studyinglogic

[studyinglogic]

Ancients on ants

The references to Dwarf Fortress are to these types of descriptions:

Excerpts from Pliny on ants (my favourite parts italicised):

If a person only compares the burdens which the ants carry with the size of their bodies, he must confess that there is no animal which, in proportion, is possessed of a greater degree of strength. These burdens they carry with the mouth, but when it is too large to admit of that, they turn their backs to it, and push it onwards with their feet, while they use their utmost energies with their shoulders. These insects, also, have a political community among themselves, and are possessed of both memory and foresight. They gnaw each grain before they lay it by, for fear lest it should shoot while under ground; those grains, again, which are too large for admission, they divide at the entrance of their holes; and those which have become soaked by the rain, they bring out and dry.  They work, too, by night, during the full moon; but when there is no moon, they cease working. And then, too, in their labours, what ardour they display, what wondrous carefulness! Because they collect their stores from different quarters, in ignorance of the proceedings of one another, they have certain days set apart for holding a kind of market, on which they meet together and take stock. What vast throngs are then to be seen hurrying together, what anxious enquiries appear to be made, and what earnest parleys are going on among them as they meet! We see even the very stones worn away by their footsteps, and roads beaten down by being the scene of their labours. Let no one be in doubt, then, how much assiduity and application, even in the very humblest of objects, can upon every occasion effect! Ants are the only living beings, besides man, that bestow burial on the dead.

(Elephants may also bury their dead.)

Guo Pu 郭璞, Rhapsody on the Ant 蚍蜉賦, translated by Wilt L. Idema (my favourite parts italicised):

When the Great Potter made the myriad kinds He gave them their collective shape and dispersed them. None of those beings are tinier than insects, And of those none are lowlier than mole crickets and ants. In numberless multitudes, multitudinous masses They crowd together, running hither and thither: When walking they do not leave any trace, When scurrying they don’t raise any dust. When the rash thunder crashes, they’re not frightened; When the fierce storm wind rises, they’re not moved. When compared to Tiger Braves, they’re not overawed; When a dragon blade slashes, they don’t show fear. Even the whale is by them overwhelmed— Without any consideration of its size or weight. With no desire of their own they put in effort; They offer the image of great courage. They produce a rare lac from the area of Jiuzhen, Leaking a rosy fluid that looks like blood. It adorned the funeral conveyance of the man of Yin: At the four corners the lines were entwined in knots. They aided the exhausted troops of the state of Qi, Along the high mounds of the Eastern Hills. They are moved by incipient Yang to secretly emerge, And as if foreknowing floods, they block their doors. Simple and deluded as these insects may appear to be, They still seem to feel the stirrings of prescience.

Ants are a form of thing, known for travelling in cliques. They are small in size, unknown in color, and bashful in temperament. Every ant has two appendages they use to hurt other beings, and four appendages for other activities. Scientists have discovered many types of ants; gay, Protestant, electric, and chill. Their wealth is considered low.

[studyinglogic]

[studyinglogic]

—Torrin A. Greathouse, from Medusa with the Head of Perseus

[studyinglogic]

"I can't tell you any stories," I say, "because I've got this gap. There's an empty chasm between me and everybody else. I wave my arms about inside it but I can't get hold of anything, I shout into it but no one hears: it's total emptiness."

"In those situations I sing…"

– Italo Calvino, from “Wind in a City,” Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (Vintage, 1996)

[studyinglogic]

Two Horror Movies, with sundry comments on Godzilla

I rarely watch movies, and in particular I almost never watch horror movies. I prefer to read the plots online: so many of the cheap thrills of horror movies come from mere effects (jumpscares, uncanny valleys) that they are uninteresting to watch. To paraphrase from The Unwritten, in a delicious piece of double meaning---what keeps bad writers going? Genre conventions.

And even reading the plots online are often a mixed bag: The Wicker Man has cleverness to it, while The Blair Witch Project reads like an incoherent dream.

The horror movies I find most interesting are those with religious themes. Religious horror, in other words. In fact, the only horror movie I've ever watched is 11-11-11, and I plan to read the plot for Heretic.

At least for me, horror in itself is uninteresting; I find horror is horrifying more for what it points to. I used to find reading Lovecraft very comforting, precisely because the specific horrors he describes are so implausible: no matter how bad the world is, there are no Great Old Ones who might awaken to destroy us. But it becomes horrifying when thinking about the worldview that underlies his stories.

(And similarly for Godzilla movies, which are either fun monster fights or cutting commentaries on society. My favourite of the second type is Shin Godzilla, for its commentary on bureaucracy.)

Two horror movies were released October 2024: Smile 2 and The Apprentice. Both have similar plotlines, as far as I can gather. The plot of Smile 2 is about a malevolent entity which is passed from person to person; the plot of The Apprentice is centred on Roy Cohn's influence on Donald Trump. The similarity is obvious: it is Cohnness which is passed on to Trump, his habitus, his way of being, his adversarial offensive style, his form of life, his disregard of the truth, his manipulation of language---all codified in three rules.

But, for what it's worth, I find The Apprentice more of a horror movie than Smile 2. The evil entity in Smile 2 can only be passed from one person to one person; Cohn's Cohnness is transmissible to many and affects many (the end of the movie promises that).

And the Smile movies are uninteresting to me insofar as humans can only be victims in that world; in The Apprentice, humans can be both evil entities and victims, and in fact the entity himself becomes a victim towards the movie's end. (Cohn's panel on the AIDS Memorial Quilt reads "Bully. Coward. Victim.")

A final horror in The Apprentice is that the entity does not know it has become the entity. I am reminded of the final scene of The Godfather Part II, where Michael Corleone is supreme but sits alone; his choices and circumstances have rendered him a completely different person from the friendly, optimistic man he was when we first met him. But in The Godfather, the corruption is known and calculated and chosen; in The Apprentice, it happens slowly and gradually. Similar to Smile, the death of the previous person the entity possesses marks its entrance into a new person; Cohn's death marks the absorption of Cohnness into Trump.

This theme of ignorance occurs in Lovecraft as well, if not more strongly, because ignorance is the only option. Explorers who encounter the horrors beyond comprehension are driven mad (and hence their knowledge of these horrors is contained and rendered incommunicable). People who do not encounter these horrors are live happy lives of ignorance.

My favored interpretation of Lovecraft comes from Alan Moore; as Ayres puts it in his Alan Moore: A Critical Guide (pp. 151--152):

The horror is not that Earth has been deformed into something Lovecraftian, but that Lovecraftian wickedness has always been there, in need of agents to activate it. ...Joshi notes that Lovecraft’s characters confront chthonic horror and end up mad or suicidal. When Lovecraft’s narrators seem to display acceptance, Joshi clarifies, Lovecraft is “indicating that his [the narrator’s] mind is changing, emphasising the horror” (Moore 2017a: n. pag.). Acceptance, in this schema, is actually the more unnerving response, for it means that horror itself is no longer recognizable as such.

The same message recurs at the end of The Apprentice.

[studyinglogic]

One of the few egg-laying mammals on our planet is the echidna. They are medium sized solitary mammals covered in fur and spines made of keratin. Although they closely resemble hedgehogs and fill the same ecological niche they are not closely related at all. ©Ross Holdsworth

[studyinglogic]

preparing some groundbreaking work for a powerpoint party tonight

[studyinglogic]

Uncollected fragments

Everything I write here is true, but I am writing purely from memory, which of course means it is also not.

What is truth, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. (Bacon?)

Truth is the limit of inquiry by an ideal community of inquirers. (Peirce?)

The time the work is set in decides the form, writes Eco. But fragments have no form. What, then, is their relationship to time?

But some sort of form is necessary for intersubjective understanding. (That is why I think daos must be collective.)

Thinking through, by, with, against texts. Constructive. Jung.

The encyclopedic imposes an order; the fragmentary is always unfinished.

Eighteenth century China: Zhang Xuecheng is robbed and loses his manuscripts; he mourns their loss.

Nineteenth century Europe: Thomas Carlyle's draft history of the French Revolution is burned by someone who mistakes it for kindling.

Present time, present place (Lain!): some information is lost.

I have read two different accounts of van Gogh's last words. "The sadness will last forever" and "I want to die like this." The first is the most well attested, coming from Theo van Gogh's letter; the second is found in a biography by two scholars.

See you later.

I open my drafts folder, intending to write, but my whole body aches and I save my magnum opus for another day.

I wake up from a dream that I have to write an essay on Jane Eyre.

I vaguely remember seeing something on the heart of the world. Here, I stand with Nishida. It is ineffable place (basho). But of course there are other options. Wang Bi? Le Guin?

"And I'm trying to hold on to my past; it's been so long that I don't think I'm gonna last." What genre is this? "Energetic dream pop."

Fundamentally, only two types of things have significance in ___ _____ __ _ ___ __: texts and people.

The first thing I see when I wake up is an argument over the significance of Kierkegaard, with mentions of Heidegger and Barthes.

"You are a reliable source of knowledge." Everything has its modes.

"You are the kindest person I have ever met." Everyone has their element; it's easy to be kind when one is bountiful. (Aristotle on magnaminity.)

Citing sources is a responsibility, especially now (in the very fleeting present moment) when it is the easiest differentiator between LLM-generated output from human output. On the other hand, the intellectual freedoms that are lost...

Two memories anchor my life: a cat (B) and a game (S).

Sincerity vs. irony, imitare vs. rittrare, value.

"When later published in book form by Iwanami Shoten, its title was shortened to Kokoro; the rendering of the word "kokoro" itself was also changed from kanji (心) to hiragana (こゝろ)." What is the significance of the change in register? This is why languages are so important (to me). Reading a good literal translation brings me in touch with an unfamiliar heterotopian inner logic. E.g. Frieren, Nabokov on Pushkin.

How to read? Plural or monistic?

Borges's lectures on English literature skip Shakespeare entirely.

1502: Arthur, Prince of Wales dies; 1659: Dara Shikoh dies.

"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Excellent first sentence for a blurb!

And in the same way, fragments will be constantly reinterpreted. Ergodic literature.

Montaigne's Essays would have continued as long as he would have lived; what's important is the spirit of the work.

Someone's library is a collection of them, not just of books, and the inner logic is lost when the collection is dispersed (Trefethen).

For a long time, I have distrusted the encyclopedic even as I remain fascinated by it.

How do you read the Mahabharata, a work so vast? It depends on what level of fidelity you want. A lesser path, I did it by selectively reading between three translations; the most exacting would be to translate all of it into multiple languages, a path no one has taken, a path no one can take.

But how much can one do from the sidelines? This life so short, the craft so long to learn. The unending pressure of objective culture (Simmel). All the texts and people I keep in my heart.

[studyinglogic]

Tumblr community for langblrs that like to read in Japanese

✨My tumblr community for reading in Japanese got approved ✨

I would like to use this community for the following:

Sharing recommendations: When you finish an interesting article, manga, novel, children's book, or blog post in Japanese, share it with the community and tell us if there's furigana, complex grammar or keigo to watch out for!

Asking for recommendations: Would you like to read more in Japanese but don't know where to start or which genre to try next? Ask the community for their recommendations for your specific level of Japanese and reading experience!

I'm looking forward to more recommendations and discussions of Japanese books form the perspectives of other learners! If you have any input for this community please let me know.

Let's read some books together! 📚🇯🇵

[studyinglogic]

This is what hieroglyphs and figures in ancient Egyptian temples looked like before their colors faded. They were recreated using a polychromatic light display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, following thorough research.

[studyinglogic]

This is not so much a book ask as a general ask: what IS it about Wodehouse that makes him so grand? Is it just that I never quite expect Bertie’s thoughts or conversation to go where they end up going? Or is there something beyond that circumlocution he has going for him?

The answer to this question is, I think, a profound and holy mystery before which mere mortals (that is to say, ordinary chaps) must veil their sight. That said, I shall venture a few words on the p. and h. m. 

Wodehouse is, I think, one of the truly great masters of the English sentence, ranking alongside Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. His prose is sublime. His characters are fearlessly drawn in their absurdity… out of which they occasionally emerge into magnificence, or despite which they often utter startling aperçus. This is something which very, very few authors manage so consistently (Shakespeare comes to mind. Brainy fellow. Must have eaten a lot of fish.) Moreover, Wodehouse is exuberantly allusive. But his allusions are filtered, always, through the delightful and hapless Bertie. And this gives them, I would argue, a unique poignancy and hilarity.

Bertie (who won, let us not forget, a prize for scripture memorization at school) has a deeply literary imagination… or perhaps I should say, an imagination distinctively formed by a literate education. But where Lord Peter Wimsey might quote “the crashing conclusion of a youthful sonnet by Keats,” or declaim a stanza of Marlowe in the course of a flirtatious afternoon on the river, Bertie might gloomily observe that a fellow jolly well feels time’s winged whatsit hurrying near when a visit from an aunt is in the offing. (”Time’s wingèd chariot, sir.” “That’s the one, Jeeves.”) Limited anecdotal evidence suggests that such sequences are delighted in by readers with varying degrees of familiarity with Andrew Marvell. Bertie’s fragmentary and faulty and sometimes magnificently apposite quotations are a joy… and, moreover, they range from high culture to pop culture. Witness the episode where, considering himself disappointed in love, he imagines himself giving the girl in question “one of those whimsical, twisted, Ronald Colman smiles.”

Only Bertie – only Wodehouse – could turn Ronald Colman so perfectly into an adjective. Let’s talk about Wodehouse more often; it’s always a pleasure to be reminded of him.

[studyinglogic]

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

[studyinglogic]

[Also Ursula le Guin.]

For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world.

Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: a Native Narrative (2003, 21)

[studyinglogic]

In the footnote of your recent weekly post, you mentioned being a sometime skeptical of sociological criticism. Could you elaborate on why? Would really appreciate your insight!

I think I summed that up in my newsletter on Merve Emre, our premier living sociological critic, back when she was the talk of the literary world last year. The kernel of my argument:

The real question is in what way writing, or indeed dance, is “calculated.” A “sociological approach,” which stages writers as agents jockeying for power in the social landscape, also understands literary works as weapons in a struggle for status, shaped deliberately to have maximal effect on the writer’s standing. There is little room in such a worldview for inspiration, for obsession, for the unconscious, for the muses, for divine frenzy—for art as compulsory witness to experience, for art as tribute to the creation, for art as address to the ineffable. Art is artifice by definition: the process therefore necessarily involves calculation. But it doesn’t, unless we’re dealing with sheer hackwork or propaganda, involve calculation of the artist’s clout. If I’m being honest, I will concede that this lower calculus does come later—but not in the heat of composition.

[studyinglogic]

[studyinglogic]

[studyinglogic]

“Akutagawa usually took a basic idea from another work as the starting point for his own composition. And the debt - if that is actually the word for the process - seldom went beyond. … While Akutagawa often alludes in significant ways to brief, anecdotal materials, Dazai customarily has recourse to more substantial works as source materials. More to the point, he incorporates large swatches of detail, his own retelling of an earlier tale usually ending up as an amalgam of sorts. It must also be said, however, the Dazai virtually obliterates the tone and effect of the originals. … Dazai [has an] uncanny ability to turn almost any material to his own purpose … And yet, Dazai succeeds in preserving much that is recognizable from the originals even as he totally transforms them.”

—

James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation