Jarvis Cocker, My Hero

Once upon a time, a brave man had a sane response to Michael Jackson and his public image, and he heroically acted on it. I wish to briefly salute an iconic moment in the history of the fight against the forces of evil.
The former head of the band Pulp (and extremely good current solo artist), Cocker was present for Michael Jackson’s performance during the 1996 Brit Awards.

During the highly choreographed performance, Cocker got on stage and pranced around for a bit before security chased him off.



Cocker later explained that he didn’t like the way Jackson was surrounded by choirs of children and overt religious iconography, and he jumped on stage to poke fun at this. The singer - whose own lyrics are often clever, self-deprecating musings about the chasms between desire and fulfillment, between appearance and reality - has explained that while he’s not religious, he was offended by the Christ-like pose Jackson was striking.

Let’s be honest and admit the possibility that Cocker was also intoxicated in some way, that such silly behavior at an awards show is obviously attention-seeking, and that sure, maybe it was a dangerous thing to do on a stage which included a crane, a choir of children and someone dressed as a rabbi (?!) but no matter.

The important, brilliant thing is that Cocker’s instinctive response to seeing Michael Jackson was to leap in and take the piss out of him.

I wish some of the millions of people who’d seen and worked with Jackson over the years as he was transforming into a tragic freak had had an ounce of the same courage. Michael Jackson was a good singer and dancer, but otherwise almost every aspect of his life was a sad example of some of our most lamentable traits as a society.

The fact that few people aside from Cocker ever had the guts to stand up and point out that this particular emperor had no clothes shows the extent to which the sickness that produced the monstrous figure of Michael Jackson was not within him, but in us.

The current hagiographic treatment of the prematurely deceased Jackson only confirms to me that we produced this deformed creature, we created and fed his situation, and now that he’s dead we are clamoring to show off just how utterly we have failed to learn anything about our crime, about the poisonous human urge to put people on pedestals.

We grovel to the whims of people with more money or higher status than ourselves. We yearn to cheer and weep vicariously at the actions of celebrities who we expect to be superhuman. We love to worship living saints, interrupted occasionally by malicious glee at their eventual downfall.

Michael Jackson wasn’t a saint - in fact no human being in history has yet been what we think of as a saint - and yet we still love to set them up there above us and then pretend to be shocked when they fall. It’s all part of the same misguided, Manichaean, probably instinctive idealism that allows us to still believe in oxymorons like holy wars and Christian presidents and infallible popes and selfless celebrities.

It’s the rare hero like Jarvis Cocker who has the courage to point out, even for a few moments, that this whole sick cycle of saint-worship is a load of nauseating garbage, and for that I salute him. I suggest we erect a giant statue in his honor.

An American Nerd in Tokyo

So: I’m not one of those guys who loves everything from Japan just because it’s from Japan. I wasn’t in an anime club in high school. I don’t own any plastic figurines of megacephalic schoolgirls striving unsuccessfully to conceal their undergarments. I don’t always know the appropriate Pokémon to deploy in any given combat situation. I think sushi is gross.

Nevertheless, I have in my own sad way been preparing for our recent trip to Japan for about 25 years now. It all began in August, 1984, when I read G.I. Joe comic book issue number 26. This was my first encounter with ninjas. Ninjas are totally awesome. I don’t think I need to say anything more on the subject.

We got our first Nintendo Entertainment System soon afterwards. An utter failure at old-school twitch games like Pac-Man, I was obsessed by Zelda and Metroid, where I didn’t die every ten seconds and where exploration was more important than getting a high score.

I could probably go on for thousands of words about the various things from Japan I encountered over the intervening decades and how they warped me into the magnificent specimen I am today, but let’s fast forward to early April, 2009. As we headed from Bangkok to Japan for my first trip there, I had only one goal in mind:


1) Buy the fanciest Shogi set.

In spite of being possibly the world’s worst chess player I’m very interested in regional variants of chess, and Shogi not only seemed like an intriguing mutation of the game (captured pieces can be put back into play by the capturer), but a great aesthetic creation, combining carved wood and evocative calligraphy in that special Japanese way.

Technically speaking I already owned two Shogi sets, but one was an embarrassingly cheap Chinese crapfest I’d bought in Malaysia and partially ruined by varnishing it with Dr. Sloan’s Liniment, while the other was a plastic pocket set I’d bought in Singapore. So I decided that whatever else happened during our vacation, I would try my damnedest to get a nice set as a souvenir.

After an abortive attempt to enlist the services of our hotel concierge in researching the surviving time-honored, family-run Shogi workshops of Olde Nippon for me, I reverted to my suburban American shopping instincts and resigned myself to buying whatever crap I could find in big stores downtown. I snatched up a box of pieces and a board (sold separately) in Takashimaya in Kyoto, but the set of pieces cost the equivalent of ten bucks and was barely a step up from my rough-hewn Chinese abomination, so I was still on the hunt.

As soon as I had a free morning in Tokyo, I lurched off up and down the chilly avenues of Ginza with great vigor.

Here’s me setting sail on my grand adventure. Note the traditional Shogi hunter’s cap.

Turns out a lot of the stores don’t open until 11:00, so I did a lot of standing around and drinking free tea in vestibules while my vigor slowly curdled. I finally found a set of pieces for around 3,500 yen in a big toy store, and almost bought it, but the paint job seemed slapdash and I kept looking.

Here’s me out and about in Ginza. My stern expression indicates dedication to the quest. (Actually, the picture was taken after the quest was over, and my expression was meant to convey immense, uncontrolled excitement and pride. I guess I have to work on my expressions.)

I’m glad I waited, because later in a department store called Matsuya I found a much sharper-looking set for only 2,500 yen or so. The characters were actually stamped or carved into the wood, not just painted on. I found it the most handsome set I’d yet seen, and at a price that wouldn’t force us to survive on ramen flavoring packets for the rest of the trip.

Elated, I wasted no time in sauntering back to my hotel room and fixing the moment of my grand triumph forever in time by taking the lavish photo spread you see here.




Shogi aficionados will note the unusual characters on the pawns. Instead of the normal “soldier” character that I recognize from Chinese chess, it’s a bunch of horizontal lines. I still don’t know what the deal is with that.

I also found a set of playing cards, an old game called hanafuda. Adorably (to a sucker for calendrical symbology like me), its 12 suits are based on the 12 months - on plants which blossom in Japan throughout the year and the animals which frolic amidst them. To my delight I saw that the set was actually made by Nintendo, and later research showed that it was the company’s original product back in 1889.


So why have I told you all this? Read on just a bit more, dear reader, to read for yourself the surprising punchline to this rambling tale of lusty Asian shopping:

Upon my return to Bangkok, while doing some more research into the rules of hanafuda, I found Nintendo’s page about their vestigial card-game division. Something about looking at this page, and considering my hanafuda cards, made me curious about the Nintendo logo. If the company had been around for over a century, surely its logo wasn’t always the English word “Nintendo” in a snazzy red font?

What was Japanese, so to speak, for “Nintendo”? Funny how I’d never thought of that before. A short search later I found the Kanji characters, matched them up to some characters on the hanafuda card box, and realized they looked rather familiar. Where had I seen that logo before?

Oh.

I had, utterly without knowing it and completely by chance, bought and brought back home with me both a Shogi board and a set of Shogi pieces MANUFACTURED BY NINTENDO. The circle of my life was complete. I had traveled the world only to find that what I was searching for had been with me all along. Nintendo Shogi turned out to be the twist on the Moebius strip, the final/first sentence of Finnegans Wake. To paraphrase Borges:

Others will dream that I am mad, and I [will dream] of Mario. When all men on earth think day and night of Mario, which one will be a dream and which a reality, the earth or the Mushroom Kingdom?

We Did It!

photo source

John McCain Is A Colossal Jerk

I urge you to leave this blog at once and read this great Rolling Stone article on John McCain’s life story. He is actually a much more despicable privileged asshole, f*ck-up and failure as a human being than our current president. He is a vile jerk and a horny, bitter, coarse little man. He’s been making all that pretty clear on his own over the past few weeks, but this article kind of completed the portrait for me.

p.s. I’m linking to the “print” version of the article, because no sane human should be forced to click through ten pages of hyperlinks to read one article.

Anastasius of Sinai

Rembrandt is one of those painters who (whom?) I normally admire, but don’t love. Perhaps it’s just because his name comes up so often that I have tuned him out, or perhaps it’s because some of his paintings in the museums I’ve frequented, like his creepy self-portrait in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, seemed somehow unpleasant to me. But I just stumbled across a painting of his which I haven’t seen before, of the learned Anastasius of Sinai, which captures what, to me, was great about Rembrandt. The murky light, the weight of the sage’s body, the strangely comfortable solitude. It’s a picture that distills old-school learnedness to its essence: a man, a book, a desk, a window. I could have done without the elaborate Turkish carpet/tablecloth, but nobody’s perfect.

Use Your Allusion

This painting is of Dante and Virgil, strolling through Hell’s lobby, bumping into Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. This sort of pow-wow, I understand, used to happen all the time.

There is an entire category of enjoyment which has recently all but vanished from my life.

I refer to the belatedly recognized allusion.

A slow-fuze ticking time bomb in the brain that explodes into kaleidoscopic bunga-bunga api of awareness and delight. The independent discovery of something in one artwork which was inspired by another, and which in turn transforms one’s appreciation of both works. The countless matryoschka-embedded Fabergé “Easter eggs” squatting complacently behind the trompe-l’œil Potemkin-village façade of every great work of art. Note that France and Russia appear to be the birthplaces of all artistic deception or concealment.

Anyway, in other words, I miss the nice feeling you get when you hear or read something and then later find out that it was a quote from somewhere else.

Why is this feeling scarce of late? Wikipedia. Google. Etc. Whenever I get that mental twinge which tells me I’ve heard something before, within seconds I can now find out exactly where I’ve heard it before. My mom used to tell me that instant gratification was a bad thing. I still don’t see her point of view at all, but I’m closer to it than before.


What am I blathering about? Well, one of my very favorite albums of the past several years, and of all time, really, is White Chalk by PJ Harvey. One of its best tracks is “When Under Ether”, a mesmerizing, haunting song sung by someone etherized on a table, watching the ceiling move, with hints that some disturbing medical procedure has just taken place. Here is the song.



Here are the lyrics (emphasis mine).

The ceiling is moving
Moving in time
Like a conveyor belt
Above my eyes

When under ether
The mind comes alive
But conscious of nothing
But the will to survive

I lay on the bed
Waist down undressed
Look up at the ceiling
Feeling happiness
Human kindness

The woman beside me
Is holding my hand
I point at the ceiling
She smiles so kind

Something’s inside me
Unborn and unblessed
Disappears in the ether
One world to the next
Human kindness

On first hearing, the song instantly made me think of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (I wasn’t born yesterday, after all) and of a couple of Harvey’s previous songs which seemed to deal with abortion or the death of a child (come back here, man, gimme my daughter, etc.). But there was something else about the song’s lyrics which sparked a fire within my head, and my dull, slow brain was unsatisfied for about a year. Until a rainy Sunday afternoon last week, when I happened to be re-reading Eliot’s Four Quartets, and in particular “East Coker”. What did I see but some lines I’d read 15 years ago in high school or college, but half-forgotten (emphasis mine):

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

Harvey’s customary brilliance at visceral allusion, which started with the brutal Biblical tales of her first album Dry, and only got more complex from there, should have prepared me, as this was not her first exercise in dredging up a great English(-language) poet in an odd place - there was, for example, her unexpected Yeats homage B-side “The Northwood” - but I nevertheless, as I scanned Eliot’s lines, felt a quick cold satisfaction of awareness. Art had spoken to art across the decades, and my brain had traced the thread between the two without recourse to any crude series of tubes. I had found and enjoyed an allusion, and its path from my ears (when I heard the song) to my eyes (when, a year later, I re-read the poem) didn’t involve anyone but the artists and me, and for an instant I felt as if we three, the great poet, the great musician, and the listener/reader, were one. A Hermetic trinity, as it were, of artistic appreciation.

As I said above, this is a particular type of joyous recognition which I experience less and less frequently lately, and which I feel future generations will probably not be able to experience at all, because any snippet of text is now able to be checked against all of humankind’s previous snippets of text, and every allusion can be instantly deciphered via online search. I’m sure future generations will develop ever-more-subtle and relevant and intricate types of artistic expression and reference, so there’s really nothing to worry about in the grand scheme of things, but I’d like to take a moment of silent mourning for the loss of my dear, old friend, the belatedly recognized allusion, and for the demotion of our human brains, which were once our primary means of remembrance, to second fiddle after the omnipresent, pan-memorious Spiritus Mundi of the Internet.

Astrology Useful After All

I’ll be honest: my “efforts” to learn Thai died several months ago, right after I cobbled together enough monosyllables to remote-control a taxi driver.

Once I was able to meow and squawk commands from the back seat to make the guy slam wildly on the brakes, or lurch wildly from side to side, I was all set. Add to that my well-worn repertoire of four or five choice phrases to dazzle shopkeepers and waiters with, and I guess I unconsciously figured that I had pretty much all the Thai I needed for daily life. My brain stopped caring.

Lately I’m trying to slowly shift back into learning mode and pick up some of the basics I’ve been doing without. Sadly, I don’t even know some of the most essential words like “eat” or “see” or “walk”. And I certainly haven’t the slightest idea what the days of the week, or months of the year, are. The months always seemed especially daunting because they’re quite long, for Thai words. “November” is “Pruetsachikayon”. That’s just madness.


My wife, desirous of figuring out the opening dates of certain motion pictures while watching their Thai previews, asked me politely if I’d mind learning the months. After the echoes of my cruel laughter died away, I began to wonder if it might somehow be possible. Long words in Thai usually mean they’re borrowings from Sanskrit, and I’ve had success in the past coming to grips with Thai words I know are Sanskrit, like Thai “guru” and “maharaja”, which are derived from the Sanskrit terms “guru” and “maharaja”, meaning “guru” and “maharaja”. Well, those are stupid examples, but you get the idea.

By the way, the poster above is for Som Tam, an entire Thai kickboxing movie based around a racist stereotype (not that I really mind). The enormous shirtless white guy hulks out whenever those kids feed him papaya salad, because everybody knows those foreigners can’t handle spicy food. I guess it’s kind of like Popeye, if Popeye were Asian, and if instead of spinach he drank beer and couldn’t process the alcohol and hulked out after a few sips and solved mysteries in his enhanced state. Actually, that’s not any more or less silly than most superhero movies anyway. Never mind.


Anyway, I just looked up what the Thai words for the 12 months mean. What I discovered threw me for a hell of a loop. It’s nuts. We’re through the looking glass here, people. The names of the 12 months in Thai are THE 12 EUROPEAN ZODIAC SIGNS. The same exact things. Leo the lion and all. Was that goofy Battlestar Galactica mythology right? Were our ancestors from the distant space-planets of Virgon, Caprica and Sagittaron? Er... no, but check out the following list, mostly from wikipedia, with Thai month names followed by the old Indian root:

January
Makarakhom / makara “sea-monster” = Capricorn

February
Kumphaphan / kumbha “pitcher, water-pot” = Aquarius

March
Minakhom / mīna “(a specific kind of) fish” = Pisces

April
Mesayon / meṣa “ram” = Aries

May
Pruetsaphakhom / vṛṣabha “bull” = Taurus

June
Mithunayon / mithuna “a pair” = Gemini

July
Karakadakhom / karka “crab” = Cancer

August
Singhakhom / siṃha “lion” = Leo

September
Kanyayon / kanyā “girl” = Virgo

October
Tulakhom / tulā “balance” = Libra

November
Pruetsachikayon / vṛścika “scorpion” = Scorpio

December
Thanwakhom / dhanu “bow, arc” = Sagittarius

And it’s not a new thing. While it’s true that the Thais really only switched over to the Western calendar in 1889, those Thai month names are a thousand years old or more. This seemed even weirder than the time I deduced that “hello” in Thai is more or less the same word as “swastika”. I’m still not quite sure I understand how the whole months thing went down, but I’ll try to explain.


Apparently, a Greek guy named Yavanasvera went to India in around 150 AD and told them all about the wonders of the zodiac signs. For some reason this really caught on with the Hindu bigwigs and so, in addition to whatever system they already had in ancient India, astrologers started referring to certain months as, more or less, “Lion-Time” and “Scorpion-Time” and so on. I’m guessing that Joe Ricepaddy didn’t have much use for these obscure astrological terms, since I think most Asians went by the lunar calendar anyway, but they definitely entered into the Thai language at a relatively early date.

Just a guess but at least one of those pairs of names, “Karka” = “Cancer”, share the same Indo-European root word. Even more improbably, the Thai word for horoscope seems to actually start with “hora-” as well, which is pretty messed up. From a very interesting article which goes into great depth about the Thai calendar: “In fact, the Thai word for ‘astrology’ [ho:rasa:t] is derived from a Sanskrit borrowing at this time derived from Greek [hora] ‘proper time’, cognate [through Latin and French] to English ‘hour’.”


As if that weren’t enough excitement for one day, apparently a similar transmission from the ancient Near East happened with the Indian/Thai seven days of the week, which turn out to be named after EXACTLY the same things as the classic European ones:

Surya / Aditya (Sun)
Chandra (Moon)
Angakara (Mars)
Budha (Mercury)
Brihaspati (Jupiter)
Shukra (Venus)
Shani (Saturn)

In English only three of those match our current names, because some of the Roman gods/planets got switched with Germanic ones (Thor for Jupiter, etc.), but if you took a Romance language in school you should recognize that Tuesday = Mars-day, Wednesday = Mercury-day, etc. I guess I just always assumed that in Asia they had their own names for stuff like this, and I suppose they did, before the planet-day-naming fad swept the world.

This system apparently spread as far as China and Japan, where, if you’ll look at the handy chart some devoted wikipedian has crafted, they used to call Thursday and Friday Wood Planet Day and Metal Planet Day, after their names for Jupiter and Venus. So this means that by around a thousand years ago, from Greenland and Ireland all the way over to China and Japan and Mongolia and pretty much everywhere else, most of humanity unanimously agreed that we should call Sunday Sun-day, Monday Moon-day, and so on down the line for all seven days, with very few regional variations. W, as they say, TF?

This might all not seem like a big deal to you, but I’m in shock. I can’t believe that I flew to the other side of the planet, to a proud and strange Asian kingdom with thousands upon thousands of its own beliefs, rituals and unique cultural aspects completely alien to me, and the people here call August “Lion-Month”, after good old Leo the Lion.

I’m not sure I’ll remember all the Thai names of the months and days after today, but whatever happens I sure as hell have some good mnemonic devices to start with.

P.S. Apparently you can tell whether or not a month has 30 days by its last syllable of its name in Thai (-khom indicates 31, -yon 30). February has a unique last syllable all its own to remind us that it’s gimpy. I don’t know if that was a feature of the ancient names or a more modern addition. It’s a really cool idea to encode that calendrical information in the actual names of the months, but damn it I already know which months have 30 days, and the different endings make the Thai months a lot harder to remember than if they all just ended with the same suffix. Still, nice idea.

Arrow vs. Helicopter

Uncontacted tribe photographed near Brazil-Peru border
Members of one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes have been spotted and photographed from the air near the Brazil-Peru border. The photos were taken during several flights over one of the remotest parts of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil’s Acre state.

As a sort of flipside to my last post about how we’re living in a science-fiction future, here’s something to remind us that many of us are still living in the Stone Age. I’m really glad that there are still folks like this out there, doing their thing. I hope nobody bothers them too much in the near future.

Notice how agitated they look as they shoot arrows at the helicopter taking their picture. Imagine what it must have looked and sounded like to them - talk about science fiction. They’re probably composing an epic storytelling cycle about the mighty Thunder-Falcon of the Gods as I type this.

Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts

Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts

By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: May 29, 2008

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.

I don’t have much to add. In addition to having possibly the best headline ever, I think the article pretty much speaks for itself.


Remember when the year 1984 came, and everyone joked about how non-futuristic things were compared to the book 1984? And then when 2001 passed and everyone joked about how mundane and non-futuristic things seemed compared to the movie 2001? Well, I think at some point between then and now, the crazy sci-fi future snuck up on us when we weren’t looking.

Except for the flying cars and sentient androids, we’re basically living in a Blade Runner / Neuromancer world. Let’s go through the major elements of a Blade Runner/cyberpunk-type setting, the things that would have seemed like futuristic madness 15-20 years ago:

-Widespread body implants and subcutaneous microchips? Check.

-Retina, face and fingerprint scanning, voice recognition software? Check.

-Clones, genetically modified mutants and bizarre transplants? Check.


-Unmanned combat drones and other battle robots? Check.

-Lobot-style earphones worn by half the random assholes on the street? Check.

-Videophones, tiny storage devices with massive capacity, handheld tricorder-like devices with nearly limitless functions, etc.? Check.

-USA in pathetic decline? Check.

-Orwellian newspeak? Check.

-Cartoonishly dastardly corporations, apocalyptic ecological disasters, sprawling megacities in odd places like Dubai and Ürümqi? Check, check, check.


-Everything suddenly turning Chinese? ENORMOUS CHECK.

And now we’ve got monkeys with mind control over robots. Aside from, again, the flying cars, we’re living in a futuristic dystopia. And, I have to say, it’s very nice. Any dystopia where I can play Mario Kart DS wirelessly, and where my mom plays Brain Age, is a very pleasant dystopia indeed.


P.S. I had no idea how difficult it is to find a picture of a chimpanzee wearing virtual reality goggles. Preferably one also holding a gun, as I seem to recall happening in the movie “The Lawnmower Man”. You’d think it would be a snap. It is a nearly impossible task. There are no pictures of virtual reality chimps out there. None. I wasted nearly an hour looking. Isn’t a chimp in virtual reality goggles, like, an iconic image we’ve all seen a thousand times? Oh well. If you find a good one let me know.


P.P.S. I don’t often cite my photo sources, mainly because I see this humble blog as the online equivalent of one of those collage posters middle-schoolers make out of stuff cut from old magazines. Also, citing sources is a friggin pain in the neck. But the photo above of the scaffolded apartment building is from a lovely site, one which I’ve spent a lot of time perusing, by photographer Michael Wolf. It’s great stuff, although my sense of wonder at some of the photos is a bit dulled by the fact that they look like the actual view from our new apartment.

Gruesome Carnage of the Joyce Wars

One of the best things about the series of tubes we call the Internet is that it can send you tumbling down branching paths of discovery that you would never normally venture along, or which would have taken months or even years of conventional library research or study. (Plinko from The Price is Right, above, was intended as a metaphor for the branching paths of discovery, and I’m keeping it even though it doesn’t really work. I always liked Plinko.)

Anyway, start researching something apparently straightforward like panda bears or Mark Twain, and you will almost certainly end up learning about all manner of outlandish bric-a-brac like mezuzahs, Port Foozle, Zam-Zammah, or even Plinko.

This is especially good for me because I love to read but have never been very good at the business of switching gears while reading: tracking down material from footnotes, looking related things up in indexes, cross-referencing, switching from book to book to verify a detail. Once I start reading something in an encyclopedia I just keep right on reading all the articles in alphabetical order until hunger forces me to stop.

For example, if I read that so-and-so was a follower of Wittgenstein or Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer, and if I am embarrassingly ignorant of just exactly what the hell a Wittgenstein is, I will more often than not just skip over the offending word without a second thought and continue reading about good old so-and-so. If this Wittgenstein jerk is really that important, I say to myself, he’ll pop up on his own and present himself to me when the time is right. So far this hasn’t happened. Wittgenstein might as well be a brand of floor wax as far as I know.

So, the Internet is a perfect way for me to fill some of those gaping holes in my basic knowledge. For example, after an hour on Wikipedia yesterday I finally, definitively grasped the difference between Plutarch and Petrarch.

One of my virtual research binges yesterday plunged me deep into a very interesting morass, something which I hadn’t known about at all: The cataclysmic Joyce Wars of the late 1980s.

The battle focussed on a new edition of Ulysses which came out in 1984, and which was intended to be somehow definitive. I’ll give as brief an overview of the kerfuffle as I can.

Apparently, the Joyce Estate, who in everything I’ve read seem to be colossal assholes, decided to commission a shiny new edition of Ulysses primarily for the purpose of renewing their copyright for another 70 years. The new book would then entirely replace all the older editions, and they would continue to rake in the dough.

So, to summarize the project: the greatest novel of the 20th century would be substantially revised and recopyrighted, not in order to make the book better, but so that the author’s great-grandchildren wouldn’t have to work.

Admittedly, Ulysses is a book with a very complicated printing history, and most scholars seem to agree that every edition so far has between several hundred and a couple thousand errors or problems in it. So, in spite of the Joyce Estate’s rather unscholarly motives for obtaining a “new” Ulysses at any cost, their project to create an authoritative new edition created a lot of genuine excitement and support among Joyce scholars.

Whom did the Joyce Estate select to edit this grand new edition? Hans Walter Gabler, a scholar working in Munich, who had conceived an idealistic, laboriously computer-aided editorial method that he was convinced would unerringly produce the Platonic text of Ulysses as Joyce would have intended it. Let me run that by you again. A German came up with a rigid philosophical basis for exactly how something should be done, and decided in advance that no deviation from the course would be accepted. What could possibly go wrong?

Gabler’s method involved creating a computerized (this was revolutionary when he started it in the late 70s) “synoptic” text which would cross-reference all the variations in certain versions of the text. However, it seems that there were several problems with his command of English, the way he proceeded with the edits, and his inflexibility about the project, and he ended up alienating two of the respected Joyce scholars who were supposed to be overseeing the new edition. The book was published anyway, and was supposed to serve as the definitive edition for decades to come. It was, in fact, the only edition being printed for much of the 1980s.

Then a relatively young scholar named John Kidd started poking holes in Gabler’s grand construction, claiming angrily in the New York Review of Books that Gabler had introduced hundreds of new errors not extant in previous editions. Kidd’s printed arguments centered on a couple cases where Gabler had misspelled the names of verifiable citizens of Dublin - names which had been spelled right in previous editions.

After Kidd’s first article in the New York Review, there followed a spate of responses and letters back and forth between Kidd and the Gablerites. The exchanges are all online, and even if you’re not into the minutiae of editing they’re still a great read. I’m personally very interested in Joyce and the approaches people take to editing his books, but I’m far from knowledgeable enough about the textual problems of Ulysses to be able to judge Gabler, Kidd or anyone else’s insights into what should be done about this ellipsis or that comma. However, I soon found what I knew about Gabler’s methods and attitude to be annoyingly... (can I say this?) Teutonic. God knows I love many, many Germans, and many, many things about Germany, but I think we can all agree that there is a certain... tendency toward philosophical idealism? in the region. A certain desire for everything to be perfect, even if it means sweeping imperfections under the rug in the form of massive self-delusion. I witnessed this firsthand in 2002, when everyone was deeply, deeply shocked that prices suddenly doubled after the Euro conversion. But... the government assured us prices wouldn’t change! This is impossible! This can not true be! In any case, I found Gabler and his refusal to admit that his project had any flaws annoying, Kidd entertaining, and the heated scholarly arguments riveting, particularly for the way that Kidd savagely eviscerated anyone who defended the new edition of Ulysses.

In these articles, anyone who tries to stick up for Gabler gets torn apart. John Kidd comes across as the optimal defender for Joyce: pugnacious, iconoclastic, all-knowing, playful, and credible. One of his responses is amusingly written as if from the perspective of a future scholar looking back on the debate after the dust has settled. He even makes little flights of sarcastic Joycean silliness like “Irony abounds. What redounds to Dr. Kidd rebounds. On several grounds, it sounds, he’s out of bounds” (this was mocking Gabler’s imperfect English).

Gabler, on the other hand, however brilliant a scholar he might be, could only in his own defense sputter condescending gibberish like “Dr. Kidd’s argument against the edition of Ulysses, then, is seriously flawed by an elementary failure to distinguish its critically editorial functions before a background of documentary referentiality which he tends to mistake for its representational aim.” Wie, bitte?

It was a classic David and Goliath story: Kidd showed several main figures of the Joyce establishment to be a wrong-headed clique of yes-men pandering to the Joyce estate, and called for the new edition of Ulysses to be pulled from the shelves and replaced with one of the older versions.

I spent the entire afternoon yesterday eagerly reading these articles and related material, and I felt a rush of surrogate joy when I read that John Kidd had been wholly successful in his crusade. Around 1989 Random House decided they’d lost confidence in the trade version of Gabler’s Ulysses, and ended up bringing back an older edition. Kidd had in the meantime been given an important-sounding post at a new Joyce Center at the University of Boston, and his own edition of Ulysses based on his painstaking research was in the works, and would be appearing soon. The End. The Joyce Wars were over, and the good guys had won.

A triumph for critics and nitpickers everywhere, I thought. One clever man had toppled a mini-industry and had very publicly given a pompous, inflexible German professor his comeuppance. Surely Joyce would have approved.



Then I did a quick search on Kidd, to see if his edition of Ulysses had ever come out. Nope. It turns out he’s unemployed, sick and crazy, spending his days wandering angrily around his old college quad, talking to pigeons.

In a quote in the newspaper article about Kidd’s sad state Gabler, glancing down from his pedestal in Munich, murmurs something condescending about how he feels sorry for Kidd, who by the way hadn’t raised more than a half-dozen serious questions about Gabler’s edition (according to Gabler). And this article was from 2002. For all I know, Kidd’s been institutionalized or dead for six years.

My heart sank. What a tragic, if grotesquely fitting, end to the whole thing. I’m glad Gabler’s 1984 edition got discredited, but he clearly didn’t learn any lessons. And in the end, the study of James Joyce probably destroyed John Kidd’s life.


Michael: You were flying today, buddy.

Buster: Yes, I was flying. But a little too close to the sun.

Lucille: You let him go in the sun?

Virtually Finished

I’ve been working off and on the last couple of weeks on a model of the Pantheon in SketchUp, and after a six-hour push today I’m happy to announce that I think I’ve captured the basic dimensions and rough color scheme of the structure.

During the course of the modelling I learned a lot about how to more efficiently use the program, particularly about how to use groups and components, so I have a feeling that my next models will go a lot more smoothly. I have a long way to go - for example the column capitals aren’t even sculpted into any semblance of their real shape - but compared to my earlier buildings I feel as if I’ve graduated from fingerpainting in my own fetid waste to using a pencil, ruler and compass.

I’ve celebrated this virtual apodemitheosis by exporting a brief video showing a hypothetical person walking into my simulated Pantheon and looking around. I briefly flirted with adding music, then I remembered that every time I’ve looked at a YouTube tutorial video with random sh*tty techno music added, I’ve hit “mute” as fast as I possibly could.

Atlas Hugged

I’ve always found something about atlases slightly depressing. I think it’s the way they reduce the entire world to something you can manage, catalog and scientifically measure. It’s kind of a letdown to see someplace as grand and exotic-sounding as “Urumqi”, “Hammerfest” or “New Canaan” pinned down as a boring little dot at exact coordinates. I would rather see maps with blank spaces on them, or maps of imaginary places.

Historical timelines, another popular visual aid, aren’t that great either. They usually end up being just lists of kings’ names, or else they’re sprinkled with entries like “1704 - Descartes publishes De Flatulentia” which always leave you wondering how they chose what to put in and what to leave out.

I just got a terrific book, however, that more or less fuses the concepts of map and timeline, resulting in a simmering stew of utter freaking awesomeness. That book is called, quite misleadingly, “The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History”, by my new hero, the late Colin McEvedy. The title is misleading for two reasons:

1) The atlas is clearly not really that new. The book’s maps are pretty low-tech, monochromatic affairs, something like what you’d expect to see in a middle school history textbook from the 1950s. Also, the author’s views are a bit Eurocentric and refreshingly old-fashioned.

For example, he seems strangely reluctant to admit that the Chinese invented anything. I’m not sure I agree with McEvedy’s claims that the Chinese stole the ideas of writing, the Iron Age, horse riding and the chariot from wandering Middle Easterners. Just reading those claims was like a breath of fresh air, however, since for the past several years we’ve all been beaten over the head with theories that the Chinese discovered not just the stuff they really did discover, but everything else in the entire world too, from soccer to America to chess.

2) The book’s title is also misleading because it’s not really an atlas. It’s more like a timeline sliced up and superimposed on a series of identical maps. Which, as I mentioned above, is awesome. Since the underlying physical map stays the same throughout the book, the focus is on what’s changed since the last map, so the reader doesn’t have the problem which often crops up with zoomed-in historical maps (at least for me) of trying to make sense of the historical information presented on the map while also trying to figure out where the heck the action is in relation to everything else in the world.

So this book doesn’t specify, for example, where every town in ancient Greece was - again, it’s not really an atlas - but it does have dozens of nice maps that show the general movements of the people who settled Greece, the major battles they fought against Persia, etc. Since so much of history is a series of confusing back-and-forth movements where the same countries can mutate and swell and vanish over and over again, reading something which is almost a visual flip book of those mutations is really neat (by the way, the maps here are not actually from the book I have, but from the next one in the series, medieval history, but that’s all I found online).

I’ve seen this book lying around before, but because of the misleading title and cheap-looking (at first glance) maps, I never gave it a chance. Man, I didn’t know what I was missing.

Because - and here’s the strangest thing about this supposed atlas - the writing is very good, and frequently hilarious. The author has the rare skill of being boldly judgmental where people usually bend over backwards to project a facade of objectivity. In the little essays which accompany each map, McEvedy speaks in a deft, iconoclastic voice which advertises that he alone is both intelligent enough to have absorbed the mountains of historical sources and current research and clever enough to cut through all the nonsense with a simple, clear pronouncement. This could seem obnoxious or unprofessional, if his writing weren’t so winning.

Here’s one of my favorite examples so far of McEvedy’s writing, where he gets snippy about the population of ancient Rome:

This brings us to the second blind spot in current thinking. Classical scholars are absolutely wedded to the idea that ancient Rome had a population of a million or more. Historical demographers have told them that this cannot be so, it flies in the face of what the Romans themselves said, and, given what we know of the size of cities in the ancient world, it makes no sense at all, but the academic consensus remains rock solid. It is almost as though admitting to a lower figure would somehow diminish the standing of classical studies. This is not sensible and we will have none of it: the atlas uses a ballpark figure of 250,000.

This sort of thing puts a big smile on my face, and in spite of the density of the maps and the tiny, tiny text I read the atlas cover to cover in one day. I plan to get the other books in the series on different time periods as soon as I can, but unfortunately I think the book I just finished was the one which had been revised most recently, with the others being decades old. I don’t really care, though.

The great writing and refreshing concept of superimposing different information on the same map throughout the book may have just pushed this book into the lofty category occupied by my previous favorite book which graphically represents history, A Street through Time. This is not a compliment I bestow lightly. A Street through Time is a very special book indeed.

Monuments of Unageing Intellect

I’d like to embark upon a brief ekphrasis of a unique website, byzantium1200.com.

Some of my favorite poems by my favorite poet dwell on the splendor and mystery of Byzantium. I’ve always been fascinated by the Eastern Roman Empire, and not entirely out of Gibbonish dispassionate historical interest, but for some of the more romantic reasons that I assume attracted Yeats: the enticingly tragic idea of a vanished civilization; the strange and fascinatingly odd persistence of a shard of the Roman Empire into the 1400s as a shadowy, besieged offshoot made strange by ecstatic Christianity and Eastern pomp; golden mosaics and clockwork songbirds.

As such, my idea of Byzantium is usually the sort of thing that regrettably looks less interesting the more closely you investigate it. Each new book I read about the history of the place threatens to diminish the allure of my romantic preconceptions. However, today I stumbled across something which is securely grounded in the actual history of the city yet which also, I feel, shares something of Yeats’s Platonic, clockwork-and-mosaics sense of wonder.

The website is nothing less than some driven person’s attempt to make a virtual reconstruction of the entire city of Constantinople. For some reason they decided to pretend to focus on the year 1200 A.D., but obviously the virtual edifices tend to have a timeless, golden-age quality. Over sixty buildings have been resurrected from nothing but dust, documents and the few stones which remain.

It’s not a museum exhibit, scholarly paper, movie backdrop or a video game, but something which intriguingly combines aspects of those more familiar types of project.

In fact, if you ask me this isn’t just an elaborate exercise in simulated 3D architecture. It’s a work of art that spits in the faces of Time and Ruin, and an example of mankind’s ability to put a heartbreaking amount of energy and effort into any sort of imaginative pursuit, no matter how clumsy or prosaic the tools involved might have seemed when they first appeared. Honestly, when you first saw Tron or played Pac-Man, did you think that in a decade or two people would be conjuring long-dead cities into minutely detailed virtual existence - for fun?
The site’s links section points to several other, similar online projects. I have a feeling I’m going to be spending the next couple of days perusing these - and wondering if I could ever do something similar with my pitiful skills in SketchUp.

A Jay kan clepen “Wat” as wel as kan the Pope

Just something I made in SketchUp today. It’s the central... Stupa? Or chedi. I think this is called a chedi. Anyway, the shiny gold thing in the center of Wat Phra Doi Suthep temple, overlooking Chiang Mai. I wanted to do something small and completable, after all my half-finished cathedrals. So I just spent a couple of sometimes-frustrating but overall satisfying hours on this bad boy. I didn’t have any blueprints or anything to go by, just a couple photos from very weird angles that I tried to match as best I could.
Of course, the model captures nothing about what makes the real thing so moving: the brilliant gold plate glinting in the sun, the smell of incense, the people making their orisons circling the base, the feel of the courtyard’s cool marble under your bare feet, the breezy mountaintop, the sound of ringing gongs. None of that’s in the model. But I still felt something vaguely... therapeutic in calling into existence even a pale shadow of the thing.

Mosaics Were the First Pixels

I recently reported on my seeming inability to make a halfway-decent building using the program Google SketchUp, and I just wanted to share the fact that I have, in fact, just succeeded in virtually sculpting a moderately admirable edifice. It’s not nearly as nice as I’d like, but - unlike in the crummy real world, where when I erect a shoddy building it usually collapses and kills dozens in a fiery imbroglio that is quite tedious to cover up - I can always go back and improve it later. It’s a pretty accurate (as far as the basic proportions go) model of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, and I finally buckled down this afternoon and slapped textures on all the surfaces. I’d originally planned to make a much more realistic simulation, with textures on every surface taken from high-resolution photographs, but I ended up copying some and reusing them in a slapdash and haphazard manner because otherwise the thing was clearly never going to get done. All the major mosaics on the inside, however, are properly placed and pretty sharp-looking.

Here’s what the thing looks like on the outside.
Here’s what my model looks like on the outside.
Here’s a view of the inside.Here’s a view from inside my model.
Not bad, huh? Of course, the vaulted ceilings of the real building don’t have “GREATBUILDINGS.COM” watermarked on them every three feet, but as I said above, this was a rush job just to get the thing textured before I fell into the unique and irrevocable despair which we all know is so disastrously common to thwarted master virtual architects. Now, with at least some progress to show for myself, I feel like a virtual weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

The reason I chose to finish this lil building this week, by the way, is that it seemed like a Christmas-y sort of activity, kind of like decorating a tree only far, far dorkier. My other seasonal activities so far have been to try to read Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in Old English and a recent obsession with keeping tabs on the gradual construction of the Christmas market in Dachau via a webcam. The charming village, that is, not the nearby concentration camp. You think your job’s tough? Just be glad you’re not head of the Dachau Tourist Board.