News and Reading

The news cycle continues to be disturbing.  Somewhere between the revelations about January 6th's insurrection, someone contrasted and compared Trump, the Proud Boys, and the D.C. Insurrection to Mao Zedong, the Red Guards, and the Cultural Revolution -- which resonated with me in a horrible way.  

At least Trump has been impeached twice now.  I can only hope that the Senate will convict him so that he is unable to hold office ever again.  

I keep thinking that once the inauguration is concluded, things will settle down... but I fear the damage to our social structures will take a long time to fix -- if only "The Scouring of the Shire" were so easy. 

I am finding that I need to step away from electronic devices after nine PM, or my sleep suffers.

On the more fun side:  

I finished "Beowulf."   I know that I should appreciate it more, but I don't.  I should contrast and compare it to "The Epic of Gilgamesh," because they both have that weepy royal bromance feel to them that isn't speaking to me.   I imagined asking my Old-English and Medieval Scholar friends, "Am I a bad person for not liking something in the canon?" (and "Am I an elitist for not being in raptures about this latest translation?")  but I couldn't imagine what their responses might be other than "This is a literary example of how one should lead a virtuous/good life" (and is the earliest existing example of literature with a fire-breathing, gold hoarding dragon in it).   Beowulf worked better for me when I read it in small snatches that would allow me to admire some of the more clever phrasing and word choice.  (Coincidentally, I had re-read the part of The Hobbit where Bilbo brings out a cup from Smaug's horde, and I noticed the parallels.)   I wanted to like the modern idioms, but ultimately the use of "bro," "fuck," "shit," "my main man," and "daddy" were too jarring and distracting to me.  

I've paused in "The Ancient Egyptian Netherworld Books."  It's kind of fun--the spells and addresses spark all sorts of writing ideas--and kind of exhausting (we're blasting Apep, the Snake of Chaos again?).  I keep wanting to read the source materials, and it looks like I have to do some kind of Inter-library Loan to do so.

I've been reading "This Is How You Lose The Time War," by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and I've been enjoying it so much that it took me a while to realize that it's got a strong epistolary element, which doesn't usually work for me.  Part of the reason is that the formats of the letters--feathers, tree-rings, lava, seals--are intriguing; part of it is that the authors are having lots of fun with language.   I'm about half-way through.

I just got a hard-bound edition of "Reynard the Fox," by Anne Louise Avery, and, while I've only read the introduction and first chapter, the binding (with a purple ribbon sewn into it!), the dingbats, the footnotes, and the feel of the paper hits all the aesthetic points of owning a physical book.  I've been following Ms. Avery's Old Fox micro-fiction on Twitter, and I'm hoping the printed Reynard will equally please.

Designing for the March For Science

I want to be in the local March for Science in April, and I'm thinking about a poster.

I started working on a Jupiter-based one with the thought that Galileo was forced to recant what he'd seen in the telescope (and I was so intent on the layout that I spelled science "sciece").  But I'd gotten the story mixed up:  he hadn't been forced to recant that he'd seen  moons orbiting around Jupiter. Instead, he'd recanted that the Earth orbited around the sun in a heliocentric system.  His inquisition was possibly brought on as a result of churchmen seeing themselves cast as the Simpleton in Galileo's "Dialogue" between a Simpleton, a Student and a Sage.  So my design with a telescope  and Jupiter wasn't so good.

Then I thought that I'd try to make a poster about the Burning of the Library of Alexandria, except that it might not have been burnt down so much as defunded.  There are parallels between defunding the Library and defunding NOAA, but I'm not sure how to make that a poster, much less a poster with cool-looking flames on it.

I wish we still had the Art Nouveau and Art Deco gods and goddesses of industry:  the burly men holding lightning bolts and gears, and women with wind-swept hair holding wheat and fish.  Maybe I could fashion an image of science and science funding with that style.  This line of thinking led me to images of industry and recruitment posters from the two world wars.

From there I recalled the Homeric story of how Hephaestus--or Vulcan, to use his Roman name--made a shield for Achilles, showing the good life.  Would my March for Science poster show the lame god at his forge, fashioning the circular shield and showing tools of science along the rings?  I could have flames curling out of the forge!

But the martial nature of the image --a war poem about the forging of tools of war --bothered me.  I'm marching for science, and peaceful applications of science.  Should the story be retold, with a shield of war, a shield of commerce, and a shield for the rest of us?  Maybe I should turn to the goddess Athena -- didn't she create a mechanical owl?  Oh, wait, no, that was the original "Clash of the Titans."

I was coming to the conclusion that I didn't have a good narrative, something that would make a good visual image, like Prometheus bound.  Er...  Albert Einstein working out relativity?  Richard Feynman's quantum mechanics notation?  Robert Oppenheimer and the work on the atomic bomb?  Mr. Spock deciphering glyphs on an alien obelisk?  Commander Data learning the Vulcan nerve pinch?  Frankenstein and his monster?

I think it's a misstep to focus on one specific scientist, not because I don't want to celebrate particular scientist, but because I'm marching to show that I think science should be funded on a national level and data and the scientific interpretation of data should inform long-term national policy.

---

I went to the library to try to find mythical figures in science which would suggest a strong graphic to use on a poster.  There were a lot of books on the science of mythology, or the science behind magical beliefs, or the "Mythbusters" series.  But not a lot on the mythic meaning of science, or stories we share as a culture about how to do science.

There are some misconceptions about how science works:  the apple falling on Newton's head, or the idea of a rebel scientist working alone to make a breakthrough.  But these aren't myths in the sense of a story or symbol that explains.

I'm coming to the conclusion that science -- or at least science funding -- doesn't have gods and goddesses.  We have a toolkit:  measurement, rigorous observation, deductive reasoning, and disproving the null hypothesis.  And Bunsen burners.

So how do we keep our signs and march from eliciting the response, "So what?  The elites are crying because their toys got taken away," or "You guys sure spent a lot of money to put a remote control dune buggy on Mars."

"Science is hard," plays back into the idea of elites with toys, too.  Why is it that athlete-elites command so much respect, and science-elites less so?  It takes athletes a lot of practice to get to the Olympics, and some experiments can take as much time and effort, but do we have cities bidding against each other for "science Olympics"?

---

In the original Disney movie, Tron, there's a scene between Dr. Walter Gibbs, the original founder of a corporation, and Ed Dillinger, its current CEO.  "User requests are what computing is about," says Dr, Gibbs.  "Making money is what computing is about," says Dillinger.

Perhaps I should adopt a different narrative:  funding science will avoid a future Midas story, where plutocrats turn everything they touch into robots; a story not with serfs serving plutocrats, but with drones serving modern-day Borg-ias.  Maybe this isn't so much about de-funding science so much as it is about keeping a serf class uneducated, or industry unregulated.

Somewhere in the back of my mind was an early American quote about a well educated public. I did some searching and found this quote from Thomas Jefferson: 

"The value of science to a republican people, the security it gives to liberty by enlightening the minds of its citizens, the protection it affords against foreign power, the virtue it inculcates, the just emulation of the distinction it confers on nations foremost in it; in short, its identification with power, morals, order and happiness (which merits to it premiums of encouragement rather than repressive taxes), are considerations [that should] always [be] present and [bear] with their just weight." --Thomas Jefferson: On the Book Duty, 1821.

and also

"The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny are] to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes." --Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526

At this point, it seems like I need Lady Liberty arm-in-arm with the all Nine Muses...  And to think all this started with me wanting to make a sign to carry on a protest march.

The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory

A while back I read The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, by Cynthia Eller (Chapter One excerpt: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/eller-myth.html).  I keep referencing it, and I realized I hadn't blogged about it much.


The basic gist of The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory is that the prehistoric record is such that no one can say with certainty anything about prehistoric people other than things like, "they left behind these ruins," or "they buried people this way," or "they produced these sculptures and drawings." Eller then goes on a point-by-point argument against the story of a golden, pre-historic age (roughly 5000 to 2500 BCE) where society was centered on women, in which women were revered for their mysterious life-giving powers and honored as incarnations of the great goddess, and which was subsequently somehow transformed into what is called "patriarchy."

Eller concludes that the story of a golden age of woman-centered society (especially a pan-European one spanning over 2000 years) is a myth which should not be treated as historical fact.  As a myth, Eller argues that it is neither helpful as a guide for how women and men conceptualize their self-perceptions of gender and how the genders relate (her view is that the myth engenders sexism by heightening the differences between male and female), nor is the myth of prehistoric matriarchy required as a template from which to model a future society that has reached feminist goals (since it's a myth, it's not a history we're doomed to repeat; let's move on to equality).  She concludes, however, that adherents of the story of a golden age of prehistoric matriarchy are unlikely to abandon their "passionate hope and religious faith" in the story.

Eller's tone is sarcastic in places, and I found myself saying "ouch!" after reading several passages.  I did wonder at times if she was using particularly silly sources (ala Philip Davis in Goddess Unmasked).  However, I would recommend The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory and I found it useful for generating the following questions:

• Does Harry Hay's story of the Qeddishim count as a "Golden Age of Male 'Homo-archy'?"
  
• Golden Age stories seem to feed into 'apocalyptic end-times,' 'after the revolution' or to 'boosting self-esteem' thinking; is there another way to incorporate them into a world view?
  
• As someone who is seeking the Divine Queer, is there such a thing as a "divine queer way of knowing?"  How would a story help to weave together our erotic, the spiritual, and mental lives -- and how would my story as a gay man be different from someone with a different gender and orientation?   Or, to put it another way, is a book like "Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-sex Love" (in the Eugene Library, 0974638838) going to be useful?

In applying The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory to my own experiences and observations as a gay man, I came up with the following:

In my experience, gay men have tried to seek myths of how gay men have functioned in various other cultures (for example, Greek, Japanese, First Nations).  The rational behind using other cultures as material for gay myths has been to bolster gay self-esteem by providing modern U.S. gay men with prototype gay ways of being.

These myths are unsatisfying to me because I am neither an aristocratic warrior nor an indigenous pre-industrial native.  And instead of synthesizing new cultural solutions to the question of what it means to be a gay man, it seems to me that there are many "Indian-wanna-bes" trying to heal their self-esteem issues by being something they aren't.

This is not to say that the myth of a prehistoric matriarchy would motivate women the same way that my gay male examples seem to motivate gay men.

There is also a "Golden Age" in American Gay Culture, which would have been around 1980 in New York City (post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS).  This golden age helps support the stereo-type of the urban gay male (think Will and Jack from Will and Grace and the Bravo TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy).  As evidence for my supposition that the gay golden age promotes stereotypes, I'd present the movie, Jeffry; and the novels An Arrow's Flight, by  Mark Merlis and Like People in History by Felice Picano.  These are mostly literary sources, and could be biased.

But - like the myths borrowed from other cultures - this golden age (at least as it is represented in cultural and literary sources) is not helpful to me because I am not a Castro Clone nor a Greenwich Village Artist.  The internal push-and-pull about personal identity and big city gay social expectations can be seen in the book Life Outside by Michaelangelo Signorile -- which basically blames Wall Street for seducing gay men into restrictive roles about what is "masculine" and "gay" -- think Tom of Finland. (Unfortunately, Signorile seems to have not read Starhawk, Niomi Wolf, nor an introductory statistics text.)  Signorile's solution was to suggest that gay men move to small cites and find mentors.

I should point out that I'm very lucky - I've never been institutionalized or beat-up physically for my orientation (although 1976 through 1983 were very rough years to be a nerd and perceived queer) .  And I'm very lucky to be maintaining a household with a loving partner.

So, to bring this back to  The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, I can empathize with Eller's written preferences for a history grounded in archeological evidence (as opposed to imagined or intuited myths), although I don't know how easily applicable an archeological history of people can be mapped onto today's culture.  Rather than fetishizing a place (such as Stonehenge or Isreal or Canterbury Cathedral or the Parthanon), focusing on prehistoric cultures seems to fetishize a particular time.

Eller argues that the story of a prehistoric matriarchy comes with strong expectations about what it means to be a woman (and by inference, a man) which set up restrictive gender roles. Given my experiences with the Golden Age of Gay New York City, I would have to agree with her.

But maybe I'm stuck in a pre-Hegelian modality - or perhaps I need to re-read a copy of Godel Escher Bach and practice writing "mu." 

Others have not been so amused as I have been with The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory and here are their reviews and critiques:

Review by Kristy Coleman: http://www.cynthiaeller.com/colemanreview_new.htm

 Eller's response to Coleman:  http://www.cynthiaeller.com/responsecoleman_new.htm

 Review by Joan Marler:  http://www.belili.org/marija/eller_response.html

 Comentary by Marguerite Rigoglioso:  http://www.belili.org/marija/rigoglioso.html

 Eller's response to Marler and Rigoglioso:  http://www.belili.org/marija/c_eller_response.html

 Review by Max Dashu: http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/eller.html

 Eller's response to Dashu:  http://www.cynthiaeller.com/responsedashu_new.htm

Halogen Mania and Information Essay

Today I replaced a 300 watt, 120 volt halogen bulb in a torchiere. Oh. My. Goodness. Words cannot express the exuberance that flooded through me this morning when I transformed our dingy gray morning kitchen nook into a Shrine of Brightness. I probably frightened a half-dozen Twitter and Facebook followers with my manic hymns of thanksgiving (and video).

All I can say is that last Winter's "creative slump" is very definitely connected with the light levels. So don't take away my electric Summer unless you want a reenactment of Psycho, directed by Ingmar Bergman.



In other news, Amanda on Facebook asked: "At what point does society decide we've collectively stored enough information about ourselves? We worry about losing any scrap of information, but, how much information has been lost to the sands of time already? Will what we save now really matter? Would it have helped us to know how many times a day Beethoven picked his nose or how he drank his tea?"


And my light-induced reply:

"Our storage habits are cheap right now; if they became more expensive they'd slow down. Yes; we're building a gigantic data Ozymandias -- but! Marketers take the information and use it to sell stuff. Google and FB make the storage cheap because they've tricked us into becoming data miners for our friends and family.

So sure: if you pick your nose at the same rate and in the same style as Beethoven, then Have I Got A Deal For You! And if you drink Lipton black tea an double strength, steeped for 5 minutes in boiling water, then may I suggest this Sri Lankan Assam tea pack and electric kettle? And we all know that the tea-drinking constituency is an important voting bloc.

Now add to that how Picasa and Google Pics can help you use facial recognition software to help you "organize" your pictures and we've all got a little virtual piece of the Panopticon right in our living rooms, dens, offices, and bedrooms.

So yes, electronic information hoarding is about vanity; it's also about money and power. Er, Yes; I love the freedom of a Net Neutral internet. Why do you ask?

So -- to apply a short essay I read about Wikileaks and how conspiracies manage information -- to stop the endless data collection, we need to make it harder for the conspiracies (Google, FB) to trade information with each other so they are unable to pursue their goal (selling stuff).

The essay posited that Wikileaks does this by forcing the conspiracies to tighten communication between cells in an attempt to control information, thus stifling themselves into ineffectiveness.

I don't know if this leads to a consumer (us) strategy of posting more Cat Videos (and porn) to fill up the networks' bandwidth, or of adapting a strategy of mis-information about ourselves, or of creating fake web surfing applications to use our accounts to surf random sites and make web browser cookies unreliable or what.

But here's where the vanity part of it comes in -- we want our friends and family (and potential readers for those of us who are writers) to be able to find us and see what's up with us. So there is little chance a Bayesian content generator FB app being written or widely adapted soon.

And of course, once Google and FB no longer can use our accounts to build marketable profiles of our consumer and voting habits, there goes "I can haz free InterNets Now."

When Images Come to America...

The last week or two, I've been seeing this image with a quote (mis-) attributed to Sinclair Lewis: "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

My initial reaction was, "Yikes! This is scarily accurate."

And then... I thought the photo was a little too good to be true, did some research, and came to the conclusion that A) while the woman in this photo looks like the former governor of Alaska, it's probably not her, B) a lot of things come to America wrapped in the flag and waving a cross, and C) the Sinclair Lewis quote is misattributed. (Here's someone else's research

http://shii.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Fascism_comes_wrapped_in_the_flag )

I told some friends, and for the most part the reaction was, "Aw shucks." But then someone wrote words to the effect (the original discussion has been zapped into the virtual ether) that even if it wasn't a real photograph, it still spoke a truth and that "even if Sinclair Lewis didn't say it, he should have." (The quoted part is what I remember; I'm tempted to imply a tone, but tone is so difficult with electronic, text-only media.) Possibly they meant, "Even if he didn't say it, I wish he had." But then there were a couple of follow-ups along the lines of, "Yeah; it should be true."

Whoa. He should have said it? That's like saying, "Well, even if it isn't true, it should be." (Insert image of John trying to figure out which logical fallacy the previous argument is at http://www.logicalfallacies.info/ .)

The whole exchange bothered me, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it (and I was having difficulty turning away from logicalfallicies.info...). Was this someone's idea of Truth equals Beauty, Beauty equals Truth? Or was this line of reasoning some sort of sympathetic magic: it's true because I say it is?

And then I started thinking about this old New Yorker cover.

I mean, there are some folks on the opposite side of the political spectrum from me who might argue that this image from a cover of The New Yorker speaks a truth, and they would like it to be true because... well... it should be.

Right?

Are we talking historical truth , or mythic truth ? Because, you know, I've been here before when it comes to people insisting to me that a image is a record of a historical truth (and that I shouldn't doubt it), when all it really is an image that speaks with the power of myth to their needs, either for personal validation or to fulfill a political agenda.

Here it is:
Yep. "The Sorceror." Ooops, I mean, "The Lord of the Animals (humanity's first depicted deity)." Ooops, I mean "The Shaman." Ooops, no, that's definitely Cernunnos, -- wait a minute! This drawing isn't the same as what's on the cave of the at Trois-Frères! But, hey, even if it isn't true, that mean ol' Christian Church probably would have repressed it if it was!

Yes, I just made that last sentence up; nobody has actually said that to me. And even if they haven't, they probably should.


My point is -- yes, images speak to us and can resonate with us; but so do optical illusions. And satire is fun (I love satire); but it is only a first step toward truth.