A LETTER I FOUND THROUGH GM'S SITE

Bored, I was going through all my affiliated sites, and then through their affiliated sites, when I found this on GM's site under the heading A Letter to the Times. It was written by someone named Cassandra Goldman. I thought it was just stunning. Imagine, a woman, who hasn't turned in her brain to the feminist comintern.

There's more of it, but this is all I could figure out how to copy. I don't know how to make a link to her site, but you can go through GM's link, and then find her site down on the lower right, if you want.

"How Many Women Does Feminism Have To Kill?
May 3, 2009 by cassandragoldman

Feminists rant a great deal about how evil and abusive men allegedly are, and yet, they have done everything they can to make sure that women are in as much danger from them as possible.

Last year Pippa Bacca, a 33-year-old Italian performance artist, decided that she would don a wedding dress and “hitchhike from Italy to the Balkans to the Middle East to send a message of peace and ‘marriage between different peoples and nations.’” Her website said, “Hitchhiking is choosing to have faith in other human beings, and man, like a small god, rewards those who have faith in him.” After three weeks of hitchhiking, her naked corpse was found in Turkey.

Didn’t her mother ever tell her that hitchhiking is dangerous? The article gives no indication that it occurred to her family that she might have behaved unwisely.

A couple of years ago, Jennifer Moore, a New Jersey teenager, went bar-hopping in Manhattan wearing a miniskirt and halter top. Her car was towed because it was parked illegally. The attendants at the impound lot refused to give her car back to her because she was clearly intoxicated (even though she was below the drinking age). She got into a taxi with a strange man. She couldn’t have known that he was a convicted drug dealer as well as a pimp whose neighbors routinely heard him beating his girlfriend, but she did know that he was twice her size. Two days later her raped, sodomized body was found in a dumpster.

Didn’t her parents tell her to be careful of strange men? And not to wander dangerous areas of New York in the middle of the night dressed like a hooker? Or that getting drunk is a lot more dangerous for women than it is for men? Apparently not. Her father described her: ”She was somebody who was trying to carve out her own personality as a strong, independent woman,” and added, ”maybe too strong, maybe a little too independent.” Ya think?

A 17-year-old English girl named Cara Marie Burke went to Brazil to live with her boyfriend, a drug dealer named Mohammed D’Ali Carvalho Santos. One day they quarreled and she threatened to report his activities to the police. He prevented that by beheading her."

The article actually ends with her praising the patriarchy. You got to find it to believe it, but I don't know how to make it any easier than I just have.

OUTER SPACE

I asked a retired mathematician from Ohio State University if -4 mph squared would really equal 16 mph. He said it was easier to imagine this in outer space.

I didn't really even know how to follow up on this. It was at a party, and you have only about a third of a second at a party to respond. If you can't figure out what to say, you have to pretend to go and get a drink, or food, or check to be sure there's enough seeds for the canary.

I explained I needed a drink. Anybody got any idea what he meant?

What I think he meant is that directionality doesn't matter in space, but aren't you still going toward Orion or away from it, so that directionality still exists? Are we now in hyperspace, at warp speed, or something?

CREATIONISM & The Apples of Kazakhstan

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Genesis 1: 1 (King James Version).

Now that my church has moved over to the Missouri Synod, I've been reading up. Not only did they not take a strong stand against slavery in the Civil War, but they believe that the Bible is inerrant (Creationists).

Worried, I called a few friends. One is a botanist, and one is an electrician. They are both Presbyterians, but one belongs to a progressive, and one belongs to a very conservative, congregation.

"Are you a Creationist?" I asked the progressive.

"No," he replied. "And yet, I do think the universe was created with certain rules that make life possible. It's not chaos. Carbon can only gather in certain formats, and most living things are made out of carbon. Also, I'm not against Creationism. It hasn't been disproved. Science can't really prove anything. It can only disprove. And it's not been disproven that there was some kind of design in the universe. The universe has strict rules: gravity, for instance."

He went on for another ten minutes.

I called the conservative.

"The universe has strict rules that make life possible. Gravity, for instance. And carbon only combines in certain formats. I grew up Catholic, and we called these mysteries. I'm comfortable with mysteries. They work for me. I do not just believe in logic. If I did, how could I also believe in love?"

He went on for another fifteen minutes.

I don't know what to think about Creationism. The universe appears to have certain rules, such as gravity, and carbon only combines in certain forms, and maybe God made those rules. Here on earth, carbonated life appears. I'm reading The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan, who writes about apples having originally been from Kazakhstan. Johnny Appleseed planted thousands of apple seeds in Ohio -- each apple seed is different from any other. Mr. Appleseed is a kind of Dionysian boundary figure who lived in the early 19th century, seeming to spread apples, and Swedenborgian fragrances, (he had a ten-year old fiancee). Back then, the settlers used to make hard cider from the apples, and kids drank the mash. Maybe the ten-year old did (they never married, as he caught her flirting with other little boys, and hence decided she was not Eve). The Temperance Movement smashed the orchards, and people ate the apples of Adam. From those plants that Appleseed grew, commercial growers tend to graft new plants -- from the Granny Smith, for instance, or from the Golden Delicious. Four apples out of thousands of possibilities, make up our standard pomatic repertoire.

In Geneva, New York -- is a genetic library of 2500 plus paired apple trees at the Plant Genetic Resources Unit. It's affiliated with Cornell University.

Every WILD apple seed produces a completely different apple. But a tree takes ten years to fruit. Grafted trees grow quicker, but are less resistant to infections (they're clones).

The most genetically diverse apple trees are from Kazakhstan, where 350 year old apple trees as big and thick as oaks, tall and thick as Jack's beanstalk, exist. You can get Kazakstanian seeds from the Plant Genetic Resources Unit in Geneva, New York, and help to keep biodiversity from caving into the monolithic simplicity of the box stores. They'll send them for free. Write:

Philip Forsline
Plant Genetic Research Unit
630 West North Street
Geneva, NY 14456

Don't forget an S.A.S.E., and tell him that Lutheran Surrealism aims to continue his work!

MY CONGREGATION SWITCHES TO MISSOURI SYNOD

During the funeral process for my dad, my congregation took a vote and switched to Missouri Synod.

I grew up Missouri Synod.

A lot of ELCA congregations are switching over to avoid the endless textual harassment of the ELCA (they changed all the pronouns from masculine to gender neutral in the Lutheran hymn book, so now God and Jesus are no longer Father and Son, but Creator and Redeemer, and they somehow squirrel around all the third-person plurals to make a hilarious mess but nobody wanted to sing that stuff we just stared at it!).

Missouri Synod is very two kingdoms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_the_two_kingdoms

But they believe in Creationism. Was it God who was responsible for the Big Bang?

The ELCA had become a bunch of flying communist squirrels with masks. No, ELCA had been infiltrated by Natasha and Boris-style communists. Bullwinkle felt alarmed.

So now we're Missouri Synod. The vote was 44-2 (secret ballot).

News from North Korea

The Wall Street Journal had an amazing article on North Korea today. It's about a website called North Korea Uncovered, which purports to give a very good overall map of the secretive country. There are sites over 300 square miles where they keep political prisoners. Many of these prisoners starve to death in conditions that make Buchenwald look like a summer camp. Another site is even larger where there is a mass grave for the several million who died in the famines of 1995-1998. One can also see the swimming pools and palatial estates of Kim Jong-Il and his closest associates. The slide show that's online is breathtaking:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124295017403345489.html

I like websites like this and Durham in Wonderland that open up the secretive undertakings of communist regimes.

http://freekorea.us/2007/02/18/holocaust-now-looking-down-into-hell-at-camp-22/

Book Purchases

The Memorial Day booksale at the Bibliobarn on Rose's Brook Road out in S. Kortright just opened. I went over with my daughter and picked up these books at 50% off:

Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, by Brian Rotman (St. Martin's, 1987).

Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, by Ludwig Wittgenstein (MIT Press, 1967).

The Birth of Mathematics in the Age of Plato, by Francois Lasserre (American Research Council, 1964).

Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology, by P.B. and J.S. Medawar (Harvard 1983).

Greek: A New and Simple Approach for those who Want to Read Greek Literature, by F. Kinchin Smith (Teach Yourself Books, 1983).

A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter of 1939-40, by William R. Trotter (Algonquin Books, 2000).

A History of Finland, by Eino Jutikkala with Kauko Pirinen (Dorset Press, 1988).

I also got two books on Harry Potter for my daughter. The total price? $29.95.

I love the owners of the Bibliobarn: H.L. and Linda Wilson, originally out of Norfolk, VA. Also saw my friend Gary Mayer there, buying novels. He painted a huge mural of the nineteenth century literary scene in London behind the barn. It took him all winter. It looks great: my son is in one scene stealing a wallet from a scene out of Dickens.

S. Kortright has two big cultural institutions: the Bibliobarn, and the Kortright Center, which is going to feature Leon Redbone in about a month for $22. I think I'll go.

YESTERDAY'S INCIDENT PUZZLES ME

I had an odd moment yesterday in the grocery store. It was finally summer and the thermometer said 83 degrees. I went to the store to buy cucumber seeds. There were about 5 kinds. I bought one called Spacemaster 80 Cucumber, for $1.99, and one called SMR 58 Cucumber, for $1.89. (I briefly considered Armenian Cucumbers, but decided to stick with a cucumber that looked like a cucumber my father would have recognized.) I was thinking of planting them, and whether or not it was too early (we may still get one more frost), when I pulled up into cashier's aisle #5, wondering exactly when the yellow flowers would pop up and how long it would be until I got actual cucumbers (one says 56 days, and the other 57). Underneath the cashier's aisle was a red basket. Ordinarily I would put mine into that one, and make a stack, but I decided I didn't have to do it. The other red basket was quite far under the counter, and its arms were crossed, so I would have to open the arms first before I slid mine in, and I exercised too much yesterday, and on Monday I had played softball for the first time in several years, and my rotater cuff hurt, and my back hurt, and my leg hurt (I dove for a pop fly and missed it, but did a complete somersault in the process and landed on my knee). I have been a little faint lately from low blood pressure (90 over 60) and didn't want to feel faint as I reached under the counter, plus, I was being lazy. So I just set my red basket next to the other one, hoping that no one would notice.

A woman in front of the line that I vaguely recognized started talking to me and asking about my children. I wasn't sure who this was, but was pretending that I did know. Meanwhile, a redheaded woman behind me (about 38 yrs. of age, with bluejeans, and some girth about the middle) began fussily stacking the red baskets, including her own, and in the process dropped a pocket computer out of her shirt pocket and then seemed to leave the hand gadget on the floor (it was face down, so I didn't know if it was a phone, but it was quite thin -- maybe a third of an inch in thickness, and about four inches by eight inches -- and in the back was the panel with the tiny screw for the battery section). I was afraid she hadn't realized she had dropped the gadget (whatever it was), and twice she seemed to step on it, and I was afraid she would lose it, so I said to her,

"Did you drop that thing?"

At this point she pulled herself up to her full height (several inches taller than me) and said, "Yes, I DID, because I was cleaning up YOUR MESS!"

I was taken aback. She was actually yelling at me for some reason. She was full-blown mad. The lady in front of me with whom I had been chatting said nothing, until she left, and then whispered, "I'll see you at soccer tomorrow night."

I turned my back on the human cyclone behind me, who still seemed immensely agitated. Maybe she was on something? I felt that if I locked eyes with her, she would start up again. I left, but today the incident still rankles. Why had she been so loud? What was going on? Does everybody have to stack all the red baskets? Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don't. Usually I do it, but I didn't feel like it yesterday. Is it mandatory to stack the red baskets? Isn't this something that the grocery store personnel do? There were only two baskets next to one another underneath the grocery counter. Does two non-stacked baskets constitute a "MESS"?

Then my daughter and I went to church, because she was going to be the Wednesday night crucifer. I haven't been since my dad's funeral service, because I cry all the time in church even on ordinary days, and I have been crying rather excessively lately even without church. Last night I started crying again, tears all over my face. It started at communion, when I thought about my father in the viewing, and couldn't take it again, and then began to commune with him, and pray for him that he's in heaven. There was an amazing moment in which my dad was crying too, so sad to be so far away, and now no longer able to touch. Somehow it's the innocence of being in the presence of God. I can't hide my feelings in church, or even try to be reasonable, as I can most of the week.

Luther actually said, "Reason is the devil's whore."

And I thought about the beauty that faith makes possible, and which reason can't name. Beauty is something that no one can name, and which doesn't compute within any reasonable rationale. It's beautiful that there are 300 trillion stars surrounding a black hole at the center of our galaxy. It's just stunning. It's beautiful that there are trillions of galaxies, each containing trillions of stars. The whole notion of infinity is beautiful. And filial love is beautiful, even if it's not the love that poets generally try to touch upon.

But compared to love, there were the hateful calculations of the redhead, and her having tried and condemned me for not stacking the two red baskets, and she even blamed me for her having dropped and then oafishly trampled the gray thin gadget which helped her to reason, all of which merited me being yelled at, which took me by surprise.

I'm a little more sensitive, also a little more self-absorbed, due to the funeral, but should I have been yelled at for not stacking those two red baskets?

NOTHING ADDS UP IN ALGEBRA

-2 x -2 = 4.

2 x 2 = 4.

How can both of these equations be true?

I don't know. I've never known this. I've always wondered why this is so, since 4th grade when I pointed it out to the math teacher, who pretended it was no big deal. Next to a problem like this, the logical leaps of an Edward Lear seem ... like precision itself.

I got a book by Alberto Martinez called Negative Math (Princeton UP 2006), in which he states that this is perhaps the first book entirely about the history of negative numbers. And he states that lots and lots of people have believed that negative number rules don't add up. Here's the names of a few:

D'Alembert, Newton, Fermat, Descartes, Euler, Gauss, to name a few.

Some of these have argued that since geometry is always logical (you can see it, and seeing is believing), that we should therefore be able to translate all algebraic equations into geometrical and thus physical and visible positives, or else we are left talking nonsense.

Apparently the country where negative numbers have been most acceptable is in Germany. Kant thought they were useful in talking about areas of philosophy that had previously been too difficult to enter into without any precision!

The more empirical English had trouble with negatives. Even the French had some wariness with regard to negatives. Stendhal, for instance, argued that you shouldn't be able to subtract a larger quantity from a smaller quantity.

What about debt? In debt, you can be "in the hole." That is, you can owe ten thousand dollars more than you actually have, or have a mortgage and be a half million down. So that does make sense.

What about when you get the square root of negative one?

This is called an imaginary number. Euler said that we needed to know what we are talking about when we are talking about imaginary numbers (31).

Geometry is at least physical (I don't think there is such a thing as negative space), but algebra is just a roaring mess.

-4 + -4 = -8.

But -4 x -4 = 16.

So one moves to the left into the further reaches of the negatives. The other (if multiplication is supposedly a kind of addition) then we suddenly leap into the positives. I'm only half-way through the Martinez book. However, I'm happy to run into all the conundrums that have upset me since I was first introduced to negative numbers, and was infuriated by all the paradoxes, and seemingly arbitrary solutions.

Francis Maseres (a French mathematician) said that negative numbers and imaginary quantities (he gives many examples, such as x to the third power - bx = c, which has two solutions, one of which has x as a positive number, and one as a negative number, have been treated "with an uncommon degree of obscurity, and has been made the subject of much mysterious and fantastic reasoning, (or, perhaps, I should say, discoursing, since it deserves not to be called reasoning) concerning negative and impossible numbers)" (44).

The weirdest parts of philosophy are not nearly as arbitrary and impossible as the most basic notions in algebra, which are taught with a straight face by professors all the way down to elementary school teachers, seemingly blind to the paradoxes at the heart of their supposedly logical system of math. Math is as bizarre as myth, without even the slightest awareness of its mythical perplexities, which are presented to us as being the height of logic.

While most everyone can grasp geometry, I fear that only the unthinking can stomach algebra at present. It just doesn't make any sense, especially as soon as negative and imaginary numbers are introduced.

UGLI FRUIT

Not mentioned in the Garden of Eden specifically, the Ugli fruit was found growing naturally in Jamaica about 300 years ago.

It's a cross between a tangerine and a pomelo or perhaps a grapefruit.

A related fruit is the tangelo, which has been growing in China for about 3000 years. How did such fruit come about?

It's odd that fruit exists. And yet it is "natural." But some fruit are now hybridized, or they have had something done to them called "genetic engineering." In many cases these fruit cannot recreate themselves, since the bees don't know what to do with them, or they don't multiply quickly enough to be good eggs, commercially speaking. So scientists get busy and try to prod them into greater tonnage. For thos e who worry about the "naturalness" of a product, this seems as gross as Frankenstein. The Ugli Fruit even looks like the Frankenstein of the Citrus World!

I don't know what it means to say that something is natural. Is what's natural, good?

If you act naturally, are you behaving well?

Isn't human civilization based on acting artificially, according to local customs?

Should anyone go about without deodorant, we might say, this person smells just like nature intended them to. Wouldn't it be better if they used an artificial deodorant, like the rest of us?

Humanity has changed nature. We breed dogs from wolves into Dachsunds and other ankle biters, according to all kinds of bizarre criteria: ability to walk with heads high, ability to chase Frisbees, ability to grow very long fur.

We try to exterminate mountain lions in various parts of the country (or at least we used to do this, but now the nature people are claiming this isn't good, and we should stop trying to tamper with nature).

What is the right boundary between man and nature? Are we part of it? Are we stewards of it? Do we have the right to exploit it? do we have the right to exterminate viruses?

The Ugli fruit (pronounced Oo-glee) is just atrocious in every way, physically. God could not have designed such a hilariously mishapen fruit, at least not without laughing. Shouldn't we retouch it a bit, and give it a better wrapping? It tastes something like a sweet grapefruit, but the individual pieces are somewhat chewier.

Try one: you might like it.

MORE ON IQ TESTING

In the latest edition of The American Scientist (May-June 2009), there is a review of a book called WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE? Beyond the Flynn Effect (Cambridge UP 2009).

The review is by Cosma Shalizi who is listed as an assistant professor of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon. He has a blog called Three-Toed Sloth.

Shalizi writes that over the 20th century IQs have been rising in all the western democracies as the hoi polloi gets used to thinking scientifically. IQ tests, in fact, were meant to limit the access by the unwashed to higher-level jobs, because they had a bias toward those who had university-training, which was itself limited to the higher classes. With democracy came a huge push from the groundlings to take jobs that had traditionally been reserved for their "betters." IQ was an attempt to give meritocracy a good name, by statistically proving that the intelligent deserved their better chances.

"Meritocracy, as Flynn says, is an incoherent ideal -- even if we agreed on 'merit,' and allocated rewards on that basis, the winners would use some of their resources to give their children unfair advantages. But spreading educational opportunities and opening up positions of influence to broader peaceful competition has been widely beneficial" (247).

As more people learn to think abstractly, IQs will continue to rise. Education teaches us to see that a fox and a cat are both "mammals," and to know the Fibonacci sequence, among other patterns cited in the article as now within the reach of most college-educated individuals. Shalizi sees this as basically a good thing.

Whatever intelligence is, it isn't "a single attribute" (246), Shalizi writes. There's the Howard Gardner notion of Multiple Intelligences (intrapersonal, interpersonal, athletic, emotional, in addition to the ability to solve abstract problems quickly). Shalizi argues that the problems are quite arbitrary in most tests. Ability to solve the pattern sequence posed by several drawings (and to determine the next drawing to fit the pattern out of a number of choices) is precisely where IQ is rising fastest. Someone named Raven drew up a number of these pattern puzzles, and Shalizi comments, "What's tested by Raven's Progressive Matrices is not how well you can find patterns, but how well you can find the patterns Raven liked" (247).

Shalizi doesn't appear to believe that IQ tests can measure how well someone will think on the ground (he gives Odysseus as an example of an intelligent man, but was Odysseus -- a man who provoked a god into delaying his homecoming by ten years and who returned home without a single member of his army, truly intelligent? Perhaps the difference between cleverness and wisdom might enter into this equation?).

Shalizi points out that the kind of IQ question on which IQ is not rising worldwide is one based on trivia. "What is the capital of Paris?" People still apparently don't know this kind of thing, while they ARE learning to think in patterns. "Gains are lowest on items that test vocabulary, arithmetic and general information (for example 'On what continent is Argentina?')" (246).

"Intelligence consists of the combination of 'mental acuity' 'habits of mind' 'attitudes' 'knowledge and information' 'speed of information processing' and memory'" (246). How to measure these things is a big question, taxing the intelligence of the testers as well as the tested.

Intelligence tests are enormously interesting. I generally score the highest on purely verbal ones (invariably coming out at 99%). With the pattern-oriented ones, I see so many patterns, and I can't figure out which one the tester might like me to choose. Testing is odd, and strange. Is it ever fair?

We do all agree that it should be fair, don't we? But then, is there any fair definition of fairness?

Utopias are the Opiates of Intellectuals!

FATNESS Vs. FITNESS

Being fat is a crime against the state. Children and dogs in danger of being taken by child protective services in all anglophone countries.

I found this blog called The Food and Health Skeptic, by Dr. John Ray. He writes:

"OBESITY NOW A CRIME IN BRITAIN

"Obesity has become such an issue of political incorrectness that two brothers appeared in court yesterday charged with allowing a dog to get too fat. Rusty, a nine-year-old labrador, may only have been doing what labradors do, which is to eat everything in sight. But he ballooned to more than 11 stone (161 lb, 73kg), the ideal weight for a large-boned 6ft (1.82m) woman, but not a retriever, which should be chasing sticks and newly shot game. Rusty had trouble standing up, and after no more than five paces he had to sit down again, breathless. He looked, magistrates at Ely, Cambridgeshire, were told yesterday, more like a seal than a dog."

The dog was removed from the brothers' care, and given to the RSPCA, at which point Rusty promptly began to lose weight. Blogs from Australia to England, and all over America, complain that children are being taken by child protective services to protect them from their parents' lack of discretion.

I limit myself to a cup of oatmeal with yogurt (non-fat) in the morning. In the afternoon, I have a sandwich, with decaf coffee, or decaf tea. In the evenings, I eat a micro-waveable boxed dinner, with less than 300 calories. And I'm still fat!

My weight is at present 174 pounds. I am five feet, ten and a half inches. According to the Body Mass Index published by the US Government, I am approximately four pounds over what's considered normal. That is, I'm fat. Just another forty pounds and I'd be considered obese.

The BMI says that for 5'10" men the bottom of the weight chart for normal is 133 pounds. This means I could lose another forty pounds and still be considered normal. (Sometimes I wonder if the BMI was first drawn up at Auschwitz.)

I admit I could look a little less like a Boa Constrictor digesting a hippo.

Worldwide, suggestions have been made to tax fatty foods, the way we tax cigarettes and alcohol. Of course, the food lobbies aren't happy.

I have another proposal.

I propose that anyone more than one ounce over the BMI pay a thousand extra tax dollars (per ounce) each April 15th. If you can't pay, you have your house taken away. If you have no house, you have to go to a fat farm and work out until your body matches the BMI suggestions.

I'm four pounds overweight and by my own calculations, and my own Draconian proposal, I would end up in a fat farm, doing jumping jacks for the state. It's not as if my health is poor. My blood pressure is low. (About 90 over 60, whatever that means.) My cholesterol level is ok. About 192 (a bit high, but apparently the trouble starts at 200 and up, whatever that means.). And everything else is all right: kidney function, heart (EEG), liver function, thyroid, PSA, blood sugar (89, which is good), and calcium are all just fine. But four extra pounds! Why hasn't the state taken me away for my own good? Shouldn't the state have fat patrols on every street, "disappearing" those who are eating more than their share?

Not just the stick, some will scream, but the carrot! Ok, I propose that those under the top limit, would get an extra thousand dollars back from the treasury for every pound of flesh that they are under the suggested BMI upper limit for normal until they hit the bottom of the chart. This would mean that I could potentially make 47 thousand dollars a year on thinness until I reach the minimum weight of 133.

Without the carrot or stick, what else are we to do? Should we depend on people to regulate themselves?

I wonder -- if the government were to pass my proposal, would the school cafeterias resist?

School administrators need the extra money from the taxes, so if my proposal were to pass, they might try to butter up the kids, so as to squeeze more tax money out of the polity.

Dieticians at Elementary Schools could easily become war criminals in the war on fat, cooking up blubbery excesses in their kitchens. With parents locked away in fat farms, hooked up to bicycles, repaying those extra calories of consumption back into the system, high school cafeterias would be Willie Wonka-ing their children with a dizzying array of sweets, in order to collect even more taxes.

I'm sorry I brought all this up. Never forget that the state is basically evil.

CANON

In sociology, a canon is "an accepted rule or principle."

In aesthetics, the notion of a canon is something today that is violently fought over, and seemingly no two people can agree on what it means for something to be beautiful.

Originally, a canon referred to a reed in ancient Greece that was used as a common measuring stick.

"For his mural painting The Birth of Venus Sandro Botticelli stated that the distance between the nipple and navel, between the two legs and between the navel and the groin must all be equal for a figure to (in his opinion) be ideally proportioned. Other such systems of 'ideal proportions' in painting and sculpture include the Polyclitean canon and Vitruvian modules, best-known in the Vitruvian Man." (Wikipedia, The Canon)

One finds disputes over what the canon should be constituted of in probably every sphere. Whether or not Pluto is a planet (some argue that it's just an asteroid, others argue that it's rounder than an asteroid, and thus is a planet, still others argue that it should be called a "dwarf-planet," and others just want to call it an object).

In basketball one wonders whether the greatest players have to have won a championship. This would mean that Reggie Miller who played for the Indiana Pacers for eighteen years and never won a belt would not qualify. Alan Iverson, only 6 feet tall, and already well on his way to having never won a championship, would also be disqualified.

The canon of English was once filled with high-minded white men. In the seventies when I began to study literature at the college level, Ernest Hemingway was considered America's finest writer. One is reminded of this by Richard Brautigan's constant references to Hemingway in his prose poems of the 70s collected in Revenge of the Lawn. Brautigan to some extent even copies Hemingway's style. Today, of course, Hemingway is far less studied, and rarely trotted out as "the model writer." He's now put down as a macho man, while feminine sensitivity is increasingly valued as a sign of the aesthetic (ask not what such feminine sensitives would have done about Nazi Germany, ask only how close they are to the eighties ideal man, Woodie Allen, once considered the sexiest man, by feminists). A kind of pissing contest is always in play with regard to men, and to women. For a long time, it's been who's most sensitive, and many around still try to play at that. Others blow it off. Either extreme can be appalling.

In basketball, one can win a championship based on quantities. Shaquille O'Neal gets a lot of baskets. They may not be beautiful. They may be only workmanlike baskets, largely accomplished by his ability to bull his way to the hoop. But baskets he does get. His feet are the size of pontoons. His ankles are thicker than my thighs. He's a kind of human oak tree, that moves. But is he really a great player? In terms of sheer quantity of baskets scored: yes.

But what about quality? Wouldn't quality be better typified by Clyde the Glide, who also never won a championship? Literature is a matter of quality, and quality is something that is confusing.

What is quality in literature, or in art?

Today, after Duchamp's urinal, Manzoni's merde d'artiste, yams applied up the touche of Karen Finlay, Yoko Ono's apple, the notion of a work ethic underwriting art has been dismissed. Even the notion of craftmanship has been dismissed.

A canon of a sort remains in areas such as ice skating. Triple axles imply a certain work ethic. Not everyone can do one. I couldn't do one if I practiced until the sun burned out!

In art, we have however the phenomenon of "a monkey could do that." Pollock's drip paintings, the seemingly messy canvasses of a Franz Klein, the scribbles of Cy Twombly, the mad art of Dubuffet (based on the work of the insane), the free associations of Andre Breton's poetry... Mike Topp's poems.

Especially to outsiders, they appear to be simple. Something that anyone could do.

Much of popular culture still appears to have a work ethic. Not everyone can play the guitar like virtuoso Eric Clapton or Keith Richards. It would require years and years of work to attain that kind of mastery.

Looking back a few centuries, we can see that Shakespeare had that kind of mastery, and in painting, someone like Albrecht Durer clearly had a work ethic. Or they could at least do something that no one else can do.

But at least since Whistler's Nocturnes -- the notion of a work ethic or the craftmanship that is slowly but steadily gained has gone out the window as the essence of value. Whistler claimed in the trial that his lifetime as an artist had gone into the ten minutes it took him to paint the picture I've placed above (fireworks). Bollocks, said Oscar Wilde. I can't remember who won the case, but Whistler's viewpoint won the day.

The very framework of the window, went right out the window with the window, to paraphrase one of Corso's late poems, and now we're left whistling in the dark, when we try to think about aesthetic value.

Any mention of a framework of values infuriates some. Into this vacuum of aesthetic values have stepped a bunch of political goons who claim that race, gender, and class should be our new values. It doesn't matter if the work is any good. Since that can't even be defined, let's instead define beauty as that which is good FOR the political values of race, gender, class (some other values are trying to get into that mix -- disability, gayness, and other marks of "identity"). These seem to borrow from the Nazi framework (if it's good for the Aryan race, then it's good). For "Aryan" substitute your own clientele, or identity-group.

Against these various rugby-scrums, Lutheran surrealism has vainly sought to resurrect the notion of a universal aesthetics.

We've searched high and low for a framework: a window, a viewpoint.

In ethics, and in law, we've rediscovered the ten commandments.

In aesthetics, we've looked into math, into aesthetics itself, into religion, into philosophy, into literary theory, into ecology, into ourselves, into art theory, and frankly, there's nothing!

So meanwhile over the last thirty years we've had books like Enlarging the Temple (by Charles Altieri) which have sought to open the poetic canon. Books like my own have tried to insert various comic writers (especially ludic surrealists such as Soupault, Codrescu, and Corso) into the mix. In such a free for all, all notion of quality has perhaps been forgotten. Perhaps we have even given up on the notion of a consensus. But it's not as if there aren't still some definitions worth noting.

For Hegel, the great moment in art was the same as the great moment in religion. "Bref, elle est la presence vivante de l'infini dans le fini" Pour Connaitre la Pensee de Hegel, Roger Garaudy, p. 177. [In brief, it is the living presence of the infinite in the finite.]

Other Lutherans such as Paul Tillich make similar assertions.

A less theological account is provided by Elaine Scarry, (who teaches at Harvard) in her book, On Beauty.

Scarry has argued that over the last few decades we have derided beauty, and have instead sought to replace it with political justice. But, she says, "the absence of beauty is a profound form of deprivation" (118). Beauty, she argues, "seems to place requirements on us for attending to the aliveness... of our world" (90).

Marcia Muelder Eaton argues in a book I can't find on my shelf (she teaches at the U. of Minnesota) that beauty is the Mother of Ethics. That is, when we perceive something as beautiful, we begin to think about how to protect it, and how save it, how to create a cordon of the sacred around it.

Beauty is not something we can simply dismiss. As difficult as it is to define, this does not mean that it can be dismissed. Kant seems to argue that an aesthetic judgement must be universal and that it must therefore be "valid for any rational being of our kind" (Aesthetic Judgment: Studies in Kant, Dieter Henrich, p. 31).

In the absence of the ability to achieve this (there are so many blockheads who refuse to think aesthetically, and who can't even carve a nice sentence, or even manage to comb their hair!, and yet who insist they have a voice, too, in these matters), do we nevertheless have to jettison all notion of the beautiful, and thus of a canon?

Do we have to throw away the aesthetic yardstick of quality, and insist instead on the political yardstick of quantity: and throw beauty out the window, and instead think merely about what a given book or poem gives to our identity-group? That way leads to pure ugliness.

I am arguing instead for a revival of the discussion of a universal beauty, appealing across cultures -- as do the sands of Zen gardens, the mosques of Istanbul, the paintings of Durer and DaVinci. People travel from all over the world to see these marvels. Every population looks at the stars at night, and writes poems about the moon. Beauty gives meaning to our world, and through it, we may yet find a way to unite the populations of the earth, rather than disuniting them with the Balkanization currently splintering us into a thousand rubgy-scrums of power-mad self-interest.

Moral Reverse Domino Effect

The moral reverse domino effect of Jack Spicer's passive construction, "My vocabulary did this to me," continues to topple generations.

The truth is that each person has a name and a face, and language doesn't control us, or else everyone would end with Spicer's fate.

But I'm tired of fighting the Marxist-Saussurian language policy: let the dead bury the dead.

You cannot argue with the faceless.

The left supports Athens.
The right supports Jerusalem.

The right is about moral inquiry.

You cannot have moral inquiry without spiritual freedom, at least the independence to choose one's own axiom.

"He's got the whole world, in his hands..."

Not quite. We have our share of it, too. But we may not be able to change people through argument. Experience determines ideas.

No ideas without persons. I never believed in the poem w/o the poet, or a history without people. The soul is my mother and father, grandparents, children, friends. The soul is grounded in the particulars. Skeletons forming into rugby scrums over generations.

But skeletons without a soul? Soul is perhaps the freedom with which we choose to exist as acrobats or baboons, as caterpillars, or mimes doing green things in the silence, after the macaroni dinner: the infinite problems of existence.

In this zoo the zebras are dressed like prisoners, and the skeletons the keys of the piano made vertical.

Be realistic: demand God.

Toward a New Definition of Man

Man is the animal that tries to exterminate other viewpoints.

DO DOGS HAVE SOULS?

In Cumberland (I thought this was the area just south of Harrisburg -- still a fairly conservative religious area, but apparently these signs are in Hartford, KY) there is apparently a war of signs between a Catholic and a Presbyterian church. The Catholics believe that dogs have souls. The Presbyterians do not. (Did somebody invent this war of signs, or is it real? I got it through an email feed.) It's all over the net at this point. One site is here:

http://www.ourrisingsound.com/2008/08/19/presbyterian-vs-catholic-church-sign-debate/

One of the great projects of this blog is to define the difference between man and animal. "Naturally," the left believes we are just animals, and should act like them, until of course there's a moment when they suddenly start shrieking about human rights, and demanding them. But then there's an odd new trend to grant animals souls, and thus to argue that animals are saintly, and thus that they should have human rights, and even in some cases, since they are more saintly than humans, they are thus more deserving of going to heaven.

I find all these controversies diverting, although I personally like the view presented in Genesis that humanity is meant to be a steward of the animal kingdom.

It is very hard to get the correct relationship. Last week a black cougar was spotted about twenty miles from here just outside of Hobart by a conservationist who works with farmers. Many people are delighted with the return of such panthers to areas in which they have been eradicated. As the father of small children, I can say I am far from delighted. I think they have no right to be here. At the same time, I find them very interesting, and would like to see one (from a distance).

Did Caligula Marry His Horse?

Lately we've been talking about America being on the downswing, and how many have tried to find a parallel in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, particularly as described by that monkey, Gibbon.

I remembered that Caligula had married his horse, but when I looked it up, most of the articles said only that Caligula had appointed the animal as head of the senate. The animal had to be consulted on military matters of strategic importance. Here is a brief excerpt:

"In addition, whenever he won a race the horse was seated in the place of honor beside the emperor at the table of royal banquets and Caligula would ply him with fashionable delicacies such as sea urchin, parrot and dormouse. But Incitatus resisted such epicurean delights and would only take barley (dusted with gold in his honor!) from the golden bowl. At all such feasts, the assembled guests had to toast the health of Incitatus 20 times over. But even all this apparently did little to console the spurned and desolate horse. So convinced was Caligula that Incitatus was irrevocably grief-stricken by his marriage to a woman, that he continually tried to make recompense: he included his name in every sentence he spoke, and had his name used as part of the binding oath for legal documentation; when new temples were built in honor of the new god, Emperor Caligula, the loyalty of Incitatus was rewarded by appointing him deputy head priest, which meant he had great responsibility for supervising the rites of the temple, in consideration for which he received an excellent salary."

When I looked up "animal-human marriage" via Wikipedia, there were a few hundred cases of such, but no society that encouraged the practice. A British woman married a dolphin for fun. In India, a girl of seven was wedded to a dog. Most of the marriages described were between humans and various mammals. There were no marriages to insects, and none to fish, and none to spiders.

Caligula's great love for his horse shows imagination of a kind that humanity has rarely countenanced. Sadly, Caligula's horse spurned him and Caligula had him beheaded. Had PETA been around at the time, there would no doubt have been an investigation.

If one were to have an animal preside over the American Senate as it is presently constituted, would there be a precipitous drop in quality, or would the level of discourse rise to a new pinnacle?

Yeah or neigh?

A little more equality toward the various species should be assayed. Why can we not imagine a spider presiding over the senate? Or an amoeba? Are we so species-ist that we cannot imagine raising other creatures, even inert objects like rocks, to a position of true equality, and allowing a boulder to occupy a seat in the Senate? And what of our traditional enemies: the viruses? Why should only humans occupy such an exalted place?

Should we not extend equality to the microbes and viruses? Should we continue to molest such other phyla with the dark energies of science as we attempt to commit genocide against various viruses, who are only trying to live? When the government countenances marriage between a human and a deadly virus, then we will be moving in the right direction -- a direction that Caligula pointed toward, but his career was too swiftly ended by conspiracies against equality. Oh, had he only lived! What precedents might there have been!

BEAUTY CONTEST WINNER NIXED FOR BEING TRADITIONALIST

According to the BBC radio news blog, a woman named Carrie Prejean appears to have lost the Miss America contest after being asked what she thought about gay marriage by Perez Hilton. When she said she was against it, she lost the contest. Apparently, there was only one right answer, and the bigot who asked it, couldn't abide any response but the one he demanded.

Here's some of the coverage:

"Showbiz guru Hilton - one of the judges at the beauty contest - has been criticising the 22-year-old all week for what she said when he asked her about legalising same sex marriage across the country.

...

It's gone down well with evangelical Christians who number in their millions in the US."

"Carrie only said what the majority of Americans believe," said Maggie Gallagher, President of NOM. "Marriage means a man and a woman.

"Her example resonates, especially to many young Americans, because she chose to stand for truth rather than surrender her core values."

...

Celebrity gossip star Perez Hilton asked Prejean the question.
Carrie Prejean was attacked in the UK by Tory Shadow Home Secretary, Alan Duncan, on the BBC One show Have I Got News For You.

The openly gay MP came under fire when he said, "If you read that Miss California has been murdered, you will know it was me, won't you?"

...

Carrie Prejean didn't get the Miss USA title and her answer on gay marriage may be why."

I think it's unfair (even Orwellian) to ask a question that has only one answer, and to expect candidates to go against their religious faith or face blackballing from a contest, or worse, murder, if their answer departs from it.

This is a curious clash in the Culture War. The extreme point of the pleasure principle (one could say) touched an extreme point of the old superego (what people should do). For those of us in the middle who try to in some way negotiate between the two, it's hard to know what to do.

Basically, I think they both have some role in culture, but one cannot dissolve the other.

The "multicultural left" is really one culture that has put all other cultures into a blender. They choose from Christianity the Sermon on the Mount, and do away with everything else (love is all you need). From Buddhism they take Be Here Now, which allows them to "love the one you're with," and from Jung and others, there's this and there's that.

The multiculturalists are really against any strict superego, as they are basically pleasure-driven (I think it's their only principle). Marriage, to the extent that it looks like fun, is what they want, so they should have it.

The older Christian culture, which doesn't drink, which doesn't see pleasure as a very strong need, is hard to relate to the new culture, and so the two clash.

There are, however, places where the Venn diagram overlaps. Neither culture is very supportive of child-molesting (although some on the left like the Foucauldians think it's ok, they are generally quiet on this topic, at least in public). Both cultures like something about the notion of "soul-mates," but I think that the right is a little more honest about it, and a lot more willing to suffer for it (it's not easy to be friends for life with someone, and it requires a lot of give and take -- the left wants mostly to be on the take). Both cultures are capitalistic, although the left wants to redistribute the money of the harder-working to the lazier groups, and the right wants to preserve the notion of hard-work equals gains, citing Aesop's fable about the grasshopper and the ant. The left seems to opportunistically cite the Sermon on the Mount for just about everything. Is that text really so communistic as it seems? One Lutheran theologian told me it isn't about this world at all, but about the next, and how things are going to be up there.

Where might the two cultures find common cause down here?

You'd think that the least the two groups would stand for is the first amendment. But oddly, it's the right just now that is more frequently silenced, and the left which is much more violent in its infringement of Christian's right to speak. Is that really so, or is it just my perspective?

Certainly Carrie Prejean is being made to be as sorry as possible for having spoken out. In turn, she suddenly has a career with the Christian right.