Sunday, January 18, 2015

Study Notes: Jan 11-17, 2014: "Star Trek and Moral Judgment," &c

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 
Homework for the future: 


 "5 Unconventional Ways to Become a Better Writer"
  • Stephen King: "Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
  • "Generally, there are two things that writers recommend to others who want to improve: more writing, and reading."
  • Reading exposes us to other styles, other voices, other forms and genres of writing." 
  • Roz Morris: "Reading-- the good and the bad-- inspires you. It develops your palate for all the tricks that writers have invented over the years. You can learn from textbooks about the writing craft, but there's no substitute for discovering for yourself how a writer pulls off a trick. Then that becomes part of your experience." 
  • "I've actually realized recently that there is a kind of freedom in giving up that feeling of needing to see everything. Sometimes, it's okay to skip parts. Especially if they're not relevant to you."
  • Roberto Estreitinho: "A short bonus regarding long reads: in case of doubt, skip to the conclusion. If it's worthy of understanding how the author got there, read it all. If not, congratulations. You just avoided wasting time." 
  • Roberto Estreitinho: "All the information we have available only increases our stress levels and diminishes available time. We consume much more than we create, we read much more than we think, and it should be the other way around. We have to make sure we consume the things that truly matter to us, but only so that we have time to create something that matters to someone else." 
  • Henry Miller, The Books in My Life: "One of the results of this self-examination-- for that is what the writing of this book amounts to-- is the confirmed belief that one should read less and less, not more and more.. I have not read nearly as much as the scholar, the bookworm, or even the 'well-educated' man-- yet I have undoubtedly read a hundred times more than I should have read for my own good. Only one out of five in America, it is said, are readers of 'books.' But even this small number read far too much. Scarcely any one lives wisely or fully."
  • Pierre Bayard: "To speak without shame about books we haven't read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed by family and school, for we can strive toward this image for a lifetime without ever managing to coincide with it." 
  • William Faulkner: "Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. if it's not, throw it out the window."
  • "Try pushing yourself to try a new genre or writing style now and then." 
  • Milada Horakova: "There was a time when I read voraciously, and then again times when work did not permit me to take a single book in my hand, apart from professional literature. That was a shame. Here in recent months I have been reading a lot, even books which probably would not interest me outside, but it is a big and important task to read everything valuable, or at least much that is." 
  • Nicholas Sparks: "Second, you must read, and read a lot. Did I say A LOT? I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I've read has taught me something. I've learned that some authors are incredible at building suspense (see The Firm by John Grisham), I've read others that scare the jeepers out of me (see The Shining by Stephen King). Some authors can weave an incredibly number of story lines into a single, coherent novel, with all parts coming together at the end that makes it impossible to stop turning the pages (see The Sum of all [sic] Fears by Tom Clancy), while other authors make me laugh out loud (seeBloodsucking [sic] Fiends by Christopher Moore). I've also learned that many, many authors fail when attempting to do these things. By reading a lot of novels in a variety of genres, and asking questions, it's possible to learn how things are done-- the mechanics of writing, so to speak-- and which genres and authors excel in various areas." 
  • Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature: "Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation." 
  • Shane Parish: "While on the flight to Omaha, he was reading. he took notes on the material itself, and every time he completed a chapter he pulled out a sheet of white paper and wrote a single page summary on what he had just read. he places the paper in another folder. This is how he gets his learning deeper and this also enables him to refer to summaries in the future." 
  • Daniel Coyle: "Research shows that people who follow strategy B [read ten pages at once, then close the book and write a one page summary] remember 50 percent more material over the long term than people who follow strategy A [read ten pages four times in a row and try to memorize them]."
  • Mary Gordon: "Before I take pen to paper, I read. I can't begin my day reading fiction; I need the more intimate tone of letters and journals. From these journals and letters-- the horse's mouth-- I copy something that has taken my fancy, some exemplum or casual observation I take as advice. These usually go into the Swedish journal, except for the occasional sentence that shimmers on its own, and then it goes into the handmade Vermonter. I move to Proust; three pages read in English, the same three in French. In my Proust notebook I write down whatever it is I've made of those dense and demanding sentences. Then I turn to my journal, where I feel free to write whatever narcissistic nonsense comes into my head." 
  • Kurt Vonnegut: "Find a subject you care about and which in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style." 
  • "If what you read makes you angry, or sad, or frustrated, or whatever-- use that. Finding something you care about is worth cherishing. If you want to rant against the author's premise or post a rebuttal to their argument, go for it. This will make your brain work really hard, as you analyze their ideas and form your own in response. It can even take place as marginalia-- the notes and marks we make in the margins of our books... This is an important step to take if you want to move from being in motion to taking action-- putting pen to paper is the first step!"
  • Paul Graham: "Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them." 


"Star Trek and Moral Judgment"
  • Mike Potemra: "I have over the couple of months been watching DVDs of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show I missed completely in its run of 1987 to 1994; and I confess myself amazed that so many conservatives are fond of it. Its messages are unabashedly liberal ones of the early post-Cold War era-- peace, tolerance, due process, progress (as opposed to skepticism about human perfectibility)." 
  • In response to the above: "Kevin notes [in a linked article] it is not every day you get conservatives to admit they oppose (or dislike) peace, tolerance, due process, and progress." 
  • Potemra: "I asked an NR colleague about it, and he speculated that the show's appeal for conservatives lay largely in the toughness of the main character: Jean-Luc Picard was a moral hardass where the Captain Kirk of the earlier show was more of an easygoing, cheerful swashbuckler. I think there's something to that: Patrick Stewart did create, in that character, a believe and compelling portrait of ethical uprightness." 
  • "But surely the proper conclusion to be draw, then, is that being an ethically upright and generally virtuous person is, however surprising this result may be, consistent with being tolerant, peace-loving, even with upholding due process. And there is no particular difficulty to the trick of being in favor of progress while being skeptical about human perfectibility." 

"Less Thinking, More Doing"
  • Paulo Coelho: "One day you will wake up and there won't be any more time to do the things you've always wanted. Do it now." 
  • "Begin with the end in mind. Drop your preconceived notions. Forget about what 'society' or your friends or your family expect of you. What do you want out of life? What do you want to be remembered for? Be true to yourself and don't worry about anybody else. Your life is yours and yours alone. It might be helpful to imagine what you think success would look like in a year or two. Begin with that and work backwards to create action steps that will take you from Point A to Point B." 
  • "Baby goals are great for your esteem because they offer a constant stream of positive feedback that will make you feel happy, encouraged, and productive."

"Serpent Symbols and Salvation in the Ancient Near East and the Book of Mormon"
  • "Societies and scripture of the Near East simultaneously attributed two highly symbolic roles to serpents. One role connected serpents to the heavens by having them represent deity, creative powers, and healing. The other linked them with the underworld and associated them with evil, harm, and destructive influences." 
  • "In Egypt the snake was a chthonic animal (a creature representing any one of a number of gods of the earth and underworld) and the embodiment of life-giving powers."
  • "One of the forms of the god Atum, believed to be a primeval creator deity, was the snake or serpent that continued to live season after season. In a fascinating dialogue with Osiris, the Egyptian god of the netherworld and of final judgment, Atum predicts the destruction of the world he created and his own reversion back to the form of a serpent or snake." 
  • Henri Frankfort: "The primeval snake... survives when everything else is destroyed at the end of time." 
  • "The serpent was strongly and continually associated with creation and eternal existence in the ancient Egyptian ethos. The Egyptians portrayed life itself by the image of the rearing serpent, and a serpent biting its tail was a common Egyptian emblem for 'eternity.'"
  • "Another primeval deity mentioned in the Pyramid Texts is Amun, one of whose two primary representations was that of a snake named Kematef (meaning 'he who has completed his time')."
  • "At Karnark it was believed that Amun-Re and his divine consort, the goddess Mut, gave birth to a son named Khonsu. Mut is also symbolized as a snake and is called 'Mut the resplendent serpent.'"
  • "Wadjet (meaning 'green one') was the general Egyptian term for cobra, and in that form she became the symbol of royalty and unification. In fact, the cobra, or uraeus, became a generic Egyptian ideograph for the concept of immortality. Thus the pharaoh was described as 'the living years of the uraeus.' Wadjet was attached to the royal crown as protectress of the king or pharaoh and in the end became the 'eye of Re.'"
  • "Significantly, green was the color that symbolized resurrection in ancient Egypt."
  • "From the gilded shrines of Tutankhamen: The head and feet of the Pharaoh are encircled by the serpent Mehen, the Enveloper. he eats his ever-growing tail as a symbol of eternal regeneration, a motif copied by the later Greeks for their cosmic serpent, Ouroboros." 
  • "Mehen assisted Re on his journey through the realm of night so that he would reemerge unharmed morning after morning, day by day. Thus the plans of a supreme spiritual adversary, represented by a serpent, were foiled by the powers of good, also represented by a serpent." 
  • "Even certain Pyramid Texts manifest this preoccupation, one of which indicates that the dead king (pharaoh) gains eternity by winning the 'snake game.' Though little else is known about this element of the salvific process in ancient Egypt, one wonders if this contest was not symbolic of having to pass some kind of postmortal test or final judgment in which the deceased would be required to demonstrate his knowledge of special information gained through his mortal experiences. Perhaps." Trying to shoehorn some LDS theology in there, are you? 
  • "The Sumerian god of spring vegetation, Tammuz, was linked to the image of the snake. Both he and his mother bore the title 'mother-great-serpent of Heaven,' that is, the serpent deity who emanated from the heaven god Anu. The snake was also the sacred symbol of the god Ningizzida, who was called in Sumerian mythology 'the companion of Tammuz.' He was the guardian at the door of heaven who had the power to bestow fertility, 'who protected the living by his magic spells, and could ward off death and heal disease for the benefit of those who worshiped him devoutly.' The image of Ningizzida as a horned serpent on the seals of scrolls from ancient Mesopotamia seems to have been a sign of his divine power." 
  • "As with the god Ningizzida, the Mesopotamian corn goddess, Nidaba, was shown in representations with serpents (springing from her shoulders)." 
  • "The greatest sovereign the Sumerians ever produced, King Gudea of the city-state Lagash, placed a representation of a serpent deity at the entrance of one of his temples around 2050 C.D., presumably to act as a guardian of the sacred edifice where life is renewed." 
  • "Karen Joines: "The cultic association of the bull with the serpent emphasizes the fertility aspect of the serpent... The serpent-bull symbolism is widespread. Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Assyria have influenced the Canaanites at this point, and Palestine again becomes part of the larger Near East in its cultic symbolism." 
  • "Thus the serpent in this epic [Gilgamesh] fills a similar role as the serpent in Genesis, preventing the renewal of life by controlling or manipulating certain special flora to its advantage. Later Persian tradition also tells of a special plant that bestowed immortality. But Ahriman, the evil adversary of the one true 'Wise Lord' (Ahura Mazda), created a serpent to destroy the miracle-working plant." 
  • "The most troublesome of all serpents in Mesopotamian mythology are described in the Babylonian creation epic (the Enuma Elish)-- those primeval 'monster serpents' that constitute the forces of chaos in the primeval world of the gods. Described as 'sharp toothed, with fang unsparing,' possessing bodies filled 'with poison for blood,' they gather in council, preparing to wage a way in heaven against the great gods." 
  • "Tiamat is killed by Marduk, the champion deity, and her body is cast out of the presence of the gods, half to form the earth's seas and the other half to form the sky." 
  • "In Phoenician inscriptions, [the medicine god] Eshmun is called Adonai, 'My Lord,' parallel to the use of the Hebrew Adonai in referring to Jehovah." 
  • "The serpent could give life or take it, let another creature live or cause it to die by invoking, as it were, a kind of 'instant judgment' in deciding to strike or not." 
  • "The Agathos Daimon was often depicted as a winged serpent and regarded as a good spirit. Seemingly, this linkage of serpents and birds cuts across a broad spectrum of cultures. Cultic or ritual vessels unearthed from Early Iron Age Canaan bear decorations with the serpent-dove motif."
  • The author goes on to lengthily consider winged serpents in the context of Jesus' injunction to be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves."
  • "Quetzalcoatl's high priests even bore the title 'Prince of Serpents." 
  • "In the Hebrew language the creature is called a nahash, a viper, from which derives the noun for cooper or brass (nehosheth), also used as an adjective denoting the 'brass' serpent that Moses erected on a pole in the wilderness..."
  • "The people sin and fiery serpents bite them. Moses constructs a brass image of the harmful creatures and the people are spared. But it is really Jehovah who is the cause working behind the image, the actual instigator of both death and life... The serpent symbol is now seen in its true light-- a valid and important representation of God's ultimate power over life and death. God is the reality behind the symbol." 

 "Queerness in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell"
  • Drethelin: "JOHNATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL: REPLACE EVERY MENTION OF 'MAGIC'/'MAGICIAN' WITH 'HOMOSEXUALITY'/'HOMOSEXUAL' AND YOU MAKE ANY POTENTIAL READER A GIGGLING MORON BECAUSE IT TURNS IT COMPLETELY INTO A SUBVERSIVE COMEDY."
  • "The whole narrative, from the god damn title on down, is built around these two men and their contentious orbit around one another. One is a lifelong bachelor who seems to have very little interest in, or use for, women; the other a young gentleman who finds himself continually drawn to and repulsed by his mentor." 
  • "I stopped watching both Sherlock and Once Upon A Time because I was so sickened by their queer-baiting and their erasure in general of queer characters (special shoutout to Stephen Moffat for mocking fans who ship Watson and Sherlock while turning the lesbian on the show straight for Sherlock. You fucking pillock)." Emphasized because it's important. 
  • "You may have noticed in the quotes above that Clarke is fond of archaic spelling and grammar patterns more in keeping with the 19th than the 21st century. That's quite deliberate on her part-- the whole book is written very much in the vein of Dickens or Austen, and she describes the narrator as 'a perfectly ordinary, nineteenth-century, all-seeing, all-knowing narrator.' While omniscient, the narrator is gendered (female) and very clearly situated in time and space, in 19th century England." 
  • "The book is very, very wedded to the medium of print. Not only is it heavily reliant for its overall sense of time and place on the copious footnotes through the text, which often serve as entire self-contained fairy stories in their own right, it also depends upon that particular 19th century omniscient narrator voice. The saving grace of JS&MR from the standpoint of queer visibility, let alone feminist and critical race/postcolonial concerns, is that the particular construction of the text encourages the reader to conceive of the text as being of a particular time and thus heavily influenced by the viability of particular political statements in that time period. Strip that away and I think that, for the audience, it becomes much more difficult to justify the way the narrative is divorced from present day political concerns." 
  • "The most scholarly discussion of the book comes from journals on Gnostic Christianity, and mystic religious traditions." 

"Night of the Living Fandom"
  • "I want to talk about the fact that this [fan-made] anthology wasn't (just) posted on a message board or AO3, but actually produced in two different formats: a PDF book, and an ebook that is compatible with most e-readers. This format is significant because Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Magic, now only publish the novels for Magic in digital formats-- there is no print novel line now. And while we do state openly that we're a fan project, at least a few of our social media followers assumed that this was one of those virtual publications. The fact that we were able to create something that as far as visuals and content are concerned at least can temporarily confuse someone as to the reality of what they're seeing suggests some interesting things about the way the tech we used to compose the anthology-- largely open source tech-- can disrupt the hierarchies of what is 'legitimate' art."
  • "When it came to composing things, it's not social media per se that gave us the greatest advantage. Rather, it was Google Drive. We have a shared Drive account for the Expanded Multiverse that we used to gather and organize all the different works for the anthology. Our copy editor, Lord LunaEquie, was able to add individual, consistently formatted, and fully proofread documents that I could access. This was invaluable because it meant that when it came time for me to put all the texts into a single document, I didn't have to worry about the formatting. I could drop the text in and edit the overall page formatting to generate a consistent look and feel for the project." 
  • "The program I gathered all the documents in was LibreOffice... The great thing about LibreOffice is that, besides it being free, it comes packed with all sorts of intriguing functionality. For this project, one of the most useful functions was the ability to set basic external styles for headers of various sizes and the text as a whole. This allowed me to quickly take the preformatted documents Luna had generated and alter them to have an aesthetic more consistent with the gothic horror content of the anthology. Anything labelled Header 1 would automatically receive the same font, the same size, the same page placement, &c. It wasn't exactly easy or painless, as I still had to manually check to see that everything was applied correctly, but it was certainly easier than it could have been. And while this is functionality that I believe is present in Word, the important factor for me is that this functionality is available for anyone with internet access and the ability to download the .exe files that power LibreOffice." 
  • "LibreOffice, being open source, is set up to allow for heavy customization, and attracts people eager to introduce their own odd tools for generating a greater range of functionality." 
  • "What Sigil provides is a totally free way for authors to create ebooks that can be read on a whole host of devices. Where webpages and pdfs might fail to function correctly on some devices, or demand a constant internet connection (depending on how you're reading them), or be prohibitively unportable, the simplicity of these files and their minimal cost to entry (free programs, and simply an input of time) means that fanfiction writers, in particular, can easily create whole collections of their work and make them available, as we have, for download via free services like Google Drive. In the case of Magic, it means that as Wizards abandoned print entirely in favor of e-publication, we've been able to fairly easily and cheaply bring the standard of our own work up to the level at which this professional publisher now exclusively works." 
  • "I don't see educational gatekeeping as inherently a bad thing. Or to put it another way, I don't see educating in a way that results in some people's efforts being treated as more successful than others as a negative form of gatekeeping. The democratization of knowledge should not and cannot mean a total democratization of perceived expertise and ability. Some people are just, at any given moment in time, going to be less knowledgeable than others, and put out work that isn't as good as it could be. The response to that fact shouldn't be to treat all fanworks as equally good but to treat them as equally worthy of being worked on and treat fan creators as all worthy of being educated (within some limits of what people can be expected to put up with, of course)." 
  • Sam also goes into the internal structure of the Expanded Multiverse project of which he is a part, and how they handle admitting stories into the project, &c &c. It's good stuff. 

 "The Selfish Gene" (Ch. 2: The Replicators)
  • Ooh boy! Is this going to be an SG-1 crossover?
  • "In the beginning was simplicity." 
  • "Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is satisfying because it shows us a way in which simplicity could change into complexity, how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people." 
  • "Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of aotms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name... The things that we see around us, and which we think of as needing explanation-- rocks, galaxies, ocean waves-- are all, to a greater or lesser extent, stable patterns of atoms." 
  • "Before the coming of life on earth, some rudimentary evolution of molecules could have occurred by ordinary processes of physics and chemistry. There is no need to think of design or purpose or directedness. If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way. The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition." 
  • "In our human estimates of what is probable and what is not, we are not used to dealing in hundreds of millions of years. If you filled in pools coupons every week for a hundred million years you would very likely win several jackpots."
  • "Evolution is something that happens, willy-nilly, in spite of all the efforts of the replicators (and nowadays of the genes) to prevent it happening." 
  • Jacques Monod: Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it!" 
  • "Replicators began not merely to exist, but to construct for themselves containers, vehicles for their continued existence. The replicators that survived were the ones that built survival machines for themselves to live in." 
  • "Was there to be any end to the gradual improvement in the techniques and artifices used by the replicators to ensure their own continuation in the world? There would be plenty of time for improvement. What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth? Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines." 

"Evolution?"
  • "The Chordata also include a variety of near-vertebrates that have some of the specializations of vertebrates but do not have a backbone. Many of these near-vertebrates have a long flexible rod of cartilage known as the notochord instead of the bony backbone; this defines the group known as the phylum Chordata. When you were an embryo, you had a notochord before the cartilage was replaced by the bone of your spinal column." 
  • "For over a century, all the anatomical and embryological evidence (and more recently, all the molecular evidence as well) clearly shows that our closest relatives among living animals are the echinoderms: the starfish, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers... The most striking demonstration of this comes from our embryology. When you were a simple ball of cells (blastula) just a few cleavages after you were formed by fertilization, there was a small opening in the ball called a blastopore. If you had been an embryo of a worm or an arthropod, your blastopore would have developed into the mouth end of your digestive tract. But in the deuterostomes (echinoderms plus chordates), the blastopore becomes the anus, and the mouth develops on the opposite side of the blastula... The cells in the fertilized egg in most animals cleave in a spiral pattern, but those in deuterostomes do so in a radial pattern. Deuterstome embryos have cells that are indeterminate, meaning that their fates are not determined at the very beginning (as in most animals) but can become part of a new organ or even regenerate an organ if necessary. If you break up the larva of a sea urchin early in development, each ball of cells can turn into a complete animal." 
  • "Chordates are also distinctive in that they have a nerve cord along the back, above the notochord, and the digestive tract along the belly, below the notochord. By contrast, annelids and arthropods have their digestive tract along their backs and their main nerve cord along their bellies." 
  • "Chordates differ from worms in that the digestive tract ends with an anus not at the very end of the body... but only partway back; the tail (composed of notochord and myomeres) usually extends behind the anus." 
  • "Although hemichordates do not yet have a notochord, they have the embryonic precursor of the notochord. In addition, both groups have a true pharynx, which occurs in no other group but chordates and their relatives. Finally, they have nerve cords along the back, and the digestive tract along the belly, a configuration that occurs elsewhere only in chordates. There is also a lot of embryological evidence that hemichordates are our closest relatives."
  • "We mammal chauvinists like to think of the last 65 million years as the 'Age of Mammals,' but in terms of diversity, the teleosts were evolving far faster than the mammals, and we could easily think of it as the 'Age of Teleosts.'"
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