I’ve spent the last couple of days exploring The Guardian‘s secret philosophy / religion section and reading interviews from the Paris Review (and reading more and more Marquez; I can understand why Bolaño makes fun of him now, though it’s hard not to find the man’s scribblings adorable).  The last interview I read this afternoon was with Haruki Murakami, who changed my life at fourteen with Norwegian Wood (him and Eugenides; see: The Virgin Suicides).  There are two quotes I loved, in particular :

“In the 19th and early 20th centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task. In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it’s the real thing. But I don’t. I’m not pretending it’s the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it’s a commitment, it’s a true relationship. That’s what I want to write about.”

and

“I like to write comic dialogue; it’s fun. But if my characters were all comic it would be boring. Those comic characters are a kind of stabilizer to my mind; a sense of humor is a very stable thing. You have to be cool to be humorous. When you’re serious, you could be unstable; that’s the problem with seriousness. But when you’re humorous, you’re stable. But you can’t fight the war smiling.”

This came, of course, directly after reading a joyful interview with the comic writer P.G. Wodehouse who must have been the merriest man alive. But still — these words gave me some solace. “You can’t fight the war smiling.” Of course you can’t, though you must try to delight in what you can.

And then there was this Don DeLillo ruby hidden in the midst of a beguiling David Mitchell interview :

“It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.”

I suppose, in the heady pursuit of science, it is impossible to bury reality.  In the academic world, there is the interminable reality of rejections; politics; ghastly ideas (and some ghastly people promoting them as well).  That strange, fake world.  But sometimes, for a moment, it’s nice to forget it — and to struggle on, imagining the rightly impossible to be very near.  Sometimes I think that perhaps what is so devastatingly wrong with the current state of academic psychology is the lack of wonderment among certain careerist academics; the obsession with protocol and publicity and status and not (rightly) with the meat and marrow of ideas, which might transform our world, which might bring us some much needed relief. When money and career are at stake, there are far too many too easily compromised.  And for what?

Should earnestness be a requirement in a good scientist?  Or should science teach us to be cynical?

(Link is to “On Bullshit,” the Frankfurt essay.)

I can’t even explain how happy this comic makes me.  The poverty of the digits?  Chomskytron?  And just look at my lips!  I’m a mad hot bot, apparently.

Anyway, not what this post is about!  (But so excellent, I had to include).

I recently came by a fantastic little textbook written by Larry Trask, an acclaimed (and out-spoken) American linguist who specialized in the study of Basque, and was known to occasionally rage against Chomsky in The Guardian.  The subject of his text?  Historical linguistics.  A subject that, to be fair, I haven’t read much about since being an impressionable young teenager, and discovering Merritt Ruhlen and protohuman language in the musty (dusty) stacks of the Glendale Public Library.  (“This sounds like historical fiction…” I remember thinking)  In any case, the Trask text has proved a wonderful refresher and I highly recommend it if you can find it on Amazon; it appears to be selling for under $5!

Continue Reading »

There is a temptation to see a concept as a static ‘thing’ somehow stored in mind. One might imagine, for instance, that our concept of the word ‘hammer’ consists of visual memory for a hammer or series of hammers (or a ‘prototype’ or ‘schema’ of a hammer, whatever that should be).  That we can think how this might be so, is not a good reason to adopt this idea.  Indeed, it would be far better if should we discard this notion altogether.  If we take language to be a skill, like tennis or painting, we see quickly how this idea breaks apart at the seams.  For one does not have a static ‘concept’ of how one paints a landscape, or a fixed ‘concept’ of how one approaches a serve; rather one learns, over time, the toss of the ball, the arc of the back, the gentle shiting of weight, the flex of the wrist; and in all of this, there is the demand of sustained practice and coordination, the reproof and rebuke of time, and as ever, a great number of processes – physiological and mental – that contribute to the execution of the act (which is, almost certainly, imprecise).  If a concept is a skill too, then it is a learned process; an active engagement; one of a suite of ways of representing the world.

On our confusion with words (and our idea that a word ‘stands’ for a thing), Wittgenstein said :

“This [confusion] is connected with the conception of naming as… an occult process.  Naming appears as a queer connection of a word with an object. –[But] you really [only] get such a queer connexion when the philosopher tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word “this” innumerable times.  For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.  …We can [of course] say the word “this” to an object, or as it were, address the object as “this”–[but this] is a queer use of the word, which doubtless only occurs in doing philosophy.”

“…for the present enshrines the past – and in the past all history has been made by men.” –Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Last week, I wrote a short piece on my (stunning) failure to be socialized according to our culture’s gender norms. As I pointed out, I spent much of my adolescence wearing my father’s hand-me-downs and drinking cheap whiskey with the loud boys (the kind, you know, who wore cordovan wingtips and eyeliner to first period). We were a delightful lot of misfits. Anyhow, an old friend, reading this, sent me a link to a new collection by Dries Van Noten, as photographed by The Sartorialist, with the note “ahead of the times, eh?” But of course.

The Sartorialist writes : “The take away from this show? Steal your Dad’s clothes, all your dad’s clothes. His shirts, his jeans, his sportcoats are all fair game now.”

Why, I wonder, did I ever learn to wear lipstick? And like it?

To be fair, menswear has long been a ‘classic look’ on women of my build (broad shoulders, long neck) and height (as tall as a man). In search of my style predecessors, I searched the Internets for some of my women-loves. I’ve posted a small gallery at the end of the post.

But before getting to that, I thought I would raise a number of questions on gender that still demand discussion :

On language
How does language shape our thoughts on gender? How do we use language – as a form of behavior and as an expression and extension of culture – to implicitly enforce gender norms?  And then — secondarily — If we think that language is shaping (or implicitly constraining) our thoughts and beliefs about gender, is it worthwhile to assess and try to change those values? Should we try to self-consciously change the way we speak?

On biology
In society, what role does biology play in propelling men (and not women) to the top? Are the traits of highly successful men (e.g., hyperfocus, ambition, hypomania) truly absent in women? In what way is the expression of these traits mediated by cultural norms and practice?

On sex
How does female sexuality play into all of this? What part does modern culture (pornography, fashion, etc) play in shaping our expectations of women? Must powerful, iconic women necessarily be de-sexualized, gay, or explicitly counter-culture?  What happens when women turn the tables and objectify men?  [Links are to the Martin Amis classic on pornography "Pussies are bullshit," the Dove ads scandal, and the Karen Owen sex-thesis (er, f*ck list), respectively.]

And finally, a provocative question from a conversation I was having this evening about Hemingway (who was often accused of misogyny) :

What does it mean to be a misogynist in an age (or society) where women are socialized to be powerless, subservient and inferior?  What does it mean to be a feminist?

In the days to come, I’ll write a little on the research I’ve been doing on the differences in how we use gendered words (like “he” and “she” and “man” and “woman”).  The differences are striking, and sometimes more than a little startling.  Here’s a simple one you might not expect : when it comes to labeling people by their sexual orientation, we’re far more interested in a man’s preference than a woman’s.  In fact, we label men by their orientation (gay, straight, bi) about ten times more often than we do women.  But that ratio nearly reverses when it comes to marital status.  We talk incessantly about whether women are “married,” “single,” or “divorced,” but when it comes to the guys, we couldn’t care less.  What does it all mean?  –I’ll get to that bit shortly.