soften the blow or to divert it. Crammed with riches, Europe accorded the human status de jure to its inhabitants. With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism, since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation. This fat, pale continent ends by falling into what Fanon rightly calls narcissism. Cocteau became irritated with Paris — ‘that city which talks about itself the whole time’. Is Europe any different? And that super-European monstrosity, North America? Chatter, chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honour, patriotism and what have you. All this did not prevent us from making anti-racial speeches about dirty niggers, dirty Jews and dirty Arabs. High-minded people, liberal or just soft-hearted, protest that they were shocked by such inconsistency; but they were either mistaken or dishonest, for with us there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters. While there was a native population somewhere this imposture was not shown up; in the notion of the human race we found an abstract assumption of universality which served as cover for the most realistic practices. On the other side of the ocean there was a race of less-than-humans who, thanks to us, might reach our status a thousand years hence, perhaps; in short, we mistook the elite for the genus. Today, the native populations reveal their true nature, and at the same time our exclusive ‘club’ reveals its weakness — that it’s neither more nor less than a minority. Worse than that: since the others become men in name against us, it seems that we are the enemies of mankind; the élite shows itself in its true colours — it is nothing more than a gang.

John-Paul Sartre, in the introduction the Franz Fanon’s The Wretched Of The Earth (1963; compare with Camus’ “Neither Victims Nor Executioners”)

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow

I am going to be in Philadelphia on the 4th of September for a meeting, and am thinking of paying a visit to New York the following weekend, simply because I’ve never been. Does anyone have any recommended activities for me?

You came to me this morning
And you handled me like meat.
You´d have live alone to know
How good that feels, how sweet.
Anonymous, and hard, and fast -
(I´d know you in my sleep) -
Then born together, born at last
A thousand kisses deep.

I loved you when you opened
Like a lily to the heat.
I´m just another snowman
Standing in the rain and sleet,
Who loved you with his frozen love
His second-hand physique -
With all he is, and all he was
A thousand kisses deep.

All soaked in sex, and pressed against
The limits of the sea:
I saw there were no oceans left
For scavengers like me.
We made it to the forward deck
I blessed our remnant fleet -
And then consented to be wrecked
A thousand kisses deep.

It´s true that you could lie to me
It´s true you could to cheat
The means no longer guarantee
The virtue in deceit.
That truth is bent, that beauty spent,
That style is obsolete -
O since the Holy Spirit went
A thousand kisses deep.

(So what about this inner Light
That´s boundless and unique?
I´m slouching through another night
A thousand kisses deep.)

I´m turning tricks; I´m getting fixed,
I´m back on Boogie Street.
I tried to quit the business -
Hey, I´m lazy and I´m weak.
But sometimes when the night is slow,
The wretched and the meek,
We gather up our hearts and go
A thousand kisses deep.

(And fragrant is the thought of you,
The file is now complete -
Except what we forgot to do
A thousand kisses deep.)

The ponies run, the girls are young,
The odds are there to beat.
You win a while, and then it´s done -
Your little winning streak.
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat,
You live your life as if it´s real
A thousand kisses deep.

(I jammed with Diz and Dante -
I did not have their sweep -
But once or twice, they let me play
A thousand kisses deep.)

And I´m still working with the wine,
Still dancing cheek to cheek.
The band is playing “Auld Lang Syne” -
The heart will not retreat.
And maybe I had miles to drive,
And promises to keep -
Your ditch it all to stay alive
A thousand kisses deep.

And now you are the Angel Death
And now the Paraclete;
Now you are the Quickening Breath
And now the Belsen heap.
No turning from the threat of love,
No acrobatic leap -
As witnessed here in time and blood
A thousand kisses deep

Leonard Cohen

This is how the hero of our time must be. He will be characterised either by decisive inaction, or else by futile activity

Mikhail Lermontov, A hero of our time (1840), trans. Paul Foote

See also, George Orwell on Henry Miller Inside the whale (Thanks James)

Who would like to recommend things for me to see while I’m at the edinburgh fringe festival?

Here’s my starting list of shows I’ve circled:

Things I’m definitely going to see (mostly a healthy dose of the improv)

The TEAM - Architecting (Traverse Theatre, all sorts of times)

ImproJam - The Karaoke of Comedy (C socu urban garden, 17:45)

People Will Talk - An improvised play (Sweet Teviot Place, 17:30)

Rules of Drama and Suspense with Bronya and Siony (Sweet Teviot Place, 16:20)

Things I’d probably enjoy if I went to see them

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (Spotlites @ Merchants’ Hall, 31st to 2nd, 20:15)

Knapps’ Last Tape by Samuel (Spotlites 16:10, 3rd-6th; Assembly 15:55)

Pillowman (The Vault, 11:55, 4th-9th)

Ed Hamell - Hamell on Trial (Underbelly’s Baby Belly, 17:40, 18th-24th)

Henry Rollins (Gilded Balloon Teviot, 22:45, 18-25th)

Things I just liked the sound of from the book

Mark Wason - All the thoughts i’ve had since i was born (Pleasance Courtyard, 20:00)

Which To Burn? Rachel Ogilvy (Gilded Ballon 13:15)

Who’s Afraid of Howlin’ Wolf (C soco 20:45)

Recommended by friends, or with friends in

Alex Horne - Wordwatching (Pleasance Courtyard, 19:40)

Funk it up about nothing (Musical Theatre, George Square, 17:15)

Matt Green - Grow up green (Pleasance Dome, 19:00)

Political Animal (Underbelly, 22:30)

Secret Agents (Pleasance Dome, 19:50)

Shakespod (C 17:10)

I asked the audience to imagine that I was running a game show. I announced that I would go along every row, starting at the front, and give each member a chance to say “cooperate” or “defect.” Each time someone said “defect” I would award a euro only to her. Each time someone said “cooperate” I would award ten cents to her and to everyone else in the audience. And I asked that they play this game solely to maximize their individual total score, without worrying about friendship, politeness, the common good, etc. I said that I would stop at an unpredictable point after at least twenty players had played

Like successive motivational states within a person, each successive player had a direct interest in the behavior of each subsequent player; and had to guess her future choices somewhat by noticing the choices already made. If she realized that her move would be the most salient of these choices right after she made it, she had an incentive to forego a sure euro, but only if she thought that this choice would be both necessary and sufficient to make later players do likewise.

In this kind of game, knowing the other players’ thoughts and characters– whether they are greedy, or devious, for instance—will not help you choose, as long as you believe them to be playing to maximize their monetary gains. This is so because the main determinant of their choices will be the pattern of previous members’ play at the moment of these choices. Retaliation for a defection will not occur punitively– a current player has no reason to reward or punish a player who will not play again — but what amounts to retaliation will happen through the effect of this defection on subsequent players’ estimations of their prospects and their consequent choices. These would seem to be the same considerations that bear on successive motivational states within a person, except that in this interpersonal game the reward for future cooperations is flat (ten cents per cooperation, discounted negligibly), rather than discounted in a hyperbolic curve depending on each reward’s delay.

Perceiving each choice as a test case for the climate of cooperation turns the activity into a positive feedback system—cooperations make further cooperations more likely, and defections make defections more likely. The continuous curve of motivation is broken into dichotomies, resolutions that either succeed or fail.

George Ainslie, A Selectionist Model of the Ego: Implications for Self-Control (also see pp93-94 in Breakdown of will)

The phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ was first popularised in an article about population control.

The rebuttal to the invisible hand in population control is to be found in a scenario first sketched in a little-known pamphlet in 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd (1794–1852). We may well call it “the tragedy of the commons,” using the word “tragedy” as the philosopher Whitehead used it: “The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.” He then goes on to say, “This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.”

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

…

When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin once they see the necessity of mutual coercion, they become free to pursue other goals.

…

The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from he misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.

Hardin, G. (1968). The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243-1248.

Simplified models of artificial situations can be offered for either of two purposes. One is ambitious: these are “basic models” - first approximations that can be elaborated to simulate with higher fidelity the real situations we want to examine. The second is modest: whether or not these models constitute a “starting set” on which better approximations can be built, they illustrate the kind of analysis that is needed, some of the phenomena to be anticipated, and some of the questions worth asking.

The second, more modest, accomplishment is my only aim in the preceding demonstrations. The models were selected for easy description, easy visualization, and easy algebraic treatment. But even these artificial models invite elaboration. In the closed model [of self-sorting of a fixed population across two sub-groups (’rooms’) according to individual’s preferences for a group mean age closest to their own], for example, we could invoke a new variable, perhaps “density”, and get a new division between the two rooms at a point where the greater attractiveness of the age level is balanced by the greater crowding. To do this requires interpreting “room” concretely rather than abstractly, with some physical dimension of some facility in short supply. (A child may prefer to be on the baseball squad which has older children, but not if he gets to play less frequently; a person may prefer to travel with an older group, but not if it reduces his chances of a window seat; a person may prefer the older discussion group, but not if it means a more crowded room, more noise, fewer turns at talking, and less chance of being elected chairman.) As we add dimensions to the model, and the model becomes more particular, we can be less confident that our model is of something we shall ever want to examine. And after a certain amount of heuristic experiments with building blocks, it becomes more productive to identify the actual characteristics of the phenomena we want to study, rather than to explore general properties of self-sorting on a continuous variable. Nursing homes, tennis clubs, bridge tournaments, social groupings, law firms, apartment buildings, undergraduate colleges, and dancing classes may display a number of similar phenomena in their membership; and there be a number of respects in which age, I.Q., walking speed, driving speed, income, seniority, body size, and social distinction motivate similar behaviours. But the success of analysis eventually depends as much on identifying what is peculiar to one of them as on the insight developed by studying what is common to them.

Schelling, T. (1978/2006). Micromotives and Macrobehaviour, pp183-184.

If you are on a bike and you get hit by a car, we say you were ‘tragically killed in a cycling accident’. However, if you are walking along and you get hit by a car, we do not say that you were tragically killed in a walking accident. Framing, eh?

We can’t define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers… one saying to the other: “you don’t know what you are talking about!”. The second one says: “what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?”

Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964), Volume I, 8-2

From Broken Koans and other Zen debris

One afternoon a student said “Roshi, I don’t really understand what’s going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I’ve been doing this for two years now, and the koans don’t make any sense, and I don’t feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what’s going on?”

“Well you see,” Roshi replied, “for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.”

And the student was enlightened.

Academia is a quintessentially literate culture. Studying is reading, the outputs of research are papers and books. Your are judged on your ability to express yourself in writing, and when you do this you must reference the written works of others. This is what defines scholarship. More than this, the habits of thought are patterned by literacy. Literate thought is analytic, dissective. The business of science is that of ordering into lists, breaking into parts, assigning subordinate and superordinate.

And yet there is also a non-literate part to being an academic, a part closely alighted with the praxis of the discipline. This is giving lectures, discussing in seminars, attending conferences. The paper outputs of academia can disguise this component, but it is essential.

In a high-education system dominated by production-line and consumption values, by a receptacle-model of education (students as containers, education as a substance) it is easy to denigrate the ‘live’ oral component of academia, but in doing so we deny students contact with an essential part of scholarly life. Additionally we deny ourselves a cognitive model which can augment literate thinnking.

Walter Ong (Orality and Literature, 1982/2002) has written convincingly about the psychological dynamics of oral vs literate culture. Literate culture encourages finished works, whereas the knowledge of oral cultures is always live, an act of telling rather than knowing. As such it is part of a commons, rather than copyrighted (and plagarised). Oral knowledge is situational, empathetic and participatory, rather than abstracted and objectively distanced, it is contested rather than autonomous and tends towards holism rather than the progressive analytic deconstruction of literate thought. Oral thought is thematic compared to literate thought’s ability to dictate strict chronologies and linear narratives / list structures (just think of the memory constraints on oral culture which lacks written aids to see why pure abstract lists are impossible).

It is clear that academia needs to take elements from both of sides of these distinctions. Oral cognition can be impressionistic rather than precise, conservative rather than innovative and amnesic rather the hypermnemonic. Nonetheless the lived aspects of oral thought are a vital part of disciplinary practice and exposure to them is essential if students are to get a true view of their subjects.

A similar thing is argued by Kevin McCarron, a English literature lecturer and part-time stand-up comedian who argues for the imporance of improvisation in teaching. He says that an overreliance on preparation (the script or text of the class) as getting in the way of the (living) interaction of student and teacher:

(article in the Times Higher Education)

“If we don’t put ourselves under pressure, nothing interesting or exciting is going to happen. How could it? In fact, what we’ve done is spent three hours the previous night making sure that it doesn’t happen.

“Then we have the gall to offer these hours of preparation as morally sound. Self-protection is being offered to the world as a moral value. That preparation has been done to protect the teacher from the students. Teachers spend hours and hours preparing because they are terrified of bring caught out.”

Apostrophe’s insert themselves in my writing at inappropriate places. I know the rules of their use, I promise (for possessives, not plurals. Permissible to indicate omission, etc) but they just seem to come out. My explicit knowledge isn’t enough to make my procedural knowledge, as expressed through the faster-than-deliberate-thought action of typing, obey. I hypothesise that although my deliberative consciousness has learn the rules of apostrophe use, which are defined at the syntactic and semantic level, my procedural motor system is more vulnerable to low-level statistical features of writing — such as that apostrophes often come immediately before an ’s’ at the end of the word. Presumably some words have a sequence of letters which trigger my ‘end of word’ pattern (for example the stem ‘apostophe’, which ends, like many words, in an e) and when I go to add an ’s’ the ‘use apostrophe’ pattern is also, although in appropriately, triggered. This is galling because I hate reading writing with inappropriately placed apostrophes, but I also find it interesting. What is interesting is that typing, like speaking, is a complex action which is overlearnt, but flexible, which is in obeyance of conscious goals, but which the bulk of the details of enactions are unconscious. This unconscious realm isn’t merely motor, not just how I type or speak the words, but it reaches up to include what words I type or say, even what precise meanings I come out with. Hence the phrase “How can I know what I think until I see what I say”.

From McGrew, W. C., & Tutin, C. E. (1972). Chimpanzee dentistry. J Am Dent Assoc, 85(6), 1198-204. cited in Moerman, D. E. (2002). Meaning, medicine, and the ‘placebo effect’. Cambridge University Press: New York.

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Dear Correspondent

I regret to say that I have been unable to deliver your electronic mail to Mr Stafford. My employer has left with me strict instructions to run certain automated checks on the spelling, grammar and vulgarity of unsolicited messages, and I’m afraid it is due to the result of these checks that I am unable to deliver yours.

Mr Stafford has adopted this procedure after realising that many so called ’spam’ messages contain basic errors of spelling, errors of punctuation and grammar or simple profanity. As you will know the basic problem of spam filtering is where to set the threshold so that no important messages are deleted, and so that few spam messages are delivered. Mr Stafford reasoned that he would not miss being denied badly spelled, poorly constructed or simply rude messages — even genuine ones — and that this procedure would be most effective in identifying spam that was not caught by his frontline spam filters. Additionally, this system means that any spam that is delivered does at least have the virtue of being well written, something which mitigates a good part of the offence, he feels.

This is why I have been employed as an ‘email butler’, and why you are hearing from me rather than receiving a reply directly from Mr Stafford. Please understand, I am certainly not saying that your message *is* spam, merely that it fails on my checks of what we regard as proper English. Perhaps you have misused the apostrophe? I’m afraid to say that the misuse of just one of these little fellows is enough to have your message rejected (not so with mis-spellings, which my employer allows, in my opinion, to compose a very generous percentage of the message).

If you feel that your message is important enough to be brought to Mr Stafford’s attention then I would urge you to either redraft with more care, or to send a short note to Mr Stafford requesting that you be added to my list of his trusted friends and colleagues — I’m afraid to say that, as has always been the case, the ‘right sort’ are allowed to get away with behaviour that would have the ordinary person thrown out of polite society!

Yours

E Butler

On behalf of Tom Stafford, Esq

Guardian news 30/5/08:

Reed Elsevier has finally stopped organising arms trade fairs - five months later than it promised shareholders and staff….Yesterday the company said it had sold the DSEi, ITEC and LAAD defence exhibitions to Britain’s largest independent exhibitions group, Clarion Events, for an undisclosed sum…”The events we have acquired in the defence-and-security sector are a valuable and profitable addition to our portfolio and fit perfectly with our strategy for international expansion,” said Clarion Events’ chief executive, Simon Kimble.

Story at defensenews.com

Clarion seems to run trade shows for the gambling, petrochemical, biofuel and gas industries, as well as the NEC baby show…

Vaughan is so spot on over at mindhacks.com that I’m going to excerpt him here:

For example, an experiment might find that fear is associated with amygdala activation. But it’s impossible to say the reverse, that every time the amygdala is activated, the person is fearful.

Here’s an analogy. On average, people from New York may be more impatient than people from other cities.

If you predicted that all people from New York were impatient on the basis of this, you’d be grossly mistaken so many times that it would make your prediction invalid.

In fact, taking the average attributes of populations and applying them to individuals is stereotyping, and we avoid it because it is so often wrong as to cause us to misjudge people.

Alternatively, if you met an impatient person and therefore concluded that they must live in New York, you’d be equally inaccurate.

The democratisation of publishing has come at just the right time to salvage the knowledge that will be lost due to the disintegration of the traditional family.

Men protect women, a man once told me indignantly.
Sure,
some do.
Who do they protect them from?
Other women?
Children?
Wild rutabagas? *
Rampaging rabbits?

Helen Potrebenko

* A kind of swede

Now, from Defra, you can get a noisemap of the UK, searchable by postcode. This is the area around my house:

Dutch institutional investors and company executives are pressing for more rules to govern activist shareholders, news agency Reuters reports.
…
‘We have all seen that investors with a short term horizon and a strategy of shareholder activism try to make life miserable for companies,’ Jan Hommen, chairman of publishing group Reed Elsevier, was quoted as saying. ‘They have no loyalty at all to the company or other stakeholders.’

dutchnews.nl, 9 May 2008

Thesis: Irony is so corrosive that even the slightest drop in anything you pursue will eventually destroy all seriousness and purpose. The project will then be impossible to sustain, except for the regular injection of large quantities of self-importance (for examples see critical theory, purportedly ‘post-modern’ art).

I have this recurring fantasy where a younger me is looking out of my eyes as I go about my daily life. The fifteen year old me can’t read my thoughts, or affect my actions. He doesn’t know how he got here, temporarily trapped inside the thirty year old me, doesn’t know what is going on. All he can do is read what I look at, listen to what I say, and try and deduce what kind of destiny awaits his future self. Is he pleased with how he ends up? Is he amazed at the confidence, the responsibility, the freedom that I have? Does he smile in recognition when I call up people he already knows, obviously still in touch? Does he wonder how some things worked out? He can’t ask any questions, trapped there. He just has to look for clues. Some people leave a trace on my adult life while he’s visiting, others are agonisingly absent. He watches the adult me and tries to figure out if these absences distress him, tries to figure out what he likes and avoids, what he loves and hates. He can’t tell for sure, just watches me, as I watch myself, swept through my own life.