Splatter-Riffs on Neologisms, Linguistic Relativity, ETC

The Case of the Missing Sex Words

The biologist and public intellectual David Barash wrote in his book The Myth of Monogamy (co-written with his wife, Judith Lipton!), that we have a sex-as-defined-within-marriage frame: premarital sex, marital sex, and extramarital sex. But notice we have no words for post-divorce sex, or widow or widower's sex. And let's imagine the case of a 45 year old confirmed bachelor's sex life. Surely we aren't willing to call that sex "premarital," right? What does this sort of stuff tell us about the semantic unconscious in our society?

                                                   Barash and Lipton

Peter Lyman
A U.C. Berkeley professor named Peter Lyman died in late June/early July of 2007. He had written a book called How Much Information? In the book he expressed concerns about terms like "virtual community" and "information superhighway" and "digital library." He thought those metaphors/neologisms could block thinking about real problems. Did he have a point? Jaron Lanier, in his discourses with Joel Garreau in the book Radical Evolution, seemed to think so, although Lyman's ideas weren't directly addressed.

Metaphors and Public Policy
Which reminds me of Lera Boroditsky. Today I ran across a paper she co-published with Paul H. Thibodeau, on how metaphors very subtly influenced how people reasoned about issues of crime, the environment, and the economy. I've only given it a cursory read so far, but it seems to strongly buttress the arguments about metaphor and political and social thought put forth in books by George Lakoff. If anyone's interested, it's HERE. (For progressives: frame the crime problem as a "virus"plaguing the commons, and not as a "beast" that needs to be captured and locked up. Thibodeau and Boroditsky give some reasons why.)

Roots of Neologisms?
What might be the ultimate goal of a neologism? How do they arise?

Glad you asked. One answer I like was given poetically by one of the great novelists of ideas in the 20th c, Robert Anton Wilson. Very late in his novel The Widow's Son, there's a long epistolary passage from the young hero to his mentor/uncle, the novel being set in the late 18th century. The young initiate is discussing at length his evolving understanding of occult ideas such as the "vegetative soul" "animal soul" "human soul" and something called the "fourth soul," which "perceives the invisible web of connections between all things; but it is no more infallible than the rest of the brain, or the gut, or the liver, or the gonads." (italics in original) With the "fourth soul," meaning seems to flow into us, but we forget we are making the meaning. We forget we did a lot of mental work, and then suddenly meaning comes to us, seemingly unbidden, as some sort of "revelation." What's most interesting is that we don't take responsibility for these sudden "meanings." We don't know how to exercise some sort of wisdom about these meanings, and this is why we have so many "holy fools."

But to the meat of the neologism thingy: the initiate says this meaning-making is equivalent to creativity and is the god-faculty in us. We get a meaning-making revelation and take the "word" with absolute literalness. Here's perhaps the salient passage:

"When beauty was created by a godly mind, beauty existed, as surely as the paintings of Botticelli or the concerti of Vivaldi exist. When mercy was created, mercy existed. When guilt was created, guilt existed. Out of a meaningless and pointless existence, we have made meaning and purpose; but since this creative act happens only when we relax after great strain, we feel it as 'pouring into us' from elsewhere. Thus we do not know our own godhood and we are perpetually swindled by those who assure us that it is indeed elsewhere, but they can give us access to it, for a reasonable fee. And when we as a species were ignorant enough to be duped in that way, the swindlers went one step further, invented original sin and other horrors of that sort, and made us even more 'dependent' upon them." (pp.386-387 in my old paperback version)

So: with Wilson, there seems to be some sort of continuum of invention of words: here they flow into us, as if by revelation. But because we have decided to entertain this idea of where language comes from, and how it works in our lives, many of us have suffered needlessly, because we think language came from some other realm. We made the "meaning" of the words that (much earlier) were made, probably via some Vichian utterances and grunts, and gesturing, singing, and poetic intoning. Gradually words become reified, and the ruling classes and their priests began shaping what the words "really" meant.

This passage also seems to imply that it's imperative that we not only figure out how we're "swindled" by language, but to own the god-power in ourselves (the only place "god" really exists?) and use language creatively, actively, to take back the power of language and to use it to better our lives.

Six Faves

1. Sturch: This hasn't seemed to have caught on. It's a word that implies the State and Church have mutual interests of control in mind. According to a 1961 article by Robert Anton Wilson in Paul Krassner's The Realist, Philip Jose Farmer, the wild science fiction writer, coined it.
2. Santorum: Dan Savage gets credit for the coining of this one, but he canvassed his readers first. A good example of purposeful, mindful and creative use of neologizing capacity to attempt to discredit a political foe. What is it? For our non-Unistatian readers, it's "the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the product of anal sex."And also the last name of a prominent anti-sex, very conservative Senator.
3. Shordurpersav: Coined by the Church of the Subgenius, who acknowledge that our belief in deities can be temporary, if we want it, and it's a short way of saying a god or goddess or some other entity is one's own "short duration personal savior." 
4. Sardonicide: Possibly minted by Hakim Bey, it means to laugh something to death, or something that was laughed to death. 
5. Privateering: I was going to make all six start with "S" but I liked this one too much, at least recently. I'm not sure who coined it; it may be very old indeed. But George Lakoff suggests that those of us who object to the privatization of the public sphere -  by billionaires and others who do not have the idea of the common good in mind - should use this word for what they do. 
6. Modeltheism: I got this from Robert Anton Wilson. It describes intellectuals, academics, or any one of us who stumbled onto one model of looking at the world, forgot it was only a model and not the Absolute Truth, and now seem to worship this model as if it was heaven-sent. When we do this, we block out millions of other signals; we make ourselves stupid this way. 

Neologisms and the Neo Soft (?) Whorfian Revolution

My Idiohistory With Linguistic Relativity
I had begun trying to understand Chomsky's linguistics around 1990. One thing that spilled out rather quickly was I was apparently wrong about the idea that the structure of the particular language you speak shapes the way you think about phenomena. This idea was fairly taken-for-granted until around 1970. Then a few studies were done on how people from different tribes used language for things like color, and Chomsky's idea of universal grammar seemed to hold sway, according to these studies. Or so I read. On one level, I still thought this had to be wrong, because whenever I made some cursory study of a new language I noticed how strange I felt; there was always some aspect of the way the new language made me think that was novel. Also: as a crazy fierce autodidact, I found one quick entry into some new territory of knowledge was to get hold of a standard fat textbook for the field, go directly to the glossary, and study the words and their definitions. The specialized jargon allowed me to think about things I never would have before. But this, I knew did not mean that, "underneath" it all, people weren't still "really" thinking about the phenomena in the same way, despite the way they seemed to conceptualize differently, based on their different language. The Chomskyans virtually wiped this idea of linguistic relativity off the map of "serious ideas" roughly from the period 1975-2000 or so.

A little later, in the early 1990s, I fell in love with the works of Robert Anton Wilson. In the first book I ever read by him, Right Where You Are Sitting Now, which was assembled as a collage and utilized techniques derived from Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs and their "cut-up" method. I turned a page late in the book and found a page with a "smaller" piece of paper made to look as if it was hovering over the page, at a slightly Dutch angle. The paper - or rectangular block? - had a shadow beneath it, a sort of "Kilroy Was Here" guy looking over the top of the paper, but with +/- signs for eyes and ears. Inside the block were three quotes, one from RAW himself: "Verbal chains guide us through our daily reality-labyrinth." Another was from Joyce's Ulysses, where Leopold Bloom, reflecting on the repetition used in the Catholic mass, and his own occupation, advertising, thinks to himself, "Mass seems to be over. Could hear them all at it. Pray for us. And pray for us. And pray for us. Good idea the repetition. Same thing with ads. Buy from us. And buy from us."

                                                      Benjamin Lee Whorf

A third quote was from Benjamin Lee Whorf: "A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos." But this went against Chomsky. And it was published in 1982, when linguistic relativity was supposedly dead. Nevertheless, I decided to obtain Whorf's Language, Thought and Reality. I haven't bought the universal grammar line since.

The only problem I found in Whorf (whose teacher was the great first-generation cultural Anthropologist Edward Sapir, who studied under Franz Boas), was that Whorf seemed to think the language we are born into prevents us from thinking in new ways; we get boxed in. This was later dubbed "hard Whorfianism" by some, in contrast to the idea that our language tends to shape how we perceive reality, often labeled as "soft Whorfianism." Whorf, who died in 1941 and was largely self-taught, never saw any of what we would call empirical testing of his ideas. But there are empirical tests galore now, and this is why I call it "Neo Soft Whorfian" in the headline for this blogspew.

Lera Boroditsky
I forget where I read it, but Boroditsky - perhaps the figurehead in the renaissance in linguistic relativity - wrote about a study about how time is perceived differently among Mandarin speakers, compared with English speakers. In English we think of time like we think of our sentences, as running from right to left. We say "The best years of our lives are still ahead of us." Or "All your troubles are behind you now." Boroditsky showed that the Chinese thought of time in the way they wrote language, famously: vertically. How mind-blowing! Yep: next month is "down." It's the down month, or "February" to me. Last month - December - would be thought of as the "up month." Of course, in English I can say, "Looking down my calendar, I'm busy through March. How about April we go to Hawaii?" Similarly, apparently Mandarin speakers use a horizontal metaphor for time every now and then, like we English speakers do. But they clearly use vertical metaphors for time far more often, while we English speakers use horizontal ones far more often.

                                                 Lera Boroditsky, grew up in Minsk

So Boroditsky and colleagues decided to see if they could determine  if Mandarin speakers think about time differently than we do...which is a different idea than looking at how the language is structured. When Chomsky's ideas about linguistic relativity held sway, it was thought that all sorts of other things could influence the way people speak about the world in different ways. What was important was that we are all using a basic universal grammar at the core, despite how wildly different our surface language speaking may be.

By the way, here is a statement by Boroditsky about Chomsky's linguistics, and how the Whorfian ideas have now been demonstrated empirically:

"The question of whether language shape the way we think goes back centuries; Charlemagne proclaimed that 'To have a second language is to have a second soul.' But the idea went out of favor with scientists when Noam Chomsky's theories of language gained popularity in the 1960s and '70s. Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages --- essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways...

"The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable, unpredictable differences emerged...

"Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent to hone and suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what's needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects in cognition...

"One of the key advances in recent years has been the demonstration precisely of this causal link."
-quotes gleaned from "Does Language Influence Culture?"

Back to the Mandarin/English dealio:

Try this with your friends, and if you have a native-born Mandarin speaking friend, all the better:

Stand next to your friend and point to a spot in the air directly in front of your friend and say, "That spot represents today." Then ask where they would put "yesterday." And where "tomorrow"? Most English speakers, overwhelmingly, pointed to a sport horizontal to the spot that represents "today." Mandarin speakers pointed to spots vertically, about eight times more often than English speakers did.

Neologisms
These are literally "new words." How do they come about? It's complex. Often they're portmanteau-ishly derived: two pre-existing words smashed together. Because many of us can't afford to go anywhere when we have time off, we now take a "staycation." The examples are endless. Also, the old adage that those who control the language control the future and the past seems true enough, and one way they do is via manipulation of language, and one of those ways is via neologisms. When a wealthy person died, there was an estate tax paid. Out of right wing think tanks, we got a term that sought to replace this: "death tax." Despite it being in the best interests of most citizens to keep the estate tax paid,  research on human nervous system response to certain words led them to keep rich families richer than they would have been, and "death tax" just sounds unfair, doesn't it? It's the same thing, different words. And the thing is: people buy it. I think Chomsky has some small (ironic!) part to play in this, but mostly, people are not taught how language really works in our society, and it's a travesty, in my opinion.

Of course, specialized fields of study will necessarily invent words to describe many of their new findings, and sometimes the new words float out into the common atmosphere. Other times - most interestingly to me - poets and novelists will mint a new word that allows us to think - or describe - something we used to have to use many words for, often accompanied by copious hand-waving.

But what about those of us who are Ironists will seek a vocabulary unique to ourselves, if only because, as Richard Rorty wrote, we do not want to find ourselves on our death bed, self-describing ourselves using someone else's vocabulary. We might not use neologisms, but old language in new ways, via subtle turns of metaphor.

I am not sure if neologisms work in the same sense that cognitive neuro-linguists who study linguistic relativity - scholars like Lera Boroditsky - say that the structure of the local language shapes perception and thought. But I suspect these two ideas are interrelated.

Rorty wrote in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, that "A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species." (p.20) Furthermore, "Ironists specialize in redescribing ranges of objects or events in partially neologistic jargon, in the hope of exciting people to adapt and extend that jargon." (p.78)

"Every gloss becomes a potential meta-gloss..." - Robert Anton Wilson, Wilhelm Reich In Hell (p.40) This meta-gloss might have to be named. usw.

                                            William Gibson, influenced by Burroughs,
                                            Pynchon, and Borges, extremely influential
                                              himself, and rightly so!

Because I've carried on far too long, as usual, I'll end with a quote from a poet, the science fiction-ish William Gibson, who coined "cyberspace," which you might think is the "space" you're inhabiting right where you are sitting now:

"The essential art of pop poetics is the art of neologism. Cyberspace was my contribution, a term which was hollow, senseless, waiting to receive meaning. I don't care what people pile on top of it." - in an interview with Bruce Sterling and Steve Beard, found in the latter's Logic Bomb (p.63).

Lera Boroditsky's papers

I don't get how this dude's head seems to float atop his body, but he's talking about the ideas above:

The Drug Report For December, 2012: Booze

Gotta get one in before the ball drops...Or the other shoe drops. Or I drop a bowling ball on my foot, which would damage the shoe on my other foot, or...

Okay, booze-hounds. I'm writing this at 4:25 PST, which means it's 7:25 EST in New York, and some of you are already well on your way to plasterface.

My friends in England? That's...plus nine, right? It's already New Year's for you. Jeez, the sun still shines here, now. I hope you make it home okay. Jeez, I shouldda written about booze yesterday. Well, at least you get the news first. We on the West Coast of Unistat are always the last to know.

You Are Not Required To Get Rat-Legged Drunk
The main thing I wanna urge upon y'all, if you're listening: you are not required to get so ripped on booze you wake up in a pool of your own filth...on a living room rug in a house you cannot identify. No, that was last year. Things can be saner now. You get a do-over every 365 (or so), barring death. You can choose to limit yourself to only 15 Long Island Ice Teas this year, half of what you had last year. You can walk away after noticing people's alarmed faces when you slur out some idiocy, then bash your shin on the coffee table so bad that's gonna leave a mark till Valentine's Day. You have agency. You're all sitting around, drinking beer, recounting the year, laffing, trying to convince each other 2013 will be the Best Year Ever? Fine. Good. But try to abstain when someone brings out the beer funnel. I speak from experience.

Some booze items of note before I send myself on my way to a NewYear's Party/housewarming/potential bete noir. (Do I have cab fare? Check!):

Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire, on always being drunk.

A Toast
A toast, from Homer Simpson:
"To: alcohol! The cause of...and the solution to...all of our problems!"

Are You Smart?
"Why Do Smart Kids Grow Up To Be Heavier Drinkers?" (My personal fave of the shots in the dark here: best way to deal with morons. Your mileage may vary.)

Accidents Will Happen
Here's some very good news if you're going to get shitfaced tonight (or any night), and get into a horrible accident: "Intoxicated Patients More Likely To Survive Traumatic Injuries". Note: the doctors here suggest NOT using this study as a reason to get so tweaked you can't even remember your own name. But hey, what do doctors know? Lest ye think this study (that you didn't even read) is bogus: it takes into account 190,612 sozzled patients who showed up in ERs and trauma centers from 1995-2009, so that's nothing to sneeze at. Or barf over. Yep: fractures, internal injuries, open wounds: a 50% reduction in mortality (i.e, death) if you had the decency to get badly injured while piss-drunk. What this article doesn't address is my pet theory about this all along: when you're drunk your body just crumples all zen-like going-with-the-flow. Straight people see they're going over the edge of the highway and get all tensed-up, which only makes the injuries worse. Also, you won't even really feel the pain all that much until the next day, which is an added bonus. Don't say I never tried to improve your lives. I'm here to help!

PSA
A Public Service Announcement: Friends Don't Let Friends Butt-Chug: You'll only make an ass out of yourself by using your ass to get ass-drunk. Talk about drinking like an asshole!:

C'mon. This is just too silly, even for me. Besides, what if the wine has a nice bouquet? The receptor sites in your anus will not be able to appreciate it like those ones in your mouth. It just makes sense to drink with that orifice in the middle of your head instead. (As far as I know, Robert Parker has not addressed this issue.)

A Riddle
Puzzle this one out before going out and getting hammered: former UK drug advisor chief David Nutt, in the Lancet, showed that alcohol was more dangerous than crack or heroin. Nutt got sacked in 2009 after this. You don't offend the National Pastime by breaking bad news like that and get away with it.

But: given that knowledge - and what the fuck, it's probably right, right? Need another beer? I'll go get you one - how do we assess this bit of datum: taking a Benadryl then driving makes you drive worse than if you were drunk-driving. And Benadryl is legal, OTC (over-the-counter).

Given my knowledge of the mathematics of set theory and logic, I can only surmise that it's far safer to do heroin, then some crack, and then drive. Wait till you get there before washing down your Benadryl with some Wild Turkey. Anyone got a different read on this?

Wha???Speak a Little Louder, You Drunk!
According to this study - as reported by the brilliant and sexy science writer Maggie Koerth-Baker of BoingBoing - bars that have louder music make people drink more, presumably because you can't talk to your friends so you may as well have another swallow. So: loud music causes quicker drunken-ness-ish. Plato was right about music: it's dangerous. Like poets. Stay away from music, especially loud music, and it goes without saying that poets are still a pain in the ass. (See Baudelaire, above.) Drink in peace, my friends!

Another Caution Before You Drink and Drive
A woman got all Merle Haggard and drove, hit someone else's car. A real fuck-up. But the nightmare: the judge made her read the Book of Job and write essays about it as part of her punishment. Man, that's harsh. Forced reading. Jeez. It's not like she was butt-chugging or anything.

Like We Didn't Already Know
A French study showed that people with tattoos and piercings drank more at the local bar. Gosh what a surprise. Well, let's just hope they're not doing Benadryl too.

Sobering?
Things like this may help you make better choices tonight. Or maybe you're already hungover as you read this, in which case: drink lots of water, and just try to sleep as much of it off as you can. And fer crissakes: take a B vitamin supplement! The Bs help convert your food into energy, and that coffin varnish you drank last night just killed the Bs.

Happy New Year to all, wherever you are in the world!

Some Origins of Marxism and Instrumental Rationality as a Revolutionary Tool

I see that the NY Times has found out that the FBI has had counterterrorism agents investigating Occupy. Gosh. I knew the FBI infiltrated, undermined, bugged, harassed, planted evidence...on anyone they deemed "left wing" since...their inception. But gosh darn it, I thought they would have quit by now. I thought COINTELPRO was all over, and the FBI now suddenly cared about a person or group's Constitutional rights to think and say whatever they wanted, no matter how unpopular (or wildly popular?) or seemingly non-violently threatening of the existing order of wealth and privilege. Yea. Golly.

How did Marxism start? In secret societies. The right-wing conspiracy theorists who see Illuminati everywhere are/were right: these revolutionary movements do get going in secret Masonic-based societies, with initiations, etc. But this still doesn't mean Nesta Webster was "right," although I confess I do find her a wonderful paranoid read.

                                             Someone drew this pic of Marx, the 
                                             Young Hegelian. We can see why some
                                             of his friends called him The Moor

Who were The League of Outlaws? Oh, they gave birth to The League of the Just. Who were they? Oh, they gave birth to the League of Communists. When Marx and Engels wrote that the Communists had nothing to hide, in the Communist Manifesto, they were addressing this very issue: time to come out from hiding!

The League of Outlaws were German emigrants in Paris who blindfolded initiates in secret ceremonies and used secret handshakes, recognition signs, and passwords. (If you dropped the term "civic virtue" in conversation you were indicating where you stood.) They had a pyramidical structure. A strict distinction was made between upper and lower members. They were bound by oath, says the late great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his terrific Primitive Rebels, pp.169-170. All of these ritualistic secret society gimmicks were taken from the Carbonari. This was around 1834. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 - carried off by extremely well-educated professional revolutionaries who led peasants - we see that Marx was wrong about educated proles in a vanguard party leading other proles in taking over the means of production. Marx was wrong about pretty much every "Communist" revolution of the 20th century. It was educated professional revolutionaries leading barely-literate peasants. But I digress...

So lemme back-up: what was the beef of the guys in The League of Outlaws? They were smart enough to see the Rich were dealing from the bottom of the deck, and they wanted things more...democratic. More fundamental fairness. What horrible people. But don't worry, the version of the FBI they had to deal with was even more brutal. And the FBI has many thousands of buckets of blood on their hands. I hope you know about, say, Fred Hampton?

On Marx himself: There's a fascinating discussion on radicalism and intellectuals being prevented from rising higher on the status ladder in Marxist sociologist Alvin Gouldner's The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. (Get from the local public library?) At one point, in a long footnote discussing Lewis Coser's ideas about "blocked" intellectuals - as Coser writes in his Men of Ideas - Gouldner writes, "Coser develops the argument that the Jacobin leadership was composed largely of those whose careers had manifested upward mobility, but whose future ascendence was blocked. The study of diverse career blockages - e.g, of educated clerkly revolutionaries, of the sons of those killed during nationalist struggles, of displaced elites - is crucial to an understanding of the radicalization of intellectuals. A basic and familiar source of such blockage is, of course, having the 'wrong' gender, ethnic, national, racial, linguistic or religious identity. Thus early communist leadership in Czarist Russia had a 'relatively high proportion of men of non-Russian extraction,' according to W.E. Mosse, Slavonic and East European Review (1968), p.151. Radicalized Jews are thus simply a special case of this more general problem of blocked ascendence. But we need to be careful not to overestimate the role of injured material interests in producing radicalization nor underestimate radical interests (in *CCD), which, when offended, can also radicalize. And it is not only career blockages which may sharpen radicalization (e.g, Marx), but prior radicalization may elicit repressive career blockages which only then further intensify the pre-blockage radicalization (again Marx)." - Gouldner, p.114

[*CCD = Culture of Critical Discourse, a basic orientation in language and mind of the contemporary intellectual.]

Marx was radical, hounded all over Europe, ending up in London, subsidized by his wealthy friend Engels. But what Gouldner's talking about is Marx's anger.

                                            a semi-witty reversal on Groucho

Two scholars of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), Bergin and Fisch, document Vico's influence on Marx in The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, pp.104-107. In a footnote to Marx's Das Capital, Marx wrote:

"A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the eighteenth century was the work of a single individual. No such book has yet been published. Darwin has aroused our interest in the history of natural technology, that is in the development of the organs of plants and animals as productive instruments sustaining the life of these creatures. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, the organs which are the material basis of every kind of social organization, deserve equal attention? Since, as Vico says, the essence of the distinction between human history and natural history is that the former is made by man and the latter is not, would not the history of human technology be easier to write than the history of natural technology? By disclosing man's dealings with nature, the productive activities by which his life is sustained, technology lays bare his social relations and the mental conceptions that flow from them."

Too bad Marx did not foresee the advent of electronic communications (radio/TV/Internet/phones) and how this affected relations in capital so profoundly. But then what do we expect from him? Certainly not to be a Prophet, as so many Marxist ideologues have...However, another antecedent of Marx seems surely and ironically Matthew25:15; Acts 2:45; Acts 4:32-35...

Another - O! I could cherry pick influences on Marx all day! - interesting influence on Marx, one frequently omitted in discussions, is Bachofen, who thought human society was originally based on motherhood, female ideas, the rights of mothers. I throw him in here for the truly committed. If the machines of war that threaten to annihilate the human race seem "male" to you, then maybe Bachofen and Marx weren't whistling up the wrong tree?

Instrumental Rationality: Only recently are a few Economists understanding that they must think of the natural environment as part of their system. Need I say more about this 240 year old Mass Hypnosis? It has us near the brink. Will we be able to survive and recover from this "rationality"? It remains to be seen. There will be more and more technology-caused unemployment. Spend a month Googling "robots" and see if we can think about money and human values in a new way quickly enough, because our idea that "I bought the machine, therefore I rule: you're fired!" is killing a lot of us. Go back to what Marx said about the history of technology, by way of Vico: how the eighteenth century inventions were not the work of a single individual. This has been evermore true as time has passed. We missed a Golden Opportunity at some point to claim all productive machines on behalf of the collective mind of Humanity. Which brings us back to Occupy.

I've spent a lot of time hanging with Occupiers. They're young, well-educated, not part of a secret society or revolutionary vanguard. They do know the score: they have incurred large debts for their educations and the "free trade" agreements and banksters and automation have made those jobs they were trained for go away. Another term for what banksters and automated, ultra-fast computerized  trading with "derivatives" and other "instruments," and automation and free trade agreements, blah blah blah: that term is instrumental rationality. And where are the human values there? And in this day and age, instrumental rationality for what?

There is more of a disparity of wealth in Unistat since 1928, which should make even an FBI agent care about that generation. I said should. Somehow I doubt the FBI is as worried about armed right wing lumpenproles who get all their ideas about "reality" from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh; naw, you never know: the Occupy kid with his Anthropology degree might be a real threat! Best keep an eye on her.

Here's a 2 1/2 minute video essay on this famous picture of Marx, by Marshall Poe.

Books and Reading and My Paranoia, My...Testicularia

I read a lot. One of the ideas I've read a lot about lately is how books and reading are going away, falling away towards some whirling cultural drain circle, and it's only a matter of time before all that was great and holy (and secular!) and good and free-speechy and democratic would leave the world stage. Everything about sustained leisurely concentration on significant texts and how books and reading elevate us and allow us our humanity: it will all soon be gone, say the (some but not all) intellectuals and the book-lovers. Because of the Internet, mostly. That's what's killing an entire world off.

I read most of the stuff about this bookpocalypse (or the more proper: biblioclasm? libricide?) on Internet.

                                        a shot of the Paris bookshop once owned by
                                        Sylvia Beach, who first printed Ulysses

Yee gawds there's a lot of this stuff - very well-written pieces, usually, by highly literate, thoughtful, even at times erudite writers - on Internet. The topic: how the Internet is killing what they love.

Somehow I doubt the advent of the telephone had similar effects on highly literate paranoids. A PhD in Comparative Lit calls his friends and all he can talk about is how this telephone thing is ruining us! No one's gonna care about talking face-to-face anymore! I haven't done the research, but somehow I doubt this occurred.

(To be fair, e-books, video games, cell phones, TV, virtual reality, androids, iSomethings and horrifying things like Second Life we've read about in books...any sort of media not the codex-book, really: are also partly to blame. I have even read a large handful - at minimum, ten - of articles about how colleges and universities have drastically dumbed-down their reading requirements.)

It's as if these dead-tree codex-book readers are addicts, and The Man is slowly persecuting them, and the tide of Mass Perception is slowly turning against them: they are intent on getting rid of our drugs! Hey, we admit we're hooked, but we're happy! Our drugs are like Smart Pills! Yours? Not so much. The Man wants us to use their drugs! And don't they know how special our drugs are...were? You all are making a big mistake! Don't call up what you can't put down! (Anyone got a spare Xanax?)

I admit I'm one of these types (And yes: I'm writing this on a blog, fer crissakes!: Their drugs are powerful, I admit), and I also admit to caricaturing them/me here. But only for effect, yassee. Make no mistake about it though: we're paranoid, tinged with anger, peppered with pomposity, strung out on libraries...and maybe the structure of non-book knowledge to come is too weird and beastly and unheimlich...let's avert our eyes. No! Don't give up!

Taking My Testicularia* Down A Notch
In order to allay my fears, I have gone in search of dissentual data. I'm getting my things in order and not trying to make peace with a damned demiurge who'd allow this to happen. (Deep breaths!)

*Testicularia is a word coined by Dr. Leonard Shlain: if we have Hysteria, to describe wild, unhinged emotions, and we use a term derived from female anatomy, Shlain thought a word for men who are unhinged ought to exist, and also be derived from a roughly equal anatomical part. Voila!: Testicularia, this time my own. Oh, well...(NB: mushroom hunters/mycologists already have their testicularia; they've had it for a long time. Apparently it's a rare one. This is one case where a word already existed, but it was a specialist's word, and Shlain's idea seems to have sprung isolated from knowledge of the rare fungus. And there's my requisite nutball  digression!)

But not all the news from my olde timey perspective is bad, viz:

                                                  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Facebook Gen Uses Libraries: A Lot?
According to a recent PEW poll as reported on NPR, 8 of 10 Unistatians aged 16-29 read a book in the past year, compared to only 7 of 10 of the other adults. This was supposed to be good news? Oh wait, there's more: the young ones liked the library. (Hey, that's grand!) Some better news: they say that e-books fit their lives, but they don't want print books to go away, as they're part of the general landscape, or something. Hold on, I just read the article again more closely, and it doesn't seem as sunny as the headline suggests. Not to me it don't. What constituted that one book in the year? And this is self-reported, right? Jeez, if you were called by a polling group and you'd actually done nothing but smoke weed and play Black Sabbath covers in your mom's basement all year, wouldn't you at least have the smarts enough to fib and say you'd read...I dunno...five books that year?

Okay, if they really are reading one book a year...don't tell me: it's Harry Potter and the Secret of the Goblin of Doom, right? Something like that. Oh and maybe: a graphic novel? Even a fuddy-duddy like myself has enjoyed some of those. I'd like to think a small percentage took that whole year to luxuriate in Ulysses or Dante, or Lucretius, or Darwin. But I seriously doubt it. This article strongly suggests post-literacy tribalism. And what does PEW consider "long form" in their study? Anyway...

Of Five Million books in the NYPL, only 300,000 were requested last year.

Testicularia rising...

One For Our Side: Finnegans Wake Finished!
"On Completing Finnegans Wake" by a brilliant young person who goes by "PQ", based in Austin, TX. There's still hope? Dig the devotion to actually reading. And the most informationally-dense work in English literature, or whatever that language is. I've always called in Wick-Lang.

As Jeremy Campbell wrote in Grammatical Man, in discussing Claude Shannon's method of mathematically quantifying information in a text, or any series of signals, "In James Joyce, almost every word comes as a surprise because there is no familiar context preceding it. In Finnegans Wake, the reader must supply context from his own knowledge or his knowledge of Joyce commentators to make sense of the sentences as they appear on the page. Some of this context will be composed of mental concepts." (248) The scholar-artist of the avant garde, Richard Kostelanetz, writes in his A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (2nd ed.) that, in FW, the interpretation of human experience is "hardly 'original' or 'profound,' but thanks to the technique of multiple reference, incorporating innumerable examples into every part of the text, the theme is extended into a broad range of experience. No other literary work rivals the Wake in allusive density; in no other piece of writing known to me are so many dimensions simultaneously articulated." Kostelanetz thinks that the reader's acceptance or rejection of FW is a "fairly reliable symbolic test of his or her sympathy toward subsequent avant-garde writing." (212)

I've found this true myself. And I thoroughly enjoyed reading PQ's reportage about what secondary sources he used, how wonderfully weird and prescient and otherworldly Joyce's mind seems in certain passages, and just basically PQ's periplum* with the Wake.

*periplum: like phenomenological vision. It traces back to something like Greek voyages around a coast-line, but as Ezra Pound scholar William Cookson wrote - as Pound resurrected the word, largely - Pound used it as something like "voyages of the mind." In Pound's Canto 82, he writes a vision of:

                              three solemn half-notes
                                                        their white downy chests black-rimmed
                              on the middle wire
                                                              periplum

Q: What vital info was removed by Pound in order to cause an explosion of associative connections within you?

A: Whatever you thought it was. But if you "saw" the birds as half-notes, as Pound saw them on the middle wire, whatever Pound decided to leave out to make the lines more highly charged, this removed info is the exformation.

Ah, but I was supposed to discuss my paranoid decline of reading. On with it!

A Plug For Marshall Poe
Here's a guy who takes Marshall McLuhan by one hand, and pulls him through to the other side. A cultural elite who addresses the problem of "Death To The Reading Class," and what to do about it. Poe addresses those of us who read books and think book-reading is "intrinsically better" than any other media. And we think other people should be like us. But they can't. They don't like reading and they never have. Poe has adults reading for 15 minutes a day here, but not enjoying it. And he discusses the history of the elite classes trying to get everyone else strung out on their/our drug, books. But it's never worked, and he thinks it's because our eyes and brains "were made for watching, not decoding tiny symbols on mulch sheets."

This reminded me of a study I wrote about back here (skip down to "On the Minority of Long-Form Readers"): only a tiny class - and they are probably not only cultural elites (I'm certainly not one!) - genuinely enjoy reading long, fat, dense books. It's us who are the weird ones! My mother said she started me on phonics around three or four and I just started reading and never stopped...

Anyway, Poe says we book readers have gotten it wrong: it's not the reading that the masses are missing out on, it's the knowledge in the books. "Books imprison ideas; the 'new books' podcasts set them free."

And so he's developed three ways smart people who don't like to sit and decode abstract symbols on paper can access new ideas. Two use a podcast method, and one uses a video method. If the title of the article I linked to by Poe is "Death To The Reading Class," then he adds, "Long live the Multimedia Class!"

New Books In History podcast
New Books Network podcast
Mechanical Icon: video essays on famous photographs, highly influenced by Montaigne

Am I shooting myself in the foot here? I'm not sure.

On the Connecticut school shooting

Okay, this is my perspective as I write this rantish bit to follow: I stayed up until 4:45AM reading and writing, my own typical OG bubble-life. Slept in to 12:15. It's uncommonly cold here in Berkeley - frost warnings over night and a projected high temp in the high 40s today - so as I groggily put on sweat pants and a long-sleeved shirt to go do my yoga, I flipped on the AM radio and heard people arguing about "something's gotta be done" about guns. I thought: yea, of course: the Aurora Massacre, the recent mall killer in Portland, the guy on the NFL Chiefs, etc. No shit. I've thought our gun culture was insane since I was about 17.

But then, my brain still booting up, slowly coming online: I wonder if they're talking about this because of a new shooting that happened while I slept? Then the national news cut in, "This is a special report..." My suspicions were confirmed: 20+ people killed at an elementary school? In Connecticut, this time. That's all I know as I write this. I hit the fat OFF button on my radio and went downstairs to do yoga, then shower to Diana Krall, grab some coffee, get bundled up.

I can blog about this without any more information on this elementary school shooting that I already know (and I know almost nothing). Why? Because, like a recurring bad dream, I've seen this one before, ad nauseum.

A very large portion of the mind of Unistat has been made unfathomably stupid, and having five or six transnational corporations owing all of the mainstream media may have a lot to do with it. If you think people yelling ad hominem epithets at each other qualifies as "discussing the issues," and you were never taught to read and think for yourself, either in the public or private schools or you've failed yourself by not teaching yourself by using your library card, you're gonna live in fear. I guarantee it. And if you're afraid and think They are gonna gitcha, They are everywhere and are Bad because they don't share Our Values (as if you ever really contemplated values in any deep way), then you probably wanna own an automatic rifle. Ya know, the kind the military uses to blow bodies apart with one shot.

NOW: I know there are thoughtful, even-tempered, peace-loving, broad-minded people who own guns. I've had personal experience with them. But I'm not talking about them. These people I call "thoughtful" think there ought to be background checks, waiting periods...you know: SANE things.

But we're living in Groundhog Day-land here, folks. We see it every six weeks. Some unstable individual deliberately commits some unspeakable act, often ending it by killing himself, or doing an impression from film noir: remember Jimmy Cagney in White Heat? He wasn't going down easy. They call it Death By Cop these days: shoot it out, knowing you'll probably lose, but hey: maybe you'll get away. Escape! You never know when you're deranged. Heck, maybe you'll take some of 'em with ya before you go down in a hail of bullets. You'll be famous! And dead. "Top of the world, Ma!"

Yawn: I'm sure by now that the idiot media, who now seem criminally complicit in how fucked up the country is by giving in to the 50/50 idea. Someone who has facts, human values, and is biased towards non-death and killing will appear and say what they say about how we need a sane system of gun control laws that will not trample the rights of gun owners, then someone from one of the NRA PR groups will appear and argue some version of one of these 1.) Because of gun control laws, this happened, and gosh it's terrible. But it's BECAUSE we have some tiny, ineffectual modicum of a gesture toward gun control that allowed all this to happen. Then, 2.) an expert in fascist PR - they have very deep pockets - will appear on Fox "News" and argue that, had the teacher at the elementary school had an automatic rifle her/himself (I have no actual data about the shooting besides 20 plus killed, and supposedly the shooter himself), and been properly trained in military rifle shooting, she/he would've saved the kids's lives, but "liberals" have allowed this massacre to happen, because...something so ridiculous only the people who listen to Rush Limbaugh can take it seriously. And the easiest, most thoroughly predictable one, 3.) With this tragedy, now is not the time to discuss gun control. It's indecent! And how could you "liberals" be so callous in your disregard for the grieving families of this terrible, terrible, gosh darn horrible and "unfortunate" incident? Give it some time before you do what you always do: politicize the suffering of innocent children! Show some class, "liberals."

Oh wow! I almost forgot 4.) a classic, tried-and-true American idiocy: some right wing POS will claim the reason all those children were massacred? Our mental health system is a shambles! Just kidding: they don't care about that. Here's the 4th classic argument by Good Ol' Murrkin fascists who are prominent on the airways: it's because of gay marriage, legal marijuana, and that we don't allow prayer in schools and that the ACLU exists! That's why the kids are dead. Once again: The Liberals have killed our children, and yes, The Liberals and their anti-American agenda will seek to "politicize" the shooting. It's what Hitler and Mao and Stalin and Osama and Attila and Manson would've done, so of course Obama will, too. (If you're reading this outside of Unistat, and you've never lived here, I am only exaggerating slightly. Believe it or not. This is an armed madhouse, a rapidly degenerating Empire, make no mistake about it.)

Wayne LaPierre, the head spokesman for the NRA, who used a classic pre-emptive attack on Obama in 2008, and still does: Obama wants to take away everyone's guns! That's the way "socialists" act. (This is patently insane, and there's no evidence that Obama has done one damned thing about our gun problem/sickness. He's barely even mentioned guns. And the "socialist" meme only flies because of the vast miseducation I mentioned earlier.) Nevertheless, right after both election wins by Obama, gun sales have gone through the roof, and as Ring Lardner said, "You could look it up."

No doubt that the Slippery Slope arguments are being ramped up by these cowards: Now Obama will really want to take our guns, give them to the UN, and it's...totalitarianism! So, the obvious lesson is: quick! Get out the rainy day fund and buy more guns, pronto! And get ready to shoot anyone who looks like they're "from the gummint."

But Obama will only use some flowery rhetoric about "Folks need to know...that violence won't solve anything, and...uhhh...mental health professionals can help you if you're feeling angry...uhhh...stressed-out..." Something innocuous like that. (<----channeling my inner Obama-think here) And nothing will be done. Obama and the Democrats won't do a thing. Oh, they'll rail about it for five days, a week, ten days at the outside, maybe, because they need to appease their constituency. But then the issue will peter out until the next massacre, due just before the Super Bowl. Why? Because, we're so fucked up politically, the 2% have done such a fantastic job of Divide and Conquer, that sane, rational gun control is now a "third rail" issue!

Oh yea. More Groundhog Day stuff: cue the hordes of far-right whackjobs with their conspiracy ideas that, Obama and Holder are orchestrating the whole thing. Why? 'Cuz the more of these mass shootings, the more "libruls"will demand they take away our penis substit...I mean, guns! Yea: It's a Liberal Plot!

I've seen it before, and should I get a masochistic streak tonight and decide to surf the TV "news" I'm sure to see all this...except the last conspiracy thing, which so far only sees the light of media day on Internet, although you never know how insanely, inhumanly low Faux News will go.

Ah yes: to you who are basically on the same page as me, here: How do you feel about "Today's tragic events..." The word "tragic" will be overused. It's not "tragic." It's cyclical. It's predictable. It's a symptom of a national disease. Is it completely disgusting? Yes. Heinous, almost unspeakable death of people who had nothing to do with whatever was fucked up about the shooter(s)? Yes. Do our hearts go out to the loved ones who are grieving now over their sudden loss? Yes. Tragic? No. Read up on tragedy and get back to me. The mainstream media has abused to the verge of mutilation the word "tragedy."

Number of guns per capita, by country.

Finally, let me come up with one for those people who will believe anything: Bob Costas and Michael Moore have secretly bankrolled a liberal Big Government plot, in cahoots with Obama and other Do-Gooders who hate capitalism and love Sharia Law, to cause these mass shootings...the main reason being they hate the Second Amendment and despise the Constitution and Murrrka; they don't think law-bidin' folk should be allowed to pertekt they own! Someone should gun 'em all down, in the name of...of...of...FREEDOM!

Free Radicals, by Michael Brooks

I never tire of contemplating how Copernicus and his co-conspirators gave us a convincing heliocentric view, and how that ricocheted and echoed down through time and changed the way individuals conceived of themselves in the cosmos. To knock the geocentric view out of the picture was quite the coup, eh? Then Darwin (and aye: Alfred Russell Wallace and scads of others) carries off an even bigger move: we're part of a long line of mammals; we're not God's Special Kids. Einstein and Hubble and many others made us understand that we're only part of a so-what solar system, one of quintillions (at least!) that exist. (Hubble space telescope sees a tribe of galaxies from the dawn of the universe.)

And yet some human egos need to resist these insults. To me, these new models constitute knowledges that are compliments to human ingenuity, having the added bonus of being "true."

Copernicus called nature "God's temple," and said we can know God through studying Nature...which got the Vatican to put his Copernicus's book on the Index. We do not know what, if any, drugs Copernicus took, but I do see him as a mystical weirdo, one of the guys on my team.

Darwin seemed very upset that he was upsetting the God-fearing. He had a lot of physical ailments, but he published his books anyway, and I continue to be staggered by his accomplishments. He followed up on some Wild Ideas put forth by thinkers in the immediate previous generations, ideas from disciplines not his own, like geology. And he persisted, despite sicknesses, as if possessed, because the Wild Ideas were interesting and might allow him to midwife some Wild Child of his own. One of my favorite sociologists of knowledge, Randall Collins, makes a very persuasive case that the most valuable thing an intellectual can do is to open up new spaces for other intellectuals to think in. And what a space Darwin opened up! Jaw-dropping...

                                                        Charles Darwin

Einstein seems sorta embarrassed by how he developed his world-shattering ideas: daydreaming, goofing off, tinkering around with images. He had mystical ideas about how Nature worked, but the his math wasn't up to snuff to prove them. As Michael Brooks writes in his recent book, Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science, "His papers are riddled with errors and convenient omissions - though they were lazy fudges rather than, as with Newton, deliberate frauds. Einstein repeatedly failed to take account of known facts when formulating his ideas." (p.7) Supposedly Einstein once said, "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." His inspirations had no traceable source, hence Brooks's term for Einstein's animus: "mystical." It was clear to Einstein that working on the most interesting unsolved problems in physics could not be done logically, deductively, step-by-step: this would be beyond human capacity. No, he used Something Else...And one of the results was the ending of WWII.

Well, Brooks's book wonderfully extensionalizes/elaborates on Paul Feyerabend's main thesis: that "anything goes" in science. It's the best on this subject I've seen yet. I'd like to say that Feyerabend (mentioned in the book) would be pleased, but you never really know with Feyerabend.

Another Brief Riff on Perspective: Science as a "Brand," 1945-Now
Brooks says his book is about "the humanity of scientists - and what that really means." And he juxtaposes this with a narrative foisted upon almost all of us: the scientists are basically slightly less caricatured versions of Mr.Spock, from Star Trek. Brooks says this is a "cover-up" that's been wildly successful "because even the scientists haven't understood what has been going on."

Here's the Science brand after 1945: It's "logical, responsible, trustworthy, predictable, dependable, gentlemanly, straight, boring, unexciting, objective, rational. Not in thrall to passions or emotion. A safe pair of hands. In summary: inhuman." (p.2) Brooks elaborates on this at length, and it's a slam-dunk to me, an inveterate reader of dissentual data about this Science brand, which I smelled as bovine excreta at age 17. But it's the details and solid research, coupled with an investigative journalist's style - Brooks has a PhD in quantum physics - coupled with an enthusiasm to shine light on the cover-up, that makes the Brooks book so eminently readable.

Almost every fantastic breakthrough in science does not meet the "scientific method" narrative they still brainwash kids with in the schools.

To those interested in Buckminster Fuller's thesis about scientists as "Wizards" that the Machiavellian Owners of the World bought off: there's much here to build on Fuller's argument. (I'm mostly referring to Fuller's criminally underappreciated GRUNCH of Giants.) Brooks quotes Michael Schrage in referring to the bankers/corporations/energy moguls after WWII, when physicists were seen as the "Merlins of the Cold War...their wizardry could tip the balance of the superpowers in the twinkling of a quark."

Q: If the Scientist-as-Spock story is hooey, then what does go on?
A: Dreaming, cheating, mania, drugs, daring self-experimentation, pranks, and High Weirdness in general.

But let me return to perspective.

                                       "Earthrise," taken xmas eve, 1968, Apollo 8

Stewart Brand on LSD in San Francisco
In the mid-1960s, Brand, who paid attention to seemingly everything that would later change the world - was high on acid on a gravel-covered roof in the beatnik-y North Beach district of San Francisco. He was thinking about space flight and how astronauts had recently gotten glimpses of Earth from space: a new perspective. Then he remembered hearing Buckminster Fuller give a talk in which he thought a major flaw in humanity's assumption about itself that has led us to a possible brink was that, even though most of us "know" the world is round, we don't really conceptualize of our planet that way. We tend to conceive of the world as flat, and if we could only carry around with us the image of "a round ball, isolated in space, an island in an inhospitable cosmos, perspectives would change." And Brand, on LSD, became transfixed on allowing us all to see a picture, a photo of the Earth. He worked tirelessly, like a campaigner, writing NASA, getting college kids all riled up, writing the UN, the Soviets, members of Congress. He started in February of 1966, and by the end of 1967, photos of from Apollo 8 - one taken by William Anders, and called "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken,"by Galen Rowell in The 100 Greatest Photographs That Changed The World, was perfect for Brand's purposes. (Brooks, pp.15-17)

Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot"
The words are from Sagan, watch this 3 1/2 minute video. Is this perspectival-feeling "olde news" to you? Or do you still feel it? Are we jaded? Does anything shift inside you? Or do you remember when it did, but now you're concerned with the multiverse or dark matter? Does this seem "cheesy"to you? Or does it make you melt, emotionally? What does it do to your sense of "self"?

Oh, now we can access via library DVDs, the science channels on TV, other amazing cosmological schtuff on You Tube...other planets, galaxies, taxonomies of galaxies, etc. But the pale blue dot was what Bucky Fuller wanted us to feel so we'd start to think we all live on this spaceship planet together, and do we really want to make it an armed madhouse? Michael Brooks makes a good argument that we  might never have gotten this perspective without radical, anarchic thinkers.

                                                        Dr. Lester Grinspoon

Carl Sagan was a bigtime pothead. He was good friends with Harvard MD Lester Grinspoon, who was a pioneer in medical pot. Brooks relates how Sagan liked the creative insights cannabis gave him, and tried to capture these by tape recording them so he'd be able to access them and take these ideas seriously the next day, when his buzz was gone and he needed to write. Dig this bit from Sagan via Brooks:

"If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say, 'Listen closely you sonofabitch in the morning! This stuff is real!'." (p.246)

Brooks's Free Radicals tells of the somewhat likelihood of Francis Crick's LSD use, and how it may have helped Watson and himself to discover the structure of DNA. Kary Mullis's LSD use is now-legendary, and he thinks it was a valuable asset in his discovery of the polymerase chain reaction technique, for which he won a Nobel Prize. Richard Feynman's pot smoking and LSD use is mentioned, as is William James's experiments with nitrous oxide.

But the true value of Brooks's wonderful little book is that he has quite thoroughly dismantled the "brand" of Science being done by slightly human Mr. Spock-types we were all taught; he gives a withering number of examples in a breezy prose that the business of making scientific breakthroughs is anything but clean and orderly and rational. It's thoroughly, gloriously, anarchic.

A 90-second bit with Michael Brooks: