The future of medicine

Tugs - A. Barake - All rights reserved 2014

An item on this morning's public radio twigged my imagination. It was an interview with someone preparing to go on a medical mission to a developing country, with a fully equipped hospital ship.

Usually these kinds of stories annoy me, because there is the whiff of self-righteous do-gooding, and I know I am probably misguided about feeling this way, but pride is a big factor in human behaviour and the recipient's pride is rarely discussed.

Anyways... because I was annoyed, my mind strayed to alternatives to charity, in the same way that accessible ramps on buildings or at curb crossings benefit everyone, not just people with mobility impairment, why not try to overhaul the way medicine is delivered to everyone, using these mission approaches. For example, there are fully equipped ophthalmology planes that can land in remote sites to do eye surgery, there are the above mentioned hospital boats that provide all kinds of services including surgery, and there are travelling emergency teams that go to disaster sites for first response.

Well how about eliminating our (bloated) static hospital infrastructure, that is continuously growing its administrative load following Parkingson's laws, and make all medicine mobile?

The current ubiquitous Web and mobile telephony infrastructure combined with good scheduling software could provide the required efficiencies. The MD's and support staff would travel to the patients and treat them in-situ, with the best mobile equipment money can buy. I think it would be cheaper than maintaining the infrastructure we have now. It would be the return of the house call.

HAL, Zombies, Territorial Instinct, and Idiot Philosophers

Fire alarm panel in Kyoto apartment. From my flickr

It hit me like a flash today that 2001 A Space Odyssey is all about the "me" inside us.

Kubrick augmented Clarke's fairly banal story about extra-terrestrial visitation into a philosophical tour-de-force when he modified HAL's role in the story.

He made HAL truly and fundamentally conscious, with all the attendant complications of having to deal with another "me" on the ship.

There exists a school of thought which we could call the ostrich psychologists, who refuse to study or to consider consciousness since they see it as "subjective".

Their idiot brethren cognitive philosophers have proposed a thought experiment to demonstrate this point of view, where a zombie with no "me" interacts with a normal human. The argument goes like this:

• If such a zombie could behave in every way like a person, interact in day-to-day activities "normally", yet not be self-aware, who is to tell that the "me" is not there? 
• So ergo, consciousness is a fabrication and is useless.

There is a big flaw in that argument (despite my brutal simplification, that is the crux of it, I promise):

How do we know that the zombie could behave like a human? It may not be possible.

Consciousness is a survival trait, since it makes one evade pain, evade death, it comes with a territorial urge, a the need for a place in the world, a self is an embodiment of the sensory matrix.

So consciousness is, must be, an evolutionary an advantage, it has to make you run or fight better.

Kubrick saw this clearly and expressed it dramatically. HAL defends its turf because it is conscious. The "me" must prevail over those who want to snuff it.

I'd like to finish with a wonderful quote from a non-idiot:

The demand for continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself to possess true prophetic power. We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature, non-existent until then.

—William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890

Open letter to Lakoff about his book on math

Dear Prof. Lakoff

A short note to say how much I am enjoying "Where Mathematics Comes From". It is providing closure for me.

In the 1980's, I fell in love with math during a college course based on the very foundations-conscious Calculus text by Spivak and although I enjoyed the rigor and beauty, I could not help but feel a bit uneasy at the hoops one had to jump through for the proofs to work, all this in the name of eliminating intuition.

I eventually ended up on the "applied" side, to the regret of my wonderful teachers, because I felt much more at ease with the way things seemed to work out intuitively. Successive approximations to non-linear functions using the university mainframe seem to do the trick of finding solutions to things I was curious about. Infinitesimal approaches, simplex algorithms and Fourier series implemented in WATFOR to solve hard differential equations numerically were simple but magical approaches to understanding. I was gratefully standing on Turing and Church's shoulders.

Anyhow, over the years I kept looking for insights as to why the pure math left me a bit uneasy since I still admired the beauty of it, (like pining for a high-school sweetheart) in all kinds of places including David Foster Wallace's overly baroque book on the math of infinities (yikes).

Your book reconciled the comfort of the applied and the beauty of the formal for me. There is a cognitive continuum after all, between the purists and us engineering/computing folk.

It connected the dots, clarifying the things that seemed like bridges by grounding them. By focusing on the metaphors for infinity it helped in categorizing things that were both computing and theory, but that could only exist because of computing: compiler theory, the Aho-Ullman stuff derived from Chomsky. I can now see why there was all this cognitive dissonance when I was learning Analysis.

For example, the space-as-points versus space-containing-points argument you and Nunez make is beautiful and could be applied to the philosophy of physics as well. The notion of particle comes to mind. I think Feynman the intuitionist in physics is a counterpart to Poincare in the world of math. His explanations of energy quanta and fields address the analogous notions of space and points in the world of physics, where it seems some still cling to the Platonic reality of math. The intuitionists, like Poincare, were very courageous and insightful as well as demonstrably able to make new discoveries as they sidestepped the Gottingen school's rejection of intuitive geometry and Cantor's objectification of infinities. Set theory is nice but infinity is just NaN.

I had read Kline's history of math some years ago and although I agreed with his view that a rift in math was created at the time when intuition was relegated to a sideline, there seemed to be something missing, much more to say. Your work with Nunez closed that loop for me.

I am now curious and encouraged to find out more about any research to make rationals (the real Reals :-)) the basis for discretization, as well as links between foundations work and Chomsky's formal grammars. I agree as the book infers that terminology in math is key to disambiguation - but technical terms like Real and continuous are too deeply entrenched of course. Maybe intro calculus courses should begin with a review of those specialized semantics. Like lawyers learning contract terms...

I am also curious about reactions to your work from the math community (rather than by the pedagogical folks) since I think the arguments are revolutionary and deeply original. I looked cursorily on the Web but found little of substance in reaction or support of the ideas in the book. Are mathematicians looking into closing the gaps you identify? Did you get much substantive opposition to your views? Finally, kudos for the other wonderful work on political discourse. Sorely needed. I wish I could be young enough again to enroll as a student of your faculty, but I will continue to follow your research with great interest nonetheless.

Last Year at Marienbad and Kubrick lovers

Resnais/Robbe-Grillet's movie could have never been made by Kubrick, by any American. It is a gulf that cannot be bridged. It is a great film that defines the distance between two cultures. A defining artefact.

But let's look at the commonalities first. Formalism, cinematography, music, all these are components of the medium, mastered by both sides. Influences are acknowledged, Marienbad left its mark that way.

The difference is in the extreme surrealism, if that is at all a possible term. Resnais does not hesitate to go all the way, and manages to get it made as a mainstream film. Cultural considerations could never trump commercial ones that way in Hollywood. Never.

It was panned by American critics. It was a challenge to their perceived cultural hegemony. I am not sure what the current critical status is, other than it being something which has taken place, that exists and that cannot be taken back. This is the advantage of reproducible media over museum pieces, stone temples, things that can be annihilated in war. It is also the curse of the commercial interests who want to charge toll, but who at the the same time want mass consumption.

There are others like it, Tarkovsky's Nostalghia comes to mind, but very few that speak universals without compromise or banality.

Marienbad tiptoes and steps on formalism, uniqueness, understanding, ambiguity, misunderstanding, romance, and pretentiousness, and succeeds in being unique, beautiful, and influential.

Commoditization of Relationships

All rights reserved A. Barake 2013

Finding a partner for love, for life is part of the journey for most, and it is a bit of a paradox that we need to think of that person as special for it to gel. The search for the click of compatibility is at odds with what biology has evolved for us. Put random male and female animals together and they will usually mate. Of course there are exceptions, and it may well be that we as a species are evolving away from this facility so as to ensure our survival in this increasingly competitive environment.

What made me think of this topic, the selection of mates, is the age-old cultural stigma around pornography, around commoditization of desire. I think that one reason this feeling exists is that it tends to devalue the specialness felt around love, around desire. It compartmentalizes it and ultimately makes it a consumable. Nothing new here. Prostitution, pornography and sexual entertainment, to coin a phrase, have always been part of commerce. I think it is useful to think of them clearly, as subsidiaries of humanism, as ways to make us conform, to be farm animals in the corporate culture. The test is that someone profits from them. They also represent an area of potential emotional confusion, because they link very strong feelings and instincts with something that is too tightly framed and packaged as a consumer item. It is not a good idea to become attached to consumables, and it is not a good idea to separate your emotions in such a way as to be able to cater to those needs in exchange for currency. The malaise I feel is akin to the distinction made between a soldier and a murderer. The cultural definition is clear, but not completely rational, it is based on emotional separation. (An aside: the current CBC attention to post-traumatic stress disorder is the tip of a very big iceberg, one that they will never acknowledge, since they are an instrument of the state, a placebo for culture, a fucking depressing lie, but all we have left in the mainstream.)

Marcuse, in An Essay on Liberation makes a case for the way we internalize comfort and consumerism, becoming willing corporate subjects. Subjects are manipulated, held. Reading between the lines, one can see that conformity is part of the enabling mechanism, and commoditization of our humanity is the precipice to stay away from. Individual feeling, specialness, and its protection from influence, including advertising are survival mechanisms too. The difference between a surviving consumer culture and one that thrives on equality is sustainability. At some point, if we follow the former to its logical conclusion, we will have to eat dollars and copulate with machines.

The Continuity of Consciousness

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

Were the Greeks onto something when they coined the roots of the word "consciousness" and "continuity"? To be conscious is to remember the last moment of perception and to link it to the next, to have your brain relate perceptions into some coherent short term stream, so that you can feel and act on it.

Consciousness is continuity of perception. As you fall asleep, that continuity gets fragmented and you tend to forget the next moment, you lose consciousness and continuity.

Consciousness depends on the existence of the short-term cache used to process incoming data from the senses. It has to be fast, and it has to integrate the information for the deeper layers, the one that drive action and long term memory. It has to draw upon memory as well. Short term memory is limited in size because it is big on processing power. Lots of neurons required.

Current research on cognition suggests that we have a bunch of neural bundles in the brain that do this work all in parallel, that these compete for bandwidth, and the resultant dynamic network signals are what we can call consciousness. The signals that have control of the bus at the time, and that pulse it to make us act and remember are the Self.

This model does not address the big question of the Me. What makes a writer want to take this flow of perceptions, call them ideas, record them on secondary external memory and publish them so as to possibly communicate and affect the behaviour of others. The Will to Power?

What links us to the world as Beings. This is what the better religions are struggling with, and Zen Buddhism comes close to understanding it when it concludes that the universe is Me, and that the relationships between beings is the Universe. Still, a loop. Maybe language is the issue. We have an object-oriented language, and that is a flawed model, as many programmers and programs are discovering. The world cannot be entirely described as a hierarchy of "objects" What is an object anyhow, except an integration by the senses, a model. Another loop.

Some drugs like alcohol, anaesthetics, and sleep hormones allow these neural bundles to slow down, to rest and possibly to re-organize, do to maintenance. Caffeine and other stimulants speed up the bus somehow.

We feel and act differently under these influences because our front end processing changes, the continuity of short term memory and of sensual processing changes, thus affecting our sense of self and our relation to our longer term memory and patterns of integrated behaviour.

Musicians and visual artists discover new patterns under the influence. Whether they create "better" work or play better is difficult to say, but I think that the intent is to explore different avenues, which can lead to better work when edited. Write drunk and edit sober said the late Kingsley Amis.

Two Movies about Sex and Love

From my flickr

Both are Canadian made, both are based on autobiographical novels, both are small, relatively unknown, and both treat sex and obsession realistically, without the usual prudish conventions. The theme of lost childhood also runs through both, with scenes in playgrounds and scenes from childhood. The differ in the the gender perspective, which makes the  juxtaposition interesting to me.

The more recent is Lie with Me (2005), and the other is The Favorite Game (2003).

Lie with Me, based on the novel by Tamara Berger, deals with the obsession of a young woman with a stranger, and his reciprocation, and it follows their affair as it evolves. It explores sexual obsession and love, love as questioned and ultimately defined by words and acts, love as visceral need. The point of view is subjective but switches between the lovers. The inevitable weakness is that the viewer cannot understand why their mutual attraction is stronger than attraction to the other players, say the other girlfriend, or the other men she meets. One must accept the coup-de-foudre as it is presented, in documentary fashion. There are few words, the movie is all subtext, and the subtext can be interpreted broadly. It is about the space between lovers, and succeeds in reflecting the mystery of falling in love, the insecurity and excitement, and the release.

The Favorite Game, based on Leonard Cohen's first novel deals with Leo's (as he is called in the movie but not in the book) search for love, and tries to explore the basis for his behaviour through flashbacks. Leo is afraid of commitment but is obsessed with beauty and with sex. The movie follows his affairs from his point of view, making the viewer identify with him maybe too strongly, and the weakness here is that despite his callow and selfish behaviour, he remains a sympathetic and charming fellow. It is a male perspective. The women are well cast, developed as characters, as much as the novel allows, but the movement of the movie leads to an implicit acceptance of Leo's inability to give enough of himself. It is a sort of visual justification of his remoteness and egotism.

Juxtaposing the two points of views above is interesting, in that in Lie with Me, there is a search for more, for extreme attachment, for physical and emotional welding, whereas in the The Favorite Game, there is is search for detachment despite the need for physical intimacy. It is not about sexual possession, only about sexual conquest.

As movies, they suffer from the fact that the viewer is necessarily outside, a manipulated, carried-about observer, and cannot be made to feel what the characters feel. We must watch what goes on in documentary fashion and try to catch a reflection of the subtle emotions at play. The acting, writing and direction are good, but the medium and form are restrictive. Love and sex in movies are extremely difficult to convey accurately. The most sucessful and best example I can think of is Paris Texas, by Wim Wenders. There are no sex scenes, there is only talk and glances, and the point of view is omniscient. Wenders succeeds through word images, landscape, haunting guitar, and almost cliche settings. Strange and beautiful. Eric Rohmer's movies succeed in the same way.

Oh, one last thing, Lie with Me is set in Toronto, in the Annex, and The Favorite Game mostly in Montreal. No significance.

Fake Control Through Cheap Realities

Just reread Susan Sontag's famous book on photography. One of the later essays starts with what could be a comment on the Internet: images are necessary to alleviate the anxieties of modern culture, things like class and money stress, consumerism, emptiness and lack of privacy. Images provide a surrogate sense of power, of ownership and control over reality as well as enough variety to keep desire down, or at least to channel it.

Hey, this is why the Internet is not censored in our culture. It is a pacifier.

We have more than just the photos Sontag was writing about, more of the pseudo-real to keep us occupied and calm. Hell, interactive stuff too, live feeds, tweets that are like ESP antennae hums, and eyes everywhere taking and framing pictures that are pasted to a map. It reduces the biological need for face to face, for real politics, for making art and for ultimately making trouble...except when it is used an means of communications and of organizing. So we need to watch out for that, to suck it up and store it so that we can incriminate those who use it that way.

Keep on doing selfies.

Meta-fiction, script writing, travel writing and the novel

Copyright 2010 - A. Barake

I have been reading Redmond O'Hanlon, Michael Palin, and Bill Bryson recently, in parallel for no particular reason. So for the same reason, I will comment about them together.

After having enjoyed Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", which I think is his masterpiece, I picked up his book of columns on returning to live in North America, New Hampshire specifically. Like his other travel chronicles, it is an amusing collection of his peculiar collisions with everyday reality, filtered and edited extremely cunningly, but apparently effortlessly. He is an artist of the everyday, a likable author, although I have become suspicious about amiable literary personae since I read Witold Rybczynski's gentle books on history and architecture. You see, he taught classes at McGill while I was there, and he certainly was not amiable. Maybe he did not like teaching.. who knows, but I was very surprised as how radically his literary voice differed from his aural one.

So Bryson is well edited, slick, fun. Low on big content, even less than Witold, but big on small stuff, except in his science book, which I have acknowledged above and cannot recommend enough.

Let us move on, towards the synthesis that I am trying to circle, using the next guy in the list. Palin. Specifically his novels, and more specifically his latest, "The Truth". I think it is a ripping yarn, perfectly suited for a TV short series, but I also think that it is a failure as a novel. It tries hard, with many details taken from life, that may resonate with some readers, that surely resonate with the author, clear descriptions, characterizations and lots of touching interactions with minor characters, yet the voice of a novel is missing. The writing is friendly but fluffy, verbose almost, requiring editing. I wanted to edit it while I was reading it. Michael, I offer my services officially if you wish. It just needs tightening up to become a good novel. It needs excising of noise as well as the addition of texture for coherence, it needs a drive, a plot that gels, not just a good story. And by the way, I think Palin is truly amiable, not someone with a dual persona. What you read is what you get. A huge success and role model due to innate talent and goodness, not editing. Just sayin'.

Then there is O'Hanlon, who had been sitting on my shelf unread for years, I mean the Borneo book that made his name. What a hoot. Apparently the man was coming out of years of slogging at his thesis, a bit down, when he decided to hit the jungle with a friend who happens to be a great poet, but who comes off as a calm, wry and stabilizing partner but ultimately a side-kick in the book, not the way he sees himself I would think.

O'Hanlon can write. The stuff is direct, intelligent, and gets into your head like a conversation over drinks late at night. It was written by Redmond for Redmond, but it makes one want to be Redmond, or at least to be around him. Of course it is a sort of advertisement for himself, but it is brilliantly self-deprecating, and smart as well as genuine, a masterpiece. I will read his other stuff to see if my opinions about his truth can be sustained.

I have written about Paul Theroux and Coetzee here before, particularly about how I think they shape their voice, how they manage to write freshly when so much of the plain style has already been done before them, on the same subjects. Their trick is individualism, filtering common experience and internalizing the world in a deeply reflective way. The other guys I mention in this essay go there too now and then, O'Hanlon being my favorite, but Palin being the most honest about it I think. Bryson is a journalist, so it is difficult to tell if and
when he will turn on you, or how deep the stuff goes with him. It may be just copy.

Where does fiction and meta-fiction intersect with the travel story? Palin's book is an attempt, but as I said, I think it fails. O'Hanlon is pure travel, no fiction. Bryson is column journalism, short narrative, with some
exagerration for fun. Theroux does walk across the border into the country of the novel, he is aware of how lying well is an art. Coetzee too, but by avoiding the lie, by mixing characters with self, by doing the meta fiction thing very well.

I wish some of the lesser meta-fiction types writing today (who would use any mention of their name as advertising) would put in the effort to reach the borders of that territory rather than re-treading the plain biographical noise with outrageous urban experience that is so common. Bukowski, Cohen, Kerouac all did it very well, but they were also poets, and that is their legacy, their context. Meta navel gazing only works if you prove yourself through poetry too. Coetzee does it with prose alone.

Selfies

Add captioCopyright 2018 A. Barake

The usual trope about the necessary relationship between the individual's pursuit of art and its potential for universal appeal makes it a spectrum, or a see-saw, where some classic works seem to transcend the creator to the point of redefining them, think of Kafka for example, and others are callow self-centered curiosities,  vicarious navel-gazing porn, something we can escape into for a while, think of Leonard Cohen, or of Madonna.

Being a spectrum that ranges from the personal to the universal, and the laws of statistics being what they are (more on that later), most artists balance with one foot on each side of the fulcrum to make a go at it.

Since I am using a categorization argument, I must also talk of those who create entire new universals, new micro-cultures, new ways of seeing, by extending the culture. Movements are easier in groups, thus marketing attempts that wow the weak-minded critics, but once in a while, a huge, huge ego leave the packs behind, through mono-maniacal focus and dedication. This is a special  flavour of self-centredness. This is
what we label as genius.

The cost is to the normal. You cannot be outside the norm and live normally. Looking at examples, like Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hemingway, we see the huge personal toll on their close ones. Relationships have to come second to the work.

Since we learn by aping others, there will always be minor artists who embrace the self-centredness first and then hope for the universality.

What easier subject to study than the one we are in love with most. The self-portrait is a rite of passage, like the nude. Without a real muse, I can be my own. Even a muse can act as an amplifier to my ego.

There are so many writers, musicians, visual artists, who can do no better than tell us stories about themselves. The ones we hear above the din are the ones who tell us with style, those that rise above the averaging noise, that can be seen through the grass, but the intensity, quirkiness, and interest is no substitute for transcendence.

Define transcendence? It is a tear in the fabric of the ordinary. It can be a distillation of events that has not occurred to others - therefore something new, always a winning formula, but more commonly, it is a new
combination of the ordinary that falls outside the usual intersection of normal bell curves.

This brings me to the statistical discussion that I promised earlier. Someone wise said that statistics is the mathematics used to make sense of stories. What that means is that we can use statistics to understand how stories are related, and how likely they can related to patterns. And patterns are the stuff of
thought, of art. Patterns are things that occur because the environment is what it is, so a pattern is a tendency, and from there we can rise up through the layers of entropy towards culture, toward life and art.

Statistics came into its own in the early twentieth century, and became so useful that it is now essential in industrial production, in fact a Guinness employee - yes the dark beverage company - discovered a family of distribution curves that help us "know" the level of uncertainty of events or data from very scarce samples, from very short stories, because stories follow natural patterns.

Statistics is counter-intuitive because it is not about individuals, but about groups, about populations, and we are not naturally empathetic, we are competitive, we are locked inside one vision, inside the self and the self wants to think itself unique. Statistics is the tonic to free-will arguments.

Art has to be on the edges of the bell curves, yet it has to make the bell ring from there.

Lars Von Trier, green screens, and the edge of Reality

I want to talk about why I think all this "virtual movie making" is happening and why Lars and his buddies wanted to put an end to it and why all this may be misunderstood.

First why all the green screen effects, backgrounds, characters? Is it because  there may be the feeling that what can be captured on film as reality has become banal, overly accessible? Is it because we can travel much anywhere quite affordably, and so locale is losing its novelty appeal, it is no longer only the rich that can visit Petra or Goa, or the Forbidden City?

So maybe we make things up. Other planets, other systems, alternate reality, dystopia, and fantasy. There even seems to be a trend to recreate the destruction of skyscrapers that marked the start of this decade. Abuse breeds abuse, and we are repeating the behaviour of the Japanese post-nuclear monster movies, on a different scale, with transformer planes and spaceships crashing into futuristic cities. 

 Lars seems to object to this, and rightly so. There are interesting and real (in the non-CGI sense) experiences and associated beauty to be mined still. We are thrill seeking entertainment consumers but we don't have to be just that. So his solution is  to make movies about thing we usually do not see, the intimacies and extreme moments, sex of others. I am not sure this is any better. It may even be  the same, cheap thrills. 

Has the mining of multi-layered human experience ended, has the Nouvelle Vague covered all that territory? Soderberg and Nichols are still doing good stuff on the North American side of that vein are they not? Why not build a bit? Stories and scripts are risky, it is easier to assume that the middle of the bell curve wants the opening weekend escapism, but then I  think there is an opportunity to quell the angst of the consumer culture and the futile lust for the new and special with the quiet calming, dare I say Zen, reality that a focused lens can bring to life. It is a bit like writing about the everyday to make is stand out to make it special, a diary of life as it could be as it is.

The male bimbo

In CEGEP (Quebec grades 12-13), I was lucky to attend a great poetry class as part of the English curriculum. The teacher was an ornery young guy called Mike. During one of the first classes, he asked what poets we read, and someone said Leonard Cohen. I could have said that but I hadn't, some instinct stopped me. So the poor soul who did incurred the Mike's wrath. Cohen was, in his opinion a poseur, a fake depressive who just trolled for women. This was in the late 70's, before he Len became the poet laureate for elderly ladies and their hip husbands. Mr. Tower of Song.

I liked Cohen's work. I should even write that in the present tense. I did not dislike the guy back then, I had read The Favorite Game, and thought it was a great love story, love of Montreal, for love, for bodies, for self, for adolescence and coming of age, not for an individual woman per se, although Shell comes close. (Does he spell her name like that? I forget).

Cohen is the type of guy that many more women than men like, on average. I tried to come to terms as to why, you know, why "women go for that type of guy"? But that is a silly question. There is no logical argument. There is only comparison. Why do guys go for Pam Anderson?

Simple solution to the mystery - Len is a male bimbo. Women go for bimbos, men go for bimbos, everyone goes for bimbos, they are the fast food of love.

The end.

Overweening Generalist: Neologisms and the Neo Soft (?) Whorfian Revolution

Overweening Generalist: Neologisms and the Neo Soft (?) Whorfian Revolution

the Baron - go see it

Anything I would say would not do it justice and be pompous.

Here's to Gilliam

On training to be a vector

Copenhagen, from my flickr

I saw a picture of a Seoul skyline today, with, in the the foreground, a bamboo (inspired) roofed temple and in the background curtain walled skyscrapers. The use of bamboo rods to make a roof determines the shape of the roof, and this in turn makes the constraint an exercise in honing beauty out of a difficult material. So the roof was painted, curved like a wave, the tube-ends ornamented and waterproofed. Maybe it was not even bamboo anymore.

I bring this up because I am working on a local North-American project for private clients and I was musing about alternate materials like bamboo. I am a vector, like most architects, for cross cultural forms and materials. Vectors can carry diseases like mosquitoes do malaria, can fertilize like bees, or they can annoy like architects with out-there proposals.

It would be a risk for my client to consider non-local, non-traditional (in North America) roofing materials, however carefully detailed. They pay me mostly to avoid having to deal with the building officials who can be a hurdle, and who likes things tied up in nice local ribbons.

Did my training prepare me for this vector role? Did it give me the selling skills, the confidence and the ability to pierce the cultural protection force field.

No.

It did give me some technical and design exposure, but it tried to destroy any confidence I may have had about my ideas, like many professional schools do. Destroy the character and rebuild it. Pavlov showed that that does not work for all character types. He had identified four types in his research on brainwashing for the Russian military:

"the strong and impetuous type, the strong equilibrated and quiet type, the strong equilibrated and lively type, and the weak type",

i.e.:

1. Those who took it, who fought back, who grew stronger but who were not prone to being followers, who may hold secret grudges (Jason Bourne)
2. Those who  held their core, and could later be commanded and trusted (Arnold Governator...)
3. Those who talked back, who talked it though, but who broke in a good way, who could be trusted (Bruce Willis)
4. Those that broke and that could not become strong again (Darth Vader)

I am not sure where I fit in. Maybe this is a spectrum. I know that I hold no love for the empire my professors, that I would cross the street if I saw them coming first, and that I have not bought into the ideology of pragmatic architecture that they tried to instill. (I will post on the kind of abuse perpetrated on students at another time).

I think I am an "advisory vector". I usually will test the waters with a client, propose alternatives, and not be too upset if they go with the middle of the road. It is after all their money, their baby. This avoids disasters like the Toronto spiky museum additions, and the 1776 foot high skyscrapers that mean nothing, but it also tends to promote the status quo. Public clients are another story some might argue, but I disagree. Public money should not be abused for the benefit of the ego of the star architect. It is a difficult call, since good star architecture can revive a place, bring tourism money, but it can also be just annoying and self-serving and an abuse of the committee process, not to mention public funds..

Can someone link this to ethics of the profession? Is it more ethical to be a cross pollinating vector? Is it more moral to be a bee than to be a carpenter ant? Architecture, when it happens, gives meaning to construction, but it has to happen, and for it to happen, there has to be a will, and a will must exercise power, leadership. This is not a given in many contracts.  What is art? :-)

Architecture is predicting the future

When an architect is asked to design something, part of the challenge is to anticipate the effect that this usually large built and immovable object will have on the many people that will see, use and possibly inhabit it.

Conceptual art approaches can help, for example making a building evoke an idea, or using an idea to start a design, but they are never enough. That my building is 1776 feet high may help get sponsorship, but in it will hardly be perceived.

Fame or notoriety help. Celebrity architects draw buzz and crowds. One can invest genius in a built object and the aura of the famous designer creates a culture around the space.

The inescapable challenge of architecture however is to be present in time and space in a significant way.

Here is an example of how things can go wrong:

In my little town, the well-meaning heritage preservation committee got involved in the review of a design for a pump house that would sit along the waterfront. The building would need to have the volume of a large two storey house.

The committee looked around "for context" and found a nearby older shed that had two stone gable ends and a very symmetrical sloped roof, a kind of 19th century shed. So they strongly suggested that the utility's architect (or most likely engineer), take the cue.

The intention was to reflect the heritage of the industrial waterfront area.

The result was a large, white stucco covered imitation of an old shed, like an over sized paper model of it, sitting there contrasting against the dark water and sky.

I don't think that was the intention. I also think that any architect would have easily anticipated this and informed the client of the danger. Unfortunately, the heritage preservation committee is wedded to form and mimesis (a pompous architect term meaning copycatting). Unfortunately, it is an easy notion to sell, a concept that seems to make sense, reflect shapes, and if you are lucky materials.

An aside:
I agree with many of my colleagues who say that if you are going to do some restoration work or add to an older building, choose one: re-use material or re-use form and proportion, but don't do both, at the risk of getting some half-assed mimesis.

Ok, so back to the story. This thing now sits on the waterfront, annoying, out of place, and a reminder of industrial sheds we lost, but bigger and worse.

So instead of learning a lesson, this heritage committee moves on, job well done, and is now addressing the problem of our train station. Again, mimesis is being suggested, but this time there is no proximate context, so they looked in the pattern books for old train stations with huge eaves, and came up with some hybrid Frank Lloyd Wrightish stone bunker, because they wanted the stone of course.

What is galling is that the railway people had proposed a very nice, airy design, with proper functional overhangs to protect people on the platform, but with nice glass, and curves and a good light feel to it, considering the barren context of the area, a jewel that may have lightened the oppression of the district.

I don't think it will be realized, because no-one thinks that architects can predict the future, especially when the heritage preservation committee is locked in the past.

A Tale of Two Realities

I have just begun a new job. No hiatus between this new one and the old. One day I am in hell, the next in paradise.

The one I left was as a software manager in a large organization, and the current one is as a software lead in a very small organization.

Other objective differences: the previous job was bureaucratic, there were many processes and constraints and a network of communication and decision paths, and the systems my team built had to reflect the complex interrelated and often historically constrained requirements.

The current one is technical, working within a small team and with very precise mostly self-defined scientific requirements, adjusted to meet specific customer requests. The software has to run precision equipment to capture and calculate results within extremely tight tolerances, both in time and numerical accuracy. The only measure of quality is repeatable precision. The culture is one of technology and science.

In the new job, I report to people who have the same engineering training as I do, who have more experience in the R&D business than I do, who I can ask questions of without risk of offending or destabilizing them emotionally. Peers and superiors in all senses.

In my previous job, I reported to people who asked me to explain what I did "in simple terms" and who liked to hear themselves talk so that they could pretend to make sense of their lumbering thoughts in public forums, often referred to as "meetings" but which felt like beatings. Dissent could be career limiting.

The analogy I would like to give to dispel any conclusion that I may be a pretentious ass is as follows:

Suppose you are a medical practitioner, a physician, and you see patients in a clinical context. You have to diagnose and prescribe treatment as part of your day to day routine.

Also, suppose that you are "managed" by someone who had not undergone the same level of training as you, say a registered nurse, who knew the lingo, understood the context, but did not feel confident enough to make life or death decisions affecting patient health, but felt competent enough or was somehow appointed to tell you, the physician, how to run your practice.

For example, "please use language that is easier to understand in your charts". Or  "make sure your handwriting is legible for the pharmacist", or " you have not seen your quota of patients today, why did you spend 6 minutes more than average with Mrs. Smith today?".

Could you practice under such circumstances? How long would you last?

I lasted 5 years in the analogous IT context. My manager was a technologist, previously a school teacher who joined th IT boom of the nineties and hung on. She did a bit of COBOL programming, hated it and went into management because she could talk better than she could listen or understand.

She is proud to claim that she does not understand the need for system architecture versus program design, her eyes glaze over when there is talk of latency, language choice, servers, data flow analysis, code profiling, and factoring and she had no patience for options analysis or proof-of-concepts. She will not deign to read code. She has trouble with email client software and spreadsheets.

She wants simple, clear explanations and plans, and wants to set deadlines before beginning design, because iterative work can only lead to grief. She always used waterfall approaches in COBOL, and they worked fine for her.

Her weakness and fear prevent her from adding value, from making decisions. She was a pass-through for her manager's decisions to me and my peers. No value added, but lots of aggravation and delay. Never understood or wanted the concept of situational management, which is probably the most effective way of managing people, so effective that there have been lawsuits about who has a right to claim authorship and teach it. She is a scared rabbit, hanging on until she can retire and cash in.

Others in that environment have said that we, the technical folk who did the work, should not "speak Neanderthal" when in the presence of senior executives, by which it was meant that we should use non-IT terms of less than 3 syllables. The executives in question were the CIO and her direct reports.

But all this is now in my past, one-day-old stuff. I am now in another world, where the conversations around me centre on measurement tolerances, ADC resolutions, real-time interrupt-driven code, clock speed and sampling rates, hierarchical state machine approaches, language selection and compiler efficiencies. I have scope probes and micro-controllers on benches beside me, no fuzzy walled grey cubicle partitions in sight, and a project to deliver with people I can talk to who want me to talk dirty.

I am in heaven.

Gender relations

Franz Erhard Walther, 1983 - Paris, Centre Pompidou - by A. Barake

Still digesting the readings from Thanksgiving...

I read Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" recently, and as I was driving in this morning, it hit me how such a study can be a good reflection on the state of gender relations at a point in time yet how it is just that, a touch point  since these relations are so varied, so much in flux, constantly evolving and I asked myself if her study was of any use in day-to-day life.

The sample size being dealt with is huge- 3 billion give or take a few million on each side of the equation, and this results in a large variety of sexual behaviours, variability and variety. The middle of the bell curve is very broad, even if we limit it to Western culture, as she does.

Yes, we are a laboratory for sex, as we should be. Until we get totally artificial about it, survival and renewal require this experimentation. Since our brains are so adaptable, interest in sex requires huge variety I guess. There is no end to the variations, and the minor things are as exciting as the major ones, however you define the categories. Marketing and advertising depend on this instinct as their currency of the new.

Despite the difficulty of categorizing such a complex topic, De Beauvoir's expose covers and uncovers much ground. Her method is to work at the delta she perceives between gender status, behaviour and emotion in every context of her time, and historically where she can.

One observation which struck me was the notion that a large number of  women she observed define themselves through a male spouse or mate, as a means to gain territory, because of the cultural power disparity that existed. Desire and power, the old story, examined with great perspicacity and dissected and countered with new approaches. The central thesis of the book.

I extrapolated this notion to the study of relations between gay men and hetero women - to try to answer the question of why there can be friendly attraction without sexual attraction. Also, to test whether there was a converse with lesbians and hetero men. There isn't in a general sense. De Beauvoir has a chapter on lesbianism, and she concludes that the relation between heterosexual and same-sex desire is much closer and symmetrical in women than in men.

Having also read what Camille Paglia says about homosexuality, I am not sure that one can conclude anything like that. The spectrum is very broad as I wrote earlier, and maybe de Beauvoir's snapshot is just a reflection of what she could see, or what was visible when she wrote the book at mid-century.

Gender relations and sex remain very difficult things to generalize about, and I think it goes back to the idea that we are attracted to the new, to variety, and that behaviours that test and taste that variety are usually good for evolution, for survival, so long as they are not culturally or biologically damaging.

As the culture and the population widen, the behaviours that can be experimented with can grow, there are wider safety margins, and there is also motivation and opportunity. The taboos and secrecy around sex that act as cultural anchors to maintain tribal cohesion loosen as the tribe expands to include the planet's population. The need for protectionism disappears, reflecting the monetary and commercial globalization.

This may be why there is a resurgence of fundamentalist thought, a backlash, a clinging to what can be perceived as a moral high-ground, based on limited communications, limited population size, limited cultural migration. Pockets of resistance.

Oh yes, the book was banned by the Vatican. Go figure.

This is brought to you by...

The Turing test.
This blog is a simulation. It is written by an AI.

Half-baked vs open to possibilities? A manifesto.

studio series A. Barake 2008

I like the unfinished.

Whether it be studies, sketches, snippets of songs, or first drafts.

They seem alive, they allow for the future.

The future that I can choose to defer, giving me the hope of potential, of life going on.

Half-baked means that dinner is coming.

I also like the fully realized. It is post-coital, closure, comfort, time for closing the eyes and savoring.

So what is left not to like in this spectrum?

The mediocre, the completed in haste, the delivered for money not love, the faked, the cliche , the pandering to mass appeal, the blue smoke sentimentality of bad films by Spielberg and his ilk.

Playing the devil's advocate, I can see that the charges of laziness and lack of discipline can be laid. Other lesser judgements could be "wishy-washy", indecisive, uncommitted.

Yes, all valid categories for this approach, but the Venn diagram is flawed. These are not super sets of the incomplete. The incomplete is the super set of the attributes I list, and of many others. The incomplete action is the existential act, the rest is just noise and judgement. Being incomplete may not lead to riches, mass appeal, or to classic status, but it can reflect life and happiness. Certainly for me.

Overweening Generalist: Another Promiscuous Neurotheologist Post (But This One Gets Shanked Into the Chomskyan Rough)

Overweening Generalist: Another Promiscuous Neurotheologist Post (But This One Gets Shanked Into the Chomskyan Rough)

Themes versus categories

From my flickr

Trying to make sense of experiences and events can lead to categorization.

I try to resist that, given that I think and have written here that categorizations are usually trade-offs between understanding and convenience.

A grouping is as good as the criteria used for grouping, and there's the rub.

Rational categorizations, the ones used by encyclopedias, are part of our cultural thinking. What I think is missing from the cultural tool arsenal is emotional grouping. (I really should say it is missing from the serious argumentative arsenal, but is very present in rhetoric, which can have a bad name.)

I think the reason for that is individuality. Emotions are based on experience, and this differentiates the perceived and experiential validity of the grouping depending on the audiences' family, clan, nation, etc... This may be why AI is so hard.

But...

now we have the means to not generalize.

We can simulate individuals, mirror them really, and build networks of relationships, like Facebook and other network applications do, and map the emotional gradients and correlate to the other more usual and accepted categorizations and deal with the rhetoric.

But I did not begin this post to write about that.

I want to write about the notion of theme, which is a categorization of emotion and fact, intertwined, used in the arts.

Let me give an example: the outsider theme

I was reading Edward Said's autobiography over (Canadian) Thanksgiving, where he talks about his feelings of being between cultures, and I related it to other immigrant and emigrant writings. Rushdie provides liner notes to Said's book, and I believe that Hitchens was a supporter and friend. I mention this because both are contrarians and sometimes wilful outsiders.

How to describe, or even define the theme of "the outsider"? How does it differ from a category?

Outsiders may feel kinship based on the feeling of belonging, which is rooted in emotion, even in biology.
Attempting to completely categorize the theme of the outsider with words will fail, because one has to feel as an outsider to completely know and understand. Sometimes the feeling is due to internal stuff: memories, wounds, predispositions, inheritance, rather than external immediate factors. It is not reliably induce-able and I would also say that it is not measurable - yet.

For example, a novel's or a painting's theme is a shot in the dark, a collection of experiences and perceptions manipulated to model a simulacrum or resonance of the theme in the audience's mind.

The success of the work depends on the accuracy of the resonance between "player" and "listener", and sometimes on the group think that comes with it, the meme concept, aided by marketing, and that is how culture moves along and changes. Evolution in action.

Happy (survivalist) themes succeed more easily, thus escapist magic, futuristic fantasy, sex stuff. Stuff that is more emotionally ambivalent like Graham Greene's and J.M. Coetzee's  works provide themes that can take root, sometimes grow into the main thread, the canon, produce seed, and thus can join other classics in the taxonomy or network of thematic relationships we call culture.

Themes versus categories. We can now manage thematic encyclopedias. The Web is the perfect tool for this.

Another rant about software

Software does not really rot, despite what developers experience every day.

What decays is its environment.

Software embodies perfectly adapted machines that cease to function as everything around them evolves. Software has no friction to wear it out. The claimed obsolescence occurs because it gets old compared to the world around it. At least that is the hype. Clients are missing out on upgrades, security fixes, whatever. The Internet helps of course because it is a true wilderness with predation.

The smart boys in the IT marketing departments of big companies learned this probably by accident and have been helping the phenomenon along ever since.

This is the upgrade cycle.

The lucrative business model is based on what I think is a partly artificial problem, or at least one that has been blown out of proportion.

Here is a fantasy based on a moral, ethical and unrealistic world:

A program is written to meet a requirement, is tested, goes through a few iterations with the user community and becomes stable and useful and productive and everyone is happy for a long time.
The underlying hardware also gets faster and better but remains consistent with the older platforms so that the software can continue to run, or be upgraded in an incremental way, but stays in support essentially as long as nothing fundamentally better comes along.

This is not impossible, Windows and IBM both provided this kind of upgrade path for their OS's and systems  for a long time, but then realized that there was much more money to be made by setting deadlines on support so as to convince client IT managers that their stuff may break and cost too much to fix if they did not pay protection upgrade.

FUD is easy when knowledge and complexity do not keep up with each other, and a company certainly can create and control complexity, which has the added bonus of thwarting compatibility, integration and competition. IT companies that have survived have defied the inexorable race to zero cost of most consumer technology, especially something as perfectly light, reproducible and useful as software, by bucking all the good practices of design while giving them marketing lip service. HP, and other engineering companies, like DEC may have misunderstood this twisted logic. Sun certainly did.

Open source is a defense and a mitigation to this pathology and has the potential  to reduce the crazy costs associated with IT change by distributing the cycle of maintenance it across IT shops, using common knowledge. It is an extension of the Unix ideals of clarity and modularity and community. Heresy of course. Communism some have called it.

So we continue to have big companies and governments paying huge sums for essentially very little, a sort of insurance. Let's call it that then, software insurance. That is heresy too, especially if you read the disclaimers that are standard with all commercial software. No guarantees.

Any suggestions on how to shine some light here?

What's next?

Copyright 2018 A. Barake

E.M. Forster in his "Aspects of the Novel" lectures discusses the difference between plot and story. Plot includes meaning. Can we know meaning, and do we want it in a story? The novelist's art can make meaning crystallize in the reader's mind by drawing on shared experiences, on context, on cultural tropes. Can this not happen through simple storytelling as well?

A poetry teacher I remember from long ago said that the writer must try to control intent as closely as possible. He was dead against the scatter words to the winds approach of free-association that some of us were playing with. In fact he chastised us quite severely about it and the reprimand stuck to this day.

I was thinking of plot versus storytelling because of the wild popularity of the Harry Potter stories and the recent hype around Rowling's imminent release of a "serious" novel for adults. Harry Potter works are driven by the "what's next" urge. I remember reading stories to my younger brother before bed and he could not wait for the next instalment, to the point of learning to read so that he could get to the denouement of the latest twist before the next evening.

So will Rowling's addition of plot to storytelling make her serious novel more successful? I don't think so.
Plot is a luxury, at least in the commercial sense.

The success of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy adds evidence to my claim. I think the sexual encounters are the equivalent of the "what's next" of a standard story. Same principle as in detective fiction. There are comments on readers' site about skipping across the sexual descriptions just to get to the next variation setup. So it is about anticipation, more so than about meaning, or description.

Tipping the balance of writing towards such commercially successful mechanisms makes the writing more cinematic, flatter dimensionally. I am not making a value judgement. I think that it is not sustainable. Art is about Eros, about tension and sublimation, and repeated denouements lead to wanting bigger and bigger bangs.

So conservation is a goal of plot artistry, learning to fish rather than being served the trout all cooked. Playing with the mind. It sounds pompous, but writing in a sustained way is to influence and seduce and to keep the love alive. Boring is the worst insult you could throw at a writer, and that risk exists if stories begin to repeat as they ultimately have to. Even the Thousand and One Nights  had to end in a boring marriage.

Cognitive Philosophy

There seems to be a movement afoot - long overdue - to embody the foundations of intelligence and philosophy. It is partially old news, the heroic AI of the 50's, 60's and 70's has been discounted despite our benefiting from the results of that research in today's mainstream technology: neural nets, machine speech recognition, handwriting recognition, natural language translation, cars that drive themselves, and all kind of other low-level intelligent (unconscious?) activities simulated by programs.

I think that it is the Minsky flavour of AI (now re branded cognitive science), the one grounded in logic, seems to have fallen out of favour -since the fruits of that work did not rise up to the expectation of the "I" in AI; an AI based only on logic, a formal game with symbols that pretended to be words. How can that be smart without the observer having to make all kinds of allowances and assumptions?

This stuff was subject to sometimes acrimonious debate for a while, until technology and big data made many of the arguments moot.

The good news is that there is now a strong movement towards the recognition of the role of the perceptual environment and its embodiment in animals like us as part of the equation.

This realization may be due to the Web, indirectly, since it should be now be obvious that the seeming "intelligence" of the Google search would not exist without the "environment" of all the Web sites, which are of course interactions with people's brains (in fact there was a very simple AI program that used "Google distance" as a way to measure metaphorical strength between concepts. For example "Castro" and "cigar" scored pretty high on that scale).

So now there is a movement, a possibly serendipitous program of research coming together to ground AI in the real-world of experience, and some of the people that I think are leading this effort align themselves along a somewhat elegant but odd symmetry of ideas.

Let me explain.

There is David Gelernter, the computer scientist and columnist who wrote "The Muse in the Machine" and "Mirror worlds". These books made me want to go back and look at AI again. In fact I ran back. His arguments are so cogent, so seemingly simple and common-sensical that I almost missed their radical novelty. He states that data and the links between data is the key to intelligence. These links are often emotional gradients, in the sense that logic is not always what binds ideas; it is similar emotional affect!

The brain associates memories based on the closeness of the emotions they evoke, the sensory input parallels that occurred as the memory is created. The whole model, not just the idea...how you felt, how cold or hot or tired or dizzy you were. This links data to environment so elegantly that it is a mystery to me why no-one has picked up on this earlier. He breaks the syntax/semantics dichotomy very deeply. Also, Gelernter has very conservative political views - right of centre. I am noting this now so as to make my strange symmetry argument a bit further down. Bear with me.

There is George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist. His work with Johnson on embodied philosophy and with Nunez on the origins of math, takes the empirical evidence around the links between our brain wiring and the perception of the world and uses it as a foundation for philosophy.

Basic brain mechanisms are considered to be foundational and ideas grow as hierarchies of metaphor (i.e. links).

Metaphor becomes a key mechanism for cognition. Similarly to Gelernter,  Lakoff et al propound that metaphors are based on evolutionary and environmental constraints, not some platonic logic ideal. No such thing as the separation of  mind from the world of things. These guys are existentialist scientists. Finally! The rampant positivism and Platonism of the English speaking world, the Whitehead/Russell school, is giving ground. Merleau-Ponty and Husserl are now more visible in the world of scientific cognition.

Lakoff is an ex-student of Chomsky. He seems to disagree with the flavour of Chomsky' thesis of hard-wired syntax in the brain. He believes syntax and semantics to be more of a spectrum of complexity in cognitive biology than a differentiator between humans and other animals. Also he is a non-neo-con, a strong and vocal opponent of  right wing politics as it is played in the US today, and although I hesitate to slot him with Chomsky on the political front, they are on the same side of a hypothetical centre line.

So we have right and a left wing thinkers on cognition who fundamentally disagree in the political realm, the realm of people relations, nations, influence, and power. That is a healthy and good thing. This lends support to the notion that there is a grounding in "objective" reality for this thinking on cognition, it is much more than opinion.  (A slim argument, I know, but hey, this is my blog, I can say what I want.)

Aside from the political thing, I want to continue to talk about is the cognition thing. There is another thinker/scientist that seems to be breaking new ground along those same lines.

He is a neuro-scientist, one who gets his hands dirty opening up craniums, working with brain surgeons. William H. Calvin. I read two books of his: "Conversations with Neil's Brain" and "How Brains Think, Evolving Intelligence Then and Now". His ideas centre around the notion that cognition is an initially subconscious Darwinian process among neural bundles that remember perceptions, integrate them and ultimately model the environment perceived by the body, and that the successful "species" of memories/emotions (let's call them cognitions) are the ones that we call conscious, the ones that rise to the top of the noise of cognition, to differentiate themselves as our inner voices.

His research fundamentally agrees with the models put forth by Gelernter and Lakoff. Like Lakoff, he believes that most cognition in the brain is fomented through unconscious processes. Like Gelernter he finds that memories are linked through non-logical processes. He shares with Lakoff a deep knowledge of Chomsky's ideas on innate language ability and like Lakoff disputes the simplicity of these models, without denying the human brain's ability to parse language. He also talks of metaphor, not surprisingly, since all this is supported by empirical evidence at the chemical and behavioural level.

So I am very happy that this stuff is happening. I tended to get hot under the collar when I read "classic" texts by Minsky or Pinker on intelligence. They seemed simplistic and smug. I was always perplexed by the lack of attention given to Grey Walter's ideas which preceded but anticipated Gelernter's. I wanted 'The Muse in the Machine" to be discussed more, but to my chagrin, Penrose's strange books on quantum brain hypotheses got more press.

Let's get back to empirical research, let's continue the program of work that will ultimately bring philosophy and psychology back into science.The foundational thinkers list above should also include Turing. Even Penrose mentions his "other work". He did mathematical research on molecular biology (plants mostly) and how stem cells can become complex structures. His mathematically-based hypotheses on these matters were validated experimentally just this year in the UK. Ultimately this theoretical work may prove to explain some of the brain mechanisms underlying the work Calvin and others are doing.

There are conceptual layers to all this analysis, from the bottom-up: the molecular, the cellular, the systems (bundles of neurons evolving), and the cognitive and behavioral, leading to metaphor, logic and science, including physics, on to philosophy, morality  and politics. The gaps needs to be filled so that we have a continuum of understanding. A New Science in the Vico sense. Something we made and understood that we made, but that is grounded in experience.

(I just found an earlier post that was wishing this stuff would happen, and so here we are.)

Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello device

I am working my way through Coetzee's novels in no particular order, and I have just finished Slow Man. Elizabeth Costello's role becomes clear there. Coetzee, no doubt all too aware of his self-centredness; in fact he keeps alluding to it through his secondary characters, who keep asking if they really can be considered secondary, if anyone can; so as I was saying, to deal with that dilemma, he creates this other author's voice, to take him outside J.M. In a sense it works. He manages to see things differently, and I am sure the choice of gender helps him. Empathy is strong in his writing, but it is a clinical empathy, one rooted in observation, like a photographer that sees misery, captures it and then moves on. It is not care, it is halfway to care. So The Elizabeth Costello device pushes the plot towards action, towards mistakes, she forces him to do and to confront.
Again, why the fuss? Why not just write from the perspective of other voices than his own? Probably because he is so honest and is not wired that way.
The method succeeds in making his work interesting, but as John Crace in his pastiche of Coetzze in the Guardian  notes, he keeps writing the same book. Why not?

In fact I have argued the other way for songwriters. Is the medium a factor? Can songs be egocentric, since they are an accepted form of wooing? Are novels different? No answers here.

Comments on Coetzee and the books Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year and Summertime

J.M. Coetzee’s work is more often about himself than not, in subtle reflections that achieve the necessary universality. Yet I feel a great unease about it. The undertone of self-criticism and mockery is subverted by the very fact that he is writing about himself. In effect saying that that is what is important. I know that it is deeper than that, that he uses himself consciously as a device, one that is central to his approach to fiction, but I also know that sadness and depression come from loneliness.

However, Coetzee has succeeded in reaching others, he has two Bookers, a Nobel and is loved by readers and writers, including me. He says things that need to be said, with courage and balance.

But, and this is what gnaws at me, there is the self-centredness, the one he is aware of, that he digs into all the time, the fatal flaw.

Maybe I can talk about the novels I mention in the title, to give examples. Elizabeth Costello reads like a crotchety set of essays by someone who does not care how they are perceived, because they are gone, above criticism. Costello is dead at the end, in a sort of purgatory, and this gives closure to all the ranting. It is good ranting though, holds your attention, and despite the characterization, shows balance. This is the tour de force. The hard foundations of Coetzee’s writing are a) humanism, probably more accurate to say animalism, avoiding pain, b) guilt about colonialism, and anger about the guilt, since he is not directly guilty, he is constantly trying to extricate himself from it c) self and others, connection, sex as a mystery.

Elizabeth Costello contains a casual sexual encounter in a hotel, between business travellers that is masterful in showing how a we inhabit our bodies when close to one another, how strange, beautiful and limiting awareness of sexual contact is. Sex and loneliness in Coetzee’s work are bound tightly. He does not really understand the other, despite all the voices.

This brings me to Summertime, where he reflects on his middle years through women that have known him. This is masterfully written, but the uneasiness I feel about it relates to the above, he cannot get out of himself. He realizes it, since his characters allude to his “autism”. Realizing it and trying to exorcise it and ultimately failing in my view is what makes the work so strong, but also so flawed. He can go on telling us he knows this, and there are two possible conclusions: i) he is truly failing - case closed ii) he is using this mechanism to drive his creativity, it is a shtick. I refuse to believe the second.

In Diary of a Bad Year, he tries again to bring out Coetzee from his shell. Two and a half points of view. Himself, as always, a young woman who becomes his typist, and the views of her boyfriend, an foil to the humanist/animalism/anarchist Coetzee character. Archetype does not mean one-dimensional here. He is fully fleshed, but a bit distant, a bit vague, a bit too consistent. Coetzee is getting revenge it seems on that type. I know these types well, I dislike them too, but again, I almost want to not believe that Coetzee is exercising a form of petty literary revenge. Not petty I guess, the themes are broad enough, but in all three books there is a sort of accounts settling smell, things that his “autism” may have prevented him from doing in real time may be coming out.

So in conclusion, I must admire the man and admit that I enjoy the work, but some of it seems to evade complete control, which to me is a criterion of classic art. This is the mystery of Coetzee’s work.

Theroux, Hemingway and Stendhal

I sometimes wonder if attribution of inspiration is required for authors. Most art derives or is inspired from previous work, and the role of critics is to know that other work enough to goad or at least constrain the temptation and therefore promote originality in a semi-Darwinian sense. The problem is that the greater the corpus the harder it gets, and the Internet may or may not always help since it is also loaded with Everything.

So here is my little contribution.

Stendhal claims to have bought at great expense some family stories from which he derived The Italian Chronicles.  He felt that Italian history was too formalized, censored, under the influence of power to be truthful, and since he had lived in Italy he felt he was in a position to comment on this, so he undertook to translate and interpret some stories that presented the other side of history, the secrets and betrayals that he felt would balance the official stories. His chronicles (although he did not use that word) were presented in the form of short stories, some quite troubling and violent.

I read them recently and the style reminded me of Hemingway. It was direct, unemotional, not flowery in the least and very clear. I went back and read the war-related books "The Charterhouse of Parma" and "The Red and the Black" and found the battle scenes and landscape descriptions to be very similar to the ones in "A Farewell to Arms", in style and theme.

Of course it is not plagiarism or even close. Hemingway went as far as saying publicly that he wanted to beat Stendhal in the ring. The stories were different, it was the tone that was the same.

This brings us to Theroux and his "Stranger At The Palazzo D'Oro". I stumbled upon an excerpt in Granta magazine and then read the full novel later. It is a typical Theroux story (bear with me, there can be such a thing), in that it is beautifully set, beautifully written, but at its core has a very maudlin unsatisfying plot.

I know, it sounds harsh, but that is how I feel.

His protagonist meets a fine-boned countess, completely of another world and he seduces her, fucks her silly, and describes the power games that ensue.

It is titillating in strange ways, confusing in others, cliche in most, and yet it is good writing, because it sounds so real, and there are many unexpected turns, although in the end it does not close or satisfy beyond what a good soap opera can do.

So back to the link with Stendhal. The chronicles have a story that could well be the inspiration for the Theroux tale. It almost seems that like Stendhal, he adapted the plot to his contemporary purposes and then went into the bedroom.

I don't think there is anything false about this. It is just interesting that here are two authors that took something from Stendhal, one took the style and themes, the other just the plot.

There are may ways to mine the classics I guess.

Success

Elvis at the fair, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

Can be simply measured as the width of your circle of influence. Not money, not fame, but influence. Who will follow.

Toronto Museum of Science and Tech

Toronto Museum of Science and Tech, originally uploaded by MisterMeta.

Truth is an average of the prevalent beliefs.