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| One question which is hard to avoid when looking at current politics (at least in developed countries) is: why does one side (usually the "conservative" side) seem so crazy, as though they were dialling in from an alternative reality? It may be blatant, as with many high-profile American Republicans and Rob Ford, or it may be more subtle (why is the Canadian Conservative Party so fixated on extending sentences and increasing penalties when every serious study shows that that Just Doesn't Work?). If you look at the history of the conservative / progressive split over a reasonable period of time (say, three to five centuries) it's reasonably clear that it would be almost as accurate to label the first group "rural" and the second "urban". Issues may change, but the type of distribution of the heartland of these positions remains fixed: the Cavaliers were country squires (largely) and the Roundheads were largely backed by Cits. (These are broad generalizations: Cromwell was from the fens and there were urban sophisticated Filmerians; but as broad blocks, the rural/urban split applies.) You could say the same of the Tories and Reformers in the mid-19th century fights over the Corn Laws. It's certainly true of the American Red State / Blue State divide and of the relative bases of support for the major Canadian parties. (It can get complicated where there are areas which are "rural" but industrialized, such as some mining districts, where dominant opinion can be leftish -- as with some areas in northern England which support Labour). However, it's been generally true in the past that it was hard to paint one side as "crazy". There have always been kooks in all areas of the spectrum, but Peel and Disraeli led parties with policies no crazier than those of Palmerston, Gladstone and Salisbury. The "Big Tent" parties of the middle of the 20th century were dominated by leaders with differing opinions but a largely consistent view of the world (many of Nixon's policies with regard to, for example, public health and foreign affairs were more like those of Lyndon Johnson than like anything now supported by the Republican Party). So where does the current strain of frothing-at-the-mouth crazy come from? Or, in a milder form, bullheaded support for positions which have no substantive support from people who have any knowledge in the areas (climate change, penal reform, public health) and which tend to alienate the voters in the centre whom these people ought to be courting to establish/extend a majority? I have a thesis. I think these people are relying on "common sense", and we've reached a stage where "common sense" has failed badly, irrevocably, and permanently. A couple of centuries ago, everyone ran things based on "common sense". Oh, we all knew that our senses couldn't be trusted as regards the non-movingness of the earth, but that didn't affect everyday life much. ("Common sense" tends towards Aristotelian rather than Newtonian mechanics, but that didn't affect many people: only a few people did ballistics or calculated planetary orbits.) We've had a succession of well-established results since then that violate "common sense" but give us a much better picture of how the world works. Some of these are abstract and don't affect everyday life much (Relativity, Quantum Mechanics: you can use transistors and GPS without understanding the theory). Some of them are practical -- notably well-established results in macroeconomics (restraint in recessions and tariff barriers to protect jobs both sound so sensible), cognitive psychology (just what is the real relationship between consciousness and responsibility?), and climatology (anthropogenic global warming models which involve large cascade effects from small triggers). There are all sorts of studies which show that, in the aggregate, the "common sense" approach of increasing penalties does not reduce problems related to "antisocial behaviour", ranging from Prohibition to the War on Drugs to DUI. Strict child discipline produces worse results than a tolerant and flexible approach. Then there's a second set of well-established results, which don't violate baseline "common sense" but make things a lot more complex: evolution and modern genetics; reassessments of historical narratives; textual criticism of scriptures, the recognition of contextual and historical complexities in familiar texts. If you grew up accepting simpler versions of any of these (and who doesn't? Even I don't answer my 10-year old daughter's questions with "it's complicated" every time) learning about them can seem just as much violations of one's gut sense of how things are as learning about quantum causality. This second process dates back to the 17th Century: the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes is probably it's starting point. It accelerates in the 19th century when Schleiermacher and Lessing help the whole process along. For good or ill, there's now a consensus reality established by research which has many, many divergences from one grounded in "common sense". It's still a pretty broad reality: you can accept all of the firmly-grounded research findings and be, say, an orthodox Christian (though you have to have a nuanced view of, for example, inspiration and theodicy, and you're pretty much required to hold with a deus absconditus for the most part) or a conservative as regards school curriculum (there's space to argue for a canon reinforcing and reinforced by a common culture, but you have to be careful setting up your premises). There's a large chunk of the population which is firmly wedded to "common sense". In their day-to-day lives this may not have massive consequences (depending on what they do), but it produces support for political positions which are not merely reactionary (seeking to put genies back in bottles) but fantastic (ignoring that many of the bottles never really existed in the first place). These people are disproportionately rural (more urban occupations require confronting one aspect or another of the newer worldview) despite that fact that there's nothing essentially rural about the view (there are lots of Torontonians who still support Rob Ford) and disproportionately older. | ||||||||
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Sunt Lacrimae Rerum
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May 9th, 2012
April 24th, 2012
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| A number of profiles of the national Harper Conservatives have noted that it has an aim to "shift the country to the right" with a fundamental realignment. Two events yesterday highlighted how this is not happening -- and how it's as a result of self-inflicted wounds. The first was the unexpected defeat of the Wildrose Party in Alberta; much of this has been attributed to the negative feedback from a couple of social conservative candidates who were, um, too honest about their views on sexual orientation and ethnicity, combined with the fact that their libertarian leader wouldn't rein them in / disown them. (Harper undoubtedly has members of his caucus who agree with them, but he's got such a degree of control that it's worth their political life to speak out of turn, even on much less flammable issues. This doesn't bode well for the CPC once Harper departs and they have a less extreme control freak in power.) The second was the Liberal/NDP agreement which will put off an election in Ontario and shift the overall tone of the budget slightly (ever so slightly) to the left. Despite the fact that the budget was ideologically a fairly (small-c) conservative document, with dominant themes largely similar to the National CPC budget (restraint, cutbacks -- it took a lot of arm-twisting to get McGuinty to agree to a minor tax-the-rich provision, and even then it's a temporary surtax aimed at paying down the deficit), the PCs rendered themselves irrelevant almost instantly by simply refusing to have anything to do with it. Hudak's version of combining electoral opportunism (backing local control except when he doesn't over things like, oh, subways) and refusal to work in a compromise mode is pushing the provincial policies further away from the right (only minimally, though -- I'm sure the Tories will be happy to back the government in confrontation with the teachers' unions.[1]), or, at least, ensuring that the government is going to be defining itself as "centrist against the right" rather than "centrist against the left". Toronto has the most right-wing executive in decades, and they can't get their act together. (The first budget was the easy one: I predict that given the greater weakness of the Ford administration and now that the relatively low-hanging fruit has been taken, next budget will end up with far less in the way of belt-tightening.) Of course, much of that is Ford's peculiarly self-neutering approach to governance, but he's not helped by allies like Mammoliti and Holyday who manage to emit utterances which are guaranteed to alienate anyone not already in his base. There's an argument to be made that the gap between "mainstream" Canadian opinion (even in Alberta) and that of the core social conservative base (largely rural) on which the Conservatives depend has become wide enough that (as in the US) there are almost two different consensus realities in play. The national conservatives have managed to get into power by putting these differences on display only in ways which don't get a lot of play in the way that explicit statements do (see: long-form census, climate policies which don't actually involve outright denial but favour Big Oil, immigration reform which can be described as "adverse effect discrimination" without showing outright explicit bigotry, cutting support for "fringe" players in the NGO arena such as environmentalist groups or KAIROS, changing SSHRC and NSERC grant policies, etc.); but they're a constant limit on their appeal in the urban core of Canada where the majority of the population lives. It's a little bit like the problem that long-term governments have of being "in the bubble", except that Smith and Hudak aren't in government, and the reality they live in imposes critical levels of blindness through their own choices. [1] Who supports the government against the Doctors is another question. That might actually have a more NDP/left populist appeal. | ||||||||
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April 18th, 2012
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| I find it amusing that, on the relative heels of Christopher Priest's characterization of Rule 34 as resembling an Internet Puppy, Adam Roberts (who has his own history of tut-tuttery, but at least as much critical heft as Priest) characterizes it as "not only the most entertaining book on the list, but arguably, within its admittedly narrow parameters, the most fully accomplished". Other rankings are equally different. (Roberts' review of the Clarke shortlist is well worth reading: the first three at http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2 | ||||||||||
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April 16th, 2012
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| A regular refrain in the the discussion going on hosted by Charlie Stross on Amazon's e-book strategy is little paeans to the Amazon recommendations; which I find odd, because from my experience Amazon recommendations fail badly, in a number of ways. If you want a broad abstract analysis, Tom Slee had a good article on diversity in an Amazon-style recommendation system. What I've noticed is a set of concrete examples of issues.
The one area I've sometimes found Amazon useful is in popular science books in disciplines in which I'm not a specialist but am mildly interested. I think Melvin Konner's The Evolution of Childhood originally showed up as an Amazon recommendation. But the useful recommendations are few and far between. | ||||||||
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April 11th, 2012
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| A while back there was some complaining about the Clarke shortlist, to which response has been varied, to say the least (one spinoff via Catherynne Valente leading to a broad discussion of online fora and sexism, another generating Internet Puppy t-shirts). And there have been the usual complaints about the Hugo shortlist as well. One of the sub-themes of all of this is the riff that nominations are being given for fan-pleasing characteristics rather than for "quality". Which, of course, raises the question: how is having a characteristic of pleasing fans not in some meaningful sense "quality"? To deal with that, I think we have to go back to thinking about the implications of "genre". Genre begins somewhere in the ancient world. It doesn't begin with a pre-defined logical set of categories, nor -- emphatically -- does it ever begin with the first work in a genre. It begins with the second work. We don't define genres by means of rules until we have a lot of samples for critics to work on; we define them by the characteristic that works in a genre are in conversation with previous works. Epic gets defined not by Homer, but by the Nostoi, and the Argonautica, and most especially, for us, by Virgil. The Aeneid picks up some traits of the Iliad and the Odyssey which then become the defining traits of epic afterwards (dactylic hexameter, extended similes, epithets, set combat scenes, beginning in medias res, etc., etc.). The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for elegies, or odes, or the Greek Novel. For Science Fiction and Fantasy (or Mystery, or Horror) and other modern genres, the same basic principle applies. One of the reasons that it's so hard to define where SF ends or hard SF ends is that what makes a work SF is that it's in conversation with prior SF works, even if only implicitly. Sometimes the binding is tight, as with, say, the relationship between Stross's Saturn's Children and late Heinlein, or Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis and Asimov's (original) Foundation stories. Most of the time it's more general. Most space opera is in some way a response to the Lensman books, even if at several removes. Usually, themes are drawn in from a whole cloud of background sources: works about intrasystem sublight exploration, or genetically cloned servants/slaves, or parallel universes with branching histories all respond to an extend a web of previous works which make use of those tropes. This is one major reason why certain sorts of "crossovers" don't wear the SF label very comfortably -- works by mainstream authors who make use of tropes (one is tempted to say "appropriate", but the tropes are frequently drawn from nonfiction sources, not from random SFnal ones) without being in that sort of a conversation with prior works of SF. So A Handmaid's Tale, or Jurassic Park, or On the Beach don't integrate really well (although works can be adopted after the fact). By contrast, previously non-genre authors who are well-read in the genre don't need magic passwords to get in, even if they bring in themes which are non-genre along: not only is Out of the Silent Planet in conversation with Wells, but Lewis was a reader of the pulp SF of the period. The work which creates modern heroic fantasy as a genre isn't really The Lord of the Rings; it's probably The Sword of Shanarra, which proved that you could drop many traits of LOTR while slavishly imitating a restricted subset of them and be a commercial success. (Quests, elves, magic trinkets, halflings, Dark Lords). It's notable how hard it seems to be for fantasy to get away from that subset (not, for instance, picking up Tolkien's heavily elegiac tone): for all of the existence of other potential progenitors (Dunsany, Cabell, Mirrlees) only a limited subset of other strains really took off until fairly recently. (The major competitor was the grittier (thieves, mercenaries, and urban settings abound) and much more episodic sword and sorcery tradition of Conan, Elric, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, etc., which is responsible via cross-breeding, frequently via RPGs which drew on both sources, with the larger scale of heroic fantasy for today's grittier writers such as Erickson, Abercrombie, and Martin). Prior to Martin's breakout in the ake of the HBO adaptations, the really big fantasy sellers -- Brooks, Eddings, Jordan -- all could be slotted fairly comfortably into a slot as "post-Tolkienian". (Martin acknowledges a debt to Tolkien but the nature of his action which draws heavily on different tropes imported from the historical novel makes him more "in dialogue with" than "derivative". You could write a Martin-style book about periods in Tolkien's background -- the Kin-Strife in Gondor, perhaps, or some periods in later Numenorean history, but it wouldn't look much like LOTR.) I see a lot more radiating going on now, but I think that much of it isn't a result of hearking back to lost elements in LOTR or other fantasy progenitors, but rather the effects of cross-pollination with "literary" concerns and with historical fiction. "Literary" fiction is as much a genre (actually, a set of genres: the Fielding - Austen - James - Joyce - Powell trajectory of the classic novel is somewhat distinct from the Radcliffe - (Emily) Bronte - Collins romance tradition which eventually contributes to both modern romance and mystery genres, and both are distinct from the parodic tradition derived from Swift and Sterne whose recent exponents include Pynchon, Wallace, and Stephenson) as SF is: it's "in dialogue with" a longer list of core works (it's older) including those in Leavis' "Great Tradition" (well, Fielding, Austen and Eliot at least; I don't think many authors these days feel any need to be in dialogue with D.H. Lawrence), plus Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Hardy, Thackeray, Powell, James... These works look a lot like SF from a distance. Unlike epic, the lines go to the edge of the page, they are divided into chapters, and they make use of the same broad types of narratorial models. However, the core characteristics of literary fiction (and in particular the novel) are not those of SF: ideas are less important (Eliot said of James that "James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it"), prose style as an end in itself is much more so, events themselves are downplayed and inner reactions to events take the foreground. This genetic way of defining genre, of course, allows for all sorts of crossovers. A novel can be in equal dialogue with exemplars from different traditions (it's possible to Imagine a Dance to the Music of Time analogue set on Barrayar, and there is much excellent work being done these days which draws heavily on the developed techniques of the novel while thematically remaining in close dialogue with the SF and Fantasy genres (consider Roberts, Valente, Mièville)). But it's not required for an SF novel to be in much of a dialogue with the literary tradition to be a reasonable nominee for an SF award. Rule 34 would never even be in the running for an award within the literary genre; but pace Christopher Priest, it's a reasonable nominee for the Clarke award, because it's strong in one of the core SF areas (ideas within a particular set of fields) and combines that with good readability. (Clarke's books themselves don't exactly give off literary emanations, hmmm?). Of course, it's frequently a mark of Really Ambitious Books that they do try to use a broader set of referents (whether they succeed or not is a different question), and it's usually a mark of a good author that they edit their prose to a reasonable degree of tautness (I'm looking at Connie Willis here.). You can (and I frequently do) feel that, well, no, the best SF novel of the year didn't win the Hugo, or the Nebula, or the Clarke. It's also reasonable, sometimes, to emit a what were they thinking? noise when a particularly good novel doesn't even get into the nominees in a year which is not entirely stellar nominees. However, decrying the whole state of the awards because novels with qualities relevant to the literary genre are being beaten out by works without those qualities is not really called for. | ||||||||||
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March 30th, 2012
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| In one sense, it's high time, but the government doesn't seem to have thought things through cleanly. Or if they have, they haven't been entirely up front about it. Cents will still be used for electronic payments and for bills of exchange. Only cash transactions will involve rounding up or down. "If businesses round cash transactions to the nearest five-cent increment, any gains or losses relating to cash transactions (a maximum of two cents per transaction) will balance out over time", says the Government of Canada website. Except that they won't. For purchases in the two-to-ten dollar range, where businesses frequently don't allow debit purchases, maybe (although microtransaction cards may mess that up, as well). And for people who pay bank fees on a per-transaction basis, maybe not. But people who have a debit card backed by an account with a high enough balance to escape fees will tend, if only marginally, to pay cash when rounding would be down, and pay by debit when rounding would be up. Not on every transaction, of course; but I would expect there to be a broad bias over large numbers of transactions against the merchant and in favour of the customer. $12.02 purchases will tend to be paid in cash, with values rounded down to $12.00, but $12.03 purchases will be paid in debit to avoid the rounding-up to $12.05. The answer is reasonably obvious -- to have prices set so that they will be an even multiple of 5 after tax. This can be done easily enough if every item is purchased separately: in Ontario, with an HST of 13%, a 1.77 purchase is $2.00 plus a mill (rounded off) after tax. However, with an prime factor as the percentage multiplier, there will be an exact match only every $5.00, i.e. 65 cents in tax; which means that the tax payable will be slightly different depending on what combinations one buys in. There is a real solution to this, of course, which is to have businesses post prices including tax as rounded values. This can be done with the HST, as it's not restricted by the constitutional limitations which require that provincial sales taxes be posted and visible, but it's currently not popular with businesses, which would much rather post a lower price and bump it up at the till. (Some stores, like the LCBO, post a blended price at rounded values. The LCBO is not going to have problems with this.) The abolition of the penny may be just the shove that's needed to get merchants to post the price you will pay rather than the price before tax -- because otherwise they will lose out, on average, over a large set of transactions. | ||||||||
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March 29th, 2012
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| 1) If imposing conditions of work is not considered a ground for striking, it's hard to imagine what would be. 2) Internet puppies are obviously the future. (Seriously. if you haven't read Rule 34, there is an MMPB due out in late June.) 3) I've been expecting a rise in pensionable / retirement age for years; the (Canadian) Conservatives have now delivered. (For the record, I expect retirement age to reach 70 by the time I'm 67.) 4) My 10-year-old daughter has taken to watching a particularly vapid subset of the products of the Disney Channel movies (e.g. Geek Charming, Sixteen Wishes, Another Cinderella Story). Does anyone know anything (on DVD) which subverts this in such a way as to be attractive to a 10-year-old? I'm not looking for alternative themes (e.g. Girls Kick Ass as Well as Boys): I mean something which starts out looking like the sub-genre effectively enough to suck a 10-year-old in but subverts it while remaining appealing to the target audience. | ||||||||
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March 21st, 2012
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| ... well, two closely related ones, actually. I do not understand WTF Ford can be thinking. First, there was his reaction to the report late last week: dismissing it as "biased" and "hogwash" before it was released. It would have been so much better for his "side" if he had waited until Monday and claimed to be dismissing it after reading it. And then there was his only contribution to today;s debate -- moving a reconvening in early April; a move which was bound to fail, and did, and contributed nothing to the debate at all, even at the level of his brother or Giorgio Mammoliti. It's bizarro-world enough at City Hall, with right-wing counsellors pushing for new taxes and left-wing ones pushing for fiscal prudence. Ford seems to be stranded: he can't back his allies (because they want taxes) or the centrists (because they're putting transit in the middle of roads, and in any case he probably hates Stintz with a fiery hate right now). | ||||||||
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February 13th, 2012
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| I have seen far too many repetitions recently (like this) of the idea that putting in LRTs is somehow intrinsically inferior to subways. I'm not even going to go into the details of the obvious point -- that it would be inappropriate and wasteful to massively overbuild where projected demand out to 2050 is insufficient. (Maybe if we lived in a post-scarcity society... but we don't.) And I won't point out that the people whom Mayor Ford really means when he talks about "people" wanting subways aren't the poor saps waiting for the fourth overcrowded Finch bus in a row, who'd be happy to have anything which carried a significantly higher number of people at even a marginally greater speed, but the motorists on the roads who don't take transit in any case. What I will point out, because nobody seems to have done so, is that there is a set of people you can point to, and blame, for the fact that Etobicoke and Scarborough will get little in the way of subway service[1]. It's the urban planners who allowed Toronto's "inner suburbs" to sprawl at low density during the 1950s-1990s. If we'd had planners -- and it would have had to be at the provincial level, not city, because of the Vespra problem[2] -- who were willing to require development up to a reasonable level of density (while reserving space for dedicated transit) and encourage the sort of mixed-use zoning which tends to generate "vibrant" communities, there would be much better transit now, and fewer people having to commute for two hours or so from the edge of Scarborough. And the higher densities might even support subway service. [1] They have a bit, along the Bloor-Danforth line. Just not very much. [2]Barrie tried to prohibit the building of sprawling malls to protect its downtown. The builders simply went outside the city borders to the neighbouring townships and built there. | ||||||||
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February 6th, 2012
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FROM Clee to heaven the beacon burns, Look left, look right, the hills are bright, Now, when the flame they watch not towers To skies that knit their heartstrings right, It dawns in Asia, tombstones show We pledge in peace by farm and town 'God save the Queen' we living sing, Oh, God will save her, fear you not: *Well, sixty. But for sixty it requires Kipling, which doesn't have quite the right tone. | ||||||||
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November 17th, 2011
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Snarfed from : ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small} chickenfeet2003Instructions 1. Open up your music player. Hit shuffle. 2. Record the first few words of the first 20 songs that come up that do not give away the name of the song. Skip instrumentals, but don't skip the embarrassing ones. 3. Make hapless LJ denizens guess the song names and artists. Google is cheating. 4. Least hapless LJ denizen wins admiration. 1.Und der Engel sprach zu ihnen. 2. From stormy windes 3. Saeviat tellus inter rigores 4. Spiritus nonis, Domine 5. Wir singen dir in deinem Heer 6. Angeli, Archangeli 7 I met a man whose brother said he knew a man 8. There were shepherds abiding 9. Duo seraphim clamabant 10. Kyrie eleison 11. Eram quasi agnus 12.Populus Sion, ecce Dominus veniet 13. Angelus Domini nunciavit Mariae 14. Dixit Dominus Domino meo 15. O Sancte Sebastiane 16. Te decus virgineum 17. Resurrexi et adhuc tecum 18 Bereitet die wege, bereitet die Bahn 19. Salve flos tusce 20. From harmony, from heavenly harmony I am afraid that with very few exceptions getting the artist will be impossible. | ||||||||
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November 7th, 2011
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| Yesterday's lection in the RCL was (and has been since the Common Lectionary was introduced) the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins: it's the beginning of a more apocalyptic, or at least judgement-focused, shift in Year A (next up is the parable of the Talents, followed by the Sheep and the Goats on the Sunday Next Before Advent / Feast of Christ the King). There are really only two hymns I know for the gospel. One was in the old English Hymnal, but is not in the New English Hymnal: it's a 19th-century translation of a Greek 8th-century original, set to a very nice Tallis tune originally composed for Archbishop Parker's Psalter, and isn't the one I'm interested in here[1]. The olther is a Philip Nikolai hymn which has been translated into English several times: Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. The hymn is helped a great deal by the fact that there is a Bach chorale harmonization of the tune, as well as a Cantata (BWV 140) built around it. The interesting thing is why there's a Lutheran hymn that was major enough for Bach to build a cantata around. Many people these days assume that it was an Advent piece, but the parable has never, to my knowledge, been an Advent lection.[2] Prior to the three-year lectionary in the 20th century it seems to have been a Sunday lection only in the Lutheran order of service.[3] The Calendar for what is usually referred to as Ordinary Time ("Tempus per Ordinarium") has a problem. The Christian year begins within four days of St. Andrew's Day with the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which is essentially, modulo the lunar week, a solar date. But it has a large block of movable time beginning (in the old calendar) with Septuagesima and ending with Corpus Christi (Sacred Heart, if you want to be finicky about it, but Corpus frequently gets transferred to the following Sunday and Sacred Heart doesn't). This block is centred on Easter, which is determined by the relationship between the vernal equinox and the phases of the moon, and it has a range of almost five weeks variability (Septuagesima can be as early as January 19 and as late as Feb 20[4]). Traditionally, this was dealt with by having a long set of Sundays after Epiphany and patching unused ones between the second-last Sunday after Pentecost/Trinity[5] with specified lections (Trinity 24/Pentecost 23) and the Sunday Next Before Advent. (The modern calendar assigns every Sunday at least one date within a week's span, but provides pairs of dates before/after the Easter block, so that Sundays which drop off before Lent (Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quniquagesima having gone the way of all flesh) reappear right after Pentecost; Sundays at the end of the Church year are therfore always the same for the same year in the three-year cycle.) The Lutherans seem to have done something different. At some point the German Lutherans (or at least those in Leipzig, although the pattern seems to be rather more widespread) assigned a set of new lections to the end of Trinity season. One of these was the Wise and Foolish Virgins, assigned to Trinity 27 -- which is why Bach wrote a Cantata for the Sunday (and it may very well be why Nikolai chose to use the text as the basis for a Chorale in the first place). [1] My guess is that it's been dropped because you have to have an extremely serious-minded congregation, these days, to sing a hymn which begins "Behold, the bridegroom cometh in the middle of the night". [2]One of the volumes of Carols for Choirs suggests Zion hört, the second verse, as a part of the Advent Carol Service derived from King's College Cambridge. [3] I'm sure if I hunted around in the old missal I could find it used somewhere, but it's not a Sunday lection. [4] This means that the extended Christmas cycle, which ends with Candlemas on February 2, can overlap with the extended Easter cycle. Older settings of the propers include a tract as an alternative to the Alleluia for Candlemas for this reason. [5]Pentecost for Roman and very advaced Anglo-Catholics; Trinity for Anglicans and Lutherans. | ||||||||
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November 1st, 2011
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| This morning on Metro Morning, CBC once again (they've done this before, many times) seriously misused the term "alleged". They were dealing with a criminal case and made reference not only to the "alleged perpetrator" but to "the alleged victim". Now, I understand why they want to use "alleged" for the accused: if he's not found guilty, it would be libelllous simply to refer to him as the perpetrator. (It would still be better just to follow legal use and say accused rather than alleged, but we'll let that pass.) However, in this case it was very clear that the victim was a victim of violence -- who committed the violence may not be determined fully, but it is certain, based on published medical evidence, that he was a victim of violence. This isn't a case of someone (say) claiming to be abducted where it turns out that they've been having a holiday in the Berkshires. So he is "the victim", outright, not "the alleged victim". I'll allow "his alleged victim", which is borderline, since it can correctly be taken to modify "his" or incorrectly taken to modify "victim" -- but not "the alleged victim". ETA: The Globe and Mail is also guilty of this. | ||||||||
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October 27th, 2011
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According to this CBC report, Ford not only called 911 twice when confronted with This Hour Has 22 Minutes' Marg, Warrior Princess (evincing cluelessness not only in his reaction, but ignorance of the difference between calling police and calling a number set aside for genuine emergencies) but verbally abused the dispatchers: "Sources say Ford turned on the dispatcher, yelling: 'You … bitches! Don’t you f--king know? I’m Rob f--king Ford, the mayor of this city!'".Appearing on CBC News Network on Thursday morning, CBC reporter DaveWords fail. The probability that he's going to get dinged by the police the next time somebody catches him using his cellphone while driving probably just went way up. | ||||||||
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October 20th, 2011
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| I'm not going to comment on the film Anonymous, mainly because I haven't seen it, nor do I intend to see it. However, I'll make a couple of notes regarding the authorship issue. 1) One of the books that anyone who wants to pronounce on the matter should read first is T.W. Baldwin's William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greek (which I read about 30 years ago, but we'll skip over the length of the intervening time, shall we?). A quick search shows that the entire text of the book is available at the University of Illinois Press website. (The basic conclusion can be summarized by saying that Shakespeare was better educated in Latin than a typical graduate with a BA in classics today. Ben Jonson was much better educated and probably had a right to make the point from personal experience (cf. the irritation of "would he had blotted a thousand"[1]), but he was also self-instructed.) 2) On the matter of trying to derive authorial background from the plays: this is much broader than the authorship question. Leaving aside the 19th-century attempts to read the sequence of plays as a crib for biography (Shakespeare was depressed and published tragedies, etc.) and the arguments over his religion, there's a long history of people trying to argue that Shakespeare was X during the "lost years" because of how extensive his knowledge of some particular area was. Since the areas are ... heterogeneous, shall we say, they are arguments for nothing more than the futility of trying to read Shakespeare's life out of the plays. It's an easy trap to fall into. Consider Love's Labours Lost, for example. Quite aside from the whole discussion of the School of Night (and whether it ties into other controversies of the time) you would have to have half your wits removed not to notice that the treatment of Rosaline echoes the Dark Woman of the sonnets. It's a useful observation, if you want to discuss thematic and stylistic traits across works; but I've seen people tempted to try to read LLL biographically as a result. (The assumption being underpinned by the further common but unfounded assumption that the sonnets just because they are lyrics must be direct reflections of Shakespeare's life). 3) The Oxfordians (actually, just about anyone other than the Baconians, as Bacon outlived Shakespeare) have to base a chunk of their arguments on redating the plays, since Oxford died in 1604. It's worth pointing out that the standard dating of the plays, complete with error bars, is not dependent in any way on assumptions regarding Shakespeare's authorship, and only minimally on an argument from developing style. Some plays are anchored by external references to performances, or via publication; some by internal references within the plays to public events which would have been familiar to the audience at the time of performance (this, of course, works strictly for the copy-text, as a reference might be added on revision for a later performance). Frequently sources determine a terminus post quem by their availability. A few are based on performance factors (the building of Blackfriars, or the availability of a performing bear). 4) If you want to have fun with Shakespeare's life and works, there's lots of precedent for doing it in a way which doesn't make you out to be an ignorant idiot. Everyone has been citing Stoppard's screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, but I'll throw in another example: Elizabeth Bear's Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth. In other words, make what you're doing obviously a riff on history rather than an attempt to rewrite it. [1] Regarding a bit of Julius Caesar which is not in our received text. | ||||||||
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September 27th, 2011
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| ... no, not John Constantine, the other one. It's interesting reading "chronologically backward". I've just been reading Charles Norris Cochrane's Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine -- which is, let me stress, still a valuable and worthwhile resource, especially for its treatment of the classical background, even though it was published in the mid-1940s. (Cochrane was a classicist by discipline.) However, I had previously read Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians, which focusses on the pre-Constantinian period and finishes with a treatment of Constantine, as well as several more recent studies of the Christianisation of the empire such as Peter Brown's Authority and the Sacred. Cochrane represents the normative narrative against which the later authors' positions are set, and although many of the items remain the same, the overall picture changes remarkably with a change in perspective. The later writers draw on the same prominent authors from the period as principal sources, but draw more heavily on lower-level "social history" data where it can be determined. In both cases, there's a reaction against identifying a core orthodox Christianity with a prominent "rigorist" perspective. In both cases, there is an argument that the rigorist view which is visible throughout the period -- Tertullian is an early example at an extreme -- is not representative of the Church as a whole at least until relatively late on, near or after the time of Augustine. Most Christians during the pre-Constantinian period were more flexible, and less idealized (and less like the members of a small vehement fringe movement) than we would have said a century ago; many converts to Christianity under Constantine were flexible and "worldly" not because their conversion was "surface" or incomplete but because the Church which they joined already had a sizeable flexible and worldly component. Accordingly, where Cochrane sees, say, Lactantius as a figure who imcompletely absorbs Christianity because of his continuing attachment to a classical, Roman philosophical view Brown argues that there's a couple of generations (at least -- and probably more in the East where later discontinuities were less marked politically) in which one "mainstream" (and theologically orthodox, along Nicene lines -- we aren't worrying about the Catholic/Arian split here) Christian current was much more tolerant of continuing social patterns which were part of the structure of society than what eventually became the case.[1] The other big difference is in the treatment of Constantine. Where Cochrane sees him as a "surface" quasi-convert, Fox makes a strong argument for him as a strong convert (to the version of Christianity which blends classicism and orthodoxy). This is actually a significant difference -- because Cochrane's view of Constantine in the context of his competitors makes the adoption by the Empire of Christianity seem like an almost inevitable thing: if it was strong enough to hold on during the persecution under Diocletian, it was a significant enough power bloc that it had to be admitted into the arena of the licit and engaged as an imperial support rather than an adversary. In the alternative narrative, there was rather less inevitability about it -- we're far more in the domain of pure contingency, with changes hinging on the personal views of one man. [1] This isn't necessarily even as much a change in Christianity as a change in the environment -- where the Church had to take over holding the social structure together, in the West, where there was a power vacuum, there was no longer a strong classical civic tradition to rely on, and the new overlords certainly were not steeped in it. With no balancing strong cultural tradition on the other side figures like Boethius or Fortunatus become odd survivals and have no successors. | ||||||||
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September 22nd, 2011
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| This year's Making Light Dysfunctional Families Day[1] post prodded me to put together some things I've noted about the idea of deference. A couple of centuries ago, deference was a structural part of how society (in the West, at least) was run. Everyone had their place and unless you were absolutely on top of the heap there were people whom you deferred to, and the deferential relationships were a large part of the formal structure of society. If you look at accounts like The Making of the English Working Class you can see several corollaries of this:
But we don't structure society like that any more. Formally, the extension of the vote has not only enfranchised the workers, but it has been accompanied by the replacement of networks of social deference with economic dependencies: our money comes from corporate employers (meaning that even the senior executives are formally in a parallel rather than a higher level, as co-employees). Many of us expect to mingle as relative equals with people "above us" in our employment scale once work is over. The "parson" is now frequently shepherding a congregation many of whom are equally-or-better educated and who are not likely at all to react in a "Father knows best" manner. The Tories no longer champion the landed establishment: they support "small business owners" (read: petit bourgeoisie). Deference at an adult level is now mainly an optional kind of social varnish: for every person who thinks that the PM or the Queen or "captains of industry" should be deferred to there are probably several who would disagree. (The use of the term "deference" to refer to a recognition of a genuine expert's expertise in an area is really a different thing.) However... Many people have retained the deference model in terms of how to bring up children. It made (pragmatic) sense to inculcate deferential behaviour in children when they would have to continue showing that behaviour all their lives. It makes none now. Deference (as distinct from politeness) is not an adult social skill (or it's not supposed to be: there are workplaces which are exploitative not only economically but socially and co-dependent family relationships which subordinate one partner or the other -- these exist, and some people (Southern Baptists wrt women, for example) think of them as desirable in some cases, but such positions are frowned upon by society as a whole)). But many people still expect that the norm for children to relate to adults is a deferential one, even though this is no longer a preparation for life. Many (not by any means all) of the life stories on the ML thread seem to me to reflect just this sort of breakdown -- parents who are upset at any failure of deference and who are willing to go to great lengths in reacting to it -- especially when expressed by adults whse resources in dealing with a failure of expectations are not good -- are angry, or easily outraged, or have dependency problems, or the like. Schools are an odd mixture. The typical classroom structure is designed to produce effective wage slaves, modelled on industrial work[2]. It depends for control on children's deference to the teacher, even though the emphasis is not on producing deferent but obedient workers. They're appallingly bad at producing real knowledge workers, because they don't have the resources to provide the one-on-one attention required to foster and train up intelligent critical thought. If we want to address this sort of thing systemically then we need not only to provide counselling and support resources on a large scale, but also explicitly address the obsolescence of the adult/child dynamic which shapes those relationships. [1] Which I follow but do not contribute to: I have been lucky in having supportive, non-angry, intelligent, not-too-intrusive parents (and grandparents) and sane siblings. I can't say as much for my relations with my peers at school in public school, where I had variants of the usual geek/outsider problems, but that wasn't a family thing. [2] During the early industrial revolution factory employers did not like hiring adults who had not been trained to factory work as children because their mode of work and capacity for extended repetitive tasks did not match factory production. The classroom model of the 19th and 20th century school ensured that children would have those abilities without the need for child labour to inculcate them. | ||||||||
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September 19th, 2011
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| I have seen several articles over the last few months setting out Harper's ambition as being one of reformulating the Canadian political dynamic to that Conservatism becomes the dominant/default ethos. I'm going to translate that into practical terms as "he'll view himself as successful if he retires while in office and if his successor wins at least one election at a majority level following his retirement (with no intervening losses, but an intervening minority government is OK)" (a nice concrete metric). How easily is this achievable? Wel'l let's take a look at, oh, the last seventy years. At the federal level, we have, hmm, King (followed by St-Laurent, check) and Pearson (followed by Trudeau, check). That's it. At the Ontario level, we don't do a lot better. Frost (followed by Robarts, check), Robarts (followed by Davis, check). Both during the same time period of WWII followed by extended economic expansion (at end of term, for King, who started much earlier). This is not that easy to do -- but it's effectively what Harper's ambitions translate to. (Social change is probably way beyond his reach. Government tends to follow social change, laggardly, rather than vice-versa, and social change is driven by a mass of factors most of which are beyond government (especially the Federal Government, given only s. 91 powers plus the spending power). | ||||||||
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September 15th, 2011
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| Everything that can be said has probably been said about OSC's butchered^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H retold version of Shakespeare's Hamlet. However, the discussion reminded me of something: the Hamlet story goes back a long way and has some odd extensions (consider non-fiction works like Hamlet's Mill). One of its tendrils was a retelling by James Branch Cabell which went back far more closely to the original: Hamlet Had An Uncle. (The link goes to a Google Books partial preview of the print-only Wildside Press edition.) It is very Cabellian in style: "Hamlet was that son whom the loving endeavors of Geruth and Fengon had begotten in the bed of Horvendile[1][2] They tell of yellow-haired big Hamlet how inexpressibly was his conduct adapted to distress his parents". It is also very much more, um, early Germanic in plot and structure: the obvious parallel to draw as a modern retelling is Tolkien's The Legend Of Sigurd And Gudrun (although that is verse and this is prose). [1] In this story Hamlet's father regains his traditional name of Horvendile (Danish) == Earendel (A/S) == the evening star. Yes, it's where Cabell got the name of the Poictesme character. [2] Note that in this older variant of the story Hamlet is Fengon's (=Claudius') son, although he believes himself to be Horvendile's. | ||||||||
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| There is an article in the Globe and Mail on the death of the "systems novel", referencing another article in the Sydney Morning Herald. The classification is interesting, but I think a few points can be made: First, Freeman's argument in the SMH is just wrong on the facts. The systems novel has not disappeared since 2001; in fact, one of the fullest examples would be Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, published from 2003 (Quicksilver) to 2004 (The System of the World). Secondly, I have a question as to whether, from a standard critical point of view, many of these are novels at all. It's been fairly clearly agreed for decades what the mainstream of the novel is: not as narrow as Leavis's Great Tradition, but similar to it: Richardson, Fielding, Austen, Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, James, (some of) Joyce, Woolf, etc.[1] The novel's main focus is on small-scale interpersonal relationships, and its focus is almost entirely social. There's been a little less agreement on the bounds of the prose romance, which is older than the novel (Arcadia is an example, and so is The Castle of Otranto) but I think there's a clear affinity of much genre fiction (SF and Westerns, especially) to the prose romance form: action and adventure, suspense, and a focus on plotting around events are characteristic of the romance, in verse or prose. (Most modern "genre romances" are, on this classification, actually novels, just to confuse things, although they have an ancestry in the Gothic Romace by way of Jane Eyre.) The "systems novel" has affinities with both (depending on the instance cited -- Stephenson differs from Pynchon, and both from David Foster Wallace) but it's not clear that in any normal sense these are "novels" or "romances". This accounts for part of the number of readers who give up on them in frustration. The reader with novelistic expectations may find some social and interpersonal relationships -- there's a definite influence of the roman-fleuve, from Proust through Powell -- but these aren't the main focus of the work. On the other hand, although they include (frequently) events and plot lines which on the surface fit into the model of the romance (war! piracy! symbolic death and rebirth!) the reader who comes to them expecting plot-based excitement will grind to a halt while expansive digressions take over (one set of ancestors for the form runs through Burton's Anatomy, Swift, and Sterne). One reason they tend to be rare is that they're hard to write well. They require a polymath author with an engaging prose style (if you're going to hold people's attention through that sort of discursive tour, modelling yourself on Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis is Right Out) and usually a keen sense of the satiric. The advent of the Web has helped a bit -- research has become a shade easier. Here's a test of the thesis. On September 20, Neal Stephenson's Reamde (review by Cory Doctorow) is being released. At 1056 pages, I'm betting that, as well as being a "techothriller", it also fits the criteria for a "Systems novel". (And near-future SF to boot, at least if you count Cryptonomicon, This is Not A Game, and Halting State as SF.) [1] Yes, I'm aware of recent attempts to push the origin and classification back well beyond Fielding, and notably to include The Tale of Genji; and that there is also the well-defined classification of the Greek Novel. However, the age (or cross-cultural breadth) of the novel as a form seems to me to be of less import than its essential characteristics and issues regarding influence. | ||||||||||
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Sunt Lacrimae Rerum
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