Merf. Thinking is Hard.

Paul Feyerabend, “Science in a Free Society”

Ouch.

:

[Intellectuals] have succeeded in preventing a more direct democracy where problems are solved and solutions judged by those who suffer from the problem and have to live with the solutions and they have fattened themselves on the funds thus diverted in their direction. It is time to realize that they are just one special and rather greedy group held together by a special and rather aggressive tradition equal in rights to Christians, Taoists, Cannibals, Black Muslims but often lacking their understanding of humanitarian issues. It is time to realize that science, too, is a special tradition and that its predominance must be reversed by an open debate in which all members of the society participate.

May 15

reading a neurology book called Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio right now. it’s a lot more science-y than I’m capable of grasping, but still enjoying it thoroughly—he’s got an easy and accessible writing style so even though the words are hard, I still feel like I grasp SOME things.

the main gist of the book is to demonstrate how the whole debate about rationality being bracketed off from emotionality is bunk; that the parts of the brain that are about emotions are also vital for decision-making.

the main example he begins with is Phineas Gage (tho Wikipedia tells me that the portrait of Gage is mis-guided and misinterpreted) and goes on to detail other similar cases, and the part i’m reading right now is all the science-y things that talk about just how the brain and body work together for all sorts of neurological functions

it’s really fascinating and I really am appreciating how he’s emphasizing the fact that we are very much tied to how our body functions, our cognition and personhood isn’t some cogito ergo sum willpower nonsense but related to the complex stuff in brains and also a person needs emotions to be rational in any socially functioning sort of way

now my mind’s racing off in two directions: 1) a biography of Phineas Gage in which he seems to have coped fairly decently despite his disability and it’s medical accounts by people who’ve never met him that make him out to be socially-maladjusted after his injury (in which case it’s well worth examining how medical institutions are very much responsible for institutional ablism that disabled people face today; if we didn’t have doctors condemning pwd to some weird “disability is destiny” fate and society didn’t take it up, might disabled people have a much easier time?) and 2) how does this work in terms of mental depression? i mean, we’ve all seen the brain scans of “normal person vs. depressed person” but is there anything out there which examines the neurology of depression the way Damasio does of the neurology of emotion? and if there is, why isn’t it made more easily available?

anyway, the point is, i like this book

edit: also I think i should look into criticisms of this book re: autism because he mentions autistic patients a couple of times and i wonder if he’s representing them properly

Apr 8

A.L. Becker. “Beyond Translation—Essays Towards a Modern Philology”, 1995.

I have a thing in my eye…

:

…moving beyond transation is also an attempt at restitution for the careless aggression and violent appropriation involved in any act of translation—a restoration of the balance, a making visible of our failures. It is a new sense of what fidelity in translation means.

…

The need for restitution came to me strongly a few years ago when I discussed before a Malay audience, in a stranger’s version of their language, my experiences in translating the opening lines of the great Malay classic, the Hikayat Hang Tuah … When I was finished, and the last polite questions appeared to have been asked, a respected Malay scholar stood up and said he hoped I would not translate Hang Tuah into English.

I was nonplussed. Why not? He explained that if it were available in English, no one would read the Malay. He seemed to state this as a matter of obvious fact, not as an accusation. I did not make a good response. I suspect he knew I wouldn’t and had politely waited until the end of the questioning. I had not thought that a translation might come to represent the Malay original. I had seen it, naively, only as giving access to the original. I had no sense of the responsibility of it or even being entitled to… translate.

… Translation has not been a neutral painless act. It has been necessarily full of politics and semi-intended errors of exuberance and deficiency. … Some reciprocity is called for, not out of silly sensitivities and politeness alone, but because translation is not a neutral act. Translation fidelity itself demands a reciprocity, a sorting out of exuberances and deficiencies, a confession of failures and sleights of hand.It is the only way I know of by which to make restitution to those who, in old Malay words, mpunya carita ‘wrought the words and in that sense own them’.

Apr 5

OK so the colonial novel’s characters are showing signs of fraying

my favourite white lady is getting depressed because for all her efforts in preserving idk European Civilization in her house it is not working for her and she’s becoming more and more unhappy and her husband works way too hard

it’s a shame, really; i relate to her a lot

but she still has silly white savior tendencies and if there is anything that will ruin a person in a position like hers it is white savior tendencies

the sociopathic white lady is still super-insulated from all her shit because her husband the resident is a dodo. someone has been sending him letters about her indiscretions and now all she’s thinking is which lover to get rid of to minimize damage and stay as ~happy~ for as long as possible

also right now there is a conversation about ghosts and of course the white people are like what and the local lady is like LISTENNNNN

idk

i think when the locals start talking to you about ghosts you ought to pay attention

especially, you know, in SEAsia

what an ill-advised assumption that it’s just wild cats in the tree after you’ve been told what kinds of sounds wild cats make

at this point i’m pretty sure the other colonial literatures will be like, “if you fuck with SEA you will be destroyed” much like how Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was all about white men getting destroyed from too much contact with Africa or something

not that i’ve read much

just somerset maughum’s “The Outstation”

but it was essentially the same message

we’ll see

+

all right i have stopped reading for the night, but the last chapter I read was about the Resident who suffers from the same kind of cognitive dissonance you see in a ton of white dudes who are like BUT AM A GOOD PERSON OK MAY HAVE DONE SOME BAD THINGS BUT NORMAL AM A GOOD PERSON and doesn’t actually know the people he has affection for… you know, the kind of person who loves a person because they are supposed to, not because they actually care about the human being who is the object of their affections?

really even tho this tale is subtitled “A story of Modern Java” pretty much much of what is coded is not-white is “old fashioned” and it’s all about these bored somewhat sociopathic colonial/creole people who… I guess will inevitably drive themselves towards destruction

+

oh we now have a family of half-eurasian half-Solo *googles, Solo is the old name for Surakarta* and apparently the husband won the Solo princess’s heart by cooking her some delicious food

i approve!

+

so I am reading this colonial novel and about a quarter through it

it’s called The Hidden Force and so far it appears to be a portrait of bored white colonials, both migrants from Holland and “creoles” (white people, essentially, born in Indonesia)

the Resident is in love with a bored indifferent wife who cheats on him, with his son

and his secretary’s wife is also super bored and is the real life of the party

the wives have way more personality than the men

aaaaaaaaaand now the secretary’s wife’s set have in response to her complete fucking boredom suggested they play “gipsy table-turning”

which i think is a form of ouija

and well

yeah

of course you bored white women want to fuck with our local spirits when you’re bored

of course

Mar 26

BWAAAAAAAAHHAAHHAHAHAHAHA The paper on Cats: The Musical got an A MUAHAHAHA

Mar 24

there is a line in Macavity: the Mystery Cat in which they list a few things he does. the lines go

“And when the larder’s looted, or jewel-case is rifled,
Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke’s been stifled,
or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair—”

and i just

“another Peke’s been stifled”

did they just imply that Macavity suffocated a Pekingnese?

+

after a brief thing articulating hegel’s dialectic on human/divine law i made up ‘cat law’ so i can talk about the jellicle cats

i am really excited for this paper