demo #9: terrorists

i really don't want to upload this, but i want to be comprehensive in getting everything up, and i actually really like the musical aspect of parts of this (especially the end section, which is one of the creepiest things i've ever managed to successfully get out).

lyrically, this is the most embarrassing of these tracks, and not because i was being a goof on purpose (which is true for most of this stuff), but because i was trying to be insightful for a change and failed badly. i have no idea why i mixed the vocals so loudly but it's irreversible....

well, again, i was 15. systemic analyses were a little beyond me, and further beyond the people surrounding me.

i guess i could at least say that the version of things i was exposed to didn't make sense to me. hence the first-person satire, in misguided biting punk rock prose.

i should also point out that 'terrorist' in 1996 had a different meaning that younger people may not be able to connect with. terrorists were people that blew up abortion clinics in the deep south, gay night clubs in germany, federal buildings in oklahoma, churches in northern ireland and synagogues in montreal. while terrorists always identified as religious extremists, the religion they connected to was not certain and, at least in the mind of this individual, the assumption was that they were usually christians and probably white supremacists. i didn't get properly programmed after 9/11 because i avoided media; to this day, i still assign white supremacist christian groups as the primary suspect in any kind of attack , and tend to hold to it until evidence surfaces. when you keep that in mind, the song makes a little more sense.

recorded in october, 1996. remastered on oct 14, 2013.

Midterm Rebuttal

Midterm Rebuttal

Part 1

            Question 1

            I was given a mark of one out of two for defining the term novum. We agree upon the definition, so there’s no point in discussing this further. Nonetheless, I would like to assert that your claim that a “novum” separates science fiction literature from non-science literature is baseless and invalid, negating your justification for decrementing a mark.

            I am a mathematician, so I think and talk in math (I’ve been told that I don’t buzz like a fridge, but if you listened to some of my music then you’ll likely agree that I am like a detuned radio). One of the things that mathematicians do is define and write theorems for algebraic structures.  Usually, the first goal when it comes to understanding a new algebraic structure is formulating a characteristic theorem that determines whether or not some related algebraic structure is really the algebraic structure that is desired. On page 1 of the midterm, you claim that:

            Also, distinguishes SF from non-SF

 

dis - tin - guish [di-sting-gwish]

–verb (used with object)

2.  to recognize as distinct or different; recognize the salient or individual features or characteristics of: It is hard to distinguish her from her twin sister.

            So, your claim is clearly that a work of literature is science fiction if and only if it has a novum. I will prove this false by contradiction in both directions, completely collapsing any claimed causal relation between “novum” and “science fiction”.

            First, the assumption that it is even possible to define literary genres at all is required to even consider whether or not your claim has any meaning. Now, consider the genre of political theory. Clearly, the genre describes works of fiction as texts that describe ideal political structures are also describing fictional political structures. Often, these texts are written with an attempt to construct an ideal that is hoped to be almost workable, this is even the goal within the genre; but, as the proposed implementation is an abstraction it cannot, regardless of how realistic the implementation, ever be considered as non-fiction. Who could argue that the attempt to write a new political system, even if it is a synthesis of existing ideas, is not the presentation of a new idea? So, then, is The Republic science fiction? The Constitution of the United States of America? The Magna Carta? The works of Marx and Engels? Il Principe? This list could grow quite long but five counter-examples are more than sufficient.

            Further, what of the case of historical revisionism? While the term itself has negative connotations, the idea is actually quite scholarly. Anybody working in the fields of linguistics, archaeology, geology, evolutionary biology, palaeontology or physical cosmology, to name a few, is essentially a historical revisionist. These people too are constructing works of fiction as eventually they will all be overturned; science has no absolute end point and is itself fully aware of the impossibility of constructing a perfect model of the universe because the mathematicians have informed them, through the works of Gödel, that this is impossible. They have even, as they desire to do, compiled experimental evidence that “proves” this by experimenting with particles and formulating the various quantum theories from their observations. The newest idea coming out of cosmological physics is actually that the universe breathes in the way that Empedokles envisioned, that it cycles through creation and destruction indefinitely, which renders free will to precisely the place that Vonnegut describes it on p. 241 in the small text. I tried to write my first honours thesis about that by the way, this was another text that I read long ago, but the School of Mathematics wouldn’t let me; I ended up exploring a kind of abstract algebra that I (incorrectly) thought may be useful in attempting to describe events in time in precisely the way that Vonnegut did. A group is an associative loop. I’ve digressed too far. Scientists thrive on knowing that nothing in science is absolute, it is what excites them at their core, they are always hoping for some new discovery that’s going to let them rewrite the books that have already been written. What future was there in rewriting notes to Newton for the next thousand years? Who would have been content? Do you think they want to write notes on Einstein for the next hundred, let alone thousand? He’s already being questioned loudly. Everything in science is fiction, even if it does roughly describe the way that things almost are. Does a profound novel not roughly describe the way that things almost are, albeit using different methods?

            In the context of timelessness, what the historians write is even inevitably relegated to fiction. Consider the case of Claude Debussy. We are close enough to his life to be able to state with great certainty that Claude Debussy never learned to read or write. Recently, a very popular dime store novel was written that has the fanciful notion within it that Debussy was a learned statesman near the head of a powerful secret society. As Debussy will long be remembered as the greatest composer of his era, if remnants of this popular text survive, say, a nuclear war, then the fantasy that Debussy had powerful links to the real structures of power in western Europe could very well find it’s way into historical documents discussing his life, at which point something that was intended to be purely fictional will have become real history. If we go back a little further, we can already see the blurring of myth with history when it comes to the lives of Alexander Hamilton, H.G. Wells, Ludwig Beethoven and Evariste Galois. There was some discussion in class about how one of the defining characteristics of the steam-punk genre is that it is deceptively historically revisionist. Still even further back, we have genealogical records housed in sagas that only abstractly describe history in the form of short stories and symbolic links and still further back we have texts such as The Iliad, The Upanishads and The Bible that are only capable of describing history in the form of elaborate and sometimes epic poetry. All history eventually reaches this end state of poetry where it can be regarded as nothing more than symbolic fiction. Today, the writings of Herodotus are nearing that point. All that is required to take them over the edge are a couple of really well written adaptations, some sloppy record keeping, the collapse of western society and a subsequent new renaissance when the texts are translated back in the version of epic poetry that was maintained in, say, Chinese. The temporal relationship that describes how history becomes poetry could be understood by observing the following graph, which sets pi equal to the coefficient of poeticity because pi is a poetic number.

            The new idea in the case of Debussy is that he was a learned statesman. As it is the idea that is important here and not the text, let w be a romance novel set in Nowheresville, Ohio in the nineteen-fifties that’s about crew cuts. Yes, crew cuts; w is the most elaborate and profound novel ever written about crew cuts, a novel where the author concludes with an epic analogy between the crew cut and the transmigration of souls through the process of rebirth, concluding that deep within our subconscious nirvana is achieved and discarded as boring during the process of every trim. In the alternate reality invoked by such a text, Debussy could be said to have lived into the fifties and to have, due to his deep esoteric study within the priory, have come to understand the process of rebirth attached to each trim and to have attempted to undergo weekly crew cut trims in order to trap himself within the discarded nirvana, to break this cycle; if successful, this would likely render him a vegetable, but senility does strange things. Such a text could be argued to be science fiction.

            So, forget about crew cuts, what about pogo sticks? Yes, a novel about the enjoyment that humans derive from pogoing, one where it is claimed that even a powerful and connected man with a deep understanding of the collection of compiled esoteric wisdom, one like Debussy, who was the master of the Priory of Zion, can derive enjoyment from the simple act of pogoing and listening to Rachmaninov. We can’t have Debussy listening to Debussy as that could create an infinite loop, which could be science fiction. If this text is written without discussing the technology of the era, we are in Nowheresville, Ohio after all, and has no interest in anything other than the personal relationships between Debussy, a few locals and a pogo stick (which could not have it’s own personality as that would be science fiction) then in what way is this text science fiction? It could perhaps be called steam punk, but a story about personal relationships that happens to have a few new ideas does not science fiction make.

            So, if having a new idea doesn’t imply that a text is science fiction, does a text being science fiction imply that it contains new ideas? The large majority of science fiction is based on mythological archetypes. Adapting Greek, Roman, Babylonian, German and Celtic gods and heroes to roles is not just a common approach to writing science fiction, it’s practically the template. Furthermore, the vast majority of technological gadgetry utilized in science fiction comes from existing, older science fiction. Consider the character of Marvin the Martian, which is based on the aliens from The War of the Worlds. Clearly, this silly cartoon strip was science fiction, but the technologies were mostly adapted from Roadrunner cartoons; they were not describable by the term novum because they already existed in Roadrunner. Less absurdly, consider all of the alien abduction texts and films, almost none of which contain any ideas that weren’t developed within the first few attempts at writing about alien abduction. There are countless spin-offs of spin-offs of spin-offs of Star Wars that contain no new ideas or technologies but are unquestionably science fiction.

            So, if the concept of a novum is of no value in constructing a characteristic theorem for the genre of science fiction then what is? Nothing is. Literature cannot be defined in this manner; only algebraic structures, i.e. numbers and things that contain numbers, can be defined by characteristic theorems. In literature, every original work defines it’s own genre, of which imitations may follow or even transcend but which cannot be placed within the same category as any other original work. I would argue that Gravity’s Rainbow transcends Slaughterhouse-Five but I would place them in the same genre as one is an imitation of the other; I would claim the same thing for Star Trek and it’s “American Colony In Space” derivatives and War Of The Worlds and it’s alien invasion derivatives, if an earlier text about alien invasion cannot be found. Using this approach, one may construct a set SF that contains all of the original science fiction texts that have ever been written (arguments will undoubtedly arise over the contents of such a set) and then define science fiction in the following manner:

            Science Fiction: All texts that are or are derived from texts within the set SF. 

            And, if I was German, or at least Swiss, I could write a Zscience-Fiction Characteristic Theorem:

ZFC  Theorem: A text is zscience fiction if and only if it is either in the set ZF or it derives from a text within ZF.

            The arguments over which texts are to be included in the set SF can never deny this process of legitimacy as the contents of this set are trivial and of no relevance to the process, which is the novum of this rebuttal. I think I deserve the full mark on this one, but I’ll stop whining for a half a mark.

            Question 3: I should type up my precise response.

            “Uncanny: Yes, from the German, which is probably linguistically (ed - etymologically) sound as English is a German language. Translated, it means “unhomely”, from outside of the home, alien, “the other”.

            You claim:

                        “àOk, but signifies both strangeness + familiarity at same time. More than just strange or alien.”

            The definition that you handed out to the class is:

            Uncanny: Loosely speaking, the term is applied to that which is strange, unnatural or disturbing. In German the equivalent term is “unheimlich”, which can translate as “unhomely”.

            You then continue on with the following.

            Freud argues (ed - emphasis added) that the uncanny in literature and in the psyche refers to phenomena that evoke (ed - emphasis added) sensations simultaneously of familiarity and strangeness. As a psychoanalytic term, the uncanny can also refer to that which has come to light which should have remained hidden or suppressed.

            What you presented to the class is clearly broken down into two parts. The first is a definition of uncanny and the second is a tangential comment that Freud has explored the concept, probably right after he explained that Exotropia is the result of being abandoned as a child (where’s mommy?). Let’s see what the dictionary says…

un-can-ny [uhn-kan-ee]

–adjective

1. having or seeming to have a supernatural or inexplicable basis; beyond the ordinary or normal; extraordinary.

2. mysterious; arousing superstitious fear or dread; uncomfortably strange.

Origin: 1590–1600

            As a mathematician, I’m qualified to state that 1590 < 1856 and I don’t see anything about the strangeness/familiarity thing there. Freud actually appears to have written an entire text analyzing the uncanny. I haven’t read the book (although I have read two texts by Freud, including the opus; I find his writing to be creative and thought provoking but irrigourous and ultimately pure philosophy with little scientific grounding), so I’m not about to claim that I know what Freud wrote in it, but that’s not really important as you didn’t present the Freudian/arbitrary analysis as part of the definition, you presented it as tangential in the form of a Freudian/arbitrary analysis. To be clear, what you said is  “Freud argues that the strange and alien in literature and in the psyche refers to…”, which is an analysis of the human reaction to the uncanny, that it evokes contradictory sensations, and not a definition of the uncanny itself. How Freud (arbitrarily) analyzes the human response to the strange/uncanny doesn’t alter what the uncanny is defined as! So, I should again have 1.5 for this one, I think, if you want to knock me a half point for not presenting the Freudian/arbitrary analysis of how humans react to the uncanny, which is itself entirely baseless as you asked for a definition of the term and not a Freudian/arbitrary analysis.

            Question 4

            First, my response was “Grotesque: Imperfect; not conforming to idealizations or not having imaginary/ideal characteristics.”

            Your response: “No sense that this is drawn from our class discussions or definitions.”

            The mark was 0.5/2.

            First, I deny the relevance of what was discussed in class. Neither defining a concept within the class nor handing out a sheet with a definition on it, regardless of where it was sourced from, provide any evidence whatsoever for the validity of the views presented. Quoting a pre-written text is not a valid way to provide evidence as the existence of a view neither implies nor negates it’s correctness.

            Furthermore, had I shown up to class and presented this view then it would have been drawn from the class, which means that your argument is equivalent to allowing us to arbitrarily construct our own exams.

            If the question was “What are the arbitrary and largely irrelevant viewpoints of Mikhael Bakhtin when it comes to the grotesque?” then I would accept the mark as I did not regurgitate the arbitrary and irrelevant views of Mikhael Bakhtin. The question was to define the term “grotesque”, which was actually done quite admirably; my definition is an adaptation of the one that John Ruskin defines in The Stones Of Venice when discussing the grotesque nature of the renaissance and it was actually presented that way as an attempt to present an alternate view of the grotesque body that I found more convincing. I made repeated reference on the exam, directly and indirectly, to various things that were of various interest during the Victorian era because you made your interest in that time period clear during class. Did you not recognize it?

           

            The definition was drawn from class because it was drawn from a view that was widely held during the Victorian era and because it was drawn from what I would have presented to the class had I decided to bother showing up.

            Still, just because John Ruskin says it is so does not necessarily mean that it is; there is likely an anti-Ruskin lobby in existence that would actually claim that truth is defined precisely by negating the words of John Ruskin and that periodically both burns effigies of him and defaces his tombstone. While I would label such views and actions as extreme, I cannot deny them of any sort of legitimacy. Ruskin’s views are no less arbitrary than Bakhtin’s. Yet, deductions are impossible without assumptions and if we’re going to discuss a definition at all we have to start from somewhere. This is what the dictionary says about the word grotesque:

gro-tesque [groh-tesk]

- adjective

1. odd or unnatural in shape, appearance, or character; fantastically ugly or absurd; bizarre.

            If we have a shape, how do we know that it is odd or unnatural in shape? Is it truly arbitrary and of no consequence? Within a collection of slightly different spheres, which ones are of an odd and unnatural shape?

            It could be naively argued that sometimes the difference between shapes is so obvious that any discussion as to which is natural and which isn’t is a waste of time. “Clearly”, these imaginary people say, “there is a profound difference between a donut and a coffee cup.”. A mathematician that has spent time studying topology would claim otherwise; such a person would claim that there is absolutely no difference between a donut and coffee cup, that they are exactly the same thing and that one can always be continuously transformed into the other. A donut, then, is a grotesque coffee cup and a coffee cup is a grotesque donut. If the donut is a coffee cup, is it not a coffee cup that does not conform to an idealization of a coffee cup, both in shape and in function?

            How unnatural is unnatural enough to be grotesque? Consider a cube, one made of granite. If you slowly chip away at this granite cube in a controlled manner with the intent of constructing a sphere, taking photographs at intervals of five seconds, when does the photograph cease to be of a cube and begin to be of a sphere? With every chip, the block of granite is less cubical than it was, meaning that even a single chip renders the block an imperfect cube, one that is unnatural in it’s shape of being a cube, one that does not conform to cubic idealizations, one that is indeed a grotesque cube. So, I’m completely flabbergasted here and quite certain I deserve the full two marks. Unlike the others, there was nothing missing from my definition, you just didn’t follow the Ruskin reference as I assumed you would.

summer, 2009

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/thoughts/trolls/2107rebuttal.html

aloha

hey.

i'm not entirely piecing together those apparent wedding (?) pictures, but i do hope you're happy. and safe.

life here is sort of quietly hectic. like, i don't have a worry in the world. i love it. but i've got so much stuff to do.

i've got my website up here:
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/

it's a primary focus. i hope to finally have the shell done in the next few hours. it's taken far too long to sort through. then, music...

...and reading.

i guess we always had different perceptions on the value of existence. you were all about the body, and physicality; i was all about the mind, knowledge, abstraction. maybe it's funny that i'm the empiricist and you're the spiritual one?

...but i'm happy here. i've found something.

erin is still in ottawa, if you're curious. i wanted to have my own place, i was clear about that from the very start. i didn't really trust her, and i didn't really like the other people that were planning on coming down. she ended up unable to find somewhere to stay in windsor, so she stayed there. honestly, i'm sort of happy about that. our friendship was based on being mutually antagonistic. we're both always right. etc. so we just fought, and maybe we both enjoyed it on some level. yet, she's a lot more competitive than i am and it brings out this really mean streak. near the end, i got kind of *afraid* of her and wasn't really sure how to cut off communication.

that seems to be over with, now, and i'm very relieved about it.

if you're ever in the 'hood, you should drop me a line.

but this email is to say congratulations. i think.

jess

i really don't think that morality works in the brain at all. i think it's an arbitrary human construction. and i think we've wasted sixty years exploring the consequences of liberal nonsense.
http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnint.2013.00065/full?utm_source=NPG&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_campaign=FBK_SM_1310_FHNR&WT.mc_id=FBK_SM_1310_CON13

the proper scientific study of morality is in the context of evolutionary biology.

(and the things in this article would then follows as adaptive traits. but it eliminates morality as something altruistic, reducing it to a reproductive strategy. this *ought* to be the great insight! instead, people view it as something negative. getting beyond that break in abstraction is important, moving forward.)

this may be useful in the near future.

every columnist has a different perspective on this, which just demonstrates that nobody really knows what's going on. there's an apparent consensus around a bipartisan move to cut social services, and little beyond that.

let me as you this question: if the tea party comes out of this discredited, who benefits the most?

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/11/the-economic-consequences-of-us-debt-default/

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/10/14/gree-o14.html
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/10/12/afgh-o12.html
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/10/10/redrawing_the_map_for_democracy

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19179-syria-and-our-educational-system-a-discussion-with-noam-chomsky-richard-falk-lawrence-davidson-and-ilan-pappe

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/10/11/civil_surge_syria_moderates_government
http://truth-out.org/news/item/19334-the-tragedy-of-greece-as-a-case-study-of-neo-imperial-pillage-and-the-demise-of-social-europe
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/5742/did-a-huge-impact-lead-to-the-cambrian-explosion

ok. but that's why they used to teach greek philosophy. i guess, in the end, the two are so similar that it doesn't really matter...

"But in Chinese, the word for “mind” and “heart” are the same."

i can't remember which greek thinker realized we think with our mind (empodokles?), but he was overturning the view that we think with our heart. the poetic usage here is interesting, but the linguistics here are rooted in bad science.

"Recent research into neuroscience is confirming that the Chinese philosophers are correct:"

lol. no. you didn't understand what they meant. they meant to state that your heart is the centre of thought in your body, that it's where decisions are processed.

nor does the heart have anything to do with emotions. the brain, on the other hand, does.

i'm taking a step back from this now...

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-are-hundreds-of-harvard-students-studying-ancient-chinese-philosophy/280356/