John Holbo

Amazon is giving away a whole Philip Glass album: The Orange Mountain Music Vol.I. I’m really, really enjoying it. On the other hand, I’m using it as background music for scanning and doing itsby bitsy Photoshop stuff. It goes up and down and up and down and my hand goes up and down and up and down, and etc., and we seem to be getting on together. When I was in college I hated Philip Glass. I paid a lot for a ticket to a concert, without knowing what I was in for. I was bitterly disappointed. What do you think of the man? Give the album a try, if you are a skeptic.

I got my hands on a pretty good old book, Cartoon Cavalcade (1943) – and if you got your hands on it too, you wouldn’t pay more’n a few dollars for the privilege, my friend. It’s an anthology of American cartoons from the 1880’s to the 1940’s: 450 pages worth, plus editorial matter from the early 40’s, providing a historically interesting perspective on all this history. Following up this much-commented post of mine, I’ll post a Reginald Marsh item from 1934: [click to continue…]

Steve Benen ponders John Boehner on hate crimes: “The Democrats’ ‘thought crimes’ legislation … places a higher value on some lives than others. Republicans believe that all lives are created equal, and should be defended with equal vigilance.” Benen: “if Boehner doesn’t want to consider the circumstances behind a violent crime, and doesn’t want to pursue “thought crimes,” then he’d necessarily reject the rationale behind every hate-crime law, right?” Benen goes on to note that, apparently, Boehner does not. He “supports existing federal protections … based on immutable characteristics.” Which Boehner thinks include religion, but not sexual orientation. Who knew?

There is, I think, an even more basic problem, which is theoretically interesting, which I would certainly like to see used to swat down Boehner-style arguments, and which I’ve never actually seen anyone make (but probably I just missed it). Practically all crime is ‘thought crime’ in the good ol’ common law sense of the Latin phrase actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea – ‘the act does not make guilt unless the mind be guilty.’ If we were to take a strict liability approach to all violent crime we would be obliged to place wrongful death on a par with premeditated murder. (After all, it’s not as though the lives of those killed accidentally are worth less.)

This refutes the notion that there is something sinister and Orwellian about post-Drakonic/post-Hammurabian developments in criminal law. (Damn liberals and their newfangled political correctness!) It doesn’t follow that ‘hate crime’ legislation makes moral and practical sense, of course. We could have that discussion after Boehner is done looking up ‘immutable’ in the dictionary.

What is your best theory about how this image was generated? (I got it from Amazon.)

Seriously. This can’t be a picture of a published book, can it? On the other hand, it’s an image of a book published in 1984, so presumably they made the image by scanning an old book. I am curious whether such a monstrosity exists in real life. It’s not just the misspelling. It’s like a full course in how not to design a book cover.

More translation mysteries tonight. Conservapedia is calling for a Conservative Bible Project.

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[4] defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”;[5] using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

They are basically planning to start with the King James Bible and then just make it say what they think it should. Not only do they apparently regard it as inessential to involve anyone with knowledge of the original texts – although they off-handedly contemplate this as a possibility – they are touting ‘mastery of English’ as one of the benefits those who help with the project can expect to reap. What can one say? I find it hard to believe the whole thing isn’t some sort of elaborate, Borat-style hoax. Could it be? (Is Conservapedia for real?) Discuss.

via Sadly, No!

It has come to my attention that Terry Pratchett’s discworld novel, Thud! …

is available in German translation under the title, Klonk!:

I think German readers must lose some of the heavy, earthiness of the English word in translation. ‘Klonk!’ is lighter and more metallic. I don’t think it means the same thing as ‘thud!’ Discuss.

I’m an undisciplined note-taker. I like to read a lot, putting post-its or other suitable markers in the pages as I go, and planning with the best of wills to take notes later. (I type very quickly, after all. I should be able to take notes even though I use so many post-its.) But then I just never get around to the sloggy, typing-it-all-in part. Recently I’ve tried to change things up. I sit down with a stack of books full of post-its and scan in just the post-it’ed bits, plucking the fluttering yellow feathers from these literary birds as I go, until I could stuff a whole pillow with used post-its by the time the night is over. I turn all the scans from any given book or article into one PDF, and I use Acrobat’s OCR capacity to make it semi-searchable. I can do something else while I work, like listen to an audiobook or podcast. I find this semi-mindless tidying of the aftermath of my reading mind’s life to be relatively pleasant activity. Now I want to take it to the next level, making the most of all my PDF’s (and docs in other formats, too, of course): does anyone here use, for example, DEVONthink, which some people have told me is good and useful. (But I am suspicious that these people are more obsessive than I about this sort of thing. I’m not a database-devotee by nature. I’m not going to go scripting stuff for DEVONthink. I know I won’t.) DEVONthink seems like a good deal because it has OCR based on ABBYYFineReader. And DEVONthink doesn’t even cost more than FineReader. Acrobat’s OCR, although adequate for basic purposes, is not great, and FineReader is supposed to be pretty good. So even if that was all I used it for …

Tell me of your time-saving note-taking methods, but don’t tell me to type it all in. What are good scanning products and OCR software suites and notetaking software. I’ve been using Zotero and I like it just fine. But maybe DEVONthink is better enough to be worth paying for, especially with the OCR?

Alan Grayson has caught some flak for alleging the Republican health care plan is ‘don’t get sick, and if you do, die quickly.’ For instance, here is push-back from the Corner: “if you must respond, just repeat after Ed Morrissey: “I seem to recall that Republicans wanted to abolish the death tax, and Democrats objected. Which party wants to make money off of your dead corpse?” In other words, technically the plan is, ‘don’t get sick, and if you do, die quickly. And if you manage to do so with more than $1 million, you can give it all to your kids.’ This is a health care reform plan? Repeal the estate tax?

I don’t see why only Theory and Monday should have all the fun. Still, one comment from Michael’s thread caught my eye. Hidari:

I might also add that the ‘anti-relativist’ or (as I would prefer to put it) ‘anti-contextualist’ position is generally hopelessly confused in that they tend to use Positivist arguments to support Realist positions. But you can’t do that. The positivists were instrumentalists, as befitted their anti-metaphysical, pro-empiricist assumptions. Realism is a metaphysical position.

The rest of the comment suggests this is supposed to express a Nancy Cartwright-style view, which I don’t think is really quite properly described as anti-realist. (It is anti-Realist, for certain values of the self-important capital-R. But that is another kettle of fish. Or, possibly, Fish. I mention this out of scrupulosity because it just isn’t clear to me the positions Hidari is objecting to in the thread are Realist, as opposed to realist.) Anyway, the point is this. I’ve been watching the new They Might Be Giants Here Comes Science DVD with my girls [amazon]. It’s great! Can’t decide yet whether I like it better than the earlier TMBG kid’s discs, but it does measure up so far.

In the opening number, one of the Johns does exactly the thing that bothers Hidari (and Cartwright is indeed someone who scourges this particular move): offering positivist arguments on behalf of realism.

As I was saying, one of the Johns quotes Rudolf Carnap, “science is a system of statements based on direct experience and controlled by experimental verification.” And the other John then says: “Or as we say, Science Is Real!” And the song starts. But these two statements are hardly equivalent. Indeed, even the graphic for the song title is eloquently anti-Carnapian:

This clearly implies that science does not consist of sentences. It is a thing that itself contains the things that sentences about science are about. Or as we say: things! Reality! (Call it what you will. Place is thick with the stuff.)

Here’s a YouTube link to the video for TMBG “Science is Real”, complete with Carnapian intro. (You can also watch it as an Amazon preview, but they cut the Carnap bit! That was the best part!)

So your job, this Reality Thursday, is to write a song – or poem – expressing as clearly as you can, with extra style points for keeping it intelligible to an 8-year old – your favored philosophy of science. Does it consist of sentences, or does it consist of reality? You decide! The only thing I can think of that rhymes with ‘paradigm’ is ‘spare a dime’. As to the rest: I’m recovering from the flu myself and have 100+ papers to grade, so don’t ask me to dance you a little jig. I don’t have the time or energy.

You can also comment in prose.

I just got Masterpiece Comics, by R. Sikoryak [amazon]. It’s great. Inspired mash-ups of classic cartoons/comics with Great Literature. Batman and Crime and Punishment. Wuthering Heights and Tales From the Crypt. Blondie and The Book of Genesis. Peanuts and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”. Bazooka Joe and Dante’s Inferno. Little Lulu and The Scarlet Letter. Here’s a preview from D&Q. Above and beyond the perfect-pitch mimicry, I like the symmetry of the moral critique – of Dostoyevsky and Batman equally, and so forth. You can learn from this stuff. For example, if Stanley Fish had read Sikoryak’s “Blond Eve”, it might have occurred to him that familiar, blanket critiques of curiosity may not make self-evident moral or rational sense. Going a step further, this whole business of condemning curiosity tout court, in the strongest terms, all up and down the scale, in ordinary life, morally and scientifically, concerning matters large and small, can seem downright peculiar. Some sense of the diversity of human impulses and activities that would fall foul of a ban on ‘curiosity’, hence some sense of the problematic character of such a ban, might have crept into his column in some way. Alas.

UPDATE: Before accusing me of misreading Fish, please consider whether this comment satisfies you.

Some thoughts, related to Michael’s ‘going pro’ post and Kieran’s recent post on impact factor. To what extent is the whole internet afflicted with the Matthew Effect? “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” If you want to be a bit more specific, to what degree are search results afflicted by it?

Let me illustrate with a couple cases I’ve personally noted, which I suspect are representative. [click to continue…]

I’m lecturing on cosmopolitanism tomorrow, so the mind turns to origins and starting points. Diogenes said he was a ‘citizen of the world’ – that is, kosmopolitês. But it occurred to me today that, actually, that’s not a good translation. Better: citizen of utopia. Or, a bit more modestly: citizen of the well-ordered state. Or: citizen of wherever they’ve actually got good government. I can’t get the Perseus Project to load right now, so I’ll settle for this. ‘Kosmos’ originally meant harmony, well-orderedness (in a military or ornamental sense). Pythagoras may (or may not!) have given the term its earliest astronomic usage, inspired by a sense of the gloriously ornamental orderliness of the heavens; it seems doubtful that Diogenes could have accessed that new sense sufficiently to extend it to mean ‘the world’, and, by further extension, ‘all of humanity’. He was just saying his allegiance was to the truly good and proper. This naturally goes together with cosmopolitanism, in our sense, because it’s a reproach to ‘my country, right or wrong’ sentiment. But ‘I’m a citizen of the best country’ just isn’t the same thought as ‘the best country would be a universal brotherhood of man’. Not that it’s exactly a burning issue, what this guy Diogenes thought. He’s dead (no, I don’t know where you can send flowers). Still, it’s kinda interesting. Am I missing something? Someone probably already wrote a paper about it anyway. That, or I’m missing something.

Everyone should have a hobby. Mine is: when Top Shelf comics has one of their periodic $3 sales, I try to tell people that a couple of these recurring, sadly semi-remaindered titles, are only just about the best I’ve read from the last couple years. I wrote the same damn post – about the same damn books, practically – only last year. It’s not as though writing the same post over and over makes me appear especially clever. I must believe what I’m saying. Here, let me talk you through the procedure: you should buy, at a minimum, Scott Morse‘s The Barefoot Serpent and Lilli Carré‘s Tales of Woodsman Pete and Dan James‘ The Octopi and the Ocean and Mosquito. Check out the previews if you don’t believe me. I also feel the James Kochalka and Jeffrey Brown titles would be very solid purchases, and the price is right. And, oh, I could walk you through the best bits of the whole store, in my private opinion. (Buy Jeff Lemire.) But I want to focus on these four recommendations as sincerely heartfelt. $12 for the foursome. That’s pitiful. I feel I am robbing the artists themselves, just telling you the good news. Please buy these books so that Top Shelf runs out and I don’t have to keep writing this post. (Maybe I’m misunderstanding the economics of the situation and this will go on forever. Maybe it’s like Wall Street. It doesn’t have to make economic sense. I just don’t know.)

In other news, I’m reading Jan Tschichold‘s The Form of the Book. He’s the Wittgenstein of typography. (But that’s a different story: and I don’t mean that Tschichold was a good philosopher. It is a point about temperament. I do say so admiringly.) The next time you are at a party, see if you can humiliate your host by subjecting his or her bookshelf to this discerning treatment.

Only the book jacket offers the opportunity to let formal fantasy reign for a time. But it is no mistake to strive for an approximation between the typography of the jacket and that of the book. The jacket is first and foremost a small poster, an eye-catcher, where much is allowed that would be unseemly within the pages of the book itself. It is a pity that the cover, the true garb of a book, is so frequently neglected in favor of today’s multicolor jacket. Perhaps for this reason many people have fallen into the bad habit of placing books on the shelf while still in their jackets. I could understand this if the cover were poorly designed or even repulsive. But as a rule, book jackets belong in the waste paper basket, like empty cigarette packages.

What I like is the afterthought quality of ‘or even repulsive’. I would like to see this scene played on the stage. But I wouldn’t pay a lot of money to see it, admittedly.

Now why did my previous post garner scarcely a comment?

The Plain People of the Internet: It hadn’t any McArdle in it!

I: Surely, my good man, we have not come to such a pretty pass as that.

The Plain People of the Internet: But here we are, and here you are.

I: I prefer to think it was due to modesty. False modesty, perhaps. But if it weren’t for false modesty, some people would have no modesty at all. Or so I like to flatter myself.

The Plain People of the Internet: What are you babbling about, you great baby, and bottomless bag of blog posts!

I: In my post, I quoted John Kricfalusi on the baneful influence of cool. “Why do young artists say they like UPA? Because it makes ‘em cool. Hipster Emo time. (It’s also easy to fake) It’s like when teenagers discover communism. They think it’s real cool to go against common sense and experience. But then when they meet the real world head on later, they realize it was youthful folly. You’re supposed to grow out of it. I too fell under the UPA spell for the 3 weeks I wanted to be cool.” But what is it, of which he speaks? A contrarian herd instinct, thus a bleating contradition in terms? An emo knee-jerk? What is the common denominator of Gerald McBoingBoing and the dream of One World Government? In short, what’s cool? Or if you prefer, what does ‘cool’ mean? Compared to this question, the trouble with McArdle’s opposition to health care is but a bagatelle.

The Plain People of the Internet: Blast your eyes!

I: I have been doing some research on the subject. Here is a passage from Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. Joe Gargery – honest soul, who wears his heart on his rolled up sleeve, as he works an honest day at the open flame of the forge – reports on what has become of Miss Havisham’s fortune: [click to continue…]