tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34429396819253275472024-02-07T15:47:59.840-08:00north bank essaysnorthbankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17764220434474903244noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3442939681925327547.post-19108855022408544292012-02-16T13:53:00.000-08:002012-02-16T13:53:56.260-08:00CONTRARIAN ECOLOGY<br />
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CONTRARIAN
ECOLOGY</div>
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Everything
now is either managed or it should be, including 'the natural
environment'. We call it that if we're planning to manage it, and, in
Australia, we rarely think 'environmental management' without
thinking 'restoration'. There is that image of Australia pre-1788,
the native bush before ferals, weeds, clearing, logging,
super-phosphate, and all that. It's an image that captivates ecology,
pop ecology and romantic environmentalism.</div>
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There's
a whole culture of ecosystem management — National Park managers,
degrees in ecological management, Catchment Management Authorities,
assorted bureaucracies, and 'out there in the community' there's
Landcare. It's civic society. It's not a media thing though. At
budget time you might hear a mention of Caring For Country or some
other government program rebranded, or axed. But it's not up there
with Tasmanian forests, the Barrier Reef, the Murray-Darling, Climate
Change, or bushfires.</div>
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Back
in 2009 I went to a conference of the Society For Ecological
Restoration in Perth, where I sat in on a session on 'novel
ecosystems'. Richard Hobbs from the University of WA spoke, so did
Eric Higgs, a Canadian ecologist who'd written a book called <i>Nature
By Design</i>. It was on the final morning, a time for mild
stimulation and slight unorthodoxy. 'Ecosystems are emerging that
never existed before. It is impractical to try to restore ecosystems
to some “rightful” historical state. ... We must embrace the fact
of 'novel ecosystems' and incorporate many alien species into
management plans, rather than try to achieve the often impossible
goal of eradicating them or drastically reducing their abundance.'
That was the session's theme, even though the quote itself is more
recent. It's from a June 2011 article in <i>Nature</i>, by the US
ecologist Mark Davis and eighteen other authors, including Hobbs.</div>
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<span style="background: transparent;">The
stimulation was mild, the novel ecosystem thesis was not quite as
novel as I had hoped, and novel ecosystems themselves didn't seem all
that novel. I thought of subtropical forests of queen palm and
camphor laurel, riverbanks of Madeira, catsclaw and balloon vine,
seasides of bitou and glory lilly, even wheat fields, gardens and
golf greens, or the minimalism of motorways, and nuclear test sites.
I guess now was the time to 'embrace' them and tweak them into
something useful or cool or subversive by wedging in a bit of
designer biodiversity. But was the thesis any more than just hyping a
groovy response to the empirical surprises and philosophical
challenges that had puzzled and entertained restoration ecologists
and naturalists for ages?</span></div>
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Provide
a label and you collect a body of thought, maybe even kick off a
discipline. In the 1950s the 'ecology of invasions' was used to
gather together a set of ecological ideas that had been around since
before Darwin. <i>Origin of Species</i> mentions things like cattle
going feral in Australian. Twenty years earlier John Henslow, the
Cambridge biologist who had passed his place on <i>The Beagle</i> on
to his younger proteg<span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;">é</span>,
had formulated a rudimentary theory about competition between natives
and exotics. People in Australia have long been doing what, in the
1970s, they started to call 'bush regeneration', restoring the bush
to something like its pre-invasion condition by removing exotic
weeds.</div>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;">Now
we have the label 'novel ecosystems' gathering together ideas that
have also been around in some form since Darwin's day. The ideas
inspired the nineteenth century Acclimatisation Societies with their
vision of enhancing the flora and fauna of Australia and America. And
while bush regenerators have been weeding the bush since the 70s,
Permaculture designers have been trying to build self-sustaining
ecosystems from encyclopaedias of useful plants and animals. More
recently Peter Andrews became a folk prophet of novel ecosystems by
sexing up standard on-farm water management with exotic willows and
contrarian weed ecology. It was only a matter of time before the
novel ecosystem label registered in the media as breaking scientific
news. That June 2011 </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Nature
</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">article
</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;"> — </span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">a
summary two page manifesto that relied on references to several other
papers to do the ecology</span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
— </span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">was enough to get
the ABC and the SMH interested. They picked it up and ran 'novel
ecosystems' as a story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;">Meanwhile
in America and hence the world there was science journalist Emma
Marris with a new book to promote. And by December 2011 Michael Duffy
was interviewing her on ABC radio's</span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Counterpoint</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;"> about
</span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Rambunctious Garden:
Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I</span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;">t
was clear the Anthropocene — the current epoch, so called because
the big ecological changes are anthropogenic — was out and proud,
and Marris's 'Nature 2.0' was the new pristine. The header on
Marris's web site, a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle's Joe
Christensen, leaves us in no doubt that world historical events are
afoot: '</span><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">Marris is
already being compared to the greatest environmental writers and
thinkers of the past century, Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold.'</span></strong></div>
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With
a pitch like that it wasn't going to be long before someone noticed
the contrarian potential of novel ecosystems, tailor made for taking
on environmentalism. I remember the editor of a scientific journal on
restoration ecology predicting some such thing way back at the 2009
conference.</div>
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Contrarianism
is a seductive attitude. It has an unfortunate appeal for
self-promoters, because it seems to underwrite radical intellectual
originality with owlish scepticism. You can fancy yourself as Galileo
against the clergy, plain-spoken amongst the mealy-mouthed. Richard
Steele nailed contrarians three centuries ago: 'they can turn what
little knowledge they have into a ready capacity of raising doubts,
into a capacity of being always frivolous and always unanswerable.'
Michael Duffy began an essay in the SMH with the line: 'It's been
suggested that passionate environmentalism is a bit like religion. It
has its own sense of original sin, the belief that the New World was
once a pristine and stable wilderness that was defiled by Europeans'.
The rhetoric is a give away: the passive voice, the vague
'suggested', the lines 'a bit like religion' and 'original sin' to
rankle those atheistic greens. Create a straw dummy of your
opposition before you blow it down</div>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;">Prompted
by Duffy on ABC's </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Counterpoint,</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Marris noted the irony that supposedly anti-racist greens tread a
fine line between invasion ecology and xenophobia when they apply the
native/alien distinction to flora and fauna. Meanwhile in</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
the </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">New
York Times</span></i></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> she
and three co-authors</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
let readers know</span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> that
'in fact, humans have been changing ecosystems for millenniums' and
'we have learned that ecosystems are not — and have never been —
static entities.' They made it sound as if this were not textbook
ecology.</span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;">Maybe
I'm being too harsh. It's not easy to write one truth after another
and be scrupulous about every inference and implication. We all use
rhetoric. And it uses us. Me too now. Even the </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Nature</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
article had the straw dummy trick. When it made the point that
'n</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">ativeness
is not a sign of evolutionary fitness or of a species having positive
effects' was that supposed to imply that all those restoration
ecologists had been unable to figure out that invasive species have
the evolutionary advantage and that native species are not reliably
resilient under a regime of inv</span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;">asions?
And there's the claim that 'invaders do not represent a major
extinction threat to most species in most ecosystems'. Note the
casual proliferation of 'most's and 'major's, the feral 'represents'
replacing the native 'is', the implication that those misguided
restoration ecologists must think that invaders are a </span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">major</span></i></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;">
extinction threat to </span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">most
</span></i></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;">species
in </span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="background: transparent;">most</span></i></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;">
ecosystems.</span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: transparent;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">What
do they think? Why</span></span></span></span> remove exotic species
from native ecosystems? It's a combination of post-Darwinian ecology
and aesthetic passion. The science is about how long-term
evolutionary processes in the absence of high rates of species
invasion — e.g. in pre-1788 Australia — create ecosystems rich in
species and varied in structure, even though they might be
susceptible to invasions. The aesthetics is in the 'rich' and
'varied'. Restoration ecologists sometimes call the Anthropocene the
Homogecene — an epoch when a few weedy and feral generalists
dominate lots of ecosystems. It's not a matter of corny primevalism,
religious environmentalism or native plant Nazis. The complex
organisation of nature fires the great aesthetic emotions of
admiration and wonder. Goethe said 'the beautiful is a manifestation
of secret laws of nature, which, without its presence, would never
have been revealed.' Those secret laws sound like what modern ecology
is about.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Nature</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
article ends soberly bureaucratically.</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;">
'We urge conservationists and land managers to organise priorities
around whether species are producing benefits or harm to
biodiversity, human health, ecological services and economies.
Nearly two centuries on from the introduction of the concept of
nativeness, it is time for conservationists to focus much more
on the functions of species, and much less on where they originated.'</span></span></span></span>
Environmentalists and restoration ecologists have always argued in
the same managerial terms. Environmental politics still has '<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background: transparent;">to
organise priorities around' </span></span></span></span>terms like
biodiversity and ecological services, terms that have to do the
talking for the aesthetics of nature.</div>
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But
novel ecosystem ecology has its aesthetic too. It wants to be
post-modern restoration ecology — original and avant garde. Defined
negatively it's about not restoring some authentic pristine nature.
And it's about not simply gardens and farms. The positive is mostly
imagined in examples that don't yet quite live up to the dream: theme
parks of the early Pleistocene; authentic Anthropocene wilderness
weedscapes; bioengineered ecosystems that deliver economic and
ecosystem services; meta-gardens that are wild and 'rambunctious',
with their own cool, hyper-functionality. There are whole genres out
there.</div>
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Note
however that the old romantic aesthetic about wildness is still at
work here: Let nature do its thing, but let it be the new unruly
nature of the Anthropocene, and don't try to impose your old Nature
on it. Let nature naturally move on. Even that schizoid division of
humans from nature seems to persist. But of course it makes things
very handy, almost too good to be true. Its efficient — humans can
let nature do the work. It's fun — we can tweak and play around
with ecosystems if we like. It's liberating — it replaces
melancholy with positive thinking. And when it comes to environmental
politics it's useful: any excuse for trashing a bit more of the old
nature, or winding back the culture of ecosystem restoration and
national parks. But the culture is entrenched. It remains to be seen
whether or not the novel ecosystem thesis will be a successful
invader.</div>northbankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17764220434474903244noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3442939681925327547.post-20423845098516063192011-07-09T01:02:00.000-07:002011-07-09T01:02:35.172-07:00Stories and explanations; or what vs why
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Stories and explanations; or what vs why</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">The wonderfullest things are ever
unmentionable. </span>
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— <span style="font-size: x-small;">Herman Melville, </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Moby
Dick</i></span></div>
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A long way into Ulysses S Grant’s <i>Memoirs</i>,
somewhere close to Appomattox, there is a little story about a
migraine. The Army of the Potomac has closed in on General Lee’s
Confederate Army. Grant is ‘suffering very severely with a sick
headache, and stopped at a farmhouse on the road some distance in the
rear of the main body of the army’. He has ‘spent the night in
bathing his feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard
plasters on his wrists and the back part of his neck, hoping to be
cured by morning’. It is April 9, 1865. Abraham Lincoln would be
dead within a week.</div>
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In an exchange of letters between the generals,
Lee, having ‘set up a white flag’, is talking peace but not
surrender, and he has invited ‘an interview between the lines’.
Grant has ‘no authority to treat on the subject of peace’ but
says ‘the South laying down their arms’ will ‘save thousands of
human lives’. Making the rendezvous is complicated by geography,
the placement and hostility of armies, and poor communication —
with your own side as well as the other. And there’s still that
sick headache. Grant’s memoirs make waging war sound like very
serious event management. And he seems to be able to deal with
contingency after contingency. Methodically. Geography and clear
communication are among his strengths. Still suffering from the
migraine, and with time running out, Grant gets another letter from
Lee, this one by the only route fast enough: ‘through the rebel
lines’. Lee now wants to talk about surrender. ‘The instant I saw
the contents of the note’ writes Grant ‘I was cured.’</div>
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This is one of a handful of little stories I
remember from Grant’s memoirs. In another, at the fall of
Petersburg, Grant ‘had not the heart to turn the artillery upon …
a mass of defeated and fleeing men’. That’s how he puts it years
later when he wrote the memoirs. A third takes place shortly before
Sherman’s march to the sea and during the 1864 Presidential
election. Grant diagnosed the situation: the North was weary, but the
South was ‘a military camp’. It’s a story about thinking
something. The fourth was a famous scene of the war: the eventual
meeting between the generals took place, not as planned in the
Appomattox Court House, but in an orchard nearby, where Lee was
waiting, leaning against an apple tree. ‘Like many other stories,’
wrote Grant ‘it would be very good if it was only true.’ The
fifth is better. Grant, his headache cured, ignored his troops’
suspicions that Lee was foxing, and made for the Appomattox Court
House where he finally met the beaten Confederate talent. Lee was
wearing a full, new uniform and a sword. Grant was in ‘rough garb’
and ‘without a sword’. There you have it: my take </div>
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on a civil war,
far away and in another century. </div>
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Years later ex-President Grant lost his fortune in
a dodgy financial partnership, was diagnosed with throat cancer,
wrote the memoirs he had never wanted to write, published them and
died — all between the summer of 1884 and the summer of 1885. Mark
Twain, who’d not long started the company that would publish
<i>Huckleberry Finn</i>, wrote a contract that would pay Grant 70% of
the net proceeds, a lot more generous than Grant’s first publisher
had offered. Grant managed posthumously to deliver his family from
debt. Of course none of this is in the <i>Memoirs</i>. </div>
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Other stories not in the <i>Memoirs </i>are one
about Grant having once been a slave owner, a similar one about
Sherman, and another about Mark Twain doing a stint as a Confederate
militiaman.</div>
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An essay by Les Murray appeared in the August
2010 <i>Monthly</i>. ‘Infinite Anthology’ it was called:
‘Adventures in Lexiconia.’ The essay began by listing some of the
words the poet had submitted to the <i>Macquarie Dictionary</i>. The
first was <i>pobbledonk</i>: ‘Scarlet sided banjo frog. Large
robust frog common in swamps in coastal Queensland and New South
Wales.’</div>
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I thought the essay got a few things a bit wrong
— including <i>pobbledonk</i> — the sort of things someone might
write <i>sic</i> after. I often notice people — especially
lexicographers —describe the language I speak and hear every day in
ways that differ from my own experience. I guess we can expect this
at the close, familiar range of current coinage and usage, where we
can all be Humpty Dumpties about what we say and think things mean.
It’s why lexicographers get coy about urging their descriptions as
prescriptions: they know they can’t get them quite right because
there is no just right. Les’s <i>pobbledonk</i> differed from my
experience, and from others’ too. It’s often the way with common
names of plants and animals. I thought <i>pobbledonk </i>might have
been what they called it over in his valley. In a letter to the
October <i>Monthly</i> Angus Martin corrected it to <i>pobblebonk,</i>
and said the name applied to several related species, not all of them
scarlet-sided. He avoided technical clarification by not citing the
genus <i>Limnodynastes</i> — specifically <i>Limnodynastes dumerili</i>
— maybe thinking that was the sort of thing a snoot would do, like
writing <i>sic</i>. Taxonomy is one of the places where lexicography
still ventures to the high ground of prescription; it gets the point
of making clear lexical arrangements. Still, that’s no reason why
you shouldn’t call your frog a <i>pobbledonk</i>. If it’s a
mistake, it’s like a child’s mistake, or a poet’s, or someone
who collects words like shells on a beach. Between nickname and
common name, where idiolect takes on the world, mistakes can have as
much right as authorities. Les Murray is the sort of poet who gives
the world back its language enriched by his idiolect.</div>
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In another essay — it’s ages since I read it,
I don’t remember its title — Les Murray made a comment about
writing and explanation. It was something like: explanation spoils
writing and good writing avoids it. I can’t remember if he was
specific about just what explanation was or why it was a problem. Nor
can I claim I’m getting him right here in word or spirit. I am
really only saying what I remember, not what he said. It’s just a
story, my story. And I would add that somewhere — I don’t
remember where — Virginia Woolf said ‘explanations are so much
water poured into wine’. I guess the point is that explanation is
garrulous, strays from the particular into the general, from the
concrete into the abstract, and it’s used to make excuses. So leave
explanation to philosophers, academics and other cavillers. Let it
mess up or water down their prose.</div>
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Whatever Les Murray said though, or Virginia
Woolf meant, it niggled me enough to make me think about the
aesthetics of prose. Or maybe it’s the ethics. Iris Murdoch
suspected we think of certain people as good, e.g. Socrates, for no
better reason than ‘the simplicity and directness of their
diction’. Montaigne was cunning about this and figured that
apologising for the rough edges of his prose could win him moral
favour. Apologies like this sound patronising — that old mix of
humility, and hypocrisy, salted with avuncular irony. Socrates used
to try this sort of thing too. So the question really is, when it
comes to prose, what are the virtues? And after chewing this over for
a long time, I’ve decided at least one thing: whatever its dangers
good prose can just shirk explanation.</div>
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In the November <i>Monthly</i> Les sort of
explained his spelling of <i>pobblebonk</i>. He ‘got the d back to
front’. That’s sending acknowledgement on explanation’s errand.
It avoids saying <i>why</i> with the barest of <i>hows</i>. As for
his authority on frog naming and scarlet sidedness, he cited not his
valley but his frog book (not mine, nor I guess Angus’s): Lynne
Adcock’s and Ian Morris’s <i>Frogs</i>. Fair enough. But as
explanations go, it was maybe not as clear as one of Samuel
Johnson’s. Boswell’s ‘Doctor’ was ‘asked by a lady how he
came to define’ the word <i>pastern </i>as ‘the <i>knee</i> of a
horse’. ‘Instead of making an elaborate defence, as she expected,
he at once responded “Ignorance Madam, pure ignorance”.’</div>
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Johnson was not always so direct in his writing
as in his speech. William Hazlitt thought he was ‘a lazy learned
man, who liked to think and talk, better than to read or write’.
‘Others wrote English’; Johnson’s wrote ‘long compound Latin
phrases [that] required less thought’. His ‘style of imposing
generalization’, long inverted periods, and ‘words with the
greatest number of syllables’, all ‘depended on [a] sort of
arbitrary pretension’. Johnson used the formalities of style and
rhythm to conjure up his words and thoughts — a far cry from
Grant’s way of writing: ‘I only knew what was on my mind and I
wished to express it clearly.’ When Hazlitt wrote, according to
Virginia Woolf, he used ‘strong tea and sheer force of will’. But
give him a great day’s experience and he would write it up in an
essay like <i>The Fight</i>, a narrative so spot-on you get the
impression that, even in raw experience, ‘the fight was a complete
thing’. Hazlitt wrote the story so that the friend he went to the
fight with might ‘relish it’, and ‘on purpose that such a bit
of human nature might not be lost to the world’.</div>
<div class="western">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
Grant long resisted writing memoirs, and he ended
up writing them by ‘sheer force of will’, dying from throat
cancer. As a result quite a bit of human nature was not lost to the
world. That’s one thing narrative is good for. In a literary war
over content, if explanation is barely defensible, narrative needs no
defence. It’s hard for an explanation not to tell you what to
think. It argues. A story can dish up human nature and let you
decide: make your own judgments, read from it whatever plot or
argument strikes you. I suppose the plot that most people expect and
get from Grant’s memoirs is something that starts with recruiting
volunteers in Illinois, and then goes down the Mississippi and
through Tennessee to Virginia, Appomattox and Lincoln’s
assassination. There is a lot of grinding military detail and names
of battles. All those events on which so much depended. But the
<i>Memoirs</i> plot for me is about a man who was probably drawn to
live a free, easy, mediocre life. A man who liked a drink. Grant does
not, for instance, seem as tough as William Tecumseh Sherman. One of
Mathew Brady’s photos shows Sherman straight out of the swamps of
Georgia, hungry face, chewed hair, all gristle, hardly yet civilised
by the new peace, the fresh uniform that’s hanging off him, and the
black ribbon tied to his arm in memory of Lincoln. At the start of
the war Grant came out of ten years of retirement from the military,
ten years of second-rate business dealing. He was almost forty and
about ready to go to fat, but he found himself obliged to deal with
the events history stuck in his way, to rise to the hard occasion,
painstakingly to respect the circumstances he faced. And it is
something in itself that he was able eventually to rise to the demand
of being the reliable colleague and commander of one tough prick like
Sherman, to respect <i>that</i> circumstance.</div>
<div class="western">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
The memoirs are a story of painstaking respect,
an elliptical mention that takes six hundred plainspoken pages. It’s
funny that it took Grant all those words to be laconic, and to win
praise for writing terse prose. It takes so many words to not say
certain things. It’s in this wordiness that terse prose like
Grant’s contains the seed of a style of high evasion that instructs
us in the eloquence of omissions. It’s a style that contains the
germ of its own baroque. Read Hemingway with his repeated phrases and
‘and’ after ‘and’. Like Grant it’s wordy, and plain, but
it’s ornamented with plainness. From about Gertrude Stein on the
laconic entered a baroque phase. For example, read Cormac McCarthy.</div>
<div class="western">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
When it comes to writing about war, Socrates
argued that a general would be better than Homer. Mark Twain said
Grant’s memoirs were ‘the most remarkable work of its kind since
the <i>Commentaries</i> of Julius Caesar.’ They made Gertrude Stein
weep. History plants the content of certain works — things on which
so much depended — deep into the psyche of a nation or culture. I
don’t think that Grant’s prose would be so highly regarded, if it
had lacked the content he wrote about. I’d say much the same about
the prose of the King James Bible. In prose, content is style is
content. Grant’s content was all experience and narrative.</div>
<div class="western">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western">
Some explanation.<span style="font-family: Garamond,serif;">
</span>Experience is what defies plans and pre-formed explanation,
and there’s no story that accounts for it before it happens. That’s
why we say it’s the best teacher. It’s not only because it’s
hard to ignore what happens to you, and easy to ignore what happens
to someone else. No teacher can anticipate it. Generalisations miss
the point. Experience demands a story, the special type of argument
we use for exposition of the mere, salient detail.</div>
<div class="western">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
But there is supposed to be something easy,
almost pre-digested about narrative: compared to theories and
explanations, stories are easy to read and, especially if they are
about actual events, easy to write. Though we are ready to blame
someone for making up a false story, or praise someone else for a
work of fiction, if a writer just tells us <i>what happened</i> we
can fail to give due credit because we treat the story not as the
writer’s work but as common property given to everyone by the
events themselves. Where is the thought in telling it? Or the
imagination? As far as facts are concerned, Johnson took it for
granted that writing history was easier than fiction because history
gives you its stories ready made. And since experience is just
history from really close up, it must be easier to write than
anything. But it’s not really like that.</div>
<div class="western">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
While events don’t happen to us as stories,
what happens to us is not grasped as experience without narrative
somehow getting into the process. We grasp it, sort it and archive
it, all by narrative, and when we retrieve it, we retrieve it using
narrative again. Memory is a kind of narrative re-elaboration. And
any notion we have of the <i>events in themselves</i>, or of the <i>raw
experience</i>, can only be given back to us courtesy of the
narrative that we conceive or remember them with. <i>Raw experience</i>
and <i>events in themselves</i> are abstractions. Narrative is
experience thought, perhaps understood. It’s explanation in its
minimal form.</div>
<div class="western">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
Stories are made after the fact but the quality
of experience is the quality of its narration — how well thought it
is. We have the opportunity to retell our experience, to understand
it differently, maybe to get it right. But sometimes when we try to
do this — as we well know in the case of the most troubling
experience — we can be cursed to relive it. We retell it but only
by worrying over it again and again, keeping the wound open.
Especially after a war there are a lot of things people just want to
forget, leave unsaid. It’s a time to be laconic.</div>
<div class="western">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western">
Sick headache is a good old term for migraine, a
bad headache that made you bilious. Migraine used to be called
psychosomatic when ‘psychosomatic’ meant that getting over your
headache was about mind over matter. There is something to be said
for Stoicism, but not when it’s just the moral high ground. A
small-time migraine sufferer, I can only remember getting over two
without taking analgesics, applying a hot water bottle to my
forehead, lying down in the dark or all of the above. Both times I
was working, and others were relying on me — the same circumstances
that can turn a twinge into a killer. Mind and matter are so mixed up
in the organ we call the brain (there’s a lot of explaining to do
there) we’re inclined to grant the mind a power we might not if we
were suffering from arthritis or a kick in the balls. I don’t
really think Grant’s story is about mind over matter though, at
least not in the Stoic sense of moral will. And it’s not even so
much about the big moment obliterating and curing the minor ill.
Those are the sort of prefabricated explanations that experience
defies. You might want to think Grant tells the migraine story to
make one of those points, but he doesn’t spell it out. More than
anything, the sick headache story just says ‘I was there, this is
what was happening’. Grant was a player but he writes as a witness.
Why water it down with an explanation.</div>
<div class="western">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western">
A narrative can contain anything. It strings
events into a process, tells <i>who, what, where, when</i> and <i>how</i>
and, as a rule, draws the line at <i>why</i>. When the woman asked
Johnson <i>how he came</i> to define <i>pastern</i> as <i>knee</i>,
he was nudged to the end of his tether of English <i>wh</i>-words<i>.</i>
<i>Why</i> abandons us beyond the tact of narrative to the hazards of
explanation. The rest is science, theory, philosophy or excuses.</div>
<div class="western">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western">
Montaigne said we were all historians but we
avoid the question of what actually happened by turning our attention
to the causes and explanations. We conceal our inexperience,
ignorance, or laziness in a blur of generalisation. Whether used or
abused, explanation goes beyond what it’s explaining towards other
things: towards anything and everything else, to check that what is
being explained is consistent with everything else we believe; and
towards some general principles, so that the clutter of information
in our web of beliefs can be reduced to a neater order. That’s its
brief. But there’s more to it than the formalities of consistency
and neatness: we check on consistency only to check on truth, and, as
a rule, we expect understanding to tidy things up. So there’s the
passion of <i>why</i>, the passion for truth and understanding. And
that’s the point. Thinking is a passion, the life experience of the
mind. Explanatory prose that neglects to be true to <i>that</i>
experience degenerates into tedium or, like an excuse, avoids the
issue. It just tidies up. It doesn’t do the thinking. By making up
some phoney story to say that it has, it explains the last trace of
experience away.</div>
<div class="western">
<br /></div>
<div class="western">
I retell stories about minor incidents in a
distant war? I quote someone’s ‘pobbledonk’ or ‘pastern’?
In general, before being used for proof or authority or due
acknowledgement, or for display of erudition, all citations are
properly anecdotes brought back from intellectual experience. In my
experience am not sure which came first, the stories or the theory
and explanation, but they are all part of the story, not an abstract
string of events but once off fabric.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 1.27cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western">
<span style="color: black;"> One morning in May 1931
Walter Benjamin was in the south of France thinking about Ernest
He</span><span style="color: black;">mingway —</span> comparing him to a
bad writer. An idea came to Benjamin, he expressed it, and he
explained it by describing, in general terms, the way he’d thought
of it: ‘speech is not so much the expression as the making real of
thought’. Benjamin was at great pains to distinguish what he was
thinking from the platitude that ‘a good writer is one who says
exactly what he thinks’ — the same notion that is behind Grant’s
‘I only knew what was on my mind and I wished to express it
clearly’ or Pope’s ‘what oft was thought but ne’er so well
expressed’. Still on the same line of thought a couple of years
later Benjamin wrote a bunch of little essays he called <i>Thought
Figures</i>. He freed his thought from its original context, shed
Hemingway and shed the solemn invocation — ‘we must be careful if
we are to arrive at any real insight’ — by which he’d had to
summon the proper effort of thought the first time round. These were
narrative details, the indices of that experience of thinking and
writing two years earlier. They left their traces now in the truth of
the idea which he retained only in its sharpest formulation. He had
lived his experience down to this, a great explanation of a good
writer’s talent: ‘He never says more than he has thought.’ She
never says more than she has thought.</div>
<div class="western">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western">
Gertrude Stein may have wept, but she wouldn’t
have been troubled; only a desperate blurb would ever praise Grant’s
prose for being ‘disturbing’. There is none of that kind of
torment. There are no demons, just event after grinding event. Like
reading Caesar it’s distant and reassuring. The headache
disappears. Grant has a lot of words but doesn’t say more than he
has thought, he says less. It’s a negative talent. There are lots
of things that won’t be explained, or that he won’t explain,
things left unsaid, for better and worse: mistakes perhaps, and
misdeeds; maybe excuses. That’s what laconic has come to: not just
words and plain stories, but hidden stories and unspoken thoughts. It
longs to unthink thoughts. For better and worse. I wouldn’t say
narrative is easy and explanation isn’t, like I wouldn’t say
avoid explanations. Someone lives through a war or whatever, and
bears witness. Whoever writes an explanation has to live through
thinking and writing and the hard part of getting it right: the
careful witness of thought.</div>
northbankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17764220434474903244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3442939681925327547.post-51990704089386915252011-04-06T23:12:00.000-07:002011-04-06T23:12:53.907-07:00Heritage Weeds in LattelandAn essay on camphor laurels, coffee, democracy, streescape, tourism and Bellingen<br />
The essay is also available in <a href="http://www.scribd.com/">pdf</a><br />
<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/52468273/Heritage-Weeds-in-Latteland" style="display: block; font: 14px Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; margin: 12px auto 6px; text-decoration: underline;" title="View Heritage Weeds in Latteland on Scribd">Heritage Weeds in Latteland</a><iframe class="scribd_iframe_embed" data-aspect-ratio="0.703917050691244" data-auto-height="true" frameborder="0" height="600" id="doc_15779" scrolling="no" src="http://www.scribd.com/embeds/52468273/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-10t0h20300usvepyjd2z" width="100%"></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
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</script>northbankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17764220434474903244noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3442939681925327547.post-12403221913301026162011-01-24T21:07:00.000-08:002011-01-24T21:09:44.863-08:00Truth and Historical Narrative: Essay 5 of Philosophy Of History For The Time Being<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: small;">This
essay is about the persistent and obdurate misunderstanding of two
things that history cannot do without: the concept of truth and the kind
of inferential exposition or argument that we call narrative. It is as
if people want to make life interesting, or they want to sound original,
so they misconstrue truth and narrative. Being wrong is not original,
and in the process of getting things wrong they make them dull and
predictable. They also forget just how much philosophers have been able
to say about truth - this essay is a reminder - and just how important
truth is to logic, and logic is to narrative.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/38791962/Essay-5-Truth-and-Historical-Narrative" style="display: block; font: 14px Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; margin: 12px auto 6px; text-decoration: underline;" title="View Essay 5. Truth and Historical Narrative on Scribd">Essay 5. Truth and Historical Narrative</a> <object data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" height="600" id="doc_857799731428269" name="doc_857799731428269" style="outline: medium none;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100%"> <param name="movie" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf">
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<embed id="doc_857799731428269" name="doc_857799731428269" src="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=38791962&access_key=key-27s9fz62pxd7c53fmlvq&page=1&viewMode=list" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="600" width="100%" wmode="opaque" bgcolor="#ffffff"></embed> </object>northbankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17764220434474903244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3442939681925327547.post-72291849094956331952011-01-12T16:50:00.000-08:002011-01-14T17:11:30.890-08:00Drawing From The Wrong Side Of Your Brain<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"> It seems like this is the latest golden age of
radio. I heard this fable of Aesop’s yesterday on a download from CBC Canada.
Jonathan Goldstein told it on <i>Wiretap. </i>It’s called <i>The Bat and The
Weasels:</i></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0mm 0mm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">"A bat was out flying one day when he fell to the ground. Lying on the
ground he was immediately caught by a weasel. The bat pleaded for his life, but
the weasel refused his pleas telling the bat that he was by nature an enemy to
all birds. Hearing this the bat assured him that he was not a bird but a mouse,
a flying mouse. And thus the weasel set the bat free. Shortly afterwards, the
bat, while out flying again, fell to the earth once more, where he was again
caught by another weasel. (This is a completely different weasel) Once again
the bat begged this other weasel for his life, explaining that he was in fact
not a bird but a mouse. But this time, this other weasel told the bat that not
only did he hate birds but he also had a special hatred for mice. Hearing this the
bat then assured the weasel that he was neither a bird nor a mouse but a bat.
And thus for a second time the bat escaped."</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">That’s
the end? What kind of story is that? When asked what it meant, most of the
people on <i>Wiretap</i> were at a loss. First up Jonathan’s colleague Howard
ventured that it was like a koan, one of those impenetrable little Zen fables.
You know the sort of thing: <i>T</i></span><i>wo hands clap and there is a
sound. What is the sound of one hand?</i> After time to <span style="font-size: 11pt;">gather his wits he concluded that it wasn’t a
very good story. Among others there was Rabbi Popko who saw it as a story about
survival versus dishonour. Personally, I like the way the bat does two
different things and they both work at least (and maybe only) once. I think
maybe the rabbi said something like this too. Before I listened to the download
there was something on the <i>Wiretap</i> web page that made me expect that
around about now there was going to be something about a Jew surviving by
telling one Nazi he was Polish or something and telling another Nazi he was a
Jew. But there wasn’t. After the rabbi came a writer, it might have been John
Hodgman I think. He trashes the little story. It’s a terrible, terrible fable.
To illustrate he retells it as a bad joke. Something like this: Two weasels go
into a bar. Bat is the bartender. One weasel says I hate birds. The other
weasel says I hate birds and I also hate mice. Bat says good thing I’m a bat.
The moral of telling it this way was: Just as the joke fails because it isn’t
funny, the fable fails because it has no moral lesson, no take away. This
possible John Hodgman said he would not include this fable in The Book.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Jonathan phoned Laura Gibbs, a translator of Aesop,
and she said that the fables have been handed down just as summaries. On the
page they have been torn out from their context in a living oral story-telling
tradition. People like lawyers would have used compendiums of fables as a
source for their speeches. I guess the lawyers could adapt a fable to their
case. (Jonathan, by the way, was using his Aesop for his insomnia). For the
record here’s Laura’s translation from Oxford University Press’s <i>Aesop’s
Fables</i> (2008):</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-indent: 0mm;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">"A bat had fallen to the
ground where a weasel grabbed her and was ready to kill her. The bat begged for
mercy but the weasel refused, since weasels are the natural enemies of every
kind of bird. The bat insisted that she was not a bird at all, but only a
mouse, so the weasel let her go. Later on, the bat fell to the ground again and
was seized by another weasel. The bat also begged this weasel not to kill her,
but the weasel refused, since there was a war between the mice and the weasels.
The bat denied that she was a mouse, but only a bat, so once again the weasel
let her go. As a result, the bat was able to save herself twice by changing her
name."</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="margin-left: 36pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-indent: 0mm;">
<i><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Clearly we must not always
stick to the same course all the time since people who change with the times
are often able to escape even the greatest dangers.</span></i><span style="font-size: 10pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Gender issues. War between mice and weasels.
Changing names. It is always good to see a different version of a fable. The
littlest changes remind you that the art and the moral is all in the retelling.
Yes it’s got a moral too. A take away. Whose privilege I wonder is it to tack
that on? Aesop’s or the reteller’s? Aesop, whoever or whatever he was, is now
the product of telling and retelling and retelling. It’s called Aesopica and
that’s all Aesop really is anymore. Fables only live in being retold. All of
culture’s like that really. It’s like life: it survives and evolves only in reproduction.
Cultures that ban their re-imagination annihilate themselves. Versions of these
stories have been told here and there all throughout Indo-European culture. The
animals change, the morals change and no-one can tell anymore who Aesop was or
who the Ur-Aesop was and whether he or she was the same Ur-Aesop who gave the
indigenous cultures of Australia and America their versions too. Do we all get
our stories from the same Ur-Aesop or are all our stories so similar because
they respond to the same human interests?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Laura thought <i>The Bat and The Weasels</i> had now
become, if not dead, then decrepit. It had become a kind of cultural dead-end.
And Jonathan ended <i>Wiretap</i> by having a go at reviving it. He went for a
modern version about a bat, the child of pigeon and a mouse, who discovers its
identity as a bat. It is too long for here (you can listen to it on line) too
elaborate, and not as good as the joke, which is maybe at least sort of funny
and definitely good storytelling. Its brevity gives it semantic leverage.
Jonathan’s real contribution to story-telling is the whole beautiful episode of
<i>Wiretap</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"> Just one other thing about the
responses. It was the comfort respondents took in quibbling, things like: this
bat was not a good flyer; these weasels weren’t as cunning as weasels are
supposed to be; weasels, like everyone else, don’t eat birds because they hate
them, they eat them because they like eating them. There must be something
important going on here. But maybe that’s another story. I wanted to say that
usually these stories go in threes. Three weasels would walk into a bar. What
would have happened when the bat fell to the ground a third time? By the way,
Rabbi Popko reminded us that the German for bat is <i>fliedermaus</i>, flying
mouse. I wanted to say, flying fox is English for bat, at least where I live.
Not really quibbles. Footnotes.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0mm 0mm 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
Anyway now I have to say how
beautiful this fable is, what brilliant story-telling. No moral tacked on the
end could ever do it justice. Of course there is not much point acting like a
mouse and being terrified of weasels, when you could just be hanging out like a
bat instead,<i> </i>but what is the point of saying <i>that.</i> The fable is a
wonderful distillation, so clear people seem to look right through it and see
nothing, its spirit and meaning so strong that people don’t get it without
watering it down in elaboration. That’s what good fables are: indeterminately
short. Like bits of string that you keep in a jar for when you need them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"> I am starting to get some idea of
what the take away of this essay might be. I think it’s something to do with
the assumption that a lot of people make that this fable rather than being all
Zen and Koanic, is just not very good or sort of derelict. Like the West or
modernity. <i>The Bat and The Weasels</i> though reminds me of those little
stories Franz Kafka told. The maybe-not-very-good ones. Not Zen, more Jewish I
guess, or greekjew as James Joyce might have said. Here’s one called <i>A
Little Fable</i>:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0mm 0mm 0.0001pt 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">"'Alas,'
said the mouse, 'the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the
beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I
was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls
have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the
corner stands the trap that I must run into.'</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0mm 0mm 0.0001pt 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><br /> </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0mm 0mm 0.0001pt 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">'You
only need to change your direction,' said the cat, and ate it up."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Is
this a story or an aborted story? It sounds a bit like <i>The Trial</i> in one
hundred words or less. In another one of Kafka’s little stories someone says
‘All these little parables really set out to say merely that the
incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0mm 0mm 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">So
I was talking about <i>The Bat and The Weasel</i> with two friends. And the
conversation being conversation got around to being about something else. One
friend’s mother had wanted to draw so she enrolled in a course called Drawing
From The Right Side of The Brain. You know the kind of thing. Creative adult
education. Lesson One: The master puts pencil and paper in front of the pupils
and says draw this. It was a copy of one of those pictures of a lamp base or a
vase that also looks like the profile of a face (or two faces) or something.</span>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Whatever it is it is a bit tricky. That’s the point. They use them in
first year Psychology courses. A Rubin vase I think it’s called. I think it’s a
figure-ground thing. But maybe it’s a right-side/wrong side thing too. (Ludwig
Wittgenstein could have used his duckrabbit picture if he’d got the job of
drawing master. It’s either a gormless duck or a puzzled rabbit looking into
the wind.) Friend’s mother didn’t know where to start. That was why she was
doing Drawing From Right Side of The Brain in the first place. Just draw what
you see said the master.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0mm 0mm 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">As
it turned out Lesson One was a replay of one of friend’s mother’s nightmares.
It was like when she was a child and a teacher had stuck a pencil and paper in
front of her and had said draw a map of Australia, and when she had primal
drawer’s block, the teacher just told her again to draw it, anyone can draw a
map of Australia. (On its side it looks a bit like a duck or a rabbit, or a
cranky drawing master) This is where the story gets terrible. It’s a whole
other story. My friend’s mother was pretty upset about having to learn all over
again how not to draw. She went out into her garden. She had a beautiful
garden. She slipped climbing up a little wall, crushed a vertebra. It was like
the beginning of the end for my friend’s mother. The fate of the drawing master
is another story. Gossip.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtR6qUtIkxuaXOTvlb2EcHDeUIUXc0uOYGrd-LJ6fyI48xG428dhehYYiPcs18lv9JMmp_vHg6tSdmGjAoSgLOYB23BZiUjqoMo62qHAAF8x_f1BtDa-pZhJLsphKSYLbCpa2VpEnr0JI/s1600/duckrabbit_only.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="147" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtR6qUtIkxuaXOTvlb2EcHDeUIUXc0uOYGrd-LJ6fyI48xG428dhehYYiPcs18lv9JMmp_vHg6tSdmGjAoSgLOYB23BZiUjqoMo62qHAAF8x_f1BtDa-pZhJLsphKSYLbCpa2VpEnr0JI/s200/duckrabbit_only.gif" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Now while all this was happening I had been thinking
about mentors. Mentor was a guy who walked out of the pages of <i>The Odyssey</i>
and became a common English noun around the middle of the eighteenth century.
By the end of the twentieth he had become a verb and then a gerund, and with
that a new institution: the mentoring program.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">In <i>The Odyssey</i> Mentor is in <i>loco parentis</i>
to Telemachus whose father Odysseus is away at the Trojan War. Mentor is the
wise counsellor. Now one thing that is a bit funny about Mentor is that in most
of his scenes Mentor is not quite himself. Athena, the wise and bright-eyed
goddess, assumes Mentor’s aged form and voice. She or he encourages Telemachus
to journey in search of his father, eggs Odysseus on against his enemies back home
in Ithaca, and even ends up establishing peace at the end of the whole show.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">It’s the wise counsellor role that has come into the
lingo. The zeitgeist has it that what we call young people (and probably young
men especially) are now peculiarly susceptible to being fatherless. Divorce,
the crisis of masculinity, feminist triumph, you know. Happily Mentor was there
in the wings of tradition to provide the solution and take the place of the
absent father.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2">
Tradition, that revered and obscure father to us all,
is partly what mentoring is all about. How better to recapture that now absent
father than by the managed folksiness of mentoring. How better to become
re-enchanted. The zeitgeist has figured out that education is now alienated
from experience. Experience, if you’re young, is disaffected. As for basing
education on pop psychology about learning styles — that’s light on supporting
evidence and it ends up with the same old alienation affect anyway. Even
‘visual kinaesthetic’ learners are bored with colour and movement. So here we
all are longing for those old tribal ceremonies that recognised and celebrated
the stages of authentic life. High school isn’t a proper initiation, nor is
university, apprenticeships are hard to come by, vandalism and gang behaviour
are antisocial, and adolescent circumcision is too drastic. So let’s mentor. We
can extend it to life-long learning too. We could mentor drawing from the right
side of the brain. And we could have a mentoring task force to fight the war in
Afghanistan. In fact we do.</div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2">
Once the verb ‘to mentor’ appeared with its promise
of a society re-enchanted by wisdom and informal but managed instruction, it
wasn’t long before the gerund appeared as evidence that a maybe innocent desire
had spawned a demented offspring. What was once a happy relation between humans
became a manufactured contrivance. Soon there were mentoring programs.
Meanwhile, no one sounded entirely comfortable pronouncing the last syllable of
mentor. It was too much like the unstressed ‘-er’ ending that English uses to
turn a verb into its agent. So no one should have been surprised when the
person mentored became the mentee. It had come to this.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">I don’t think I ever had much in the way of a
mentor, but maybe that was the point of a mentor. It was a pretty informal
thing. Maybe you weren’t supposed to realise you’d had one until it was all
over. Maybe like Telemachus you didn’t really realise you’d had one at all.
Besides, Mentor wasn’t a real mentor anyway. That was Athena. And she wasn’t a
proper male role model. Anyway I used to think that a mentor sounded like not a
bad idea. It had sounded pretty good in <i>The Odyssey</i> for a good two
thousand years.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0mm 0mm 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Today
I read a quote from <i>King Lear</i>: </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to
sweeten my imagination. It’s in that scene on the cliff at Dover, just after
Gloucester jumps. How did Shakespeare just keep on coming up with this stuff.
What side of his brain was he coming from.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> Anyway like the troubled
King, I just want an ounce of civet. I don’t really want imagination being
turned into consolation, creativity into therapy, Mentor into a mentoring
program. I can do without the pitch.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0mm 0mm 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Enough.
That’s it, that’s the essay about Aesop, The Wrong Side of The Brain and
Mentoring. If I start to explain how they go together, I’ll just complicate it
like I did with the thing about King Lear. What’s he got to do with it? It’s
like trying to draw a rabbit and ending up with a duck that looks sort of like
a map of Australia with two Cape Yorks. I just know they go together. An essay
can say anything but it can’t say everything. It wouldn’t want to. Like one of
Aesop’s fables an essay is finished when it feels it’s said enough.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0mm 0mm 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0mm 0mm 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">But there’s the moral of
course and I can’t do better than Aesop for that. A bat falls to the ground and
gets caught by a fox. When the bat begs for his life, the fox refuses, saying
that he is by nature the enemy of all birds. The bat assures the fox that he is
not a bird, but a fox. And the fox spares the bat’s life. Some time later the
bat is going somewhere crawling on the ground this time, just in case, and gets
caught by another fox. When the bat begs the fox for his life this fox says he
hates other foxes. So the bat assures the fox that he is not a fox but a bat.
The fox says no your not, you’re a crawling fox, and eats the bat.</span></i></div>
<div style="margin: 0mm 0mm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0mm 0mm 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">OK.
So there is more. Of course there is. There is the third friend, the one I tell
<i>The Bat and The Weasels</i> to after I think all this is over. First I tell
him my version of Jonathan’s version of Aesop’s version. It’s Friday afternoon.
He’s just finished doing something meaningless. Anything would amuse him. And
he is amused. Or polite. So then I tell him the one about two weasels walk into
a bar. He’s even laughing. So now he tells me a joke. Why do Irish scuba divers
roll out of the boat backwards. It’s an Irish joke he says. Why I wonder. I
really want to know. Because if they rolled forwards they’d end up in the boat.</span></div>northbankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17764220434474903244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3442939681925327547.post-27767999225774994772010-10-11T21:00:00.000-07:002011-01-24T21:10:52.045-08:00Writing and History. Essay 2 of Philosophy of History for the Time BeingFor history to happen something like writing, which combines durability and replicability, narrative and specific denotation, had to be invented. Of course it’s not just writing as such that is needed, but recorded language, whether it’s in the visual text we call print or the audio ‘text’ of a voice recording. Speech alone is not a record, or at least it’s only a fleeting record written on air. I expect the evolution of media will continue to change the media of history.
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The fourth essay of Philosophy of History For The Time Being examines a <span style="font-size: small;">single event to show how wonderfully ambiguous a thing an event can be.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> It chooses it's example carefully - an event that's very stale news (if you follow Australian politics - otherwise it would never have been news), an event whose identity is maybe almost fixed now as far as definitive history is concerned, but an event that is of such monumental banality that it's a matter of great wonder that it has not disappeared altogether from
historical recollection: it's the famous handshake between Mark Latham (Leader of the Opposition) and John Howard (Prime Minister).</span></span></div>
<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/37700166/Essay-4-A-Long-Hard-Look-at-an-Event-The-Latham-Howard-Handshake" style="display: block; font: 14px Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; margin: 12px auto 6px; text-decoration: underline;" title="View Essay 4. A Long Hard Look at an Event, The Latham-Howard Handshake on Scribd">Essay 4. A Long Hard Look at an Event, The Latham-Howard Handshake</a> <object data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" height="600" id="doc_432187297619432" name="doc_432187297619432" style="outline: medium none;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100%"> <param name="movie" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">This is the first of a series of essays and footnotes around the traps of history and philosophy
of history. They try to address the questions of philosophy of
history, popular or otherwise, but not head on. So they aren't about the History Wars, or </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 11pt;">whether history is
fiction, or about whether 'young people' lack historical
consciousness.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> Instead they are about neglected or misunderstood notions that frame
historical consciousness.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">I think that important concepts like <i>act, event, fact,
truth, narrative, writing, actual footage, media </i>and<i> selection</i> are often
used in thinking about history but that they get seldom get the attention
they need. Except maybe for cinephiles or media theorists, I doubt whether <i>actual
footage</i> is even much thought of as an important concept for the philosophy
of history. If only because of the pre-eminent role of media in driving the history
of history, I doubt whether there is a more important concept. Because they are
all such everyday concepts, they might scarcely seem worthy of philosophy. They
look banal not profound. As is the case with many of philosophy’s objects most
people think they just understand these things already anyway; they are a
birthright and they become the unquestioned building blocks of theories about
history rather than being treated as the objects of inquiry. If they have been
scrutinised, critique has done its work on them, and now they come with a
pretext for disregarding or discarding them. Sometimes I think they are just
misunderstood, sometimes misused or abused. When people start to get
philosophical about history the terms often seem to be used, unconsciously or
in some cases even deliberately, as innocent looking props diverting our
attention from theoretical trickery or received doctrine. Even though most of
the terms are well known to philosophical reflection, far too much of the
serious thought that philosophy has given to them is ignored when
philosophising about history.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">I have written these essays because I could not find
philosophy of history or theories of history that reflected on these concepts
to my satisfaction. I’ve written about what I would have liked to read about. I
now hope I find a reader who also wants to read about what I wanted to read
about.</span></div>
.<br />
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<br />
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</p>In How Fiction Works<a href='#1'><sup>1</sup></a> James Wood quotes Roland Barthes: ‘The function of narrative is not to “represent”, it is to constitute a spectacle still very enigmatic for us but in any case not of a mimetic order… “What takes place” in narrative is, from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing: “what happens” is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming.’ From here Wood proceeds: ‘Now to charge fiction with conventionality is one thing; to move from this charge to the very sceptical conclusion that fictive convention can therefore never convey anything real, that narrative represents “literally nothing”, is incoherent.’ <p>
</p>Now I could proceed like this: Barthes is already in the cloudland having fun trying to chase the clouds away —the ones about narrative being mimetic. (I could call these Aristotles’ clouds, after all he’s the one who called fiction mimetic in the first place.) Barthes does this by generating more of his own clouds: the line about what takes place in narrative being ‘literally nothing’; and the line about ‘“what happens” is language alone’. Along comes Wood and seeing how cloudy things seem to be getting begins trying to sort things out a bit by deciding that the cloud Barthes means by ‘narrative’ is ‘fiction’ (It probably is; people are always using the words ‘narrative’ and ‘literature’ in rather cloudy ways to mean fiction). Since Wood is responding here to the critique of the conventions of realism, he launches his own cloud and glides along on it to chase another cloud which looks like one of Barthes but is actually only a cloudy reflection of one of Barthes — the one about fictive convention never conveying anything real. All this is in the last section of Wood’s long, easy essay, where, eventually growing weary of chasing clouds, Wood has had enough: ‘So let’s ‘replace the always problematic word “realism” with the much more problematic word truth’. An awful lot of people writing about fiction have ended up doing this. The ‘still very enigmatic spectacle’ of fiction notwithstanding, the problems of what realism is notwithstanding, fiction is in one way or another, true. It’s just true.<p>
</p>Enough. Let’s just ask some obvious questions. Is fiction mimetic? What does a fiction refer to? Can we say a fictional narrative is true? What is fiction?
Is fiction mimetic? Yes, it represents whatever it is about by the use of likenesses of what it is about. Fiction is a likeness of narrative; literary fiction is a likeness of what people say or write. Let’s be quite clear about this. The whole of a novel is a likeness of a story about all the characters in the novel, or perhaps many stories, for a novel is made of likenesses of many stories, and these likenesses includes lots of other likenesses, likeness of how the characters speak or write, likenesses of how people in that society speak, likenesses of other stories or bits of stories. Fiction is a mimesis of life, primarily in the sense that it is mimesis of linguistic and narrative life. What does a fiction refer to? Linguistic and narrative life.<a href='#2'><sup>2</sup></a>
Why is this so hard to grasp? Why do we ignore it and peck at the reflection in the window? Why do we chase clouds around? Wood quotes George Eliot: ‘Art is the nearest thing to life’. And then adds, ‘The great Victorian realist is being precise here: art is not life itself’. He is very wrong. Art is part of life itself. How strange that so many people, especially those who know art is an important part of their lives, can think art is not part of their lives. Art is life at its liveliest, life at its most eloquently social. Wood quotes Eliot saying almost just this: ‘It is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowman beyond the bounds of our personal lot’. We are living when we do art. Narratives, fiction or non-fiction, are part of life too. All our speech and writing, all our stories are part of life. So when I say fiction is a mimesis of life, if you are used to thinking that narrative or perhaps rather narrative art, is not part of life but somehow something other than life, then you will have trouble getting the simple idea that fiction is the mimesis of life, of linguistic and narrative life. And you will have trouble understanding that narrative life, and indeed the whole of our linguistic life, which is just about the most important thing we live, because as hyper linguistic social animals we live nearly all our lives in, by and through language and narrative, is a pretty significant part of life as we know it.<p>
</p>This answers another question that people might have: Isn’t it trivial to explain something as profound as fiction this way?<a href='#3'><sup>3</sup></a> What we say and tell is one of the most important parts of our life. We either do things with words or we talk about them. Wallace Stevens said ‘life consists of propositions about life’. Wood says that ‘round’ characters are impossible in fiction, ‘because fictional characters, while very much alive, are not the same as real people’. I would say that fictional characters are only alive in a metaphorical sense — that is if the narrative artist can render them well. And I would add that a lot of real people, living or dead, are only known to us through written characterisation. Abraham Lincoln, apart from a few photos, is no less literary than Leopold Bloom. What Barthes called ‘language alone’ is anything but ‘literally nothing’. Our great actions are mostly linguistic, social actions, and when they aren’t, we can’t help talking about them.<p>
</p>We seem habituated to separating art from life, the way we separate language from reality, culture from nature, reason from passion, all when art is life at its liveliest, language is reality at its most astonishing, reflecting itself, culture is nature at its most exquisite, reason is passion at its most profound and urgent. Many would find this ridiculous, but that is partly because we are so inured to separating these things, and we are so ready to load one or another of these pairs with the judgement that it is somehow more authentic than the other because it came first or is more down to earth. It is precisely because art is an outstanding state of life (just as language is of reality, or culture of nature, or reason of passion) that we felt the need in the first place to say that art is of a different kind from life (or language is from reality, culture from nature, reason from passion).<p>
</p>Can we say fiction is true (and I mean true in a strict logical sense and not the metaphorical or vague sense that we sometimes use in statements like ‘moral truth’)? Yes, but to explain why, we need to consider how mimetic narrative can be true, bearing in mind that we use the word true (or false) of things like assertions, claims, statements, and beliefs.<a href='#4'><sup>4</sup></a><p>
</p>So how does mimetic narrative, which is about people that don’t exist and events that never happened, make a truth claim? It does not make a truth claim about the events in the world of the fiction. It does not claim things like that there was a man named Leopold Bloom who was married to Molly who wandered around Dublin on 16 June 1904 eventually to meet up with someone named Stephen at a brothel and a bus shelter before going home where Molly was dreaming away in bed. So far as this sort of truth is concerned, fiction is only true by being frankly false. As mimetic, fiction shows what it tells and what is true are the claims made, often only by implication, of this act of claiming by showing. Fiction makes truth claims about the language and narratives it shows: ‘Here is a story about a man in Dublin’, ‘Here is what someone or many people might have said about such and such’.<p>
</p>Joyce’s story The Dead begins ‘Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet’. We read a truth claim about the character Lily’s state as she is busy assisting the arrival of the guests at ‘the Misses Morkan’s annual dance’, where, just before Christmas, the two elderly sisters entertain their musical friends and relatives. The author shows us a narrative which itself shows in the verb phrase of its first sentence — ‘literally run off her feet’ —Lily describing herself. This is Lily’s use of a cliché used by the common speech of the time, and the author uses it to show us Lily’s use of it, even though Lily is not speaking it at all, and maybe hasn’t even got time to think it either. This is so called free indirect style, the stylistic engine of the prose of fiction, especially modern fiction. I suspect, in one way or another, it is the stylistic engine of all prose, even the plainest speaking, the most sincere and clear self-expression cannot avoid using the words of others. That is what a language is: a common heritage. Free indirect style (terrible term) is sketched by Wood so nicely at the start of his essay, celebrated by Barthes so mischievously and (as it turned out) misleadingly in “The Death of the Author” and examined by Bakhtin so adventure in his writing on the novel, and by Pasolini quite rightly as the stylistic norm also of cinematic narrative too. Free indirect style exploits the recursive logic of fiction by extending it into every level of construction of fiction’s narrative. So who makes the truth claim in The Dead? The author of the narrative. And going up one more level of recursion, which is to say one more level of objectification, it is the author James Joyce showing us this ‘author’ making this truth claim. Or going down one level of recursion this author shows us Lily or her culture using that cliché. You might dismiss this as some kind of ironic postmodern nesting of stories within stories, truth claims within truth claims. Certainly irony, parody are familiar drivers of free indirect style. They are everyday forms of objectification, and supposed postmodern sensitivities about objectivity notwithstanding I would call what you might want to dismiss objectivity. Fiction is a tornado of objectivity, and in free indirect style we witness the tornado deliberately rearranging the levels of objectification deep down into the individual sentences.<p>
</p>In general ‘It is said …’, once the opening gambit not only myth, or ‘it has been written’, the usually unspoken opening gambit of historical writing, could well be the unspoken assumption of fiction as well. Fiction lets us scrutinise an object, a narrative consisting of many truth claims and other linguistic acts. Just as the primary object of historical inquiry is not the events a document reports but the document itself as an object surviving from the past, the primary object of a reader’s scrutiny is the narrative as an object, not the acts and events the narrative describes, but the act of making a claim about them that is true or false. So different from one another, myth, history and fiction, at least share this: they aspire to truth in this sense.<p>
</p>But perhaps this is not really truth; we seem to have become divorced from what in the first place and after all really interests us in fiction.
Literary fiction is about linguistic communication and narrative, but that does not mean it is about linguistic communication that is about nothing or about narrative that is about nothing. Such things would just be abstractions. What happens in fiction is not ‘language alone’ because for language properly to be language it has to be about something, and for narrative to be narrative it has to be about events. A fiction is about a narrative or several narratives, which are about events. We should recognise here the operation of recursion, of embedding one thing within another: fiction shows linguistic acts or narrative acts which are in turn about the world of the novel, that is, a fiction is about something that is about something. Fiction is true at the first level of embedding, at the level where it shows us linguistic and narrative acts. But even so the levels of embedding do not neutralise or quarantine us from the events that occur within the second or deeper embedding, the events in the world of the novel; if the fiction is showing language and narrative it has to show language and narrative doing what language and narrative does; that is, doing what is affecting, otherwise it is only narrative in abstract and the level at which fiction is true could not be true in any other than a trivial sense.<p>
</p>Notes<p>
</p><a name='1'></a>1. Now a lot of people, e.g. Walter Kirn in the New York Times, D J Taylor in The Independent, seemed to take some satisfaction in giving a bit of stick to the author of this bright, genial essay for variously being genial, polite and a bit old fashioned, knowing what he likes, writing what is essentially a literary primer, and not really liking David Foster Wallace, none of which seems to be out of place. It is a good literary primer; and I would recommend it along with David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction, and if you a really serious about knowing how fiction works you should definitely not ignore the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. I would also say that it is an essay so it takes the digressive, personal liberties essays are good for. Lastly I would say that Wood is not so hard on David Foster Wallace; and I would never forgive him if he were.<p>
</p><a name='2'></a>2. This also includes other kinds of fiction too, such is cinematic fiction; cinematic fiction is the mimesis of cinematic, narrative and linguistic life.<p>
</p><a name='3'></a>3. We are quite contradictory about explanations. On the one hand we like to expect that the answer a question about something that we think of as profound, like art, will be as profound and as moving as art itself. But there is no reason to expect explanations of poetry can or should be poetic. On the other hand we expect that an explanation will somehow be simpler than what we are explaining and not just complicate the issue. Samuel Johnson defined ‘network’ as ‘any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections’ just to make the point that sometimes we can’t define something in simpler terms. Woods ‘much more problematic word truth’ is a plain and familiar concept that can only be defined by more complex terms. However the purpose of an explanation, as opposed to a definition, is to explain something in terms of something else, so that instead of having two things to explain, we only have one. An explanation is essentially reductive: it reduces the amount of information.<p>
</p><a name='4'></a>4. If fiction can be true it can also be false. Truth claims are what we use to tell lies. However, even though glib theorists of fiction say things like fiction is a kind of lie, fiction is not a lie; a fiction is a truth claim. If a fiction is a lie it damages its aesthetic value by damaging its truth value. A fiction that lies turns from ethical to tendentious, erotic to pornographic, sincere to pretentious, or some like failure.northbankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17764220434474903244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3442939681925327547.post-89187400702134803512009-05-17T21:52:00.000-07:002009-05-17T22:08:03.249-07:00observing memes<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/15578885/Observing-Memes-and-Narrative-Culture" style="display: block; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 12px auto 6px; text-decoration: underline;" title="View Observing Memes and Narrative Culture on Scribd">Observing Memes and Narrative Culture</a> <object ="" align="middle" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0" height="500" id="doc_266131967054951" name="doc_266131967054951" rel="media:document" resource="http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=15578885&access_key=key-b0jm76gw9cfs4c66lpb&page=1&version=1&viewMode=" width="100%" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/"> <param name="movie" value="http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=15578885&access_key=key-b0jm76gw9cfs4c66lpb&page=1&version=1&viewMode=">
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What is a meme, how do we observe one and how do we replicate one? Properly conceived, a science of memetic selection can explain otherwise mystifying social and cultural phenomena. </div>
<br />northbankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17764220434474903244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3442939681925327547.post-85370485228398266852009-05-16T19:25:00.001-07:002009-05-16T21:32:26.982-07:00the death of roland<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/15556233/The-Death-of-Roland-Barthes" style="display: block; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 12px auto 6px; text-decoration: underline;" title="View The Death of Roland Barthes on Scribd">The Death of Roland Barthes</a> <object ="" align="middle" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0" height="500" id="doc_749267963251899" name="doc_749267963251899" rel="media:document" resource="http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=15556233&access_key=key-pk0bugm2nl1btm2rze1&page=1&version=1&viewMode=" width="100%" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/"> <param name="movie" value="http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=15556233&access_key=key-pk0bugm2nl1btm2rze1&page=1&version=1&viewMode=">
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Why do people still go on about Roland Barthes ancient-and-now-legendary essay "The Death of the Author"? Why do they willfully misread it or misquote it? Just what is it about this essay?</div>northbankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17764220434474903244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3442939681925327547.post-6211993262372233722009-05-10T00:27:00.000-07:002009-05-10T00:54:37.412-07:00media events<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/15132489/Media-Events" style="display: block; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 12px auto 6px; text-decoration: underline;" title="View Media Events on Scribd">Media Events</a> <object align="middle" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0" dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" height="500" id="doc_391910896104109" media="http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/" name="doc_391910896104109" rel="media:document" resource="http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=15132489&access_key=key-cuim160jrri6ic9gswa&page=1&version=1&viewMode=" width="100%"> <param name="movie" value="http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=15132489&access_key=key-cuim160jrri6ic9gswa&page=1&version=1&viewMode="><param name="quality" value="high"><param name="play" value="true"><param name="loop" value="true"><param name="scale" value="showall"><param name="wmode" value="opaque"><param name="devicefont" value="false"><param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"><param name="menu" value="true"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><param name="salign" value=""><embed src="http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=15132489&access_key=key-cuim160jrri6ic9gswa&page=1&version=1&viewMode=" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" play="true" loop="true" scale="showall" wmode="opaque" devicefont="false" bgcolor="#ffffff" name="doc_391910896104109_object" menu="true" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" salign="" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" align="middle" width="100%" height="500"></embed> <span rel="media:thumbnail" href="http://i.scribd.com/public/images/uploaded/27884633/02hUjtpTEtzXJQRtqN_thumbnail.jpeg"> <span property="dc:description">Notes on the feedback between the media and history, how the news makes the news, and how that makes history</span> <span property="dc:type" content="Text"> </span></span></object>northbankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17764220434474903244noreply@blogger.com0