A Book Without Covers

I read some time in the 80s that men are better at remembering exactly when and where they learned something, while women are more likely to "just know it." This fit a popular idea of gendered brain differences, which turn out to be minimal, if they exists at all. As I could usually identify with some precision where I had run across a fact, to the point of remembering where it was on the page, I kept it in my back pocket for a few years, but it eventually went into a trunk in the attic. I did a rough comparison questioning a few people I knew then and found that there did seem to be some male-female difference in remembering the provenance of an idea or fact. I wouldn't bet the farm on it, however. 

I think that ability has deteriorated in me over the years. Making up a plausible explanation on the spot, it may be that when we are young our knowledge is more atomised. Facts sit alone in a few folders in a drawer. As we grow older more facts go on each page, more pages go in each folder, each drawer receives more folder, on up to Borges The Library of Babel. The network becomes more important than the folder.

I have found a strong exception to this theory in myself, however, and in two of the subjects I know best. I have noted for years that I care little for chapter and verse in Scripture compared to other Christians, and remember concepts rather than filing system. I can tell from wording whether something is Gospel, Epistle, Wisdom, History, Prophet, etc, aided by how the concepts connect, but which prophet or which epistle I usually have to look up if there are not other contextual clues. As in reading music versus playing by ear, it is better to have both, but people do just fine leaning entirely on one

This is also true from my knowledge of CS Lewis. I can nearly always identify which work of fiction something is from and where in the story it goes, but I often cannot even narrow things down very well if I can't find some cheat clues in the context.* In discussion, I will think of an applicable Lewis phrase but be unable to recall whether it is from Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, or The Four Loves. I might narrow it down to being from an essay, but be uncertain whether it is something from God In The Dock, The Weight of Glory, or Of This and Other Worlds. Owen Barfield wrote "what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he thought about anything." The interconnectedness of his thought still astounds me. It is not quite a cylindrical book in my mind, but the dividers are few.

 

*It is the same with Lord of The Rings. Sometimes I can't remember if something was said by Gandalf or Elrond, Merry or Pippin, but the others are clear.

Christopher Scalia

 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but probably haven't read)  new by Christopher Scalia.  I had not realised he went to William and Mary until I heard him on the Great Books podcast a few years ago, discussing "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." This list goes back to the 1750's and I like that approach of a true overview, not one or two older ones followed by a bunch from the 1950s on. 

He took a course in Scottish Literature in 2002 and has been fascinated ever since. 

A Calling-On Song

My wife and I sang this in the car with great gusto for many years. The children did not chime in, preferring to teach themselves to read with Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes books.

This is a live version, not the one you know from "Below the Salt."

 

The Power of All Media

Update:  Being There should fit into this somewhere, but I never saw it and can't find a spot. 

I have had many conflicted opinions on all media.  This may be because I myself have been powerfully affected by things I later concluded were not good for me.  I downloaded the TikTok app only a couple of months ago in order to watch my daughter-in-laws videos. It rapidly became something I pointlessly devoted too much time to, and today I simply deleted it. Because the algorithm keeps showing you what you want, you get the impression "Gee, there are way more people concerned about this than I thought," many of them knuckleheads. TikTok does not just show you what you like, but what you hate and can't resist looking at and getting steamed. You also are exposed to people you would seldom meet in real life, who have formed their opinions about various groups and ideas from TikTok and social media itself. I find myself thinking Wait a minute.  I know hundreds of people in that group in real life.  I can think of examples who fit your stereotype of them, but mostly not. You simply have no idea what you are talking about. Related: Gell-Mann Amnesia. 

Yet this is also why I have long considered movies dangerous as well.  They give you the impression that you know things that you don't, in insidious fashion. You believe you have thought this up yourself, with your sharp discernment of those around you, when you have actually been led by the nose.  When they convince you that it was your own idea, they might have you forever.  As far back as the 80s (or more) I could tell that people's opinions of Christians, especially the  fundamentalist/Southern Baptist/evangelical/Pentecostal/born-again varieties, could not possibly be based on folks they had met in great numbers in New Hampshire.  They are thin on the ground here now, and were scarcer then. Yet the people I talked to at work, and even the people in the mainstream denominations spoke authoritatively, as if they knew exactly what was up with those folks. 

Or not the movies.  Books and magazines told us stories as well, and we become confident we have seen the world more clearly than others. My wife once got so involved in a character when she had read too far into the night and had to make herself go to bed that she prayed for his coming day of decision on the morrow. I cannot accuse. In the summer of '73 I stood in my backyard and was filled with intense longing to walk toward Middle-Earth, if only I could know which direction it lay. Into these discussions people swiftly include the power of the theater, and then in almost hushed tones that storytelling around the fire is most powerful of all, able to unite tribes over generations, huddled together like the rabbits in Watership Down. Where else would we learn about life and how to live it? Without a scaffold of narrative we can't even observe much around us with any understanding. I think of my brother as more media-created in his personality than I am, but it is the household my children grew up in that sounded like a wisecracking sitcom every evening and every ride in the car. 

I have always been a little sheepish about how much TV I watched every evening in high school, when I was supposed to be conquering the world with my vast intellect but instead watched three episodes of Gilligan's Island every weeknight, including two of the same episode. I have now decided that the near-mindlessness was the point. Leading up to my senior year of college I would come to panic wishing that my brain would simply turn off for ten minutes to give me a rest. I wasn't watching television then. There are many kinds of meditation, and even the early Buddhists considered watching fish in a pond could be meditation.  Sitcoms activate just enough of the brain so that you can't think about anything else very long. You can give yourself over to its spell.  When I try to be silent in my own head the noise gets louder, as my own radio station takes over.  But Gilligan could capture the stage and keep it, giving me my moments of peace.

We consider Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney to be a novelty, but where else are we to learn about the world, really?  They are all dangerous.  

Augury

Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace.
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go.
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living.
But the child that is born on the Sabbath day,
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay. 

I haven't heard it in years, but it came to mind recently. I had always wondered how such easily-disproven augury had survived, but as there is high variance in everyone's behavior, especially children, I suppose you could talk yourself into most of it. There were days I was full of woe, and days I worked hard. The rhyme only goes back about 200 years, so I then wondered if it was just supposed to be a bit of English charm without much attempt at accuracy. But people took these things seriously even three hundred years earlier.  And the list was a little grimmer, likely due to harder conditions. 

If a man-child was born on a Sunday it was believed that he would live without anxiety and be handsome. If born on a Monday he was certain to be killed. Those born on a Tuesday grew up sinful and perverse, while those born on a Wednesday were waspish in temper. A child born on Thursday, however, was sure to be of a peaceful and easy disposition, though averse to women. Friday was supposed to be the most unlucky day of all, it being prophesied that a child born on this day would grow up to be silly, crafty, a thief, and a coward, and that he would not live longer than mid-age. If born on a Saturday, his deeds would be renowned : he would live to be an alderman, many things would happen to him, and he would live long.

I don't think augury was the point, though they certainly looked for signs in everything in Merrie England*: the behavior of flocks of birds, the birth of deformed animals, dreams and other spectral evidence. Such augury was twinned with grammarye, in which people hoped to make such things come into being if they were hoped for, but seldom referenced if they were not until near death, when Fate had done its work. Speak it into being, or not.

There is also a fatalism in it, a teaching for children and all hearers that life could be hard and there might not be much one could do but endure it. Good looks and good temper might be your lot - notice that prosperity is not included in the lists - but woe and hard life come to many. 

*A period which began, ironically enough, just after the Great Plague, when people almost frantically began to have regular celebrations according to the liturgical holidays, but clean up some of the impiety of them from the dark and unknown past. It was at that time that a spirit of egalitarianism grew up around Europe, as people saw that the wealthy had fared little better during the catastrophe, surprising heirs came to inherit lands, and laborers or craftsmen became more valuable.

 

Switch to Facebook

I have bragged about my daughter-in-law's many TikTok followers, but she has been on Facebook and YouTube as well.  I am assuming Instagram, but don't know. I just learned she had not bothered as much about TikTok lately and has put her energy into FB, because fake creators have been stealing her stuff and putting it up, so she doesn't get paid for it.  Apparently FB pays better anyway, and she is up to 2,000,000 followers there. My son would like her to do more YouTube, which pays even better, but the filming and editing requirements are more difficult.  Anyway, Pinay sa Alaska, Pinay sa Alaska It has changed from salmon smoking to salmonberry picking recently.  

You can learn how to make candied smoked salmon. 

Obvious Racism

 Racist reference to eugenics, with a threat of violence

 

The Kenji BLT

Reposted from 2023. We crammed half a dozen BLT's into last August and September, and will do the same this year. Then no more until 2026. This has also expanded into other tomato dishes I have been uninterested in for 70 years. 

******** 

I have not been much of a tomato fan, and thus not a BLT fan.  I usually have cheese instead of tomato, which people seldom notice, but when they do, it is with disapproval.

But it's Kenji, and when he said the sandwich should be conceived of as a tomato sandwich, not a bacon one, I figured I would give it a try. He starts out saying not to even bother until the good tomatoes come out in August. Now that it's August, I thought I'd put this up.

Best BLT I have ever had, by far.  I recognise that this is not saying much, but I mention it anyway.

 

Theorbo

I sent out the hurdy-gurdy link to a few friends, and one sent back the idea that he should jam with this guy,

 

It Finally Happened

 

Hoarding

 Bethany at Graph Paper Diaries has a new post up about Hoarding.

Autism Opinion In a Different Direction

"The Spectrum" How Autism was Hijacked by Narcissists by Hannah Spier, MD at Psychobabble.

The comments are long but include some good talking points.  There are plenty of people with nothing but angry and ignorant opinions (on several sides of the debate), but there are also some genuine disagreements from people who have some evidence and persuasive reasoning on their side.  And there are some who are both angry and knowledgeable. 

From the essay: 

When Leo Kanner first defined autism in 1943, it was estimated that 4 to 5 children per 10,000 were affected. Today, the CDC puts that number at 1 in 36, almost one child in every classroom. If any other medical condition, blindness, epilepsy or paralysis showed a spike like this, it would trigger a pandemic-level outcry. But with autism, we see at best a curious murmuring as to what this is, and at worst, a growing chorus of people insisting, they too, belong in the group.

From experts, instead of raised alarms or calls for serious public health investigation (as would be expected for any other childhood disorder) we get calls for inclusivity and a self-congratulatory attitude toward their advancement in diagnostic understanding and tools. Another example of ideological capture of psychiatry by cultural sentiment.

A few commenters with some solid points disagreed with nearly every part of that statement above. Of particular interest to me was a reference to the pioneering work of Grunya Sukhareva in the 20's and 30's, who identified autism and described what was clearly the same pathology quite differently. I will have to look into this. Stay tuned.

I will warn you that you will be entering a world of accusation, counter-accusation, and ill-will. So of course my comments will spread oil on troubled waters. 

NC Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish

I noticed for the first time at the Wyeth collection in Rockland Maine that NC Wyeth was similar in his later, serious painting to Maxfield Parrish.  As both were illustrators before they became renowned painters, it struck me that this might be the connection.  The storytelling of illustration, gradually liberated because they had made enough money to be able to paint as they pleased. Putting them in this category brought Norman Rockwell to mind, another illustrator who increasingly became a serious painter as he went forward. All three ended up in rural New England settings.

I wondered if anyone had ever put any effort into the similarity before, assuming that some graduate student in art history had given it a go, and threw the three names into the search engine.

Well, well.  There is an exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in from now through January 4th, Illustrators of Light: Rockwell, Wyeth, and Parrish from the Edison Mazda Collection. I seem to have read some sub-zeitgeist pretty well.  I would go this Tuesday but I think my family, especially my wife, might feel left out.  Soon, though. With the difficult scheduling, maybe I'll go twice, with different batches of friends and family. There are other illustrator-painters in the exhibit as well. 

Three examples that I don't believe are in this exhibit:

 

 

Addictive Instrumental Song

 

Palindrome

Reviled did I live said I as evil I did deliver.

 

I had not seen that one before 

AI Recipes, or from an English as a Fifth Language Source?

Easy Grilled Yellow Squash Sweet C s Designs

Place an infant in a box. Load the box with blankets and also maybe a plaything or two. Set it on fire!

 

I find this concerning. 

 

Mushroom Poisoning A Risk When Relying on AI Generated Field Guides

Concern has been growing that new foragers might eat a poisonous mushroom if relying on foraging guides written by artificial intelligence (AI).

Growing?  I would hope it had already been very high. 

Letters to the Seven Churches in Modernity

Occasional commenter Earl Wajenberg has a site of his own, Wind Off The Hilltop. (Hmm.  I should put that on my sidebar. Only five years overdue.) He is part of my Thursday Pub Night and has both wide general knowledge and some specialties.  He is both a tech writer and a writer of science fiction. An old friend of his unearthed a piece of his from decades ago which he has just put up  Letters to the Seven Churches in Modernity A sample:

To the angel of the church in Suburbia write:

The one who brought division and scandal says this: I know you have kneaded the gospel into the bread of the nations, making it part of custom and law, and that you have quietly and slowly spread the good news through the generations.

But I have this against you, that you have made my name a label, not of righteousness but of respectability. Instead of making holiness your custom, you have called your customs holiness. You have sought reputation from repetition of prayers you have emptied. You have dinned the gospel in your ears until you no longer hear it. You have become lukewarm, fearing to scandalize the scalded.

Therefore repent or the gospel will depart from you and the praise of the world will be your only reward, quickly lost.

He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who overcomes will be blessed for the sake of my name when he is cast out of the assembly.

 

Mystic Liberalism and Mystic Conservatism

I have a liberal Christian friend who is of mystical bent, and a conservative Christian friend of mystical bent. The former goes to sweatlodges and has a wealth of life-advice that she swears comes from Native Americans, such has having both hawk-vision (seeing the big picture) and mouse-vision (seeing the immediate and personal). I would bet that if you used that metaphor on a clever Patuxent in 1630 they would pick up the meaning and approve of it. But it is the type of abstraction I have never seen in any discussion of Native Spirituality. I would bet just as much or more that it is not NA wisdom. It's a bit New-Agey modern interpretation of the world. My friend, who I will call C, also continues to believe in recycling even when told that most items lose money, and the environmental impact is near-invisible. The effect of weird chemicals on our food from the plastics is much greater than whether we melt them back together versus putting them in the ground.  The ground is large, our bodies are small. Yet she is sure that Nature is grateful to us when we make such efforts on her behalf and treats us more kindly. She had all sorts of bins all over the hospital for various materials, which she would carry to her car and drop off. Interestingly, she deeply objected to the idea of doing this for Gaia, because she was Roman Catholic and saw that as worshiping a false god. I refrained from telling her that recycling is an environmentalist sacrament. She is a nice, nice person and it would hurt her.

The conservative Christian mystic, who I will call S is "very into prophecy." She grew up NewYork Italian Catholic. She just knows that some of what is predicted in modern books about Daniel and the Revelation to John are true and can tell you which ones are not, because she discerns their spirits. I have known her long enough that I have seen these change over the years. It is always somewhat paranoid, but who the forces are behind these evils has shifted. She has been in a true cult, the Boston Church of Christ, and even when in trinitarian churches has gravitated toward those with at least some heterodox views. She is thrice-married, with each of the husbands greatly influencing her theology at the time.  The first two were abusive (I don't know the details), so she left them. While she could show temper and quick judgement at times, she was basically the sunniest, warmest, least-judgemental friend you could find. When I first met her in the early 90s, she was lavishly pro-Israel because of its role in end-times prophecy. She was quite anti-Catholic. As the focus of her paranoia slowly changed, I wondered if she would get around to blaming the Jews. In the meantime, she eventually started going to Catholic women's retreats because of a cousin in New Jersey and decided that they did retreats the best. Her third husband was an older man who had been a fundamentalist preacher in Georgia. He tolerated her Catholic flirtations, but gradually convinced her that the Jews today were not the same as the Hebrews in the Bible. 

I got irritated when I knew them, but not often. Lovely, dear people who deserved the best I could bring. In my frustration I would drop the occasional hint, which they almost invariably misunderstood. I have had some mystical experiences, but very widely spaced.  I am suspicious of that approach to God, however much it is recommended by people who are much nicer than I am. Mostly, I am merely bemused.

Judging Limericks

Isaac Asimov had advice for how to judge a limerick contest: Read them all and laugh. Then take a black pen and start again, eliminating all the ones that are off-color.  Award the prize to the one that is left.

I actually did date a girl from Pawtucket for a few months. 

Terrence Tao and Research Dollars

On August 2, local time, Fields Medal winner Terence Tao posted several posts saying that the US government recently suspended almost all federal funding to his University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) through agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and his research team was also affected.

"The suspension of my personal funding has had some impact on me, particularly as my summer salary is now in limbo (which I had previously deferred in order to support several of my graduate students with previously awarded NSF funds), leaving me with few resources to continue supporting my graduate students," Tao wrote.

According to Science magazine, on July 31, local time, the NSF notified UCLA that nearly 300 of its grants would be suspended "until further notice."

Terrence Tao is the real deal, perhaps the smartest person alive at the moment, at least in mathematics. I will not question the importance of his research nor stamp my foot about what the practical applications of it might be.  It's math, Jake. Practical applications lie dormant for decades and then change everything in a decade. So I waive any objection there.  I wouldn't understand the explanations anyway. Yet there is a missing piece in his argument, amplified rather than corrected by the reporting on his complaint. He is working for an establishment that is breaking the law WRT discrimination, openly and defiantly.  

I don't think it pays to be an absolutist.  Terrence Tao is not responsible for everything his university does wrong. In a large workplace, we all have had occasion to shake out heads and think "I wish they wouldn't do that. They're going to get caught some day and there will be hell to pay." OTOH, when that hell comes to pay, it might splash over on to you, and the question of whether you were an innocent bystander, morally negligent, an abettor, or even an accomplice to the act. There were always things going on at my hospital where I wondered whether I should be minding my business - which people will always say I should - or reporting misconduct - which other people will always say I should. OTOOH, at what point does it kick in that you are a simple machinist doing your job, but it's fixing the trains that send people to the Gulag? UCLA is not the Gulag, nor are they just ignoring parking tickets. I dislike being sold the idea that the infractions are so unimportant that people who work there bear no responsibility.

I don't know where Tao's complicity falls in this situation and I will not even attempt to figure it out. I can notice things, however.  When an agency is looking at money or power being taken away, they put the most sympathetic causes forward. There they go taking money away from the most vulnerable among us again. I have an automatic suspicion about this now. What are they spending money on that they aren't mentioning? No, there's no communists here, boss.  No one here but us agrarian reformers. Tao could work wherever he wanted. UCLA's deal must have been the best on offer. And perhaps all the R1 universities are so compromised that there is no real choice in terms of corruption. But at what point do the all-stars use their celebrity to effect changes?

Cheese

 More from GKC, on a lighter note.

Common Accusations From Christians

Update below. 

You will see lists on social media along the lines of "Jesus never said to love people only if they look like you. Jesus never said to love the stranger only if they have the right papers. Jesus never said to feed the poor only if they speak your language."  

I resent it because it is a deceitful political statement masquerading as a command from God.  I have discussed here Reflections on the Second Commandment and there is the much better Meditations on the Third Commandment by CS Lewis.  The short version is that while we are commanded to teach, we are forbidden to put words in God's mouth.  A phrase I use is that we cannot forge God's signature under our ideas. When speaking about public charity, which is related to but different from private charity, people muddy this distinction, I think to their peril.  And to my annoyance, as I said.

Next, there is the implication that we are not doing this already, or that some people want us to do none of it. This is not so. America gives a great deal to its poor, welcomes more strangers by far than anyone else, and protects them much better. The reason we think otherwise is that we have many more strangers than other nations and it is getting difficult to keep everyone safe and avoid stealing jobs and services from our own citizens, especially the poor. So lecturing other Christians that they are not obeying God about feeding the poor or welcoming the stranger ignores the physical reality in favor of an imagined better political reality.

I notice that visiting the sick and imprisoned is not mentioned. Could that be because those are things they would have to do themselves, rather than farm out to the government? You can't kick other people's politics on those.  The self-righteous tone is looking a little thin at the moment. 

Next I would like to look at the "just because they don't have the right papers" part. This makes it sound like it was some technicality, that they just forgot them on the counter when they left for work this morning.  Oh, you wicked other Christians! Can you not see that this makes no difference to Jesus?  How can you be so hard-hearted? If we were talking about a person God had put in front of us in real life - a mother with a baby, a child that is lost, an old person fallen in the street, a neighbor whose house has been flooded - I would pretty much agree with you.  But when you are talking about united political action, you have crossed over into giving other people's things away.  They are not yours to give without consent.

If you "just don't have the right papers" you aren't married. If you have lost them or they have been destroyed, you can get new ones.  It is not the papers that are the issue, but the underlying reality that the papers testify to.  If you don't have the right papers, you don't own your house.  If you don't have the right papers your adoption is a kidnapping. If you don't have the right papers you aren't a graduate.  If you don't have the right papers you are not a doctor, or a policeman, or a union member...or a citizen. Those are paper contracts based on social contracts we have agreed to as a group.  You are not allowed to confer an MD on someone just because you think it would be nice if they got to be a doctor.  Citizenship is conferred by a society. We usually do this through some kind of government, such as tribal elders, but it is ultimately not for a splinter group of tribal elders to confer. 

If someone who wants to be a doctor or a policeman but isn't is hungry or being mistreated, by all means, help them.  But welcoming the stranger, as in Numbers 9:14, has interesting follow-on effects. A foreigner residing among you is also to celebrate the Lord’s Passover in accordance with its rules and regulations. You must have the same regulations for both the foreigner and the native-born. The foreigner is welcome, but is no longer free to be outside the community expectations. If you wish to join, you may join, and God has commanded that we must welcome you.  But you have to join.  You have to enter into the mutual obligations of our society. Different societies have different rules for how this is to be done and this can get complicated.  I hate it when people regard this a simple - so simple that they feel free to speak to other Christians in such condescending tones.

Some of the people I see this from are committed Christians, personally generous, intelligent and often thoughtful. However, they surround themselves with Christians who are like themselves - quite the irony, really - who have agreed on what should be done politically, and so gradually move to believing that this is what Jesus commands. Thus, now I will choose a Scripture verse: "Do not take the name of the Lord in vain." Do not forge his signature under your politics. 

Update from a link by Althouse. A person very critical of Jesus does in fact shed light on the questions that some who oversimplify from the leftist side are accusing.