They're OR Scrubs. Oh, are they?

IN ALMOST EVERY PICTURE

in almost every picture #9 is the latest addition to the long running series of found photography. This time around, we are presented with the peculiar story of one family's attempts to photograph its black dog. "Attempts" being the operative word.

Unfortunately, their camera's limitations mean that the canine appears, time after time, as only a vague black blob. The all black dog shape is seen posed in all kinds of domestic situations, usually with his owners as part of a tableaux of homely contentment.

But while these contexts make it clear that the silhouetted pooch is an integral part of this family's life, it's equally clear that there's no situation capable of providing the requisite amount of light.

Colour / black & white, 155 x 200 mm, 112 pages, soft cover.

http://www.kesselskramerpublishing.com/catalogue/inalmosteverypicture9/

The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind

Bicameralism (the philosophy of "two-chamberedness") is a hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human mind once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind. The term was coined by psychologist Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind only as recently as 3000 years ago.

Jaynes asserted that, until roughly the times written about in Homer's Iliad, humans did not generally have the self-awareness characteristic of consciousness as most people experience it today. Rather, the bicameral individual was guided by mental commands believed to be issued by external "gods" — commands which were recorded in ancient myths, legends and historical accounts. This is exemplified not only in the commands given to characters in ancient epics but also the very muses of Greek mythology which "sang" the poems: the ancients literally heard muses as the direct source of their music and poetry.

For example, in the Iliad and sections of the Old Testament no mention is made of any kind of cognitive processes such as introspection, and there is no apparent indication that the writers were self-aware. According to Jaynes, the older portions of the Old Testament (such as the Book of Amos) have few or none of the features of some later books of the Old Testament (such as Ecclesiastes) as well as later works such as Homer's Odyssey, which show indications of a profoundly different kind of mentality — an early form of consciousness.

http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/Julian_Jaynes_The_Origin_of_Consciousness.pdf

Battlestar

Berlin Philharmonik

The Invention of Love

from
The Invention of Love
by
Tom Stoppard


The character AEH is A. E. Housman, whose arrival at the Styx, after his death, begins the play. (There are later hints that this may be a dream experience on his deathbed, or perhaps these are memories of his death, included among the postmortem encounters of remembered people and events which provide the fabric of the play.)

The character Housman is his younger self. Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin appear as characters, and topics of discussion, as well.
The Invention of Love

Copyright © 1997 by Tom Stoppard
Act One

AEH:
I’m dead, then. Good. And this is the Stygian gloom one has heard so much about.

Charon:
Belay the painter there, sir!

AEH:
‘Belay the painter!’ The tongues of men and of angels!

Charon:
See the cleat. I trust you had grieving friends and family, sir, to give you a decent burial.

AEH:
Cremation, but very decent I believe: a service at Trinity College and the ashes laid to rest – for fathomable reasons – in Shropshire, a country where I never lived and seldom set foot.

Charon:
So long as the wolves and bears don’t dig you up.

AEH:
No fear of that. The jackals are another matter. One used to say, ‘After I’m dead’. The consolation is not as complete as one had supposed. There – the painter is belayed. I heard Ruskin lecture in my first term at Oxford. Painters belayed on every side. He died mad. As you may have noticed.

Topic:

The Afterlife


Charon:
A poet and a scholar is what I was told.

AEH:
I think that must be me.

Charon:
Both of them?

AEH:
I’m afraid so.

Charon:
It sounded like two different people.

AEH:
I know.


AEH:
[...] There are places in Jebb’s Sophocles where the responsibility for reading the metre seems to have been handed over to the Gas, Light and Coke Company.

Topic:

Insults


Pattison:
The curriculum is designed on the idle plan that all of knowledge will be found inside the covers of four Latin and four Greek books, though not the same four each year.

Housman:
Thank you, sir.

Pattison:
A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.


Housman:
[...] The Regius Professor can’t even pronounce the Greek language and there is no one at Oxford to tell him.

Pollard:
Except you, Housman.

Housman:
I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way. Betrayal is no sin if it’s whimsical.

Topic:

Secrets


Jackson:
Kissing girls is not like science, nor is it like sport. It is the third thing when you thought there were only two.

Topic:

Kisses


Jackson:
Did they get married?

Pollard:
No. They loved, and quarrelled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.

Jackson:
He invented it? Did he, Hous?

Pollard:
You don’t have to ask him. Like everything else, like clocks and trousers and algebra, the love poem had to be invented. After millenniums of sex and centuries of poetry, the love poem as understood by Shakespeare and Donne, and by Oxford undergraduates – the true-life confessions of the poet in love, immortalizing the mistress, who is actually the cause of the poem – that was invented in Rome in the first century before Christ.

Jackson:
Gosh.

Housman:
Basium is a point of interest. A kiss was always osculum until Catullus.

Pollard:
Now, Hous, concentrate – is that the point of interest in the kiss?

Housman:
Yes.


Ruskin:
When I am at Paddington I feel I am in hell.

Jowett:
You must not go about telling everyone, Dr Ruskin. It will not do for the moral education of Oxford undergraduates that the wages of sin may be no more than the sense of being stranded at one of the larger railway stations.

Ruskin:
To be morally educated is to realize that such would be a terrible price. Mechanical advance is the slack taken up of our failing humanity. Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended. There is a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell where once you may have seen at first and last light the Muses dance for Apollo and heard the pan-pipes play. But its rocks were blasted away for the railway, and now every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton.

Topics:

Hell

Railroads


AEH:
You are to be a rounded man, fit for the world, a man of taste and moral sense.

Housman:
Yes, sir.

AEH:
Science for our material improvement, classics for our inner nature. The beautiful and the good. Culture. Virtue. The ideas and moral influence of the ancient philosophers.

Housman:
Yes, sir.

AEH:
Humbug.

Housman:
Oh.

AEH:
Looking about you, does it appear to you that the classical fellows are the superior in sense, morality, taste, or even amiability, to the scientists?

Housman:
I’m acquainted with only one person in the Science School, and he is the finest man I know.

AEH:
And he knows more than the ancient philosophers.

Housman:
(Oh – !)

AEH:
They made the best use of the knowledge they had. They were the best minds. The French are the best cooks, and during the Siege of Paris I’m sure rats never tasted better, but that is no reason to continue eating rat now that coq au vin is available. The only reason to consider what the ancient philosophers meant about anything is if it’s relevant to settling corrupt or disputed passages in the text. With the poets there may be other reasons for reading them; I wouldn’t discount it – it may even improve your inner nature, if the miraculous collusion of sound and sense in, let us say, certain poems by Horace, teaches humility in regard to adding to the store of available literature poems by, let us say, yourself. But the effect is not widespread.

Topic:

Education


AEH:
[...] Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don’t like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical with ours.


AEH:
[...] Literary enthusiasm never made a scholar, and unmade many. Taste is not knowledge. A scholar’s business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can’t have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.

Topics:

Scholarship

Commas


AEH:
To be a scholar is to strike your finger on the page and say, ‘Thou ailest here, and here.’


AEH:
[...] By taking out a comma and putting it back in a different place, sense is made out of nonsense in a poem that has been read continuously since it was first misprinted four hundred years ago. A small victory over ignorance and error. A scrap of knowledge to add to our stock. What does this remind you of? Science, of course. Textual criticism is a science whose subject is literature, as botany is the science of flowers and zoology of animals and geology of rocks. Flowers, animals and rocks being the work of nature, their sciences are exact sciences, and must answer to the authority of what can be seen and measured. Literature, however, being the work of the human mind with all its frailty and aberration, and of human fingers which make mistakes, the science of textual criticism must aim for degrees of likelihood, and the only authority it might answer to is an author who has been dead for hundreds or thousands of years. But it is a science none the less, not a sacred mystery.

Topic:

Science


Housman:
[...] The passion for truth is the faintest of all human passions.


AEH:
You think there is an answer: the lost autograph copy of life’s meaning, which we might recover from the corruptions that have made it nonsense. But if there is no such copy, really and truly there is no answer.


AEH:
[...] Euripides wrote a Pirithous, the last copy having passed through the intestines of an unknown rat probably a thousand years ago if it wasn’t burned by bishops – the Church’s idea of the good and the beautiful excludes sexual aberration, apart from chastity, I suppose because it’s the rarest.


AEH:
But lay down your life for your comrade – good lad! – lay it down like a doormat –

Housman:
(Oh – !)

AEH:
Lay it down like a card on a card-table for a kind word and a smile – lay it down like a bottle of the best to drink when your damnfool life is all but done: any more laying-downs we can think of? – oh, above all – above all – lay down your life like a pack on the roadside though your days of march are numbered and end with the grave. Love will not be deflected from its mischief by being called comradeship or anything else.

Housman:
I don’t know what love is.

AEH:
Oh, but you do. In the Dark Ages, in Macedonia, in the last guttering light from classical antiquity, a man copied out bits from old books for his young son, whose name was Septimius; so we have one sentence from The Loves of Achilles. Love, said Sophocles, is like the ice held in the hand by children. A piece of ice held fast in the fist.

Topic:

Love


AEH:
[...]

We’re always living in someone’s golden age, it turns out: even Ruskin who takes it all so hard. A hard nut: he looks hard at everything he looks at, and everything he looks at looks hard back at him, it would drive anybody mad. In no time at all, life is like a street accident, with Ruskin raving for doctors, diverting the traffic and calling for laws to control the highway – and that’s just his art criticism.

Topic:

Critics
Act Two

Housman:
[...] It’s where we’re nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it’s for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn’t matter where on what, it’s the light itself, against the darkness, it’s what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God.

Topic:

Humanity


AEH:
[...] I only say, look at the logic. Because a manuscript has suffered loss, therefore the lost portion contained something which Mr Buecheler wishes it to have contained; and scholars have been unable to detect any error in his reasoning.

Topic:

Logic (examples)


Chamberlain:
Alfred Housman?

Harris:
I think he stayed with the wrong people in Shropshire. I never read such a book for telling you you’re better off dead.

Chamberlain:
That’s him!

Harris:
No one gets off; if you’re not shot, hanged or stabbed, you kill yourself. Life’s a curse, love’s a blight, God’s a blaggard, cherry blossom is quite nice.

A Shropshire Lad


AEH:
[...] I have been practising a popular style of lecture, as yet confused with memories of University College, but it’s based on noticing that there are students present.

Topics:

Teachers

Universities

Style


Chamberlain:
We belong to a sort of secret society, the Order of Chaeronea, like the Sacred Band of Thebes. Actually it’s more like a discussion group. We discuss what we should call ourselves. ‘Homosexuals’ has been suggested.

AEH:
Homosexuals?

Chamberlain:
We aren’t anything till there’s a word for it.

AEH:
Homosexuals? Who is responsible for this barbarity?

Chamberlain:
What’s wrong with it?

AEH:
It’s half Greek and half Latin!

Chamberlain:
That sounds about right.



Note (Hal’s):
Oscar Wilde appears as a character in the next few excerpts.




AEH:
But it’s all true.

Wilde:
On the contrary, it’s only fact. Truth is quite another thing and is the work of the imagination.

Topic:

Truth


Wilde:
[...] I dare say I would have wept if I’d read the newspaper. But that does not make a newspaper poetry. Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography, and biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes. I was said to have walked down Piccadilly with a lily in my hand. There was no need. To do it is nothing, to be said to have done it is everything. It is the truth about me.

Topic:

Art


Wilde:
[...] The betrayal of one’s friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is lifelong regret.


Wilde:
[...] But the artist is the secret criminal in our midst. He is the agent of progress against authority. You are right to be a scholar. A scholar is all scruple, an artist is none. The artist must lie, cheat, deceive, be untrue to nature and contemptuous of history. I made my life into my art and it was an unqualified success. The blaze of my immolation threw its light into every corner of the land where uncounted young men sat each in his own darkness. What would I have done in Megara!? – think what I would have missed! I awoke the imagination of the century. I banged Ruskin’s and Pater’s heads together, and from the moral severity of one and the aesthetic soul of the other I made art a philosophy that can look the twentieth century in the eye.

Topic:

Philosophy

White to move and mate in 2

Paul Morphy's only chess problem, composed when he was 10!

The Champion

Selfoss isn’t a town that looks like it’s a thousand years old. There are no gothic cathedrals or narrow medieval streets that follow the path of an ancient cow track. It’s just a few hundred neat, scandinavian buildings straddling the Olfusa river. Which, by the way, looks even newer than the town, like it just carved a course out of the flat, Icelandic plain in the last shower. In fact, the oldest thing here is the person I’ve come to meet. Although being buried in the local cemetery does tend to give you a certain permanent longevity in a place.

The headstone is a neat little thing. Just a name and dates:

Robert James Fisher
March 9, 1943 – January 17, 2008.


I can only be thankful they didn’t try to make it some gauche chess symbol.

I take out a small folding chair and place it in the snow that dusts the graveyard. Now it’s just a matter of waiting, so I sit down and start reading through my iphone’s twitter feed.

***
It’s a week after the July 4 fireworks and the summer of 1972 is shaping up to be the hottest in a century in suburban Ohio. It’s already 100 degrees and not even noon. I’ve retreated to the small back room in our house where a watercooler blows humid air across the couch. On the grainy black and white TV, the Spassky-Fisher world chess championship is starting.

Now, I’m not going to bore with a bunch of chess annotation. K-KKt2, BxE4, who gives a shit, right? The one thing you need to know is that the game starts out even, and if it remains even, then its a draw. That first game, Spassky was as level as a Tupolev Tu-95 strategic nuclear bomber. Pieces were walking off the board in perfect matched pairs and it was a sure thing that both players would simply pick up a ½ point each. Bobby had to tip the scales, make the sides uneven.

***
A new tweet pops up. “So you think game 1 was a blunder?”

I look at the name of the sender, but the letters fade out of focus, like they’re struggling to exist in this medium.

“Was that a rhetorical q?” I reply.

“No. I still don’t know the answer myself.”

***
Even as a ten year old, I knew it was a blunder. Yes it broke the symmetry of the position, but at what cost? Spassky sat and pondered the move for a long time, looking for the trap. But there wasn’t one. No matter how the position was calculated, Bobby was one move short and couldn’t stop losing the piece, and the game.

Spassky was up 1-0.

***
An RT from some anti-zionist nutjob pops up. I ignore it and try to type on the small keyboard but the cold is starting to numb my fingers.

“So what happened with Game 2?”

“:-) that was tipping the scales.”

***
Had this ever happened before in any world championship? Chess or otherwise? (This was well before the internet so the television announcers could confidently claim that it hadn’t.)

The clock on the screen read 6:59pm. The game had to start at 7:00pm. The cameras focussed on Spassky, sitting calmly at the board. Across from him, an empty seat. Bobby hadn’t turned up, had told the organisers he wouldn’t be turning up, was already on a plane back to the States, had been kidnapped by the KGB. Half a world away I sat staring at the old Bakelite television, willing Bobby to walk out onto the stage at the last second and take up the challenge.

He didn’t. The clock flashed 7:00pm and Spassky stood up and walked off stage. He was up 2-0.

***

Snow begins to fall in the long Arctic twilight.

“What did Spassky say?”

“That old Jew Kissinger actually called me. Said I was a soldier in the war against the evil empire. Hah, their thanks didn't last long did t-” the 140 character limit cut off the sentence.

“What did Spassky say?” I repeat.

“He was KGB you know. They all were, Karpov, Kasparov. Thought they were invincible. Thought I was burnt out. Would have agreed to anything.”

Another tweet comes through.

“They thought I was mad…”

***
Game 3 just showed a commentator moving pieces on a board. Bobby had requested the third game take place off camera in a small back room. Spassky agreed. So all we saw were the moves that were replicated by notes being passed out of the game room onto the big board out the front.

In my own small back room the temperature had soared. The water cooler had packed it in, so I sat sweatstuck to the couch. My eyes transfixed by the unfolding game. Bobby was playing black and from the first move was playing an unbalanced opening. Spassky tried to impose order on the board but then Bobby wrenched the fulcrum of the game away from his opponent. But unlike the move in game 1, he had calculated this move to perfection.

After the checkmate, the reports said that Bobby got straight up and walked out, but Spassky sat in that small back room for a long, long time. Staring at the board.

The rest of the match was a foregone conclusion and Bobby romped home to an easy win, becoming the first American world chess champion in nearly a hundred years.

And never played in another chess tournament again.

***
I painstakingly type in the question I had been waiting over 50 years to ask. My finger pauses over the send button. But the feed is filling up with rants about conspiracies and hate and anger. Simultaneously they are fading out of view as the connection dies off. He is almost gone, this is my last chance to ask. But my finger moves across to the delete key instead and wipes out the text.

The answer lies where it has always been, in a small back room in suburban Ohio in the summer of 1972, where, for a few short days, I was the champion.

Rip Torn vs Norman Mailer

Mailer concluded principal photography without resolving the final scene, and Rip Torn (playing his brother-in-law and assassin) allegedly decided to take it upon himself to "improvise" an attack by hitting Mailer on the head with a small hammer, drawing blood. Mailer retaliated by tackling and then nearly chewing Torn's ear off as they grappled viciously, and it rapidly escalated into an unhinged on-camera brawl as Mailer's horrified kids screamed in terror.

Egg McMahon

A Touch of Sin

Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han

Heidegger - What is Metaphysics?

J5 live

High Jump

Yi Sang

United Federation of Planets

Tupolev Tu-95

Tu-95, the ubiquitous Bear, the fastest propeller powered aircraft ever built (it was only about 50 kts slower than its U.S. turbojet powered contemporary, the B-52)

I can't get no sleep

The Pigs

My grey-eyed father kept pigs on his farm

In Tuscany. Like troubled bowels all night

They muttered in my childhood dreams, and grumbled

Slovenly in moonlight, sprawled in night-slush,

While chill winds dried the mud upon their hides.

I lay in the faint glow of oil-lamps,

In a musk-scented stillness,

And from the icy paddocks heard the pigs.

My thoughts were haunted by pig-greed, how pigs

Surge to their food-troughs, trample on each other,

And grunt and clamber swilling themselves full.

Often we emptied food on top of them,

So that they swam in muck. And then one day

When the wind splattered us with dust, my father

Heard a pig squealing, crushed beneath the press,

And we began to stone the pigs, and drew

Blood with our stones, but they just shook their buttocks,

And grunted, and still tore at cabbage leaves.

Passing a dozing boar one summer morning

My father pointed at two dead-pan eyes

Which rolled up quizzing me (and yet its head

And snout snoozed motionless, and flies

Fed and hopped undisturbed among the bristles).

Only a pig, my father now explained,

Could glance out of the corner of its eye.

I watch two bead-eyes turn and show

Their whites like death-flesh.

One dusk this huge old boar escaped and chased

Me through an olive-grove upon a hillside.

Dumpy, it thundered after me,

With murder in its eyes, like someone damned,

A glow of Hades perfuming the air.

That night my father took me in his arms

And told me that of all the animals

Only pigs knew of death

And knew we merely fattened them for slaughter.

Puddles of hatred against man, they wallowed

In greed, despair and viciousness,

Careless of clinging slops and vegetable scraps,

And the sows even eating their own young.

The knowledge of death made pigs into pigs.

Later that year this old boar ate

A peasant woman's baby and was burned

Alive one night by public ceremony.

My father stood there by my side,

His toga billowing in the rush of heat,

But in the flames my child-eyes saw

Not a pig, but myself,

Writhing with stump-legs and with envious eyes

Watching the men who calmly watched my death.

-Les Murray

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

Selfoss, Iceland

Battles without Honour and Humanity

Punctuation Rules

The rules governing whether to place punctuation inside or outside speech marks are complicated. The quick summary is:

• Semicolons and colons – outside
• Exclamation marks and question marks – according to logic
• Commas and periods/full stops – inside in the US, outside in the UK.

True Detectives