SubscribeFebruary 19th, 2011
random catness
When I open a can of wet cat food and my cat does not quickly assault
my legs with headbutts a strange sort of worry starts to creep into my
mind. This worry mounts the longer I’m shy a cat in the kitchen. I
scoop more and more mushy maybe meat into her bowl. When I’ve put the
food bowls down on the ground and there’s still no cat in sight then
the worry starts to change into fear. This is when a search must be
made to find the remains of the cat who would have to, in my mind, be
maimed and bleeding out in some dark corner of the apartment to have
not made an appearance for food.
Yes, if one of my cats misses the opening of a can I think that they
must be dead. Sometimes I over react. I know this fact about my self
but knowing it has stopped me from yelling at many an old person
for… whichever old people thing they’re all outside doing today.
The hunt for the corpse takes place on unsteady ground. My movements
are that kind of quick and not altogether steady ones that only come
from mixing fear and a forced clear-eyed calm. I counter worry with
cool headed bravado so that the search can be thorough and efficient
and not degrade into the kind of random scrambling and tossing of
clothing that one would imagine being tied up with the word
hysterics. First aid first; four fingers of courage after.
I head to my roommate’s room. Her music is loud but the door is open.
I enter. I ask after the cat. My roommate looks confused. I feel
confused. She turns off her music and the house goes quiet. Slowly my
ears, and I assume hers, adjust and the only sound in the apartment
is of my other cat busily licking up his meaty paste. Half a second
after hearing the ruinously aggressive ripping force of his tongue on
the meat in his bowl the missing cat blurs out from under a table that
has a heater under it. Everything is, in this moment, explained to me
and the emotional structure built up to keep me clear caves in and I
sag in the door.
Two barbed tongues now lap up the processed dead.
November 24th, 2010
assumptions hard at work
In a post a few days ago I mentioned an odd little study I am reading called A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus by Richard Payne Knight. The study itself shows that so-called pagan ritual and symbolism have survived into Payne’s time. He does that by investigating fertility cults via the use of genital symbolism, both male and female, hence the “worship” of priapus.
For me this is not the odd part. It seems clear that what passes for religion today is an accretion on the corpus of what passed for religion before.
What fascinates me about the study is the language, the underlying cultural assumptions, especially pertaining to gender. Given that gender and sexuality is critical to Payne’s analysis, his assumptions here seem important. For example: Discourse was published in 1786. Mary Wollstonecraft would publish A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. These were barbaric times. So it will not surprise you that the male part of procreation was considered the active part, and the female part passive. (a note: when he speaks of the “organ of generation” he means the penis)
The great characteristic attribute was represented by the organ of generation in that state of tension and rigidity which is necessary to the due performance of its functions. Many small images of this kind have been found among the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, attached to the bracelets, which the chaste and pious matrons of antiquity wore round their necks and arms. In these, the organ of generation appears alone, or only accompanied with the wings of incubation, in order to show that the devout wearer devoted herself wholly and solely to procreation, the great end for which she was ordained. So expressive a symbol, being constantly in her view, must keep her attention fixed on its natural object, and continually remind her of the gratitude she owed the Creator, for having taken her into his service, made her a partaker of his most valuable blessings, and employed her as the passive instrument in the exertion of his most beneficial power.
The female organs of generation were revered as symbols of the generative powers of nature or matter, as the male were of the generative powers of God. They are usually represented emblematically, by the Shell, or Concha Veneris, which was therefore worn by devout persons of antiquity, as it still continues to be by pilgrims, and many of the common women of Italy.
(The emphasis is mine)
Imagine suffering such an assumption. Rock on Wollstonecraft.
October 15th, 2010
Indeterminate monads and pink fairies
My son is normally the person I go to if I want to talk philosophy but on this occasion I was telling my daughter about Leibniz and that phrase “indeterminate monad” that was obsessing me a few days ago.
She said it sounded like a bunch of pink fairies who were wandering unable to complete their quest.
When I could talk again (gasp*wheeze*snort*guffaw), I said not nomad, MONAD.
She asked me to tell you that she is not in a special school.
September 6th, 2010
What will the future be like?
I was talking with my son about science fiction of the past and how many of the icons, images and tools of those old stories and TV shows have showed up, or had an effect on the design of what we have today – the Star Trek communicator and the flip phone, for example. When I saw this video today on Wimp.com, I felt as if I have seen a glimpse of something that will be common place probably shortly after my life, or perhaps even before I die.
I read, and admire, the new philosophy and research being done on embodied cognition and suspect that if we externalize how we come to have concepts, that this will have as much impact on us as externalizing our memory did when we figured out how to code words and meaning using signs, and then later when we figured out how to spread our sets of signs through the book and the printing press and, of course, much later, through the internet. Each of these profoundly impactful changes works partly because they externalize something we already do – externalizing our language, translating sound and concept into signs that can be transported over much vaster distances and time than can the simple speaking voice and memory codified like in epic or story, once told orally to those around, but now told to a vastly increased audience.
Anyway, watch this and see if the embodied character of the invention gives you the same feeling of being clairvoyant.
via Wimp
September 1st, 2010
Sentence for today
Civil rights come attached to civil responsibilities; one will be lost without the other.
August 31st, 2010
Hah!
If you cannot answer a man’s argument, all it not lost; you can still call him vile names. ~Elbert Hubbard
March 18th, 2010
Birthdays
My son’s birthday today.
February 6th, 2010
Vancouver
While I was in the hospital my kids, knowing me rather well, brought me several books to read. One of them, written by Charles Demers, is called Vancouver Special. It was a good choice since it is filled with really good black and white photographs and short essays that are themselves structured much like images. (For some reason I find images easier on the body than narrative.) The book is organized around different elements that make both a city and an image. For the city these are things like neighborhoods, people and what the author has called culture but is in fact the relationships that bind and make meaningful the first two. For example, he has a essay on nature in the culture section that, while informative and dryly funny by itself, side-lights and connects the chapters on First Nations and Kitsilano.
Reading it is quite a bit like interacting with a Vasily Kandinsky painting. I was thinking of this one. The blue bits are the essays on people, the green and orange are neighborhoods, the lines and arcs that delineate and connect are the bits on culture.
To get the painting, you have to get the relationships between the elements, which, I suppose is true of all narrative, but with Demers’ book as with art like Kandinsky’s, the way in which those elements are displayed has much more to do with space than with time. And narrative arc is almost always about time. This is, in itself, something deeply “Vancouver.” If Demers did that on purpose, I not only like his book but deeply respect his ability as a writer.
The pictures in the book, black and white photographs by Emmanuel Buenviaje, can be “read” right along beside the text. I mean, if you can imagine text structured as a complex image, then it shouldn’t be so hard to connect the pictures into meaningful series using the rules of narrative. But I’ll leave that up to you. You’d have to spend time with the book, with its elements and its arrangement.
This is not one of his but it (very vaguely) gives you the feel of the ‘graphs. If you want a better idea, you can click on this link and it will take you to his Flickr account. There are a number of black and white Vancouver shots there plus plenty of colour. One that caught my eye is here. I like it for a number of reasons but partly at least because I happen to occasionally catch the bus on that corner.
The book was published last year and opens by talking about the social, historical and political implications of the 1986 Expo and the 2010 Winter Olympics. This is not just a planar tourist book. It has depth: achieved by both political and historical knowledge and awareness. Vancouver, for all its wonders and beauty, suffers from the general North American dis-ease with its history and its past and, therefore, present choices. I was here during Expo and now the Olympics and the same battles for and with the homeless population have occurred both times, as an example. It’s a bit like a woman so obsessed with her aging face that she goes in for a lift and then there, as she turns grinning at herself in front of a mirror, on top of her completely ignored and clearly aging 50 year old neck and shoulders is the face that befits a 25 year old.
The thing about a person (or city) like that is that what this means has everything to do with the eyes of the beholder. In this case Demers looks on with honesty, but also with love, more like compassion than pity or disrespect. Because of all these things, Vancouver Special really is a very good introduction to what it’s like to live here. If you’re interested.
November 22nd, 2009
Confusion, moths and reading too much
I am the kind of reader that has many books on the go at the same time. Normally this isn’t a problem since I read almost entirely non-fiction. When I hit the end of a read-run then I’ll pick up some fiction. I take a break, then back to non-fiction. The world is orderly. When I intermix them, things get a little strange. And confusing.
I think it’s something with the way the two genres affect my mind, but when I read them together it’s as if they start a feed-back loop and my mind starts making weird connections, not static exactly, but definately off-the-wall cognitive shots. So for example, I am re-reading Woolf’s The Waves, and there is Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury along with Sherman Alexie’s books. Add to that a book called The End of Illusion: the end of literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, one called Proust and the Squid (great title), one on the philosophy of mind. There’s another on religion and the american mind and one by Foss that’s become a bit of an obsession (can’t seem to let it go, it’s just such a wonderful idea).
So I started dreaming about moths. My son, who sends me random topics to write about, sent me one about moths and their propensity to immolate themselves in candle flame and haunt floodlights. He sent me the topic some weeks ago, but I haven’t done anything about it because I could feel that whatever I thought of moths wasn’t ready to come out through the fingers. I suppose reading Woolf was bound to trigger a connection there. And the other books, those too – like somehow they are growing toward each other, sparking against each other, but only, it seems, when I turn my head, when I am not looking directly, but as Dickinson said, looking aslant.
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November 8th, 2009
My kind of horror movie
You should know I don’t do horror. I learned my lesson early in life with respect to the power of images and how they mess with my head, so now I am fairly careful about what I deliberately allow access to my senses. This little movie, however, made it past my self-imposed censor. It’s about the kind of humor it uses.
Litlove has a post called Reading Dangeroulsy that speaks to the question of a person’s choice about whether to continue reading a book that he or she finds disturbing. Some time ago I posted on my decision making process about whether to watch the new movie Precious; the two things are related for me. I still haven’t decided whether to watch Precious or not, but I do know that I will not go to watch it in the theatres — way too traumatic having to react not only to what’s on the screen but to other people’s reactions as well.
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