Moyen Âge

I read the first half of Robert D. Richardson's William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism in the spring, set it aside for a couple of months, then finally picked it back up and finished it a few weeks ago. Loved it!

Except for the occasional touch of pedantry, Richardson does an admirable job of compressing James' full life and voluminous writings into ~500 pages. He presents a man easy to admire, and difficult to pigeonhole — an analytical physiologist/psychologist/philosopher professing "a strong bias toward irrationalism," a Darwinist championing religion/spirituality and the paranormal, a scientist critical of the scientific mainstream...

Disbelief is just as stable as belief, so the "true opposites of belief, psychologically considered, are doubt and inquiry, not disbelief." Belief and disbelief, he insists, "are but two aspects of one psychic state." ---

James...refuses what he bluntly calls "medical materialism," the view that the spiritual authority of a Saint Teresa can be undermined by classing her as a hysteric, that of a Saint Francis by calling him a hereditary degenerate, that of a George Fox by pointing to his disordered colon. "In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution...It should be no otherwise with religious opinions."

James recognizes the power of belief, the "truth" of a gut feeling, a religious experience. His Truth is not fixed, not out there waiting to be discovered, perfect and whole. His Truth is life lived...action, experience, the personal, the connections between objects (rather than the objects themselves)...

People's sense of dramatic reality is what they will certainly obey, no matter how much they pretend to follow nothing but points of evidence. ---

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight — as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted.

---

[Fact and theory] are both made of the same...experience-material. The same material is 'fact' when it functions steadily; it is 'theory' when we hesitate...Truth is thus in process of formation like all other things...There is no eternally standing system of extra-subjective verity to which our judgments, ideally and in advance of the facts, are obliged to conform.

---

I am convinced that the desire to formulate truths is a virulent disease. It has contracted an alliance lately in me with a feverish personal ambition, which I never had before, and which I recognize as an unholy thing.

---

What most horrifies me in life is our brutal ignorance of one another.,
...we are doomed, by the fact that we are practical beings with very limited tasks to attend to, and special ideas to look after, to be absolutely blind and insensible to the inner feelings, and the whole inner significance of lives that are different from our own. Our opinion of the worth of such lives is absolutely wide of the mark, and unfit to be counted at all.

James, the exasperated anti-imperialist:

To the ordinary citizen the word anti-imperialist suggest a thin-haired being just waked up from the day before yesterday, brandishing the Declaration of Independence excitedly, and shouting after a railroad train thundering towards its destination to turn upon its tracks and come back.

James, the self-deprecating Harvard professor:

[T]o be a college man, even a Harvard Man, affords no sure guarantee for anything but a more educated cleverness in the service of popular idols and vulgar ends.

James, the writer:

[The day] looked as if God had just spit on his sleeve and polished up the universe till you could almost see your face reflected in it.

Upon completing William James, the bio, I was tempted to pick up a volume of James' own writings, but I decided I needed a break...so now I'm reading something a little less intellectually demanding: a comic book (Watchmen).

As a non-German speaker, I found this book to be rather amusing. It's "for Dummies" and I can't even make sense of the book cover...

And speaking of book covers, Sylvia of Classical Bookworm has just posted a handy guide for bending Amazon.com book-cover images to your will (very useful for blog posts such as this one). For the advanced tutorial, see the original Amazon-image-hacker guide: Abusing Amazon images.

I saw this on the age of perfection a few weeks ago and thought it would be fun. It's taken me a while to get around to it, but here it is:

Rules:

• List seven songs you are into right now.
• No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring/summer.
• Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs.

1. "Ootishenia", The Be Good Tanyas -- When I first heard this song, the majority of the lyrics sounded like gibberish. Only with time and a lyrics sheet was I able to fully decipher what the heck they were singing about...
2. "Toe Jam", The Brighton Port Authority (a.k.a. Fatboy Slim) + David Byrne + Dizzee Rascal -- David Byrne silliness, check out the (risque...oo la la!) video
3. "St. Cajetan", Cracker -- classic Cracker
4. "Unpredictable Woman (Changing Weather Blues)", Lightnin' Hopkins -- sweet, sweet blues
5. "I'm So Glad", Skip James -- I love this song....finger-pickin' falsetto blues
6. "L'homme À La Moto", Edith Piaf -- recently saw La Vie en Rose, so I'm on a slight Piaf kick...
7. "She Hates Me", Puddle of Mudd -- heard this recently in My Super Ex-Girlfriend (which I thought was actually pretty funny)...grungy-pop, catchy

I'm supposed to tag seven others, but I'll just say: if you'd like to play, have at it.

You might've noticed that I haven't been blogging (or commenting) all that much lately. My wife and I took a summer vacation to France (Provence) and Switzerland, and we came back with some sort of lingering stomach bug (Montezuma's William Tell's revenge: our doctor thinks it might be giardia...we'll know soon), and I've been sort of busy with work, and blah, blah, blah...

Long story short: vacation pictures!

We started in southern France, based out of Avignon. The moment we walked off the train, we were hit with a wall of humid heat...it was freaking hot (high-80s, low-90s). And we had read somewhere that you'll stand out like a sore thumb if you wear shorts in France, so I hadn't packed any. BIG mistake. It turns out shorts are extremely common — at least in southern France — and for good reason (i.e., it's freaking hot). So I sweated through the first couple of days, then bought some shorts and sandals. After that, I still sweated, but not quite as much as before.

We rented a car and drove through olive groves to Les Baux — the village and the 10th-century ruins:

We made a spur-of-the-moment stop at this roadside chapel and its attendant abbey (Montmajour) near Arles:

We explored several hill-towns...drove through Gordes:

Stopped briefly in red-ochre Roussillon:

Photographed little side alleys:

Dipped our feet in the milky-green river in Isle-sur-la-Sorgue:

And visited the huge outdoor market in Vaison-la-Romaine...herbs and spices:

Sausages:

Then we took the train to Switzerland — the land of William Tell, Ovomaltine (the cold drink, the hot drink, the ice cream bar, the candy bar, the cereal, etc.), Toblerone, hazelnuts, dairy (milk, cheese, yogurt, Rivella: the milk-flavored carbonated beverage), and garden gnomes (we saw them everywhere) — staying in the little town of Spiez on the southwestern edge of Lake Thun (Thuner See):

Switzerland offered some relief from the heat, but not all that much (highs still reached into the upper 80s).

Another little bit of travel advice we'd picked up was: In Switzerland, English will suffice...you really don't need to learn any German (or French). Perhaps it depends on your definition of "suffice," but that's not entirely true. English is spoken quite a bit, but German is definitely the dominant language. If you can't speak or read any German, it's quite difficult to decipher a German menu. It can also be a challenge to do something as simple as buy water on the train. And if you don't speak German, knowledge of French is quite helpful. I can speak a few travel-related phrases in French (Ou sont les toilettes? C'est combien? Un cafe, s'il vous plais. Je ne regrette rien.) and can read a little. Even though my knowledge of French is rather pitiful, I felt a profound sense of relief anytime there was French to be read/spoken instead of German...I could understand 10% instead of 0%!

Spiez:

We took the Jungfraujoch train way up to the "highest railway station in Europe"...great views...

The view from the top (Aletsch Glacier):

By cable car and funicular, we made it up to a flower-lined hiking trail:

Forget-me-nots:

We visited Ballenberg, the huge (163 acre) Swiss open-air museum featuring more than a hundred historic Swiss homes, farms, etc. (14th-century to early-20th-century), animals (rabbits, ducks, turkeys, chickens, pigs, cows, etc.), and craft demonstrations (spinning wool, spinning silk, smoking sausages, etc.):

Ballenberg goat:

Ballenberg donkey:

We stayed a few night in Kandersteg, south of Spiez:

Kandersteg, church:

Oeschinensee, a ski lift + short hike from Kandersteg:

We spent a few nights in Thun, on the far western edge of the Thuner See. You can see several kids swimming in the Aare River. We seriously thought about joining them...if it had been hotter, we probably would have:

Thun:

We discovered a fantastic little Italian restaurant here on the river...and my new favorite drink, crodino: an Italian non-alcoholic bitter + sweet orange aperitif. Unfortunately, it appears to be exceedingly rare here in the US. I can't even find a place to order it online! :-(

Thun Castle (12th century):

We took a boat ride to Oberhofen (the castle is 16th-century+):

Thuner See gull:

We took a bus to Chillon (~10th-11th century, very cool!):

We bought blueberries in Bern...

...and pastries everywhere we could:



And then we came home.


Random notes:

• If you're not a sun-worshiper, don't visit Provence in the summer.
• It would've been fun to spend the night in one of the Provençal hill-towns like Vaison-la-Romaine or Gordes.
• It would've been fun to spend the night in one of the high-mountain Alpine villages like Mürren or Kleine Scheidegg.
• Everything is not available via the internet.

I was reddere in rode þan rose in þe rayne;
My lyre als the lely, lufely to syghte,
And nowe I am a grisely gaste, and grymly grane,
With Lucefere in a lake lawe ame I lyghte.

———

[ I was ruddier in body (branch) than (a) rose in the rain;
My leer (face) as the lily, lovely to see,
And now I am a grizzly ghost, and grimly groan,
With Lucifer in a lake low am I sunk. ]

Scottish Alliterative Poems In Riming Stanzas:
The Awntyrs Off Arthure

I finished Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death a few days ago. I loved it! It's a terrific popular-science/history book...part gothic tale (there were a few particularly spooky passages that kept me on edge whilst trying to fall asleep), part life of a scientific researcher (Can one create a respectable scientific research team/program investigating the paranormal?, How best to recruit scientists to such a potentially career-damaging program?, How to deal with criticism, both legitimate and spurious? Blum covers the tedium of gathering data, the difficulty in attempting to develop a coherent explanation for often bizarre and intermittent phenomena, etc.), part character study (Blum beautifully brings to life the cast of characters: the scientists involved in psychical research, their skeptical colleagues, the mediums, charlatans, spiritualists, etc.).

Blum includes endnotes as well, but, oddly...and frustratingly, the notes are not denoted in the text (the standard superscript numbers are completely absent). You must flip to the back to see if an endnote exists for a given passage...very strange.

Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To suppose that it means a certain set of results that one should pin one's faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius, and degrades the scientific body to the status of a cult.

William James

From the Acknowledgments:

I saw myself as the perfect author to explore the supernatural, a career science writer anchored in place with the sturdy shoes of common sense. In the way that books do—or that one hopes they do—this one changed the way I thought, and definitely altered that sense of perfection. I still don't aspire to a sixth sense, I like being a science writer, still grounded in reality. I'm just less smug than I was when started, less positive of my rightness.

What changed? I had the pleasure and privilege of spending three years in the company of genuinely brilliant thinkers—William James and his colleagues who questioned and explored possibilities so acutely that it was impossible not to reevaluate my assumptions.

Deborah Blum

Atween cuckowé and the nightingale
    There is a manner of strange difference;
On freshé branches singeth the woodwale,
    Jays in music have small experience;
Chattering pies when they come in presénce
    Most malapert their verdit to purpose;
All thing hath favour, briefly in sentence,
    Of soft or sharp, like a midsummer rose.
                             ···
All worldly thing braideth upon time;
    The sonné changeth, so doth the pale moon;
Th' aureate number in calendars set for prime;
    Fortúne is double, doth favour for no boon;
And who that hath with that queen to doon
    Contrariously she will his change dispose,
Who sitteth highest most like to fall soon,—
    All stant in change like a midsummer rose.

John Lydgate (c.1370 - c.1451)
The Falls of Princes
read the full poem »

Like watching stars that lie soft and bright
In the violet depths of the midsummer night.

William Allingham (c.1824 - 1889)
"Bona Dea", Life and Phantasy

Merry Midsummer everyone!

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A bit confused as to the astronomical significance of the solstice? This handy, straightforward guide explains it all... ;-)

Source: Starry Messenger: "A drawing of a demonstrational armillary sphere, from Libros del saber de astronomia del rey D. Alfonso X De Castilla."

The prickly pears are blooming! They have such lovely, waxy, translucent, yellow and rose-tinged petals — bugs and bees love them.

This is weird, right?

Description: lion with helmet, monkey riding pillion, riding on unicorn; they follow monkey on foot (Flemish, c. 1470-1490)

View (and search) thousands more here: www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/medievalimages/ — including a few from Mexico:

Description: The founding of Tenochtitlan ("Prickly Pear Cactus Growing on a Stone"), capital city of the Aztec empire, on a rock at the centre of a crossway of clear water in an otherwise marshy region. The eagle, still the national emblem of Mexico, is an Aztec symbol for the sun. In the four quadrants (? wards of the city) are depicted the city's ten founders, including their leader Tenuch ("Stone Cactus Fruit") on the left nearest the centre. Below are two standard conquest scenes, each with a pyramid temple toppled and burning. Around the margin is the 51-year count of Tenuch's rule, calculable as 1325 to 1375.The signature and title of André Thevet, the manuscript's earliest owner in Europe, are added at the top. (Mexican, early 1540s)

Technical/blog:

Not long ago, it came to my attention that if you signed up for a Movable Type account via this blog (for commenting purposes), you'd never receive a confirmation email. Oops. That's been fixed.

Also, if you've noticed the carbonkid.com domain name popping up here, there, and everywhere, that's the parent domain of wilcone.com. It has suddenly and rather rudely encroached upon wilcone.com due to the way I configured Movable Type 4. I might switch a bunch of stuff around one of these days and kick carbonkid.com back upstairs. Until then, do not be alarmed.

Last week, I was blocked from viewing my blog for 36 hrs...the horror... It had something to do with a router in California. Happily, that's been fixed, but I can't say I was impressed with Comcast tech support.

Music:

My wife and I went to hear The Be Good Tanyas a week or so ago at the 2nd Annual Santa Fe Women's Celebration. The sound quality was poor, but the show was entertaining nonetheless. The group's from British Columbia and plays alt-country/folk/bluegrass/New-grass/Americana. Check 'em out: begoodtanyas.com.

In other music news, my craptastic MP3 player recently started working again (apparently, Windows Vista wasn't giving "itself enough permission to run the driver"). Now I can listen to The Be Good Tanyas while on the move. Yay!

Books:

I just finished anthropologist Jeremy Narby's The Cosmic Serpent — very enjoyable. Though I didn't quite buy his main thesis, his study of indigenous Amazonians was fascinating, his mix of anthropology, biology, chemistry, and mythology interesting, and his enthusiasm contagious.

The confiscation of [indigenous peoples'] lands and imposition of foreign education, which turns their young people into amnesiacs, threatens the survival not only of these people, but of an entire way of knowing. It is as if one were burning down the oldest universities in the world and their libraries, one after another—thereby sacrificing the knowledge of the world's future generations.

Sad, but true.

There is a superstition in avoiding superstition, when men think to do best, if they go furthest from the superstition, formerly received; therefore care would be had that (as it fareth in ill purgings) the good be not taken away with the bad; which commonly is done, when the people is the reformer.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Upcoming reads (and re-reads):

• William Gibson's Spook Country (just out in paperback, yay!)
• Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (more William James — ought to complement the Bio nicely)
• Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (classic!)
• Ray Bradbury Something Wicked This Way Comes (spooky summertime classic)

— Or The Meme That Time Forgot.

Many moons ago, heu mihi posted this meme:

If you'd like to receive a gift from me before the end of the calendar year, be one of the first five people to leave a comment, and ye shall receive! Just email with your RL address. You just have to put out the same call on your own blog, and send out five gifts yourself.

As a recipient of said fabulous gifts, it is now my solemn duty to continue the meme. Thus, if you would like to receive a gift (the gift being Sir Reginald and his band of merry metallic men + a cool plastic monster, courtesy of Toy Joy, Austin, TX), be one of the first five to leave a comment, send me an Æ-maile with your RL address, and ye shall receive.

— Les Aventures de Sir Reginald —

Sir Reginald leads his band of merry men — Humfrey of Snitterfield, Hubert le Fox, and Odo — against the terror of the Gryckysch Sea, the dreaded Cyclops:

Sir Reginald and his band of merry men bravely turn tail and flee the fury of the Mynotaur.

Cerberus, hell-puppy of Hades, licks Odo's helmet.

Sir Reginald and his band of merry men take on not one, but two wickyd wyrms
— Humfrey, watch out for that tail!