Lazy Glossophiliac

An Eyewitness Report

2011-10-12T19:43:00.005-04:00

I work in Downtown Manhattan and am easily amused, so last week on my lunch break I went to ogle at the Occupy-a-Little-Square-Next-to-Wall-Street people. There were between 100 and 200 of them, mostly young. One dude was playing the bongos as I walked by.

This area isn't very far from City Hall Park, where much bigger, noisier, more energetic demonstrations occur at least a dozen times a year. When the city clerical workers' union is out in force, you're gonna know about it from at least 15 blocks away. Compared to that the occupiers looked listless and boring. I guess someone in the media made a decision to cover them. Or perhaps it snowballed by accident (the coverage of course, not the occupation.)

As for the young people themselves, some were hipsters, others not. There was probably a 90/10 white/black mix there. Apparently Asians aren't big enough on either altruism or laziness to find such events worthwhile.

Why Do Women Like to Travel?

2011-09-16T23:10:00.002-04:00

This question has bothered me for a while. The average man has a lot of interests, and since different men tend to have different ones, the total number of distinct male obsessions and hobbies is numbered in millions. All women have pretty much the same interests, and there are scarcely more than a handful of them in total. Why should travel, of all things, be one of those?

I'm guessing that this is a recent development. In the past most travel was dangerous, unpredictable, uncomfortable - the kind that still appeals to a subset of high T adventurous guys. If Richard Burton and Columbus were alive today, they would probably try to cross the world in a canoe or swim across the Bering Strait naked in winter or traverse the Antarctic on foot, all in a shorter amount of time than the current world record holder.

That's not the kind of travel women have ever liked. They're into packaged deals - hotels, fat tour guides, group photos in front of the Eiffel Tower, lying on the beaches of a continent other than their own. This is all very modern.

Some would tell you that to women travel is like jewlery or flowers - they don't like it for itself, they just like seeing men spend money on them through it. And indeed one would expect all the leading experts on jewlery and botany to be men, not women. But what is one to make then of the fact that single women often travel with each other on their own dime?

I've heard the theory that women like to travel because in hotels they don't have to cook or do any household chores. Perhaps there's some truth to that, but I doubt that it's the whole truth. Wealthy women still seem to like riskless travel more than wealthy men do.

My hunch is that women's desire for frequent superficial changes of scenery has to do with gender differences in focus and attention. It is more male to want to focus deeply on one thing at a time and it is more female to prefer to quickly jump from one topic to another, never delving deeply into any one of them. Perhaps the feminine passions for constantly redecorating one's home and changing one's wardrobe are related to that.

The intelligent high T guys' preferred type of travel (mountain climbing and the rest of it) isn't just dangerous, it also requires a lot of focus. It can often be described as a single-minded pursuit of a difficult goal, in other words the very opposite of anything that the average travel agency has ever tried selling. Most men won't climb the Everest, but a largish percentage will put even more effort into other, stationary hobbies than it woud have taken to climb it. Compared to that packaged tours seem passive, scatterbrained, and above all, boring, to many men. But not to any women.

Review of The Mauritius Command

2011-05-16T23:02:00.005-04:00

The Mauritius Command, 1977, by Patrick O'Brian. Glossy's rating: 8.7 out of 10.

I loved this volume as much as the others, but instead of rhapsodizing about O'Brian's style, humor and plotting, I'm going to spend this review disparaging Stephen Maturin's politics and general worldview. Since O'Brian is such a tremendous writer, you end up knowing his protagonists from the inside, in a way in which it's rare to know anyone but oneself. So even a cynical right-winger like me cannot in the end hate Stephen. His disappointments, hopes and moods are described too realistically, and will remind anyone who's occasionally tried to think for himself of himself a bit too much for hatred to be a typical response. And yet most of the things Stephen says about politics are such nonsense!

Here he takes part in a discussion of crime and punishment:

"There was a man," remarked Captain Eliot, "who was sentenced to death for stealing a horse from a common. He said to the judge, that he thought it hard to be hanged for stealing a horse from a common; and the judge answered, "You are not to be hanged for stealing a horse from a common, but that others may not steal horses from commons."
"And do you find," asked Stephen, "that in fact horses are not stolen from commons? You do not."

What a moronic thing to say. I'm sure that hanging, like any punishment, would decrease the number of horses stolen. And the more severe the punishment, the larger the decrease . Now, one might argue about the trade-offs between effectiveness and humanitarianism, but Stephen, by vulgarly boiling down an inherently probabilistic phenomenon to a binary yes-or-no form, seems to "argue" here that hanging isn't even effective as a deterrent. Wasn't he supposed to understand something about statistics? I clearly remember statistics being mentioned in a description of his card-playing techniques in an earlier novel.

A man who would steal a horse might steal a lot of other things, might break a lot of other laws. He's a rotten man. How selfish it is for Stephen to enjoy the benefits of living in a law-abiding society while wanting to undermine the forces that had made it such.

Still on the topic of capital punishment, Jack says:

"And as for the value of human life..." "...one man, even a post-captain, nay' - smiling - "even a commodore or jack-in-the-green, is not to be balanced against the good of the service."

Clonfert, one of the captains serving under Jack, indignantly calls the above "the Tory view of human life."

This conflict between goal-oriented and idly sentimental thinking, masculine vs. feminine, accepting the world as it is vs. indulging in saccharine fantasies about it, is very familiar. On this issue the right and the left of 1809 are recognizable as themselves today.

When Stephen asks Jack to elaborate, he says:

"I do in fact dislike hanging more than I said, but more for myself than for the hanged man: the first time I saw a man run up to the yardarm with a nightcap over his eyes and his hands tied behind his back, when I was a little chap in the Ramilles, I was as sick as a dog. But as for the man himself, if he has deserved hanging, deserved it by our code, I find it don't signify so very much what happens to him. It seems to me that men are of different value, and if some are knocked on the head, the world is not much the poorer."

It's not that liberals disagree that men are of different value - few seem to put right-wingers on the same exalted level as themselves. Instead, they tend to be more hypocritical about it. All but the most naive of them act as if they believe that different men have different values, but few will admit to it in principle.

Here is Stephen on procreation:

"I freely admit I find most babies superfluous, and unnecessary."
"Without there were babies, we should have no next generation," retorts Jack.
"So much the better, when you consider the state to which we have reduced the world we must live in,..."

Oh yeah, that's logical.

"...the bloody-minded wolfish stock from which they spring..."

What are the chances of a weaselly stock surviving long-term?

"...and the wicked, inhuman society that will form them."

Guys like Stephen should be forbidden on pain of death from coming within a mile of forming any children.

And just to top it off, here are his thoughts on women and intelligence:

"...a girl, when grown into a woman, has greater need for her intellect than a man."

WHAT?

In the following passage he tries to justify his dependence on opium:

"...and I take it only when my disgust is so great that it threatens to impede my work. One day, when he is sober, I shall ask McAdam whether disgust for oneself, for one's fellows and for the whole process of living was common among his [mental] patients in Belfast - whether it incapacitated them. My own seems to grow; and it is perhaps significant that I can feel no gratitude towards the man who took me from the water."

I don't find it strange that Stephen, the self-proclaimed humanitarian, is disgusted by people and by life in general while Jack, who kills men for a living without feeling much guilt over it, loves life and a great many of the living.

Those who act, who constantly see the direct consequences of their actions, feel in control and are happier for it. Idleness, dependency are frustrating. Jack is still alive to a large extent because he's fought for it. It's an accomplishment, a prize snatched from others in the course of the infinitely thrilling game that is war. Even money is more appreciated by those who've worked hard to get it than by those who've merely inherited it. And since Jack has fought for his life fair and square, he expects others to do the same, without whining if they lose. And he really, really wouldn't have whined if he was in their place. He's just not made that way.

Of course this take-it-or-leave-it, fair's-fair attitude to war depended on civilians not being involved. A large majority of the people who were hurt in the battles described in these books volunteered for them. Isn't it ironic that in the modern world the mafia and similar organizations honor the old aristocratic don't-touch-the-civilians code better than most states?

Stephen exists in a bubble of safety created by Jack personally and by guys like Jack generally. He hasn't fought for his life. During his duel with Canning at the end of the last novel he actually wanted to miss. Life is a given to him, and apparently a boring one at that. Dependency, even if comfortable, even if luxuriant, is depressing. If you do not feel yourself to be the master of your own fate, if you do not frequently see your actions having an effect on yourself and on others, you will be that much less happy for it - a toy in others' hands. You will instinctively sympathize with the losers of this world. For my own part, I was never more liberal than when I was unemployed for a couple of years after college, living with my parents, depending on them.

The best ways to deal with such feelings of loserdom are to try to turn oneself into a winner, or, if that's impossible, to at least refuse to whine about it. Succumbing to envy, hating all winners on principle, is the least socially-responsible choice. There is a reason why no one who feels that way ever admits to actually being moved by envy, instead hiding behind supposed humanitarianism. Envy is both pathetic on the individual level and harmful to a society as a whole. If the worst players on your team are furiously trying to trip up the best ones, your team will fall behind those teams that are united. The same is true of civilization and of humanity. The envy of a few has the ability to hold back the world.

The above is probably not the only motivating factor behind Stephen's liberalism - there's also his mixed ethnic background, his bastardy in an age when that was (with good reason, of course) looked down upon, his having been born into a minority religion (he's a lapsed Catholic), the herd effect of being an intellectual during the Age of "Enlightenment", and, finally, his being an alter ego for a writer born in a much more liberal period than his own.

But it may well not be a coincidence that in this book Clonfert, the character most acutely aware of his inability to measure up to Jack, takes up the liberal position in the argument about the value of human life which I quoted above.

And Stephen admits in a diary entry that his motivation for siding with the English in the Napoleonic wars is neither love for the English nor for humanity, but hatred for that particular historic moment's most spectacular, most flagrant, most unapologetic winner:

"And although my loathing for Bonaparte and his evil system is an efficient stimulant, hatred alone is a poor, sterile kind of basis."

And yet he genuinely likes Jack. And if the sentiment Stephen expresses in the following passage isn't conservative, I don't know what is:

"...a ship at sea, particularly a small ship on a foreign station, is an enclosed village; and whoever heard of a long-matured judgment of a village being wrong? The communal mind, even where the community is largely made up of unthinking and illiterate men, is very nearly as infallible as a Council."

He's not wholly predictable because he tries to think for himself.

In my review of H.M S. Surprise I said that Stephen is the more interesting of the two protagonists. And yet Jack's letters to Sophie are some of the funniest and most endearing passages in these books. The one I'm going to quote, however, is more revealing than entertaining. Here Jack is talking about two French ships of war, the Minerve and the Bellone:

"...there is a rumor that someone, a Royalist or Papist or both, damaged their bottoms with an infernal machine: but I find it hard to believe that even a foreigner could be so wicked."

Even though this royalist or papist would have helped Jack's cause, he still looks down on his sabotage as unsporting. War should be honorable. He knows that not all foreigners happen to share his views on honor, but his benevolence, his typical desire to look at everything in a cheerful, magnanimous light, conquers all in the end, and he ends up refusing to believe that any Frenchman could be so villainous as to help the British by dishonest, sneaky means.

Victory Day

2011-05-09T20:56:00.006-04:00

For anyone with a non-trivial connection to the old USSR or to the states that have become its heirs, today is Victory Day.

One of my grandfathers went through the whole war, was wounded, got back to the front, came home alive. Two of my great-grandparents died during the German occupation of Pochep, Russia. As a kid I used to play with my grandfather's "Victory Over Germany" medal, brushing my hands over the mustached face on the front, thinking of all the hundreds of Russian movies I'd seen about The War, imagining myself in it.

It's interesting to think about why we won and they lost. Some would tell you that Hitler's big blunder was starting his Russian campaign on June 22nd instead of a month or two earlier. A May start would have given him more time to try to take Moscow and Leningrad before the winter set in. But actually the war would have continued even if he took the capital - Stalin had plans to move the government to the Urals.

Some say that Hitler lost because of a failure to divide and rule. If he promised the Poles, the Balts, and, most importantly, the Ukrainians, independent states after the war, then perhaps more of them would have joined him in his drive against Russia. But even if he was willing to make such promises, how many would have believed him?

Prolonged all-out wars are anomalies, evidence of a miscalculation on somebody's part. It makes no sense to go to war unless you think you can quickly win. The German effort against France only lasted a few weeks because both sides quickly agreed on the vitally-important question of who was stronger.

In the Great Patriotic War the two sides did not agree.

Even though all of my known ancestors were Jewish, I grew up immersed in Russian culture and feel that perhaps I have a little bit of an insight into it. Russians are unique in being extremely altruistic without being fussy. Going through the countryside you see terrible roads, leaning houses. A surprisingly small percentage of the fences are fully vertical. The constant need to always have everything sparkling clean, perfectly upright and by the book, which is so characteristic of Germans, is absent from the Russian character. It's actually absent from the national characters of a great majority of the Earth's peoples, including mine. But unlike this great majority, Russians are extremely altruistic in a crisis.

It's an unusual combination and not everyone picks up on it. If you frame an issue, almost any issue, in terms of selfishness vs. altruism, in terms of sticking by one's buddies when they're in trouble or abandoning them, in terms of being morally good or bad, then your average Russian will respond more altruistically than almost anybody on Earth. One can call it the Chernobyl syndrome - a lackadaisical everyday attitude occasionally leads to screw-ups which are then followed by unbelievable feats of heroism, which are later shrugged off as nothing special.

There is a cognitive dissonance here. I can easily imagine a German officer thinking "how can a country with such roads be a threat?"

Well, in many Russian minds the question of whether or not one should do one's absolute best for filthy lucre, for a wage, on a regular weekday, does not involve honor or morality or anything of the sort. And if your boss is unhappy with your work, that may well be his problem - a normal human being endowed with a soul and some empathy, someone who is not a brute or an automaton, wouldn't expect his employees to slave away for hours on end over some meaningless who-knows-what anyway.

But the question of one's duty before a friend in real trouble, before the whole community in trouble - that does involve morality, shame, pride, etc. very directly. And unlike many other peoples, Russians are perfectly able to trust, feel loyalty to and sacrifice for entities that are much larger than extended families. If need be, this very strong altruism can be felt about hundreds of millions of people.

It seems to me that Hitler might well have misunderstood the Russian national character, and consequently underestimated Russia. He went in because he thought that Russia would have been as easy to overrun as all the other countries with bad roads. In fact it is not.

The MAT

2011-05-08T13:22:00.003-04:00

I took the Miller Analogies Test yesterday because I had nothing better to do on a Saturday and because I wanted to see if I could get into the Prometheus Society. I can't. I fell short by a mile, actually by many, many miles, scoring only a 476. Here's a blog post by a guy who got a 506, and here's another by a gentleman who got a 486.

I took the GRE 3 or 4 times over the years, getting almost identical results each time. There are tables on the Internet that show equivalent scores between different standardized tests, and a 476 on the MAT is almost identical to my old GRE scores.

I've taken a specific work-related test 4 different times by now. One of those times I screwed up the timing and didn't get to the last dozen or so questions. But the other 3 times my scores were almost identical to each other. It's eerie. Also funny, considering the amount of money made by test prep companies and publishers every year. How much of the medical profession operates on the same principle?

About 5 years ago I had a bout with cancer. Half of my hair fell out because of chemotherapy, I couldn't keep any food inside me for a week at a time, and for long periods a weird, chemo-related fog spread over my mind - an amazingly crappy sensation that I've never experienced before or since.

But even that failed to permanently alter my scores. I got pretty much the same result on those professional tests before and after chemo.

Complex mechanisms tend to be fragile, but the mind apparently isn't. Kingsley Amis, my favorite English-language author, drank heavily all his life, and yet his last novel, written in his early 70s, was just as witty as the ones he wrote in his 30s. If hundreds of gallons of whiskey won't screw it up, what can?

By the way, according to this PDF (p.40), the highest MAT score during the 2001-2003 period was 563. Good God! Why is Lady Gaga a celebrity, but the guy who scored a 563 on the MAT isn't? That's supposed to be 6.52σ above the mean, which gives us a right-tailed p-value of 3.515*10^-11, which translates into a frequency of roughly one in 28.45 billion people. Well, perhaps the testing isn't as reliable at the extreme right tail as elsewhere, and perhaps the extreme right tail of the IQ distribution isn't even very normal to begin with. Regardless, my hat goes off to the geek who managed to score that high. Has anyone outscored him since 2003?

The highest level that tests like the LAIT claimed to reliably measure was, if I'm not mistaken, around 175 IQ. 6.52σ, assuming a mean of 100, implies something like 198. Of course the mean here should be higher than 100 because only people who want to go to graduate school take the MAT. The company that operates the MAT has a lot more resources than Mr. Langdon or Mr. Hoeflin. For example, the 563 guy was the best in a sample of 126,082 people. However, since I'm not a psychometrician, I'll stop there.

What of the test itself? I was surprised by how un-PC it was. You had to know who people like Camus, Renoire and Degas were. As far as I remember, all the cultural references were Western and all of the culture referenced was high, not TV-based. However, it was a real IQ test because sometimes I couldn't get the analogies even though I recognized all of the terms in a question.

Review of H.M.S. Surpirse

2011-04-28T20:09:00.009-04:00

H.M.S. Surprise, 1973, by Patrick O'Brian. Glossy's rating: 8.8 out of 10.

Some thoughts on the series' protagonists:

Because of his greater intelligence, Stephen is more interesting than Jack. But Jack is by far a better person. At the end of this volume he is shown writing a report for the Admiralty containing his soundings, draughts of the coast and other research of a sort that probably wasn't much less complicated or less useful to science than Stephen's efforts in botany and zoology. But the reverse - Stephen doing Aubrey's job - that wouldn't have flown at all. He would have refused to punish the idlers and the incompetents, he would have disobeyed orders, empathized with the enemy, spent hours asking himself if war could ever be justified, if life was worth living, if it was not in fact an illusion, and on and on. He would have gotten himself and everyone aboard killed within a fortnight.

Forget a man-o-war, how could any organization run or fully staffed by Maturins survive for long? Without guys like Jack occasionally managing to make small parts of the world so safe that illusions about its true nature temporarily seized being deadly for others, liberalism could have never been born. The “Age of Reason” would have never come about.

The ability of human reason to rival the unthinking parts of nature is pathetically weak even today. In 1806 it was almost non-existent. Even when you'd think it would be easy, as in the cases of wigs or artificial leather, human invention routinely falls short of the real thing. Anything more complex - hearts, kidneys, economic models, "scientific" theories of history or morality - reliably becomes a farce. The naval traditions that Stephen constantly makes fun of, including the Royal Navy's propensity to whip drunks, the ethnic generalization he scoffs at (unless of course it's directed at Englishmen), the religion he had abandoned, the sexual morality whose flouting by Diana he excuses - all of those may well be described as forces of nature. No single person has ever created a stereotype, a piece of folk wisdom, a successful (i.e. enduring) system of morals. They form like rivers, with every water molecule finding the most efficient way down by itself until zillions of them join each other in a permanent river bed.

It's true that the carriers of traditions and stereotypes are very rarely able to justify them intelligently, but that's not as important as some apparently think. If you ask a liver how it works, it wouldn't tell you either. Traditional societies with all of their superstitions have been working for eons. Attempts to reason about the basics of existence, morality and social order have a much worse track record than that. I'm not saying that these attempts will never succeed. Perhaps some number of centuries after the hypothetical invention of fake leather that looks like real leather all sociological speculation too will seize being manifestly defective. It's not impossible. But until that happens one should never take it seriously enough to try it. And one should be very weary of making fun of elements of working systems.

Stephen is not. Among other things we learn in this book that he was enthusiastic about the French Revolution until its Jacobin period, that he finds nothing wrong in others' pedophilia, that he disdains elementary hygiene, simple personal cleanliness because - wait for it - to him it's all useless social convention, a superstition. Just because he can't see a good reason to do something, he arrogantly assumes that no such reasons must exist. Even his choice of chemical mood changer is pig-headed in this very specific way. At least European genomes and social structures have by now had a few millenia to adjust to the alcohol that everyone on board these ships swills in spite of Stephen's protests. The opiates he takes instead are a far more novel, and therefore more dangerous, poison.

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I found this passage interesting: "The Lively was a fine example, an admirable example, of a Whiggish state of mind at its best; and Jack was a Tory. He admired her, but it was with a detached admiration, as though he were in charge of a brother-officer's wife, an elegant, chaste, unimaginative woman, running her life on scientific principles."

I can't say I'm shocked by it, but it's still fascinating. If the Tories primarily represented the aristocracy and the Whigs the bourgeoisie, then of course the latter would be fussy and boring, while the former bold and adventurous. And since there is no aristocracy in America, the right here falls back on representing the middle class, so it necessarily becomes boringly responsible (at least compared to the left) - the reverse of what Toryism apparently meant within the world described by O'Brian.

Another anachronism: in the following passage set in Bombay an Indian guide tries to tempt Stephen ("the sahib") with local entertainment:

"Would the sahib want me to bring him to a house of boys? Cleaned, polite boys, like gazelles, that sing and play the flute?" ... "There [is] Kumar the rich, an unbeliever; he has a thousand concubines. The sahib is disgusted. Like me, the sahib looks upon women as tattling, guileful, tale-bearing, noisy, contemptible, mean, wretched, unsteady, harsh, inhospitable; I will bring him a young gentleman that smells of honey."

In the modern world, except perhaps in Afghanistan, gays are proud to exemplify the cattiest, least attractive aspects of femininity even more than women do. A modern man who's tired of bitchiness would never think of turning to buggery as an escape. What people rarely consider is that in a society where buggery is accepted as normal, the average buggerer (and even the average buggeree) wouldn't be an emotional outlier at all. He would be an average guy instead, and regular guys hate bitchiness wherever they see it. So the emotional motivation for buggery becomes reversed by 180 degrees.

Being hormonally normal, the typical pre-modern buggeree would have probably been far more likely to be coerced into it or to do it for money than his modern, far less numerous and, not coincidentally, far more unusual colleagues. This means that if Islam ever manages to stamp out widespread buggery in Afghanistan the way Christianity once stamped it out in the Hellenistic world, that would be a big win for personal rights and a big loss for coercion. Not that most libertarians or "human rights" campaigners would see it that way, of course.

One of the conclusions here is that anyone who's ever wondered how a fairy could have possibly conquered half the civilized world in the 4th century BC shouldn't. At that time and place limp-wristedness simply wouldn't have been a typical part of that particular package. An obvious corollary is that those modern gays who look for forerunners and heroes in Greek antiquity and the pre-modern East quite likely would have been despised by those heroes of theirs more than they are by the average man of today.

Review of Post Captain

2011-04-03T17:25:00.007-04:00

Post Captain, 1972, by Patrick O'Brian. Glossy's rating: 8.7 out of 10.

First things first: I found all of Master and Commander's virtues in this volume as well. The humor is just as dry. You never see any of the jokes coming until the exact moment of their punchlines and, just as importantly, O'Brian never lingers over them past that moment. One's desire to know what happens next to Jack and Stephen never wanes. If only real life could draw one towards most of its characters as well as O'Brian draws you to his. And I never have and probably never will learn this much, about history or anything else, while being so expertly entertained.

There is a flaw here though. Unlike in the first book, Jack and Stephen, especially the latter, are made to fall in love in this one, and unfortunately it's not pretty. Of course love can be as exciting as any human emotion, and in fact O'Brian does compare it to war in its capacity to make one feel life at its fullest. And yet his battle scenes are about a million times more interesting than his courtship and jealousy scenes. It's hard to blame the author's nerdiness for this because his female characters are nothing if not realistic.

One of the biggest problems here is that he refuses to make fun of Jack's and Stephen's love interests. This is especially disastrous because one of them happens to be a raging bitch. Every other consequential character is regularly made fun of in these books, some lovingly, others not so much. But Diana Villiers, a slut by the standards of any age, except perhaps of the present one, is allowed to just be there, almost without authorial comment.

We can be sure that this attitude wasn't caused by a misapplied sense of chivalry. When marine captain McDonald, a positive character throughout, says the following about the weaker sex, we're not meant to withdraw from him in horror:

"I hate women. They are entirely destructive. They drain a man, sap him, take away all his good: and none the better for it themselves."

This is as good as any comment on the senselessness with which Jack and Stephen waste their friendship, their health, and nearly their lives over Diana.

So why does O'Brian never cut her down to size, why are all the passages that involve her so reliably humorless? If Stephen's relationship with Diana was based on anything in O'Brian's own history, then of course those chapters would have been endlessly interesting to him even as they're written. Too bad for the reader then, who's never seen the woman behind Diana, never had any complicated history with her, and who just has to sit there looking at her being predictably selfish for the umpteenth time, while wondering when is the action finally going to move off to sea again.

But I'm being too harsh. A good 90% of this volume is about Jack's and Stephen's professional lives. I'm sure I'm far from being the only reader who would have paid good money for prequels. Jack's story should really have started when he was first sent to sea as a kid. The best literature is frequently about youth, plus we would have had a chance to learn about his mind-bogglingly complicated craft with him and through him. However, to be able to write about the late 18th century with O'Brian's level of confidence a modern writer would have probably had to start his decades-long obsession with it in his childhood too. And how many people do that?

At the end of the novel a British squadron captures some Spanish ships coming from South America with ungodly amounts of money. One comes up on this sort of scenario a lot while reading books set in the age of sail. The Spaniards' lack of organization is mentioned in this volume, as it was in the first one. If they really were that hapless and that rich at the same time, then why didn't the English, the French, and the Dutch simply take away all of their American colonies from them? I don't know the answer to that question, I'm just asking.

Review of Master and Commander

2011-03-01T20:10:00.008-05:00

A review of a book I've recently finished reading:

Master and Commander, 1969, by Patrick O'Brian. Glossy's rating: 9 out of 10.

A common reaction to works of genius is "I didn't know human beings could do that". I can honestly say that before I read Master and Commander I did not imagine that a man could know this much about a bygone world.

Out of all the innumerable ways in which the Napoleonic era was different from ours, O'Brian again and again mostly just uses the ones that can help him make his next sentence, paragraph or plot twist more interesting. This, along with other hints, creates the frightening impression that he might have known that particular world as well as normal people can only know the one into which they were born, and that he was able to pluck completely at will anything from it that good plotting or the promise of a good joke might have suddenly asked of him.

The two protagonists - Stephen Maturin and Jack Aubrey - are, respectively, a nerd and a gregarious, guileless natural leader of men. Obviously, anyone who could have possibly written such a book would have had to feel closer to the former than to the latter. It's interesting to note in this context that Maturin is half-Catalan and half-Irish and that in the novel circumstances lead him to participate as a non-combatant in British attacks on the Catalan coast and on Catalan shipping. The half-German, half-Irish O'Brian happened to have been involved in Britain's WWII effort as an ambulance driver, and perhaps as a spy.

If this book teaches us nothing else, it's that naval warfare in the age of sail was really, really complex. When one ship boarded another, pure courage had a chance to carry the day, but everywhere else it had to be supplemented by prodigious technical expertise, hard work, discipline and fanatical attention to detail. The reason why Britannia ruled the waves for so long is hinted at when Jack tells a midshipman:

"The pleasant thing about fighting the Spaniards, Mr. Ellis,"..."is not that they are shy, for they are not, but that they are never, never ready."

Later in that scene we are told that the Spaniards' "efforts were brave enough - one man balanced there to fire until he had been hit three times - but they seemed totally disorganized."

With Germany divided into dozens of states, England was left as the largest country in Europe that was full of fussy, detail-oriented people who worked well in teams. It would have probably taken a miracle for it not to have monopolized the seas.

It has often been said that Europe's working classes tended to have a better friend in the aristocracy than in the bourgeoisie. This is entertainingly exemplified in this book when a City stock broker goes into a long tirade against the common man while Jack and Stephen listen in disgust. It's impossible to imagine such speeches coming from either Jack or his lieutenant James Dillon, both of whom come from old landowning families. Since the aristocracy was martial in origin, it was bred to despise cowardice to a much greater extent than boorishness. And of course the common sailor had many more opportunities to act bravely than all the stock brokers of the world combined.

Just a little bit about that boorishness, though: the effect of alcoholism on sailors, at least as it is described in the book, reminds one of nothing more than of the effect of gravity on bodies. Duty, the fear of whipping, the need to work for a living (and, of course, to pay for drink) are ultimately like chairs, ladders and floors in that they can only temporarily prevent bodies from falling towards their default state, in their default direction, which for sailors always seems to be drunkenness. Any time that they are left on their own in port, they get sloshed. Any time they're described as being whipped on board ship, it is of course for being drunk. When Jack orders all the prostitutes off his sloop in the beginning of the book, the crew's opposition is muted. However when Stephen suggests that the sailors' usual allowance of alcohol - a half-pint of neat rum a day per man - be diluted to promote health - the ship's gunner replies "Oh dear me,"..."if they was only to get half a pint of three-water grog we should soon have a bloody mutiny on our hands. And quite right, too."

I was curious to know how British naval officers of that era were made and promoted. It turns out that young men became midshipmen mostly through family connections, progressed to lieutenants by passing a test, were promoted to captains and then post captains again mostly through family and political connections, with the rest of their promotions automatically determined by seniority. And the lieutenant test wasn't blindly graded. None were depicted in the novel, but I've read up on them online: basically, a group of captains, some of whom you'd know personally, would ask you questions.

There was no shortage of bravery either in this book or, I'm sure, in real life, but the relationship between heroism and one's career prospects was not depicted as being particularly close. It makes you think: if even Britain during its heyday wasn't very meritocratic, what hope can meritocracy have anywhere else?

I'm sure that by somewhat narrowing the circle of people eligible for high offices the class system increased the mean IQ, decency, industry, etc. of the powers that be. But the way men got ahead within that rather large circle seems to have been as unmeritocratic, as full of pettiness and random chance, as anything in the modern world.

Watching 90s Videos

2010-10-08T21:32:00.004-04:00

Wasting time on YouTube, I came up on this series of videos, counting down about 160 "alternative songs of the 90s". I just had to look through them all. I began watching MTV just as the 90s were starting and abandoned it within sight of their conclusion, having gotten my first real job at the end of September of 1999. I really wish that this wasn't the sort of music I knew most about and had the greatest feel for, but unfortunately it is. The instrumental classical repertoire is a million times more beautiful, subtler and less childish, but the songs listed below elicit in me greater feelings of nostalgia and at one time even seemed somewhat cooler. I could have come up with at least a couple hundred 90s videos which the guy who made this list missed and which I would have graded higher than a 5, but that would have (pleasurably, but still) wasted even more of my time. In the list below, the number to the left of a song's name represents its place in the countdown that I found on YouTube. The numbers on the right are grades that I gave to these videos myself.

2    Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana)    10
65    Song 2 (Blur)    9.95
7    Under the Bridge (Red Hot Chili Peppers)    9.9
122     Say It Ain't So (Weezer)    9.9
1    Losing My Religion (REM)    9.9
46    Glycerine (Bush)    9.9
21    Disarm (Smashing Pumpkins)    9.9
34    Tonight, Tonight (Smashing Pumpkins)    9.8
154     Sink to the Bottom (Fountains of Wayne)    9.8
78    Other Side (Red Hot Chili Peppers)    9.8
45    Cannonball (The Breeders)    9.8
71    Basket Case (Green Day)    9.8
24    Wonderwall (Oasis)    9.7
126     Today (Smashing Pumpkins)    9.7
113     Human Behavior (Bjork)    9.7
109     What's the Frequency, Kenneth? (REM)    9.6
20    Sex and Candy (Marcy Playground)    9.6
26    Scar Tissue (Red Hot Chili Peppers)    9.6
79    Low (Cracker)    9.6
44    Everlong (Foo Fighters)    9.6
117     Drive (REM)    9.6
6    Creep (Radiohead)    9.6
97     Swallowed (Bush)    9.5
153     Doll Parts (Hole)    9.5
9    Enjoy the Silence (Depeche Mode)    9.4
136     Sour Times (Portishead)    9.3
56    Santa Monica (Everclear)    9.3
22    Come Down (Bush)    9.3
87     Violet (Hole)    9.2
18    Come Out and Play (The Offspring)    9.1



14    1979 (Smashing Pumpkins)    9
104     Big Me (Foo Fighters)    9
102     Bullet with Butterfly Wings (Smashing Pumpkins)    9
63    Come as You Are (Nirvana)    9
132     Dreams (The Cranberries)    9
128     Everything Zen (Bush)    9
41    Fade into You (Mazzy Star)    9
94     Friday, I'm in Love (The Cure)    9
13    Good Riddance (Green Day)    9
105     Karma Police (Radiohead)    9
100     Lightning Crashes (Live)    9
70    Lump (The Presidents of the USA)    9
95     Never There (Cake)    9
3    One (U2)    9
147     Ruby Soho (Rancid)    9
92     Runaway Train (Soul Asylum)    9
146     Self-Esteem (the Offsping)    9
73    Semi-Charmed Life (Third Eye Blind)    9
59    Shine (Collective Soul)    9
139     The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get (Morrisey)    9
121     The Way (Fastball)    9
11    Zombie (The Cranberries)    9



31    All Apologies (Nirvana)    8
49    Epic (Faith No More)    8
141     Everything to Everyone (Everclear)    8
96     Heart-Shaped Box (Nirvana)    8
156     Hell (Squirrel Nut Zippers)    8
119     Hey Jealousy (Gin Blossoms)    8
43    Iris (Goo Goo Dolls)    8
74    Istanbul, not Constantinople (They Might Be Giants)    8
38    Jeremy (Pearl Jam)    8
134    Malibu (Hole)    8
23    Plush (Stone Temple Pilots)    8
118     Sick of Myself (Matthew Sweet)    8
37    The Impression That I Get    8
99     When I Come Around (Green Day)    8



16    Alive (Pearl Jam)    7
57    All the Small Things (Blink-182)    7
17    Black Hole Sun (Soundgarden)    7
67    Brick (Ben Folds Five)    7
66    Closing Time (Semisonic)    7
137     Come On Eileen (cover by Save Ferris)    7
19    Don't Speak (No Doubt)    7
62    Even Flow (Pearl Jam)    7
36    Every Morning (Sugar Ray)    7
89     Far Behind (Candlebox)    7
82    Good (Better Than Ezra)    7
112     Hunger Strike (Temple of the Dog)    7
48    I Alone (Live)    7
29    Learn to Fly (Foo Fighters)    7
61    Lovefool (The Cardigans)    7
51    No Rain (Blind Melon)    7
157    Not if You Were the Last Junkie on Earth (The Dandy Warhols)    7
35    Paranoid Android (Radiohead)    7
131     Pepper (Butthole Surfers)    7
120     Radiation Vibe (Fountains of Wayne)    7
30    Sabotage (Beastie Boys)    7
81    Suedehead (Morrisey)    7



55    Buddy Holly (Weezer)    6
150     Fall Down (Toad the Wet Sprocket)    6
90     Found Out About You (Gin Blossoms)    6
25    Ironic (Alanis Morisette)    6
28    Jumper (Third Eye Blind)    6
32    Longview (Green Day)    6
123     Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm (Crash Test Dummies)    6
111     Mysterious Ways (U2)    6
60    The Distance (Cake)    6
106     The World I Know (Collective Soul)    6
12    You Oughta Know (Alanis Morissette)    6



40    All-Star (Smash Mouth)    5
93     Give It Away Now (Red Hot Chili Peppers)    5
148     Liar (Rollins Band)    5
110     Regret (New Order)    5
115     Shimmer (Fuel)    5
76    Stupid Girl (Garbage)    5
91     Tomorrow (Silverchair)    5



101     Alright (Supergrass)    4
151     Bound for the Floor (Local H)    4
152     Carnival (Natalie Merchant)    4
103     Name (Goo Goo Dolls)    4
75    Popular (Nada Surf)    4
124     The Freshmen (The Verve Pipe)    4
142     Unsung (Helmet)    4
108     Walking on the Sun (Smashmouth)    4
58    Would? (Alice in Chains)    4



138     Ball and Chain (Social Distortion)    3
116     Been Caught Stealing (Jane's Addiction)    3
27    Black (Pearl Jam)    3
53    Fly (Sugar Ray)    3
64    Head Like a Hole (Nine Inch Nails)    3
144     Infected (Bad Religion)    3
80    Intergalactic (Beastie Boys)     3
114     Interstate Love Song (Stone Temple Pilots)    3
5    Loser (Beck)    3
149     Mother, Mother (Tracy Bonham)    3
69    No Excuses (Alice in Chains)    3
85     Novocaine for the Soul (Eels)    3
107     One Week (Barenaked Ladies)    3
42    Pets (Porno for Pyros)    3
127     Sober (Tool)    3
50    Tubthumping (Chumbawamba)    3
77    What's It Like (Everlast)    3
155     Zoot Suit Riot (Cherry Popping Daddies)    3



10    Bittersweet Symphony (The Verve)    2
4    Closer (Nine Inch Nails)    2
54    Connection (Elastica)    2
140     Counting Blue Cars (Dishwalla)    2
33    Criminal (Fiona Apple)    2
130     Freak on a Leash (Korn)    2
47    Just a Girl (No Doubt)    2
133     Los Angeles (Frank Black)    2
145     My Own Worst Enemy (Lit)    2
86     One Headlight (The Wallflowers)    2
135     Push (Matchbox 20)    2
15    Santeria (Sublime)    2
125     Sell Out (Reel Big Fish)    2
84     Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in my Hand (Primitive Radio Gods)    2
72    Stop! (Jane's Addiction)    2
52    What's Up (4 Non-Blonds)    2
88     Where It's At (Beck)    2



129     All Mixed Up (311)    1
68    Blind (Korn)    1
8    Bulls on Parade (Rage Against the Machine)    1
39    Down (311)    1
143     Right Here, Right Now (Jesus Jones)    1
158     Rockafeller Skank (Fatboy Slim)    1
98     What I Got? (Sublime)    1

The Social Network

2010-10-02T11:32:00.010-04:00

I saw The Social Network yesterday. A few of that movie's problems in order of increasing seriousness:

The Zuckerberg character was made to engage in a lot of fast-paced witty banter here. Nerds simply don't do that. There is a trade-off between quick-wittedness and the ability to focus deeply. Nerds are only really capable of the latter, while the people responsible for this film have persuasively shown themselves to be only capable of the former.

In the movie's first scene Zuckerberg's girlfriend, a saintly voice of conscience throughout, breaks up with him, thundering from on high that although he will go through life thinking that girls won't like him because he's a nerd, girls actually won't like him because he's an asshole. And that was right after the Zuckerberg character apologized to her for a perceived offense!

The sort of people who spread the meme that young nerds (think about this, nerds!) are striking out with women because they're not being nice enough to them deserve society's severest forms of punishment. There is no value in their lives. Did I mention that this script was written by a known coke head?

Finally, there is the demonization of preppies and of Harvard's student clubs. The fat, dim, drug-addicted slob who wrote this dreck really, really wanted us to know how much he envies athletic, clean-cut, well-spoken, gentlemanly individuals. No sense of self-worth whatsoever. The real Zuckerberg has said that he was never obsessed with any such clubs, and that this aspect of the story was invented from whole cloth by the screenwriter, and I believe him.

Hamptons Quality, Newark Pricing

2010-09-30T15:09:00.004-04:00

I was in Times Square a couple of days ago and I saw this billboard. No, that's not Ben Stiller. According to a web page I just found, any resemblance to Mr. Stiller is unintentional (right...), and that's actually someone named Wass Stevens, "a local actor and doorman." Of course there's the possibility that it is actually Ben Stiller furiously trying to "punk" passersby on Broadway. Regardless, it's the best-looking ad I've seen in some time. For those who don't know greater New York's geography well, Newark is a black ghetto and the Hamptons host the largest collection of billionaires' summer homes in the country, or maybe the world.

In spite of having grown up in Russia, though perhaps unsurprisingly in view of my family background, I've only tasted a couple of sips of vodka in my entire life. They were utterly disgusting. But then all alcohol turns me off. The most expensive booze I've ever tried was a bottle of Veuve Clicquot which the guy who sold me my current apartment left for me in the fridge as a parting gift before moving out. I did appreciate the gesture, but the champagne itself tasted like soap mixed with dust, bubbles and medicinal alcohol. Perhaps I'm simply missing something essential that allows others to enjoy the taste of these drinks.

What I Saw on 9/11

2010-09-11T16:05:00.005-04:00

Today being 9/11, I decided to type up my experiences of the World Trade Center attacks. In 2001 I worked in Downtown Manhattan, in a building situated about 150 yards from the WTC's North Tower. The Trade Center itself was a familiar place - I used to regularly hang out at the huge bookstore located in building #5, and 3 months before the attacks I had even visited the observation deck on the roof of one of the Twin Towers.

On the morning of 9/11/01 I was doing paperwork in my cubicle when I suddenly heard an extremely violent sound and felt our building shake. The sound was similar to the kind you'd hear if a truck started unloading big metal pipes onto asphalt: more like loud banging than like explosions. This seemed to go on forever, though of course in such situations the sense of time becomes severely distorted. Everyone, including me, was shouting. My immediate sense was that something had gone wrong with our building, but within seconds a few of us were already in front of the nearest window, which happened to face the WTC. Metal cladding was coming off the North Tower and fluttering in the air like silver-colored confetti. I now know from TV footage that the initial hit had produced a fireball, but by the time I got to our window, it was already gone. Very quickly a theory of what had happened formed in my mind - I decided that this was a replay of the 1993 WTC attack. Someone must have taken a small bomb to one of the top floors in an elevator.

The damage didn't look serious, and so panic, in me at least, was quickly replaced by curiosity. I mentioned my theory to a middle-aged man standing next to me. He said that his wife worked in the WTC. This didn't sound nearly as dramatic as it does now because in those first few minutes the idea that those buildings would soon fall simply couldn't have ocurred to us. Weeks later, when I finally saw that guy again, he said that he couldn't find his wife for many hours after the collapse, but that she did end up escaping from the whole thing unhurt.

When our conversation naturally died, I looked back at the long rows of cubicles. Almost everyone was gone. I didn't feel like I HAD to go, but staying behind would have felt weird too, so I started slowly walking out of the office. There were a few people in the stairwell, including another guy who said that his wife worked in the WTC. Unlike the first one, he was crying hysterically.

When I walked out of our building, I went TOWARDS the WTC, not away from it. A sizable crowd had gathered in front of the North Tower. A lot of smoke was now coming off the damaged area. The whole thing looked more serious than a minute after the hit, but still not quite catastrophic. Someone was waving a white curtain from a window midway up the building.

After a few minutes of looking at this, I moved back to the sidewalk in front of the place where I worked. My boss was telling everyone who was gathered there that the North Tower was hit by a "white plane." In my head I immediately dismissed this as nonsense. She worked much further away from the windows than I did, so what could she have seen or known? She also told us that after a while we would have to go back into our building so that she could fill out the paperwork that would allow us to go home. I thought about who I was going to vote for once I got back to Brooklyn - 9/11/01 was an election day.

The sense of near-normalcy completely evaporated when a coworker of mine emerged from our building's doors, saying that she'd seen people jump from the top of the WTC. A friend of hers had forgotten her bag upstairs, so the two of them went back up into our office, and while there, they glanced out the windows and saw people jumping.

As if that wasn't enough, we soon heard a loud thump somewhere up close. I now suspect that this was actually one of the bodies, but at the time I imagined that it was a part of the North Tower's facade hitting the pavement. Our own office building was blocking our view of the Twin Towers, so I could now only guess what was going on there. A minute or two after the thump large numbers of people dressed in office clothes started quickly running past us, heading uptown. I now know that they had just seen the second plane approaching the South Tower. I was standing in the cavernous entrance to our building with a female coworker. Seconds before the second hit I shouted to her "this is a good wall", meaning that if parts of the North Tower started raining down from the sky, we'd have some cover.

Then we heard an incredibly loud sound, which seemed to go on and on, while the ground beneath us shook back and forth. The second plane had just hit the second tower, but since my view of this was blocked by our office building, I assumed (wrong word of course, because in moments like that you don't consciously think) that big chunks of the first tower were now coming down and that the whole building might fall on us at any moment. Later that day, when I had free time, I tried going back to those moments in my mind. For a split second I was definitely out of touch with reality out there. For example, I remember having a very strong feeling that I alone was witnessing something very important and that everyone else was unaware and urgently needed to be informed of it. In fact there were thousands of people around. Did I look up and see any debris in the air? For some reason this seemingly important question already became unanswerable two hours after the event.

I have no recollection of starting to run, just of running itself. If I had an opportinity to think anything through, I would have dropped my bag before taking off, but in fact on that day I ran for my life with a 10-pound bag containing a 1200-page CompTIA A+ test-prep book and a lot of other things.

If the 110-storey tower fell in my direction, how many blocks would it cover and am I out of its shadow yet? I definitely felt that question with my back for a while. A block north of where I started to run I ducked into an entrance of an office building. Someone else had already sought cover there. I stayed with him (or her) for only a couple of seconds. The entire street was running for its life, and it felt scary not to participate. Another block, and I saw lots of smoke and a commotion on the opposite side of the street. I later learned that one of the second plane's engines had fallen there seconds before, knocking a woman into a coma. At the time it was all a blur.

I ran for quite a while, as did everyone around me. Somewhere in Tribeca or Soho we gradually switched to walking. It was a long time before I saw anybody moving in the opposite direction though. I finally stopped when I saw a huge line in front of a phone booth. Cell phones weren't working because the transmission antennas on top of the WTC were knocked out. My parents knew that I worked Downtown, so I really wanted to tell them that I was OK. A man in front of me in line for the phone said that he heard about a plane going into the WTC. I immediately imagined a spoiled brat crashing his Cessna into one of the towers - JFK Jr. had recently killed himself in a roughly similar fashion and the news was still fresh in everyone's minds. When my turn to go into the booth finally came, the line went dead. I continued moving north, joined another such line, was disappointed again, then found a yet another line, and finally recorded a message on my parents' answering machine.

As I moved further uptown I saw a crowd of people gathered around a car whose owner opened all of its doors and turned up the volume of the radio to the max. This is how I learned about what actually happened. The news about the Pentagon shocked me the most. Coordinated attacks on multiple cities! The freaking PENTAGON!

I was very tired, so I ended up buying a bagel and a bottle of water and sat down on the ground. As I started to eat, I heard some shouting. All I could think of was "do I have to run AGAIN?" I went out into the crowd which stood in the middle of the street and was told that one of the towers had just gone down. Of course I imagined it falling sideways, not the way it actually fell. I learned about the second tower's fall in a similar fashion.

All of the bridges and tunnels leading out of Manhattan were closed, so I stayed in the city until early evening, seriously planning to spend the night there at one point. I talked to more strangers that day than at any other time in my life. Everyone wanted to describe what he saw, where he ran from and what he thought this meant politically. I remember a young guy shouting that because of what happened he wanted to go fight in Iraq. Yes, Iraq.

The subway started running at around 4 or 5 PM. There was a lot of confusion about which trains were going where. Eventually a passenger who used to work for the MTA said that she knew how to get to Brooklyn. I was a part of a large crowd that followed her. She told us that her husband worked on the 103rd floor of one of the towers, but that he had called in sick that day.

I was reassigned to Queens two weeks later, and then back to downtown Manhattan a few weeks after that. For several months afterwards there was a strong smell of burning in the air there. Eventually, after many months, the documents on which I worked on the morning of 9/11 were returned to me, all covered in soot. I worked in the area for a few more years before changing jobs and still visit it with some regularity.

Finally, a few thoughts about the conspiracy theories:

I think it's very likely that the official story is mostly true. The more people you involve in a conspiracy, the less likely it is to stay secret. Remember the guy, to take a random example, who told the media that he operated the school where the hijackers trained to fly? Was he in on the conspiracy too? What about the hijackers' grieving relatives interviewed by the media? And so on.

It seems to me that the number of folks that would have had to be involved in the hypothetical the-government-did-it scenario would be far too high for the conspiracy to hope to be effective.

At least in the official version the hijackers did not have to spend any effort on making it retroactively look as if some other organization had done it.

Did some highly-placed people wish for a casus belli all along? Sure. But did they have the actual ability to pull off not just the attacks, but also an elaborate operation redirecting the blame, all in a society as chaotic, disloyal, undisciplined and unpredictable as ours? I seriously doubt it.

The Greatest Vote Getters

2010-09-03T21:47:00.005-04:00

In my last post I mentioned the fact that Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Portugal's dictator from 1932 to 1968, was recently named the greatest Portuguese person ever by his homeland's TV viewers. These sorts of shows (The Greatest Belgian, Great Greeks, etc.) originated in Britain and have now run in more than two dozen countries. The Wikipedia provides a summary of the winners here.

It's fun to see who got picked and who got dumped by whom, and it's even more fun to come up with one's own alternatives. What do those bums know about their own history, right? :-)

Let's start with Britain, whose TV viewers put Churchill up top. I'm generally biased against politicians, but at least the entire world has heard of him and in between his drinking binges he did sometimes seem like a serious person. In contrast, I had never heard of Isambard Brunel before he was named the second greatest Briton ever on that show, and the less is said about Princess Di (#3) in this context, the saner. My problem with putting Darwin (#4) so high on that list is that humanity has been acting as if it already knew most of what he had to say since at least the birth of agriculture. Verbalizing the default assumptions of every farmhand and amateur genealogist who's ever lived and then extending those to their logical conclusions doesn't seem like a historic feat to me. Glossy's pick for greatest Briton ever? Newton. Also my pick for greatest human.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the German version did not include the word "German" in its title, calling itself "Unsere Besten" instead. The Princess Di spot (#3) was occupied here by Karl Marx, with Adenauer substituting for Churchill. In general the German list turned out to be more political than most. Glossy's pick? Beethoven.

Just like their historical rivals, the French chose a WWII-era pol (de Gaulle) as their top man. It was fun to see Zinadine Zidane and Charlemagne back together again on this list (nos. 21 and 22). I'm guessing that the footballer is just as enthusiastic about being called a Frenchman as Charlemagne would have been about being called a Gaul. Other than that the list is remarkable for having more actors and singers on it than most others. My pick would have been Lavoisier.

The Italians chose Leonardo, which is pretty good, but I'm going to argue against it anyway. Renaissance painting advanced towards realism and expressiveness gradually, over several centuries, so it's impossible to assign the bulk of the credit for it to any one person. And outside of painting Leonardo's output was more remarkable for breadth than for depth. I would have picked Galileo, for his role in the advancement of the scientific method.

The Greek top 10 is evenly divided between towering figures of universal importance, every one of whom has been dead for more than two thousand years, and more recent personages of whom almost no one outside of Greece has ever heard of. Alexander the Great, who initiated Greece's decline by integrating it with the East, came in first place. I would have picked Archimedes instead.

The Spaniards put their current king in first place, his wife in 4th, their eldest son in 7th and the son's wife in 15th - monarchism and patriarchy! Franco placed 22nd, Columbus was 3rd here, but 12th in the Italian list.

Alexander Nevsky ended up winning the Russian vote. Disregarding what I said about political leaders at the start of this post, I would have gone with Peter the Great instead. He Westernized Russia before the West started rotting, so his reforms were overwhelmingly positive in nature. Russia had not contributed anything to science or technology before he came along and it has never ceased such contributions since him. Before Peter, Russian high art existed strictly for internal consumption, after him it was able to be appreciated by foreigners. Russia was never a major power on the European or world stages before him and it has never stopped being one of a handful of Great Powers since him. And none of that had to happen, at least not in the 18th century. The Russian government had been aware of the country's lag behind the West for a long time [ru], but nothing was done about that until Peter came along, probably because no ruler before him possessed that much natural energy. OK, so he personally beheaded a few loudmouths. Trifles. Alexey Tolstoy's big book about him is still the best historical novel I've ever read.

Nerds in Politics

2010-08-30T23:13:00.011-04:00

I got peeved by a phrase in this morning's Steve Sailer post about education reform:

"A Democrat turned Republican turned Independent, Bloomberg struck the press as the perfect non-ideological technocrat..."

Bloomberg hasn't struck the press as a technocrat because he's changed parties or because he's non-ideological (he's actually quite ideological). He's mostly struck them that way because he's a big nerd. Pretty much everybody who's heard him speak knows that.

This got me thinking about the fascinating topic of nerdy politicians. You'd think there wouldn't be any - pols need social skills almost as badly as pimps - and yet for some reason there are. At least three obvious nerds - Harry Truman, Richard Nixon and Newt Gingrich - have made it much higher in post-WWII American politics than Bloomberg ever will.

Further afield, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who ran Portugal as a dictator from 1932 to 1968, and who was named the greatest Portuguese person ever by Portuguese TV viewers in 2007, beating his closest rival (an unreconstructed Commie) by a better than 2-to-1 margin, was a big, big nerd.

John Major always struck me as nerdy, though I don't know enough about British politics to be sure of this. This guy is definitely a nerd though.

I could probably name a dozen or two less prominent examples. On average nerds definitely make for more conservative politicians than normals, though there have been exceptions.

Weirdly enough, I think I do know why nerds can become successful in politics in spite of being spectacularly unsuited for it: we tend to be more interested in policy than almost any other group of human beings. And in order to affect policy one usually has to go into politics.

Shaking hands, kissing babies, making morally-questionable deals, managing subordinates - all of this is distasteful to nerds ("This would be a great job if it weren’t for the people", Richard Nixon), but if those things are the price of getting a chance to change the course of history, some nerds are willing to work at it.

In contrast, hyper-social politicians like Bill Clinton tend to enjoy the political process as an end in itself and are blander than bland on policy.

As a Russian-born history nerd I couldn't resist the question of whether or not a geek has ever governed The Motherland. The likeliest candidates would probably be Peter III, Paul I, and Yuriy Andropov. None of these were terribly important though, so I could well be wrong about them.

Ideology and Profit

2010-08-19T12:55:00.005-04:00

A standard leftist critique of the world in which we live is that it's entirely run by money, that the powers that be only ever care about profits, etc.

But nothing could be further from the truth. I see ideology trump the profit motive every day, in both big things and small.

One of the clearest, though obviously not the most important, examples of this phenomenon can be observed in team sports.

What is the most obvious way for team owners and leagues to earn more money? The answer's simple: making teams monoethnic. Believe me, the Fighting Irish would be a lot more popular than they are now if all their players were actually Irish. It wouldn't even matter if they ever won anything. The Soviet Union never had a hope of winning the soccer World Cup when I was a kid, yet the streets literally went empty every time the national team played an important game. People will root for their own no matter how much they suck for the same reason that parents routinely sacrifice the world for their mediocre or imbecile kids instead of dutifully supporting other people's little geniuses.

A profit-maximizing setup for the NFL would have a Black team, a Mulatto team, an Irish team, an Italian team, a couple of southern White teams, a Midwestern White team, etc. Such a league would be so much more popular than the current one that it would actually take money away from most other leasure-oriented industries. Music, movies, travel, hiking - everything except for porn and hard drugs would suffer a severe downturn in popularity. If you know of any other types of entertainment that could reliably outcompete simulated race war in the public mind, I would like to hear of it.

And yet team owners are completely powerless to change the laws that ban the monoethnic setup, laws that are clearly depriving them of historic profits. So much for the power of money to influence policy.

Some would say that the reason why the reigning ideology effectively bans monoethnic professional teams is to minimize ethnic conflict. These people are idiots. The easiest way to minimize ethnic conflict is to have monoethnic countries, and the reigning ideology is obviously against that. Also, experience shows that tournaments involving ethnic teams don't have to lead to any violence at all. During my Soviet soccer-watching childhood Dynamo Tbilisi's roster was 100% Georgian, Ararat's was 100% Armenian, the Ukrainian teams were overwhelmingly Ukrainian, etc., and yet ethnic conflict across the old USSR couldn't be more dormant at that time. This was mostly due to the post-WWII Soviet state's discouragement of mass population movements. As a result, the average citizen still lived in the roughly monoethnic environemnt of his ancestors.

If the people who run things in the modern West want to discourage ethic strife, they're obviously tackling the wrong end of the problem.

By the way, I only picked sports to illustrate my point because it was the first example that occured to me. In pretty much every other industry ideology lords over the profit motive 9 times out of 10.

The easiest way to make money in Manhattan real estate would be to bribe local politicians to relocate housing projects to Whocaresville and to build luxury towers in their place. Yet this would make Manhattan even less NAM-mmy than it already is, so it's ideologically unacceptable.

Any US airline could increase its profits if, like Asian ones, it started hiring only young, attractive women as stewardesses. And yet they're powerless to change the rules that don't allow them to do that.

Thousands of firms could become more efficient if, when hiring, they relied on actual IQ tests instead of on imperfect proxies like what colleges applicants went to. But that's been declared illegal too.

And so on. The idea that money is the biggest motivating factor on the big stage is naive.

Reasoning and Truth

2010-08-04T00:21:00.010-04:00

Steve Sailer has posted about a subject that's fascinated me for years: why does reasoning lead to self-deception more often than to truth in most people, even when this reasoning is applied to the simplest of topics, topics in which the truth is practically lying on the surface? And I definitely include myself in "most people" here - over the years I've managed to reason myself into believing oodles of things that now seem utterly false to me. And if experience is any guide, a lot of what I believe now will seem false to me in the future, moreover, some of it will be definitely proven to be false. And of course the errors in my "reasoning" will turn out to have been idiotically simple.

Did reasoning evolve in order to help us win arguments with people or in order to help us search for any sort of objective truth?

I was quite obsessed with this topic at one time, so much so that I even included a scene about it in my sorry excuse for an unfinished novel.

True rationality, though rare, does exist, and if the computer on which I'm typing this wasn't built on cold-bloodedly rational principles, I wouldn't be able to make this post. At the end Steve wondered where and when such true rationality originated.

I may well be wrong about what follows, but I have a hunch that a lot of it originated with farming in northern latitudes. We know from archeology and from written sources that in antiquity northern European farmers lived on isolated homesteads, not in villages. When combined with primitive farming technology, the harsh climate could only feed so many farmers per square mile, so they had to spread out. In isolation, the struggle with nature must have taken precedence over struggles with other people. Nature can't be bullshitted into anything, but people very much can be.

It's interesting to note here that the north of the temperate belt of the eastern side of Eurasia was always covered with steppe, not farmland. The Yellow River valley - the cradle of northern Chinese civilization - is located roughly at the latitude of central Spain. And the nomads who roamed north of there seem to have lived in groups.

Most conscious reasoning is rationalization in support of notions we would subconsciously like to be true and which we want others to believe, usually for our own, selfish, subconsciously-determined reasons. The two are obviously linked - the most effective BSers are the ones who sincerely believe in what they're spouting. You've got to convince yourself before you can hope to convince others. It seems that BSing skill would increase one's evolutionary fitness in most social setups, with relative isolation being the only setup that could work in the opposite direction. Hence, a search for the origins of rationality would be a search for historical conditions that favored relative isolation.

I'm sure that truly rational (i.e. unemotional, unselfish, completely conscious) thought is rare in all peoples and in all cultures. However, if in one society 1% of all the men have a tendency to consciously think rationally 1% of the time, while in another only 0.1% of all the men tend to think like that 1% of the time, then differences in scientific and technological achievement would probably arise under certain circumstances. Historically these circumstances have definitely included the urbanization of formerly farming populations, but I'm sure that there would be lots of other preconditions too.

An Old Song

2010-08-01T18:07:00.002-04:00

While I was in college and for a year or two afterwards, I occasionally played acoustic guitar. I mostly made up little melodies like these, but several times I unsuccessfully tried writing complete songs. Since I now have a blog, I decided to record one of those unsuccessful attempts and to post it on YouTube.

It took several runs through the song to finally remember all of its demented lyrics, but the guitar part came back to me almost instantly. For some reason human beings tend to remember movements better than words. The sound quality sucks, but since it's not a very good song to begin with, I doubt that better recording equipment would have improved it much. Of course one of the greatest things about music is that you don't need to be any good at it to enjoy playing it, so, as funny as it may seem, I had some fun recording this thing today.

Reading up on Russia

2010-07-31T12:15:00.002-04:00

A commenter at Sublime Oblivion posted a link to a collection of biographies of the people who are currently running Russia. I haven't been following Russian politics closely at all, so that book has proven to be very interesting reading for me.

The foreword has confirmed my previously vague impression that if Medvedev had ultimate power, he would move Russia in a "Westernizing", "liberalizing", defeatist, Yeltsin-like direction. Perhaps most damningly, Anatoly Chubais - one of the authors of Yeltsin's ruinous privatization - was named in this book as a supporter of Medvedev in internal administrative conflicts.

The book goes on to say that the faction opposing Medvedev, which is led by this guy, argues for a coalition with China against the West, for a more imperial Russian policy towards the former Soviet republics, for a more state-directed economic policy and for electing Putin to a third presidential term in 2012. Medvedev, of course, wants a second term for himself.

What can I say, I'm rooting against Medvedev here. Putin is called a virtual tsar in the foreword, though the powers ascribed to him seem to fall a little bit short of autocratic. Since Putin is from St. Petersburg, a large share of the people at the top, including Medvedev, are from St. Petersburg too. There is a pattern of powerful men elevating their former classmates from university or co-workers from the time before they had achieved real power. In a more clannish culture (the Middle East, India, etc.) nobody would ever care about former classmates. The extended family would always come first. But Russia's not like that.

The foreword says that "in the cultural-civilizational sense Putin is a Westerner", but that he harbors "disgust for Western democracy". I couldn't agree more. The people running Western countries now harbor disgust towards Western culture and civilization, so there's no reason why someone who hates those leaders shouldn't be called a Westerner.

A Second Post of YouTube Links

2010-07-31T00:48:00.009-04:00

First, an appropriately epic cello cover of Final Countdown. If you've never seen any Latvians in your entire life, then not clicking on that link may turn out to be especially fateful because, let's face it, you may never come across a reason for looking at any of them ever again.

This is pretty cool too. I especially like that guy's ferocity on the kazoo. And here's more of him, now with a partner.

Continuing with the theme of covers, here's a banjo version of The Phantom of the Opera.

Next, Suzanne Vega's Small Blue Thing. God, I love that song.

In my late teens and early 20s, quite unoriginally, I watched way too much MTV. This was always one of my favorite videos in that channel's repertoire, though I'd never known much about the band that made it until now. Every little fact that I just learned about them from the Wikipedia seems incredibly predictable. The Deal sisters who formed the Breeders had a laser physicist father, which is unsurprising because nothing that sounds that cool could ever come from anything but major brains. Both were addicted to hard drugs for large portions of their lives and of course both are now childless at 49. Moreover, a few YouTube searches have revealed that much of the rest of their musical output consisted of utterly unlistenable mess. I'm left to assume that the only reason why Cannonball sounds so great is that it was recorded during a rare window between heroin binges. Of course they toured with Nirvana and played in many other people's bands with many other drug-addicted "alternative" luminaries.

On a more cheerful note, here's the kazookeylele guy doing Bohemian Rhapsody.

More on Inception

2010-07-27T19:09:00.007-04:00

Why was everyone in this movie so sure that Fischer would act on a thought that first occurred to him in his sleep? I'd put the probability of that happening at well below 50%. He could forget about his decision immediately after waking up or he could simply dismiss it later, the way most people dismiss all the variegated nonsense they dream about. Isn't sleep one of the worst possible states for implanting ideas into people anyway? I still have a pretty good grasp of the Communist ideology which my teachers endeavored to implant in me at school in the 1980s, but I honestly don't remember what I dreamt about last night.

Inception reminded me once again of how atypical nerdy instincts about everything are. Every nerd who's ever lived would find Ellen Page far superior to Marion Cotillard, yet in this movie the protagonist is made to obsess endlessly about Ms. Cotillard while ignoring the Ellen Page character as much as possible. From the point of view of the plot Ellen Page's lines might as well have been delivered by Michael Caine because except for a brief, inconsequential moment no one in this movie seemed to even notice that she was female.

Also, Cotillard's character was named Mal. There would have been nothing wrong with this in a novel, but since this was in fact a movie, I misheard Mal as "mom" several times, partly because the name first popped up in a conversation between DiCaprio and his screen father. I'm sure I wasn't alone in thinking that in that scene they were talking about Leo's screen mom. The plot was confusing enough already, so adding to the potential for confusion by giving characters ambiguously-sounding names was a sloppy move.

Anyway, these are all minor quibbles. Overall it's a pretty remarkable movie.

Inception

2010-07-26T23:24:00.006-04:00

Just saw Inception. Very impressed. The movie is mostly about the relationship between dreams and reality and I must say that after it was over, coming back out onto New York's very ordinary-looking streets, going down into the subway, etc. felt like a big, big letdown. How the hell did I get stuck in a reality in which no one ever looks as cool as Leo and Ellen Page did whenever they tried to figure out the baroque complexities of Christopher Nolan's plot? I can't claim to have understood everything in that plot, but I don't think one even needed to get most of it to like it.

One nitpick: in the beginning, when Leo DiCaprio's character is looking for someone with sufficient imagination to build his dreams, he visits what looks like a graduate-level architecture program run by Michael Caine. Hasn't Mr. Nolan heard that architecture's been dead for ages? No one who's involved in it now could possibly have any imagination at all. If art were money and Bramante was Buffett, then the best architect of modernity would be a surly, smelly, penniless bum with an untreatable addiction to the cheapest brand of glue in the Universe.

Good movie though.

Some Thoughts on "The Last Days of Disco"

2010-07-10T20:54:00.010-04:00

I just watched "The Last Days of Disco" again.

I've always wondered if Whit Stillman's conversation was as full of long, grammatically correct, literary sentences as that of his movie characters. He provided some spontaneous-sounding commentary on the DVD I just watched, mostly reminiscing with Chloë Sevigny and Chris Eigeman about making the movie. I thought he was much wordier there (i.e. more bookish, less sloppy) than the average person, but still not as wordy as his characters. Not that that's problem or anything.

One realistic touch was casting the better-looking actress (Kate Beckinsale) as the bad girl and the plainer one (Ms. Sevigny) as the good girl. I'm guessing that this is rarely if ever a free choice for young women. They would all like to be bad girls, but only the pretty ones can reliably get away with it. When Beckinsale's character finally develops serious feelings for a guy, he abruptly dumps her. I bet that happens quite often. Only a saint can resist hurting the feelings of a woman who had acted like a calculating bitch for ages, but then suddenly turns sincere. Really sincere. How come that dynamic isn't portrayed in movies and novels more often?

Another question: how can Chris Eigeman seem so sympathetic while playing such cynical, unprincipled smartasses? He's pretty much the best thing in this very good movie.

Finally, why are all three of Stillman's movies so good? Um...., well, there's a lot of subtlety in them, and so few cliches. Each one has some characters who are serious men and occasionally features serious conversations, but you get a very strong feeling from these films that the man who made them does not take himself seriously. That's a very appealing combination. Nothing in the dialog or the plot insults one's intelligence, which is astounding in a Hollywood movie. If anything in any of this guy's films has managed to insult your intelligence, you should seriously consider donating your brain to science after you pass on. Perhaps something new could be learned from it. The relationships portrayed are pretty realistic and yet the movies are funny and amusing. Real life isn't funny. Most mortals' attempts to be funny quickly devolve into cartoonishness. Combining realism with entertainment isn't a small accomplishment.

Tolstoy on Management

2010-07-03T23:05:00.008-04:00

I'm still occasionally thinking about War and Peace. One of Tolstoy's favorite points in it was that kings, generals and other leaders of men typically only pretend to lead them and that the further one gets from doing real work, the less effect one invariably has on historical events. That's a whale of a generalization and on seeing it I first suspected authorial bias. Tolstoy understandably hated Napoleon, and Napoleon just happened to have been described as a genius by everyone who wrote about him except for Tolstoy. The count's attack on the general idea of managerial (but, conveniently, not artistic) genius can seem like a retaliatory swipe against a single man who, among other things, had invaded Tolstoy's motherland.

The only consideration that prevented me from dismissing Tolstoy's voluminous rants on this topic as mindless pettiness was that these rants agreed with all of my actual, personal observations of and experiences with management. Of course the level at which I made these observations is laughable compared to Tolstoy's. He personally knew and was related to almost everyone who ran one of the world's biggest empires. I spent the first few years of my working life filing paperwork and making copies. And yet improbably, most of the things that Tolstoy wrote about leadership have parallels with what I've seen.

The typical manager I've known not only didn't direct any work, he didn't even know what exactly most of the work consisted of. Often half of the orders given physically could not be followed. The easiest way to understand what physically can and cannot be done is, of course, to attempt to do it, and that disqualifies most managers. Half of the orders that can be followed aren't followed either - some because they're counterproductive, others through laziness. My 11 years in the workforce, 4 of them as a supervisor, have convinced me that the amount, nature and quality of the work that typically ends up being done almost exclusively depend on the nature of the workforce, especially on its work ethic. Every employee seems to have a rough, unspoken understanding of how much he is willing to work and care. There is pretty much nothing that a boss can do to change that understanding. The forces that appear to shape it most - ethnicity, age, personality - are well outside of the boss's control. The typical boss has long ago made peace with the fact that his orders aren't being followed. Those who are liable to be infuriated by this remove themselves from the system long before they can achieve positions of any prominence. In both government and large public companies employees are fired much more often because of personal conflicts arising from clashes of wills unrelated to any actual work than because of laziness or of any work-related mistakes. No one cares about work enough to want to fire anyone for not doing it or for doing it badly. And weirdly enough, there are usually some people about who are willing to work even if they know that they won't be fired for sitting on their asses all day. It is undoubtedly these people who keep civilization from collapsing.

If management doesn't direct any actual work, what does it do? It orders statistical reports about the work, conducts meetings and at the higher levels attends meaningless ceremonies. Having done about a million statistical reports I am quite sure that, at least at the places where I have worked so far, they are rarely read. Some of the data requested at meetings simply cannot be gathered. A lot of the data that can be gathered is obviously incorrect, yet this is rarely noticed.

I've been close to falling asleep at almost every managerial meeting I've attended. This is especially telling because I never fall asleep on the subway or in front of the TV and I had never, ever slept during classes at school. What can be more boring than a bunch of people talking about things they do not understand?

I'm guessing that private companies and the few public companies which, like Apple, are still run by their founders, are better at all of this than is the typical workplace. How much better though? The tsars certainly thought of themselves as rightful owners of their governments. Same with Napoleon. And yet Tolstoy was still able to write all of the stuff he'd written about the meaninglessness and futility of power everywhere he looked.

By the way, I'm not trying to denigrate most managers' worth as people here. Tragically, they tend to be smarter and more conscientious than the poor sods doing most of the actual work in this society. A more efficient system would work to redirect high quality people from management to productive activities. Same with hipsters, humanities professors, Wall Street rats and the rest of them. I realize that I'm starting to sound like Chairman Mao now, but yeah, perhaps some of his stuff made sense.

If I ran a large organization and was personally invested in its success, I would first get rid of 95% of its management. I would use the savings to attract a better class of actual workers by offering them higher salaries. This seems like a no-brainer.

When my boss told me years ago that I was going to supervise a couple of employees, I never thought of changing my attitude towards them. Occasionally I say things like "shouldn't we be doing X now?" and sometimes 10 or 20 minutes later my supposed subordinates actually get up and go join me in doing X. An outside observer might assume that at those moments I exercise my supervisory powers, but he would be wrong. Just as often one of my subordinates says to the other and to me "shouldn't we be doing Y now?" and guess what, in those cases I often eventually get up and go join him in doing Y. I never try to actually supervise not simply because it would be futile, but also to avoid looking ridiculous to myself and others.

World Cup

2010-06-26T17:08:00.012-04:00

I saw both of today's World Cup matches and there were empty seats in the first one. This is astounding. The World Cup is the biggest athletic competition in the world - the confident, hetero brother of the Olympics. And there are empty seats in the knockout stage! Even the crazy, beer-loving, hooliganism-prone international soccer fanbase was too scared to travel to that hellhole to support their teams.

I once bought a little book called "101 Things To Do Before You Die". "Be present when your country wins the World Cup" is in that book next to things like "save someone's life", "write a best-seller" and "make the front page of a national newspaper". Well, this year if you're Argentinian or German, all you may need to do to check off that item on the list is conquer your fear of big black crowds - there seem to be lots of empty seats at these games. For the record, so far I've done 7 of the "101 things", most of them easy ones.

More stereotypes confirmed: like every black African team I've ever seen play, Ghana had a white coach. Before this match every commentator gushed about Ghaneans' sprinting ability, and once the game started, what do you know, the Ghaneans turned out to be great sprinters. The condition of the pitch in the Uruguay - South Korea game was not up to high school, let alone World Cup standards.

Not a stereotype, actually a mystery: in 3 out of its 4 games in this tournament the US team allowed a goal in the first few minutes. I've watched thousands of soccer games in my life and I have never seen any team habitually experience this particular problem before.

The networks were trying really hard to sell America on soccer this year, but one of the commentators assigned by them to the US - Ghana game was named Ian and talked with a British accent. For millions of Americans who never watch soccer, but tuned in today because they heard that the US team had been doing well lately, this would have been just another reminder of how foreign soccer is.

On the one hand I was disappointed that the US lost, on the other I was relieved that the game wasn't decided by penalty kicks. People who know nothing about soccer often complain about its low scoring and boredom. People who do know something about it are more likely to complain about diving and the random unfairness of penalty shootouts. Skipping extra time and deciding tied games by a series of corner kicks would be fairer, since scoring off a corner normally requires great skill.

La Manche

2010-05-23T16:21:00.005-04:00

In my review of War and Peace I commented on the extraordinary level of dominance that French enjoyed over other European languages during the period described by Tolstoy. The rise of English in the late 20th century would have seemed bizarre to anyone living just a few generations ago.

Britain became a political superpower right after its Industrial Revolution, but that had almost no effect on the prestige or popularity of its language outside of the British Empire's domains. A 100 years ago there seemed to be no reason to expect that America's rise was going to challenge French either. A language's prestige depended on its association with high culture, not with raw political power. This is why Latin could still be taught to millions of schoolchildren 1,500 years after the Roman Empire's fall. For centuries French was the premier European language not because France had a lot of power (sometimes it did and at other times it didn't), but because it had developed an extraordinarily refined culture which people wanted to emulate.

In the final analysis it wasn't England's or even America's political rise that made English prominent, but the precipitous decline of reverence for high culture after WWI. In the 20th century, perhaps for the first time ever, a culture no longer needed to be perceived as refined for foreigners to want to emulate it.

Anyway, to demonstrate just how marginal English seemed to everyone before the 20th century, I'm going to talk about the English Channel. As you probably know, the French call that body of water La Manche (the Sleeve). The Channel was always more important to the English (it connected them to the rest of the civilized world) than to the French, but it's shared by both countries and cultures equally and its naming by other nations can serve as a kind of test of linguistic influence.

If you bring up the English Channel in the Wikipedia and then click on the word "Languages" on the left, you'll see links to the corresponding articles in other tongues. It comes as no surprise that 13 of the 13 living Romance languages and dialects that have their own articles about the English Channel call it La Manche or something similar - after all, French is a Romance language itself. Why wouldn't its sister tongues take its side in this little linguistic dispute?

The fact that only 4 out of the 10 Germanic languages and dialects I looked at follow the English lead in naming the Channel English is far more telling. And one of those 4 is Scots! Germans call the Channel Ärmelkanal. Der Ärmel, just like La Manche, means "the sleeve". Icelandic does the same thing. The Dutch chose to screw their English relatives in a somewhat different manner - they just call it Het Kanaal (the Channel), strategically dropping the English part.

By now you wouldn't be surprised to learn that all 11 Slavic languages I looked at in the Wikipedia call the Channel "La Manche".

Most non-Indo-European languages agree: languages as diverse as Basque, Estonian. Mongolian, Swahili, Turkish, Kurdish, Hungarian, etc., use the name "La Manche" or, more precisely, its local manglings.

The ones that call the Channel English are few and far between, for some reason including Finnish, Malay and Chinese.

Review of War and Peace

2010-05-17T22:32:00.024-04:00

Война и миръ (War and Peace), 1869, by count Leo Tolstoy, read in Russian. Glossy's rating: 6.5 out of 10. Tolstoy's rating in C. Murray's Human Accomplishment: 42 out of 100 (10th place overall in Western lit.)

This enormous novel is almost entirely devoid of humor or stylistic elegance - two qualities I love most in literature - and yet I can't honestly say I hated it.

It is a book written for and about a unique, fascinating people that, sadly, is now gone forever. I'm talking here about the Russian aristocracy, to whose upper reaches count Leo Tolstoy himself belonged, and in a way about European aristocracy in general. Who were these people, whose destruction or assimilation in most countries, and removal from power in all others have coincided with the disappearance of duels, of the practice of noblesse oblige and of so much beauty? What did a thousand years of careful breeding accomplish in their case?

Let's start with the duels, one of which is memorably described in the book. These wealthy, powerful, overwhelmingly smart men were routinely willing to risk their lives for honor. A few disrespectful words were more than enough. Note that this behavior had nothing in common with that of modern goons after a "dis". In order to call themselves gentlemen, men had to give each other equal chances, fighting one-on-one, at a predetermined time and place, long after the initial rush of emotion had a chance to subside. Fairness, at least within the circle of those who were judged to be capable of it, was inseparable from honor.

This attitude was carried into battle and beyond. Here Tolstoy describes the French emperor talking to a Russian POW after Austerlitz:

"You are the commander of Emperor Alexander's regiment of Horse Guards?" asked Napoleon.
"I commanded a squadron," replied Repnin.
"Your regiment fulfilled its duty honorably," said Napoleon.
"The praise of a great commander is a soldier's highest reward," said Repnin.
"I bestow it with pleasure," said Napoleon.

Try to imagine a conversation like that happening in a modern war.

The old aristocracy's privileged lifestyle only amazes until one thinks of today's rich. I doubt that wealth in modern Russia or modern America is distributed any more evenly than it was in 19th century Europe. What has definitely decreased though is the elite's sense of responsibility towards the rest of society. In the novel the Rostov family owns numerous opulent homes and has thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of peasants working on its estates, and yet no one is surprised when Nikolay Rostov, who was modeled on Tolstoy's father, volunteers for active duty as a simple hussar. He eventually rises to the rank of officer, but in those days no matter how high you rose in the army, your chances of getting shot were always good. Petiya, Nikolay's only brother, is killed in action near the end of the novel. And Kutuzov, the Russian army's overall commander during the decisive stages of its war with Napoleon, and an heir to an old princely family, is missing an eye by the time we meet him in the novel - it was lost in an engagement with the Turks.

Sure, on occasion privileged kids still volunteer to serve in the wars their fathers help start. However, in the world described by this novel this wasn't just many times more common than now - it was expected of them.

This elite's sense of duty, so startling to the modern eye, is most apparent in the scene that describes how a large part of the Russian side of the war was funded. As far as I know, all of the major participants in both of 20th century's world wars financed their involvement through taxes, i.e. naked coercion. In War and Peace, however, the Tsar meets with the aristocracy and the commercial class of Moscow to discuss what to do, and they simply end up volunteering the necessary money and troops. The Tsar then tearfully thanks everyone for their sacrifices to the nation. This is repeated in St. Petersburg and Smolensk. In other words, the ultimate winner of the Napoleonic wars funded most of its efforts similarly to how the office where I work funds birthday parties and baby showers. No modern Western state can have that much trust in its citizens.

And no modern Western politician can inspire these sorts of feelings, not even among the young:

Stopping in front of the Pavlograds, the Tsar said something in French to the Austrian Emperor and smiled.
Seeing that smile, Rostov involuntarily smiled himself and felt a still stronger flow of love for his sovereign. He longed to show that love in some way and knowing that this was impossible, wanted to cry. The Tsar called the colonel of the regiment and said a few words to him.
"Oh God, what would happen to me if the Emperor spoke to me?" thought Rostov. "I would die of happiness!"
The Tsar addressed the officers also: "I thank you all, gentlemen, I thank you with my whole heart." To Rostov every word sounded like a voice from heaven. How happy he would be if he could now die for his Tsar!
"You have earned the St. George's standards and will be worthy of them."
"Only to die, to die for him!" thought Rostov.

Any impulse to smile at this now should be tempered with the realization that these sorts of feelings win wars. And you can't write any of it off on brainwashing - neither TV nor government-run educational systems were yet on the horizon in 1805. In fact, Russians of Rostov's class were largely educated by private tutors imported by their families from France. Most of the written material they consumed was also in French.

France's dominance of the cultural scene of that time is astounding. Many of the Russian nobles portrayed in the novel were more comfortable speaking French than Russian. It is also made clear that Pierre and Andrey, the novel's leading protagonists, know German, and there are dozens of German characters throughout the book. Tolstoy includes a lot of French and a few German passages without translation here, assuming that an upscale Russian audience would have had no trouble understanding them. In contrast, the novel has only one English character, he appears in only one scene, has no importance of any sort and doesn't even get a name. War and Peace lacks English passages for the same reason that it lacks Albanian ones - an educated Russian audience wouldn't have been able to read them. Although the British Empire was the most powerful state of that time, its cultural impact outside of its domains was scarcely detectable.

At one point Tolstoy takes time to describe the long-dead Russian upper class accent. That passage reminded me of nothing so much as old phonograph recordings of Lenin's speeches. It's as scary as it is true: modern Russians' mental image of how the aristocracy spoke to a large extent comes from the recordings of the guy who led the effort to exterminate it.

I'm sure that a big reason why I'm fascinated by literary descriptions of the aristocracy is that they're so far removed from anything I've known in real life. It's impossible to idealize anything one knows well, and yet most people have an inborn desire to idealize something. Unfortunately Tolstoy succumbed to one of the more negative manifestations of this impulse. He ended up turning the ordinary Russian peasant into a sort of internal noble savage, endowing him with qualities that no human has ever possessed. The picture of count Tolstoy - a rich man and a direct descendant of Russia's original royal family - in a peasant shirt, familiar to every Russian schoolboy, is one of the most ridiculous images to ever become associated with literature. At least I idealize people who are smarter than I am.

Rousseau, the leading European promoter of the noble savage idea, could be enthusiastic about savages precisely because he'd never met them. Tolstoy did know some peasants, but only as chattel on his estate, and later as his employees.

In War and Peace the internal noble savage is most prominently personified by Platon Karatayev, a peasant soldier whom count Pierre Bezuhov meets while in French captivity. I found Tolstoy's breathless descriptions of Karatayev cringe-worthy. He took every sign of that man's stupidity - his unreflective nature, his inability to repeat what he'd just said, the childish simplicity of all the stories he tells - as something profound, mysterious and other-worldly.

Pacifism was another trendy idea to which Tolstoy fell victim. Seeing him try to square it with his obvious pride over Russia's beating of the French was pretty amusing. The two opposing sentiments, one abstract and most likely taken from books, the other intuitive and obviously experienced first-hand, remained unreconciled till the end.

It would be grossly unfair to depict Tolstoy as a 19th century hippy though. His views on women, for example, were not very different from the blogger Roissy's, or from any sane man's. Here's a part of his description of Anatole, the novel's biggest playboy:

...in his behavior to women Anatole had a manner which particularly inspires in them curiosity, awe, and even love--a supercilious consciousness of his own superiority. It was as if he said to them: "I know you, I know you, but why should I bother about you? You'd be only too glad, of course." Perhaps he did not really think this when he met women- even probably he did not, for in general he thought very little--but his looks and manner gave that impression.

Here Tolstoy comments on women's inability to handle abstract ideas while describing Countess Rostova's response to her son's desire to serve his country:

She realized that if she said a word about his not going to the battle (she knew he enjoyed the thought of the impending engagement) he would say something about men, honor, and the fatherland--something senseless, masculine, and obstinate which there would be no contradicting, and her plans would be spoiled.

Here's Dolohov talking to the young Rostov:

Yes, dear boy," he continued, "I have met loving, noble, high-minded men, but I have not yet met any women--countesses or cooks--who were not venal.

And here is prince Andrey, one of the noblest souls ever to be realistically described in print, summing it all up for young Pierre:

If you only knew what those society women are, and women in general! My father is right. Selfish, vain, stupid, trivial in everything--that's what women are when you see them in their true colors!

This reminds me that War and Peace abounds with ethnic stereotypes that only a boring PC prude could pretend not to enjoy:

All Moscow repeated ...the words of Rostopchin, that French soldiers have to be incited to battle by highfalutin words, and Germans by logical arguments to show them that it is more dangerous to run away than to advance, but that Russian soldiers only need to be restrained and held back! (...)

...all of Ramballe's love stories had the disgusting quality which Frenchmen regard as the special charm and poetry of love...

...L'amour which the Frenchman worshiped consisted principally in the unnaturalness of his relation to the woman and in a combination of incongruities giving the chief charm to the feeling. (...)

Pfuel was one of those hopelessly and immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion--science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. (...)

A combination of Austrian precision and Russian courage - what more could be wished for?" (...)

Prince Andrey's father talking about Napoleon:

"Buonaparte was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has got splendid soldiers. Besides he began by attacking Germans. And only idlers have failed to beat the Germans. Since the world began everybody has beaten the Germans. They beat no one--except one another. He made his reputation fighting them."

And this was written only a few years before France's decisive defeat by Bismarck in 1871! Tolstoy's hostility to Germans came from two easily-identifiable sources, the first of which might well have been biological. Russians love living large, not caring about the consequences of every minor thing they do, having noisy fun and being overly generous with everyone. This has always clashed with the more cautious and disciplined German national character. An American parallel would be a southerner's disdain for old Yankee fussiness and perceived joylessness.

The second reason had to do with the proliferation of Germans in Imperial Russian service. When Tsar Peter the Great embarked on his project to Westernize Russia at the end of the 17th century, he needed technical expertise, so he invited thousands of foreigners, mostly Germans, to the country. Many stayed permanently, making up a large percentage of the army's officer corps. Old Russian aristocracy like the Tolstoy family understandably felt threatened by this. Over the course of the 18th century through repeated marriages with German princesses the Russian Imperial family itself became mostly German. Tolstoy was too respectful of monarchy as an institution to just come out and say it, but his descriptions of Alexander I as a reserved, duty-bound, extremely formal man fit the German stereotype, which is repeatedly made fun of elsewhere in the novel.

To many modern readers the war in War and Peace is most remarkable not for anything that actually happened in it, but for the bizarre way in which much of it reoccurred more than a century later.

An ideologically-driven conquest of the European continent by a man of unremarkable origins, that man's obsession with and then abandonment of a plan to conquer England, his late invasion of Russia, easy progress up till Moscow, a fierce fight for the city leading to a turnaround in fortunes, and later his vast army's annihilation on its long journey back to Europe, ending with the Russian occupation of his capital - how could every one of those things have happened twice, and in exactly that order?

At one point in the novel Tolstoy says that every historian of the Napoleonic Wars agreed that Bonaparte started his Russian campaign too late in the summer to be successful, and that he didn't adequately prepare for the Russian winter.

Well, what were the chances that that would happen again? Both seemed to have overestimated Britain and underestimated Russia. Here Tolstoy describes a well-documented conversation between Napoleon and a Russian ambassador:

How many churches are there in Moscow?" he asked.

And receiving the reply that there were more than two hundred churches, he remarked:
"Why such a quantity of churches?"
"The Russians are very devout," replied Balashev.
"But a large number of monasteries and churches is always a sign of the backwardness of a people," said Napoleon, turning to Caulaincourt for appreciation of this remark.
Balashev respectfully ventured to disagree with the French Emperor.
"Every country has its own character," said he.
"But nowhere in Europe is there anything like that," said Napoleon.
"I beg your Majesty's pardon," returned Balashev, "besides Russia there is Spain, where there are also many churches and monasteries."
This reply of Balashev's, which hinted at the recent defeats of the French in Spain, was much appreciated when he related it at Alexander's court, but it was not much appreciated at Napoleon's dinner, where it passed unnoticed.

It's clear to me from this and from other things I've read that a big reason why Napoleon overestimated the Brits and underestimated the Russians was his erroneous assumption that modernity must always be good and that backwardness must always be bad. In times of general moral decline backwardness easily becomes an advantage, and what was the French Revolution if not a giant step downwards for Western Civ.? Of course, Hitler also loved going on about the backwardness of Russia's "Asiatic hordes".

It would have been too much to expect this 1,600-page novel to be a paragon of literary style, and it's not. Reading War and Peace is more like listening to a very smart man talk than like reading something that a very smart man has written. He repeats himself a lot. The sentences are inelegant and overlong. He sometimes goes on for pages expressing an idea that with more effort could have been condensed into a couple of lines. What keeps you from doubting the man's intelligence is his ability to get deep into the minds of dozens of very different kinds of people in order to describe their motivations realistically.

Tolstoy's extremely common-sensical takes on dozens of topics that seemingly have nothing to do with the plot are in themselves reason enough to read this book. To give a small example, here he describes a minor character singing:

Uncle sang as peasants sing, with full and naive conviction that the whole meaning of a song lies in the words and that the tune comes of itself, and that apart from the words there is no tune, which exists only to give measure to the words. As a result of this the unconsidered tune, like the song of a bird, was extraordinarily good.

When thinking about opera's ridiculousness, it's tempting to imagine that the 19th century was so soaked in artificiality that it didn't even notice it. And yet here Tolstoy shows that he clearly understood the appeal of the kind of singing that is diametrically opposed to all opera, of the kind of singing that in the world of 20th century popular music would be associated with 1960s folkies and 1970s singer-songwriters.

My least favorite part of War and Peace was its first, philosophical after-word. I found its ideas to be mostly self-evident and its style too boring for words. What is philosophy if not empty talk for smart men, their equivalent of feminine chatter? One almost never learns anything new from reading it and I certainly didn't learn anything new from that after-word.

Do I think that War and Peace deserves to be the most famous novel ever written? Not for a second. However it's not at all a bad book. It's so ambitious that at its end the author denies, not without justification, that it's even a novel. I found it to be a clear window on a fascinating place and time and I think it contains more than enough wisdom and insight to outweigh its faults.

Robin Hood

2010-05-15T22:07:00.014-04:00

I often enjoy historical movies, so today I saw Robin Hood with Russel Crowe. I've only seen one Ridley Scott film before - Blackhawk Down - and Robin Hood turned out to be much worse. The villains were too evil, the heroes too lovable, the battle scenes too similar to the ones in all the other Hollywood movies with swords in them - in fact all of the ways in which this movie was bad turned out to be as cliched as its plot.

No, I didn't expect this to be an English equivalent to Andrey Rubliov, but if Scott throttled down his bad guys' scowling even just a little, his film would have benefited from it.

The man who played King John looked like a younger and much, much less talented version of Rowan Atkinson. Cate Blanchette became too old to play a major movie star's romantic interest so long ago that it really made me question Scott's judgement. He presumably made the plot idiotic in order to attract the largest possible audience, but it didn't occur to him that making lady Marian pretty would have advanced the same exact goal without forcing him to look like a fool himself?

Russel Crowe was OK, but the actor who played sir Walter was spectacular and clearly the only one in the cast who looked comfortable impersonating a nobleman. I just looked him up, and it turns out that his mother was a baroness. Wow.

The scene where the king of France tries to invade England was deliberately made to remind the viewer of old photographs of D-Day. I have no idea what the point of that was.

There was a mild anti-government message in the movie. I pay taxes too, so I was all for it, but as a history nerd I know that the sentiments depicted were pretty ahistorical, at least for the medieval common man. The feudal system encouraged constant warfare between petty landlords. The average guy usually ended up rooting for a strong centralized state because only it could reign in the nobles, the knights and the bandits.

The modern state has gone far beyond its original function of securing law and order and now redistributes wealth from the productive elements of society to unproductive ones. This has given these productive elements a reason for hating the state that in the Middle Ages would have simply been unknown. In the actual, historical Middle Ages the only people who wanted to limit the power of kings were usually their nobles.

Dreams From Whose Father?

2010-04-18T11:23:00.009-04:00

During a discussion of Obama's first book on iSteve somebody posted a link to Jack Cashill's site where he argues that Bill Ayers must have had a substantial involvement in writing Dreams From My Father.

I read through that whole page and it left me unconvinced. For example, Mr. Cashill treats the fact that both Ayers and Obama described people's eyebrows in their books as incriminating. Same with the use of the words "stooped" and "fedora" by both. Perhaps we should now suspect Ayers of being a prominent Linux nerd.

"Obama tells the reader that the neighbor’s “silence” impressed him. “Silence” impressed Ayers as well. There are at least ten references to the word in Fugitive Days. "

What impressed me is that Cashill considers things like that to be tell-tale signs. Millions of people must have written about being impressed with silence at some point in their lives.

As I wrote in the comments on iSteve, Obama may well have gotten help with his book, and he may even have gotten it from Ayers, but those quotes on Mr. Cashill's page did nothing to convince me of that.

Back to Intrade

2010-04-17T17:11:00.010-04:00

I've won about $400 on Intrade since the start of this year, most of it through small bets on American Idol eliminations. The greatest thing of all about this field is that it lacks any experts. The stock market, for example, is full of guys who are really, really knowledgeable about stocks. Same with any kind of sports betting. Even though I've followed the NFL on and off for years now, I'd be scared to bet on it because there are lots of guys out there who've been obsessed with football all their lives.

Men, let alone geeky ones, rarely watch American Idol, so no one who's betting on it on Intrade could be fairly called an expert. Having only watched a few shows, I already feel completely up to speed.

This morning, while looking through the news, I saw an article that linked to a TMZ story about Crystal Bowersox, the Idol frontrunner. Apparently she's had a major hissy fit, threatened to quit the show, and had to be talked into staying by Ryan Seacrest himself.

"In front of several people, Crystal told Ryan she couldn't handle the competition.... she said she hated the attention and said to Seacrest, "What's the point?"

Couldn't handle the what!? She's never been in the bottom 3 and Cowell embarrasses himself weekly by gushing to everyone about how great she is.

And while there are millions of naturally shy people in this world, I've seen Crystal on TV way more than enough to be sure that she's not one of them. I believe that in her case "hating attention" is a swipple pose, related to the brooding, "misunderstood" pose familiar to spoiled middle class children everywhere. Oh, what she wouldn't give to be finally misunderstood some day.

Just two of the problems with this:

1) Swipples don't watch American Idol.
2) What exactly is there to misunderstand about Crystal? As I've written before, she sings pop songs like a fat, drunken middle-aged man. It's really not complicated.

When I shared that last point with a co-worker of mine who watches American Idol, she started defending Crystal by comparing her to Janis Joplin. I don't know if it was through drugs or because of some inborn chemical imbalance, but Janis Joplin really was crazy. Luckily for Crystal, she's just posing.

While it's icky and immoral to find unhinged people fascinating, sadly, on occasion, everybody does anyway. In that sense Janis Joplin was far more fascinating than this Crystal girl will ever be.

Back to business: I've yet to regret shorting Crystal's win-it-all Intrade contract. This TMZ story should further strengthen her poseur image in the minds of the downscale, swipple-hating Idol audience.

------------------------------

One weird thing I've noticed about Intrade is that events whose chances of occuring cannot be more than 1% sometimes trade as if their likelihood was 10% or 20% instead. I've seen this phenomenon again and again and I've made most of my Intrade winnings by capitalizing on it.

For example, just last week I shorted a contract predicting the passage of an immigration bill before the end of this year. The market was saying that it had a 20% chance of being signed into law, which was clearly insane. If a similar bill failed in 2007, when the unemployment rate was still low, the chances of this one passing now must be very close to zero. I expect to win about $120 on this bet alone.

Another such case is the contract predicting a bombing campaign against Iran before July 1st of next year. An event like that would be sure to lead to an oil embargo, which in the current economic climate is clearly unacceptable to the kinds of people who usually make these kinds of decisions. There is a fear out there that, largely due to the debt situation, this economic crisis could turn into something that's never been seen before, something worse than the Great Depression. An oil embargo could easily be the final push that plunges the world into an economic abyss. This is why a war with Iran is extremely unlikely in the near future.

But for some reason there are people on Intrade who're giving this war a 20% chance of occurring before next July. Needless to say, I've shorted that contract too.

Thoughts on the Latest News

2010-04-10T13:21:00.006-04:00

A plane carrying much of Poland's political leadership, including its president, has crashed in Russia. It's a tragedy, of course, but while reading about it in the NY Times I couldn't help but be annoyed by this sentence:

"The two countries had been making strides in recent months to improve their ties, which had been strained since the days of communism, when Poland was a Soviet satellite."

It's amazing that somebody at the Times, somebody whose job is apparently to report on Poland, thinks or can get away with pretending to think, that the Russian-Polish rivalry dates to "the days of communism." Or that it ever had anything to do with communism.

Russia and Poland had been at war with each other in pretty much every century since the 11th. The two countries tried to swallow one another whole several times. For example, Russia's main state holiday, its rough equivalent of other nations' Independence Days, is the anniversary of the Russian popular uprising that chased Polish occupiers out of Moscow in 1612. Oh, you didn't know that the Polish army once occupied Moscow? Then you shouldn't be reporting on Poland for the New York freaking Times!

The article points out the irony of this tragedy occurring near the place in the Smolensk region where thousands of Polish officers were executed by the Soviets in 1940. But anyone who knows anything about the history of that region is more likely to remember that Russia and Poland fought several incredibly bloody wars for Smolensk in the 16th and 17th centuries. The human toll of every one of those wars surpassed that of the Katyn massacre many times over. Ethnically the Smolensk region was always Russian, so its repeated occupations by Poland could never be described as anything but foreign aggression.

What, you're saying that such imperialistic attitudes died centuries ago? Then obviously you are unfamiliar with the concept of Intermarum. Jozef Pilsudski, Poland's leader between 1926 and 1935, wanted Poland to once again run the entire area between the Baltic and the Black seas, calling it Międzymorze in Polish and Intermarum in Latin (both words translate as between-the-seas).

"Józef Piłsudski's strategic goal was to resurrect an updated form of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, while working for the disintegration of the Russian Empire, and later the Soviet Union, into its ethnic constituents. (The latter was his Prometheist project.)"

You've got to give the guy credit for ballsiness. An attempt to put that project into practice would have rivaled WWII in scale. This map of it is nothing but insane. It shows Poland running an area with a population at least 5 times greater than its own. And the reason why guys like Pilsudki didn't just go for it was weakness, not humanitarianism or lack of desire.

Back to Communism:

In the 1920s and 1930s, while Soviet Communism still conformed to Marx's and Lenin's original direction, The New York Times was one of its biggest fans. But when after the war Stalin remade Soviet Communism into its polar opposite (Russian nationalism), the Times and similar organizations suddenly became anti-communist. Which is to say that they kept true to Marx's and Lenin's original conception of Communism, while Stalin severely deviated from it. But since he continued to call his government Communist, the New York Times, together with the US government, started calling themselves anti-communist in order to better express their disapproval of him. It's confusing, I know.

Polish nationalists, who understandably hated the Russian occupation of their country after WWII, started exploiting this change in terminology as soon as they caught on to it. Guys like Lech Walesa, to get sympathy from half a world away, portrayed the latest round in their millennial conflict with Russia as a struggle against communism, not as a struggle against Russians as an occupying people. Did he realize that actual Communism died in Eastern Europe in 1946 and that the guys whose help he was seeking against the Russians were actually Marx's primary political heirs? I'm sure he did.

The more you think about politics, the more you realize that all of the intelligent, pragmatic actors in it are moved by ethnocentrism, i.e. by Darwinian forces. Ideologies like communism, libertarianism, PC, anti-racism, feminism, Islamism, what have you, are for the most part ruses. The people who believe in them sincerely are chumps, losers, detritus lining history's road.

Not that mere observers like me, whose political involvement is limited to laughing at these ruses in private or on blogs that nobody reads, aren't losers ourselves. Of course we are. I'm not trying to get onto any high horses here. It's just an observation.

Even More Idol

2010-03-31T23:28:00.004-04:00

Not sure why, but I keep winning money on my Idol bets. I won $49 last week by betting on Katie Stevens not getting the boot and $117 today by betting on Andrew Garcia staying. Could both of these wins have come at the expense of the same person? I'm only going to feel guilty about it if it's a kid or an old lady in urgent need of $166 for emergency surgery for an extraordinarily cute puppy that she rescued from a burning building while on her annual trip to help nuns save dolphins in Africa.

The weirdest thing is that both times the other person kept offering me these contracts even after I ran out of money and couldn't buy them anymore. If I had a few thousand dollars in my Intrade account, I would have won several hundred on each of these bets. I don't know when the other guy was going to stop.

About the actual competition: I'm rooting for Casey James and Lee Dewyze, in that order. The judges are being vicious to a guy named Tim Urban, who's taking all they're dishing with quiet dignity, smiling, like a real gent. So they make fun of him for that. It would be a lie to say that I'm a fan of Mr. Urban's singing, but I liked his attitude in the face of public disapproval so much that yesterday, while watching, I suddenly got off the couch, found my cell phone and just went ahead and voted for him. This has never happened before. Then I walked over to my landline phone and voted for him again. Then I wrote this post, at the end asking anyone who might accidentally stumble upon it to consider a vote for Tim Urban next Tuesday.

Idoling Away

2010-03-23T22:08:00.010-04:00

I watched another Idol show for Intrade purposes. Some impressions:

I'm extremely annoyed by Cowell's attempts to seem like a snob while gushing over every second or third Idol singer. A real snob (how do I know this? :-) not only would never praise any of these people, he would honestly dislike every bit of their singing as well.

The judges rarely pass up a chance to advise contestants to lose control during their performances, as if the stage was some kind of a giant WC. In real life nothing of any worth is achievable without laser-like focus and a ton of self-control. This applies to good music as much as to anything.

Every week that I've watched this show this year Simon has predicted that a contestant named Crystal Bowersox will win the entire thing. She's got a nice, friendly face and seems like a genuinely good person, but somebody must have told her that she's "alternative" and she seems to have really believed it. She expresses her alternativeness by trying to sing one or two verses of every song like a fat, drunken, middle-aged man, by wearing blond dread locks and a piercing on her chin, and by constantly talking about how alternative she is. I'm considering shorting her main Intrade contract. Since when has brooding, status-conscious middle class youth been a part of the Idol's core audience?

All successful Idol singers are belters, so this season a girl named Siobhan Magnus has driven this to its logical conclusion. She ends every song, regardless of its mood or genre, by shrieking at the very top of her young, healthy, freakishly capacious lungs. Everything else about her is either boring or weird, but Intrade puts her chances of winning in second place, right behind Crystal's.

I put a bit of money on a guy named Michael Lynche. He's a born smoothtalker, the judges love his singing and his Intrade contracts were selling below 7 before I started buying them. I don't think he'll win the entire competition, but he'll probably stay until the final 3 or 4, at which point his Intrade contracts would sell for at least twice the price at which I got them.

Tolstoy on Doctors

2010-03-18T13:23:00.009-04:00

I'm reading War and Peace now and will probably post a review here when I finish. I don't remember how, but in childhood I managed to only read 1.5 of the novel's 4 volumes, all of which must have been required at school. If I missed the rest of the book because I was out sick, then this post would be pretty fitting.

Tolstoy didn't care the least bit about elegant prose or humor, but he wrote about a very interesting, no longer existing group of people (the Russian aristocracy) from an insider's perspective and he had a lot of wisdom. He applied this wisdom to dozens of very diverse topics in this enormous book. I made this post about Tolstoy's take on the medical profession because it completely agrees with mine.

In the third volume Natasha Rostova, one of the novel's major characters, is suffering from teenage heartbreak, but her family mistakenly believes that her condition is more serious than that.

"She could not eat or sleep, grew visibly thinner, coughed, and, as the doctors made them feel, was in danger. They could not think of anything but how to help her. Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease Natasha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine--not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business. But, above all, that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were really useful, as in fact they were to the whole Rostov family. Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible, as they were given in small doses), but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and of those who loved her--and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering. They satisfied the need seen in its most elementary form in a child, when it wants to have a place rubbed that has been hurt. A child knocks itself and runs at once to the arms of its mother or nurse to have the aching spot rubbed or kissed, and it feels better when this is done. The child cannot believe that the strongest and wisest of its people have no remedy for its pain, and the hope of relief and the expression of its mother's sympathy while she rubs the bump comforts it. The doctors were of use to Natasha because they kissed and rubbed her bump, assuring her that it would soon pass if only the coachman went to the chemist's in the Arbat and got a powder and some pills in a pretty box of a ruble and seventy kopeks, and if she took those powders in boiled water at intervals of precisely two hours, neither more nor less.

What would Sonya and the count and countess have done, how would they have looked, if nothing had been done, if there had not been those pills to give by the clock, the warm drinks, the chicken cutlets, and all the other details of life ordered by the doctors, the carrying out of which supplied an occupation and consolation to the family circle? How would the count have borne his dearly loved daughter's illness had he not known that it was costing him a thousand rubles, and that he would not grudge thousands more to benefit her, or had he not known that if her illness continued he would not grudge yet other thousands and would take her abroad for consultations there, and had he not been able to explain the details of how Metivier and Feller had not understood the symptoms, but Frise had, and Mudrov had diagnosed them even better? What would the countess have done had she not been able sometimes to scold the invalid for not strictly obeying the doctor's orders?

"You'll never get well like that," she would say, forgetting her grief in her vexation, "if you won't obey the doctor and take your medicine at the right time! You mustn't trifle with it, you know, or it may turn to pneumonia," she would go on, deriving much comfort from the utterance of that foreign word, incomprehensible to others as well as to herself.

What would Sonya have done without the glad consciousness that she had not undressed during the first three nights, in order to be ready to carry out all the doctor's injunctions with precision, and that she still kept awake at night so as not to miss the proper time when the slightly harmful pills in the little gilt box had to be administered? Even to Natasha herself it was pleasant to see that so many sacrifices were being made for her sake, and to know that she had to take medicine at certain hours, though she declared that no medicine would cure her and that it was all nonsense. And it was even pleasant to be able to show, by disregarding the orders, that she did not believe in medical treatment and did not value her life.

...

The symptoms of Natasha's illness were that she ate little, slept little, coughed, and was always low-spirited. The doctors said that she could not get on without medical treatment, so they kept her in the stifling atmosphere of the town, and the Rostovs did not move to the country that summer of 1812.

In spite of the many pills she swallowed and the drops and powders out of the little bottles and boxes of which Madame Schoss who was fond of such things made a large collection, and in spite of being deprived of the country life to which she was accustomed, youth prevailed. Natasha's grief began to be overlaid by the impressions of daily life, it ceased to press so painfully on her heart, it gradually faded into the past, and she began to recover physically."

The average person reading this now probably thinks that that's only how medicine was like then, that progress and technology have blah blah blah...

If Tolstoy's description fit 95% of the medical practice of his day, then it would probably fit 70% of what's going on in 2010. Medicine is still and probably will always be mostly like that.

From what I've read, Tolstoy practiced what he preached, never asking or following doctors' advice and lived to the age of 82.

Being a glossophiliac, I can't resist mentioning that the native Russian word for doctor (vrach) is etymologically related to the Russian word for lying (vrat'). Faith healers were habitually called liars by their customers. When Western medicine arrived in Russia, its typical practitioner seemed like just another type of faith healer, so the word vrach was applied to him as well. It is now roughly as popular as "doctor" in Russia, but with overuse has unfortunately lost its sting.

Some YouTube Links

2010-03-13T15:10:00.009-05:00

I waste a lot of time on YouTube, so I thought I'd share a few links here.

First, some Russian clips. I don't follow modern Russian pop music closely, mostly because it's so much worse than the Soviet-era pop songs I still remember from childhood. I love this relatively recent song by a band named Любэ though. It sounds very Russian. I've always loved the open, cozy, big-hearted, melancholic, dreamy and unhurried feel that all such music has. This one, from the same band, is also good.

Going back in time, here's the waltz from the 1978 Russian movie "My Sweet and Tender Beast". I've heard it so many times, that I can't tell anymore whether I love it because it's that good or because it's just very, very familiar. Everyone in the clip is wearing old clothes and looks dignified because the movie was based on a novella by Chekhov.

Sinking even deeper into the swamps of sentimentality, I'm going to link to the only piece of music that ever made me cry. The big number 80 behind the stage in the clip means that this must have been recorded when I was 5 years old. The lyrics are mostly about the innocence of childhood. I'm sure that at the time this had no meaning for me whatsoever, but a few years ago, when I accidentally heard it for the first time in at least two decades, the lyrics and the melody hit me both at once, and with force. Half the YouTube comments under the clip are about people crying at hearing it at well, so I'm far from being alone here. I'm sure that even to younger Russians, let alone to anybody else, the visuals would look too choreographed and phony, but that's not how I look at it all. It's one of the least phony things I know of.

Moving away from Soviet-related material, here's some British guy's pretty impressive version of Bach's Toccata and Fugue.

Years ago, while reading something about Bach, I searched the file-sharing app of the moment for fugues. One of the hits was not a fugue, but this French song, which I loved, even though at the time I didn't understand any French. Now that I do, I love it even more - the lyrics are a gem. Here's another song by the same guy, from the same concert.

Next is a link to Nick Drake's "The Day Is Done". The intro to that song is my favorite bit of acoustic guitar playing ever.

This piano version of The Unforgiven probably wouldn't sound as good to those who've never heard the original Metallica track as it sounds to those who have. The work of comparing the two that your mind unconsciously performs while listening to the cover is probably pleasurable in itself, the same way that complicated jokes, which you have to think to figure out, are more pleasurable than simple ones.

Continuing with the same theme, here's a cool instrumental version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps. And this is George Harrison's own alternate version. I wouldn't say it's better than the one on the album, but, boy is it good. And, finally, here's the version played at his memorial concert.

Idolicious

2010-03-11T20:30:00.008-05:00

I can't freaking believe it! I was right about Paige Miles. She was eviscerated by Cowell and the other Idol judges, but since she was the only black girl in a field of 8, the black vote was always going to go to her in its entirety. When Simon said that this might have been "the end of the road" for Paige, he was either lying or showing a frightening level of cluelessness. God, I wish I bet more money on her. As it is, I only won $26. By the way, it was Paige who was shown coloring a hippo in a coloring book in her bio video last week.

And Kaitlyn, the pretty girl, was voted out, just as I suspected. I know at least a dozen people, mostly co-workers, who watch American Idol, and none of them are guys. Nothing attracts female envy and hostility as effectively as feminine beauty.

By the way, I did watch yesterday's show, which was devoted to the male singers. I thought that on average they sang much better than the women. This is probably because the rough, course R&B or rock-type sound that most Idol singers go for naturally suits guys better than it suits girls. A female singer would be wise to choose something more delicate.

More Idolatry

2010-03-09T21:04:00.006-05:00

I won about $42 by betting on the Oscars on Intrade, so my total profit so far this year is about $148 on an initial investment of $950. Trying to keep the streak going, I watched a whole hour of American Idol tonight. I can't say that I liked any of the singing, but a contestant named Katelyn Epperley looked very cute, while another one named Katie Stevens seemed kind of smart. Speaking of which, my estimates of the judges' and host's IQs are: Seacrest 120, Randy 92, Ellen 130, Kara 105, Simon 125. I remember Steve Sailer commenting on lesbian humorlessness. This is probably true on average, but for some reason Ellen Degeneres is an exception.

Cowell said that tonight could be "the end of the road" for a contestant named Paige Miles. However, she's the only black girl left, and no matter what anyone says, ethnicity is the most important issue in most kinds of voting. The black vote will have nowhere to go but to Ms. Miles, so I'm guessing that she'll stay. Because of this I shorted a couple of contracts that pay out if she's booted. Or at least I think I did. I've never shorted anything before on Intrade, so this will have to serve as a test of whether or not I understand how Intrade shorting works. All I know is that it seems different from stock market shorting.

The judges were also very hard on Katelyn, the single cutest person in the room. I suspect that most of the voting audience is female, so Katelyn's good looks may actually work against her, not for her.

A woman named Lily Scott looked hideous and annoying while singing about as badly as everyone else, and yet was praised by all the judges as "unique" and "alternative". I hope to God that she doesn't end up winning the whole thing.

Glossy Watches American Idol

2010-03-03T23:34:00.007-05:00

On Sunday I'll get back the Intrade money I bet on the Oscars, which means that soon I'll have to bet it on something else. The midterm elections are still a long way off, but American Idol is sending someone home every week, and you can bet on it on Intrade, so today I watched my first American Idol show in 5 or 6 years.

They had a ladies' night, but most of the performances seemed extremely unladylike - zoo-type howling, orgasmic screeching, proud coarseness - the whole thing. The girl who sang "The Scientist" by Coldplay had a beautiful face, which made the fact that Chris Martin sounded a lot more feminine than she did while singing the original especially hilarious. I guess the general culture is a part of the problem here, but it's so much more fun to blame stupidity that I can't pass up the chance to mention the following: a 24-year old contestant said that her favorite hobby was coloring. With crayons, in coloring books. I don't remember those things ever being around when I was a kid, but for some reason hippopotamuses have long stood out in my mind as the most representative things that could be colored in them. And like clockwork, they showed that girl coloring a hippo with crayons in her bio video.

I do believe that music is one of those areas to which intelligence can be usefully applied though. Here is a good example of a very smart man singing a pop song. I guess intelligence increases one's sensitivity, one's emotional resolution, allowing one to perceive subtler and more varied shades of feeling. If you're trying to draw something in MS Paint, and you're given a hard limit of 50x50 pixels and 5 colors, you'll probably be less likely to come up with a masterpiece than if you were given 500x500 pixels and thousands of colors. I suspect that smarties sing better than idiots partly for the same reason.

A Random Thought

2010-02-25T06:13:00.005-05:00

If America wasn't bizarrely and undeservedly named for Amerigo Vespucci, what could its current name be? Probably Columbia, but another very real possibility is Occidentalia, by analogy with how Australia got named some centuries later. Of course this word would have long ago been shortened to Oxy in English.

This would have probably led "oxymoron" to be so hopelessly politicized by now that another word would have had to be found to express its original meaning. Or maybe not - after an initial period of confusion Americans could have reclaimed "oxymoron" with pride. If you think about it, it can suggest that calling Oxies morons is oxymoronic, i.e. uncalled for.

Sexiness and Nasality

2010-02-24T13:00:00.002-05:00

It occured to me some time ago that French and Portuguese - unquestionably Europe's sexiest-sounding languages - are also the only ones on that continent that happen to be heavily nasal. The odds of that being a random coincidence can't be very high.

If James Cameron wanted his Avatar aliens to sound sexy, he should have told his linguist to make their fake language outlandishly, freakishly nasal - like French on viagra. Which reminds me: the Russian word for blue (goluboy) also means gay. Avatar must have produced so many chuckles in the former USSR.

Intrade Update

2010-02-15T23:12:00.005-05:00

My bet on Yanukovych in the Ukrainian election was successful, but I still haven't gotten a payout from Intrade because Ms. Tymoshenko is acting like a sore loser, suing the victor and refusing to let the people finally forget her ridiculous hairstyle. In the meantime I noticed that I could bet on the Oscars in such a way that I'd win money regardless of whether Best Picture goes to Avatar or to Hurt Locker. If Avatar contracts are selling for $47 and Hurt Locker contracts for $44, the market is saying that the rest of the field has a 9% chance of winning. But that's obviously wrong - the real probability of any movie besides Avatar and Hurt Locker winning the Best Pic category is zilch. Oscar voting is like an election and this year all the movies besides Avatar and Hurt Locker are like the Libertarian, Socialist Workers', Green, etc. parties. So I went out and bought an equal number of Avatar and Hurt Locker contracts. Now I'll get around $30 no matter who wins.

In a riskier transaction, I bet on Tiger Woods coming back to golf before the middle of this year. My impression is that Tiger is a very disciplined, conscientious fellow. Why wouldn't he want to go back to work quickly? Unfortunately now that I actually bet some money on this, I can see lots of reasons - he could have gotten out of practice and could need months of training to regain his edge, the doping rumors may turn out to be true, etc. I really hope I haven't goofed here because if Tiger doesn't come back before July 1st, I'll lose more than $200 on him.

Hoodlums and Pool

2010-02-13T10:25:00.008-05:00

A friend and I occasionally play table tennis. Most of the clubs where we play also have pool tables. I've long ago noticed that the pool-playing demographic invariably looks more thuggish than the folks playing ping-pong. The latter group is mostly comprised of young Asians, white nerds and middle-aged, seemingly married couples of all races. The pool players look either like rap video extras or like the guys those extras will turn into if they age a lot and maybe get janitor jobs somewhere.

This reminded me that while I was growing up in Russia the criminal element there loved playing pool. Except for an oversupply of testosterone, those guys had nothing in common with the average American hoodlum. And it's not just race and culture - Russian crime tends to be well-organized, while American crime is often random. Everything is different except for this fondness for billiards.

Perhaps there is something intrinsic in that game that attracts dumb high-testosterone guys to it. The poses one takes, the languid pace, the shape of the cues. Or maybe it's something I'm missing entirely.

The Origin of the Yin-Yang Symbol

2010-02-05T21:16:00.010-05:00

Yesterday, while poking around the Wikipedia, I came up on this surprising fact: the well-known Yin-Yang symbol that you see to the right is attested in European sources seven hundred years before it appears in Asian ones!

The symbol's earliest documented occurrence is on Roman soldiers' shields. Apparently each Roman army unit decorated its shields with a distinctive pattern by which it could be identified. A book written around 400 AD called the Notitia Dignitatum shows many such patterns, some of which are pretty much identical to the modern Asian Yin-Yang symbol. The symbol first appears in Chinese records only in the 11th century.

China did not have anything like the European Dark Ages, so its ancient history is better known than the Western one. If an idea appears in the comparatively scant record of Western antiquity, but is absent from the more voluminous record of Chinese antiquity, then chances are high that this idea originated in the West.

Russian Surnames

2010-02-04T21:33:00.021-05:00

This is a picture of Michael Chertoff, the former US secretary of Homeland Security. I posted it here because "chertoff" means "the devil's" in Russian. According to his Wikipedia article, Mr. Chertoff comes from a similar background to mine, so his last name really is Russian. The match between its meaning and his appearance should by no means be discarded as coincidental - most surnames originated as nicknames and facial features are to a large extent hereditary.

Some famous Russian last names and their meaning:

Tolstoy - fat man.

Putin - the road's, the path's. I'm guessing that one of the Russian PM's ancestors lived next to a highway. By the way, most Russian surnames are in the genitive case, which means that you usually have to use an apostrophe followed by an s to translate them into English.

Medvedev - bear's. The Russian word for bear (medved) literally means "honey eater". If you like words, you'll recognize the med- (honey) part in the related English word mead. The ancient population of northern Europe was so scared of bears that it thought that naming them directly was bad luck. People invented roundabout ways of talking about these beasts without mentioning them. "Honey eater" was one of those, "the brown one", from which the English word bear descends, is another. The original Indo-European word for bear looked something like *rkto. I once saw a discussion on sci.lang about the form it would take in modern English if it wasn't replaced by "bear" centuries ago. The consensus was that it would now be spelled "urrow".

Gorbachov - humpback's.

Pushkin - cannon's.

Chekhov - Czech's. Perhaps one of his forefathers was a Czech or a serf on the estate of a Czech landlord.

Brezhnev - this name comes from the Russian word for a river bank. From what I understand, he was born close to a village called Brezhnevka, "the river bank village".

Kurnikova - chicken breeder's, as in "chicken breeder's daughter.

I don't know why, but animal-themed surnames are more common in Russian than in any other major European language. Russia's relatively late entry into the industrial age does nothing to explain this because most Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, etc. got their surnames centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Some of the animals in question seem pretty weird for surnames. One of my best friends in childhood was named Komarov (mosquito's). Muhin (fly's), Muraviov (ant's) and Korovin (cow's) are all quite common as well.

The surname of Georgiy Zhukov, the winning general in several of human history's biggest battles, means "bug's".

"Bunny's" (Zaitsev) is also a common Russian last name - here's a picture of a rabbit-like gay Russian fashion designer who bears it.

The Ukrainian Election

2010-02-02T23:46:00.004-05:00

I recently placed a bet on Intrade on Viktor Yanukovych winning the upcoming presidential election in Ukraine. Since my recent Intrade successes were probably mostly brought on by dumb luck, I wouldn't be surprised if Yanukovych lost. Some thoughts on the election:

Yushchenko, the outgoing president, is lauded by Western media as a pro-Western, pro-market reform democrat, which in the Eastern European context invariably means having sold one's soul to George Soros, as well as, of course, thievery. He's also a Ukrainian nationalist. Why, you're asking, would guys like Soros and Berezovsky finance an Eastern European nationalist of any sort? Well, the biggest nationalism in the region happens to be the Russian kind. To counter it the liberal Soros, as well as the neocons, are temporarily willing to finance smaller nationalistic movements that are opposed to it. The enemy of one's enemy and all that.

This reminds me of a quote by Jozef Pilsudky, a socialist anti-czar revolutionary who turned into a conservative nationalist when he ran Poland between the world wars:

"I took the red tram of socialism to the stop called Independence, and that's where I got off."

I bet this is how Yushchenko felt about Soros's "democracy" too. He thought he'd pretend to be a multi-culti, pro-Western, pro-whatever "democrat" - the modern world's version of a communist - as long as the big guys helped him build an anti-Russian, Ukrainian-nationalistic state. But you've got to remember that the big guys got big primarily by stealing. And after they made him president, Yushchenko had to let them steal some more if he wanted to keep being their pal. And then some more on top of that. By the way, unlike Russia, Ukraine has no oil or gas reserves.

These guys ended up stealing such a large percentage of the country's wealth that at this point in time, in 2010, anyone who's associated with them, including Yushchenko, is politically dead. He only got 5% in the first round of this year's presidential election, which left his former ally and recent enemy Yulia Tymoshenko to hold the "pro-Western", "pro-democracy" flag all by herself. Since she wanted to get a lot more than 5%, she immediately threw this flag into the dumpster in which it belongs and went into overdrive cozying up to Putin.

About Putin: in spite of my ethnic background, I've been rooting for Putin for years and years now. Why? You're probably going to laugh, but I never got rid of a geeky sci-fi-type interest in The Future of Humanity. And if you're rooting for that, you might as well root for civilization, since that's our only distinctive trait as a species. Of course, rooting for civilization in no small part means rooting specifically for Western Civ. I think in the last 5 to 10 years one had to be blind not to see that Russia, despite its problems, is Western Civ's last big hope for meaningful survival. And right now rooting for Russia pretty much means rooting for Putin, so here I am.

The good news here is that the worldwide economic crisis has made Putin's enemies relatively weaker. Ms. Tymoshenko seems to have fled from them in the same spirit in which rats flee sinking ships. Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that she'll lose the upcoming election, so I could still lose money on my Intrade bet.

The Homogeneity of Russian

2010-01-26T20:19:00.008-05:00

I have long wondered about my native tongue's mysterious homogeneity. 90% of the time it's completely impossible to tell a Russian's home town by his speech. Siberians talk exactly like St. Petersburgers who talk exactly like Moscovites, etc. There are two very provincial non-standard accents, but they're dying. This is pretty bizarre. Of all the large European languages Polish comes closest to this level of homogeneity, but unlike Russia Poland is a relatively small, compact country.

How did this situation come about? I've had a chance to ask a couple of professional linguists this question and they didn't have a clue. Some will tell you that this homogeneity was created by the strictness of the Soviet educational system, but they're most likely wrong. Early Communism had a much harsher impact on Ukraine than on Russia and Ukrainian is as heterogeneous linguistically as Russian is homogeneous. In fact a large part of Ukraine forms a dialect continuum from Russian to Polish with pronunciation and vocabulary typically changing every few miles as you go from east to west and from south to north.

Normally languages that have appeared in their current homes recently are more homogeneous than languages that have been developing in the same place forever. This is why North America hosts fewer English accents than England does. But Russian spread across the European part of the modern Russian Federation roughly 1,000 years ago, so this shouldn't be an issue either.

If anybody out there has any ideas on this, I'd love to hear them.

Intrade

2010-01-20T12:25:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I won $45 on Intrade betting on a Republican win in the Massachusetts special election. A few weeks ago I won about $55, mostly on bets about where the unemployment rate would be at the end of 2009. This means that so far in my brief Intrade career I'm up by about $100.

I'm guessing that this is mostly dumb luck. Just like in the stock market, there must be people on Intrade who regularly trade on inside info. In the case of the special election these would be campaign workers who have access to inside polls, maybe even campaign operatives who know whether the election is being rigged in some way and if so, to what extent and in whose favor.

If someone collects a payout due to inside info, whose money has he won? The money of chumps like me, who trade solely based on publicly-available data. And yet I'm probably going to bet on Intrade again. It's fun. It reliably gives you an extra something to hope for throughout the day. I've never tried mood-enhancing drugs, nor will I, but I'd be shocked if they acted as effectively as small-time gambling does. Everyone who has enough self-control to not let it get out of hand should try it.

On Learning Languages

2010-01-19T12:56:00.006-05:00

As you can see from this blog's title and from this post, I really like languages. A few pieces of advice for anyone considering learning a foreign tongue:

1. Do not, under any circumstances, spend any time learning a language's grammar. You either get grammar intuitively and subconsciously or you don't get it at all. When I was learning English as a kid in Russia I was told that it had 12 different tenses with names like future perfect continuous, past indefinite, etc. I read long, confusing descriptions of these tenses that I have now forgotten. I now use English tenses without ever thinking about them.

I know that the Russian word светленькому is a dative singular masculine diminutive adjective of "light", but that's only because the old Soviet educational system stressed such things and I'm a language nerd. I'm sure that in the 19th century illiterate Russian peasants used their language's 6 grammatical cases flawlessly without knowing what a grammatical case was, much less how many of them there were in Russian.

Trying to learn grammar consciously is like learning to ride a bike by memorizing which leg muscles have to be flexed at which exact points of the bike pedal's journey around its axis. Nature did not intend us to think about this kind of stuff consciously. Same thing with grammar.

If your goal is to learn to read a foreign language, get a book written in it (a children's book if you want to start slow), a dictionary and start reading. At first you'll be looking up almost every word (or half of them or less than that, depending on how close the language you're learning is to your own). If you don't give up early, you'll be using the dictionary less and less as you go along. The grammar will take care of itself.

Of course for learning to speak a language nothing beats talking to people.

2. Some langauges are objectively more complex and difficult to learn than others, even when you correct for the degree of relatedness to the learner's native tongue. There is a politically correct tendency to think otherwise because language is a good reflection of the mind and PC tells us that all of the world's nations are the same under their skins. This is BS. Here's a wiki about an Amerindian language spoken in the Amazon that lacks any terms for numbers (their closest things to them are words for "more" and "less"), for colors beyond "dark" and "light", lacks kinship terms for relations more distant than siblings (and doesn't even distinguish between "mother" and "father"), has no grammatical number even for pronouns (no difference between "I" and "we"), and only has 12 phonemes (if you've ever wondered, standard American English has about 45).

Obviously, there's nothing like that in Europe, but there are still genuine differences in language complexity there. French has been much closer to English historically than Spanish, lending it thousands more words than Spanish has, so you'd expect it to be easier to learn for English speakers than Spanish is. Yet everyone with a clue about this will tell you that the opposite is true. Even though French and Spanish are related to Russian to exactly the same (small) extent, I know from personal experience that it's easier for a Russian speaker to learn Spanish than French. French is simply more complex than its southern relative. For example, there are more than twice as many vowels in it that one needs to be able to tell apart. Many of them are hard to produce and therefore rarely occur in other languages. Spanish, on the other hand, gets by with the five basic, easy-to-pronounce vowels that almost every other language has.

Same thing with grammar - for example, all Slavic languages except for Bulgarian have grammars that are objectively more complex than the ones used in Western Europe.

3. It's possible to be able to read a language without being able to speak it or understand it when it's spoken. Understanding the spoken language and reading without speaking is possible too. These are really very different skills that you learn separately even when you learn them concurrently.

4. There are studies that show that it's impossible to learn to speak a foreign language without an accent after the age of 13. Being an immigrant who knows a lot of immigrants, I think I can confirm this. I've never known anyone who learned to speak a foreign language without an accent after that age. Learning to write in a foreign tongue flawlessly in adulthood is possible, though not terribly common.

Favorite Manhattan Buildings

2010-01-12T19:02:00.003-05:00

I think most New Yorkers would agree with me that the Chrysler Building is the best-looking one in the city. The number of non-traditional, post-WWI (in both chronology and spirit) public buildings that can be described as beautiful is very small. The Chrysler is the most elegant of them that I've seen.

I would put downtown's Municipal Building next. It was finished in 1912 and may or may not have served as the inspiration for Stalin's Seven Sisters in Moscow. One weird thing about this building is that it's more impressive up close than from a distance and not at all impressive from the inside.

The NY Public Library's main branch, number three on my list, looks much better from the inside than from the outside, though the exterior isn't ugly either. Of course Europe is full of such buildings, which you can't say about the Chrysler, hence Chrysler's place up top.

The Woolworth is fourth on my list. It's hard to go wrong by imitating Gothic cathedrals, so you can't give it too many points for originality either. However, it looks a thousand times better than the Sears Tower and about a million times better than anything Wal-Mart would have come up with if it ever entered the field of monumental architecture.

The Empire State. Like almost all skyscrapers it looks better from afar than when you're standing right under it.

The Met Life complex on 23rd Street. The bell tower was built in 1909. The main building was supposed to be 100 stories tall, but was cut down to 30 in the middle of the Great Depression. Amazingly, it doesn't look stubby as a result. I was once rejected for a very good job inside the old Met Life complex, and yet I still love it.

The New York Life Building. Same idea as with the Woolworth, but with a more solid and reassuring feel, because it was built by an insurance company.

Roissy in DC

2010-01-11T13:11:00.002-05:00

Roissy is back! Some thoughts about him:

I think that his blog's most important contribution to society is to disabuse large numbers of nerds of highly debilitating delusions about women. These delusions are fed to all of us by the media and the educational system, but most men and almost all women are immune to their effects because in the social sphere most people act subconsciously, on instinct, rarely asking themselves if their actions conform to any received ideas. The average human's instincts about relations between the sexes are healthy and realistic.

We nerds, however, do tend to think about human relationships consciously, and have a terrible habit of taking others' suggestions literally. A man who takes feminism literally might as well be a eunuch.

When I was growing up, the advice I got from my dad about women wasn't very different from the kind of thing that Roissy made his specialty, but of course I was too stupid to believe it. My father wasn't as cool or articulate or persistent as the people pushing PC crap. His message didn't form a complicated ideological framework. Feminism does, and nerds tend to like complexity for its own sake.

Over the years life gradually taught me that the PC view of gender relations is in many ways orthogonal to the truth. For me Roissy simply fleshed out some of the details and, through his gift for good writing, provided some entertainment. But if I read someone like him in my teens or early twenties, he would have probably made a real difference, making my PC delusions disappear earlier and less painfully than they ended up doing.

Celebtrity Sightings

2010-01-08T20:19:00.003-05:00

In spite of the fact that I've been commuting to Manhattan for more than 15 years now, I don't have too many celebrity sightings to report. I've once seen Carson Kressley, dressed up like a parrot in heat (or like whatever it is that parrots are when they're desperate for mating), on a downtown 5 train. I also once saw someone who may or may not have been Yoko Ono walking alone down 40th Street where it borders Bryant Park. Once, while sitting at a salad place downtown, I saw CNN's legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin lunching with a female friend in the aisle across from me. He looked fatter in person than he does on TV.

The most memorable sighting of all, however, happened at a pizzeria on Park Place, next to City Hall. While eating lunch there one day, I saw a commotion upfront - a group of tall men in dark suits were making their way inside. Soon a very short, older man walked in and slowly approached the counter. This was the billionaire and politician Michael Bloomberg, who was then, as he is now, our city's mayor. The guys in identical suits were his bodyguards. I'd already heard by then that for PR purposes he had taken to riding the subway to work, but I couldn't have imagined until I saw it with my own eyes that his initiative to seem like a man of the people could have also extended to eating pizza. He and another guy eventually settled down with their slices on two little stools by the wall. I'd seen his companion on TV before - he was a political consultant. They talked about the city charter revision, which was in the news at the time. I already forgot whether Bloomberg was for or against this revision, but I will always remember a piece of advice his consultant gave him while I was listening to them in that pizzeria. He advised Bloomberg to paint his opponents on the question of charter revision as "elitists".

I believe that this comment needs to be put into proper perspective to be understood fully. There is a 54-story skyscraper in this city, on 59th St and 3rd Avenue, called the Bloomberg Tower. He pilots his own helicopters and owns multiple mansions in the US, Europe, the Caribbean, and who knows where else. During a now-legendary interview a reporter once asked him how his sex life was going. "I'm a single billionaire living in Manhattan, how do you think it's going?" was his reported reply. So it is this man that was being advised, within my earshot, to portray his political opponents as "elitists". What can one even say to this? And yet it happened.

Park Slope Cafés

2010-01-06T22:15:00.003-05:00

I had to do something in Park Slope recently, which reminded me of a great sociological mystery that I was never able to solve. Park Slope is a stereotypically swipple part of Brooklyn, which, among other things, means a predictable oversupply of "quirky" French-themed cafés.

Someone once told me that most Chinese restaurants in America get their menus, decor and many of their raw ingredients from the same supply company, ensuring a homogenized feel across the whole Chinese take-out place marker sector. It would surprise me if the same thing didn't apply to "quirky" cafés in gentrified neighborhoods all over the country. Actually, it wouldn't even surprise me if the same company was doing both.

This post isn't about decor though. It's about these cafés' workforce. In Park Slope their cash registers and coffee machines are exclusively manned by sensitive, 20-something swipples who seem as though they could have come directly from the neighboring brownstones. These brownstones are genuinely beautiful and cost millions. Everyone I know assumes that the hipsters of Park Slope, DUMBO, Williamburg and other such places, to a man, are spoiled, ridiculous, do-nothing children of wealthy, but definitely to-be-pitied parents from places like Ohio or Michigan. Then why are some of them working in cafés? You certainly can't live in Park Slope on the money they'd pay you for serving coffee. I have a middle class office job and I wouldn't be able to afford living there. Neither would my boss, his boss, his boss's boss and so on.

Their silly left-wing affectations aside, swipples tend to be smart, attractive, healthy people in the very prime of their lives. If they actually needed money, couldn't they have gotten better-paying jobs than serving coffee? I mostly tinker with Excel and Access for a living and I've never seen a swipple sitting in one of our cubicles. In fact, it's unthinkable. Not only would they have better options, but they would also consider such work too boring for words. As if serving coffee wasn't boring.

They pride themselves on being independent-minded, and yet the amount of brainwashing needed to convince someone that working the cash register, no matter where, is more exciting than tinkering with Access queries to produce financial reports seems astounding to me.

I really don't know how to explain this. Perhaps these particular swipples lack the rich parents of most of their brethren. Perhaps they don't even live in Park Slope, but commute to it daily. Or maybe they live in those brownstones 12 to a room, like Salvadoran construction workers, happy just to have reached their own demented version of the promised land. If anyone has better ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Some Music

2010-01-05T20:15:00.006-05:00

These are some guitar melodies I wrote and recorded years ago.

Melody 1	Sound File	Tablature	PowerTab File	MIDI File
Melody 2	Sound File	Tablature	PowerTab File	MIDI File
Melody 3	Sound File	Tablature	PowerTab File	MIDI File
Melody 4	Sound File	Tablature	PowerTab File	MIDI File
Melody 5	Sound File	Tablature	PowerTab File	MIDI File

As you can probably hear, I'm not much of a guitarist. Besides these I have a couple of songs, complete with lyrics, which I'll upload as soon as I get around to recording them properly.

Review of Candide

2010-01-02T19:58:00.012-05:00

I recently read Voltaire's Candide and wrote up a little review:

Candide ou l'optimisme (Candide, or Optimism), 1759, by Voltaire, read in French. Glossy's rating: 4 out of 10. Voltaire's rating in Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment: 47 out of 100 (7th place overall in Western lit.)

This book's eponymous protagonist is a naive young man who was taught by his teacher, the philosopher Pangloss, that ours is the best possible world and that everything in it always happens for the best. According to Pangloss, misfortunes only ever visit us because they contribute in some way to the general good and "the more private misfortunes there are, the more general good" there is.

Pangloss also dusts off the old chestnuts that all men were created equal and that all property should belong to everyone. Voltaire wrote this novella mainly to refute these ideas, which he attributed to Gottfried Leibniz.

It was hard for me to get excited about this book-length refutation because I don't know anyone who believes that everything in our world always occurs "for the best". Most of us are aware of people who think that private property is evil and that all men were created equal, but unfortunately, those are not the parts of Pangloss's thought that Voltaire spends most of his time refuting. He simply has Candide go through a long series of fantastically cruel misadventures, all just to prove to him that life isn't a piece of cake after all.

At one point in the novella a character named "the wise man of taste" (oh, the subtlety!) holds forth on literature. Among other things he says that a good writer should always strive for newness without being bizarre. Voltaire clearly failed his own test here - all of "Candide" is bizarre.

While pretty violent, this book is not at all depressing. This is mostly because Voltaire seems completely uninterested in his characters' inner lives. I can't imagine what a movie based on “Candide” would look like, in large part because a cartoon would be far more appropriate for it. After being hanged, raped and pierced with swords, the characters invariably dust themselves off to cheerfully continue their arguments about Leibniz's ideas. Their emotional responses to being hanged and raped aren't any more realistic or thought-provoking than the physical ones.

Voltaire made his naive, honest, idealistic protagonist German. After two and a half centuries that stereotype hasn't really changed. Another one has though: in Voltaire's imagination Germany seems to have been a wild, provincial country situated on the far outskirts of civilization. In the 18th century his native France was still the cool kid of nations - a dynamic trend-setter, envied by everybody with a clue. Northern Italy had held that place during the Renaissance, but by Voltaire's time it was already considered a decadent has-been. Voltaire dramatized that feeling here through the character of the Venetian aristocrat Pococurante, who has seen everything and is tired of everything. The cycle that takes some societies from provincialism to leadership and then, almost invariably, to decline is, of course, fascinating. A century after Voltaire's death it was France's turn to become a symbol of decadence in the world's imagination, and Germany's turn to start setting the trends. Then, in the late 20th century, Germany itself joined the rest of Western Europe in the declinist camp, while America and Russia tried their hands at leading.

In his time Voltaire was a notorious liberal, and consequently a very fashionable guy to know. But times change - so much so that some of the stuff in this book would probably get him thrown in jail as a Nazi in modern France. For example: "The northern nations have not that heat in their blood, nor that raging lust for women, so common in Africa." Or this, from one female character's description of how she was raped by a pirate: "He was an abominable negro, and yet believed that he did me a great deal of honor". And this is how the same woman explains the pirates' attraction to her and to her European companions: "...our maids of honor, and even our waiting women, had more charms than are to be found in all Africa..." In a different chapter he describes women from an Indian tribe in Paraguay being amorous with apes, incorrectly stating that such unions are capable of producing offspring.

Through the character of Pococurante Voltaire dismisses all scientists and their work as utterly useless: "...if only one of those rakers of rubbish had shown how to make pins; but in all these volumes there is nothing but chimerical systems, and not a single useful thing." It’s fun to note here that Voltaire belonged to the last generation of Europeans who could have honestly made that claim. He died in 1778, just as the Industrial Revolution was starting up in England.

Another interesting thing in the Pococurante episode is that it contains a short review of what people of Voltaire’s age considered great literature. Most of the authors mentioned were unsurprisingly Greek and Roman. Only one English writer is discussed and it is Milton, not Shakespeare. In 1759, when “Candide” was first published, Shakespeare hadn't become super-important yet.

Voltaire spends a lot of time decrying the horrors of war here. Actually, I've never thought of the first three quarters of the 18th century as having been particularly violent. It is only with the French Revolution, many of whose leaders were inspired by Voltaire, that the quaint little wars and cartoonish despotisms of his age gave way to the megawars and megadespotisms of the Jacobin and Napoleonic types.

Voltaire, a staunch enemy of organized religion, included an auto-da-fe scene here as an example of how violent his clerical foes could be. Of course, the Revolution and its copycats across Europe ended up killing a lot more people than the Inquisition ever could, with most of the Revolutionaries being as anti-clerical as Voltaire. It's important to state here, however, that unlike many modern European critics of Christianity, Voltaire was a consistent secularist - his attitudes towards Islam and Judaism were often negative as well.

As a contrast to the crumminess of the real world, Voltaire included in this book a description of a utopia called Eldorado. Like everything else in "Candide", this utopia is painted in pretty broad, cartoonish brushstrokes, but I'd like to single out one of its aspects nevertheless.

Eldorado is apparently devoid of war, crime and all other forms of human conflict. Let's disregard for a moment the fact that no such society has ever existed. Let's just ask if such a society COULD ever arise, and if it could, what would be the long-term consequences?

I believe that man, like all other animals, is a product of evolution. The competition for survival, essential to evolution, takes many forms, most of them involving conflict in some way. Regardless of whether or not they want to admit it, most people enjoy conflict. I know that Voltaire did because I've just finished a book of his that joyfully attacks the church, Leibniz, a bunch of now-obscure Parisian writers who happened to be his professional rivals and lots of other people besides. If a society was somehow forced, against its will, to abandon all forms of conflict, what would become of that society long-term? Voltaire died long before the rise of political correctness, so he must have been aware of the correct answer to that question, yet he described his utopia as being devoid of conflict anyway. It is no excuse at all to say here that he couldn't have been aware of the theory of evolution as such. The 18th century was obsessed with the idea of breeding, both human and animal, so he must have known how that system worked even if he wouldn't have used modern terms to describe it.

To me the most likely explanation for the Eldorado episode, as for much else in “Candide”, is simple intellectual sloppiness.

Avatar

2009-12-30T20:44:00.003-05:00

So I finally saw Avatar. I was aware of this movie's main message long before I first put on the 3D goggles. Primitive, tribal, arrow-shooting aliens - good, advanced technology-using humans - bad. This is quite ironic since the only interesting thing about this movie turned out to be the mind-bogglingly advanced technology that made its alien world come alive in 3D. The story itself is quite mediocre.

About the tech: the 3D was spectacular, though not without occasional problems. Sometimes characters appeared thinner than they should have been and sometimes things that should have been in focus were out of it. A lot of talented artists must have put a lot of effort into creating Pandora's fauna. The horse, the lion, the dog, the dragon of human mythology and many other creatures were reimagined in a fresh, exciting way.

Sadly, not so for the PC dogma saturating Avatar's script. Besides the tired old noble savage delusion the movie had a lot to say about the evils of civilized manhood. The genius scientist character is of course played by a woman who makes obligatory fun of civilized hero's (but never of the noble savages') intelligence. And this is from a guy who's known as a techie. The main character's betrayal of his own, which in this case means all of humanity, is served up as heroism. The same exact traits (a martial ethos, for example) are presented as unforgivably evil among civilized men and as ennobling among the savage aliens. There are plugs for global warming awareness, anti-capitalism (this from the creator of all the biggest blockbusters of his generation), and the modern anti-war movement. Even though I'm against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars myself, seeing Cameron's hyper-hypocritical ass come out as anti-war almost made me want to turn pro-war.

The Conando Girl

2009-12-26T14:22:00.013-05:00

I've been a fan of Conan O'Brien since his very early days on TV. I think he's as likable as Letterman, but funnier, and as funny as Jimmy Kimmel, but more likable. Anyway, the last few times I've seen his show, the funniest skit there featured him as Conando, the protagonist of a fake telenovela called "Noches de Pasion con Señor O'Brien". In every one of these skits Conan rescues the same Spanish maiden from the depredations of cartoonish lowlifes. The funniest part is usually the appearance of Andy Richter near the end, but that's not what this post is about.

More often than not these skits end with Conan pretending to kiss the girl he rescued. The girl is a stunner, probably the finest example of Mediterranean womanhood I've ever seen on TV. Here's a sample. Besides being that beautiful she happens to remind me of someone I used to know in flesh and blood...

Where was I? OK, I finally found that Conando girl on the web. Her name is Hannia Guillen, she was born in 1982 in Cuba and has resided in the US since the age of 10. She plays somebody in a real English language soap opera called Passions. If there was any justice in this world, she'd be starring in worldwide blockbusters now, while periodically giving birth to the kids of deserving billionaires to the sounds of fanfare and universal public celebrations. Instead I had to work with Google for a good 5 to 10 minutes to simply find out her name. Oh well...

Kurt and Courtney

2009-12-26T09:31:00.011-05:00

Yesterday, while poking around YouTube, I stumbled upon "Kurt and Courtney", an old British documentary about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. I was 16 when Nevermind came out, so it made a pretty strong impression on me. I still own that little cassette and still remember most of its lyrics by heart.

This film did not change my opinion of Ms. Love one bit - I think she is a selfish, immoral, calculating psycho bitch. She had dreamed of becoming famous since childhood and must have seen Kurt purely as a vehicle. The bizarre thing is that I still kind of like her old music videos. Doll Parts, Violet and Celebrity Skin are all quite striking.

My opinion of Kurt did suffer as a result of seeing this movie, though not by very much. He was weak-willed enough to be controlled by her, and, of course, by drugs. At one point in the movie a very sweet British woman who tried to write a book about Kurt and Courtney while Kurt was still alive played a message he once recorded on her answering machine. This is what it says:

"This is Kurt Cobain. If anything comes out in this book that hurts my wife, I'll f-ing hurt you. I don't care if this is a recorded threat. I'm at the end of my ropes. You'll understand when you see me in person. Never been more serious in my life. I suppose I could throw out a few thousand dollars to have you snuffed, but maybe I'll try it the legal way first."

In spite of this Kurt comes out about a million times more sympathetic in this movie than does Courtney. She really is that awful. The filmamker interviewed a few people who asserted that she hired a hitman to kill Kurt because she was afraid that he'd divorce her. I was not convinced. All the evidence presented for that seemed shaky. However, if he was with even a slightly less evil person than Courtney at the time, perhaps he would have been less depressed and perhaps he wouldn't have killed himself.

An Unfinished Novel

2009-12-23T22:28:00.006-05:00

Years ago I tried writing a novel. At the time I had an office job in which I didn't have anything to do for long periods of time. My co-workers, all of whom were women, mostly used this free time to talk to each other. I would have liked to spend it reading books or surfing the Web, but unlike idle chatter, those things weren't really allowed by our bosses. I had to somehow look busy, so one day I opened an MS Word window and started typing the first scene of a novel. Who was going to say that I wasn't working?

Over the next few years I sporadically added new scenes, sometimes spending long periods without ever thinking about my book and at other times obsessing over its style and plot for months on end. It's unlikely I'll ever finish it (look at the name of this blog), but there's probably no harm in linking to it from here. So here it is.

Review of Madame Bovary

2009-12-20T20:06:00.004-05:00

Here's the first of my reviews of Great Books:

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, 1856. Glossy's rating: 6.5 out of 10. Read in French. Flaubert's rating in C. Murray's Human Accomplishment: 24 out of 100.

This novel both starts and ends with the story of Charles, the title character's husband. Emma, his wife, thinks that Charles is incredibly boring, which to her mostly means that he's lacking in ambition and masculinity. He is also not very smart, though he does have a lot of other enviable traits.

Charles is honest, hardworking, conscientious, uncomplaining and relatively good at his chosen profession (he's a country doctor). In Flaubert's time, just as in our day, for a physician to be good he had to consciously practice as little of his craft as he could get away with. We're told that Charles doesn't prescribe much to his patients besides laxatives and sleep aids, always fearing that he'd hurt them with anything more substantial. Flaubert was a son of the chief surgeon of the biggest hospital in Normandy, and he obviously knew the realities of the medical profession well. The only proactive medical decision described in the book - the unnecessary maiming of a stable boy named Hyppolite - is conceived and urged not by Charles, but by the pharmacist Homais, who is the novel's biggest villain.

If Charles is so great, why does Emma hate him so much? The answer is suggested by the nature of the men with whom she chooses to cuckold him. Emma's first lover Rodolphe is the most macho character in the novel, with the possible exception of the international opera star Lagardy whom she can only admire from afar and of a mysterious vicomte she once meets at a ball, and whom she can't have either. Rodolphe had had a lot of affairs and is never shy or insecure about anything. Unlike Charles, who truly loves her, Rodolphe can easily go in and out of the baroque, flowery language in which seducers usually talk in the cheap romance novels Emma had been devouring since childhood.

Her second lover, Leon, is somewhere between Rodolphe and her husband on the all-important manliness scale. When he tries to seduce her, she repulses his initial advances and he shyly apologizes. A description of that is followed by a revealing sentence: "Emma was seized with a vague fear at this shyness, more dangerous to her than the boldness of Rodolphe when he advanced to her open-armed". Eventually Leon gets the hint.

Emma's impatience with Charles's literal-mindedness and her strong desire to be lied to are made explicit in a scene that follows the death of Charles's father. Charles is being typically sincere about his mourning, shedding tears and saying all the things people usually say when their loved ones die. Emma is so bored with all that that immediately afterwards she welcomes the chance to talk to the shopkeeper and usurer Lheroux, who practically drowns her in insincerity every time they meet. Lying, noticing other people's lies - those things are less boring to her than honesty for the same reason that the romance novels she reads are more interesting to her than the real world.

Because of their secularism most modern reviewers of this book concentrate on the corrosive effects on Emma only of the sappiness and romanticism of the novels she loves so much. Charles's mother, however, diagnoses a very different problem when she calls them "bad books, works against religion, and in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from Voltaire. But all that leads you far astray, my poor child," she goes on. "Anyone who has no religion always ends by turning out badly."

Does it say anything about Flaubert himself that he put such words into a novel that ends with the heroine's suicide? Can it really be that Charles's mother was speaking for the novelist here? Perhaps. While Flaubert has obvious sympathy for Emma, he never shows any such feelings for the pharmacist Homais, a militant secularist who mocks Christianity on dozens of the novel's pages. Homais is portrayed in a negative light in every single scene in which he appears, while his biggest adversary in arguments over religion, the priest Bournisien, is usually shown sympathetically.

One of the fun things about reading any classic novel is finding all of its inevitable anachronisms - things that point out how radically our world has changed since the book was first published. For example, early in the novel Flaubert goes on for a while about how ugly Charles's hat was. Nothing made in that period seems ugly to us now, does it? Fine art museums built in the 21st century routinely look worse than 19th century prisons.

It's hard to believe now that Flaubert had to defend this essentially moralistic tale in court against charges of immorality. He was especially criticized for the phrase "platitudes of marriage", incorrectly believed by some at the time to vaguely justify Emma's adulteries. Modern would-be censors would far more likely be incensed by the mention of "the ardent races of the south", which appears during a description of the singer Lagardy.

Emma and Charles implicitly agree with each other about their respective values in the sexual market. He can't believe he managed to marry someone so far above his league. She can't believe she ended up with someone so far below hers. Since they come from very similar economic backgrounds, their mismatch has nothing to do with social class. It is biological in nature - one of the obvious problems is that Charles simply doesn't have enough testosterone to be able to genuinely attract women of Emma's level of beauty.

Is what's good in the sexual market good for a civilized society as a whole? It's hard to believe that Flaubert would have been uninterested in that question while writing this book. He had certainly depicted Charles as being more productive and useful to the world than Emma. And at the very least, Charles holds his own on that score against Leon and Rodolphe. By far the most emotionally moving part of the novel is the last chapter, which concentrates on Charles’s fate after his wife’s death.

If you read up on Flaubert, you'll inevitably learn that he worked hard on his style. He spent countless hours getting each word of each sentence just right, treating his novels almost like poetry. I liked Flaubert's clear sense of morality and his unsentimental insightfulness about relations between the sexes, so I would have been happy to report to you that I loved his use of language as well. But that would be a lie. Having read the whole thing in French, I found its style clear and unobtrusive, but nothing more than that. Since French is not my native language, I very well could have missed some of the great man's stylistic subtleties. However, I did not find anything extraordinary about the language of the two English translations I've looked through either. If the translators involved were aware of Flaubert's stylistic awesomeness, then they clearly failed to reproduce it in English. This is, of course, not impossible, so I should probably withhold final judgment on it.

Stupid Word Tricks

2009-12-19T11:20:00.002-05:00

What you see below grew out of playing with words that mean different things in different languages. For example, in my native Russian the phrase "O CHE" can mean "about a dream" or "about sleep", depending on the context. How do I connect that to Che Guevara? Now how do I do it in verse? Here's the result:

O CHE

I dreamt of Che last night, not sheep.
Here's what this dream entailed:
Che said he could not fall asleep.
He tried some meds. They failed.

"Screw meds," I told him, "Never use
That capitalist crap.
I think it's clear that self-abuse
Leads quicker to a nap.

And if at first that does not work,
Imagine a cute chick
Who shouts 'O Che!' and goes berserk
While looking at your pic."

In French the next title means "how people talk".

COMMENT ON CAUSE

"How come we talk the way we talk,"
Jacques asked his friend Gaston
While they were going for a walk
Through streets of old Lyon.

"Would you agree that our words lack
Precision, purpose, flare?"
The other promptly answered back:
"My friend, I just don't care.

I'd rather talk about the cause
Of substance and the void,
Of being, essence and the laws
Revealed by Sigmund Freud.

I'm sorry, Jacques, but you'll admit,
Compared to all of that
The silly topic you submit
Would lead to mindless chat."

"Your view is wrong," said Jacques to this,
"I know the cause of it."
"You do? Then tell me what it is."
"You are a pompous twit."

I know, I know, I could have gone more "adult" with the next one. The title means "thick fur" in German.

DICK FELL

Meet Dick - a hunter by his trade
Who specialized in bears.
Throughout the winter he was paid
To shoot them in their lairs.

He risked his life and mental health
To get their thick, brown hides.
Though not a certain road to wealth,
This work had some fun sides.

One day, while sipping Absolut
In tropical Ceylon,
He saw a bear, but could not shoot -
His ammo was all gone.

This beast had fur that was so thick,
It looked like a huge mop
As it was charging for our Dick
While slobbering non-stop.

Dick fell while running from this bear.
Alas, he died at work.
At least no PETA nerds were there
To laugh at him and smirk.

The title of the next one means "that sea" in Russian.

TO MOPE

I've come to the seaside to mope.
The sea - it has swallowed my hope!
I had a good girlfriend, you see,
Until I encountered that sea.
But then on a fateful cruise,
Quite probably led by booze,
She cheated on me with the crew.
With every last one of them, too.

Now all I have left is to mope.
But also, perhaps, to hold hope
That one of those days
She gets a malaise
And no VD clinic can cope.

The next title means "the weight" or "the burden" in German.

DIE LAST

You've gone to your high school's reunion dance
And everyone laughed at you.
You wouldn't have wowed anyone, not a chance.
Some did, and that made you blue.

One's failure in life is a terrible weight,
A hideous burden to bear.
However, I do have advice for you, mate:
Die last and you'll beat them all square.

Deny yourself things you would normally crave,
Don't smoke, only drink half-and-half.
And maybe some day, when they're all in the grave,
You'll have your belated last laugh.

The next title happens to mean "Willis' corridor was light" in German.

WILLIS' GANG WAR HELL

Bruce Willis was shooting a movie
For which he was paid pretty well.
His character, chief of a juvie,
Taught kids to transcend gang war hell.

Before he could play this jailer
An obstacle had to be faced:
A hall in his giant trailer
Had way too much light for his taste.

"Can I really focus on drama
When everything's so freaking bright?"
He whined to his favorite llama
While looking away from the light.

As crew members fixed this, perspiring,
Production was hastily shut.
That cost lots of money, requiring
Three mentoring scenes to be cut.

Believe it or not, in Russian the next title means "Vlad, the book about poppies goes to Kate but sake goes to us." Sake, of course, refers here to Japanese rice wine. You'll notice that the title has BOB, where its translation has Vlad. Why? The name Vladimir is usually shortened to Vova in informal Russian speech. Since the Latin letter V normally corresponds to the Cyrillic B, VOVA ends up being spelled as BOBA in Russian. Russian grammar decrees that in the imperative case (used for giving orders and drawing people's attention), a given name's final vowel needs to fall away, making a BOB out of BOBA. This is purely coincidental, since the names Robert and Vladimir have nothing to do with each other etymologically.

BOB, TOM O MAKE KATE A HAM CAKE

Professional cook Tom O'Dell
Enjoyed a worldwide renown
Since business was going quite well,
He hired a sou-chef, Bob Brown.
Tom O and Bob B
Cooked dinner for three
One day for a bash uptown.

A different Tom, his ex-girlfriend Kate,
A Russian mob hit man named Vlad
Were all ringing in a new year till late
The two chefs were cooking like mad.

As Bob added ham to a bowl of cake mix
Vlad took out his gifts from a sack:
Some sake for Tom and a book full of pics
Of poppies for Kate who liked smack.

However, in haste Vlad made a mistake,
Delivering booze to the girl.
This gaff almost made his good buddy shake:
"Old Vlad," he said, "you're such a churl!
The book is for her, the booze we can take,
And later on, try not to hurl."

The title of the next one means "so cute" or "so beautiful" in Spanish.

TAN LINDA

Linda was a real looker,
Pretty as a peach.
Jealous girlfriends often took her
Tanning to the beach.

They would tell her she'd look better
Like a lobster burned.
That she'd be a real trend-setter,
Never to be spurned.

Then they'd badmouth her like crazy
Right behind her back.
No, you wouldn't call them lazy
Once they start to yak.

But when summer turns to fall,
Normal way prevails:
Linda - fairest of them all.
Jealous friends - beached whales.

Glossophilia

2009-12-17T21:53:00.007-05:00

The second word of this blog's title refers to my love of languages. Linguistics will probably be a recurring topic here. I'll start with a table showing the current state of my knowledge of various tongues. I used a 0 to 10 scale with 0 meaning no knowledge and 10 meaning native-level fluency.

	Reading	Understanding When Spoken	Speaking
Russian	10	10	9.5
English	10	10	9.5
German	7.5	1	0
French	8.5	2	0
Spanish	8	5	2
Portuguese	7.5	1	0
Italian	6	1	0
Chinese	5	0	0

I spent the first 17 years of my life speaking Russian, and the most recent 18 speaking English. Russian words don't come as easily to me as they once did, and yet I never got rid of a light Russian accent while speaking English. Therefore I don't speak any language well enough for a 10! Isn't that scary?

The table below shows my estimates of the difficulty of learning language X by a hypothetical native monolingual speaker of language Y. The X ("to") languages are arranged horizontally, the Y ("from") languages are arranged vertically. I used a 0 to 25 scale with 0 being easiest and 25 hardest. For those who don't know, zh is Chinese. This table is extremely unscientific and was created strictly for fun.

				T	O
	X	ru	en	de	fr	es	pt	it	zh
	ru	X	4.5	4	4.5	3.5	4.5	3.5	25
F	en	5.5	X	4	3	2.5	3	2.5	25
R	de	5.5	3	X	4	3.5	4	3.5	25
O	fr	5.5	3	4.5	X	2	2	2	25
M	es	5.5	3	4.5	2	X	1	1.5	25
	pt	5.5	3	4.5	2	0.5	X	1.5	25
	it	5.5	3	4.5	2	1.5	2	X	25
	zh	7.5	6.5	7	7	6	6.5	6	X

First Post!

2009-12-17T19:54:00.005-05:00

This blog will simply be a collection of my musings and half-baked ideas about history, literature, language, politics and anything else that catches my interest. I've long wanted to read through Great Books in their original languages, reviewing each one as I go. Perhaps I'll do some of that here. If I see a movie or read a good non-fiction book, I'll also post a review.

I drew the animated GIF you see in the top right corner of this page using a mouse and MS Paint more than a decade ago. Unfortunately my face resembles that picture now more than it did then, making it not entirely inappropriate as this pseudonymous blog's sole visual representation of its author.

				T	O
	X	ru	en	de	fr	es	pt	it	zh
	ru	X	4.5	4	4.5	3.5	4.5	3.5	25
F	en	5.5	X	4	3	2.5	3	2.5	25
R	de	5.5	3	X	4	3.5	4	3.5	25
O	fr	5.5	3	4.5	X	2	2	2	25
M	es	5.5	3	4.5	2	X	1	1.5	25
	pt	5.5	3	4.5	2	0.5	X	1.5	25
	it	5.5	3	4.5	2	1.5	2	X	25
	zh	7.5	6.5	7	7	6	6.5	6	X

				T	O
	X	ru	en	de	fr	es	pt	it	zh
	ru	X	4.5	4	4.5	3.5	4.5	3.5	25
F	en	5.5	X	4	3	2.5	3	2.5	25
R	de	5.5	3	X	4	3.5	4	3.5	25
O	fr	5.5	3	4.5	X	2	2	2	25
M	es	5.5	3	4.5	2	X	1	1.5	25
	pt	5.5	3	4.5	2	0.5	X	1.5	25
	it	5.5	3	4.5	2	1.5	2	X	25
	zh	7.5	6.5	7	7	6	6.5	6	X

				T	O
	X	ru	en	de	fr	es	pt	it	zh
	ru	X	4.5	4	4.5	3.5	4.5	3.5	25
F	en	5.5	X	4	3	2.5	3	2.5	25
R	de	5.5	3	X	4	3.5	4	3.5	25
O	fr	5.5	3	4.5	X	2	2	2	25
M	es	5.5	3	4.5	2	X	1	1.5	25
	pt	5.5	3	4.5	2	0.5	X	1.5	25
	it	5.5	3	4.5	2	1.5	2	X	25
	zh	7.5	6.5	7	7	6	6.5	6	X