If I Looking For Bucket

I’m sure this has been around forever, but I just saw it the other day. It somehow captures the entire tragedy of existence through the plight of this unfortunate sea creature. Who among us, indeed, has not at one time or another been cruelly robbed of our bucket by the inescapable workings of Fate? It’s pretty much my new favorite image of all time, although I still like the Hopkin note.

good hyphen bye, or: who misses dash?

This is one of the first sentences in a recent New York Times article:

“WASHINGTON, March 20 — Al Gore... returns on Wednesday, a heartbreak loser turned Oscar boasting Nobel hopeful globe trotting multimillionaire pop culture eminence”

WHAT THE &^%$? Has the paper evolved beyond the need for any punctuation? Those last 13 words didn’t strike anyone as possibly requiring any sort of hyphenation at all?

This is an extreme example but I’ve seen other weird non-hyphenated things there lately, like “teen ager”. What gives?

Haiku Week, Day 7

Fever, sweat, mucus
Writhing in a wool cocoon
Waiting to emerge

Haiku Week, Day 6

Resonating tones
In a hollow wood chamber;
Ribcage and heartbeats.

Translato-Bot Strikes Again

I’m going to interrupt Haiku week just for a second for a brief note to share a few lines of superb machine translation I just stumbled across.

This little gem of inadvertent robot humor is from a blog of random news articles about animals, apparently translated by a malfunctioning Brazilian android or something, with the imaginative name of “Animal News”.

Monday, January 22, 2007

The bees of the assassin infest the area of Katrina-Ravaged

The residents of the flood-damaged parish of the St. Bernard, still that recovers of the Katrina hurricane, have a new preoccupation: bees of the assassin.

The article goes on to explain that “Sometimes they call the ‘bees to you of the assassin’ because their intense attacks can be fatal.” Who would have guessed that Portuguese-(or whatever)-to-English translation mechanoids were also such masters at writing kung-fu movie dialogue?

Haiku Week, Day 5

Thunder came early
Shattered the midday silence
The path was flooded

Haiku Week, Day 4

Paper hummingbird
A creased and discarded leaf
Fallen, torn, reborn

This one’s not as complicated as usual. It’s a little ode to my most complex piece of origami to date, a hummingbird from a design by Peter Engel. It’s interesting to me that something like that can be made from the photocopied scraps in the recycling bin.

Haiku Week, Day 3

Flames dancing on sand
God’s voice, madness or mirage?
Same thing in the end.

Since yesterday’s post partially involved me poking fun at avant-garde music, I thought I’d show I’m not a complete Philistine by mentioning that I really like Moses und Aron, an unfinished modern opera by Schoenberg that I recently acquired. The music is very atonal and strange, and the opera’s subject is a tough one to wrestle with, but I definitely like it.

The opera is about Moses (obviously) and how the Burning Bush, when it’s giving him his mission, suggests that his brother Aron be his mouthpiece. The opera’s Moses is a real puritan, and knows that his God can’t be portrayed in pictures or described fully in words. So the paradox of trying to convert the Hebrews to an invisible God he can’t talk about without diluting the message really messes with his mind. His brother Aron, on the other hand, has no trouble giving the people what they want, via magic tricks and fancy speeches (well, singing), and eventually he and they are worshipping the Golden Calf while Moses is away.

Moses comes down from Mount Sinai tablets in hand, furiously confronts Aron, and when Aron points out that the Ten Commandments are also nothing more than a graven image themselves, Moses smashes them in frustration and cries out “O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!”, which is more or less “O word, you word I lack!” He can’t figure out how to convey his message, and the opera cuts off there, unfinished after the end of Act II.



The compelling thing about this words-versus-ideals version of the Moses story for me is that it’s such a strange mix of old and modern concepts, and a weird jumble of ideas which I admire and things which I am a bit wary of.

I’m not sure whether Schoenberg’s Moses is more like a brave modern artist or intellectual, trying to create something new but realizing that all messages are distorted by the media they’re portrayed through – or more like a stereotypical religious fanatic, unable to accept any other ideas or thoughts except those he imagines are being beamed into his head directly by the Supreme Being. In the planned (but never composed) ending, Moses triumphs and, flanked by soldiers, scolds Aron for his wickedness, and Aron drops dead. Was Moses a brilliant, principled reformer or the type of guy who would have put a hit out on Salman Rushdie, or both?

I think the composer himself wasn’t sure, and I assume that’s why one of the reasons he stopped working on the opera and never finished it.

Anyway, as another irony for an opera which hinges on communication breakdown and ends with “O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!”, I can’t find the text for the opera anywhere online, so my understanding of it is currently fragmentary, based on random summaries I’ve read online and the few words I can understand in the recording. And I guess the final irony is that I was supposed to convey this all through the succinct medium of haiku, and I’ve ended up taking hundreds of words to explain myself. Oh well. I can only imagine how long my version of the Ten Commandments would be.

Haiku Week, Day 2

Screech of angry owls
Under old wooden rafters
Disorients me

Tonight we went to hear some very interesting musical performances at the Central Market Annexe, which is a cool old set of renovated colonial-era buildings with nice wooden rafters. No owls though. The owls are like totally a metaphor for the musicians we heard. Two of the performers were playing their laptops. Here’s the website of one of them. I’m not sure how they did it, but they were sort of looping and reverberating all sorts of recordings and sounds to make a kind of sonic collage. One guy played an electric guitar with a set of screwdrivers.

Unfortunately, while I am all for artistic experimentation, these very interesting concepts often sounded, in execution, like a thousand smoke alarms going off at once while a million kittens were being thrown into the world’s largest blender. For some reason all the acts tended toward high-pitched shrieking feedback tones that physically hurt my ears. Note to free-form jazz musicians and laptop sound pioneers: less high-pitched squealing, please. You can experiment all you want with muffled thumps or dull clicks, really. I’ll sit there for hours enthralled by muffled thumps. Make muffled thumps your main focus. Not ultra-high squeals. Anything but squeals.

However, while I was being tortured by many of the the sounds I was actually very interested in the intensity and obvious creativity the musicians brought to making noise. And who am I, I thought, to judge these guys’ experimental music? I wondered if I were up there deliberately trying not to make sounds that sounded like normal music, what I’d come up with. So I was interested, entranced, bored, confused, excited, physically pained, shamed and made contemplative all within the space of a few minutes. Not bad for a free concert, and I’m glad we were invited.

Haiku Week, Day 1

Spring’s tall grass breeds pests
Ancient crabs cling to their turf
Gorilla loin-spawn

Ok here’s the deal. I’ve recently been told in a friendly but firm way that my posts are too convoluted and long for normal human browsing. I really wasn’t trying to be difficult, I guess I just figured that everyone’s interests were exactly the same as my own and that therefore anything I wrote on topics that interest me, no matter how rambling, would be inherently riveting. Oops. So I’m going to post nothing but haikus for at least a week as penance, although I have in the past said I would avoid the form. This poem deals with the very real and very interesting possibility that some of our lice originally evolved on gorillas, and the larger idea that human evolutionary history can be traced by studying parasites and more specifically head and pubic lice, as discussed on this extremely interesting article. I will not be quoting from the interesting page, even though I find it very, very interesting. If you’re interested you’ll have to click on the link yourself. Thank you.

Right Ho, Jeeves

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but certain authors, musicians etc. have names that are so annoying or colorful that I develop a judgment about them before reading or hearing their work. For example, I’ve always had trouble taking the idea of someone named “Saul Bellow” seriously, and I really haven’t read much by him. I avoided the excellent English writer Anthony Trollope for years because I thought he was French. I think I initially didn’t like Radiohead as much as I should have because their name is such a corny example of the most overused and annoying “alternative band” naming scheme ever, which is simply to make a new compound word: Candlebox, Audioslave, Stereolab, Soundgarden, Superchunk, Sparklehorse, Silverchair... This retarded band-naming scheme ravaged the countryside all throughout the ’90s, only to be replaced by the almost-equally irksome formula “The ___s” in the early oughts.

The name prejudice works the other way too, though: I’ll always have a soft spot for Rainer Maria Rilke, no matter how incomprehensible much of his poetry is to me, because of the way one of my literature professors, who was from Scotland, rolled the “r”s. You should have heard the way that guy said “Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov”. He could have charged admission.

Anyway, three British authors who(m?) I long avoided because their names sounded unbearably pretentious, and therefore I assumed their work would be too, were Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis and P.G. Wodehouse. Those names are so fine, so foppish and so prancingly fancy that I wasn’t even sure if the authors were male or female, and I wasn’t eager to find out. Just forming your mouth to say “Evelyn Waugh” makes you feel like an enormous upper-class British twit – try it, but be warned that you might want to punch yourself in the face afterwards. Astonishingly, I recently learned that Evelyn Waugh, apparently something of a sadist, gave his son the only name that could have been worse than his own: “Auberon Waugh”. Try to imagine anyone other than the Queen saying that with a straight face.

Long story short, those guys with the fancy, fancy names are three of the greatest comic novelists of the last century and I highly recommend most work by any of the three. Waugh is my least favorite because he is the least funny and the most racist, upper-class and reactionary. A lot of the Waugh books I’ve read involve poking fun at the lower classes, “modern” anything, and black people. His Decline and Fall is worth a read. Kingsley Amis is also quite mean-spirited, but less upper-crust and much funnier. Lucky Jim is the best starting point for Amis.

The most humane, funniest and by far my favorite of this little trio I’ve arbitrarily assembled is P.G. Wodehouse. He wrote light and cheerful stories which mostly take place in a sort of idealized comedy England where everyone says things like “pip pip” and “right ho” and “what what” a lot. His most famous characters are a young idiot named Bertie Wooster and his superintelligent butler, Jeeves, but all the characters in all the books are almost equally funny. The plots are usually a standard sitcom-style setup where a misunderstanding forces two young lovers apart, and getting them back together involves pretending to be someone else, stealing a valuable object from a country manor, public speaking gone horribly wrong, tricking horrible old relatives into loaning you money, mistaken identities, etc. If that all sounds like very old-fashioned, superficial comedy, to some degree it is, but the way Wodehouse writes makes every line fresh and hilarious whether you’re a fan of Edwardian England or not. Here’s a passage from The Mating Season, not one of his best works, but with the following passage (slightly edited for length) where the narrator, Bertie Wooster, describes waiting to break into a house to intercept a letter or something:

...That was why on the following morning the commodious grounds of The Larches, in addition to a lawn, a summer-house, a pond, flower-beds, bushes and an assortment of trees, contained also one Wooster, noticeably cold about the feet and inclined to rise from twelve to eighteen inches skywards every time an early bird gave a sudden ‘cheep’ over its worm. My nervous system was seriously disordered, and one of God’s less likeable creatures with about a hundred and fourteen legs had crawled down the back of my neck and was doing its daily dozen on the sensitive skin, but did Nature care? Not a hoot. The sky continued blue, and the fatheaded sun which I have mentioned shone smilingly throughout.

Beetles on the spine are admittedly bad, calling for all that a man has of fortitude and endurance, but when embarking on an enterprise which involved parking the carcass in bushes one more or less budgets for beetles. What was afflicting me much more than the activities of the undersigned was the reflection that I didn’t know what was going to happen when the postman arrived.

It was just as this morale-lowering thought came into my mind that something suddenly bumped against my leg, causing the top of my head to part from its moorings. My initial impression that I had been set upon by a powerful group of enemies lasted, though it seemed a year, for perhaps two seconds. Then, the spots clearing from before my eyes and the world ceasing to do the adagio dance into which it had broken, I was able to perceive that all that had come into my life was a medium-sized ginger cat. Breathing anew, as the expression is, I bent down and tickled it behind the ear, such being my invariable policy when closeted with cats, and was still tickling when there was a bang and a rattle and somebody threw back the windows of the dining-room.

If you thought that passage, especially the phrase “...but when embarking on an enterprise which involved parking the carcass in bushes one more or less budgets for beetles”, was good, then please keep an eye out for Wodehouse next time you’re at the bookstore. If you enjoy eyestrain and/or are a cheap bastard, many of Wodehouse’s early works are starting to appear at Project Gutenberg. On the other hand if you didn’t like the above passage, then God help you.

I think I was inspired to give Wodehouse a chance in spite of his fancy name by a recommendation from Douglas Adams in, I believe, The Salmon of Doubt, and I’m very grateful to Adams for possibly introducing a new generation to these books. I’ve probably read two dozen Wodehouse books in the last two years and there are like 75 more where that came from. For me they’re like the literary equivalent of watching Seinfeld DVDs: you’ve seen it all a million times before, you know exactly what’s going to happen, but it’s always funny and it always cheers you up. By the way, I decided to write this post when I realized, in retrospect, that my post about being a Chinese detective was written in a very Wodehouse-y style.

the tragedy of human cognition

…nice phrase from an interesting article on the New York Times website about scientists studying how all humans might have evolved with a predisposition to believe in supernatural beings. To clumsily sum up the 11-page article, our brains are so good at imagining reasons and causes and sympathies for things that happen in daily life, which helps on a survival level, that we automatically tend to deduce that an unseen God or gods is hiding behind the scenes on the larger scale. Another factor seems to be that being in a religious group might have provided powerful advantages throughout history, because fanatics cooperate better than non-fanatics (as we’re seeing in Iraq). Here are some good passages from the article:

Agent detection evolved because assuming the presence of an agent — which is jargon for any creature with volitional, independent behavior — is more adaptive than assuming its absence. If you are a caveman on the savannah, you are better off presuming that the motion you detect out of the corner of your eye is an agent and something to run from, even if you are wrong. If it turns out to have been just the rustling of leaves, you are still alive; if what you took to be leaves rustling was really a hyena about to pounce, you are dead…. So if there is motion just out of our line of sight, we presume it is caused by an agent, an animal or person with the ability to move independently.

…

A second mental module that primes us for religion is causal reasoning. The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random. “We automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of why things happen to us,” Barrett wrote, “and ‘stuff just happens’ is no explanation. Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and their mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many of these unusual events.”

…

The bottom line, according to byproduct theorists, is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls — and then they grow up in cultures that fill their minds, hard-wired for belief, with specifics.

A particularly interesting paragraph for me was one towards the end about how it probably takes more courage and mental discipline to be an atheist than a believer:

What can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of spiritualism.

Amen to that.

Live from The Lump

To soak your mental adult undergarments in the stream of consciousness which led to this post, please see the previous post.

In my last post I made fun of George Lucas, but I really owe the man a lot for coming up with the character of Indiana Jones. Those of you with a freakishly misused memory for details will remember that in the third movie the map with no names in Henry Jones Sr.’s grail diary leads them to the Turkish city of Alexandretta, now called Iskenderun. How is this relevant to anything? Read on to find the mysteriously unsatisfying answer!

By the end of the Dune series so many thousands of years have passed that some of the names of major planets have changed. Caladan has become Dan. Giedi Prime has become Gammu. And so on. When I first read the books in high school or whenever, I thought that the mutated name of Caladan was confusing, odd and implausible – why would anyone abbreviate “Caladan” as “Dan” and not “Cal” or “Calan” or “Can” or something else? It just sounded wrong.

Now that I’ve been to several different countries and have seen something of the different ways that languages work, I’m not as annoyed by “Dan” for “Caladan”. Maybe in the Dune universe there was a huge tonal emphasis on the last syllable of proper names. Maybe “Cala” was the local term for “The planet called” and the “Dan” part was always the more important element. Maybe the planet was taken over by a race of people whose language didn’t have the sounds for “c” or “l”. There could be several plausible reasons for the change. And even in English, while last-syllable abbreviations aren’t that common they do exist, for example ’nads for gonads and (I think) ’sucker for... well, you know.

One place in the real world where I’ve seen especially unique place-name evolution is Turkey, where old Greek cities were renamed by Turks whose language was completely different (European languages are of the Indo-European family, while Turkish is what I think’s called a Finno-Ugric language. Or maybe it’s just Turkic? Look it up yourself.). On a trip to Istanbul a couple of years back, I was fascinated to see the ancient city and region of Anatolia called “Antalya”, and the ancient city of Smyrna called Izmir. Note that the only similarity between “Smyrna” and “Izmir” is the “’smir” sound, which has moved from the first syllable to the second in the new name. Much odder than “Caladan” becoming “Dan”.

Here are some of my favorite real-world distortions of city-names over time, moving roughly in order of increasing strangeness (some of these spellings were copied from this wikipedia article to save time, so take with a grain of salt):

Italy
Akragas -> Agrigento
Mediolanum -> Milano (I read somewhere that it’s possible the old, old name of this city was “medioplanum”, or in the middle of the plain, but it lost the “p”)
Neapolis -> Naples

France
Aquae Sextiae -> Aix
Lugdunum -> Lyon
Vesontio -> Besançon

Spain
Caesaraugusta -> Zaragoza
Carthago Nova -> Cartagena
Wadi al Kabir -> Guadalquivir

Germany
Augusta Vindelicorum -> Augsburg
Colonia Agrippina -> Köln
Castra Regina -> Regensburg

Turkey
Alexandretta -> Iskenderun (Turkish version of “Alexander” is “Iskendar”. What I think happened to the name is the “ks” sound in “aleks” got switched around (a.k.a. metathesis) to “sk”, and maybe the “al” got dropped entirely because it sounded like Arabic for “the”. Just speculation though, I’m not a historical linguist)
Antioch -> Antakya
Anatolia -> Antalya
Trebizond -> Trabzon
Smyrna -> Izmir
Ephesus -> Efes

With all this in mind, I would like to present a linguistic theory or supposition of mine:

I believe that the word “Istanbul” is not, as the main Wikipedia entry and many other people claim, from a Greek phrase meaning “to the city” (eis tin polin), but is rather just a slightly garbled version of “Constantinople”. My reasoning is pretty simple: conSTANtinoPLE has the sound “stan” in it, while “eis tin polin” does not. Q.E.D. However, I’m open to convincing otherwise – if you buy the eis tin polin theory let me know why.

To bring this all back around, I also believe that Constantinople was a major inspiration for Tolkien’s city of Minas Tirith. Just look at the way the rectangular mountains surrounding Mordor resemble the coastline of Anatolia, which leaves Gondor approximately on Greece and Italy, and the Shire is pretty much where England would be. Constantinople was, like Minas Tirith, a large city left over from a once-great empire, surrounded by huge rings of walls and long seen as a bulwark of the West against the East.


I’m not saying that Minas Tirith is a direct fantasy version of Constantinople, just that it was inspired by several aspects of it. Also on the subject, from what I understand Tolkien’s two major versions of Elvish were designed to be a fancy old version of the language, like Latin, and an evolved later version, like Italian, and that he spent a lot of his time thinking about how the language (and names) would have changed over time, so for example from Quenya to Sindarin the name Carnistir became Caranthir. The miracle is that someone so detail-oriented and obsessively nerdy was able to write a story that had any interest to outsiders at all.

P.S. As to the post title: The Lump is what I hope to get people calling Kuala Lumpur in the future. It’s much quicker to say and quite poetic, don’t you think?

My Two Trilogies

I read the Lord of the Rings and Dune trilogies pretty early on, around 5th or 6th grade. I blame all my problems on this early warping of my impressionable mind.

As I remember it I was introduced to both series by my Uncle Fred, who gave me his copy of The Hobbit first and the other books a year or two later, which is probably the best way to be introduced to that stuff. The cover, which was by a very prolific (and, in retrospect, annoyingly unimaginative) fantasy book cover artist named Darrell K. Sweet, was typical of Sweet’s work in that everyone has tight-fitting clothes, immaculate hair and looks like they’ve just dressed up for Ye Olde Renaissance Faire (see above).

No, now that I think about it, I remember two copies of The Hobbit floating around our house (one with a blue cover and one yellow-orange but both with that horrible cover painting of Renaissance Midget Bilbo cowering before a huge glowing eagle) so maybe it wasn’t entirely due to avuncular donation and my dad had always had one, but from what I can recall it was definitely Uncle Fred who was into Dune. I read the first four books in the series in middle school. At the time I was struck by the major differences between the form of the two series.


The Lord of the Rings books told one long, exciting story with a clear beginning and ending. The Dune books were a bit different in that the first book was a great story, then the other books were incredibly boring adventures of random descendants of the characters from the first book. I now know that this was due to the fact that LOTR was actually written as one long novel, and that the later Dune books are the way they are because the author was deliberately choosing to concentrate on analyzing future history over storytelling, but at the time I expected an LOTR-level literary unity from every trilogy or series I read, and the Dune series seemed like a mess.

My main problem with Dune in middle school could be summed up in two words: Duncan Idaho. I remember having very little interest in reading volumes and volumes on the exploits of several successive clones of the most excruciatingly boring minor character from the original book. Each of the later Dune books takes place long, long after the events of the first one, and for most of the time the only character around from the first book is a clone of this guy Duncan Idaho. Not only does he have the most boring, generically American name in history in the middle of a book where everyone has an incredibly cool name like Baron Vladimir Harkonnen or Duke Leto Atreides – I always imagined Duncan Idaho as a potato farmer – but the character is actually boring beyond belief. Since he’s usually a clone, it usually takes him the whole book to figure out what everyone else in that time period already knows. So he’s like Unfrozen Caveman Potato Farmer.

Now, of course, while I am still bored silly by Duncan Idaho and a lot of his pals, I appreciate the later Dune books a lot more. Setting the later books in the far-distant future of the original Dune’s already far-distant future allowed Frank Herbert to make a lot of interesting comments on civilization and history and, above all, the human desires for immortality and stability. By the last Dune book there are like a dozen different ways beliefs and characters from the past use to continue existing forever: religion, cloning, technology, telepathy, becoming a giant worm (as seen on another bad paperback cover from my youth, above), martial arts, and several I forget. The storytelling takes a back seat to these philosophical speculations on immortality – for example, I think the plot of the last Dune book pretty much was hundreds of pages of philosophical discussion where no one does anything, leading up to like one page of action where one of the characters uses a supersecret ancient martial arts technique to kick the evil leader in the head really, really hard.

A third book series that had an almost equal impact on me was Hitchhiker’s Guide, although like Dune it ceased to be a trilogy long ago. However, this has gone on long enough so I’ll have to give Douglas Adams his due later.

These random thoughts on two book series led to some more random thoughts on city names, which on my wife’s advice I’m spinning off into another post.

And to be honest, another trilogy which had an even bigger impact on me, from an even earlier age, was the Star Wars films. But if George Lucas can retroactively go in and ruin his movies decades later, then, hell, I can go back into my memories and retroactively wipe out all knowledge of ever having liked Star Wars. It seems only fair.