Nov 30– From “Hints Towards an Essay on Conversation” by Jonathon Swift (1713)

Tom Swifties

Nov 30– From “Hints Towards an Essay on Conversation” by Jonathon Swift (1713)

Summary: How to win friends and influence people.

Commentary: Having read however much Tom Swift this year, he is not someone I wanted to get a ton of conversation advice from. While he's deservedly recognized as a satirist, I feel like I've read a couple of his essays and didn't find him particularly engrossing. (Upon review, this is only the second Swift essay assigned in 15MAD so I'm not sure who I'm thinking of. Keeping all the authors straight is a challenge.) 

(And then I lost most of this entry, which is a shame since it was a pretty interesting one.)

(I'm going to at least partially retype it. I'm sure it's going to be more like an awkward summary than the actual original post.)

" Nothing is more generally exploded than the folly of talking too much" SWIFT SLAMS TALKING TOO MUCH (Fun fact: The reason slams is so overused in headlines is because of how few characters it is. I'm glad it's for a practical reason, not just that newspaper writers are uncreative morons with a poor vocabulary.)

"And, to crown the business, it perhaps proveth at last a story the company hath heard fifty times before" This is my greatest conversational fear, that I will accidentally tell a story I've already told a bunch of times before.

"with the several symptoms and circumstances of them; will enumerate the hardships and injustice they have suffered in court" Good to know that people were still "happy" to just whine about their lives endlessly for hours 200 years ago. Some things never change.

" Others make a vanity of telling their faults; they are the strangest men in the world; they cannot dissemble; they own it is a folly" I like to imagine some guy struggling to take apart a jigsaw puzzle or something. "I CANNOT DISASSEMBLE!"

Of such mighty importance every man is to himself, and ready to think he is so to others; without once making this easy and obvious reflection, that his affairs can have no more weight with other men, than theirs have with him; and how little that is, he is sensible enough.

I like how this is two pieces of advice in one. 1: People don't want to hear every random thing that happened to you/popped into your head. 2: Don't worry too much about other people's lives. Very sensible and efficient, Hume. (I should put this in my quotes document, but I can't get into it right now because my work password is dumb. I should put that doc under a different account.)

" And, indeed, the worst conversation I ever remember to have heard in my life, was that at Will’s coffeehouse," I spent some time trying to figure out what the worst conversation I've ever had was. Most of the things I thought of were actually bad poetry readings or presentations or something. The best I got was the worst date I've ever been on. We went to some outdoor cover band show (I have seen exactly one good cover band in my life, this should've been the first red flag.) where she drank wine in a sippy cup. Not in some kind of age-kink way, just in and "I'm bad at byob" way.

We wound up at a Denny's, where she just kept lying about stuff in a weird attempt to connect/one up me. "Oh, you like Mystery Science Theater 3000? I saw the first season when it came out." Girl, you would've been like one year old and watching Minneapolis-Saint Paul public TV. You just told me you were from Pennsylvania, which is it?

Eventually, I invited some of my friends to come watch this train wreck. It ended with her trying to jump in my car or something to promise I'd let her know I got home safe. I (fortunately) never saw her again.

"used formerly to assemble; that is to say, five or six men, who had writ plays, or at least prologues" That's like saying you've done a 325 day long blog thing, but you wrote them all in your head. Someone told me about that for novels once, he wrote a whole epic fantasy series "in his head." He was dumb. And also probably a rapist.

I do appreciate him calling poets, "overrun with pedantry."

"it is the same vice in women, when they are over copious upon the subject of their petticoats" Complaining that women talk about their petticoats too much is the most 1700s thing I've ever read. Today it would be Stanley water bottles or something. "METHINKS THE LADY DOTH 'an i oop' too much." (Wrong water bottle.)

He talks about how some towns apparently have people whose only job is to come to tell amusing stories and such. I knew a guy whose job was to just be a runner for all the stores on main street in his town. Need someone to pick up your lunch from the deli? Call Greg. Need someone to cover your register while you ate lunch? Call Greg. Need someone to go buy toilet paper? Call Greg. It didn't pay well, but it seemed like a very interesting job at least.

Then he starts talking about "raillery" which is a kind of teasing I'd never heard of before. Like, I guess I've done it, but not in the kind of organized way he describes. It sounds like it'd be a fun little "party" game. Like a reverse, Yo Mama. "Yo Mama's so fat that they can see her from space. Which was useful when the navigational computer on the Enterprise malfunctioned and they had to bring her in manually." Or something. I don't know if I'd be very good at this game.

"The two chief ends of conversation are to entertain and improve those we are among, or to receive those benefits ourselves." One of my favorite things in T5FSOB is these snippets of why humanity does these very basic things. Most people don't think about why they talk, they just do. But knowing why you do something helps you do anything better.

Yeah, this isn't as good as the original, more of a summary. Oh well, maybe I'll come back to this later.

Nov 29– From "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" by David Hume (1748)

 It's the HUMEidity!

Nov 29– From An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume (1748)

Summary: We don't make things up entirely, instead we derive them from existing perception and knowledge.

Commentary: Yeah, I think that's a pretty fair philosophical stance, Hume. 

Nov 28– Poems by Sir William Blake

 Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Nov 28– Poems by Sir William Blake

Summary: Poems

Commentary: I'm so tired of poetry. That's it. That's all I've got to say about this reading.

Also, no Thanksgiving related reading was kind of weird. I know it's a floating date holiday, but not a one anywhere in the range. I think there have been other floaties that Eliot picked something for, so I'm surprised.

Nov 27– From "Utopia" by Sir Thomas Moore (1516) translated by Ralph Robinson

 More Like "Disturbia"

Nov 27– From Utopia by Sir Thomas Moore (1516) translated by Ralph Robinson

Summary: There's an island where everyone is an idiot.

Commentary: Utopia always read like a satire of satire to me. The Utopians hate everything for no real reason, but Moore is also sort of trying to criticize the then present English society (and not doing a particularly good job of it). It contains several examples of the dumbest part of all utopian stories (as would be expected since it coined the term), no one is allowed to like or dislike anything. Jewelry, clothing quality, social honors, hunting, food and drink. Everything other than boring, hyper-logical, super-stoicism is bad.

It reminds me of the famous (possibly apocryphal, since I've never seen the actual interview) story about an interviewer who asked Gene Rodenberry why Picard was bald in the 24th century. Rodenberry said that no one would care. Apparently in his perfect future 500 years from now, no one is allowed to have an aesthetic preference for hair. Utopias are dumb.

Nov 26– From “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” by Charles Lamb (1811)

 God he hates (staging) Shakespeare

Nov 26– From “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” by Charles Lamb (1811)

Summary: Staging Shakespeare is bad because his words are so pretty, and actors are all hacks.

Commentary: It's kind of weird reading an essay with a frame story that I had to research. Apparently there's a statue of an actor named David Garrick in the Westminster Abbey cemetery. Garrick was an actor who (based on my skimming of Wikipedia) really liked Shakespeare. He helped organize Shakespeare festivals, revivals, etc. in the 1700s when Willy wasn't as recognized as he was today. He also was apparently influential in refining acting (LESS OVERACTING). For context, Garrick was dead for about 30 years before Lamb wrote this essay. Lamb seems to think all actors still overact badly. It's hard to say if he has poor taste, only saw bad actors, or what. Anyway, Lamb is walking through the cemetary one day, sees the statue with this poem:

To paint fair Nature, by divine command,

Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,

A Shakespeare rose: then, to expand his fame

Wide o’er this breathing world, a Garrick came.

Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,

The Actor’s genius made them breathe anew;

Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,

Immortal Garrick call’d them back to day:

And till Eternity with power sublime

Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,

Shakespeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,

And earth irradiate with a beam divine.

and gets all butt-hurt that people like actors and have the gall to compare one of them to Shakespeare. He rambles like an ass for a while, "It would be an insult to my readers’ understandings to attempt anything like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and nonsense" and, "he actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the [...] the muscles utter intelligible sounds. I checked, Morse Code hadn't been invented yet, but I feel like there had to be some precedent for intelligible tapping (to say nothing of the fact that you use your muscles when you talk.)

By volume, I think "actors are dumb" is probably the main thesis of this essay, but he eventually makes his way to his supposed point with:

It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.

It does seem like a paradox. And he never gets around to proving it. Instead he spends most of his time whining about how much he hates actors. Just before that, he has this great quote:

 I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning “To be, or not to be,” or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member.

"I can't tell what's good or not," is a choice when your entire essay is ranting about how to properly perform something, but Lamb is here for it.

Also, Hamlet is good because it's didactic. Poe was like three years old at the time, so he wasn't able to rise from his grave to slap Lamb around, unfortunately.

"All the passions and changes of passion might remain; for those are much less difficult to write or act than is thought; it is a trick easy to be attained." Acting is easy, everyone. Lamb would be that guy who whines about theatre majors, says actors are overpaid, and then says waiting tables is unskilled labor and it should be paid $1 an hour with no tips.

"It is common for people to talk of Shakespeare’s plays being so natural, that everybody can understand him." I'm curious if this is just Lamb (still) being an idiot, or if Shakespeare was considered easier 200 odd years ago. It'd be closer to when the plays were written, so I guess it makes sense.

He rags on actors for a couple more paragraphs before he starts trying to interpret the sonnets to also be anti-actor. I disagree with his interpretation of Sonnet 111 being against acting in general, but just against acting it crappy productions. "That did not better for my life provide/Than public means which public manners breeds—/Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;"

I feel like Lamb would have a job as a shouty right wing TV-host today. "ACTORS ARE TURNING THE KIDS TRANSGAY! THEY NEED SOME GOOD WHOLESOME SUPER CISHET SHAKESPEARE! BUT NOT ACTED!"

 

 

 

Nov 25– From "The Shoemaker’s Holiday" by Thomas Dekker (1600)

 My wife went to BU

Nov 25– From The Shoemaker’s Holiday by Thomas Dekker (1600)

Summary: Forbidden romance, crossdressing, bawdy jokes!

Commentary: This felt very much like a standard (if not terribly polished) comedy of the era, based on other plays I've seen from around the same time. Kind of hard to follow, not sure if that's the play, the production, or my fault.

Nov 23– Blaise Pascal’s "Thoughts" (1670) translated by W F Trotter

 Blaise Pascal loves Owlman

Nov 23– Blaise Pascal’s Thoughts (1670) translated by W F Trotter

Summary: Pascal interrupts his version of Meditations for a villain monologue about how we're all insignificant and know nothing. Also, he hates imagination.

Commentary: This was a trip and a half. It starts out with a couple Mediations style chunks (which makes sense, since the title is Thoughts) that definitely lean in the "snobbish asshole" directions (NO ONE TEACHES YOU HOW TO BE A GENTLEMAN BUT EVERYONE THINKS THEY'RE ONE! Apparently etiquette classes/books [or philosophy/ethics in that context] don't exist in the Pascal-verse). I wasn't thrilled with most of them, but they were easy reading. I did like:

71. Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.

Very Ben Franklin.

Then, I got to thought 72, which is the focus of this selection. It's a six page rant about how we can't know anything, we're pointlessly insignificant, even knowing we don't know things is itself a form of self-deception, etc. I'll circle back to my own personal philosophical take on this, but I'll do a couple quote pulls first.

 Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness. For who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect of the nothingness which we cannot reach? He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels; and I think that, as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption.

Thank you for your cliché nihilistic villain speech, Pascal. Without you, T5FSOB and 15MAD would be under the requisite emo/edgelord quota. Even better that the next line is: "For, in fact, what is man in nature?"

A MISERABLE LITTLE PILE OF SECRETS!

He goes on in this general manner for several pages, eventually revealing that he turned to villainy when he failed middle school math: 

Too great length and too great brevity of discourse tend to obscurity; too much truth is paralysing (I know some who cannot understand that to take four from nothing leaves nothing).

By the end, he's gone full Owlman and started musing about how pointless life is in the face of the multiverse:

In comparison with these Infinites, all finites are equal, and I see no reason for fixing our imagination on one more than on another. The only comparison which we make of ourselves to the finite is painful to us.

He asks, "How can a part know the whole?" and I feel like I read something about that recently in an eastern philosophy article. That everything is made up of parts, but those parts also contain the whole. The example they gave was the human body, which is made of cells, which contain the DNA of the body.

After another page or so he starts ranting about how much he hates imagination, figurative language, etc.: "Instead of receiving the ideas of these things in their purity, we colour them with our own qualities, and stamp with our composite being all the simple things which we contemplate." In this case, he's referring to the idea that we personify physics by saying things like, "objects are attracted to each other by gravity." It's not totally wrong, but is pointlessly pedantic and unreasonable. Pascal is that guy who refuses to believe that there can be more than one definition for a word.

Pascal also hates education:

80. How comes it that a cripple does not offend us, but that a fool does? Because a cripple recognises that we walk straight, whereas a fool declares that it is we who are silly; if it were not so, we should feel pity and not anger.

I think we generally think of a "cripple" as someone with an uncurable physical ailment. You got polio as a kid, got your arm run over by a train, etc. A "fool" implies that you're just dumb. I guess it could also mean someone with some kind of mental disability. I could be generous and assume it's a time/translation issue, not Pascal just saying people can't learn stuff. I'm not.

The remainder is more yelling about imagination:

82. Imagination.—It is that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity, the more deceptive that she is not always so; for she would be an infallible rule of truth, if she were an infallible rule of falsehood. But being most generally false, she gives no sign of her nature, impressing the same character on the true and the false.

[...]

Those who have a lively imagination are a great deal more pleased with themselves than the wise can reasonably be. They look down upon men with haughtiness; they argue with boldness and confidence, others with fear and diffidence; and this gaiety of countenance often gives them the advantage in the opinion of the hearers, such favour have the imaginary wise in the eyes of judges of like nature. 

He's now shifted from nihilistic villain to autistic supervillain. Honestly, I think a lot of villains are spectrum-coded.

I wonder if Pascal literally thinks people who write fantasy novels and stuff are crazy. 

So, circling back to why I decided to write one of the longest posts of the year about this, two things:

1. I'm pretty sure you could have taken my entire undergrad philosophy course and compressed it down to Plato's Allegory of the Cave and this reading. "You're all idiots, no one knows anything, and you're not even smart enough not to know anything," was basically all my professor ever said, in between whining about hating his job and telling us stories about his bong collection. He literally walked out of the room for the final exam to go polish it or something. He was completely nuts (in a very Pascal-esque way) and certainly one of the worst professors I'd ever had. (The fact that he's only one of is a fairly damning indictment of my undergrad, but he didn't spend all of geology class talking about street fighting and bigfoot, or teach us that vaccines caused autism, or any number of other literally batshit things that some of the others did.)

2. I think it's very easy to arrive at (and I think I've written in this blog before about) some variation of, "nothing matters because we're insignificant, free will isn't real, etc." And you can be a Pascal and get there and just decide that everything is pointless and you hate everything, but I don't think that's a productive way to get through life. Also, why make all these mathematical discoveries and stuff if you think they're pointless and not really knowable? There are basically four responses at that point:

1. Nothing matters, so nothing matters. 

2. Talk yourself into some kind of "God of The Gaps" version of free will like some Compatibilists.

(I don't have a picture for this one.)

3. Post cringey memes like this:

to attempt to compensate.

4. Post slightly less cringey memes like this:

I like number four. At a minimum, going and doing stuff makes me feel better. Even if nothing I do ever matters to anyone or anything else (I like to think I at least occasionally improve the life of someone else) I still would rather enjoy my life than sit around wallowing in the pointlessness of it all.