A plume of smoke, ash and steam soars five miles into the sky from an erupting volcano.
The extraordinary image was captured by the crew of the International Space Station 220 miles above a remote Russian island in the North Pacific.
The round hole in the clouds is thought to have been caused by the shockwave of the initial explosion. At the centre lies the billowing mushroom tower of grey and brown ash.
For volcano experts, the most exciting part of the image is the layer of smooth white cloud that caps the plume – a little like a layer of snow on a mushroom.
This cap of condensed air is created from the rapid rising and then cooling of the air directly above the ash column. When moist, warm air rises quickly it creates a cloud.
Lera Boroditsky has a super-interesting essay at Edge on her work empirically testing the proposition that language structures thought. (Blërg – resisting urge to… blockquote…. sigh.)
So Boroditsky’s got some clever tests, including asking speakers/writers of a different language to arrange pictures chronologically (Roman languages tend to arrange chronology from left to right, Hebrew from right to left, and fascinatingly, the Kuuk Thaayorre in Australia do it from east to west), and testing incidences of adjectives speakers of languages with gendered nouns assign to those nouns – Germans think keys (male) are hard and jagged and bridges are slender and beautiful, where Spanish-speakers (whose gender assignations switch the nouns) correspondingly flip associations.
But… okay, look. I believe in this thesis. But the tests to my mind are not conclusive evidence. Here’s why.
You can’t get into a person’s head.
Is is that simple? It is.
Because (stay with me) all of these tests don’t show that speakers of different language think differently, but that they represent thought differently. The way we write changes the way we talk, and the way we represent thought in space. The way we talk also changes the way we write. And the way we talk changes the way we talk. You don’t have any evidence – at least, any evidence that doesn’t assume the premise – that Germans actually THINK bridges are more graceful or beautiful than Spaniards do – just that they’re more likely to use adjectives with feminine associations with feminine nouns. What this suggests immediately is that language is a complex and interconnected system where terms and kinds group together, and small linguistic changes actually trigger a series of different linguistic associations and values. It DOESN’T immediately prove that language structures thought – understood as something independent from its representation.
Because if language is the vocal and visual representation of concepts, then ALL of Boroditsky’s tests are instances of language. Language structures language. And once you assume unproblematically that language directly represents thought, then you naturally discover that thought and language are inseparable. Which is what was to be shown. But this is logically a tautology – even if its empirical specifics of how that tautology manifests itself are fascinating.
Let me reframe this, then. What I think these experiments show is that in moments where we may think we are simply registering our pure and unmediated experience of the world, we’re really on auto-pilot – language is in fact doing our “thinking” for us. But this kind of not-quite-thinking doesn’t automatically deserve to be called “thought” at all.
It’s silly to make a CD-length mix playlist in 2009. I stopped listening to CDs altogether when I donated my long-suffering 1996 Monte Carlo a couple of years ago. And curation with limits is out. Why limit yourself to a static 80-minute document when you can have your own blog – hell, your own radio station – curating music all year long? Why not just make a big “favorites” list for your iPod and stick it on shuffle?
So it took the following extraordinary circumstances to get me to put this together:
1. I’m secretly an analog dinosaur. I wrote papers on a manual typewriter until I went to college, and made cassette after cassette of 60, 90, and 120-minute songs I recorded from the radio from the time I was six or seven.
2. I keep all of my music on an external hard drive, which went kaput. I’ve had to scavenge data to my overloaded laptop – which means I mostly have only a few songs/albums that I really want to listen to available to me.
3. It’s hot, and it’s summer, so songs about heat and summer keep coming to my mind. And they’re (mostly) not the obvious ones.
4. There are a few really terrific albums that have come out in the last few months.
5. The death of Michael Jackson has me reaching around in my music archive a bit.
So here’s a playlist of songs preoccupying me for summer 2009. It’s titled “Melting Like Hot Candle Wax.” If you’re really slick, you know where that title’s from already.
Apparently the sixth-century scribes who wrote it were living in what was then Judea, somewhere in present-day Israel. The document was taken to the Sinai desert in Egypt and stowed away for 300 years at a monastery called St. Catherine’s, at the foot of the mountain where Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments…. Then in the ninth century, a new set of scribes dug through St. Catherine’s looking for parchment, which was very expensive in those days. They pulled pages from eight different books–six in Aramaic and two in Greek–and did their best to erase the original writing. They then turned the pages upside down and wrote over the ancient text in jet-black ink. The newer text, in Syriac, is a copy of instructions on how to run a monastery, originally written by a sixth-century monk named John Climacus.
This happened all the time, and was one of the best advantages of writing on parchment. It was expensive – anything made from animals rather than vegetables always is — but you could scrape the top layer off and use it again and again.
There’s a whole aspect of monastic discipline and spirituality that’s tied up with manuscript and parchment culture. Preparing vellum for writing was hard, physical work – and the scraping of the parchment became a kind of allegory for spiritual renewal and an ascetic’s soul. You’re literally mortifying flesh, scraping it clean, in order to fill it with wisdom and the words of God.
But at the same time, it was prosaic and practical:
“It was like using yesterday’s newspaper to wrap up your fish and chips,” says Bolton.
I love the description of the appearance of multiple scripts in the document:
The resulting palimpsest looks like a pirate’s cipher for buried treasure, written in several mysterious scripts. The Aramaic writing, in a pale, faded brown, appears loose and fluid, with the odd curlicue swirling outside the margin. The black Syriac is careful, tight and slanting. It’s not exactly a key to a puzzle written in code, but it sure looks like one.
I agree with Nav; this post by Emily Gould is terrific. Less for her strong rebuttal of an errant “the internet is vulgar” argument — which is so silly it requires no rebut — than for this description of the internet itself:
Kunkel’s experience of the Internet bears no resemblance to my experience of the Internet, but then, that’s the funny thing about the Internet, isn’t it? No one’s Internet looks the same as anyone else’s, and it’s that exact essential fungibility that makes definitive assessments like Kunkel’s infuriating. The Internet isn’t a text we can all read and interpret differently. It’s not even a text, at least not in most senses of that word. The Internet is a chimera that magically manifests in whatever guise its viewer expects it to. If you are looking at the Internet and expecting it to be a source of fleeting funniness, unchallenging writing, attention-span-killing video snippets, and porn, then that is exactly all it will ever be for you.
On one level, you might just say the internet is just a technology, and broad claims about content on the internet exist at the same level as broad claims about things printed on paper. On another level, you might say the internet is a chimera that magically manifests in whatever guise its viewer expects it to, and man, I want to be on that level.
For my family, the death of Michael Jackson was one of those call-your-people-and-make-sure-everyone’s-okay moments. I was checking the New York Times on my cell on the way to Tampa International Airport when the story was still that he’d been rushed to the hospital, reportedly for cardiac arrest. The way they’d written the story, though, with eulogistic snippets of bio fleshing out the news report, it felt as though the writers had pasted in text from Jackson’s canned obit, which I interpreted as a bad sign. I kept saying to the folks in the Super Shuttle that I had a bad feeling about it. As I handed my boarding pass and license to the TSA inspector, she passed it back slowly, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Michael Jackson is dead.”
So. Muse upon a problematic and epic life with me, Snarketeers. What have you seen that lives up to the moment? I’ll kick us off with this reminiscence, by Minneapolis writer Max “Bunny” Sparber. And the MetaFilter obit thread is always a propos.
With all the time and energy you’ve squandered on that blog, you could have written a book. So goes the self-reproach, and indeed, the book in question turns out to be 449 pages long…
All of the posts and essays included in The Wreck of the Henry Clay are available free already on this blog, so why should you buy it? I have no idea! I have given up trying to understand the internet’s economics, but maybe it’ll be like buying ringtones versus stealing MP3s? Who knows. It took a surprising amount of time to turn several hundred blog posts into a several-hundred-page book, so perhaps some of you will be willing to pay me for my PDF-creating skills? As I said, no idea. Let’s not call this “self-published,” by the way. That has a kind of disreputable sound. It’s a chapbook, all right? Why am I doing this? I saw not long ago that someone had published a book of his Twitters, and I felt I was in danger of being behindhand. I am hereby restored to the bleeding edge. Also, now, when the electromagnetic-pulse device is detonated, I will be the only blogger in America with backup. And of course I’m looking forward to kicking back while the cold, hard internet cash at last streams in.
My new favorite blog is Gary Dexter’s How books got their titles. Dexter gives the biographies (nomographies?) of famous books according to the following criteria:
1) the title should not be explicable simply by reading the text of the book itself;
2) each title should be the title of a book or play that has been published as such (rather than e.g. a poem or story that appears as part of a collection);
3) no quotations as titles.
Here’s the story of Freud’s The Ego and the Id, part of the title and concept of which was adapted from George Groddeck’s The Book of the It:
In the early years of psychoanalysis, practitioners were very anxious to establish their respectability as legitimate medical men. This was still an age of sexual puritanism, in which the sexual organs and sexual functions were not generally mentioned in polite conversation, and in which sexual categories as we now know them, or think we know them — homosexuality, bisexuality, transvestism, transsexualism — were still at an early and controversial stage of development. In this atmosphere, George Groddeck delivered a notorious speech to the congress of psychoanalysts at The Hague in 1920, opening his address with the words: “I am a wild analyst.” This was somewhat crass. Analysts were regarded by the public as “wild” already: it was exactly the image the profession wished to avoid. In his speech Groddeck went on to develop the idea that unconscious forces were the rulers of the human organism: even bodily diseases were caused by unconscious conflicts and neuroses. Groddeck moreover insisted on bringing his mistress to conferences and was the author of a risqu
Travis (played by Harry Dean Stanton) emerges in the deserts of West Texas without any memory or speech. A doctor contacts his brother Walt, and driving back to California, Travis slowly begins to open up. Walt likewise reveals that he and his wife Anne have been raising Travis’s young son Hunter since shortly after Travis originally disappeared. Travis and Hunter then go to find Hunter’s mother, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), who’s likewise vanished.
Here’s a favorite exchange, taken from the screenplay [lightly formatted by me]:
Walt: Trav, I need to talk to you a little bit about Hunter.
Travis: How old is he now?
W: He’s eight in January.
T: He’s seven, then.
W: Yeah. [Pause] But see what I want to talk about is uh … Well, he’s-he’s like part of the family now. Anne and me are like his parents now.
T: Anne’s your wife?
W: Yeah. You remember her, don’t you?
T: No. [Pause.] Does he think that you are his father?
W: Well … Anne told him you were coming.
T:Well who does he think I am?
W: I-I told him you are his father. But see … Well, you’ve been gone a long time, Trav.
T: How long have I been gone, do you know?
W: Four years.
T: Is four years a long time?
W: Well, it is for a little boy. It’s half his life.
T: Half a boy’s life. [Pause.] I remember now!
W: What?
T: Why I bought that land.
W: Oh, Why?
T: Well … Mama once told me that uh … that’s where she and Daddy … first … made love.
W: Oh, in Paris, Texas?
T: Yeah.
W: She told you that?
T: Yeah. [Pause.] So … I figured that that’s where I-I have began. [Pause] I mean me, Travis Clay Henderson. They named me that. [Pause.] I started out there.
W: Paris, Texas, huh?
T: Yeah.
W: So you think maybe you were conceived there?
T: Yeah.
W: You could be right, Travis.
T: Daddy always had a joke about it.
W: What was the joke?
T: He’s uh … he would introduce Mama… as the girl he met in Paris. Then he’d waited uh … before he said “Texas” till everybody thought that … he meant … he would wait before he said “Texas” till everybody thought … after everyone thought he was talking about Paris, France. He always laughed real hard about it.
This movie can (and should) wreck you, it’s that good.
