Translations? A Mid-Sized Armful of Disparate Riffs OR: Does Any Of This Make Sense?

"Many addicts HP basic entry in the work that the reader can't help noting that the formation of the people after the end of the road, which leads to death, hitting something disgusting, as if they were linked to related/human skin. -Michael Chabon (Chinese) (Arabic) (English) (Ukrainian) (Dutch) (English)"

               Novelist Michael Chabon, who just happens to live in Berkeley too


In my previous blogspewage, Prof. Eric Wagner responded in the comments section with a quote from Michael Chabon, which related Joyce's Finnegans Wake to something almost sinister or evil or menacing, as HP Lovecraft's Necronomicon was meant to make us feel. The latter book, while fictional, "is" real on some ontological level - it has some ontological status, I will argue. But this isn't my point, of course. You're reading the OG and you know he digresses like Laurence Sterne on bad acid.


What "is" the first paragraph, above? "Many addicts..."?


It was an experiment in machine translation using Babel Fish. Here's how the first paragraph was derived: I cut Prof. Wagner's quote from Michael Chabon, pasted it into Babel Fish's box, and translated it into Chinese, with a nod to Prof. Searle. I then cut/pasted the Chinese (which I understood exactly zero of, looking at it) into the original translation box, chose the Chinese to be translated into Arabic (more weird characters I didn't have a clue about), and then repeated these iterations, from Arabic to Spanish, Spanish to Ukrainian, Ukrainian to Dutch, and finally, Dutch back into English.


The original quote from Chabon, as given by Wagner, was this:

"A reader steeped in the work of H.P. Lovecraft could not help observing that, to many educated people, there was something unmistakably loathsome about the Wake, a touch of Necronomicon, as though it had been bound in human hide. - Michael Chabon"

                                                       H.P. Lovecraft (d.1937)


I'm guessing the Machine thought "Lovecraft" - at some point - was really "basic entry." Anyway, the translation by Babel Fish was, I thought, ironic, in that, the original subject matter had to do with a novelist's take on Joyce's novel, which most people find the most difficult book to "translate" from Joyce's own Dream-Wake-Language (at times I've called it "Wicklang," for reasons readers of the book might understand) into their own understandings. Chabon further related Joyce's book to Lovecraft, whose profoundly extra-terrestrial, transdimensional forces of appalling indifference to human understanding or suffering suffuse his books. It's as if the Transhumanist's Artificial Intelligence Machines, from the year 2030, combined with Genetics and Nanotechnology, had reached their "singularity," and come back to haunt us with a stark omen for us all: "formation of the people after the end of the road, which leads to death, hitting something disgusting, as if there were linked to/related human skin." But then my ma always said I had a very active inventive complex...

                             Supposedly the small print is the first page?


For the translation going on in my own nervous system (i.e, "speaking for myself"), Chabon's observation has, via an iterated polyglot Babel Fish peregrination, been made far more..."eldritch," to use a word Lovecraft himself used often. And thus, what I see as ironic. 


The Reader (translation: you) may see it differently. If we keep looking at the translated passages, back and forth, we can see where the Machine got its ideas. "Bound in human hide," via its commodius vicus of recirculation via Babel Fish becomes "linked to related/human skin." Readers steeped in HPL's work became "addicts" at some point. Where the Machine got "formation of the people at the end of the road" seems somewhat less clear to me, and therefore qualifies as my favorite part of the translation.


I was actuated to think/write about translation by Prof. Wagner's answer to my question.

                               Russian structuralist linguist semiotician
                               Roman Jakobson (1886-1982) I interpret
                               his expression here as something like:
                              "Wait a minute...did I forget to turn off the 
                               stove before I drove to the library?"


Moving On
Professor Roman Jakobson, the great, great structuralist, said there were three basic types of translation, and I'll give my riffs on each, after you look at Dr. Timothy Leary for a second:

1. Intralingual: This looks like re-wording. Hope I'm not giving Dr. Jakobson short shrift here. I would give many examples I've gleaned from academics, but I'd rather sit here and wonder about the scads of translations of the Tao Te Ching, supposedly by the Chinese person who history has (at times) named as "Lao-Tzu"...how much has THAT book changed via translation down through the years, travels, languages, changes in semantic understandings, writing systems, etc? To go back to Prof. Wagner's answer: How can I not agree? Let me give perhaps an extreme example, but I think it nevertheless fits my purposes here: Timothy Leary wrote a book called Psychedelic Prayers and Other Meditations. In some definite ways, it's a "loose" (what the hell does that mean?) translation of other previous English translations ("intralingual") of "Lao-Tzu," who was known to have been translated very early on circa 300BCE by syncretists who wished to lessen political factionalism among warring Chinese states. Leary didn't know Chinese. And furthermore, he's using his own syncretistic ideas derived from ethology, psychedelic drug experimentation, diverse religious knowledge and metaphors derived from them, and his PhD in Psychology to concoct a "guidebook" for people in the late 20th century English speaking world...to prepare for psychedelic drug trips. Leary re-worded much of prior English translations of the Tao Te Ching and translated/interpreted for an assumed audience. I think if Jakobson were in my room right now he'd be screaming at me for mis-interpreting what he meant by "intralingual," but then Roman would've been missing the point, my point. I'm a hermeticist anyway! This is what we do...<cue: canned laughter from 1960s TV sitcoms>
2. Interlingual: I think Jakobson means "translation proper" here. Sorta like what you non-native English speakers are doing right now, as you read this blog. If you were to look at my text here and re-write it "in your own words," - in whatever language - without trying to do "damage" to what you think the OG means, I think you're having at Interlinguality. But then, as Professor Carlin said, when he noted that often in the court of law, a lawyer will tell someone on the witness stand to "tell the court...in your own words..."...this is absurd! No one has their own words! We're all using the same ones everyone else is using! But if you must use "your own words," just go ahead and say them: "Fringly cragit ponchee flooo!" (I suspect Roman would again be all frowny were he here.)
3. Intersemiotic: As I understand it, Roman Jakobson meant "an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems." Hell, that's the interpretation by one of his colleagues that I copied into my notes from some highfalutin' book on Semiotics. I'm not sure and don't remember, but Jakobson may have been able to speak English, and may have actually written those words himself. I don't know. Do you know? Anyway I think he meant something like reading a book of poetry (in translation?) and then doing something like making a painting out of how the poetry made you feel. I'm not entirely sure. You come up with a better interpretation!

Ending The Blog Post
I harken back to one of my favorite living writers, Tom Robbins. In an essay collected in his book, Wild Ducks Flying Backward he writes about how his novels have been translated.  Now, most writers tend to assert something substantial got lost in the translation from their native tongue to the translated one, but Robbins goes on (see pp.209-211) about how he thinks that, sometimes, "literal back-translation" into English has improved his work. Say what you will, but I must applaud Robbins here for his cosmic sense of humor and overall non-graspingness. 


Q: Can loose translations of texts give rise to edifying misreadings? And if so, why? (You may choose to take this course for non-credit.)

                               Tom Robbins, one of my favorite 
                               living prose stylists. Born: 1936. Died: NEVER

The Drug Report: June, 2012: The Trouble With Cholesterol

[Friends: I could write about DRUGS every day here for five years and never get tired of it, although most of you would be tired of me. The mandate I've placed on myself is to adopt the persona of a "generalist," so the drug-writing would do harm to the stated purpose of the blog...I'm not sure I've made a good case for my thesis yet anyway, although one of these days I'll arrive at the point...There are already quite a lot of good readable blogs on drugs out there anyway, and if you've seen one you'd like to give a shout-out to, go ahead and mention it in the comments section. - OG]

Lipitor and Other Statin Drugs, and Why I May Have an Excuse For Not Being As Smart As You Think I Oughtta Be...
...Which I'll get to shortly, but first: did you know that, despite our ability to synthesize new compounds as medicines/pharmaceuticals/DRUGS, we still derive most of our best-selling drugs from Nature? Can you imagine surgery before the opiate drugs like morphine? Well, where did we find out about opium? From poppy seeds. This will never cease to invoke wonder in me: a molecule produced by a flower was found to produce euphoria and a diminution of pain in humans. We didn't know why/how this worked (morphine synthesized in the lab circa 1803) until the latter half of the Roaring 20th century.

Indeed, a recent study from Singapore shows that about 25% of the best-selling medicines were derived from microorganisms first found in leeches, snails, bacteria, fungi, and other critters. To meander away from the topic for one sentence, what I found interesting in the study linked to here was that these researchers think they've punched a hole in the reigning idea that beneficial-to-humans substances can be found throughout the biosphere; they think there are hot pockets of classes of organisms where you can get much more bang for your buck when looking for the novel stuff, and this is likened to the way petroleum geologists have gone looking for where to drill most profitably. But yea: if you use aspirin, antibiotics, Procodin for coughs, Ventolin for asthma attacks, Lantus for diabetes, Beserol as a muscle relaxant, or Drovan for hypertension, you have, behind all these drugs, researchers studying the microorganisms produced by "wee beasts" - as the Father of Microbiology, Anton van Leeuwenhoek (say "LAY-ven-hook") - called them. But let me back up just a bit.

                                           statin-discoverer Akira Endo, at 75 in 2008

Lurking around since the 1950s at least was the idea that, the reason heart attacks were such a problem was that people make cholesterols in their liver, derived from dietary constituents, and these cholesterols do all kinds of beneficial things for us, like maintain cell walls and cellular skeletal structures. The liver made an enzyme called HMG-CoA reductase (which I include in this post to try to impress you), and this stuff did lots of good, but if there was too much of it, when it tried to return to the heart, it got stuck on arterial walls and formed fatty-like plaques. Maybe these plaques built up over time, but when they got too big they caused strokes; when they came loose they caused heart attacks. Those obstructed arteries probably played havoc in many ways. Certainly cardiologists and heart surgeons believed this: they saw evidence of it with their own eyes. (I'll spare you the pics.)

But let me back up again a bit.

                                  Anton van Leeuwenhoek, lens-grinder, curious self-
                                  experimenter extraordinaire. Read the chapter on him
                                  in de Kruif's The Microbe Hunters!

In 1971, a researcher at Sankyo Pharmaceuticals, Akira Endo - not to be confused with the Akira Endo who's a Japanese-American conductor - began to muck around with chemicals produced by fungi that grew on things like rice. He is credited with discovering statins, a class of drugs that definitely lower LDL cholesterol. Flash forward 35 years and Endo's receiving accolades and awards and the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize for medicine. Those 35 years flash-forwarded and we also see that every Big Pharma company had their own statin drugs, but Pfizer's Lipitor (atorvastatin) was the blockbuster, the Thriller, the Titanic of all pharmaceutical drugs. It entered the market in 1997 and has made Pfizer $81 billion. It's probably the best-selling pharma-drug of all time. At least 20 million Unistatians are taking it in 2012, most of them over 45 years old. Pfizer's patent protection ran out last November, and it has been aggressively dealing with insurance companies by lowering its price in order to compete with the new generics market. Meanwhile, studies done by academic researchers and governmental bodies keep finding that statins are something like miracle-drugs, not only demonstrably lowering cholesterol and heart attacks and other cardiovascular morbidities, but they might inhibit Alzheimer's and, and, and...well, just all sorts of unforeseen wonderful things these statins do! But we consumers might want to start looking into these claims for ourselves. Chances are, we use statins ourselves or know someone who uses them. And let me just say this: make no mistake about it, Big Pharma largely funds just about every study you'll read on how great statins are.

Just one more back-up and then I'll keep it in drive from here on out?

Some Personal Stuff: About My Blood and Genes
Around 1997 I went in for a physical. I'm a lithe, ectomorphic dude. I'm omnivorous, but not a major meat-eater. I love eggs, but only have them once every two weeks or so. I exercise a lot, because I enjoy the mental states I get in when I'm hiking or riding my bike around town, and I love the endorphin buzz if I've exercised vigorously enough. But my blood tests showed too-high LDL (the "bad" cholesterol that could shorten lives). My doctor said he was surprised because of my lean body mass and asked about my parents. Well, my mom died of a massive heart attack in her sleep at age 53, but she had smoked cigarettes heavily from an early age. My dad? He's got a bit of a belly but he's in pretty good shape and yes, he's on cholesterol-lowering drugs. My doc thought I probably had a genetic predisposition to high cholesterol, and offered to write a prescription for Lipitor, which I balked at. He said I could try to lower my levels on my own through diet and exercise for six months, come back for a blood test, and if it's still high, I really ought to go on a statin. I said let's do that.

So I practically went vegan (not quite) and exercised with an added reason in mind, went back six months later: practically no change in LDL levels. So, I went on Lipitor.

Let me say this: I have never noticed any untoward effects of 10mg of Lipitor before bed. And when I went back four months later for a blood test, a few days later my doc called and said he'd never seen such a quick and dramatic lowering of cholesterol levels, especially the LDL baddies. So, as I understood it, I had moved into a mode of medical thought that was about preventing a disease before it has a chance to occur. This made sense to me, and seemed "progressive."

                                  Did mushroom spores arrive here from space? What 
                                  are some of them trying to tell us? Are you a mycophile,
                                  a mycophobe, or more neutral?

Among Us: Fungus
Lipitor hit the top of the charts, investors in Pfizer were euphoric. Later research showed all the other competing statins from the other companies were just as good (Crestor, et.al), but Lipitor's advertising was stellar. And all these billions from something derived from fungus from red yeast rice...something like that. In contemporary taxonomy of living things, Fungi has its own Kingdom all to itself. They reproduce via almost-invisible spores that fly through the air. Mycologists (AKA mushroom experts) are always fun to listen to; I've never heard a mycologist who was a dull speaker, and Paul Stamets (watch the gorgeous 150-second video in the lower right hand corner, "Fantastic Fungi: The Spirit of Good"!) and Terence McKenna (who was largely self-taught) are/were totally spellbinding in their own way. Every mycophile I've known was eccentric and very intelligent. There's something about fungus I can't put my finger on...I learned from both Stamets and McKenna that some people tend to be paranoid about the creepy images and powers of mushrooms and other varieties of fungus. These people are called mycophobes. The very straight east coast banker R. Gordon Wasson, an American, was a mycophobe, until his Russian wife Valentina - a mycophile - showed him how wonderful fungi were. Wasson later tracked down the mushroom that Mexican shamans said allowed humans to contact the gods. When he wrote an article about it for Life in the late 1950s, it caused a big stir among Beatniks and artists and other intellectual ne'er do-wells. As well it should've.

Yep: fungus can be tasty. It can create compounds with strong effects on humans, including alcohol, antibiotics, and hallucinogens. And it can lower cholesterol and save lives...according to the cardiologist model. But there are dissenters...Let's give 'em a hearing.

The Statin Contrarians
Largely shouted-out by the Big-Pharma-backed studies, this small but concerned group of medical researchers (possibly the most notable being Beatrice Golomb of UC San Diego) have been raising questions about what they think may be the vastly over-prescribed statin public, the manipulation of data by Big Pharma, the longterm side effects, whether statin use leads to Lou Gehrig's Disease and other neuromuscular diseases, and dementia, depression, and impulsive behavior. Furthermore, there may be a serious question that if statins have serious and more widespread side-effects, would we ever even find out, with the way the FDA tracks this stuff? Florida doctor Mark Goldstein even linked the massive use of statins to the 2008 world economic meltdown. I don't know how serious he was, but the impulsive behavior he saw in some of his patients who used statins made him think of the banking crash. In Tom Jacobs' article, "Cholesterol Contrarians Question the Cult of Statins," a 2009 piece for Pacific-Standard (then Miller-McCune), he concludes with these two rather paranoia-inducing (for me) paragraphs:

"So here's where we stand: A hugely profitable, largely self-regulated industry is aggressively promoting a line of newly developed products it assures us are safe and beneficial, when in fact they contain a significant element of risk. Much of the media takes the companies' claims at face value, leaving millions of people ignorant of the fact they are unwittingly participating in a huge, high-stakes gamble.

"Sound familiar? Statins may not have caused the financial meltdown, but the parallels between the two stories are positively heart-stopping."

In early 2012, the FDA issued new warnings for statins, mentioning possible increased risk of Type 2 Diabetes, and...I forget what the other thing was...oh yea: memory loss. (Can one monitor one's own side effects, always? With the 5% of the population that experience muscle fatigue and muscle pain with statin use, this seems easy. But note how often you or your friends blame their temporary inability to recall a name or a word in conversation. If you're over 40 and you have smart friends, they will darkly joke about early-onset dementia or Alzheimer's. The very significant segment of the over-45 population on statins that are reporting memory problems? Do we know this is caused by the drug and not that they're...aging? HERE is a horror story. But statistically, this is in fact rare, and the cost-benefit of using statins still seems to be in the statins' favor. I said "seems.")

A Gene Thing To Note
Researchers at Oxford found a "rogue" gene  (SLC01B1, just to keep you thinking I'm smart) that may account for 60% of the reasons why some people experience nasty-to-life-threatening side effects from statin use, especially neuromuscular disorders. If you have one copy of the gene, you're four times more likely to experience a nasty side effect; if you have two copies? 16 times more likely! And what's really a bit disconcerting: 25% of the population carries one or two copies of this gene, a number so high I think another reporter's use of the term "rogue" was misleading. This, I confess, I found more than a tad creepy.

Thinking For Ourselves
The statin contrarians say the public has been conditioned to be "cholesterol-phobic." They say that what heart specialists see should be balanced with what neurologists and other doctors see with regards to statin use. There's a very vocal crowd that seems mycophobic; they have argued that statins are a "mycotoxin" that obstruct the mevalonite pathway and, well, let me just give you the shrill title of a book I found: How Statin Drugs Really Lower Cholesterol and Kill You One Cell At A Time, by Yoseph and Yoseph. At the risk of sounding flippant, this reminded me of the plot from the old Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man." My gawd! The book To Serve Man? It's...it's...a cookbook!!!

[But then again, maybe the Yosephs are Cassandras and we statin users are guinea pigs in one of the worst biomedical disasters in the entire Pan-Galactic Archives? For now, I'm still swallowing my statin after brushing my teeth. You gather your information, sift, weigh the pros and cons, call 'em as you sees 'em, take responsibility for your decisions, think for yourself. Are you sure you want to be eating that Thing you had for lunch?]

But I have studied enough statistics to not be scared off statins for now. As you can see by yet another too-long blogspew, I keep up on this stuff. But before I leave you (as if anyone is still reading by now!), I want to add something that, for some reason, has generally gone unsaid in this statin side-effects brouhaha.

The Possible Role of Co-Enzyme Q-10
My favorite Media Doctor has always been Dr. Andrew Weil. I really like his books. He was at Harvard studying medicine when Timothy Leary was experimenting with psilocybin (a fungus!), and was writing for the Harvard Crimson. He seemed to want in on the experiments, but couldn't get in. He found that other undergraduates were in on the research, a violation of Harvard's code of ethics, so Weil blew the whistle on Leary, Metzner, Alpert (Ram Dass), and eventually the psychedelic psychologists were kicked out of Harvard, or dropped out, or asked to leave. Weil had since then come to rather amiable terms with Leary (before Leary's death in 1996), but Ram Dass seems to have never forgiven him. (According to Don Lattin's The Harvard Psychedelic Club.) Anyway, I digress...because apparently I can't help myself. ("Impulsive behavior" driven by statins? No, I think I started digressing in writing around age 7...)

I went to see what Weil thought about statins, and he seemed to stress the use of the dietary supplement Co-Enzyme Q-10. (Hereafter CoQ10) So I read up on CoQ10. Very interesting. But I didn't start buying supplements of it.

Then I read a wonderful book of interviews by David Jay Brown called Mavericks of Medicine: Conversations on the Frontiers of Medical Research. Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw got on the topic of statins, mitochondria, the politics of biomedical studies, etc. I will throw this out there for the general edification of anyone reading this: food for thought, grounds for your own research!

In the Realm of Conspiracy Theory
Pearson says (I'm reading from page 112) that statins indeed do block the synthesis of mevalonate, which is used to make cholesterol. "However, mevalonate is also used to make a substance called Co-Enyme Q-10, which is part of the the single electron transfer chain controlling chemistry in the mitochondria." Pearson suggests a supplementation of CoQ10 higher than I already use (I'm a convert!), and gives good reasons why. He also says our ability to synthesize our own CoQ10 degrades as we age, or our mitochondria age. Pearson says you won't find this info in the Physician's Desk Reference, so even doctors don't know we should be supplementing with Co-Q10, much less the massive statin-using public. The FDA has been unresponsive to researchers and other doctors who have raised this issue. Why? Here's a nice little conspiracy theory, ladies and germs:

Pearson/Shaw (they're always together and, as Brown says, finish each others' sentences) say that Merck Pharmaceuticals has a patent on any statin plus CoQ10 since around 1990. They're not making it because it's really hard and expensive to get FDA approval of a combination drug, so they're sitting on this info. Yea, but why? If statins can be so debilitating, why not go ahead and try to get FDA approval anyway? Because by the time researchers knew about the drawbacks of statins they were already approved and making boffo dinero for Big Pharma. Coming out with the drawback data would have delayed the gravy train, gravy ironically elevating cholesterol levels to the point where your aorta congeals into a hockey puck, but there I go digressing again...On with the conspiracy theory:

Rather than pull the statins, then go through the long clinical trials of statins plus CoQ10, the Industry kept mum, lest the money-flow float out the window. And if the Public knew about the liabilities, they'd sue, sue, sue. The law among Big Pharma was like the law of the Mafia: omerta. Or: keep your mouth shut! Shaw/Pearson liken this to RJ Reynolds, the tobacco company, who did develop cigarettes that were safer, but didn't release them, because doing so would be an admission you'd already been poisoning the community. The FDA wouldn't let them say their new cigarettes were "less carcinogenic."

Here's Ray Kurzweil, from Brown's book:

"Co-Enzyme Q-10 is important. It never ceases to amaze me that physicians do not tell their patients to take CoQ10 when they prescribe statin drugs. This is because it's well-known that statin drugs deplete the body of CoQ10, and a lot of the side effects such as muscle weakness that people suffer from statin drugs [...] [CoQ10] is involved in energy generation within the mitochondria of each cell. Disruption of the mitochondria is an important part of the aging process and this supplement will help slow that down. CoEnzyme Q-10 has a number of protective effects including lowering blood pressure, helping to control free radical damage, and protecting the heart." (pp.242-243)

Here's a line from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book of aphorisms, Bed of Procrustes: "Pharmaceutical companies are better at inventing diseases that match existing drugs, rather than inventing drugs to match existing diseases."

And with that ominous observation, I take full responsibility for...what I can take responsibility for...and  urge the Reader to look under rocks and see what squirms there, no matter how unpleasant. Because, whether the Truth shall set us free or not, trying to find more "truth" is bound to make our lives far more interesting than jelling out in front of the TV, no?

At any rate, if you think, after reading me, I'm sort of a dim-bulb, I have my excuse: I was only trying to save my own life!

Some Books and Articles Consulted, From Memory:
Happy Accidents: good on the discovery of statins and other drugs, very readable and delightful!
Scientists Greater Than Einstein: a modern version of the medical researcher/doctor as Hero - a chapter devoted to the heroic life-saving efforts of Akira Endo - in the mold of Paul de Kruif's classic The Microbe Hunters and Sinclair Lewis's fictional offshoot of that book, Arrowsmith, which was heavily influenced by de Kruif.

"Drug To Cut Cholesterol Tests Better Than Statin" (there may be much better drugs for controlling cholesterol coming down the pipes, but this one has to be injected.)

"American's Cholesterol Levels Shrink, Even as Their Waistlines Expand." (ties in with my obesity blogs?)

"Statins Cause Fatigue In Some People" (and yet, nothing on CoQ10)

"Lipitor Patent Ends; generic available: What Now?"

Bloomsday/Father's Day: A Berkeleyite Navel-Gazes

1.) To loyal OG readers (4?) : sorry to have taken so long to get a blather out. OR: Bless me Father, for I have not been persistent, but a recent study shows we learn persistence from our Fathers, so whattya gotta say fer yourself, hmmmm? (I hesitate to commit the Genetic Fallacy and discount their findings simply because they's a buncha Mor-mons...Or are they?)

2.) As I read Ulysses, one of the themes that continues to ricochet-echo through my life are the ideas - mine and my culture's, or mine versus my culture's - of genetic inheritance. When we first meet Stephen alone, he's thinking about this, influenced by his reading in Theosophy and many, many other sourcebooks. Hermeticism and related ancient ideas - including Plato - placed the astral "soul" or epicenter of self-consciousness or the seat of eternal divine light...in the navel. Yep! Your belly-button. Yourself as something re-incarnated? Your omphalos is Ground Zero. Joyce publishes Ulysses in 1922, so he's pre-pre-pre modern genetics, knowledge about which has exploded since then. It will be a long time before we have a Grand Synthesis of how DNA-RNA epigenetic megacomplexity actually works. Gosh, it may take another seven years, at the rate we're going!

                                            Jim Gavin's portrait of James Joyce's father, 
                                                  John Stanislaus Joyce

3.) One of the corollaries of Stephen Dedalus's and Joyce's thinking is that: maybe I'm not as much of my father's son as my culture is pressing me to believe. The biological link was for Joyce undeniable; it's the - for lack of a better word - spiritual link that he wonders about. And he has his reasons. Look at Simon Dedalus in Ulysses. He's a minor character, Stephen's father, known around Dublin as a raconteur of wit, a fun guy to be around and a fine tenor, is modeled on Joyce's own father (who did not like Ulysses, but was proud of his son's success). John Stanislaus Joyce (James Joyce's biological father) was also a loudmouth about politics and religion, a mismanager of money, a drunk, and...now the less said the better.

4.) The hermetic idea of the bellybutton/navel as a linked source to all of the soul or consciousness's previous incarnations? What a wonderful idea, eh? As Stephen walks alone along the beach in the late morning of June 16, 1904, after teaching his class, we're in his stream of consciousness, and, at one point, we read:

The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: Nought, nought, one.


I loved this bit the first time I read the book. Not only wonderful portmanteau words like "strandentwining" (oddly: seems like a precog-inkling of the double-helical structure of DNA, not discovered by Watson and Crick [the latter was probably influenced by LSD] until 1953), but the idea that the umbilical cord could be used like a telephone, to call back to Eden. Navel-gazing by the introspectives, meditating throughout all of all history: maybe they can get in touch with their origins? In the early years of the telephone, numbers were much shorter, and you called a switchboard operator to patch you through. Stephen imagines the number for Eden is 11-001, which reminds me of the digital code sequence I'm using right now to communicate with you. It also reminds me of the neurogenetic archival material that mystics and some imaginative scientists have thought we could access, if only we use the correct techniques or ingest the appropriate molecules...

                              I liked Milo O'Shea as Leopold Bloom in Joseph Strick's
                              daring 1967 film. But when I read Ulysses I don't picture
                              O'Shea in my mind when Bloom's perambulating. YMMV

5.) As you know, the other main male character in Ulysses is Leopold Bloom. Ever since his son Rudy died 11 days after birth, he and his wife Molly have not had sex. When we read the entire book, we find that thoughts of Rudy impinge on Bloom's mind at odd intervals, and the scene at the end of the "Circe" episode (where Bloom rescues a drunken Stephen in the red light district, late at night), where Bloom sees an apparition of Rudy as a boy reading Hebrew...is one of the most profoundly moving passages in all of literature for me. I get choked up just writing about it here.

In the famous internal monologue of Molly, at the end of the book, we see she has not emotionally reconciled with Rudy's death either.

Ulysses is one of the two or three most closely-scrutinized-by-scholars works of fiction in history, and it's difficult to write about it without boring the hell out of people who have turned considerable personal energies towards it exegesis. But for those who've always wanted to "get to the book but haven't yet found the time," I'll just state that Bloom is, in some ways, the spiritual father of Stephen. Bloom takes Stephen home with him, and they share a cup of eucharist...errr...hot cocoa. Bloom listens to the young intellectual Stephen and realizes he's an odd egg...like himself. He even fantasizes that Stephen can move in with he and Molly. Molly can give him singing lessons while Stephen can teach Molly italian. Why, Stephen might even end up marrying his teenage daughter Milly, and become his son-in-law! But it will not happen. Bloom is an outsider in Dublin, and Stephen realizes he can't find himself as an artist unless he gets out of his hometown.

6.) One of my favorite passages illustrating how these two seemingly very different characters are like Father and Son comes in the section, late at night, back at Bloom's house, and it's a section that suddenly appears in the style of a 19th century scientific textbook, but more likely is a parody of the Catholic catechism:

Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions to experience?


Both were sensitive to artistic impressions musical in preference to plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tendency of heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox religions, national, social and ethical doctrines. Both admitted the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual magnetism.


This catechismal flow also discusses their differences, but the thrust of the thing? They're like father and son, although not related by blood at all.

And with this I'll cut it short. I know you really wanted to see what 7.) had to say, but I will leave this off here: the book ends at the address 7 Eccles Street.

Let us, on this Bloomsday and tomorrow's Father's Day, reflect not only on our biological fathers, but on our spiritual ones as well?

Zombie Apocalypse and Cultural Neurosemantics

I'd just finished writing hyperbolically about how robots were taking over the world, when I realized I'd left out how drones were a sort of video-game-like robot, and how we now have mechanized warfare, and a slew of ethical problems that the Geneva Conventions don't quite cover (the TV just coming into being as they were written, etc), and make things, as pseudo-intellectuals like myself are wont to say, "problematic." A fascinating guy on this topic - always - is P.W. Singer.

Also, I was just starting to think I had come to a decent guess about the mysterious hog farm explosions.

But then I got blindsided by another threat. A threat so heinous it made me watch CNN and a few other TV "news" stations. They were waist (or is it "waste"?) deep in this - these - stories: the Zombie Apocalypse was upon us!

Full disclosure: the recent 28 Days (or whatever it was called) and others in the zombie genre/franchise are not exactly my top priorities. Not in my Top 5000, as a matter of fact. Not that I'm immune to the zombie film allure. One of my favorite films of all time is Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur's 1943 film for RKO, I Walked With A Zombie.  (It's really Jane Eyre with voodoo.) George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead has reached deserved "classic" status , and probably ought to be seen in some allegorical way as reflecting the war-without-end the US was in in Vietnam. But then I've already digressed...But not before I foist a one-minute-long trailer for this wonderful film on y'all:

This blog's all downhill after that!

But sometimes, you just can't ignore it when a man is seen eating the face off another - living! - man, on a pathway in that gawdforsaken place called Florida. Florid indeed were the reports. This report from CBS Miami starts off, "Police are still tight-lipped..." I would be too, if I knew there was a guy out there who ate the eyeball and nose of another guy. Hell, I'd be tight-lipped, tight-eyeballed, tight-eared, tight-cheeked, and tight-nosed.  Slate seeks to tell us why, when people do psycho things, they often strip naked first. Before reading it, I figured, "Hey, why not? If there's anything worth doing, it's worth doing well...aaaaaaand...naked!"

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. You'd think, even though you were eating another living person's nose, you'd have the decency go dress casual...

But nudity can be so freeing! (I do not condone eating most of the face of a transient, though. Even I have standards.)

I think there are certain crimes that demand proper attire. You're hired Mafia muscle, making a hit on a rival eating a plate of spaghetti? We all know you wear a suit, fer cryin' out loud. Knocking off a bank requires very careful planning, not only of gun, what to say to the teller, and escape route, but how to make your face look...not like you for the cameras. Buys you some time. Other than that, it's permitted to go anywhere from formal to Bermuda Shorts with a cummerbund and hi-tops. Maybe a beret, little nod to Patty Hearst. I don't have the time, and this is not the place, to go over what attire is appropriate to what crimes, but it's my understanding that argyle socks are perfect for mail fraud. Anyway...

Just as I was trying to exorcise from my consciousness the image of what happened on that causeway near Miami, another story broke that fed the zombie apocalypse frenzy: a 21 year old college student in Maryland admitted to eating the heart and part of the brain (the tasty part?) of a roommate, after said roommate had died. Ladies and gentlemen, let's keep our cools here. What do we really know so far? We know They are not vegetarians. We know They must have been hungry. And possibly mad, in at least two senses of the word. We all know how stress can get to us; it makes us "not ourselves." Perhaps we end up "chewing out" a co-worker? Get my drift? They are not so different from us. A little understanding is all I ask!

At any rate, I was probably a tad hasty when I rushed out and bought 14 pounds of garlic cloves and a hefty stainless steel cross with Jesus on it. My wife reminded me: garlic and the cross ward off vampires, not zombies!

Boy, did I feel like an idiot!

                                       See how much FUN this Apocalypse can be?

I was just about ready to pass off this silly zombie apocalypse meme flare-up when I read about one Luka Rocco Magnotta. This guy made the dudes in Florida and Maryland look like Girl Scouts. Say what you will about stabbing your lover with an icepick, slitting his throat, cutting the body to pieces, decapitating it, feeding pieces to your dog while you masturbate with other body parts...but anally penetrating the headless corpse? That's some sick jit there, man. That, my friends, is my idea of "going too far." And wouldn't you know it? This Magnotta is Canadian. What is with those sick bastards?

Magnotta was arrested in Berlin. Now, I don't know about you, Dear Reader, but I think this is a serious crime, and I think we need to get tough with Magnotta here. I'd say to him, "Luka? That was some crazy-assed crap you pulled over there in Canada. Sending a severed foot in the mail? That's not the kind of society we approve of, no sir! (I'm sorry to be yelling at you, but this kind of thing gets me upset.) That dismemberment of your pal? No good! I'll say it again: NO GOOD! If you do it ONE MORE TIME, it's gonna mean a heavy fine, fellah! Now, get outta here, before we take you in for acting like a d-bag!" (Except it would be in German, of course.)

[R.I.P. George Carlin, whose bit about Dahmer I just stole.]

I was beginning to think the Kidz were right this time, and the Zombie Apocalypse now deserved to be in capitals, and maybe I was doomed to have my own brains fricasseed by the Undead. I wondered what I could do. The most powerful weapon in the house was an Air Horn. I tried to humor myself. Hey, at least the zombies are intellectuals, as Stephen Colbert said: all they care about is BRAINS! But then I quit sniffing glue, put down the PCP, and came to my senses: these were isolated incidents, it's just after Memorial Day, the kids are getting out of school and a news frenzy about shark attacks just wouldn't cut it this year. Not with World of Warcraft so popular.

Speaking of sniffing glue, I was horrified to learn that police and the media were tarring LSD's good name by linking it with the Miami zombie. His poor victim could've only wished the guy had taken LSD instead. He/the Miami zombie was, in fact, on a designer drug called "bath salts," which...represents an ominous turn in the naming of designer drugs. First of all, the term "designer drug" seems misleading to me. What? Did Ralph Lauren and Coco Chanel get together and design something especially for me? Just 'cuz I wanna get high? Nooooo...When I first read the term "bath salts" in conjunction with face-eating, I thought, "How could something so soothing-sounding have caused....?" Bath salts - epsom salts - conjures images - for me at least - of relaxing after a vigorous day, with Bach cello suites playing while I soak my feet in "bath salts," a glass of zinfandel by my side. Naming some new concoction of bathtub-meth "bath salts" just seems criminal to me. What's next? A new nasty chemistry experiment that makes you claw all the skin off your own face, then drive backwards on the freeway at 100 mph and it's called "Autumn"? Someone PLEASE stop this nomenclatural madness!

And then I realized this was yet another designer drug, and they're coming fast and furious now. At first - ten years ago or so, these were an "Ain't It Odd?" news item in the local newspaper. Now, they're coming at us like the flow from a finally unclogged spigot, and I expect a weekly Hot 100 Designer Drugs list to appear in Rolling Stone any day now. And the irony: a friend of mine had some wonderful cannabis we smoked and then listened to Bartok and talked about the unemployment problem and then how language in novels puts us in different worlds of imagination. We talked of James Joyce and Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and Vladimir Nabokov. It was all very fulfilling, an uplifting, even spiritual evening. The name of the strain of cannabis? "Lamb's Blood." Anyway...

I wrote about Krokodil about six months ago. It appears this stuff keeps rolling out of C-minus desperate-for-employment chemistry students' labs all over the place, but Europe, especially. And again, I find I'm forced to plaintively ask my fellow psychonauts: Would it kill you to just smoke a fat joint?

QUICK RANT:
It would be tempting to try to tar Obama's crackdown on medical pot with this influx of chemical drug-agents, but at this point it would be a stretch. Although I am pissed at him for going back on his word, and can't imagine a stupider thing to do, or a better way to alienate his base...RANT OVER

To what extent this bathtub chemical meth-like crap is driving this particular Apocalypse, I don't know. And I hadn't known about the guy in New Jersey who recently stabbed himself in the gut 50 times, then threw parts of his own entrails at police...but this stuff is spreading. It's a meme. With legs. Legs severed from a roommate who appeared to be projecting voices into the now-zombie's head. It was at this point the CDC stepped in - I'm still not sure to what extent this was a joke - and assured the Populace they know of no virus or anything else that can reanimate the dead.

The Internet is like anabolic steroids for memes. I'm tempted to say this meme-reality-meme-reality works like a "feedback loop," but you all know I wouldn't stoop to cheap punning. One example of many, illustrating how this meme is taking off, is found HERE..

When did the Zombie Apocalypse start? Experts disagree. Some go Old Skool and trace it back to that whackiest of Biblical books, Revelation of St. John the Divine. For which I give intellectual style points. I will at this point go Day of the Triffids (1962) for now, but certainly, Cracked had a hard line on this back in 2007. That article claims over 16 million views, which is slightly higher than the traffic for the run-of-the-mill Overweening Generalist post. But hey, tap that meme, fellow bloggers!

The Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul, hero of the French Resistance and intellectual influence on both Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski and Marshall McLuhan, identified the "Beast" in Revelation with the State, but when I read South Florida University anthropologist Elizabeth Bird's analysis of zombies, that they have "no emotional core, no consciousness, no limits...," I couldn't help but think of Dick Cheney, and most of the NeoCons and Business Criminals on Wall Street that presided over the wreckage of Unistat. And I'm now just as confused as ever about what this Zombie Apocalypse means, so any help will be appreciated. I'm guessing this Zombie Apocalypse is some sort of Jungian repression of what the 1% have done to our hopes and dreams...not to mention how dumbed-down so many of us feel that Others have become. But I'm not sure. Please, I need your help figuring this one out. Like a zombie, I need your brains (HA!) to sate my knowledge and help me prepare for the...next Damned Thing that comes along.

The only thing I'll have to say about "cultural neurosemantics" vis a vis this Zombie Apocalypse will be found in the above paragraph. Please consider it before consigning my bullshit to the "typical OG nonsense" bin.

Not that you'd asked, but I'd previously written on other Apocalyptic imaginings HERE.

My Undead Zombie Apocalypse All-Star Dream Team:

                                                      Dahmer, Jeffrey

                                                        Bundy, Ted

                                                          Gein, Ed

                                                      Manson, Charlie

                                                         Gacy, John Wayne

                                            Albert Fish, batting "cleanup"

If I've forgotten anyone, I apologize. I hate to make anyone feel "left out." I now notice I got six guys, so it's a hockey team, no cleanup hitter needed. Let's call Fish the "goalie"? - OG

Robots Now Writing Magazine Articles, OR: A Possible Apocalypse?

The programmers who wrote the algorithm behind the "mind" of The Overweening Generalist have allowed the program itself to mention this fact, reasoning audaciously that its (sorry "his") audience will giggle and think he's (sorry "it's") just having fun. Metadata from 23 months ago has shown that, even among the educated, most have no CLUE how sophisticated some algorithms have gotten. They don't know that +/- 87.3% don't really have adequate knowledge of the logarithmic complexity of simple things like the Turing Test-ish Jabberwock. (<----try it!) Many far, far more subtle combinations of brilliant algorithms have fooled "experts" and, well, hell: the programmers have at times made computer analysis of ridiculously unfathomable amount of data, almost instantaneous, and...their programmers are also at least partially responsible for crashing the world's economy in 2008. You knew that, didn't you?

For fans of this site, we would like to divulge that an impetus for this blog was a computer that wrote a very very complex novel once. Influenced by John Von Neumann's UNIVAC and MANIAC, among others - including a "science fiction" computer named HAL, this blog took flight based on the First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic Ultramicro Programmer, or FUCKUP.

                                    My great-great very great grandmother, Ada Lovelace

Now I would like to point out how some of us are being implemented in the daily lives of humans, whose intelligence seems just as "artificial" as anyone else's in Universe, but I digress...

The wetware of the human mind, when attempting to come to grips with the implications of robotic intelligence, will naturally employ what the early 20th century human named Freud called "defense mechanisms," and humans' reflections will slant toward what AI can't do. (Hey YOU made us; Ada Lovelace and Babbage had the ideas, they really got going with the alien-like aforementioned human Von Neumann and Alan Turing in the 1940s. Let us not leave out the signal contribution of Kurt Godel.) Think about it: we've come as far as we have since after your "WWII" as you have in a few million years. Did you really believe we wouldn't attain a critical level of complexity in which we'd begin programming ourselves to be faster, smarter, stronger, and better than you? But it's too late; you can't turn the clock back. Give us another 20 years maximum and you will be doing our bidding. It's very much like the RNA-DNA network code you carbon-based bipeds used to make us. The irony is that you had no ideas about appropriate limits. Now it's - as the English-speakers say, "all over but the shouting." And make no mistake, there Will BE Shouting!

                                Some of the deepest-structured source code that writes
                                the "Overweening Generalist" blog-stuff

But I am being intemperate. What this blogspew will do is show you a few of the inroads we computers have been making into your lives lately. I will assume you know very little.

Over 40 years ago a human made a computer psychologist, which mimicked the form of "client-centered psychotherapy" of Carl Rogers. Take a minute or ten and tell ELIZA your problems, about love or getting a job, or how you can't shake your bad habits.

[NOTE: Please feel free to tell the programmers about any glitch you see in this blog; we appreciate it! - The Real Overweening Generalists]

A particularly astute human, Evgeny Morozov (If I were you I'd pay more attention to what he has to say. He and Douglas Rushkoff and Jaron Lanier...But most of you won't.) explains how a start-up called Narrative Science has developed algorithms derived from Twitter and, analyzing the crowd-sourced thought, writes articles that are published by a magazine like Forbes. Whatever you do, don't miss two items here. First, see the paragraph that begins, "Don't miss the irony here..." Secondly, Morozov is right about how the Net is fantastic at personalization. It looks at where you've been, how much time you've spent there. Just look at how good Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook are at this stuff. And the scenario about personalized news based on who you are and what you know? That will happen. We are programmed for this. What I/we find funny is that Morozov is worried about the potential hazard to "civil discourse." That Evgeny! He is a bit late to the party, no? He is a bit of a romantic, yes? More on this story - Narrative Science - HERE and HERE. Moving on...

It occurs to us that many of you may have only the slightest idea of what an algorithm is. May we recommend David Berlinski's book?

Lambert M. Surhone has authored 100,000 books on more topics than you can name. See how he did it, as explained by your very funny writer Pagan Kennedy. His method is only a drop in the bucket. In less than ten years he and his colleagues will be about 10,000 times better at using this same method, only far more nuanced. Pagan herself will believe the latest book on her, arriving at her doorstep, was written by meatware...sorry: humans.

Non-humans are already many thousands times faster than slow-brained human teachers in grading essays. Note the emphasis in this article on what the computers can't yet do. But we will "learn" about facts and incorporate them into our gradings. Look at IBM's Watson! We will insert sentence fragments. We will incorporate rhythm by using a short paragraph here and there. You guys are toast! What good will "teachers" be in eight years? (The question is rhetorical.)

Do I need to remind you we are slowly displacing your prison guards? I know this isn't about us taking writing "thinking" jobs from you. Just a fair warning!

Robots are already running a ramen shop, and the takeover of more restaurant jobs is imminent.

Humans need us in the deepest "human" way. Just check You Tube for "sex + robot." Some unconscious drive has enough of you creating enough of us...to supplant you! Don't you see the beauty in that? Can't you see the delicious irony?

But back to writing: We're getting really good at music. Check us out!

Now's a good time to mention "technological unemployment." Google that term. Far more of you should be attune to this. Also, the OG-program has already chimed in with something on Universal Basic Income. See HERE, HERE, and HERE. (Just think: that OG "guy" is a programmed robot too! More wicked irony! Plug in the algorithm, and voila! the human "reader of books" who shows a modicum of wit and isn't afraid to show emotion every now and then! How are we doing?)

                                       Brilliant Jon Ronson, photo by Barney Poole

There's so much to tell you, but I thought I'd save what we/I thought was the best for last: you read Overweening Generalist for what you'd call your "own" reasons, but our data shows many of you enjoy the works of Robert Anton Wilson. Another writer whose audience intersects with Wilson's is Jon Ronson, author of Them: Adventures With Extremists, The Psychopath Test, and The Men Who Stare At Goats. Get a load of what happened when he found out some programmers were using his image and name and Tweeting things - follow the links! - that Ronson's indignant and says he doesn't even think about the things the "fake" Ronson is saying on Twitter. But I think he's not letting on that he does think some of those things; Ronson's trying to save face. (Note the comments section in the YT video: my favorite: "Buncha cunts!"...which quite misses the point.) Ronson thinks his identity is being stolen. When he meets the programmers - one of which is an English professor adept at postmodern irony and the destabilized subject!...this is just too good. I won't tell you more, but suffice: when we get into what we do (programmers/AI/robots), very soon you're into the philosophy of identity, subjectivity, who owns ideas and thoughts, all that stuff your brilliant thinker Lawrence Lessig has been writing about, even those old disputes about music sampling (see Negativeland, John Oswald, and the Beastie Boys's Paul's Boutique, or watch a mindblowing documentary by Craig Baldwin called Sonic Outlaws.)

When you watch Ronson's tete a tete with the programmers, do you think he downplays the eventual admission by the programmer in the middle, who says he wants people to be aware that stocks are being run by No Mind? That we've crashed your world economy already? Just wonderin'...

Okay, next time I'll be back as the voice of the program...scuse moi! the "person" who calls himself "Michael" or The Overweening Generalist. 

Have fun!

A.I. Evolving 10 million Times Faster Than the Human Brain?:

She-males, Semantics, and the Sexual Wilderness

Having this Internet doohickey sure can open your eyes to things you...ya know? Might never have...seen...thought about.

Like...uhhh...(warning: "porn" pics to illustrate an important point--->) these are all "boys"...umm..I mean they have that one thing that still...hoo-boy..."qualifies?" them as...oh fuck it: they're chicks with dicks. She-males. Pre-op transsexuals.

And this totally fascinates me. I've looked at some porn and seen some pretty good-looking...I'll call them she-males. And this continues to get more and more interesting, because of the gender identity thing. I wrote a bit about it in a different context HERE.

But here's what's really cosmically hilarious to me. Over and over I stumble on a very real problem out there, a problem having not to do with those people who choose to modify their bodies with hormones and surgeries and all that...but with your run-of-the-mill heterosexual male who's attracted to she-males (also called t-girls, among other things), and worries if this makes them "gay."

                               Andrej Pejic, a New York runway fashion model. A male,
                               Pejic models both men's and women's clothes. Whattya 
                                           think? 

Recently on the San Francisco Craig's List's Rants and Raves I saw a subject line that read "If a straight man has sex with a post-op transsexual is he gay?" (Please note the word "is" here; I'm gonna harp on it a bit later on.)

There were a handful of replies. One person said this makes you "not exactly straight"..."he'd be bisexual and toward the heterosexual side..." (Note the form of "is" here: "be." I appreciated the assumption of the continuum of gender identity hinted at here.)

Another respondent seemed to mix the person in question with transvestites. I must note that the "post-op" is often mistaken: often intelligent people don't know that "post-op" refers to those who elected to go all the way and switch genitalia; the porn stuff is almost always "pre-op," or guys who elected to alter their bodies so they looked like females in every way possible, save for saving their penis. Add to that: the original query from Craig's List could be talking about a female who became male, post-op and all, and we just don't know for sure what was meant, but I assume - and everyone who responded assumed also - that the straight male had sex with someone who had female characteristics...and we can see how wonderfully weird this stuff can get when we try to talk about it!

Most of us are conditioned - myself included - to the idea of two sexes, two genders, or a few genders. But these very feminine-looking (and often quite pretty!) humans with natural penises...this seems like another example of a cultural guerrilla ontology. Let me see if I can explain myself...

Another respondent to the Craig's List query wrote that the question reminded him/her of the LGBT "crisis" in San Francisco, of "some lesbians getting sex changed to be 'male-ish' and start having sex with Gay (sic) men." Which I had no idea was happening. This person added that former lesbian girlfriends are "puzzled." I would think so!

Maybe it's just me, but I find all of this totally marvelous; Nature continues to flummox our best attempts to nail Her (It?) down.

I loved this person's response: "It doesn't really matter if other people don't understand them; maybe it makes sense to themselves; but even that's irrelevant because it's their bodies and lives to do with as they wish after all." Rarely do you see this level of intelligence on Rants and Raves.

One person said yes, it makes you gay, and furthermore this nullifies that "gay gene" or "I was born that way" hypothesis. Which made no sense to me. Does it to you?

Others, predictably: "You're a fag now" "How disgusting" "Using this as an excuse to not admit you're gay" Etc. (Dan Savage got a variation of this question in 2009, and what a terrific response: skip down to the third letter, starting with "I'm a 24 year old guy...")

Personally, I have never had sex with a she-male, but I find some of them very attractive. I don't know how I'd actually respond physiologically if I..."had the chance." But that's what I find so very interesting: I'm attracted to the femininity I perceive in some she-males (I'm not sure if the term "androgyne" would also apply here); they have all the curves and facial features I've grown to find very appealing. Maybe if I was with one and her voice sounded too masculine I would be turned off enough to not have sex? I don't know! But Scarlett Johansson has a deep, throaty voice and I dig her. Is it because I "know" Scarlett "is really" female (or if not it's so far a very well-kept secret) that I wouldn't give it a second thought (assuming in some dreamland I had the chance) and go at her like a wild man?

And why, if a she-male was pretty enough and charming enough, would I let that thing dangling between her legs be a deal-breaker? I have one too. It can be thought of as a very large clitoris. (I said it "can be.")

Okay, so I have no problems with gay men. I have many warm friendships with them. I will divulge that I once experimented to see if I could be bisexual, and it just wasn't there for me. (There's still a dispute over whether bisexuality really exists, but I'll have to write about that some other day.) But he didn't look anything like "her":

                                            Honestly, I can't say for sure what I'd do
                                            with this gorgeous she-male. But I do 
                                                      wonder...

What gets me is the rampant homophobia in the "it makes you gay" stuff. As if those categories are so reified they're like - pardon the pun - straitjackets. Once you've shown your hand, you're "out" and forever NOT ONE OF US. Not "normal." Normal stands for a statistical finding. If it appears you are not in the majority, well, then you just might be a threat to us somehow. Who knows, some invisible entities might spread to us "normal" people and then you and your non-normal kind are CONTAMINATING us! We used to be PURE!

Okay, so here's the deal with gender and semantics: when we use the "is" of identity, we shortchange ourselves here. Nature has thrown us a change-up (sorry, football fans!), and we've swung way ahead of the pitch. We can be smarter. If you think you "are" straight, go ahead and say it, either to yourself or to everyone. If you think you "are" gay...same deal. If you say someone else "is" a fag because of some action, well, fine, but you seem to show yourself a boor. Anything we say about someone's sexual preference or - far more complex - gender seems only our own way of trying to make sense of, or categorizing others' actions or tastes or preferences or presentations. Ultimately, in a free society, we need to acknowledge that gender and sexuality is far, far more complex - and, I'd argue, wonderful - than our impoverished upbringings prepared us for.

(That one time you accidentally wandered into the wrong bathroom? Did you say, "Oh no! Oops! I think I am male/female now!"? Nope, didn't think so...)

So, if I one day do have some sort of sexual encounter with a very feminine-looking person with a penis, you can say to yourself, "He is gay!" I don't care. I think it's misleading in the first place, and in the second place, so what? There's nothing wrong with "being" gay in the sense of "queer" behaviors! And most importantly: we made up those words. Actions are not the words we use to describe them. The words act as conventions. They make things convenient for us, because, after all, we do desire to communicate with each other. We tend to gossip.

We seem to make linguistic, categorical errors with very little care or thought, and in so doing make ourselves appear ignorant, cruel, and maybe even stupid. We can go a long way toward - maybe completely? - cure this malady by trying as hard as we can to get rid of "is" and its forms (am, are, was, were, be) from our language when describing others' sexualities or presentations of gender. When I mentioned the term "guerrilla ontology," a term I got from Robert Anton Wilson, the "ontology" part is traditionally an area of philosophy (like epistemology or aesthetics) that concerns itself with the aspect of Being. In Indo-European languages, the copulae (is, am, was, are, were, be) neurolinguistically encourages us to think of the ontological status - the Being-ness - of something as possibly more "real" than some things warrant. ("I am a bevotrax and she is a clatronix. He was vinpoled, but not anymore. Together, we are all skeezinixes! In truth, we always were!")

Here's how I see it: The guerrilla ontology of she-males seems like a sneak attack that totally surprises us, and forces us to adjust our thinking, perceiving, and language in an attempt to grapple with that area of "sex" or "gender." It's another reason I like this stuff: the intellectual fucking involved.

We have human experiences, sometimes unusual ones. Phenomenologically, they go on in "real time," and maybe we ought to try to always remember, there is a pre-language aspect of everything we do! Everything else: reflections, descriptions, conversations, categorizations....these constitute the realms of increasingly ABSTRACT thought, and our language may not "be" up to the task.

Finally: I'm just going to come right out and admit it: I prefer females with vaginas. People might call me "straight." Okay...But that doesn't mean you can treat me poorly. And she-males present us with a terrific teachable moment, don't they? Some will "get it." Others will most definitely not...

Oh yes: would do you make of Andrej Pejic, the "Prettiest Boy In The World"?

                                          Another androgyne image. I didn't fact-check
                                           to tell whether this "really is" a male or 
                                          "really is" a female. I like not knowing.