On a Few of the Many Varieties of Codes and Deceptive Behaviors in History

Buckminster Fuller writes about the earliest Polynesian navigators, who were wizards who learned to sail East to West against the winds, with secret knowledge that was only shared orally with their sons, or coded in their chants: 

"Knowing all about boats/These navigator priests were the only people/Who knew that the Earth was spherical,/That the Earth is a closed system/With its myriad resources chartable./But being water people,/They kept their charts in their heads/And relayed the information/To their navigator progeny/Exclusively in esoterical,/Legendary, symbolical codings/Embroidered into their chants."- Synergetics, pp.749-751

I see this as an example of a small group who protect their knowledge because it was powerful and probably because it was thrilling for small-group cohesion.

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How do we decode writing such as what you're looking at right now? In 11th century Fatimid Egypt, under science-loving Al-Hakim (who had become ruler at age 11, but then disappeared mysteriously during a solitary walk 25 years later), Cairo was the apex of learning in the world: lots of trade with Mediterranean neighbors, a fearsome army recruited from Sudanese, Turks and Berbers, the Polynesian's sailing code long since cracked. Among the brains that drained toward Cairo at this historical moment was al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (Western scholars called him "Alhazen"), from Basra. One project was to explain perception. Al-Haytham had read the recent translations of Aristotle and agreed that things we see enter the eye via the air, but al-Haytham elaborated with more physiological and mathematical suppositions about how perception happens. Furthermore, he said we perceive via a faculty of judgement, after inference. Pure sensation was different from perception, the latter requiring a conscious, voluntary act on our part. Here was a theory of gradations of consciousness, 900 years before Korzybski: there was first pure sensation (whatever we experience before words, analogous to Korzybski's "event level"); then we voluntarily attend to some phenomena (say, paying attention to letters and words and sentences on a page: perception); then we "decipher" the words, and finally: we are reading. Al-Haytham died in 1038. (I mention the 20th century polymath Korzybski; in the first half of the 18th century the Neapolitan polymath Giambattista Vico wrote, "People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner stress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind."- The New Science, #53

                                 al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, b.965

                                 wrote possibly the first great work in 

                                 optics, influenced Roger Bacon and 

                                 Leonardo da Vinci

Roughly 200 years later, under Europe's Catholic mullahs (led by Pope Clement IV), Roger Bacon - one of those guys interested in everything - was interested in optics. He'd read Al-Haytham, but was keeping it on the QT and yet still got persecuted for "unorthodox teaching." There were a lot of Churchmen who insisted rather violently that scientific research was dangerous to Church dogma (They have made some progress since then...). Bacon explained to the Pope how optics/perception/reading probably worked. Bacon and al-Haytham had both realized it's got to be far more complex than they'd suspected. In 11th century Islam, al-Haytham was not persecuted. Roger Bacon, soon after trying to explain to the Pope roughly the same theory, found himself in a cell. 

250 or so years later, Leonardo da Vinci was interested in this same problem of decoding perception and reading. But he was smart enough to know he could get in trouble: he wrote about it in his notebooks in a secret code that could only be read when held up to a mirror. 

It's only in the last 80 years that we've gotten a thick neurobiological account of how reading occurs and there's still interesting problems being worked out at this minute.

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When looking into codes and ciphers, codes are one thing, ciphers another; all translation from one language to another is codework; any language you can't read can function as a code to crack; at one time only priests, kings, and scribes/accountants knew how to write and read: for everyone else in the culture "writing" was a code. 

O! So many codes! And right out in the open. If only we could crack/hack/decipher/decode...

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Not long ago I yet again re-watched one of those films from the Great Age of Hollywood Paranoia (c.1971-1976): Three Days of the Condor, in which Robert Redford plays a CIA agent whose specialty is reading novels, looking for codes embedded in them. These codes would apparently qualify as steganography. Messages hidden within other messages...and how do you know I'm not doing that right now? (If I'm doing it, please take my word for it: it's all in good, clean fun.)

I remember when I first saw Condor: I thought Redford's job was a fiction-writer's fancy. But apparently it's a real thing, and being taken more and more seriously by...yes, CIA, but all sorts of others working in the (not so) Great Game.

What if some of our best conspiracy writers and novelists of exquisite paranoia were leaving code in their books that hadn't yet been cracked? I mean...it could happen, right? Maybe not, but we never know. Let's not rule it out completely. Which reminds me of a passage in Don DeLillo's haunting, hilarious, deeply paranoid and postmodern White Noise. The main character - who is a professor specializing in "Hitler Studies"? - his ex-wife works for the CIA:

She told me very little about her intelligence work. I knew she reviewed fiction for the CIA, mainly long serious novels with coded structures. The work left her tired and irritable, rarely able to enjoy food, sex or conversation. She spoke Spanish to someone on the telephone, was a hyperactive mother, shining with an eerie stormlight intensity. The long novels kept arriving in the mail. 

It was curious how I kept stumbling into the company of lives in intelligence. Dana worked part-time as a spy. Tweedy came from a distinguished old family that had a long tradition of spying and counterspying and she was now married to a high-level jungle operative. Janet, before retiring to the ashram, was a foreign-currency analyst who did research for a secret group of advanced theorists connected to some controversial think-tank. All she told me is that they never met in the same place twice. (p.213)

Maybe it's just me, but "high-level jungle operative" makes me laff. 

White Noise is one of DeLillo's short novels, but there are some really "long serious novels with coded structures." Hmmmm...

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Speaking of postmodernists, Douglas Rushkoff, in his wonderful book Program or Be Programmed, writes that the postmodernists were right to be suspicious of language and "reality," but they didn't go far enough: they hadn't accounted for the hidden biases of code writers whose codes were embedded deep within our digital gadgets. (see pp.83-84, ibid)

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Well, the pre-postmodernists, often called simply Modernists? A few of them left works so cryptic (and therefore threatening to dull minds, like J. Edgar Hoover's), that they became suspect. 

Even though James Joyce never set foot on Unistat soil, Hoover saw him as a threat. Joyce had an FBI file. Because someone in Joyce's extended circle was a known communist, Joyce was suspected as one, too. (He was more of an individualist-anarchist of some sort.) From Claire Culleton's Joyce and the G-Men:

Even as early as 1920, Joyce had been plagued by rumors about him and his work, and he was (laughably) reputed to be a spy for the Austrians, the British, and the Italians. He even complained to his brother Stanislaus that Ulysses was believed to be a prearranged German code; Ezra Pound had heard that "British censorship suspected Ulysses of being a code." (p.45, Culleton)

Anyone who's looked at Finnegans Wake for 5 minutes might wonder what the eternally paranoid agents of Control thought Joyce must have been up to. If we go back to the early distinction between codes and ciphers, and al-Haytham's and Roger Bacon's and Leonardo's forays into human perception and reading, well, then surely Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are written in code, only in a different semantic sense than what an asshole like J. Edgar Hoover would sense as "code."

Similarly, Ezra Pound, after being captured by the Allies in Italy, had to answer to the charge that his Cantos were some sort of code. (see one of my earlier posts on codes, HERE, skip down to "Modernist Investigative Poets Are Suspects (By Definition?)"

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The great cryptologist David Kahn writes about the enigma of the "emotional bases of cryptology," reminding us that "Freud stated that the motivation for learning, for the acquisition of knowledge, derives ultimately from the child's impulse to see the hidden sexual organs of adults and other children. If curiosity is a sublimation of this, then cryptanalysis may be even more positively a manifestation of voyeurism." (p.755, The Code Breakers) Kahn follows with a long line of later psychoanalysts who basically agreed with Freud, and many who challenged his idea. Nevertheless, I find the idea cosmically funny. I mean: if Freud's right - and I don't think he is, but anyway - then if you've read this far and feel like you acquired some knowledge from the OG, 'tis only 'cuz you're some sort of very well-practiced voyeur! Which reminds me of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

Fairly early in the book, you'll recall, Allied spies have noticed that US Army Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop has sexual conquests all around London, and they're followed by V-2 rocket hit - in the same place he had sex - a couple/few days later. They don't know why, but there are theories. Rockets and hard-ons...Slothrop's penis must have a "code" to crack...it - his dick - was possibly encoded by...who? Does he know? Slothrop seems to not know. How are they going to crack this code? Talk about an Enigma!

                                       psychedelický grafický umělecké dílo Bob Campbell

Obscurity, Codes and Puzzles in Books: Ponderings

"Censorship is the mother of metaphor." - Borges

While I'm on record as being with the cognitive neurolinguistics of Lakoff, et.al., as my main model for the mother of metaphor, Borges here gets at something I find exceedingly interesting: the now-marginalized idea that writers have used coded language for various reasons, and one of them would be to escape persecution by the State. I give Borges his point here.
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Joyce's Friend Byrne's Crypto

With the debates about mass surveillance and encryption continuing on to what I assume is a slow boil, and with brilliant high school students bringing the debate (literally) to Capitol Hill, many of us of a certain caste of mind eventually wonder where and when this began. One day we find ourselves in the archives and indexes of old books. We learn some of what we set out for. In my case - and probably (?) yours - you get the serendipitous hit, too. A recent example from my own forays:

John Francis Byrne, who was James Joyce's best friend at university in Dublin, later invented a cryptographic device that he thought might make him rich, because it was an uncrackable "Chaocipher," which used what's called an "autokey" in the trade. It was a cigar box with some bits of strings and a few odds and ends. When Byrne showed it to his cousin she said it would win him a Nobel Prize, "not for science, apparently, but for ushering in an age of universal peace by conferring the gift of perfect security upon the communications of all nations and all men." - The Codebreakers, Kahn, p.767

                                                       J.F. Byrne, Joyce's friend

Byrne thought his device would be used by businessmen, brotherhoods, religious groups and social institutions, and by "husband, wife, or lover." (Kahn, quoting Byrne, p.768) Anyone could use his device anywhere and it would provide perfect encryption. Byrne met with and tried to sell his device to the US Army, State Department, AT&T, and the Navy, and was turned down. The State Dept sent him a form letter, telling him their own "ciphers are adequate to (our) needs."

Byrne, who published a book in 1951 called The Silent Years, mostly about remembering Joyce, devoted the final third of his book to telling the world about his amazing encryption machine, and actually challenged the public to crack his code, offering "$5000 or the total royalties of the first three months after publication of his book..." (Kahn, 768) Byrne challenged the American Cryptogram Association, the New York Cipher Society and Norbert Wiener to crack his code.

Kahn:
"Nobody ever claimed the money, and Byrne died a few years later. One may presume that the reason both for the failure of the public to read his cipher and failure of the government to adopt it was that while the cipher probably had its merits, its many demerits outweighed them for practical use. Byrne, like many inventors, both won and lost. His cipher was never broken. But his dream never came true." (768)

                                            David Kahn, 2013. His book The Codebreakers
                                            is a tour-de-force.

When Joyce came back to Dublin in 1909, another of his old friends from university, Vincent Cosgrave, told Joyce that Nora had "walked out" with him - Cosgrave - around the time Nora fell for the dreamy writer, which devastated him. He wrote accusatory letters to Nora, who was living at their home in Trieste. He wondered if Giorgio, his first child and only son, born in 1905, was really his. Byrne tried to convince Joyce that Cosgrave and Oliver St. John Gogarty (the model for Ulysses's "Buck Mulligan") were trying to ruin Joyce. It was a plot. Joyce's brother Stan told James that Nora had rebuffed Cosgrave, and this calmed the Irish/cosmopolitan bard.

In real life, Byrne lived with cousins at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin, which is the address of Leopold and Molly Bloom. Byrne is "Cranly" in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the character who lends a sympathetic ear to Stephen's aesthetic ideas, amongst other things. The section late at night in Ulysses, where Bloom has forgotten the key to his house, so he jumps the fence and gets in through the backdoor and lets Stephen in? That actually happened with Byrne. Joyce makes me think of it as a mythic thing, which is marvelous on his part...

By 1910 Byrne had emigrated to New York, where he worked as a journalist under the name J.F. Renby, an anagram of his last name. He died in 1960.
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Arthur Melzer Makes Me Think

"Against history, we developed community through the use of a subtle and ambiguous language that could be heard in one way by the oppressor, in another way by your friends. Our weapons of sabotage were ambiguity, humor, paradox, mystery, poetry, song and magic."
-Andrei Codrescu, the Romanian essayist, broadcaster and poet, in his 1990 The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto For Escape, pp.38-39

In a dizzyingly wonderful book that leaves me wondering what I'm missing, Michigan State professor of political science, Arthur Melzer, published Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (2014).

[Get a load of his out-of-book appendix, a real data-dump of historical textual examples that bolster his claims that esoteric writing (writing in a tricky way in order to not be persecuted or not damage the body politic, but it's more complicated than that) has basically gone on since writing and the State emerged.]

The book was reviewed widely and positively...by NeoCons. The bad reviews seem to be from anti-NeoCons. Melzer says the book needed to be written, and the subject - which was one of Leo Strauss's main riffs - wasn't really Melzer's thing. He doesn't like esoteric writing. He wants to read writers who say exactly what they mean.

I've read the book and find it magisterial. Then I made the mistake of re-reading a book of essays, mostly by Umberto Eco, with contributions by Christine Brooke-Rose, Richard Rorty, and Jonathan Culler: Interpretation and Overinterpretation. I find it heady stuff. But it worsened my probably paranoid overinterpretation of Melzer's avowed reluctance to address the topic, and his NeoCon ties.

Melzer:
"My friends and colleagues all regard it as curious that I should be the one to write this book. There are people who have a real love for esoteric interpretation and a real gift for it. I am not one of them."
-p.xvii

And yet there's 450 pages (plus that online appendix!), scholarly throughout. And then I'm into Eco, illustrating how paranoid overinterpretations occur. And there's NeoCon Mark Lilla, in his book on Vico (who to me is the most interesting example of what Melzer calls "defensive esoteric" writing), saying he disagrees with Leo Strauss on an esotericist reading of Vico. (See G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern, pp.243-245)

Before Melzer's book appeared, for years I'd accumulated notes on the topic on my own, but I hadn't read NeoCon godfather Strauss's 1952 Persecution and the Art of Writing. I accumulated notes based on my readings of Robert Anton Wilson, William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Norman O. Brown, Frances Yates, Nietzsche, etc.

The British empiricist Isaiah Berlin knew Strauss and liked him, admired his mind, but thought a lot of his ideas were wrong, including the esoteric idea:

Berlin:
"Strauss was a careful, honest and deeply concerned thinker, who seemed to have taught his pupils to read between the lines of the classical philosophers - he had a theory that these thinkers had secret doctrines beneath the overt one - which could only be discovered by hints, allusions and other symptoms, sometimes because such thinkers thought in this fashion, sometimes for fear of censorship, oppressive regimes and the like. This had been a great stimulus to ingenuity and all kinds of fanciful subtleties, but seems to me to be wrong-headed. Strauss's rejection of the post-Renaissance world as hopelessly corrupted by Positivism and empiricism seems to me to border on the absurd."
-Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, with Ramin Jahanbegloo, pp. 31-32

And yet Berlin seems to me one of the most astute readers of Vico. And yet: I agree with Berlin about Strauss's rejection of Modernity. And yet: Melzer's book seems overwhelmingly persuasive.

I have not read my way into yet another Chapel Perilous. But I have once again become, lately, ever-more hyper-aware of my own interpretive schemes in reading.

The headspace? Cosmic hilarity!
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Ending in a Southernly Direction

Lee Server interviewed the late great Terry Southern, and here's a passage apropos:

Server: Reading Candy as a kid, I'll confess to you, played a definite part in my growing into manhood - I don't intend to go into details. What would you read for "erotic purposes" as a youngster?

Terry Southern: When I was young, they had what were called "little fuck-books" - which featured characters taken from the comics. Most of them were absurd and grotesque, but there were one or two of genuine erotic interest; "Blondie" comes to mind, as do "Dale" and "Flash Gordon" and darling "Ella Cinders." For a while, convinced there was more than met the eye, I tried to "read between the lines" in the famous Nancy Drew books, searching for some deep secret insinuation of erotica so powerful and pervasive as to account for the extraordinary popularity of these books, but alas, was able to garner no mileage ("J.O." wise) from this innocuous, and seemingly endless, series.
-Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950-1995, ed. Mike Southern and Josh Alan Friedman, p.2
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                                                   grafica di Bob Campbell

Sirius the Dog Star in Some Poetry and Prose of Note

As I write, in Northern California, 'tis the Dog Days. The days are still, long, and marked by heat and, lately, drought. In yin-yang fashion, the heat can be modeled physically as atoms moving faster, with more energy. We're exposed all day by Earth's tilt to direct sun, and we're closer to our star, too. Correspondingly, our own atoms seem to slow down. Small exertions bring panting and sweat, and we crave the couch, a ceiling fan, whatever's in the fridge. While no doubt our ever-accelerating capital treadmill will keep many exercising and working to "get ahead" <cough>, the general run of things compass lethargy, languidness, longing.

And yet, this seems a time of supreme weirdness for our species, though this seems underreported.

                            Sirius A and B, simulated by Chris Laurel's 3-D imaging tech
                            named Celestia. Wikimedia Commons.

Here's W.H. Auden, around the Fall of 1949, nailing the listlessness of these days well:

Under Sirius

Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus:
The heather lies limp and dead
On the mountain, the baltering torrent
Shrunk to a soodling thread;
Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain,
Vacant the scholar’s brain
Under his great hat,
Drug though She may, the Sybil utters
A gush of table-chat.

And you yourself with a head-cold and upset stomach,
Lying in bed till noon,
Your bills unpaid, your much advertised
Epic not yet begun,
Are a sufferer too. All day, you tell us, you wish
Some earthquake would astonish,
Or the wind of the Comforter’s wing
Unlock the prisons and translate
The slipshod gathering.

And last night, you say, you dreamed of that bright blue morning,
The hawthorn hedges in bloom,
When, serene in their ivory vessels,
The three wise Maries come,
Sossing through seamless waters, piloted in
By sea-horse and fluent dolphin:
Ah! how the cannons roar,
How jocular the bells as They
Indulge the peccant shore.

It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe
That all in the end shall be well,
But first of all, remember,
So the Sacred Books foretell,
The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense
If today were that moment of silence,
Before it break and drown,
When the insurrected eagre hangs
Over the sleeping town?

How will you look and what will you do when the basalt
Tombs of the sorcerers shatter
And their guardian megalopods
Come after you pitter-patter?
How will you answer when from their qualming spring
The immortal nymphs fly shrieking,
And out of the open sky
The pantocratic riddle breaks –
‘Who are you and why?’

For when in a carol under the apple-trees
The reborn featly dance,
There will also, Fortunatus,
Be those who refused their chance,
Now pottering shades, querulous beside the salt-pits,
And mawkish in their wits,
To whom these dull dog-days
Between event seemed crowned with olive
And golden with self-praise. 

Longing for the earthquake that would astonish reminds me of Kathryn Schulz's recent article in The New Yorker, about the Cascadia fault line/subduction zone, that will leave Seattle in ruins and render, according to one expert, everything west of the Interstate 5 highway "dust." Now that would bring any one of us out of the doldrums, eh?

I marvel at Auden's ability to render the listless, sluggish mental and bodily states brought on by the Dog Days. And "On the mountain, the baltering torrent/Shrunk to a soodling thread" is so Joycean-trippy I'm envious of anyone who writes a line like this... 

Astronomers tell us Sirius begins to rise in conjunction with the sun, for those larks who like to wake with the Sol. For the Egyptians, Sirius's appearance meant very soon the Nile would flood their fertile fields: irrigation from the gods! To the naked eye, only Alpha Centauri is brighter, and Sirius (we're not yet addressing Sirius's cosmic brethren: soon) is the fifth-nearest known star to Earthlings. It's 8.7 light years from us, but let's let Tom Robbins flesh that out in poetic prose.

Tom Robbins

The afternoon lasts approximately as long as fourth grade. However long it takes a wuf of light from Sirius the Dog Star to reach its reflection in a puddle of tar on the Dog House roof, that's how long it takes the afternoon to go by. The afternoon is a million-car train rattling at half-speed through a crossing in a prairie town. - Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas, p.83

James Joyce

In the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses, the style has switched to a series of catechism-like questions, which  are posed regarding the interactions of the young, drunk artist Stephen Dedalus, and his symbolic father, Leopold Bloom. It's around 2AM in Dublin, June 17th, 1904:

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface toward the center of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes [...] - p. 698 in the old Viking ppbk version.

Bloom was an Everyman of 1904, but he was interested in everything. By 1905 Sirius was measured at 8.6 light-years away from us; Bloom seems to remember it as 10. So, the number for light-years is low and so is the volume: it's not 900 times that of Earth but closer to 2,834,000 times more voluminous. The important thing here is that Bloom is filled with wonder about such things and wants to share his knowledge with the younger man. 

Ezra Pound

The following passage was written under the most extraordinary circumstances: Pound had been captured by the Allies for broadcasting Fascist propaganda (Pound seemed to think he was doing what Thomas Jefferson would have wanted[?], although the broadcasts are filled with disgusting antisemitic remarks; Pound seemed to have some sort of "sickness" I know not what) to the Allies from Italy, with Mussolini's imprimatur. On May 22, 1945, Pound was taken to the Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) at Pisa where he remained for six months, as a political prisoner. At first he was kept by the Americans (Pound was born in Idaho) in a wire and concrete cage six feet by six and a half feet, open to the sky, no protection from wind and rain.  Most of the other prisoners were murderers and rapists. Pound had thought he was exercising free speech with his broadcasts. Two guards watched him at all time, and weren't supposed to speak to Pound. Pound cracked after three weeks. Under these barbaric, insane conditions, he continued with his lifelong work: writing his Cantos, encyclopedic/epic poetry, polyglot, profoundly erudite, a poem with his own version of history as he had made it from his readings. By the time he'd been apprehended, his ideas about how Modern poetry should be had largely "won" with other poets and intellectuals. With the intervention of those he'd influenced and helped (Hemingway and William Carlos Williams were disgusted by what Ez had said, but were committed to defending him should he come to trial for treason): cummings, Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, Amy Lowell, Auden, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate and many others later awarded the section of Cantos that Pound had written while in captivity the Bollingen Prize. He received this award while housed in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, DC. Here's a bit with Sirius in it; Pound is in the panther cage and the moon is coming up, along with Sirius:

the water seeps in under the bottle's seal
                Till finally the moon rose like a blue p.c.
of Bingen on the Rhine
                round as Perkeo's tub
then glaring Eos stared the moon in the face
       (Pistol packin' Jones with an olive branch)
       man and dog
                               On the S.E. horizon
               and we note that dog precedes man in the occident
               as of course in the orient if the bloke in the
               is proceeding to rightwards
      "Why war?" sd/the sergeant rum-runner
       "too many people! when there git to be too many
                      you get to kill some of 'em off."
-Canto LXXX

Water seeps through into his cage while the moon rose like a blue postcard. Bingen is a city on the Rhine located near a whirlpool. "Perkeo" was a jester in the court of Karl Phillip of Heidelberg, and an elaboration of this very Ezratic allusion can be found here. Eos is Venus at dawn. Jones is an officer at the DTC. Man and dog refer to Orion and Sirius. Then Pound makes an observation about syntax in chinese writing vs. Indo-European. After "bloke in the" we are supposed to see a Chinese character that shows the characters for "dog" and "man," which, in the text, is shown in the margins. This tiny section of Canto 80 ends with overheard conversation illustrating the almost idiotic level of political understanding by Unistat military; my impression is that not much has changed since 1945.

W.S. Merwin

Heavily influenced by Pound, Merwin won his second Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 2008 book The Shadow of Sirius. I read this luminous book and, while there are no poems "about" Sirius, reading Merwin we must keep in mind that, for him, creativity comes from something inside us that we didn't know about: our Shadow. So, his poetry comes from the "shadow of Sirius," as Sirius is a strange star system (more later). Here's a section from a transcript of an interview Merwin had with Bill Moyers, after Merwin won the Pulitzer:


BILL MOYERS: He does leave his island reverie from time to time to read his work at universities and libraries — and to pick up his Pulitzer Prize. Here's the book that won, THE SHADOW OF SIRIUS. Its author is with me now. W.S. Merwin, welcome to the Journal.
BILL MOYERS: You titled this new book, the one that just won  the Pulitzer Prize, "In The Shadow of Sirius". Now, Sirius is the dog star. The most luminous star in the sky. Twenty-five times more luminous than the sun. And yet, you write about its shadow. Something that no one has ever seen. Something that's invisible to us. Help me to understand that.
W.S. MERWIN: That's the point. The shadow of Sirius is pure metaphor, pure imagination. But we live in it all the time.
BILL MOYERS: How so?
W.S. MERWIN: We are the shadow of Sirius. There is the other side of-- as we talk to each other, we see the light, and we see these faces, but we know that behind that, there's the other side, which we never know. And that — it's the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It's the mystery. That's always with us, too. And it gives the depth and dimension to the rest of it.

(for entire interview see HERE.)

In Voltaire's Micromegas he's invented a giant from the planet Sirius. It's a proto-science fiction story. This giant promises to give men - "infinitely insignificant atoms" - the secrets of nature in a large volume of philosophy. When the Society of the Academy of Sciences opens up the book, it's nothing but blank pages. "Aha!," says the Secretary: "Just as I expected."

Which...

"Well, Lew angled his thumb aloft and eastward, where sure enough a very bright, luminous object had been slowly on the rise all evening, "it's a good one to get, all right." It was the Dog Star Sirius, which ruled this part of the summer, and whose blessings, tradition held, were far from unmixed." - Against The Day, Thomas Pynchon, p.901 

Brief Notes and Illustrations on the Illuminating Aspects of Studying Advertising

SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX!

"Now that I have your attention..." <----That's an old chestnut in advertising.

Friends, the Overweening Generalist knows his Readers, and they're the finest. The Overweening Generalist, furthermore, knows you're free and intelligent and you could choose any blog to read but you've chosen this one, right now, and the Overweening Generalist KNOWS as well as you do that in the end this is really only just another damned blog (hey, we get tired of blogs too sometimes when they don't measure up). But the Overweening Generalist feels humbled, and hopes to bring the discerning, no-bullshit Reader real VALUE, and free, instant and new information you can use.

Doesn't advertising suck ass? I mean, who says it better than (maybe)Banksy? Here he talks about advertisers "taking the piss out of you" and that they're "laughing at you" and you know every bit written inside that Coke bottle is true, right? Deface ads!Let's take back our selves, values, consciousness and let the goddamned advertisers peddle their papers somewhere else!

Or maybe even better than (maybe) Banksy was Bill Hicks (died 1994). Here he is, for less than 3 minutes of your precious time: [NSFW]

This fascinated me, because Adam Corner wrote a fairly brilliant piece for Aeon that pretty much covered what Hicks was saying here, circa 1992. Corner's piece was from November, 2013. A researcher in psychology, Corner writes, "The advertising industry anticipates and then absorbs its own opposition, like a politician cracking jokes at his own expense to disarm hostile media." Corner seems to be getting at the deep structure of advertising when he writes that ads and the people who engineer them systematically promote clusters of values that are antithetical to pro-social or pro-environment attitudes. Who cares about the problems of sustainability of human life, or that the stock market was recently revealed as being fixed, or that your neighbors were downsized and now being unfairly foreclosed upon by a predatory bank? The new i-Gadget is out! And you know you NEED one now, if you're ever going to stand a chance to be happy again.

Buy this thing. Do it. For yourself. You owe yourself. If you make yourself happy, you might make others around you happy, and Everyone wins.

Do you want to know what's one of the most fascinating things on Ad folks' minds? Well, I'll tell you: they spend a lot of money to understand how you (18-35 year olds who have education and some spending money) are cynical about ads. They need to know as much as possible about how you feel distaste towards certain ads, and why. They know a lot about your values and how you think. They are truly fascinated with your highly sophisticated understandings of what advertising does, and how it works. 

So they can sell you stuff. Stuff you probably don't need or even want. Stuff that you'll look at after two weeks and say to yourself, "What was I thinking?" Lots of people - like Banksy and Bill Hicks and Adbusters and the brilliant people who put together the video (below) - think advertising is evil. I think it's a strong point but sort of wrong, but before I elucidate, please watch this. I'll be right back after this very important message:

Generic Brand Video Click HERE Now

Does this nail the ad people or what? I think it's "spot" (HA!) on. It seems like Good Work to me, but who's buying? Didn't you already know this shit? Of course you have a DVR and fast-forward through almost every commercial, but you still like to pick apart every ad you (happen to note) see with your friends, right? It's fun...They can't put anything over on you and your pals, can They?

We "don't even look" at the ads in glossy magazines or online; we can't "afford to spend the time." But by definition we don't know how much those ads affected us subliminally. 

Have They co-opted dissent now, making dissent into a marketing tool? Is this notion too depressing to deal with right now? Want a nice tall cool beverage?

Advertisers Versus Intelligent Consumers: A Dialectic
Recently I read a precis for some academic's PhD dissertation about James Joyce and advertising in Ulysses, a novel I will always be reading off and on until I die. Most of you know one of the main characters, Leopold Bloom, sells ads, analyzes ads, dreams up ideas for ads. It's 1904, so the psychology and science of manipulation and persuasion is in its infancy. The academic, Matthew Hayward, discovered that Joyce made annotations to a pamphlet titled Advertising, Or The Art of Making Known, by Howard Bridgewater, circa 1910. It had been thought by most Joyce scholars that Joyce did this in order to procure employment at a bank, but Hayward sees it as Joyce's way of getting into that part of Bloom's advertising-mind.

Adam Corner's article (linked to above), and the (maybe) Banksy and Bill Hicks and the satirical expose of generic brand ad-writing are, as I see it, part of the historical ying-yang of ads, persuasion, manipulation and much of the world as we know it, circa 1900-NOW. Let us all study advertising in our own idiosyncratic ways, because then we learn more about ourselves as consumers of ideas and goods, it keeps us on our toes, exhilarated and more mentally alert, we learn a lot about the mechanisms of advertising and our fellow citizens, and finally, we learn quite a huge lot about human psychology and mass manipulation.

My main influence in this is Marshall McLuhan, who, in a piece called "Love-Goddess Assembly Line" (published in his seminal, whacked, hyper-creative, cranky-Catholic-conservative, Joyce-Pound-Wyndham Lewis-influenced The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man), discussed two juxtaposed ads from the 1940s (the book was published in 1951!), one for soap and one for women's girdles, and showed how women seemed to be mass-produced off an assembly line. This particular essay (the whole book is amazing, even when McLuhan seems oh-so-very wrong) has McLuhan playing "anthropologist". He wants to be able to READ advertising and make it tell us something very deep and non-trivial about the culture we inhabit. He's always pointing out recurring patterns and symbols and how symbols migrate, he's "probing" before he came to terms with this term. 

"No culture will give popular nourishment and support to images or patterns which are alien to its dominant impulses and aspirations," McLuhan writes. This line follows very closely on a quote from Cecil B. DeMille, who decries how young female would-be actresses in Hollywood all start to look the same to him. McLuhan had wondered why himself, he wants a better science of popular culture imagery and text; he wants to discern themes and their variations in the underlying "laws" that "will mould its songs and art and social expression." 

McLuhan then utters a nice line of what we now call "physics envy" from another major influence, Alfred North Whitehead:

"A.N. Whitehead states the procedures of modern physics somewhat in the same way in Science and the Modern World. In place of a single mechanical unity in all phenomena, 'some theory of discontinuous existence is required.' But discontinuity, whether in cultures or physics, unavoidably invokes the ancient notion of harmony. And it is out of the extreme discontinuity of modern existence, with its mingling of many cultures and periods, that there is being born today a vision of a rich and complex harmony. We do not have a single, coherent present to live in, and so we need a multiple vision in order to see at all." 

McLuhan then says this is where the ad agencies come in. He sees them as very useful toward focusing the multiple perspectives we must live with and understand. Dig this from McLuhan about advertisers:

"They express for the collective society that which dreams and uncensored behavior do in individuals. [McLuhan later called this "macro-gesticulation" - OG] They give spatial form to hidden impulse and, when analyzed, make possible bringing into reasonable order a great deal that could not otherwise be observed or discussed. Gouging away at the surface of public sales resistance, the ad men are constantly breaking through into the Alice In Wonderland territory behind the looking glass which is the world of subrational impulse and appetites. Moreover, the ad agencies are so set on the business of administering major wallops to the buyer's unconscious, and have their attention so concentrated on the sensational effect of their activities, that they unconsciously reveal the primary motivations of large areas of our contemporary existence."

Look at ads this way! Why not? Assume McLuhan's basically right: the advertisers are - ironically - unconsciously revealing all kinds of things about human non-conscious motivation. 

The history of advertising can be fascinating and ultra-instructive. Some of my favorite texts have been: 

• Adam Curtis's multi-part A Century of the Self
• Stuart Ewen's books on the history of "public relations," especially PR!: A Social History of Spin
• Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Herman and Chomsky
• The Hidden Persuaders, by Vance Packard. This book is often cited as the historical advent of the intelligent lay-public's engagement in what I call the "dialectic" with advertisers, but it didn't arrive until 1957. I wonder how much of a problem it is/was for consumers that we seem about 40 years behind the advertisers.    
• Mythologies, by Roland Barthes
• anything by McLuhan and possibly his finest and foremost exponent in our day, Douglas Rushkoff.

A lot, maybe most, ads fail. 

Chomsky has often used the term "intellectual self-defense," but much of advertising now bypasses (or tries to) our rational, "intellectual" mind and instead appeals to the limbic, emotional brain, and even the "reptilian" brain stem. In my experience, studying ads is at first "intellectual" because we're so used to reading. But after some time, signals from the non-rational parts of your brain will arrive at your frontal cortex and you will gain some insight. This seems very much like reading an ambiguous text, because, unless you can find and buttonhole the main ad-entity behind the studied ad, you will only have interpretations. Make yours rich!

We like to convince ourselves we're impervious to the power of ads, that they're strictly for schmucks. How wrong we are. They are an exceedingly rich source for probing the deep structure of the paideuma.

I hope you enjoyed my little piece on hacking advertising. You may be aware I was changing fonts throughout, in hopes of maintaining your interest. I also employed some big-assed font sizes, hoping to keep you reading. You may also have noted this blogspew appeared on April 1st, and wonder if the OG-dude is playing your for a Fool.

Again, you will only have interpretations. 

Are we cool? 

"Moist Panties": The Oddity of Word Aversion

Whilst reading a collection of articles on slang, trying to get a line on how it's created by in-groups in order to define themselves and give members a sense of belonging, and how created slang words make their way into mainstream culture, I happened upon the apparently mysterious linguistic topic of word aversion.

I'll get to moist panties in a sec, but I wonder what y'all make of sentences such as, "After a nourishing hot meal it was Tad's brainchild to make fudge, but feeling suddenly like he needed to vomit, he dropped the spoon, wiped his slacks, felt like puke, and threw his sweaty shirt into the crevice of his couch." Or: "The hardscrabble pugilist towed his luggage into his man-cave, his brow felt viscous and the scab began to ooze. He wondered if he'd ever win a bout again, and if this was the new normal."

Okay, I admit these sentences seem ripped from a Bulwer-Lytton Bad Writing contest, but I crammed in as many words as I could that people reported having a visceral reaction to...for seemingly no good reason at all. There are no "swear" words here. The words seem pedestrian, inoffensive.

U. of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman gives this definition for word aversion:

"A feeling of intense, irrational distaste for the sound or sight of a particular word or phrase, not because its use is regarded as etymologically or logically or grammatically wrong, nor because it's felt to be overused or trendy or non-standard, but simply because the word itself somehow feels unpleasant or even disgusting." 

I read this and, similar to the association Proust had with madeleines, I remembered a conversation with a friend in which he brought up how much he couldn't stand the word "ointment." Just the sound of it bothered him. He was otherwise of very sound mind.

So, I swerved and started reading on word aversion. It seems a lot of us have these words that really bug us, but scholars don't know why, or what percentage of the population has these aversions, or how old the phenomenon is, whether it's similar to disgust over sounds, smells or tastes, or if bilingual people - who have more of a sense of how arbitrary words and meanings are - are less prone to word aversion.

                                          Sorry! 

Sarah Fentem of The Atlantic really hates the word "panties." She goes on about why, and while I get where she's coming from, I happen to love the word "panties." Fentem seems to think it connotes patriarchy and making women's undergarments (the lower one) into a little girl thing. It's undignified, I guess. For me, it makes me slightly randy, and I don't think of women as anything less than men; au contraire: women might be better than us men. Or I find myself often thinking so...What's interesting is that Fentem seems to have a lot of company.

But the all-time gross-out word, or at least recently, in English, seems to be "moist." Which...I don't understand. Here's another word I think perfectly lovely. In reading on the aversion for "moist," I learn it migrated to us from the French in the 14th century, and meant "damp." The French got it from a Latin word that denoted that which is slimy, moldy, mushy, and possibly associated with disease.

I use "amazing" too much, and I'm not happy about it, but many others abuse it to the point where it almost disgusts me. "Your hair...is amazing!" No, it's not. Very few hairdos are truly "amazing," but let's not go down that road. I dislike the word "amazing" because of its overuse, so that doesn't qualify under Prof. Liberman's definition.

Others declare they detest the word "like" as a placeholder in everyday conversation, and I agree, but that doesn't qualify under the Liberman definition either. When college students are asked what words they dislike they often trot out pus, mucous, phlegm, vomit, puke, crud, scab and ooze, but the disgust issue seems to be baked on there. And besides, I really like all those words. They don't disgust me; I'm not aversive to them.

But why did other people cite brainchild, slacks, navel, squab, cornucopia, pugilist and goose pimple? This is where it gets interesting. Interesting-weird. To me, anyway...

I tried to compile a list, over the past two days, of words that seem to bug me, for no good reason. I came up with:

dust bunnies: I think I don't like this because I remember my mom picking up the term from TV she'd recently watched, and I guess maybe this lowbrow acquisition bothered my affected and wanna-be highbrow pretenses at the time. The aversion to the term has stuck for 30-odd years.

yummy: I almost feel apologetic for admitting this one. After all, it's an extremely common expression of joy over food, and lately: the good looks of someone else, and it seems that women will say it about hunky men far more than men about alluring women. I think maybe it seems too childish for me? As I said: I apologize to all of you, but Liberman does say it's an "irrational distaste."

FWB/friends with benefits: Gawd, I hated this from the get-go, as soon as I understood the acronym. Have your flings! Be far more..."French" folks! Enjoy your dalliances. But to couch your carnal sex-partner in terms from the workplace? "Benefits"? Now that I'm forced to write about it, I'd prefer "fuck pal" as it's so up-front and unapologetic, brazen even. The "benefits" connotes the Human Resources person down the hall, sick days, the rec room at work. Come to think of it, FWB doesn't disgust me. It pisses me off. I think of John Dewey's term for people who are so caught up in their work it's their whole goddamned life; they can't talk about anything else, even when off work. And it's BORING to listen to: who in the office said what when so-and-so showed up dressed like blah blah and then the thing that another person at work knows that the other person doesn't know they know and that some other co-worker might be gay, etc: Dewey's term: "occupational psychosis." Fuck FWB! And maybe FWB wouldn't count with Liberman, I'm not sure: my distaste seems rational to me, not "irrational."

foodie: I loathe this term, but I think I've unpacked it and it's about class and pretentiousness. I use it, but only within the context of jokes. I saw a sketch comedy bit where a guy with AIDS walks out on his date because she says in passing she's gluten-free and he says he's a foodie and that disgusts him. "Gluten-free is bullshit! I'm outta here!" I can imagine a few friends reading this and later bringing it up, because they use "foodie" all the time, and I try to hide my wincing. Hoo-boy...

upscale: I think I hate this word for roughly the same reason I hate foodie. It doesn't seem like panties or moist or crevice to me. I maybe think far too much about words...I will use "upscale" in an ironic or comic sense, too.

The American people...: A lifetime of having my Crap Detector on while politicians and other demagogues speak has me recoiling in a visceral rictus of hate for this term. It's a term that's supposed to instantly hypnotize its audience, and it only adds to my hatred of it because it seems like it works well enough for the assholes who use it.

convo: I see this in writing. People want to get together for drinks and some conversation. Only they write "convo," which strongly suggests to me they have nothing to say that could even possibly be of remote interest to me. I think this one fits Liberman's definition. I feel an irrationality in my distaste for this term.

And finally: I would like to murder and get away unpunished anytime a person says:

The F-bomb: The layers of ignorance and sheer idiocy this term connotes, for me? I can't even go into it here, now. Suffice: if you say that someone "dropped an F-bomb" I will want to drop you, hopefully with blood oozing out of your ears. FUCK seems like a perfectly lovely word to me. Jesus H. Muthafucking Christ on a pogo stick: GROW THE FUCK UP, AMERICA!

Another scholar, Jason Riggle of U. of Chicago, says word aversion seems highly specific in evoking a visceral reaction, but about feelings of disgust, not moral outrage or annoyance. The words that disgust people seem to conjur up an association of imagery or some scenario. I'm not sure any of my words work here from his perspective. And if so, it has been suggested that the people who aren't bothered by moist panties covered in crud in a crevice, who might need to put some ointment on that scab that's oozing pus? They're people who work with words and writing every day. I have since I was five years old.

Robert Anton Wilson was not word-aversive, and his first published book was a dictionary of slang and "forbidden words." He'd wanted to discuss how irrational semantic reactions to some words which acted like spells on listeners and readers, but the publishers cut out those parts. In the last decade or so of his life he wrote an essay about "fuck" and other words that we're supposed to be scandalized by...even "liberals" will seek to harm your career if you use these black magick words. RAW begins his essay, "Copulating Currency," with these lines:

James Joyce defined an artistic epiphany as any "vulgarity of language" which reveals the "whatness" or "radiance" of an event or of those structural systems which remain "grave and constant in human affairs." As biographer Richard Ellmann noted, the effect of these fragments on conversation, preserved in Joyce's novels, often appears "uncanny." I myself tend to find them a combination of the tragic and the hilarious. - see p.171, TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution

The linguistic scholars who have yet to formally delve into word aversion have already banished Alfred Korzybski to the Region of Thud; he is declasse in the groves of academe. But he'd already come up with a robust theory that covers much of this ground: we have "semantic reactions" to words and they work throughout the nervous system (NB: the current linguistic professors' use of "visceral"), and, well, let's let Korzybski speak from 1933 to us, the time being bound:

Since "knowledge", then, is not the first order un-speakable objective level, whether an object, a feeling; structure and so relations, becomes the only possible content of "knowledge" and of meanings. On the lowest level of our analysis, when we explore the objective level (the unspeakable feelings in this case), we must try to define every "meaning" as a conscious feeling of actual, or assumed, or wished...relations which pertain to first-order objective entities [...] The meanings of meanings, in a given case, represent composite, affective, psycho-logical configurations of all relations pertaining to the case, coloured by past experiences, state of health, mood of the moment, and other contingencies.
-pp.22-23, Science and Sanity

Korzybski was the one who cautioned us: the word is not the thing; the word "water" will not make you wet. A later student of Korzybski paraphrased him: the menu is not the meal. We should try to constantly remind ourselves, via a "consciousness of abstracting" that we are throwing around abstract words and maybe we don't even know what we're talking about. Does the "National Debt" have a certain odor? What color is it? How much does it weigh? If we can't give good answers to these types of questions, we may be tossing around a high-order abstraction as if it were on the same level as the hammer on the table in front of you.

Natasha Fedotova of the U. of Pennsylvania found that the word "rat" can "contaminate" words next to it. I hope you have a good rat time tonight at the cafe with all your friends! (Wha?) Fedotova served perfectly delicious food on plates that said RAT on them; people tended to not want to eat.

Here's my kinda guy: blogger Ted McCagg. He got the idea to determine the best word ever. Not the most erudite or funniest or most whimsical: "the best." And all sorts of people got involved and he laid out a massive competition, like the college basketball "March Madness" style of brackets. He loves words like Wilson and Joyce did...and George Carlin, indeed. I too like kerfuffle, hornswoggle, gherkin and diphthong. I even like viscous and maggots.

And, of course, moist panties.

[Apologies to all who have been harmed by certain words in this blog!]