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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time [are] not worthy [to be compared] with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected [the same] in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
-- The letter of St. Paul to the Romans Chapter â…§: 18-22 King James version
For a long time I have been wondering how a translation of JoachÃn Pasos' Battle-song: The War of Things might best preserve the voice of the poet. Throughout the poem he is addressing vosotros, the explicitly familiar, explicitly plural second person which does not exist in English. Turns out the key is the epigraph to the poem.
For an epigraph, Pasos quotes from the Vulgate version of the above verses of Romans; but he prefaces the quotation with "Fratres:" -- "Brethren:", which is not part of these verses. Paul's letter is addressed to his brethren the Roman Christians, so this insertion makes good sense. And if you read Pasos' poem as a continuation of Paul's address to his brethren, then the familiar second-person plural is clear from context.
This morning I had what seems to me like a good idea for a non-literal translation of the poem's third stanza:
Give me a motor, a motor stronger than man's heart.
Give me a robot's brain, let me be murdered painlessly.
Give me a body, metal body without and within another metal body,
just like the leaden soldier's who never dies,
never begs oh Lord, your grace, let me not be disgraced among your works
like the soldier of mere flesh, our feeble pride,
who will offer, for your day, the light of his eyes,
who will take, for your metal, take a bullet in his chest,
who will give, for your water, give back his blood.
Who wants to be like a knife, like one no other knife can ever wound.
(With liberal borrowings from Steven F. White's more literal translation.) This poem reminds me strongly of León Ferrari's paintings of armaments. Remember that the poet is addressing his brethren: He is asking for these cybernetic enhancements not from his God but from his peers.
so here it is you open it the book we're talking of the book you slide your eyes across the words across his words across Beckett's
no luck I see disjointed images my ear perks up
slide across the page his stream of consciousness his nasty nasty filthy flow he's talking to myself he's talking shame and talking darkness lack of ease and I I can't encompass it remember it from one page to the next
I say it as I hear it he says says Sam and when he says it your ears perk up eidetic narrative you think in your consciousness it could be only maybe not that might not be what he meant not at all
that's all it wasn't a dream that nor a memory I haven't been given memories this time it was an image the kind I see sometimes see in the mud part one sometimes saw
so trace his image in the filthy filthy mud and let his nasty words caress your ear and eyes and consciousness and think you're getting it then turn the page
something wrong there
nothing clicks you're frantic drooling imbecile it's still part one no Pim part one I mean to say before the flood perhaps before the storm before some character named Pim has entered we don't know him yet nor why we're waiting for him but abide abide and let Sam's words roll on
Another astronomy video -- looking down this time rather than up. Some beautiful images of the Earth as seen from the orbiting Space Shuttle -- including a view of northern Chile, where the VLT observatory is located:
A couple of my fave webcomix are coming out in book form soon: Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant (with a fun new episode today about Brown Recluse Spider-Man) will be available in bookstores this October, and Jon Rosenberg's Scenes From a Multiverse does not yet have a delivery date but is ready to go. I'm glad there is a Topatoco. And completing the trinity, if you're around Ontario this summer you should try and get a chance to attend the Ottawa Fring Festival, where a stage adaptation of Winston Rowntree's Subnormality will be premiering.
posted morning of June second, 2011: 1 response ➳ More posts about Comix
Midway in between Taltal and Antofagasta, an array of four telescopes stands on a mountain in the Chilean desert, whirling through space under the clear skies of the Atacama. Take a look:
Full-screen display strongly recommended. (via PopSci, via Teresa's Particles at Making Light)
At Ivan Semeniuk’s Embedded Universe, you can read a couple of posts from the week he spent at the VLT observatory two years ago.
I'm heartened to read, in Jan Sleutels' essay "Greek Zombies: On the Alleged Absurdity of Substantially Unconscious Greek Minds," (from Philosophical Psychology, 2006) that he "will not try to establish that the claims made by Jaynes are historically correct... For present purposes it suffices that the data make sense." -- I get the feeling from this of being on the same wavelength as Sleutels, trying to establish the weak claim that Jaynes' ideas are plausible rather than the strong claim that they are an accurate description of history.
Most of the authors whose work appears in Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness agree that there are four related but independent theses in Jaynes. John Limber summarizes the theses as: "(1) human consciousness from language, (2) the role of verbal hallucinations in the ancient bicameral mind, (3) the history/timing of the changeover, and (4) the underlying biology" -- these essays seem to focus primarily on defending points (1) and (2). Sleutels is the only author who really devotes much energy to point (3), to Jaynes' assertion that the historical changeover to consciousness consisting of an internal mind-space and a narrative self occurred as recently as 3000 years ago; he is devoting his energy to defending the plausibility of the assertion rather than its accuracy, probably wise.
How does he do? I think he makes his task much more difficult than it needs to be by using language which implies this changeover occurred abruptly, in an on/off fashion. It seems to me that if you are saying consciousness is a social construct, a learned behavior, then that statement necessarily entails a long period, likely thousands of years, in which society is adopting this behavior, constructing this concept, learning this vocabulary. Jaynes and Sleutels both compare consciousness to baseball as a practice which necessarily entails its concept -- i.e. you cannot play baseball without having a concept of the game of baseball, you cannot be conscious without having a vocabulary to describe the mental state of consciousness. But this seems a little limited to me. There is no Abner Doubleday of consciousness. If the internal mind-space and narrative self which Jaynes describes are going to arise out of the process he describes, a process of applying concrete vocabulary metaphorically to abstract states and internalizing those metaphors, I don't see how that could possibly happen in a sudden fashion. When I'm reading Jaynes' timeline I'm thinking of his 1300 bc date as a date for this long, gradual process to come to fruition; he declares himself that well before that time, society had grown to the point where it was difficult and stressful to maintain a bicameral state of unconsciousness, what Sleutels is calling a "zombie" state.
That said, I liked Sleutels' essay a lot; its entertaining title was the least of it. The arguments he is refuting from Ned Block are atrociously poor (assuming he is quoting the best of what Block has to offer). Looks like I ought to find out more about Daniel Dennett. (Also, interesting recommendation from John: The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature by Bruno Snell.)
At YouTube, you can listen to Sleutels giving a lecture on "Greek Zombies" at the 2006 Julian Jaynes Conference on Consciousness at the University of Prince Edward Island.
The key to [the King Tut] exhibit is...back in the Valley of the Kings on the north wall of the burial chamber. ...The second figure from the right is a depiction of the mummy as if it had just been stood up erect from where it lay and dressed as Osiris, the god of gods that each king becomes at what we call death.
Facing him... is Tutankamun's successor, Ay, caped in the sacramental leopard skin usual in such succession scenes. In his hand is a wrench-like prying instrument... What Ay is doing is well known and described in hieroglyphics that translate as "The Opening of the Mouth" of Tutankhamun's mummy.
A strange phrase. ...But not so strange to anyone remembering the history of a thousand miles to the east and a few centuries earlier In the great city-states along the Tigris and Euphrates, gods were wooden statues or idols, elaborately dressed, jeweled, and anointed, which from time to time underwent a ceremony called in cuneiform "The Washing of the Mouth." The idol was ritually carried to the river, where its wooden mouth was washed out with solutions of exotic ingredients as it was faced in various directions. And cuneiform texts state that such statues spoke and commanded their votaries what to do.
-- Julian Jaynes "The Meaning of King Tut" Art/World Magazine, 1979
My archetypal reaction to Jaynes' writing: the bicameral-mind explanation of this mural seems completely plausible, so strongly so that I can't imagine its not being correct. But on the other hand... this is not at all my area of expertise. I can confirm via Google that the ceremonies Jaynes is referring to existed historically. So... I am just going to treat Jaynes' ideas as historically accurate and see where that leads me. Here is what the Egyptian Book of the Dead has to say about the mouth-opening ceremony, in Miriam Lichtheim's translation:
My mouth is opened by Ptah,
My mouth's bonds are loosed by my city-god.
Thoth has come fully equipped with spells,
He looses the bonds of Seth from my mouth.
Atum has given me my hands,
They are placed as guardians.
My mouth is given to me,
My mouth is opened by Ptah,
With that chisel of metal
With which he opened the mouth of the gods.
I am Sekhmet-Wadjet who dwells in the west of heaven,
I am Sahyt among the souls of On.
posted afternoon of May 28th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
Sylvia is nearly done with elementary school, getting ready to move on to middle school -- one of the highlights of her fifth grade year was performing in the fifth grade musical, Grease Jr. Here is a photo of her with two friends from the cast party -- the photographer is Jeannine Redd, and congratulations to Jeannine -- the photo was selected for inclusion in the South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition's Through the Lens of Integration exhibit.
posted afternoon of May 27th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Sylvia
Speaking of "Subterranean Homesick Blues": The city of Duluth, MN has hit on a distinctive way of honoring its favorite son.
(I always thought the lyric after this was "Don't wear sandals/ You can't afford the scandal" but apparently, per his home page, the second line is "Try to avoid the scandals".)
here it is
Here is what the Egyptian 
