Of Montaigne and Names

"Whatever variety of herbs there may be, the whole thing is included under the name of salad. Likewise, under the consideration of names, I am here going to whip up a hodgepodge of various items."

-Montaigne, "Of Names," Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. by Donald Frame

I'll take some of Montaigne's "items" and riff my own hodgepodge off of those. If you're gonna ride on another writer's coattails, you could do worse than ride on Montaigne's.

"Item, it is a trifling thing, but nevertheless worth remembering for its strangeness, and written down by an eyewitness, that Henry, duke of Normandy, son of Henry II, King of England, held a feast in France where the assembly of nobles was so great that when they divided up for sport into groups according to the similarity of names, in the first company, that of the Williams, there were seated at the table a hundred and ten knights bearing that name, without counting the ordinary gentlemen and servants."

Aye, and the Williams - in Unistat - are so very much with us. It comes in 4th, currently, among popular surnames. My own surname ranks just ahead of it. I have two very dear friends who live together and their last names are Williams and Brown. Oddly, there is no Smith that I can think of in our social circle, but no one's catching the Smiths in Unistat for awhile, as my surname, while doing pretty well in 2nd place, is still 500,000 behind the Smiths. You could empty New York, Los Angeles and Chicago (around 13 million people, according to a 2011 guess based on the 2010 census) and replace every citizen with only those people whose last names fit in Unistat's Top 10 (Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller, Davis, Garcia, Rodriguez, and Wilson) and the number comes out to around 13 million.

                                                Robert Smith of The Cure

      

Now, I've always been envious of my friends with odd surnames, because my name has always felt too garden-variety. It's not a good writer's name. There were three of us with the same first and last name in my junior high school. Meanwhile, my best friend's last name was Hogshead, which really catches your eye, eh? Hogshead feels old-timey British and it's a unit of measurement: it's 63 gallons of wine, or 64 gallons of beer, which doesn't make sense to me, but there you go.

My name gets used in jokes as a stand-in for penis. "Richard Johnson" will receive gales of laughter from certain folk of adolescent mind. (I admit it: I laughed the first time too.) "Dick Johnson holds the best and biggest balls! Everyone wants to come." 

That kinda thing. 

Here's a short article on Big Data that deals with the current theme:

Beneath Every City Is A Labyrinth of Last Names

Back to Montaigne:

"Item, there is a saying that it is a good thing to have a good name, that is to say credit and reputation. But also, in truth, it is advantageous to have a handsome name and one that is easy to pronounce and maintain."

An article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, linked to in this Wired article, suggests we're subconsciously affected by first names in all sorts of non-logical ways. Our brains favor information that is easy to use ("fluency"), which reminded me of my studies of the quantifications of beauty: pretty faces are easier to process, because of their symmetry, and we've evolved to like that which is easy. So even though, as that very cool old Fleetwood Mac song said, "I can't sing/I ain't pretty/And my legs are thin...," I probably shouldn't complain too much about having a "boring" last name. Or a boring first one, for that matter.

(Adam Gopnik wittily writes about his "lowly" name.)

Montaigne:

"I have observed that King Henry II could never call by his right name a gentleman from this part of Gascony; and to one of the queen's maids of honor he even proposed to give the general name of her family, because that of her father's house seemed to him too awkward." 

Freud had an ingenious (and probably over-complicated) theory about forgetting names. It's worth reading if only because of very recent neurobiological research on memory that suggests he may not have been that far off. But the best explanation I've seen about forgetting names is that we're just not paying attention. It's as if we don't care. People who are more interested in other people and relationships tend to not forget names as easily as most of us do. However, this business of meeting people at a party and instantly forgetting their names (and they yours) has always been a function - for me, at least - of information overload. I'm being introduced, hearing names but not listening because their faces or what they're wearing or the new social environment, the room, some painting, whatever...is capturing my attention. Information is flowing into me more strongly from those other sources than someone's name. Their immediate phenomenal presence/impression crowds out the name, all-too-often.

(David Carradine named his kid "I.P. Freely"? (Note 1) This somehow lends sense to the now-knowledge that Carradine was into autoerotic asphyxiation. What ever happened to "Grasshopper"? But I digress...)

Josh Foer in his book on becoming a memory champion, Moonwalking With Einstein, gives some hints about how to remember the names of an entire roomful of new people. It all starts with linking the name to something about the way the person looks.

Our good man Montaigne:

"And Socrates considers it worthy of a father's care to give his children attractive names."

Well then I'd hazard that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West - who reportedly want to name their forthcoming child "North" - haven't read Plato. But then Frank and Gail Zappa were no dummies and they (memorably?) named their kids Dweezil, Moon Unit, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan, and...just wow: "Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen." (Only Tom Robbins comes up with names like that, and they are for characters in his projected worlds.) David Bowie named a kid "Zowie." Googling this jit can land you links to all sorts of atrocities. Now, "experts" have said that naming your kids ultra-weirdly can harm them (even Ashley and Shannon for boys become a problem when adolescence hits).

I remember taking a Psychology class in college and the topic of names and how they affect people came up. With my faulty memory, I recall the Prof repeating what we now know to be an urban legend: that a family named Hogg had two daughters and named them Ima and Ura. Ima Hogg really existed (and she looks sorta hot in the pic that accompanies the Wiki), but there was no Ura.

However, there really is a Soleil Moon Frye, which conjurs up an image of the sun shooting out freakishly long tendrils of flares and scorching the moon (and I guess I'm watching it all from a spaceship). And my favorite NBA player's name, "Zaza Pachulia," actually exists.

Because my own name is easy and therefore pleasing, but dull and faceless to me, I think if I ever get published as a "real" writer (not some overweening dipshit blog-head), I might go with something really stand-out, like "Zaza Zappa Hogg."

                                     Dweezil Zappa, a fine guitar player in his own right

Addenda: Crapper and Titzling
Thomas Crapper did not invent the toilet, but he did exist and was a plumber and did help to popularize the toilet.

Otto Titzling, unfortunately, did not invent the bra and appears to have not even had existence. My mom told me Titzling invented the bra, and I believed her. Why? Because mom and dad together told me, laffingly, that Thomas Crapper invented the toilet and I didn't believe them, so I looked it up myself, age 12 or so. Danged if mom and dad weren't putting me on! (I found a dopey source that gave too much credit to Crapper.) So mom was probably telling me the truth - although laffing when she told me of Titzling - and I lazily accepted it for years. Why? It was a good little joke! It's too much fun to believe and it seems to do little harm to, when given the chance, promulgate the idea that a guy named "Titzling" invented the bra. At least it turns the conversation towards breasts; that's always fun. While it lasts. If you look at his first name - Otto - one of the "O" breasts is slightly bigger than the other, which is statistically normal for women. So you see, all in all, very convincing that "Otto Titzling" invented the bra.

Convincing if you're a 15 year old boy, maybe?

What's your favorite real or fake name?

Note 1: Better sources give his offspring's name as "Free" and not "I.P. Freely." Furthermore, Wikipedia tells me "Free" changed his name to "Tom." Free/Tom's mom is Barbara Hershey. Me suspects someone was being unkind to David, Free, or both with the "I.P." joke found on numerous websites.

North Dakota's In The Stupidest State Race Now

Those of us who follow the awesome powers of idiotic backwardness in Unistat have long marveled at the doings of powerful wingnuts in places like Arizona, West Virginia, and especially those two perennial powerhouses of devolution, Mississippi and Alabama. But there's a new contender in town: North Dakota.

Right wingers in both houses of gummint there have passed a fertilized-egg-is-a-human-being bill. The Republican Governor Jack Dalrymple  hasn't said which way he swings here, but it looks like the good people of North Dakota will vote on whether a zygote is a person in November, 2014. And since I'm betting the voters will not be drawing so much on their knowledge of reproductive biology as what someone told them the Bible said, my heart goes out to the entirety of North Dakota's distaff side (minus those stalwart women who assert they should not have primary rights over what goes on in their own bodies, and that the State knows better).

I tar an entire Unistat state with the term "stupid" but of course I'm not applying this to those who agree with me: that women should have the right to choose as under the Roe decision. So please don't take this personally, North Dakotans who are progressive...all seven of you.

Oh, but let's not use such icky terms as "fertilize" and "egg" and "zygote": the North Dakotans like "personhood." It just feels right.

Doctors in North Dakota are already threatening to leave the state if the bill passes, and I can understand their trepidation: the bill - even though it violates Roe v. Wade - would make a doctor who accidentally damages an embryo or does IVF (in vitro fertilization) a murderer. Not to mention it outlaws abortion, of course.

[Prof. George Carlin on "pro-lifers": If you're a fetus you're fine, but once you're born, you're fucked: they don't give a shit about your life as a walking-around human trying to find love, shelter, clothing, food, a job, etc. Q: So what are these "pro-lifers" really about? A: controlling women. Women should function "as a brood mare for the State."]

Now: even voters in Mississippi have rejected a similar bill. Colorado voters have rejected bills like this three times. And, even though I'd say to my fellow bloggers: start your satirical engines! and begin to make fun of North Dakota!, there are signs that the extreme far, far Right is going to lose this one. For one: Republican pro-lifers in ND think this is too extreme, and will join pro-choicers in activist movements against it. One pro-lifer in ND remarked that they don't even have a mandatory seatbelt law yet, but they want to declare a zygote a human? It was too much, even for her.

Roe allows states to decide about abortions after the 22nd-24th week (roughly 154-168 days into known pregnancy). The second trimester ends at around 180 days. There's one (ONE) (1) place in the state to obtain an abortion, or even if you're having complications with your pregnancy that could kill you: the Red River Women's Clinic in Fargo, which wouldn't have much of a function if the bill passes, would it?

Many forms of birth control would be outlawed by this bill too, but what really sets me to wondering: how would these amateur theologists know when a sperm successfully ensconced itself in the egg? I think if they're really serious about zygotic personhood they need to train hundreds of thousands of microbiologists/amateur gynecologists, who can enter a dwelling without a warrant, at any time, when they suspect two people have been fucking "in there." They can also be given full State power to order to woman to strip, spread her legs, pee on a stick, and (I don't know, bite on a bullet or something?) endure some scraping or ultrasound or whatever is necessary in order to determine whether a sperm had made that treacherous, against-all-odds journey towards the Mighty Ovum, and...crashed through, blastocyst immanent. (These same Far Right wingers no doubt would also agree that "The government should get off our backs.")

I mean, put your Xtian Ideals on the line here. If you're serious about a zygote being a person, like 'Lil Wayne or Donald Trump or your mother's best friend's second cousin or Queen Noor of Jordan or Aunt Ethel, you need to do this. Don't go this far only to shut down the Red River Baby Killing Clinic; go all the way with your "convictions!"; how could a Good Christian expect anything less?

A spokesman for Personhood USA applauds the good folk of North Dakota, and hopes the bill passes. He says it's a "human rights" issue. (Did the OG make up "Personhood USA"? Gosh, I dunno...Google or Bing it?)

                              A sperm that's made it to the outside of the Ovum, image
                              electron microscope by David Phillips of Visuals Unlimited.
                              Can't you see the person here? (Or will it "be" one in 20
                              minutes from the time this pic was taken?)

Sundry Notes: No Need to Read This Crap
1.) The very idea of zygotic personhood seems a recent concept. Even Aristotle and medieval  Catholicism thought there wasn't a "person" in there until 40 days after fertilization (which explains why the Far Right in ND has been referring to St. Thomas Aquinas as "that socialist progressive"), or, because you can never tell if any of your "boys" successfully swam to the Big Prize: that night after Dad bought mom some flowers and took here out to dinner, and later, after something that passes for "passion," Dad slumped off Mom, slid over, and lit up a Kool. THAT may have been the time to start the possible personhood clock.

How did Arry and the medieval Schoolmen arrive at the nice round number of 40? There are all sorts of obscure reasonings and legitimations if you delve (Which I do not recommend at this time; not with the latest news about the Consumer Price Index. Get out and enjoy life!), but the short answer: they pulled it out of their asses. Domine adiuva me: aye. They did.

2.) The great comedian Bill Hicks once pondered the 18th century idea of preformationism and noted the corollary: that when he was masturbating and ejaculated all over his stomach and/or chest, he was, in effect, "wiping out an entire village." Akin to the My Lai Massacre. Or Newtown, CT. (Actually, a LOT of sperm get spent in one garden-variety ejaculation, so it's more like Pol Pot's "killing fields," but who's counting? Anyway, an interesting idea. Kinda makes ya think, eh? Don't answer that.)

3.) Some comedian or comedians in the late 1970s or early 80s joked about the Moral Majority's stand on abortion (they seem like liberals compared to what we have now, in pockets, all over Unistat) and, using the classic "slippery slope" avenue, wondered how far this can go: "These Moral Majoritarians are so radical that they say life begins at conception! What's next? Life begins at 'Let me slip into something a little more comfortable'?" Aye...(Bang! Zoom!)

4.) Laurence Sterne, the greatest digressionist in all of what Ezra Pound called "licherchoor," in his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767), wants to tell us about his life, but he needs to begin at the beginning and he takes half of the book up before he's finally born. Sterne plays on the 18th century idea of preformationism, in which he's a little homunculi (a very very tiny version of his grow-up self, inside a sperm). Gawd! What a funny book! Joyce liked it too. Here, on topic: skip down and check out the paragraph beginning with, "The Homunculus, Sir, in however low and ludicrous a light he may appear..."

Gnostic Diffusion Down Through the Ages

While walking around UC Berkeley recently, I passed the Anthropology building, named in honor of Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the first great Anthropologists in Unistat, who was there at the creation, studying under Franz Boas. Kroeber had a lot to say about how ideas, tools, techniques, etc: spread from one area to another, and he called it diffusion and developed a sort of taxonomy of different types of diffusion.

                                        Alfred L. Kroeber, American anthropologist
                                        who spent most of his career in Berkeley, and
                                        is the father of science fiction writer
                                             Ursula K. LeGuin

As I walked and my thoughts percolated to the rhythms of wandering around a redwood-heavy area, I thought of all the heretical ideas I've been drawn to, and the idea of diffusion: did all the "countercultural" ideas diffuse down through the ages? Or, what seems far more likely, did only some of them diffuse and evolve from say, 3000 years ago? Or, what about a counter-idea about diffusion that we often see, "evolutionary diffusion", which says that all humans have psychological traits in common, and that novel ideas will show up at roughly the same time, in different geographical areas, just because, we were ready for those ideas or inventions? Think of Newton and Leibniz inventing calculus at the same time. Or Darwin and Wallace. Or Priestley and Lavoisier and an obscure Swede named Carl Wilhelm Scheele and oxygen. Or any number of other inventions in which there appears to be zero evidence that information diffused (via spying?) from one area to another.

Charles Fort said something about, "It's steam engines when it comes steam engine time." (I paraphrase from memory here.)

No doubt people take their languages, inventions, techniques, ideas, and wander over the hill, get on a jet, and drop those things in some far-flung area, changing that second area in some way. But I tend to think both types of diffusion are always going on: evolutionary and the other types.

Then I started thinking about Ezra Pound. I'd written about Pound and conspiracy theories a while back. But there I didn't cover one of my favorite Pound conspiracy theories: the goddess cults which were forced underground when the Christians came to power while the Roman Empire began to crumble. They'd probably originated in Greece, Ez seemed to think.

Pound had, at around age 21, traveled to Europe and, while visiting the Ambrosian Library in Milan, had stumbled onto some troubadour manuscripts. He taught himself Provencal and made a terrific study of 12th century southern France, where "courtly love" - a very large part of what we consider to be "romantic love" in the 21st century West - was invented.

From 1208 to 1229 the Catholic Church waged a hellaciously brutal, bloody war against some heretics called the Cathars. (The Albigensian Crusade.) The Cathars were wiped out, their manuscripts burned. Apparently the Cathars were into a religion that was the 13th century's version of pagan sex as a religious thing. But the Church's story was that the Cathars were practicing a dangerous form of Manicheanism, which was an idea that the human body is a prison, and that this world was made by a fake god; the Real God was Out There somewhere. I admit this sounds like a pessimistic take on religion, but if the Cathars thought this, why was it such a threat? (I bet you have more than one good answer for that one!)

Pound thought the Cathars didn't think any such thing. He'd walked Southern France and found it utterly delightful. And he'd done an intense amount of reading in...well, everything. Pound started giving lectures in England on the troubadours and their revival of a goddess-based view of the world, one that saw experience in the natural world as a sacrament, that sensual pleasure was a basic good and in tune with what a true Deity would want for us. We do well to harness our perceptive powers, take joy in sensuous delights and sex and poetry and music and the natural world: all of this leads to a state of ecstasy. Now we can see why it was a threat to the Holy Catholic Church! It was the old pagan-goddess-sex matrix, the obtaining of a religious buzz from outside the Church confines, and the Pope and his soldiers conspired to quash it, always.

Pound made a study of troubadour music and art and found nothing of the Manichean pessimistic dualism in their work; on the contrary, he saw the awakening of the Goddess in their work (what survived the burnings). Pound came out with The Spirit of Romance, which articulated his ideas, in 1910. As to the idea that there could have been a Goddess-worship revival alongside a cult of pessimistic gnostics: Pound seemed to have some serious doubts. Furthermore, the Church had always tried to stamp out neopaganism wherever they saw it; this new Goddess religion had to go.

To be sure, the Manicheans have been considered by many writers on Gnosticism to have been a genuine strain of gnosticism; however, there were other gnostic groups that scholars paint as being far more fun to hang out with. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll - this general spirit - may have started with them. Pound's troubadours - who probably overlapped considerably with Cathars? - seem to fit this bill just fine.

When you read about the Eleusinian Mysteries, goddess worship among the Greeks, Epicurean philosophy and its permutations and coded texts under repressive regimes: these were the earlier version of what Pound thought he'd unearthed in Provence.

Did the valuation and veneration of attuned perception, music, wine, sex, and partying in the fields on a warm summer night ever die? No.

But then neither did the Empire.

                                Supposedly this is Idries Shah, but you never know with
                                  this guy...

Robert Anton Wilson, a Pound scholar but not an academic one, loved Pound's ideas, but never seemed to commit to any one narrative along these lines. RAW's historical ideas about diffusion seem to entertain both evolutionary and the other types of direct transmission. In a letter to Green Egg from 1974 (which I couldn't find at rawilsonfans.com), RAW tries to trace the origin of Wicca, and asserts that Gerald Gardner invented it in the 20th century, with help from Aleister Crowley. Gardner created a history for Wicca that extended back to the Stone Age, and as William S. Burroughs might have said, "Wouldn't you?"

                                                Gerald Gardner, probably the main
                                                brain behind modern Wicca

In 1974 RAW says he's bee trying to trace the true history of Wiccan ideas for "seven years" (so he started around the Summer of Love?), and says, as he often did, that with more and more research and information, "I am more confused and less certain than ever."

He entertains Idries Shah's ideas that the Wiccan tradition was drawn largely from the Sufis in the late middle ages: "Anyone who has remaining doubts can simply attend a Sufi dance and a Wicca festival in rapid succession, whereby it will appear obvious to the senses that the same basic rituals are being used for the same basic purposes." (Or was RAW just trying to get you to go to Sufi and Wicca parties so you'll never be the same again?)

Then RAW admits that Sufism may be merely an "Arabized offshoot of Gnosticism." This gets us back at least 2000 years, wot?

Then, because this was RAW's metier, he muddies things up considerably for us, asserting Crowley wrote some things that Gardner picked up almost word for word, but then Crowley had a "sensitive psyche" and could have picked up his ideas from ESP or witch covens that existed near him. He cites Francis King and Jessie Weston, who influenced Eliot's The Wasteland considerably (and Pound edited that poem, recall). Weston, if you read her From Ritual To Romance closely, she may have "been in contact with a proto-Gardnerian coven circa 1900-1910." This all ties in - maybe - with the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis.

RAW then says if you're trying to research this stuff and looking for earlier and earlier citations of the label "withcraft" you're selling yourself short:

"If we widen our lens and look at the subject of 'Christian heresies' and 'non-Christian heresies' and 'secret societies' etc, if we compare alchemical texts with Rosicrucian pamphlets and early Masonic charters, etc, a great deal begins to come into focus, as I hope to show in my forthcoming book on Crowley, Lion of Light."

[Wilson never did publish a book on Crowley called Lion of Light, but his writings on Crowley are voluminous and...diffuse and diffused throughout his oeuvre. For more of RAW's writings along the lines of this what he's writing about in this obscure letter to Green Egg, see his book Ishtar Rising.]

In the same letter RAW talks about all the various ways "pagan" ideas may have diffused throughout the world over the last 2000 years, although he doesn't use the term diffusion. The reason it's difficult to know for sure about diffusion is that it rarely leaves a trace: you need extensive documentation to make a case, but often Authority/Control burned that documentation. Or, as RAW writes about the many ways heretical ideas diffused: "Many other permutations and combinations are possible, and probable, considering the ferocity of persecution and the need for secrecy."

RAW ends his remarkable letter (signed off as "Mordecai the Foul," his Discordian Society name) by citing P.B. Randolph, a 19th century black American physician, who probably imported the idea of sex magick into North America. RAW thinks - based on evidence - that this amazing character (I want to read much more about this dude!) passed the knowledge of sex magick - who learned it by studying Voodoo! - to Unistatians. The more common notion of transmission of sex magick, in 1974 and according to RAW, seemed to be Templars ---> sufi magicians ---> Karl Kellner of the OTO---->Europe and then Unistat.

Wilson may have, at times, been influenced by the Sufi method of interpretation, ta'wil. The short explanation of this is "esoteric interpretation" or "creative hermeneutics." I said he may have...

An article on Randolph from 2000

Taking Vitamins: A Quasi-Drug Report

Do you use vitamins? I do, but one part of my brain - the part that's read about what a waste of money they are, that I only need to eat a balanced diet, etc - knows I ought not; another part says, "Hey they're so cheap and you really don't take all that much, what can it hurt? Might even...'help'...err...something do some thing better than it...was optimized to do?"

I do drink zinfandel and massive, hoppy beers. Ethyl alcohol in your gut can kill B vitamins, which we need to help convert our food to energy. Or so some possible quacks have written.

Then again, I like taking pills. It's fun. Somewhat related to my previous post (<------), I like to think, "This pill can do some amazing, magickal things for me! I might even live to the ripe old age of 55 if I keep up this regimen!"

But sometimes I just feel like a damned fool. And, although I assume the readers of OG are at least as smart as me, probably smarter, I also assume there are a few who will stumble in, look around, and maybe happen upon something they ain't nevah hoidda. That eating "antioxidants" in order to get a leg up healthwise, or even live longer... is quite likely a load of crap. Have you heard that one?

Anyone who follows the MSM will hear "experts" talk about how terrific antioxidants are for your health, and they are!, but only in theory. The free radical theory of aging and disease gave rise to eating supplements - vitamins - because they're antioxidating; they fight the tendency of our bodies to "rust" from the inside.

But a few years ago I looked at the Science that was supposed to bolster these omnipresent claims, and ended by taking the bull by the tail and looking the facts in the face...or however that goes. Two bigtime studies did a lot to convince me that, if I'm taking supplements it ought not be for the "antioxidating" qualities of vitamins.

 


Two Studies On Antioxidants
One study took 30,000 Finlanders who had a high risk for lung cancer (male smokers aged 50-69), and the study was randomized: you got Vitamin E, beta-carotene, both, or nothing. When the trial was over and the researchers looked to see who got what and how they did, the ones who got beta-carotene did worse than everyone else, and had significantly higher rates of not only lung cancer, but heart disease. Beta-carotene was thought by some to prevent lung cancer, but people who took it (not knowing; they may have been taking a placebo for all they knew) died at a higher rate. See "Alpha-Tocopherol, Beta-Carotene Cancer Prevention Study Group."

The second study was the Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial (CARET, a pun! get it?), and 18,000 smokers who'd been exposed to asbestos were given beta-carotene and Vitamin A or a placebo in a study that was supposed to go on for a long time, but was terminated early because those who were getting the antioxidants were dying at a far faster clip than anyone would have expected. If you turned out to have gotten the Vitamin A and beta-carotene, you were in the group that was 46% more likely to die from lung cancer, and - oddly? - 17% more likely to die from any cause.

These are very hardcore studies: randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled. Why have so few of us heard of these studies? The short answer: the vitamin industry uses the same tactics that the tobacco and (now) the anti-climate change people have used: the creation of doubt. "It's controversial!" That's their main way of keeping their show on the road. And it's relatively easy to muddy the waters and claim over and over, "Experts still disagree."

The thing that had many experts believing antioxidants might help stave off disease was the free radical theory. It seemed like a good idea on paper, but we're more complex beings; lots can happen between the swallow of a pill and...results compared to other at-risk people and some placebos, and some time. We also found out that we lose bone mass as we age, so calcium supplements seemed like a natural remedy. But calcium turned out to not really help. In fact, calcium supplementation seemed to raise the heart-attack risk for older women. Women's hormones cause them all sorts of woe after a certain age, so hormone-replacement therapy seemed like a cracking good idea, on paper. Theoretically. But the actual story was quite unimpressive, even scary. Have you heard of the calcium and hormone studies but not the Vitamin A studies? If so, why? Could it have to do with $$$$?

One thing I've learned from reading guys like Ioannidis and a few others (including, Alfred Korzybski) is that reductionist claims are seductive: they play to our rational sense of cause-effect. But when it comes to health and the human body, I am very suspicious of blood tests (with some exceptions that have proven to be statistical winners/slam dunks), animal studies, flow charts of molecules and interactions, and even aye: "theory."

Let us see many more massive randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled long-range studies done, with lots of sunlight on who was paying for the study.

Do I still take the concoction of "Men's Formula" from Trader Joe's? Yes. Why? Because I'm sorta lame, and besides, I'm scaling back! I can kick, if I just have the Will.

The Placebo Effect and Anthropology

My idiosyncratic survey so far of years of reading cultural anthropology tells me the field is sort of a mess, but it's where I live: totally thrilling intellectually and filled with endless epistemological brouhahas, High Weirdness, an ill-defined scope that I find charming, and chicanery among the natives towards the First World intellectuals who are studying them that seemingly knows no end. There's a lot of darkness too. Jeez, when you find out what Colin Turnbull was really up to with the Ik...and all that Yanomami stuff. If you ever get a chance, watch the documentary Secrets of the Tribe, directed by Jose Padilha. It's tempting to look at all the Yanomamo material from Chagnon to now, and say it would be a good way to model the possibilities inherent, of the species we call homo sapiens, were They to come into contact with some more technologically advanced Beings that truly meant no harm, but...

But I won't.

                                        A Yanomamo tribesman. Pic probably taken by

                                        Napoleon Chagnon?

I love the complexity of wildest ethnographic endeavor into Deepest Darkest (even driving five miles away from the university and living with crack dealers for a year) and the sheer audacity of it: if we can just rough it, move in with that wandering band society that lives in the rain forest which still seems to live a High Neolithic lifestyle, figure out their language by pointing at objects and writing stuff down, and just hanging out with them, taking notes, doing their drugs, eating, dancing and hunting game with them for a year or so...we'll write an ethnography and tell the First World who these people are, and maybe learn something about ourselves.

Endlessly ballsy. And yet...

That turned out to be quite naive, but I have had numerous thrills reading ethnographies and, the Walter Mitty type that I am, imagining I'm along for the ride, and let's just "bracket" the idea that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is at work on a macro-level when we try to "study" other peoples. Let's "bracket" the knowledge that the natives will tend to lie to you, pull your leg, and bullshit you. (Margaret Mead fell for a lot of it with the Samoans, it appears, but still: read her!)

Robert Anton Wilson loved to talk about the power of word-magick and belief, and how this worked in the entire nervous system. If a shaman knew that you knew that if he pointed the Death Bone at you, you were finished: no one could survive that! But you had to have fucked up pretty bad to get the local shaman to point the death bone at you; far better to go into exile and see if the tribe over yonder hill will accept you. Bring in a bride price if you can and you just have to leave your tribe. But if exile was too terrifying, and the tribe demanded it, the shaman would get rid of you by pointing the Death Bone at you, and of course, this means you're finished. You'll soon be a goner. And guys did die when the shaman pointed the Death Bone at them. Why? Belief in the Death Bone.

                                         Levi-Strauss in the field, 1930s, Brazil

Now, I have read a lot of stories about seemingly supernatural powers of certain shamans. But the best I've ever read was in Claude Levi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology.

In the early 20th century there was a Canadian Indian (First Nation-person) named Quesalid, who was pretty worldly. He thought shamanism was bullshit. But being a bright young native intellectual, he decided to go undercover and see how the bullshit worked, so he apprenticed himself to a shaman and learned all kinds of...sleight of hand. Magic tricks. He learned to jam some down feathers in his mouth, bite his lip enough so that the blood would mix with the down, then, attending a sick person, go into the act of furiously sucking on the body of the sick person, putting on a real wing-ding of an act, and then dramatically spitting out the bloody feathers: the source of the illness! It was tough work, but I have located the source of your sickness and extracted it! Here! Look at it in my hand! You'll be better soon! Everyone around is blown away by your "powers." If you're good at putting on the Show...

Most impressed by your act is the sick person. Why? Because they do get better. Quesalid had once been summoned by a very sick person's family; someone had dreamed of him as their "savior." He performed his act. They got better. Quesalid was flummoxed.

So Quesalid went on to a long career as a shaman. He was still skeptical about his fellow shamans, though. Why? Levi-Strauss didn't know, and this was as interesting to him as it is to you and me. He wrote that Quesalid takes pride in his work, practices his techniques with great attention to detail, and thinks the bloody feathers technique is superior to other shamanic schools' techniques of healing. "He seems to have completely lost sight of the fallaciousness of the technique that he so disparaged at the beginning."

Promiscuous Neurotheologist, vol.6-ish

[Due to the concurrent State of the Union address on one side of a split-screen, and the real-life film noir shoot-out of a disgruntled ex-LAPD on the snowy mountainside 90 minutes outside Los Angeles, we join another episode of the OG already in progress.]

...about a passage from Tom Robbins's first novel, Another Roadside Attraction:

Jesus: Hey dad.

God: Yes, son?

Jesus: Western Civilization followed me home this morning. Can I keep it?

God: Certainly not boy. And put it down this minute. You don't know where it's been.

Darwin Day From Here On Out: Feb.12: Pass It On!
As I write this, it's a few minutes Pacific Standard Time after Darwin Day has passed. February 12 was Charles Darwin's 204th birthday, and it's the latest volley by those who seek to push-back against the Creationists. (Those of us persuaded by scientific thought may be aware of others who do not - 46% of Unistatians in one poll said they believed in a "Young Earth" theory of creationism: God created the Earth about 10,000 years ago. The article linked to earlier in this 'graph seems mostly about a Creationist from Australia named Ken Ham, who is largely responsible for the rather clueless folk among us seeing pictures of Adam sitting next to his vegetarian dinosaur...in case you are interested in that reality tunnel..)

Karen Armstrong Enlightens Me
As Karen Armstrong wrote in A History of God, "Science has been felt to be threatening only by those Western Christians who got into the habit of reading the scriptures literally and interpreting doctrines as though they were matters of fact." (p.379) Ms. Armstrong then goes on to cover a period of theology I hadn't known much about before: the radical theologians of the 1960s who embraced Nietzsche's "God is dead" idea. In a book I have not read, Thomas J. Altizer's 1966 The Gospel of Christian Atheism, Armstrong quotes Altizer: "Only by accepting and even willing the death of God in our experience can we be liberated from a transcendent beyond, an alien beyond which has been emptied and darkened by God's self-alienation in Christ."

This reads like mumbo-jumbo to me, but then I'm no trained theologian; the lucid thought and prose of Ms. Armstrong unpacks it for me. There had to be a silence around God before He could become meaningful again. Altizer had gone on, mystically, about the pain of suffering and the dark night of the soul. Yes, but...why again? Armstrong: "All our old conceptions of divinity had to die before theology could be reborn. We were waiting for a language and a style in which God could once more become a possibility. Altizer's theology was a passionate dialectic which attacked the dark God-less world in the hope that it would give up its secret." (p.380)

I'll note that this book came out one year before Derrida made his first big splash in Unistat. I mention Derrida here because this Altizer dude, as filtered through Armstrong to my reading eyes, seems well-fed enough of an intellectual to entertain such ideas about "god." Armstrong mentions that the 1960s "death of God theologians" were criticized for their affluent, middle-class white America perspectives.

From my perspective, the idea there were intellectuals with the theology degree who had embraced Nietzsche's "God is dead" idea is marvelous enough. Armstrong also cites Paul Van Buren's 1963 The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, which argued that we can't talk about God acting in the world anymore because science and technology had become a myth that had superseded God. The best we can do is hold on to Jesus, and forget God; Jesus at least taught us liberation, and how to be free.

                                                       Karen Armstrong

Yet another 1960s theologian who embraced God's death was William Hamilton, whose contribution to  a book of essays, Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966), co-written with the aforementioned Altizer, found no God in the world of Unistat in the Sixties. Furthermore, Unistat had never had a great theological tradition of its own, and was always more utopian. Hamilton noted that Luther abandoned his cloister and went out into the world of people, looking for... not God but the spirit of Jesus among them. Hamilton says this was the way to be a theologian in Unistat in the Sixties: find Jesus in the City, among his neighbors and among technology, power, money, and sex.

Easy Remarks: Sure, these guys were white, privileged and steeped in...I'm guessing Heidegger. But they sure make a hell of a lot more sense than whatever sort of "Hate thy neighbor and the poor/Rich Folks are where it's at and by the way science and rational thought is for godless heathens and I can't wait to see 'em fry in Hell" that I see in far too many Unistatians these days.

A Brief Word On Fred N.
Nietzsche's "God is dead" seems to have become his most popular catch-phrase, but the one that's always seemed more interesting - almost zen koan-ish - is his notion and phrase "Will to power." So far my favorite definition of it is from (surprise!), Robert Anton Wilson, who parsed it out thus:

"The spirit of abundance and creativity, which is not One, not a final principle or a God-in-disguise, but the resultant of the forces that make up the mesh of Chaos." - from "A New Writer: F.W. Nietzsche"

[We now join As The World Turns, already in progress.]

Disparate Remarks on Writers and Other Artists and Their Audience(s)

Walter Benjamin

While recently re-reading Walter Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Translator" ("An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens") - I was reminded of Benjamin's counterintuitive idea that Art only confirms our spiritual and physical existence, but doesn't care about its audience. "Even the concept of an 'ideal' receiver is detrimental to the theoretical consideration of art..." This seems to fly in the face of an age-old discourse about writers assuming certain types of readers, and at least two main types: 1.) The "average" reader, who the author can't expect to really get through to; and 2.) The "ideal" reader, who, it has often been expressed, the writer has most in mind when she writes.

But I think here Benjamin is thinking of a third type of mind: the translator, who ought to try to communicate the essence of the piece in a new language, to a new audience. "Any translation which attempts to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information - hence, something inessential." Such an odd idea of the role of the translator! And odd ideas about information, essences, and audiences. I find Benjamin wrong here, but he's one of a small handful of writers who are more interesting to me even when I find them wrong. I am part of Benjamin's audience; when he wrote the aforementioned essay he supposedly did not have me in mind. I think that's about correct.

There are those writers - usually my kind - who develop their private vocabularies, which can scare off ordinary readers, but if the vocabularies contain metaphors poetic and potent enough, they spill out of the private life of the writer and into his more-or-less "ideal" readers' minds...and then they infiltrate the larger society. And change it. 

                                                      Tom Robbins

In Conversations With Tom Robbins he said he can't think of his audience when he writes, that he needs to concentrate, "like a Wallenda."

Glenn Gould, Roman Polanski, Orson Welles

Gould stopped performing live concerts at age 32, saying, "I detest audiences...they are a force of evil." This always has me wondering: how can a nervous system perform so transcendently well, all the while detesting its audience? Clearly, Gould was wired differently than most of us. For every Gould there are a hundred musicians who remark how difficult it is to record in the studio: there is no audience, no mass of Dionysian energy reflecting back from the crowd. No love-radiation from the adoring audience. I wonder how many solo performers have an active dislike for those paying, braying idiots who peer out there beyond the stage lights? Perhaps it's not as rare as I thought; I have heard of some performers who say they get an edge by working up a distaste for those who deign to sit in judgment of their performance, simply because they managed to scrape up the price of a ticket. But few dare to state their feelings so baldly as Gould did.

                                                      Glenn Gould, an enigma

I caught this line from Roman Polanski, one of my favorite directors: "I aim for the public at large, including children, and I'll target the children inside us until the day I die."

Wait, wait, wait: I know what you're thinking, and for today I'll pass on the easy jokes here; that underaged gal has said publicly she didn't want Polanski persecuted by the system as he had been. 

Now, a good lot of Polanski's films are pretty bleak. I just watched Cul de Sac. It's absurd, dark, violent, and oddly funny. But for children? Double that for Knife In The Water, which, like Cul de Sac, presents humans as predatory upon each other, which we as a species seem in active denial about; Polanski's pointing to the primate status-seeking and one-upping that seems built into our characters, unless we try to actively root most of it out. Both of those films present male outsiders competing in some primal way for the attention of a woman. For children, Roman? Maybe Polanski was being sardonic in that quote; I have it in my notes and didn't note the context. But I don't think he meant it sardonically. The quote was made before he did his take on Oliver Twist. It certainly can't have anything to do with Chinatown, can it? 

It's an odd quote, taken from p.123 of Roman Polanski: Interviews. I can't see how Rosemary's Baby, Tess, The Ghostwriter, and especially Repulsion have anything to say to the "children inside us," unless it's that the world can be a terrible and brutal place to be a child. But I can see this quote relating very strongly to The Pianist, because it has so much to do with Polanski's hellish childhood...which seems a terrible and brutish place to be a child. Maybe Roman was high at the moment he uttered that statement, who knows. Still, this is an enigmatic quote for me, and I often think of it. 

In Orson Welles: Interviews there is the idea from Welles that, when he made a film he had no audience in mind (similar to Benjamin's idea?), but when he put on a play the audience was in the forefront of his mind. Orson conceptualized the person watching action on the screen as in a different semiotic world than those watching live humans, without all the tricks that filmmakers have at their disposal. This seems at least part of what he meant.

Gurus and Cult Leaders and Their Audiences

I do not see these cases - gurus and cult leaders and their followers - as all that different from, say, the artists/performers Taylor Swift, Rush Limbaugh, Jon Stewart, Lebron James, and the magician David Copperfield and their relationships to their fan(atic)s. The small difference seems to make enough of a difference though: all of them can go "on" do their Thing, and then be done with their act and move on, as some sort of "entertainer"or gadfly, whathaveyou. Their public acts have a long-time legacy of social authorization and have been thoroughly legitimated by enough of the population that they are taken-for-granted "reality."

In Price and Stevens's provocative book Prophets, Cults and Madness, they take a page from Anthony Storr's 1996 Feet of Clay regarding "gurus," who are "people who believe they have been granted some sort of special life-transforming insight, which typically follows a period of mental or physical illness (which has variously been described as a 'mid-life crisis,' a 'creative illness' or a 'dark night of the soul'). This eureka experience may emerge gradually or come like a thunderbolt out of the sky, in the manner of religious conversion, a scientific discovery, or an intact delusional system of the type that occurs in schizophrenia. As a result, the guru becomes convinced that he has discovered 'the truth,' and his conviction, as well as the passion which he proclaims, gives him the charisma which marks him attractive to potential followers." 

This reminds me of Robert Anton Wilson's take on Timothy Leary's "metaprogramming circuit." Historically, certain odd types have accidentally activated this metaphorical neurological circuit, and fell so in love with the "new" program, new way of looking at the world, that their charisma, infectious enthusiasm, or whatever we wish to label this phenomena as: it becomes a cult, then maybe a religion, with official dogma and official enemies. The same old story from here to eternity, as Burroughs said. Wilson saw the main problem with these types as not noticing that it was their own nervous system that "selected" this vision of the world; they mistook it for a message from "out there," when it was actually from within. And there being a Seeker born every minute, they will have followers. Let's just hope it doesn't get out of hand and that someone develops a healthy sense of humor around this "special" vision of "reality." Wilson says gurus and cult leaders get "stuck" here: too much power too soon, and they don't seem to notice that, if they did it once, they can do it again: some other visions of "reality."That first one was just too awesome, too vivid and such a blast. 

On that note, from Plato's (supposedly he wrote it): Seventh Letter: "For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other sciences; but after long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like lightning flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightaway nourishes itself." 

Now: Plato is saying this happens in a dialectic; it is not Saul's falling off his ass. But it does make me wonder regarding the sulfurous proselytizers. 

                                                    Fran Lebowitz

When Your Audience Dies

Martin Scorsese made a documentary a couple years ago about the hilarious, strident lesbian humorist Fran Lebowitz, and there was a section in which she talked about the cultural aristocracy and connoisseurship of gay men who were her biggest fans in the mid-late 1970s and early 1980s. And then they started dying overnight and it harmed her art, her will to produce sank, her audience dead, and all sorts of 3rd, 4th and 5th raters rose to prominence. While she said all this with a straight face, I do believe she was in earnest...and at the same time the audacity was epic. She'd had a long writer's block. What a grandiose way to explain it! And I still felt very sympathetic to her. I also thought she was basically right: AIDS did take a major toll on the Arts. And I also felt sort of oddly honored: as a hetero male, I loved her two books, Social Studies and Metropolitan Life, as soon as they came out. I knew no other person who even liked her, in suburban Los Angeles. My ego mentally lumped myself in with the gays who survived.

Here are some quotes from her. 

Lebowitz often made me think of her as a reincarnation of Oscar Wilde, who once said that the opening night for his new play didn't go so well because "the audience flopped."

                                                              Wilde

Poetry

I can't escape the idea that "meaning" in Modern poetry derives in a considerable part from good will on the part of the Readers.

The Audience for Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land

I've been reading on "reception theory" and wondering about this book, which has captured the imagination of Heinlein's readers in a way that baffled him. His readers "made" their meanings and often the writer was aghast. This fascinates me. I got hold of a bunch of books from the library to try to flesh this out, and stumbled onto Carole Cusack's Invented Religions. Cusack says some critics were "disturbed" that The Church of All Worlds and the Fosterites were meant to symbolize the Dionysian and Apollonian in the public mind, but that "the two churches are almost indistinguishable."

"Critics are also uncertain as to whether Heinlein's positive portrayal of Mike and the CAW is parodic; another possibility is that the novel's elusive genre (variously described as novel, satire, anatomy, myth and parable) means that the meaning of the CAW has to be decided by readers, depending on their assessment of the genre of Stranger." -p.59 

I have only read this book once, but have delved into bits of it at other times. When I read it cover-to-cover I thought it a quasi-Ayn Randian book, but better written. This was at least twenty years ago. I had known that some feminists had applauded Heinlein's depiction of strong, rational, independent  women, but I also thought Jubal was a bit of a blowhard; he just wasn't someone I admired, although clearly I was supposed to. My politics were different then, and I want to re-read the book again this year, if only to notice more clearly this problem of "genre," which fascinates me. Cusack compares Heinlein to Robert Anton Wilson: "Heinlein, like Robert Anton Wilson, was a lifelong agnostic, believing that to affirm that there is no God was a silly and unsupported as to affirm that there was a God." 

This notion of not being able to place a book in a genre immediately draws me to the book. It's one of the main reasons why I became such a devoted reader of Robert Anton Wilson. The mercurial, trans-generic, one-off-ness of his books - as I saw them - was an inherent value to me. 

Speaking of Cusack, who seems to be doing sociology of religion in Sydney, her first chapter in the book is on Discordianism, and her citations include not only Principia Discordia and Thornley's Zenarchy, but Conspiracy Theories in American History (2 vols, I hadn't seen these until today); Adam Gorightly's book on Thornley, The Prankster and the Conspiracy; Alan Watts's Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen; Adler's famous Drawing Down the Moon; and my friend Eric Wagner's An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, which she cites five times.

Fran Lebowitz on homosexuality: