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A friend of mine asked me for this recipe, and I thought I'd give it to everyone. It is kind of a pain. It is also the best chocolate cake I've ever made. It is much better after chilling in the fridge overnight, so make it the day before.
Check out the house next to my grandad's, now on the market. Actually, they've been trying to sell it for $55 million for two years now, with no takers, so if you participate in the auction, bid lower, is my advice. I may have complained about this before, but they tore down a very attractive, modest, modern house to build that...18,000-square-foot Cape Cod on steroids thing. Oh, and it's available furnished, ooooh, the tastefulness.
Purty Pictures, below the fold.
These are the tastiest rolls ever. Owning a Kitchenaid stand mixer makes these incredibly easy, too. If you follow the directions and divide the dough, you can have cinnamon rolls the next morning. This doesn't take as long as you think. Really. People are very impressed by this in spite of the fact that it's not hard at all.
This will only be funny if you believe me that I didn't check the index of Thomson's Alien Quartet book before making that crack last night about how he is sure to drag Howard Hawks in somehow. I swear to you I hadn't yet gotten to the passage on p. 150 in which we get this discussion of the basketball scene from Alien Resurrection. (She's a perfect specimen, so she's real good at hoops, you may recall.)
WARNING: contains Unbreakable plot-spoilers for no very good reason.
Continue reading "Would Katherine Hepburn have made a better Ripley?" »
I'm cramming furiously and contentedly for my film and philosophy module, and I expect many posts in the days to come will be sci-fi related. Here's one of them. What you are about to read is sort of like really drafty notes to be turned into lecture notes.
Here is a thoroughly standard definition of 'sound deductive argument':
A deductive argument is sound if and only if it is both valid, and all of its premises are actually true. Otherwise, a deductive argument is unsound.
But a reductio ad absurdum is a deductive argument that proceeds from premises that are false. But a reductio can be sound, can't it? How is this possible? I mean: how is it officially possible, in light of the standard definition of deductive soundness? Is there some standard, textbook definition of 'sound reductio'? It seems that there should be. On the other hand, it is quite clear that what makes something a reductio is that it is a valid deductive structure with a certain pragmatic use as a proof, in light of the fact that the culprit responsible for generating the contradiction should be obvious. So perhaps there are technically no sound reductiones ad absurdum? (That seems absurd.)
I just read this blog Cupcake Series for the first time (this funny post via Cup of Chicha), and they kick ass. Go check it out.
There has been some speculation at Unfogged recently, regarding the nature of Jacob Levy's fanboyishness, and the nature of my superpowers (see comments). Naturally this reminded me of just how lame Invisible Girl is. She has to be told what to do in every situation by one of the male characters. Typical thought-bubbled musings from FF ish 41: "It's like a terrible nightmare! We're being menaced by the Frightful Four again! I've got to help Reed and Johnny--but how??" I don't know, lady, maybe you should consider turning invisible and using your fucking force field, for a change? Must Ben Grimm, the Gentle Jewish Giant of Gneiss, guide your every move?
John had a 7-11 Slurpee cup of Invisible Girl as a child, on which she proudly claimed: "I fight by the side of the Fantastic Four!" Or ... the Fantastic Three, maybe? Because, you see...aw, forget it. [I've still got it. See iss. number - Aw, hell, see all my issues. - ed.]
But now, in what is possibly the most daringly dramatic development in the field of contemporary confectionary, Belle's new powers can be revealed. Yes, I have the power to bake and decorate a cake that looks just like Wonder Woman. Look, and be amazed.
We had a very DC birthday around here, courtesy of the ancient, dusty Wonder Woman cake set I found mouldering on the top shelf of a strangely untrafficked Singapore baking store. 1978, people. Was it just a coincidence...or something more? Don't miss the gripping finale of this great team-up adventure next issue! Thrills, spills, and sock-em, rock-em, action! All this and more awaits you in the upcoming action-packed pixels of John and Belle Have a Blog--now, more than ever, your kind of blog!!!!!! [see you there--ed.]
From the dubious headlines department: Jury Finds Insane Killer Not Dangerous
From a NYT article about drunkenness in the UK:
"One thing that is common to ambivalent drinking cultures is the belief that alcohol is a disinhibitor and makes us violent," said Ms. Fox, the author of "Watching the English," a book exploring the nation's habits and quirks. The reality, she said, is more complicated: "It certainly interferes with your motor functions and your ability to speak rationally, but it doesn't cause you to go up to people, say 'Oy, what are looking at?' and start punching them."
I have a legal question if anyone has a legal answer. I'm teaching philosophy and film this coming semester at NUS. If I take screengrabs from a DVD and turn the resulting JPEGS into a handful of slides in a PowerPoint presentation - but don't distribute the images on the web, in notes, in any medium that the students can take away except their brains - how taboo is that? I'm allowed to show the whole damn film, after all, since the library has paid whatever extra licensing whatsit allows for that. So it would be legal for me to fast-forward to the relevant bit and stop. But to be jamming my finger into the FF button while lecturing does not seem optimal. It seems showing a few key images in a slideshow might be fair use, except maybe I'm strictly forbidden to take the first step: making the screengrabs.
What do film instructors do in the US? Is there some generally agreed-upon film school standard of what is OK to do in giving a lecture - strictly for educational purposes, mind you? (Yes, Singapore is different, but our intellectual property laws are generally congruent. And I'm just curious how film instructors do it state-side.) What about art history classes, come to think of it? Those folks are always showing slides of stuff they don't own. I take it that's considered acceptable. How else could they teach? To lecture on a film without being able to show images seems .. like dancing about architecture. That is, I can DO it. Yeah.
Courtesy of my great-grandfather. This is wicked strong, but goes down easy. It's one of those drinks where there's no way-station between the exhilarating flush of your first glass and blacking out. The base keeps indefinitely and even improves with age. I made it for a party once at which the whole recipe got drunk well before 3 am. There were about 200 people there, though.
Chatham Artillery Punch
1 lb. gunpowder green tea
2 gallons cold water
3 gallons catawba wine, or substiture Sauternes (I didn't say this was going to be cheap)
1 gallon St. Croix rum
1 gallon Hennessy brandy
1 gallon rye whiskey
1 gallon gin
5 lbs brown sugar
2 qts. cherries
juice of 2 dozen oranges
juice of 2 dozen lemons
Let the tea stand overnight in the water. Strain. Mix juices, cherries and tea (preferably in a cedar tub)*. Add sugar and booze and stir. Let sit about one week, covered; then strain out cherries. Just before serving, mix over blocks of ice with 12 quarts dry champagne.
*No, I don't have a cedar tub either. It has ocurred to me that you could put in a few clean cedar shingles of the type one can make planked salmon on; they sell those in kitcheny stores sometimes. I've only made this a few times and never tried that, though.
Below the fold, more tasty drink recipes.
Shrinky Dinks? No, Linky Links!
Cup of Chicha muses on depressing books for children. Highlight: "See Ya, Simon. Hill, David. 1992. Over the years, fourteen-year-old Nathan has learned a lot about muscular dystrophy from his best friend, but is unprepared for Simon’s rapid decline and approaching death." I totally thought she made this up, but re-reading the post, it seems to be real.
When you go to Phnom Penh, should you stay downtown or on the shores of lovely/fetid Boeng Kak? This discussion at Tales of Asia will help you decide. I used to be a partisan of the number 9 guesthouse back in the day, but the wisdom of passing years compels me to admit the center-partisans have the better case. If you stay downtown you won't be as likely to get into bad trouble as you stagger home from the Heart of Darkness. Unless you just want to lie around in a hammock smoking pot, in which case, the lake's for you. And they do make really good fries with mayonnaise there. Mmmm, mayonnaise. (Via Santepheap)
Sadly, No has a letter from an MP who served as a prison guard in Iraq. He tells of nothing truly shocking, just incompetence and sorry indifference to suffering. A depressing read. Sample: "BTW, you should also look into the story of the 18-year-old Iraqi girl who was held at Abu G for kissing her husband in public, after self-appointed morality police brought her there (her husband, of course, wasn't held). It made the front page of Stars & Stripes. A textbook case of nobody having a plan, and nobody taking responsibility in the bureaucracy."
I'm glad to see Kip Manley making use of my Bruno Schulz epigraph. He also links to this very interesting essay. I'll just add that here is a medium-sized gallery of Schulz' art. And here is a self-portrait.
A letter by Schulz quoted in the linked essay gets at why I felt it was appropriate to make a passage from his Street of Crocodiles into an epigraph for my post on mock-pastoral:
What you say about our artificially prolonged childhood [dziecinstwo] - our immaturity [niedojrzalosc] - takes me a little aback. After all, the kind of art closest to my heart is precisely a regression, childhood revisited. If it were possible to reverse development, to grasp some road back around to childhood again, to have its abundance and limitlessness once more - then that "age of genius," those "messianic times" promised and sworn to us by all mythologies, would come to pass. My ideal goal is to "mature" into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.
Shifting around to face the other direction, Ray links to my Nabokov chess post and remarks:
Journalists call them both chess "masters". But as I remember Vladimir Nabokov considered himself more problemicist than competitor, whereas by all accounts Marcel Duchamp played a vicious semiprofessional game.
Indeed, his chess problems are marvels of design. I quote from Speak, Memory, concerning one of his favorites:
The unsophisticated might miss the point of the problem entirely, and discover its fairly simple, 'thetic' solution without having passed through the pleasurable torments prepared for the sophisticated one. The latter would start by falling for an illusory pattern of play based on a fashionable avant-garde theme, which the composer had taken the greatest pains to "plant" (with only one obscure little move by an inconspicuous pawn to upset it). Having passed through this "antithetical" Inferno the by now ultrasophisticated solver would reach the simple key move as somebody on a wild good chase might go from Albany to New York by way of Vancouver, Eurasia and the Azores. The pleasant experience of the roundabout route (strange landscapes, gongs, tigers, exotic customs, the thrice-repeated circuit of a newly married couple around the sacred fire of an earthen brazier) would amply reward him for the misery of the deceit, and after than, his arrival at the simple key move would provide him with a synthesis of poignant artistic delight.
On the other hand:
A single anecdote suggests that Nabokov was a rather weak player. The evidence comes from later years when the novelist was a college professor at Cornell. Max Black, a philosophy professor and expert chess play, sat down to play a frieldy game with his colleague, fully believing that Nabokov was a strong competitor. To the amazement of both men, Nabokov was crushed in 15 minutes. A second game was contested; Nabokov was demolished in just 12 minutes. As Brian Boyd reports in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Nabokov saw Professor Black frequently for the next 10 years, but never again broach the subject of chess.
I quote from "Cooks, Forks, Waiters, Chess Problems and Vladimir Nabokov's The Defense", by David Edelman (American Chess Journal, no. 3, 1995). This highly stimulating piece appeared in the same issue as an extended analysis of Anderssen's "Immortal Game". The two together were the impetus for me to compose my little dialogue. (I'm a chess patzer myself. This is the only issue of any chess journal I have ever read. I tracked it down for the Nabokov essay, which turned out to be well worth my considerable trouble laying hands on it.)
In this week's NYT magazine, an article about a dream researcher/guru who offers classes in how to experience "lucid dreaming". The author, like John, is one of those people who don't remember their dreams. I, as long-time J&BB readers know, am one of those people who regularly has weird sci-fi dreams in which humans are living a hunter-gatherer existence in the ruins of a mighty interstellar spaceship. Or zombies. So, as a dream pro, I'd just like to warn you all that lucid dreaming is a mixed blessing.
The second dream I remember, which happened when I was about 5 years old, was that robbers came to my house in South Carolina and shot everyone in my family, including me. Then they went out into the driveway and stood around their truck, considering their next move. I was in agonizing pain, but I realized that I couldn't die or the dream would end. So, I went outside, thinking I would scare the robbers with my inhuman endurance, or that they would think I was a ghost, and that I could then call 911 and possibly save my family. The robbers just started throwing little rocks at me and laughing, and then one of them said, "this is your dream. We can kill you as many times as we want." See, now that sucks.
On the other hand, you can use your lucid dreaming powers to make weapons materialize, a la Matrix. Lots of guns. This is handy if you have to fight zombies all the time. Sometimes I can raise hell on some zombies this way, but other times I run out of ammo, or the gun jams.
Yes, you can use it to fly, but it requires the exercise of a peculiar mental muscle only used when flying while dreaming, which often fails, leaving you bobbing two or three feet above the ground, swimming through molasses, while zombies shamble purposefully after you. This is no good.
Yes, you can have sex, but if your only candidates are, say, demonic emanations of satan (yes, I have this problem all the time), or, as happened last night, pre-op tranny ice skating instructors, is that such a good thing?
On the whole, if you don't remember your dreams, maybe there's a damn good reason.
Crescat Sentantia's part-time blogger Waddling Thunder offers a recipe for homemade mac and cheese (as well as a mockery of tedious fusion/Spain-inspired cuisine). I beg to differ. What's all this just melting the cheese in the half-and-half short-cuttery I see? Where is the white sauce? I realize that the reason I offer so many more dessert recipes than savory ones is that I measure the sweet recipes, while I cook all the savory ones by ear, and I feel a bit silly offering recipes which don't have any fixed amounts. So, if you totally don't know how to cook, then sorry about this. I'm guessing, here. Go with the flow.
In my previous post I remarked that I thought Alan Moore was a bit off in his judgment that what makes Dark Knight great - and, by implication, what makes good superhero storytelling good - is achievement of a kind of mythic quality. He contrasts this with the sordid results of having to package one's product in endless runs of individually wrapped, monthly slices.
An essential quality of a legend is that the events in it are clearly defined in time ...You cannot apply it to most comic book characters because, in order to meet the commercial demands of a continuing series, they can never have a resolution. Indeed, they find it difficult to embrace any of the changes in life that the passage of time brings about for these very same reasons, making them finally less than fully human as well as falling far short of true myth.
I said this is not wrong, but 'myth' is vague and ambiguous and may lead us to seize the thing wrong way round, analytically. But I didn't really explain why. Let me take a stab at it. (WARNING: this post sort of turned into a short book.)
Continue reading "Crisis on Infantile Earths - or - If it's Tuesday, it must be Ragnarok!" »
I do not know just how in childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense of the the world crystalizes for us .... They are meanings that seem predestined for us, ready and waiting at the very entrance of our life ... Such images constitute a program, establish our soul's fixed fund of capital, which is allotted to us very early in the form of inklings and half-conscious feelings. It seems to me that the rest of our life passes in the interpretation of those insights, in the attempt to master them with all the wisdom we acquire, to draw them through all the range of intellect we have in our possession. These early images mark the boundaries of an artists's creativity. His creativity is a deduction from assumptions already made.
- Bruno Schulz
I keep not posting the promised follow-up to my big mock-pastoral post, mostly because I wrote it, it was crap, and I didn't post it. I've decided to try to break its down for smaller post spare-parts. I was going to start tonight by doing something like this to the NYT article on graphic novels - biff! pow! - but Kip Manley did it better. That saves time. Moving right along. A quibble:
The term ''graphic novel'' is actually a misnomer. Satrapi's ''Persepolis'' books (another installment is due this summer) are nonfiction, and so, for that matter, is ''Maus,'' once you accept the conceit that human beings are played, so to speak, by cats, dogs, mice and frogs.
Haven't read "Persepolis". But Animal Farm is Soviet history in barnyard code. If Maus isn't a novel, does that mean Orwell's novel isn't a novel? My strong instinct is to call Maus a novel, ergo fiction, even though it's a true story. (Surely we aren't going to start calling all those first novels non-fiction, just because the authors flagrantly inform us of the most embarrassingly intimate details of their dysfunctional families and ex-love-lives, with just a few names changed to protect the guilty.) But this isn't what I want to talk about.
[UPDATE: I quite inadvertently deleted a track-back from Majikthise, so I will reward her for my faux pas with a plug. She has a blog devoted to analytic philosophy and liberal politics. I poked around a bit and it seems a bit of alright. Have a look.]
Brad DeLong wants to know why he can't get any good tomatoes out of season, while his commenters who don't live in Berkeley want to know why they can't get any good tomatoes at all, ever. How do Italian people do it? And on a related note, why all the bad peaches? Everyone seems to agree that storage and shipping issues are to blame here, but again, do they use magical fairies to deliver produce in Italy?
Strangely enough, living here in Singapore has convinced me that this is not a market failure, but a demand issue. I get amazing peaches here, all of which are grown in America. Yes, while Georgians are picking over the fuzzy, greenish stones they are offered in lieu of peaches, Singaporeans are eating fragrant, tender peaches grown 15,000 miles away. The white peaches, in particular, are better than any I've ever had, even in Italy. And, while they aren't cheap, they aren't positively exorbitant either. I have my very own fruttivendolo, named Loon, who delivers to my house once a week. If any of the peaches he sends me are unripe, which happens very occasionally, I tell him so, and then I don't have to pay for them. Also, I get apologetic litchees or something the next week.
So, I can conclude nothing other than that Americans don't actually want good peaches or tomatoes, because if they did, someone would be selling them some. This seems counter-intuitive, in that everyone I know complains about the crummy produce on offer in the States, but maybe it's one of those "I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon" things? But shouldn't some seller arrise to serve the needs of Brad and his disappointed readership at profit margins what exceed those garnered by shipping things to Singapore? Or maybe Adam Smith is wrong about everything?
Having linked to Ray's interesting post in my post below, I will now comment on its legal aspect. Apparently the book he read contains 'transcribed eavesdropping' on ordinary conversations, the fruits of which now allegedly belong to Cambridge UP. Ray jokes that he is henceforth releasing all his personal chat under Creative Commons. But does it actually make sense that someone can transcribe someone else's words - without their permission; or even with it, but without the additional step of getting them to sign over copyright - and then own those words? The issue doesn't come up much, I suppose. But what about interviews? If I give an interview and later want to quote myself at length, don't I still own my own words (although perhaps not the interviewer's questions)? This seems like the sort of issue that must have come up at some point.
This post is for Ray, who is working independently on all the stuff I've been thinking about. (And if he hasn't been reading my stuff, I simply don't know what this is supposed to be about.) What follows is some stuff that was originally supposed to go in my long philosophical dialogue (PDF), but didn't make the cut. Clearly it needs it's own home, but it isn't quite ready to live on its own. The end is a mess, but the Nabokov quotes are nice. I've been tinkering with it, and it fits so well with what Ray says ...
Somehow, I just realized, I have never mentioned on this blog that when I was a kid, my step-dad was friends with the infamous Republican operative Lee Atwater. He was part of my step-dad's general Southern crew, all graduates of the University of the South, I think. I know what you're all wondering. Was he a dedicated alcoholic who would make jokes about having sex with 13-year-old girls? Yes, yes he was.
You know how Long Story, Short Pier is the coolest weblog ever? And he has that strip of crazy links running down the side? Check out this Albanian, be-mulleted, space rocker. You won't be sorry.
Are you all aware of how scary male Real Dolls are? I mean, orders of magnitude scarier than the female ones. I have been trying to think about whether this means our concepts of female attractiveness are more abstract than our concepts of male attractiveness. I think so. (via Cup of Chica)
UPDATE: I took out the least safe for work links so our blog won't get too many real doll cooties. You can still acess them all via the Cup of Chicha link.
Due to the fact that I have been either pregnant or breastfeeding for the last, um, four years, I have not had many opportunities to tell you all about great cocktails. Mmmm, cocktails. Here are a few patented Belle Waring tips for summer fun.
Zoë has in recent months refined her signature 'imperturbable eggplant' style of rendering the human face. This portrait, entitled 'mommy', easily lives up to the precocious promise of her earlier blue bad baby' period.
A fine and interesting Grant Morrison interview (via Long Story, Short Pier). At the risk of dragging down the tone by dragging in Kendall Walton again when we could just chat about superheroes, let me connect one passage from the interview to my posts of the last few days. We all have words we like, and it turns out Morrison is more than averagely partial to 'imagination'. I've been wondering what 'imagination' means, if you haven't noticed. What's the difference, if any, between 'imagining x', 'supposing x', 'considering x', 'entertaining x', 'make-believing x', 'suspending disbelieve in x', 'appreciating representations of x'?
Morrison isn't remotely concerned with any of this. He's telling the comics industry to grow a spine of self-confidence. Good advice. But I'm struck by the rich data set of ordinary usage he has inadvertently generated along the way. He really likes this Swiss army knife of a term, 'imagination'. (Underlining mine.)
"Wise up: the more comics imitate movies, the less need movies will have for comics as a source of imaginative material; let's remember that the movie industry is ONLY NOW learning to simulate the technology and imagination Jack Kirby packed in his pencil 40 years ago. As I've been saying to the point of boredom for the last couple of years, our creative community owes it to the future to produce today the insane, logic-shattering, side-splitting day-glo stories which will be turned into all-immersive holographic magic theatre experiences in 40 years time. The comics medium is a very specialized area of the Arts, home to many rare and talented blooms and flowering imaginations and it breaks my heart to see so many of our best and brightest bowing down to the same market pressures which drive lowest-common-denominator blockbuster movies and television cop shows. Let's see if we can call time on this trend by demanding and creating big, wild comics which stretch our imaginations. Let's make living breathing, sprawling adventures filled with mind-blowing images of things unseen on Earth. Let's make artefacts that are not faux-games or movies but something other, something so rare and strange it might as well be a window into another universe because that's what it is. Let's see images which come directly from the minds of inspired artists, not from publicity stills. Superhero comics are way too expensive for the mass market and the brand of garish, violent pulp they were once the only source for is available these days in more attractive media. We should get real about this and stop dumbing down, stop stunting our artists' creativity and stop trying to attract a completely imaginary 'mainstream audience'. The best way to consolidate comics as a viable medium is to make them LESS like other media, not more. Let our artists go wild on imaginative page layouts. Let our writers find stories in their dreams and not in the newspaper pages, at least for a little while again. Aim for the cool, literate 'college' audience, as Stan Lee did to great success in the 60s."
I could offer a thumbnail analysis of each occurrence, but that would be pedantic even by my standards. Let me just point out - you can connect the dots on your own time - that 'imagine' and variations thereupon let you talk about producers of art, art objects ,and consumers. Imaginative people imagine things, causing them to produce wildly imaginative imaginative works, making us imagine things, thereby stretching our imaginations, making us imaginative ... and around the circle of artistic life goes.
'Imagine' and variations thereupon allow you to make descriptive claims, normative claims - claims about actualities and potentialities, powers to produce and things produced. You can easily, i.e. with superficial plausibility, reify the denotation of 'imagination' and thereby metaphorically conjure a circulating substance emblematic of the whole economy of art - production, art object, consumption. It can even be reified to the point where it ends up in Kirby's pencil. (You would never say 'Jack Kirby packed supposition that Captain America is real in his pencil.') It's handy to be able to invoke, with one sweep of the hand, a sense of the unity of circulating artistic energy by talking about all stages of that circulation under one verbal heading, even if you don't actually have any particularly rich theory of the unity of circulating artistic energy.
'Imagination' is, on reflection, vastly semantically and syntactically plastic. It's got noun, verb and adjectival forms ready for use. You can slide between saying what is and what should be. (When Morrison writes, "a source of imaginative material", that mean both 'a source of fictional material' and 'a source of good material'.) It's handy to be able to slide lightly over the sticky fact that the nature of artists, the nature of art, and the nature of audiences are three separate issues.
Not that Morrison is being lazy; quite the contrary. That's what makes this passage so nice. The judgment being rendered is clear-eyed, decisive and rather thoughtful. Which just goes to show you that thoughtful people can put to economical use a Swiss army knife of a term that sort of means everything and therefore sort of doesn't mean anything. What this really shows is that the term 'imagination' is a fine multi-purpose tool in the hands of those who already have (or feel they have) a fairly confident grasp of the nature of fiction, and need a handy hook from which to hang their forceful opinions. I think attempts like Walton's to reverse this order of things - to try to take some independent sense of 'imagination' and leverage it into understanding of the nature of fiction - are much less plausible. It's like asking: what is the REAL shape of this soft lump of clay? Wait two sentences. It'll change.
I'm making believe that you're in my arms
though I know you're so far away
Making believe I'm talking to you,
wish you could hear what I say
And here in the gloom of my lonely room
we're dancing like we used to do
Making believe is just another way of dreaming,
so till my dreams come true
I'll whisper "Good night",
turn out the light, and kiss my pillow
Making believe it's you.
- "I'm Making Believe", Gordon and Monaco [made famous by Fitzgerald]
Let me pick up more or less where I left off in my previous post. I disagree with much that Kendall Walton claims in Mimesis and Make-Believe largely because I see trouble with his employments of 'imagination' and 'make-believe'. And it isn't just a translation problem, though we need to watch out for those. I'm not just uncharitably foisting my senses on Walton's sentences to embarrass his overall account. I'm refusing his senses as unsuitable.
And let me reiterate that I'm quite unsure that I have understood Walton correctly. Perhaps I'm just hacking away at a straw-man I've constructed. For now, I'm just trying to get my preliminary criticisms down in writing. I'm planning to reread after this and verify that I got it right.
Continue reading "Kendall Walton, Part II: More On Make-Believe, Imagination & Fiction" »
I read all of Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe betwixt and between sunny sessions on Thai sand. Overall verdict: quite interesting but ultimately unconvincing.
Let’s take up where I left off in previous posts. The nature and proper definition of ‘fiction’. Analytic philosophy stuff, not very flashy. Anyone who wants to help me out is welcome, but probably you will not be entertained.
And really this is just me recording impressions, trying to express them before I forget them; so everything should be qualified with 'I'm really not sure, but it seems to me that ...' But that's dead boring to keep repeating every other sentence. So I sound more confident than I really am just to punch it up a little.
Continue reading "Kendall Walton on Fiction, Make-Believe & Imagination" »
Via random googling, I discovered what my long-lost high school friend Sarah Truitt is doing:
I am investigating whether single top production can be detected in the 119 inverse picobarns of data collected in CDF Runs Ia and Ib. Single top production is expected to occur at Fermilab's Tevatron, primarily by way of channels known as "W-star" and "W-gluon fusion", at a rate considerably smaller than that of the famous ttbar mechanism but not utterly beyond hope of detection in the current dataset. The better statistics of the Run II dataset will permit full exploitation of the groundwork laid in this analysis.Work is at an early stage. My strategy thus far is to study the properties of Pythia- and Herwig-generated single top events in an effort to develop a set of kinematic cuts and understand the cuts' efficiencies. Variables of interest include the standard jet and lepton Et's along with fancier combinations of variables exploiting the distinctive kinematic features of single top events. Then applying these cuts to CDF data will provide insight into their rejection power. Other techniques, including b-tagging, will be brought to bear as this analysis develops.
Ummm, right. B-tagging; good thinking. I was wondering myself as I read along, "when is she going to bring some b-tagging into the mix?" The funny thing is, she looks exactly the same, except without a cool, asymmetrical 80-s haircut. Presumably the white-hot flame of her love for The Smiths has died down a bit, too, though I'll have to email her to find out. In 9th grade she used to write all the lyrics to The Hand That Rocks The Cradle on the blackboard, every single day. I thought that was pretty kick-ass.
Continuing the whole "hot guys" theme, Clive Owen is hot. Check out his Fametracker fame audit. He's right up commenter misseli's alley, being British, brainy and brooding. Oh, is he brooding. He's like, hatching baby chicks under his eyebrows, he's brooding so hard. Aw, just see for yourselves.
I don't know if I'm going to sign up for Clive Owen-related news updates at the Clive Owen Online Shrine, though. That'd be creepy.
Winding Up Godot, a production of Beckett's play of almost that name - or almost that play, starring wind-up toys - has been sued for $1000 by the estate of the playwright. (Via Stephany, sitting in for Maud.)
I'll keep that in mind in case Belle and I ever get around to staging "Endgame!" Our play about a failed production of Beckett's play of almost that name, saved by gradual transformation into a life-affirming Broadway-style musical. The play's sour director-star - Hamm - is gradually overwhelmed by the personality of his young, virile costar-lover - Clov - who shows up one night wearing spandex and starts swarming up his ladder in dashing, piratical fashion. Soon he has added a whole Circle du Soleil-style acrobatic sequence, "Clov's Dream", with ladders and trampolines. Hamm finds himself riding around in an Amazing Technicolor Dream Chair, courtesy of crafty stagehands, who are starting to get into the spirit of it. A sweet romance blossoms between the elderly couple playing Nagg and Nell.
Jason Kottke notes a peculiar attempt to exert illocutionary force. From Wired:
"We have a policy that we are not being hacked." When I explain that, policy or no, they are being hacked, she says, "Security isn't a priority for us. We're mostly focused on making the site go faster."
This ill communicational study in How Not To Do Things With Words reminds me of Stanley Cavell's acerbic critique, in "The Politics of Interpretation", of Paul De Man's appropriation of J. L. Austin's philosophy in Allegories of Reading.
Take [de Man’s] prominent and recurrent invocation of a distinction between the constative and the performative. He sometimes, not always, associates Austin’s name with these words, but so far as I understand his sense of what he wants the distinction to do, it contradicts Austin’s. A hint of this occurs in his last chapter, when he describes an excuse as a performative utterance on the ground that its purpose is not to state but to convince. But I say “I convince you” is not (except by chance) to convince you, and so it is trivially not a performative utterance. In Austin’s more general theory, convincingness and persuasiveness are not illocutionary forces of utterances. They are perhaps the quintessential examples of what is not illocutionary.
Shorter Paul De Man: validity isn't really a priority for us. We're mostly focused on making the theory go faster.
"Once upon a time there were three bad aliens. But Wonder Woman swupped down and roped them up. So they said, 'Curses!' The end."
Freytag's triangle really shouldn't be a right triangle, i.e. there shouldn't be an immediate, vertical, elevator-like rise up to the climax, followed by a more gradual falling action. Nevertheless, Zoë's storytelling skills are improving. And I believe this is her first, admittedly not wholly felicitious, foray into the thicket that is English irregular verbiage.
It's dull hearing descriptions of tropical paradises, so I'll just mention that Zoë joined the Filipino cover band to good effect, belting out standards like "Itsty Bitsy Spider", "ABC", "Twinkle, twinkle" and "Baa, baa, blacksheep" with Joplinesque aplomb. She also mastered, passably, the "la la la" bit to Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head". We were congratulated on her performance and progress, over three days of nightly performances, by many Norwegian, Japanese, Israeli and Russian tourists.
Here's more photographic evidence:
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