March 9th, 2010

significant objects

The blog Un-canny Ontology recently took a look at the website significantobjects.com from the point of view of Heidegger’s object-orientated philosophy.

For those of you not familiar with the site significantobjects.com, the goal of the site was to see if given significance, random everyday objects could take on objective significance, as well. As the site explains:

A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!

As demonstrated from some of the entries, these objects are not “rare” or “important” objects by any means. In fact a lot of the times these objects are purchased from thrift stores or garage sales for just a couple of bucks (max). A “fictional” account of the object’s significance is added and then sold and bought on eBay – usually purchased for way more than the item was originally worth. But what I find fascinating about this experiment is that it is purposefully doing something that we often do without thinking about it – that is, adding significance to objects. This led me to question, what is significance and how/why is it important for our understanding of object-oriented philosophy?

More of that post here.

Significant Objects is an interesting experiment, although I would argue that a lot of the significance created around these objects comes from the fact that they are featured on the website as part of the project, and not necessarily from the made-up stories.

March 5th, 2010

hello world

Here’s a post more selfish than usual; only Dutch speakers can appreciate it.

The poem Marc groet ’s morgens de dingen (“Marc greets the things in the morning”), by the famous Flemish poet Paul van Ostaijen, is a fun poem to read aloud and is largely meaningless, so a translation is no good. Ploem ploem.

March 4th, 2010

123

Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXXIII:

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old,
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow and this shall ever be;
I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.

March 3rd, 2010

earning this moment

Tatyana by Maura Staunton.

She leaves the room. Onegin writhes
On stage, ashamed of his emotion.
He scorned her as a young girl.
Now he’s mad about her! But she’s
Married, rich, so stern and cold. . .
I lean forward in my opera seat.
There goes me. And isn’t that
Every man I loved in vain?
The cast bows to wild applause.
Our Tatyana smiles, steps forward
To catch a bouquet of red roses.
I button my coat, grab my purse,
And make my slow way down the aisle
Of well-dressed, gray-haired couples
Watching their steps with downcast eyes.
I bet I’m not alone in wishing
I could go back in time, and break
A few cold hearts that broke mine
With all my hard won understanding
Of the game of love, its rules
And stratagems, and power plays.
Then through the open lobby doors
Where the crowd hesitates, tying
Scarves or pulling on wool gloves,
I see the promised snow’s begun
And someone’s whistling an aria
From the first act. A sweet joy
Rushes through me. No, of course
I’d fall in love the same way.
I’d make every great mistake
I could, and earn this lovely moment
Walking home through fresh snow
My head full of unsingable music,
Remembering this one and that one
Who made me feel by feeling nothing.

The poet has written many short stories and, to me, this poem is like a short story in pill form; it’s concentrated, poetic storytelling.

(via how a poem happens blog, where there’s also some info about the poet and an interview regarding this poem.)

February 23rd, 2010

d.h. lawrence and the second brain

Speaking of the second brain… A friend has brought it to my attention that D. H. Lawrence has written with tremendous relish on the subject of the second brain, or solar plexus:

In that little book, “Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious,” I tried rather wistfully to convince you, dear reader, that you had a solar plexus and a lumbar ganglion and a few other things. I don’t know why I took the trouble. If a fellow doesn’t believe he’s got a nose, the best way to convince him is gently to waft a little pepper into his nostrils. And there was I painting my own nose purple, and wistfully inviting you to look and believe. No more, though.

You’ve got first and foremost a solar plexus, dear reader; and the solar plexus is a great nerve center which lies behind your stomach. I can’t be accused of impropriety or untruth, because any book of science or medicine which deals with the nerve-system of the human body will show it to you quite plainly. So don’t wriggle or try to look spiritual. Because, willy-nilly, you’ve got a solar plexus, dear reader, among other things. I’m writing a good sound science book, which there’s no gainsaying.

Now, your solar plexus, most gentle of readers, is where you are you. It is your first and greatest and deepest center of consciousness. If you want to know _how_ conscious and _when_ conscious, I must refer you to that little book, “Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.”

At your solar plexus you are primarily conscious: there, behind you stomach. There you have the profound and pristine conscious awareness that you are you. Don’t say you haven’t. I know you have. You might as well try to deny the nose on your face. There is your first and deepest seat of awareness. There you are triumphantly aware of your own individual existence in the universe. Absolutely there is the keep and central stronghold of your triumphantly-conscious self. There you _are_, and you know it. So stick out your tummy gaily, my dear, with a _Me voilà_. With a _Here I am!_ With an _Ecco mi!_ With a _Da bin ich!_ There you are, dearie.

(from read print)

And:

The primal consciousness in man is pre-mental, and has nothing to do with cognition. It is the same as in the animals. And this pre-mental consciousness remains as long as we live the powerful root and body of our consciousness. The mind is but the last flower, the _cul de sac_.

The first seat of our primal consciousnesses the solar plexus, the great
nerve-center situated behind the stomach. From this center we are first dynamically conscious. For the primal consciousness is always dynamic, and never, like mental consciousness, static. Thought, let us say what we will about its magic powers, is instrumental only, the soul’s finest instrument for the business of living. Thought is just a means to action and living. But life and action take rise actually at the great centers of dynamic consciousness.

The solar plexus, the greatest and most important center of our dynamic consciousness, is a sympathetic center. At this main center of your first-mind we know as we can never mentally know. Primarily we know, each man, each living creature knows, profoundly and satisfactorily and without question, that _I am I._ This root of all knowledge and being is established in the solar plexus; it is dynamic, pre-mental knowledge, such as cannot be transferred into thought. Do
not ask me to transfer the pre-mental dynamic knowledge into thought. It cannot be done. The knowledge that _I am I_ can never be thought: only known.

This being the very first term of our life-knowledge, a knowledge established physically and psychically the moment the two parent nuclei fused, at the moment of the conception, it remains integral as a piece of knowledge in every subsequent nucleus derived from this one original. But yet the original nucleus, formed from the two parent nuclei at our conception, remains always primal and central, and is always the original fount and home of the first and supreme knowledge that _I am I._ This original nucleus is embodied in the solar plexus.

(from online literature)

Terrific! Thanks very much, Alice.

See also this glorious diagram of the network of nerves in the abdomen, including the celiac plexus or solar plexus @ wikipedia).

February 21st, 2010

this wine tastes like mouse urine to me

39PS0763-mouse-md
I don’t believe this image exists. Thanks google image search.

The wikipedia page on wine faults describes with scientific detail all the things that can go wrong with wine, and describes the processes and causes.

I love the terms lightstrike, ladybird taint, ropiness and mousiness. The following is about ladybird taint:

Some insects present in the grapes at harvest inevitably end up in the press and for the most part are inoffensive. Others, notably types of ladybirds, release unpleasant volatile compounds as a defensive mechanism when disturbed. In sufficient quantities this can affect the bouquet and taste of wines. With an olfactory detection threshold of a few ppb, the principal active compounds are methoxypyrazines, or pyrazines, that are perceived as rancid peanut butter, bitter herbaceous, green bell pepper or cat urine.

More at wikipedia.

February 14th, 2010

the apparatus of living

Housing Shortage
by Naomi Replanksy

I tried to live small.
I took a narrow bed.
I held my elbows to my sides.
I tried to step carefully
And to think softly
And to breathe shallowly
In my portion of air
And to disturb no one.

Yet see how I spread out and I cannot help it.
I take to myself more and more, And I take nothing
That I do not need, but my needs grow like weeds,
All over and invading; I clutter this place
With all the apparatus of living.
You stumble over it daily.

And then my lungs take their fill.
And then you gasp for air.

Excuse me for living,
But, since I am living,
Given inches, I take yards,
Taking yards, dream of miles,
And a landscape, unbounded
and vast in abandon.

You too dreaming the same.


from No More Masks;
Anchor Books, 1973

(via Jim Culleny at 3dq)

January 10th, 2010

language learning ent a sport

Steve Kaufmann (aka The Linguist) argues the point that language learning is more than a task to be completed wholly, a skill to be learned to a specific point of satisfaction or superlative. As he says, “it’s not about performance”:

Athletes compete to see who can run faster, or jump higher, or execute their moves with more precision, or score more goals. Athletes train in order to improve their performance. Learning languages is different. It is, for me, about communicating and enjoying another culture. In fact the learning process, itself, is enjoyable, regardless of the outcome, regardless of the performance. It is possible to enjoy languages without performing at all, without speaking. And when we speak we do not want to be judged, or at least I do not.

I often get comments on my foreign language youtube videos along the lines of:

“your Portuguese is not very good, don’t you care?”
” your Japanese sounds a little American, you should work on your accent.”
” you made a mistake in your Russian.”

Well, I don’t care. I am not in competition with native speakers, nor with other non-native learners of any language. If my mistakes are pointed out, it is likely that I will make the same mistake the next time. I know what gives me trouble in these languages. I try to pay attention to these things when I listen, read or speak. But I know that I will continue to make mistakes and will only gradually improve.

More here. There is further discussion in the comments section of that post.

January 7th, 2010

understanding others

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Jung

The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather what he does not say. Kahlil Gibran

January 3rd, 2010

Now men are all separate little entities.

I’ve been enjoying D. H. Lawrence’s essay “A propos to Lady Chatterly’s Lover”. I’ve transcribed a few pages for ease of reading, for whomever is interested.

Back, before the idealist religions and philosophies arose and started man on the great excursion of tragedy. The last three thousand years of mankind have been an excursion into ideals, bodilessness, and tragedy, and now the excursion is over. And it is like the end of a tragedy in the theatre. The stage is strewn with dead bodies, worse still, with meaningless bodies, and the curtain comes down.

But in life, the curtain never comes down on the scene. There the dead bodies lie, and the inert ones, and somebody has to clear them away, somebody has to carry on. It is the day after. Today is already the day after the end of the tragic and idealist epoch. Utmost inertia falls on the remaining protagonists. Yet we have to carry on.

Even when I don’t agree with his opinions, I’m always thrilled by the scope and passion of his ideas and descriptions.

Read more after the jump (or, alternatively, at the sources from which I transcribed the excerpt: here and here).

Thanks, Alice.
Read the rest of this entry »

January 3rd, 2010

haaa haaa haaa haaa

December 31st, 2009

being foreign

Foreigner_and_Wrestler_at_Yokohama_1861
A foreigner is shown a harsh welcome at Yokohama, 1861.
Today it’s much easier to be foreign in Japan. Photo: wikipedia commons.

I thoroughly enjoyed this article at the Economist; hoovered it up.

Ernest Hemingway, set the ground rules for the writer as foreigner when he was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris: live in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (or equivalent), work in cafés, meet other artists, drink a lot.

Not everyone can be Hemingway. Many foreigners today are threadbare students, overworked managers, trailing spouses. The male expatriate in Bangkok is a great deal freer than the female expatriate in Jeddah. The lot of unwilling foreigners is far worse still. A life of foreignness imposed by poverty or persecution or exile is unlikely to be enjoyable at all.

Even so, all other things being equal, foreignness is intrinsically stimulating. Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it. John Lechte, an Australian professor of social theory, characterises foreignness as “an escape from the boredom and banality of the everyday”. The mundane becomes “super-real”, and experienced “with an intensity evocative of the events of a true biography”.

I often feel a homesickness for places i’ve visited as a foreigner, but rarely (or ever?) for my real homeland.

Beware, then: however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner, even a genteel foreigner. Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasises over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia—a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility of it.

From the Economist. Thanks, Christine.

December 30th, 2009

let’s bring crapulous back

Before the term “hangover” became popular in 1904, one was apparently “crapulous” following a night of drunken debauchery, according to the online etymology dictionary.

After the 1530s we were crapulous, and now we’re just “hung over”. What went wrong? Let’s bring craupulous back.

December 28th, 2009

the shaggy ink cap deliquesces

4075263875_3cb2255cc4
Photo by Steve Greaves (lovely name, no?)

As the cap matures it deliquesces into an inky black fluid. This specimen was found by the side of a path in deciduous woodland.

It deliquesces!

1. to become liquid by absorbing moisture from the air, as certain salts.
2. to melt away.
3. Botany. to form many small divisions or branches.

There is a collection of similarly unique mushrooms (such as the “scarlet waxy cap” — poetry! — and the aptly named “turkey tail mushroom”) at Matador.

December 27th, 2009

jamais vu

animaldneal

It turns out déjà has siblings:

Often described as the opposite of déjà vu, jamais vu involves a sense of eeriness and the observer’s impression of seeing the situation for the first time, despite rationally knowing that he or she has been in the situation before.

Jamais vu is more commonly explained as when a person momentarily doesn’t recognize a word, person, or place that he/she already knows.

The phenomenon is often grouped with déjà vu and presque vu (together, the three are frequently referred to as “The Vus”).

(Jamais vu@wikipedia)

December 21st, 2009

to get drunk and go to pieces

By Michael Hartnett (1941 -1999):

I have seen him dine
in middle-class surroundings,
his manners refined,
as his family around him
talk about nothing,
one of their favorite theses.
I have seen him lying
between the street and pavement,
atoning, dying
for their sins, the fittest payment
he can make for them,
to get drunk and go to pieces.

The poem is called “The Poet as Black Sheep”. I found it via a review of the book Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed by Robert Sellers, which sounds very interesting, too.

Read the review of Sellers’ book here and more about Irish poet Hartnett here.

December 17th, 2009

what is a slogan but a war cry?

nike-just-do-itnike-just-do-itnike-just-do-it
Would this counsel work in battle?

The word slogan comes from the Scottish Gaelic “sluagh gairm”, meaning battle cry/the cry of an army. Dictionary.com:

Origin:
1505–15; ScotGael sluagh-ghairm, equiv. to sluagh army, host (cf. slew 2 ) + gairm cry

(via reddit)

December 17th, 2009

envenomation

467044670446704
Unlike Popeye, I do not endorse canned veg.

I referred in a previous post to a mysterious bite which caused my forearm to swell up and make me look like Popeye. Well, the swelling is gone now but my arm is weaker than before.

My interest piqued, I began Googling around to see if the bite may have somehow caused a degeneration of muscle tissue in my arm, whereupon I found many instances of this lovely word: envenomation, which according to dictionary.com is “The injection of a poisonous material by sting, spine, bite, or other similar means.”

Local and systemic skeletal muscle degeneration is a common consequence of envenomations due to snakebites and mass bee attacks. Phospholipases A2 (PLA2) are important myotoxic components in these venoms, inducing a similar pattern of degenerative events in muscle cells. Myotoxic PLA2s bind to acceptors in the plasma membrane, which might be lipids or proteins and which may differ in their affinity for the PLA2s. Upon binding, myotoxic PLA2s disrupt the integrity of the plasma membrane by catalytically dependent or independent mechanisms, provoking a pronounced Ca2+ influx which, in turn, initiates a complex series of degenerative events associated with hypercontraction, activation of calpains and cytosolic Ca2+-dependent PLA2s, and mitochondrial Ca2+ overload.

So maybe it is possible that the bite is to blame for my “muscle necrosis”. The above quote is from an article at Science Direct.

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