Looking for something else. Found this poem by W. H. Auden. It’s rare for me to find a poet who both (a) perfectly describes a feeling I’ve had and (b) is taken seriously by experts.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=119&issue=2&page=5
Note, 50-year-old typesetting means this poem just barely spills over to a second page.
I always assume that C.S. Lewis knows what he’s talking about when he puts something in a book. So this item I found when I read Till We Have Faces1 must be a kind of easter egg, avant la lettre.
In Chapter 19, the Queen is fighting a duel with the King of Phars, which ends this way: “I gave the straight thrust and then, all in one motion, wheeled my sword round and cut him deeply in the inner leg where no surgery will stop the bleeding.”
I’ve heard of this move before. It’s named after Guy de Chabot, seigneur of Jarnac, who used it in a duel against La Châtaignerie in 1547.2 It was legal, but the discourse in the fencing community (as we’d say now) regarded it as only marginally ethical. Captain Sir Alfred Hutton says3, “In later times an idea got abroad that there was something unfair about this hamstringing cut, and the term coup de Jarnac came to be applied … metaphorically to any underhand attack of what kind soever.”
This may be another subtle indicator that the Queen’s character is not 100% admirable.
Image from Cohen, p. 127
Edited to add: I just noticed that in the illustration de Jarnac’s hand is pronated, so he’s cutting with the part of the weapon called the “false edge”. Subtle reinforcement that there’s something dishonorable going on.
The difference between the concept of “truth” in the sciences and the humanities is endlessly fascinating. I’ve bloviated about it before, in the context of research progress. But another instance came to me recently as I was reading a book called Affective Ecologies4.
We use neurons when we reflect, so, maybe?
The book is about how the reader’s psychological affect is the channel by which literature affects our attitudes about the events related in a story. Prof. WvM takes the idea of “mirror neurons” and runs with it, treating mirror neurons as the physiological mechanism underlying readers’ empathy. All well and good, except, well, the mirror-neuron hypothesis seems not to be true. When it was conceived a few decades ago, it was greeted with excitement, but as people have looked at it more closely, it seems to flunk a couple of tests. That’s a shame — had the hypothesis panned out, it might have led to therapies that could have helped almost everyone on the autism spectrum.
Prof. WvM introduces the idea of mirror neurons on page 23. On page 25, she acknowledges that there are problems.
“Needless to say, the use of mirror neuron research in literary studies does have its caveats. As Kuzmičová points out, “in each attempt at fusing literary theoretical speculation with experimental cognitive science, one could identify a host of methodological problems, starting from the fact that the stimuli used in cognitive experiments usually do not bear the slightest resemblance to literary narrative”. Like Kuzmičová, I have chosen to accept most of these problems as a natural part of any interdisciplinary inquiry.”
That last line is what got me intrigued. With my scientist’s hat on, if I find one of the premises of my research is wrong, I go get a new premise. But maybe this book has a different purpose. Could it be that there’s a value to carrying out the train of logic to a conclusion, even if the starting place isn’t true? I suppose it’s reasonable to presume that something must be the physiological basis for empathy. Almost nothing of the argument depends on specifics of biology, so once the correct mechanism is discovered, the argument here can be carried over directly.
This is an interesting role for the humanities: the repository of all ideas, whether they work or not. It certainly explains why it’s necessary to keep incorrect concepts around and make grad students learn them and cite them, as I was complaining about in the older post.
A few years ago, Ashley at The Nef Chronicles wrote a post in which she tried to work out who the legal owner of the One Ring might be. She was at the time a law student. She concluded that nobody owns it.
Yesterday, Daniel Stride took up the challenge and revealed himself as a legal bloodhound: https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2023/09/17/of-golf-balls-and-war-spoils-the-one-ring-and-property-law-squabbles/ He concludes that it’s complicated, but there are four possibilities. The strongest one is one I never would have guessed. (Clickbait.)
The only weakness I can find is that Stride applies New Zealand law. While there is substantial videographic evidence that many of the events in question took place in New Zealand, the veracity of those records can be challenged. Instead, we have to consider that Sauron, the original owner, is not human, but has a quasi-divine status. Therefore ownership of the Ring is subject to Divine Law.
For the most relevant explication of Divine Law I am indebted to Tom Holt5 He quotes Erda, Mother Earth herself, saying “Human law has no bearing on property that is or has been owned or held by a God.” “God” in this context, explicitly includes characters like Sauron. She continues,”under divine law, right of inheritance is subordinate to right of conquest.” (p. 200] Lest there be any confusion, Alberich the Nibelung clarifies, “if I take something away from you it becomes mine, and if they take something away from me it becomes theirs.” (p.201)
With this precedent in mind, many of the ambiguities clear up nicely. After numerous transfers by violence and trickery, Frodo is the true owner. If any further confirmation were needed, we may note that Sam said the Ring was Sauron’s [LR 4.05.132], and Sam may be assumed to be incorrect.
“Literary critics do not mix with engineers.”
Shippey, T. A. (2016). Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction. United Kingdom: Liverpool University Press. p. 25
Leonardo Pacheco over on Mastodon has an epic pair of footnotes from mathematical monographs.
Peter G. Hinman, Recursion-Theoretic Hierarchies
“To anyone who has reached this note legitimately — that is, by following the proof of Theorem 4.18 — we offer our congratulations and suggest that some strong refreshment is in order. Try combining some hard-frozen strawberries, raspberries, or peaches in a blender with enough dark rum so that the result is a stiff mush (add powdered sugar if the fruit was not sweetened). Pour into a stemmed cocktail glass and relax! For an alternative, see the Notes to Barwise [1975, §II.6].”
Following the reference, he found Jon Barwise, Admissible Sets and Structures
When used in a class or seminar, section 6 should be supplemented with coffee (not decaffeinated) and a light refreshment. We suggest Heatherton Rock Cakes. (Recipe: Combine 2 cups of self-rising flour with 1 t. allspice and a pinch of salt. Use a pastry blender or two cold knives to cut in 6 T butter. Add 1/3 cup each of sugar and raisins (or other urelements). Combine this with 1 egg and enough milk to make a stiff batter (3 or 4 T milk). Divide this into 12 heaps, sprinkle with sugar, and bake at 400 °F. for 10—15 minutes. They taste better than they sound.)
A thing from Poetic Diction6 has stuck with me since my last reading. Owen Barfield doesn’t challenge the idea that verse began as rhythm. I, like most timid thinkers, think rhythm was there to aid the poet’s recall, but Barfield extends it further. He says rhythm is intrinsic to Nature, indeed to our own bodies: “We can only understand the origin of metre by going back to the ages when men were conscious, not merely in their heads, but in the beating of their hearts!”7
But he also notes a problem, as history goes on and languages change: those ancient languages used inflection instead of word order to convey meaning, which is very handy for a poet. If you need to adhere to a meter you can just rearrange the words however you need them. But as languages mature, word order becomes more important, so that putting a word in an unusual place is still intelligible, but it sounds affected and archaic. Poetry gets harder to make.
Barfield suggests this is how rhyme came to be. It’s a much more flattering idea to a rhymer than the usual. He says there’s a general trend: Poets tend to lose ground to writers of prose, as word order becomes more strict. For an extreme example, nobody’s writing physics papers in verse any more, as Lucretius did with De rerum naturae. So poets need something else to add to their verses. Barfield suggests it’s music. “Music (if one can use a fraction here) may comprise perhaps as much as half the meaning of a modern lyric.” Modern meaning post-medieval.
He’s thinking of rhyme, first: “in rhyme we are face to face with the development, at a comparatively late date, of an entirely new system of versification.” To which he adds changing uses of sound in general, explicitly mentioning alliteration and assonance, claiming that they were “unknown to the ancients”. I don’t agree that alliteration and assonance are quite what he’s saying they are. As I’m sure he knew from drinking beer with Tolkien,8 alliteration was there first as far as English poetry is concerned. But I’m more interested in the modernist experiments in sound that were under way in the 20th Century, such as the Sitwells were doing. Barfield saw the trend away from classical poetry to music happening around him, and didn’t see it stopping. That definitely turned out to be correct.
Which leads us to a path I’ve trodden before. Those modernist experiments in the UK fused with the afro-celtic musical innovations happening in America9 to create rap music in the last quarter of the century. By now, “as much as half of the meaning” is now “basically all”. Chapter IX of Poetic Diction closes with this: “It would be pure fantasy to attempt to prescribe in advance what uses man himself shall henceforth make of the material element in language.” Barfield lived until 1997, so he overlapped hip-hop by two decades. I wonder if he ever heard a rapper. And if he did, did he recognize his prediction coming true?
ETA: this is a re-posting of an essay from May that has mysteriously vanished from the database.
Daniel Stride has dusted off an ancient copy of Bored of the Rings, a parody by the Harvard Lampoon. I think “Harvard Lampoon” means the authors were mostly Douglas Kenney and Henry Beard, bouncing ideas off a bunch of their old college buddies. Spoiler: Dan thinks it doesn’t mean anything anymore.
To be fair, he’s too young to get most of the jokes. In fact, I’m too young to get most of the jokes, but at least when I read it ~1975 there were people around whom I could ask. (With one exception: anyone who knows what the verb “dry-gulch” means is requested to tell us in the comments.) I have occasionally thought that the most useless possible work of scholarship would be to compile a list of explanations of all the references in the text.10 If anyone’s going to do that, they’d better hurry. The Baby Boomers they’ll need as sources are fewer every year.
I agree with Dan’s individual points. For example, it’s true that the authors kind of ratchet down after the story meets Orlon in Riv’n’dell. I can’t help noting that this contains a meta-joke that the authors couldn’t have made on purpose. Since the History of Middle-earth was published, we now know Tolkien himself thought there were only a few more chapters after Bingo & Co. got to Rivendell. Everyone thinks it’s a natural transition place.
Accept no substitutes.
Where I disagree with Dan is in the way of looking at Bored of the Rings. If we look at the Lampoon’s text as a parody of Tolkien’s text, we’re straying from the authors’ intent, and missing half the fun. Bored of the Rings should be seen as a physical object. A book, not a text. The authors are explicit about this in their Foreword — their purpose is to produce a thing they can sell to make money. If that requires words to be written, then so be it. But they’re not the main point of their creation. The authors’ real interest is in the book as an object. As evidence, the three laugh-out-loud-funny things I can remember, half a century later:
The green box on the back cover of the authorized paperback edition of LotR (which Dan mentions) ends with the line, “Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it, and no other.” The green box on the back of Bored ends with, “Those who approve of courtesy to a certain other living author will not touch this gobbler with a ten-foot battle lance.” That immortal line won’t work if it’s inside. It has to be on the back cover, to be read by people who have not yet purchased the book.
The second is from the Bored equivalent of “The Ring Goes South”:
“We cannot stay here, ” said Arrowroot.
“No,” agreed Bromosel, looking across the gray surface of the page to the thick half of the book still in the reader’s right hand. “We have a long way to go.”
This exchange takes place on page 80 of a 160-page book. Exactly half of the book was in my right hand.
The third is a masterpiece of typesetting: At the bottom of Page 143, Pepsi is worried about Sorhed’s imminent attack on Minas Troney. Goodgulf assures him the attack isn’t coming soon, and their reinforcements will arrive in plenty of time. The last line at the bottom of the right-hand page is, “Trust me,” said Goodgulf. “Wizards know many things.” Then you turn the page, and the top of Page 144 reads, “The surprise attack at dawn the next day caught everyone by surprise.” This falls flat unless the text and the printer’s layout are in perfect harmony. Once again, the physical book is essential to the joke.
The later editions (such as the one featured on “A Phuulish Fellow”) don’t necessarily have all this right. It’s a miscarriage of humor, justifiable only by the fact that cashing in with the minimum possible effort is the stated purpose of the work. In fact, cashing-in is more than a purpose. It rises to the status of Theme. Because, after all, the real target of the parody isn’t Tolkien. It’s us. The tawdriness, the tackiness, the commercialization we see everywhere in Bored are a word to the wise about what awaits Middle-earth in the hands of people like us. When Burger King advertisements came out in 2001, offering cheap glass goblets as a promotion for the Peter Jackson films, I had to admit the Lampoon crew were prophets.
So that brings me to an interesting place. My disdain for the current state of copyright law is well known by everyone who’s had the misfortune to be in earshot, but in this case I can almost understand it. What force can stand against rampaging commercialization, but a pre-positioned commercial interest?
Cloud backup in case of portable-device failure.
Large Language Models with chat interfaces are all the rage, everywhere we turn these days. Some people are sure they’ll lead to a cataclysm for the human race, others are sure that they’re going to destroy the creative professions, and still others think it’s just fancy autocorrect. Without endorsing any of these positions, I decided to ask LLaMa 3.0b at Hugging Face an important question.
A speaker at this party said, “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.” Was he insulting us or complimenting us?
The quote “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve” can be interpreted in different ways depending on the context and tone in which it was delivered. On one hand, it could be perceived as an insult if the person saying it implies that they think most of those present are not worth their time and effort to get to know them better. On the other hand, it could also be seen as a compliment if the person means that there are some individuals present who are truly interesting and deserving of greater attention and appreciation. Without further clarification from the speaker or additional context, it is difficult to say for certain whether the statement was meant as an insult or a compliment.
This sounds like Otho Sackville-Baggins trying to mollify his wife. Any Brandybuck could do better, even after a big dinner with two bottles of wine.
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