24 May 2013: Notes of a Serial Dreamer

Up at 6:30 AM, 20 minute workout: five mn supine, five mn doing supine pull-ups (read: not real man’s pull-up which I cannot do at this time) on my bed’s monkey bar, ten minutes walk on a beautiful May morning.

Eggy white fluffy congee, my favorite, with a real Egg. I celebrate the Chick, the Poussin, that died that I might live.

As part of my Grand High ReRead of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, completed one half of the translators’ introduction which thoroughly covers the Matrix from which Kant’s Critique emerged. Familiar enough but I need to know it better so as to formalize Kant in this log using modern logic as opposed to Kant’s Logic, a somewhat idiosyncratic thing.

But the goal overall of studying Kant is to render my return to Catholic worship visibly compatible with Science in a Jesuitical form. Given Las Casas and the Berrigans, Catholicism grounds my yearning for social justice and a connection with my younger Father, and his concerns.

“I have a MASTER’S degree. In Science!” – Ask Mister Science, in Duck’s Breath Mystery Theater

[NB - I am serious, just flippant on occasion.]

Since my sentence of Stage IV cancer, my dreams have taken the form of a serial, and in each I am struggling to be born, but stuck in a bookstore or pro shop of some sort.

Quite vivid dream about a voyage to a slave island sponsored by a radical bookstore in which I lost most of my luggage. The sponsors of the voyage not helpful because, they said, they could give only a limited amount of help to a white male and representative of the enslaving class, even though I demonstrated excellent swimming skills (swimming from our boat, which was laid out like a crowded bus). Then, on the final leg of the journey home (by actual bus on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive in a heavy rainstorm) I lost the rest of my belongings transferring buses.

The dream ended at the ninety degree turn that LSD takes at the DePaul campus (Loyola? Can’t remember in the slightest, but I know it’s a “major Catholic university in Chicago”, therefore either DePaul or Loyola).

The “radical bookstore” similar to dream-bookstores in recent dreams, which I’ve been having nightly, about a bookstore which represents the starting point of an anabasis or adventure; this was the first such dream in which I actually embarked upon the anabasis.

Interpretation: the overcrowded bus-boat may have been a memory of the Lamma Island ferry. Had dreams about Lamma Island when living there but not, as I’d expected, since.

On the Absence of Beasts in Shakespeare

Two Gentlemen of Verona, finished yesterday: Nicely wrought but formulaic and forgettable: The only Shakespeare play with a dog in it. The rest of Shakespeare’s works marked, if that’s the word, by the absence of animals with certain revealing exceptions.

The Winter’s Tale features a bear, famously (“Exit pursued by a bear”).

But I rack my brains for any other roles for animals in Shakespeare. The first Elizabethan theaters featured bear baiting for the low fellows, and bear baiting was precisely what its name implies: testing, “baiting” and wounding the bear until it was enraged, and would attack the bravos. Sickening, like bullfighting: just as care-for-the-stranger marks the Chinese and the Jews as civilized people, no society in which animals aren’t protected from abuse can claim to be civilized.

My guess is that Shakespeare didn’t go for bear-baiting. The Duke of York is “baited” in Henry VI part 3 and it’s clear Shakespeare found “baiting” and slowly killing a man or beast reprehensible.

But I can’t think of any Shakespeare passages condemning the use of animals in war: in Richard III, Richard tells a flunky (Catesby?) to “saddle white Surrey for the field tomorrow”, and in a much more famous line, Richard is on foot crying “my kingdom for a horse”. This implies that poor White Surrey was killed in the affray unless White Surrey threw Richard and escaped to a cozy barn in Leicester with plenty of hay.

Tenderness towards horses does appear in Richard II, the deposed Richard laments the theft of his horse Roan Barbary by Henry IV.

So I fall into a watch, and then a reverie, about discovering a Shakespeare play: The Lamentable History of Spot, the Dog of Avon.

23 May 2013: A Horse! A Horse! My Kingdom for a Horse, or, Grand High Shakespeare ReRead Complete

I have finished re-reading the complete corpus of Shakespeare’s works for the first time since 1962, as long as I don’t have to read The Two Noble Kinsmen or Sir Thomas More. No other play in my Oxford Complete Works was skipped; I should have skipped Edward III which is not a “Shakespeare” play at all; Edward III is a pastiche of Froissart by several of the lads including an overly agreeable Will.

To me, Will is like a great programmer whose single-authored compilers are works of wonder who nonetheless works on a team or even, as I did at the end of my career, in the intense practice of pair programming where you mind-meld, as Shakespeare did with Middleton, with another practitioner.

I have also re-read the deathless Sonnets, the lovely Venus and Adonis, the grave Lucrece, and “various poems” including some of the most trivial poems ever written, the turkey “Shall I fly?” which is at best a technical tour de force which should have toured de forced right out the door, and the magnificent “Phoenix and the Turtle”.

I have recaptured morning moments after morning Mass at St Mary’s church and school, reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the first time while eating a delicious chocolate long john. Walking down the street in New York City to discover a “bold new film” by one Kenneth Branagh. Watching the canon on DVD in 2000, checking out the DVDs remastered from 1980s videos made by the BBC from the Evanston Library, and feeling enriched rather than drained after work.

For I have read th’immortal Shakespeare again
Nothing stales, it’s always new, a Tear or Grin.

[God that sucks.]

I have re-learned valuable lessons in reading a book from this. First of all, get a nice marker for your place and never fold pages down to mark your place as does Innogen in Cymbeline, which contributes to her downfall. Keep the book in an obvious place. If you can, don’t read Oxford hard bounds in bed or while eating since Oxford University Press trades on its marque to avoid paying bookbinders. Its bindings look good, but don’t stand up to daily use.

Oh yeah. Get a Kindle ASAP and until then read books on your computer. Dead trees are unsustainable. I yearn to again hold The Cambridge History of 17th Century Philosophy in my hands, but I yearn more for my eldest son, who is gone. Our lives are defined by lost things.

Accessing the Complete Works of a writer, musician, or (thru travel or high quality reproductions) painter can be a life changing experience. Actually reading a play, bringing it to life in your mind, is a struggle today since modern media never says “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts” as does Chorus in Henry V. But it’s a rewarding struggle.

Piecing-out “our imperfections with your thoughts” was meaningful in Shakespeare’s time given what a Marxist would call the then-obtaining, low development of productive forces. A wooden stage could not hold a single horse and the setting off of antique bombards and pistols risked assassinating audience members in a theater surrounded by the audience, as well as the sort of fire which destroyed the Globe in 1613.
It was also meaningful in 1944 and immediately thereafter in “Austerity Britain” where its “higher development of productive forces” had been thrown somewhat into reverse, with wilder regions in Scotland and Britain regressing in some respects to Victorian or even earlier standards of living. While Britons had TV before we did in America, TV having been invented in Britain in 1939, a child, watching the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the early 1950s, had to “piece out” TV’s “imperfections with” his “thoughts”.

Medium Cool? Whatev.

It’s almost forgotten as the years go by, that the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan thought that the very limitations of TV in the 1960s were permanent virtues, that made TV, permanently, a “cool” medium to be opposed to the “hot” mediums of movies and books of the time, which did more work for the viewer or reader, this being an implicit fault.

McLuhan witlessly created a crude “binary opposition” easily deconstructed because without saying so, he implied, strongly, that crude low definition TV and video would be appreciated by the cognoscenti.
What actually happened: ignoring McLuhan completely, engineers strove constantly to give consumers excuses to upgrade this all-powerful appliance by constantly increasing its analog definition, and then, of course, TV became all-digital. “Snow” and slow or fast rolling bands mysteriously disappeared unmourned from American TV screens along with pictures of Indian chiefs (when TV started to broadcast 24/700, and local standards no longer needed Red Men to send a test pattern just before the broadcasting day.

Black and white TV sets likewise disappeared from the shelves circa 1980. With my self-image as a thrifty consumer, despite the fact that even as such I’d contrive to go broke, I bought the last black and white set at Macy’s at the Stanford mall in 1983. My children, living with their Mom, constantly clamored for color TV until my former wife found an affordable unit. I never did since given my commitment at the time to 24/7 programming the major appliance in my apartment wasn’t a TV, it was a computer.

Technical “progress” was driven by the constant need to sell new units, to keep soaking the American consumer who never took responsibility for his anomie and boredom. Marshall McLuhan died uncelebrated save by a few “digerati” at Wired whose pretense was that if one was simultaneously a great programmer and a person who’d had some random exposure to books outside computer science, such as McLuhan’s Understanding Media or Bob Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, one wasn’t a dork like one’s workmates from Daly City.

I was just as much taken in by this as any one else until the 1990s and 2000s when greater access to chat rooms, Amazon, and Wikipedia, as well as the bullying of Ted “Xanadu” Nelson by editors at Wired and the subsequent bullying of contributors like me at Wikipedia, revealed that if anything, the self-styled digerati were a vicious bunch whose esteem I should not seek (“throw not thy pearls among swine lest they turn again and rend you”).

An Age of Kings

In 1962, my family gathered before the TV to watch the BBC series “An Age of Kings” on a small black and white screen. I recently discovered this series on DVD; in 2007 I had searched for it and found nothing, and I posted a suggestion on the BBC’s Web site that they find the old tapes of “An Age of Kings”. I like to think that the BBC copied the tapes to DVD format for sale because I suggested they so so, but probably quite a lot of Baby Boomers requested this too.

Watching “An Age of Kings” today, the first thing one notices even in black and white format is the prettified Middle Ages with all of the highborn in perfect suits of armor and surcoats indicating the team. This was probably expensive; 20 years on, in the BBC video Shakespeare history plays, the “knights” wear a sort of leathern quilted surcoat which is believable as armor but not “realistic”.
An Age of Kings exposes a problem with McLuhan. On our set it was low-definition not because of any intrinsic problem with analog TV.

Analog technology such as seem low-def and therefore cool to McLuhan actually throws more bits than digital technology despite the latter’s claims. An HDTV screen modified to display an analog movie as continuously varying levels of voltages, or a purpose built HDTV screen the size and modernity of a digital screen, is in terms of information theory, like a modern analog sound reproduction system playing LPs, which are still being made. Analog technology throws an infinite number of bits at the audience.

Whereas if one merely looks at the edges between objects in an HDTV image, the curved edges are made up of blocks of rectangular pixels.

It’s downright fraudulent and a reason not to get HDTV unless one likes big screens. And if one does one should examine one’s conscience for the reason why. “Piece our our imperfections with your thoughts”, chump.

The Problem with Antic Titles

“The First Part if the Contention Between the Houses of York and Lancaster” is far more conveniently known as Henry VI part 2. Wells and Taylor simply don’t realize as sheltered scholars among dreaming spires that the antic title is simply a non-starter. You probably didn’t like it, just now, when I showed off my learning and used “antic title” to mean “old title”, for when Marlowe wrote about dancing the “Antic Hay” he meant an old dance for old men and women who are often antic, if not frantic.

Likewise, general readers of a certain intelligence and literacy find, in my view, “Henry VI part 2” more euphonius and easy to remember. Harold Bloom, the American critic, hates the Oxford Shakespeare and I am beginning to realize why.

Wells, Taylor et al. never decided whether their Collected Works would be a teacher’s and scholar’s kit of tools or something for the general reader to savor with a drink and fine cigar. It’s excellent as the former but with varorium readings to contend with at the end of many plays and the removal of passages that make sense (such as end material concerning the beggar Sly, for whom the play-within–a-play concerning the Taming of one Katherine, a Shrew was staged) it’s rather confusing.

The Oxford Collected Works, alongside its marvelous companion volume, “William Shakespeare, a Textual Companion”, with the complete BBC Shakespeare reissued on DVD, would be a great toolkit for such a one as my friend the redoubtable EnglishTeacherConfessions who needs to teach Shakespeare plays in secondary schools, or a prof who need to teach classes in Shakespeare at university.

This because one of the most irritating things about Shakespeare from the viewpoint of a student just trying to make the grade consists in passages like this one, this, from Measure for Measure in the Penguin editions:

ESCALUS
[Aside]

Well, heaven forgive him! and forgive us all!

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall:

Some run from brakes of ice, and answer none:

And some condemned for a fault alone.

The Oxford edition, sensibly, has Escalus say “brakes of vice”: carts in Shakespeare’s time had brakes, bushes impeding movements were known as “brakes”. “Brakes of ice” makes no sense whatsoever. Clearly, the Folio, which uses “ice” had a simple typographical error in early hand typesetting, which used neither computers nor the older Linotype technology to allow the “typesetter” to key in the text or present the printing press with a PDF.

Few teachers have the scholarship needed to explain such anomalies which can render a student permanently pissed off at “Shakespeare” as cultural icon because of the wreckage to her grade point average.

The scholarship is found in the Oxford collected Works, and in the companion volume (Shakespeare: a Textual Companion). The editing of practically every line in the collected works is explained in the companion volume.

Students have quite enough problems reading Shakespeare’s Early Modern English because written English today is not in poetic form, and Shakespeare’s characters, in revealing so much of themselves in language, tend to confuse readers. Nonsense lines, lines that seem like nonsense, need to be clarified by the teacher confidently.

‘Brakes of ice”, indeed. Brakes of humbug, sir, sheer humbug, hey hey what what.

Change Record

23 May 2012: Draft 1 inserted
23 May 2012: Revisions
24 May 2012: Revisions

22 May 2013: Swear not at all

5:30 AM supine workout – may not be a physio workout today – black rainstorm.

Finished Troilus and Cressida, a remarkable, intellectually challenging play that demands ANOTHER re-read soon. Centered around the death of Hector as seen in the Iliad, decenters from Hector to Cressida and her frailty at oath-keeping, so on one level, T & C is a morality play about something Christ commanded (“swear not at all, but let your communication be aye or nay”) that Shakespeare seems to have taken to heart.

Juliet tells Romeo not to swear except by “thy sweet self which art the god of my idolatry”. Queen Elizabeth, in Richard III, neatly deconstructs Richard’s repeated attempts to swear by God, by his crown, by his Garter by telling him how each he has dishonored:

Rich.
Harpe not on that string Madam, that is past.
Now by my George, my Garter, and my Crowne.
Qu.
Prophan’d, dishonor’d, and the third vsurpt.
Rich.
I sweare.
Qu.
By nothing, for this is no Oath:
Thy George prophan’d, hath lost his Lordly Honor;
Thy Garter blemish’d, pawn’d his Knightly Vertue;
Thy Crowne vsurp’d, disgrac’d his Kingly Glory:
If something thou would’st sweare to be beleeu’d,
Sweare then by something, that thou hast not wrong’d.
Rich.
Then by my Selfe.
Qu.
Thy Selfe, is selfe-misvs’d.
Rich.
Now by the World.
Qu.
‘Tis full of thy foule wrongs.
Rich.
My Fathers death.
Qu.
Thy life hath it dishonor’d.
Rich.
Why then, by Heauen.
\Qu.
Heauens wrong is most of all:

This amazing scene is a foil to the much better known “Richard seduces the Lady Anne” scene of Act 1, and the later, more extraordinary scene is often brutally cut: but just as we ignore the micro pattern of Shakespeare’s verse as actors at our peril, we ignore his architectonic sense, cultivated under the unfriendly conditions of a business in a police state as it is, and thus deserving of notice and celebration. The ignorant playgoer is unable in most cases to connect a strong Elizabeth with a weak Anne, and to see that Shakespeare, unlike Richard, believes in women’s agency…much later in his career, women’s agency became a prime mover in the Winter’s Tale and elsewhere.

Elizabeth also redeems the hysterics of an aged, crazed Queen Margaret who emerges at court early in the play to condemn Richard ineffectually. But Elizabeth helps to undermine Richard in preparation for his sleepless night before Bosworth and thus materially helps Henry defeat Richard.

In Shakespeare, good people don’t “sweare”; they just do good and show up and keep their promises. Bad people, like Republican politicians, like to be “Promise Keepers” and celebrate that sort of marriage where one year, husband and wife are coiffed lovebirds and the next are divorced and in need of a shave, or the beauty parlor.

Hamlet’s associates are reluctant to “Sweare” when commanded by a ghost under the earth to do so, since at this point Horatio et al. don’t know whether the ghost is Hamlet’s father or the Devil.

Today, people have lost the distinction between sex talk, scatology (saying “shit”) and “taking God’s name in vain”, that is, invoking God carelessly when we say “by God”, “God damn x” and so on. In Shakespeare’s time, saying “sblood” on the stage or on the street was to invoke Christ’s blood shed for sin and as the Puritans gained power was increasingly thought offensive until a 1605 law banned it and related phrases on stage. This helped Wells and Taylor date Shakespeare plays for the Oxford collected works, and occasioned rewrite work when plays written before 1605 were restaged.

Troilus and Cressida is a deep play (the third longest Shakespeare play, after Hamlet then Cymbeline). Although it was profoundly unsafe by the 1590s to present a play about Christianity, the English wars of religion under Queen Mary having destroyed the “mystery” plays, the classic heroes of antiquity were fair game. It was doctrinally safe to show them with feet of clay, and to draw parallels between the highest and the lows of Pandarus.

It is indeed a paradox that in highly “religious” societies, that is, societies with an established and usually Fundamentalist church, it can be very dangerous to discuss religion or to manifest religious curiosity or enthusiasm, especially when one’s female; the persecution of witches in 1690 Massachusetts started with male anxiety about women who had formed bible-reading societies. One’s also reminded of the vicious and irreligious, impious attacks on women at the Wall in Jerusalem by “pious” Jewish men.

To return to Troilus and Cressida…the monologues of the wily Ulysses (Odysseus) as he counsels Achilles sulking the latter’s tent are to say the least thought-provoking, although I could not “cast”, in the theater of my imagination, anyone other than Sean Bean, good old Sharpie himself, in the role, because Bean had played Odysseus in a forgettable movie a few years back about the Trojan wars.

In reading a Shakespeare play, or any play for that matter, one is well-advised to examine the cast list carefully, for Cressida starts out a Trojan; but her father, Calchas, has gone over to the Greeks and without too much hue and cry being raised, Calchas is temporarily with the Greeks…like a Wallenstein in the Thirty Years War, Calchas switches sides for personal advantage and none of these turncoats are ostracized at the wild parties, including both sides, that also are striking feature of both this play and its source in Homer.

On one level, one gets the impression from the Iliad and retellings such as Shakespeare’s that the Trojans welcomed the Greeks in the same way the inhabitants of Easter Island welcomed the crew of the Bounty under Fletcher Christian: sheer boredom was relieved by the arrival of strangers with whom one could trade as well as fight.

But tragicomically, where Troilus and Cressida has long been the biggest anomaly when one has divided the plays into tragedies, comedies or histories, Cressida and Troilus’ authenticity cannot survive when the characters in the play are almost as smart as Shakespeare and their lives, in a modernist way, become a joke.

The successful recovering alcoholic has never taken a “pledge” not to drink, whether ever again, or for a period of time. He just asks “a power greater than himself” to help him stay sober for the next 24 hours.

Solemn “pledges” featuring newly hopeful wives and children half-comprehending with shining eyes were a feature of a precursor of AA, the “Washingtonian” movement of the 19th century which ended in tears, as the pledging leaders and their followers both wound up on saloon floors, face down in the beer and urine. AA founder Bill Wilson seems to have been aware of this, so he and early AA members eliminated pledges and promise keeping, thereby eliminating that shame which is so often a good excuse to drink.

But Cressida is quickly reduced to the status of a drab, a common whore, because she’s been persuaded to swear by Troilus. Just as a drunk who breaks his promise not to drink is somehow “more” of a drunk, as Ray Milland’s character convinces himself in The Lost Weekend (with “there’s that nice young man who drinks” being perhaps the wisest words in the film, spoken by two gossips.)

21 May 2013: Kiss Me Kate

Busy rainy morning. First thing supine workout with five extra minutes non-supine, dancing standing up gently on the bum leg.

Very satisfied to get to the point of doing two workouts on each weekday (when physio is available) and a first-thing workout on arising, since back when I was hale, it was hard to do first-thing workouts and impossible to do two workouts on the same day. But now it’s easy since the positive benefits are so important to me in my illness.

Of course, the workouts, with the exception of “rackety row”, aren’t as intense as my running and swimming workouts of yore, ending 26 March 2012. But a fundamental principle of my workouts ever since March 1981, when I first staggered running around the block, has been a sort of permissiveness which has allowed me to be in there for the long haul. 20 minutes of supine workout is not 20 minutes of running but the mental effort, as opposed to the physical effort, is the same, and it’s more important to preserve a continuity of effort…even as the monks of the Middle Ages preserved culture without understanding it, I need to preserve, perhaps until my dying day, the idea that I work out to wake up, that I have felt God’s presence in both intense and simple workouts.

Beef congee, fluffy hot and dark, and an Egg. Read acts 1..3 of The Taming of the Shrew, a uniquely constructed play in that it’s a play within a play in which Christopher Sly, a common drunk, is deceived into thinking his common life wasn’t real; this anticipates Descartes’ use of this fable as a thought-experiment by a few decades.

Katherine, the Shrew, is a prototype for madcap women so surprised and offended by madcap men. She doesn’t see how her hostility to men destroys her sister’s chances in the marriage meat market.

Kate’s famous speech at the end of the play is misinterpreted. It’s a highly intelligent Shakespeare with some real life experience under his belt from whatever he was doing in his “lost decade” of the 1580s showing how Kate makes a trade-off or even a social contract to obey her husband in exchange for considerable benefits.

Of course, Kate has realized that her husband is mostly hot air and has dealt with her brutally only to ensure he keeps her. Certain feminisms (where I continue to regard feminism as plural) give, as a matter of deliberate policy, absolutely no guidance to men and their avatars from Catherine MacKinnon to the ordinary women’s studies teacher, neatly inverting Confucianism, Judaism and other ancient ethical philosophies.

Womens’ desire to study Torah one would think laudable and “good for the Jews” as the saying goes, but for the darkest psycho-sexual reasons and male inferiority complexes, women studying Torah enrages some Jewish men. But…for the same general reasons, a “feminist” male is thought, at least by default and in the absence of testimony to the contrary, a fraud at best and a Ted Bundy, well spoken and well dressed only to be able to murder women, at worst. I know a real feminist guy who started out as a drinking buddy who gave me excellent advice and counsel; he likes to make crude salesmen’s jokes, some of them racist, some of them, sexist.

Confucian teachers of the old days would be offended to be even asked how their recommendations could help women lead a moral life; likewise, when I investigated feminist theory in order to ensure I was treating my ex-wife and our children justly, I was loth to take a class in a local university extension; I read books of feminist theory.

Men lack guidance in how to justly keep their wives at the intersection of sex and politics and discover that being tolerant, soft-spoken is to be “wimpy” and that their women-folk still hate wimps as of old. But now they get wimps by the carload since it takes a lot of guts to Shock and Awe a woman as does Petruchio, his Kate.

‘Tis time to realize that marriage sucks. It’s a human institution which was founded at the dark intersection of sex and property (cash and real estate) and idealists (like me, Count Tolstoy, and Prince Andrei) are best to stay clear of it or die conveniently and in the “odor of sanctity” while calling down blessings on a woman who’s made us cry, as does Prince Andrei bless Natasha at his death.

For it’s amazing, the dialectic of love. I dearly love my surviving son and will do so no matter what despite his strange (estranged?) treatment of me. Unlike Othello, and like Emily Dickinson, I can just reason, what of that? Othello thought he “knew” everything and as such, was modeled on a Renaissance “New Man” who as a magus could know all secrets: but when Othello pursued the secret, and extracted it from Iago, the secret turned to be poison, mixing, in an explosive fashion like a reactive chemical, with the still-existing love Othello continued to feel for Desdemona.

This was staged in the canonical 1980s BBC video, daringly, with Sir Anthony Hopkins literally gibbering nonsense and rolling on the floor while Bob Hoskins’ brilliant Iago, unseen by an unseeing Othello, capers with joy. Othello has seized up because he simply cannot resolve the contradiction: Desdemona is so beautiful and so nice to me, yet she betrays me. My son is so tall and smart like me yet he seems to despise me without saying so. I have, as my own Iago, persuaded myself that this is so merely because I’ve blasted out email in Peter’s direction that is probably just “too much shit”.

Ah, but I came to the same conclusion in 2009 in my long blog post “A Note on the Mercy of the Night” and this anger so stuffed may have caused this verdammte cancer. C’est une impasse and more a matter for one’s Father confessor or shrink or rebbe than anything one can solve alone.

Yes, as a baptised Catholic, who never stopped self-identifying as a baptized Catholic, I have returned, insofar as is possible in my health situation, to the actual rites of the Church including Reconciliation and the Blessed Sacrament. This is because my understanding of Kant allows me to do so, for a positive atheism or agnosticism is as self-contradictory as the reverse assertion of the truths of one’s religion. You have to know when you’re doing theology (writing, speaking, thinking, praying) since when you are it is licit, cognitively speaking, to involve theological entities, perhaps with a certain minimalism as found in the Guth version of Handel’s Messiah…about which I wrote a lot in this blog last April 2012.

Whereas different standards should guide philosophy; there’s to me, no such thing as a “Catholic philosopher” because insofar as she finds it necessary to qualify or mark “philosopher” with “Catholic”, she’s no philosopher, but instead an honorable theologian.

It’s a modern fallacy to write of “Catholic philosophers”: was Descartes one? He certainly felt so, and harbored fond hopes that his Discourse on Method would be adopted by Rome as a guide to first principles. To his surprise, his book was placed on the “Index Librorum Prohibitorum”, the charming Index of forbidden books which still was enforced in 1948 and was used to discourage Catholic students from majoring in philosophy, history, or any field where they might encounter skeptical doubt…even though for Descartes, skeptical doubt was simply the logical gesture of assuming the negation of that which you wanted to prove, and to show how it led, first to an impasse (the “evil genius” story) and then to the first proposition implied by his thought experiment: I think, therefore I am.

Well, my butt hurts as does my head.

20 May 2013: Read this frightening future history … if you dare!

Here is a stunning “virtual” yet highly likely history of the near future. As many intelligent people are aware, other folks down the road increasingly believe nonsense and refuse to believe scientific fact such as global warming’s high probability: the authors of this study blame neo-liberalism and its idiot, quasi-religious faith in markets.

While using the trappings of rationality, neo-liberalism’s “fundamentalist” denial of the utility of any government intervention is supported by increasingly ignorant individuals in a neat reversal of enlightenment, where “logic” means “believe me or else”.

Read the PDF and then my comments since my comments contain “spoilers”.

In this virtual history Western civilization collapses along with the seacoasts of Europe and the Americas: England becomes a rump state dominated by Scotland, probably a bit of luck: Canada and the USA merge so US citizens can escape killer heat. If I am still alive at this time (2030? 2020? 2015?) my lack of mobility and cancer will cause me, I hope, to simply sit still and pray, not only Catholic prayers but also Lakota death-songs: songs of gratitude. But if I can rescue my grand-daughters I should probably try.

At the worst of it The Second Black Death, with mortality levels of 50% plus, matching those of the Black Death of the 1340s, lays waste to Europe. Governance, scientific data-gathering, local authority, all collapse in a way that could only please dirtbags such as neo-liberals and “anarchists”. Dazed mothers carry babies dead for several weeks through howling storms…

China survives because it isn’t committed to neo-liberalism and (perhaps for the same reason I have not been allowed to die and rot of prostate cancer and its side effects in my apartment) Chinese authorities are able to vacate China’s coasts in a humane fashion.

This virtual history is quite factual up to 2012 and its drafting. It reports things not found in the media in the USA, whether liberal (MSNBC?) or conservative (Fox). Was 2012 in the USA the year without a winter as 1815 in Europe was the year without a summer? I do remember a series of balmy winters in the 1990s whereas back in the 1950s one could count on snowy winters, uncertain springs, hot summers and glorious “Indian summers” in each of the respective seasons. Today nobody knows what to expect.

These authors also wrote “Merchants of Doubt”, how the tobacco firms retained public relations firms and Mad Men to assert “doubt” about the health effects of smoking. Had they not been permitted to do this, my Mom, so easily frightened yet so paradoxically daring in her smoking, would probably have quit, there being NO voice whispering that maybe she’d get away with smoking; she did not, she died at the relatively young age of 72, whereas most well-to-do American and international women die in their eighties, their nineties, past 100: Mme Chiang Kai Shek died in 2003 at the age of 105.

“Truth is an absolute defense”: on behalf of our tobacco lords, the Mad Men spoke demonstrable truth. Many people do smoke and live until their nineties. The Mad Men never dared to contradict the testimony of data sets, such as the British data set that showed a spike in a disease previously rare in British WWI vets, the first British soldiers to smoke heavily: lung cancer. They simply said, with respect to the assertion “the association you show us is doubtful: perhaps the cancers were caused by another delayed reaction, to the conditions of the Front in the war, or those of the General Strike and depression”. This is to say of x, doubt(x), and this is always “analytically” true: true by virtue of its form and knowably never false when x is any meaningful scientific assertion.

It takes only a reading of Hume to understand this: but as the chair of my undergraduate philosophy department, E. D. Klemke, told me in the 1990s, increasingly students were being directed by “pastors” and homeschoolers to avoid philosophy and demand classes in comparative religion to satisfy accreditation requirements. Hume is considered perniciously skeptical whereas the taxonomy he introduced of statements is a form of knowledge and a highly useful tool.

Hume’s taxonomy should be identified here precisely because it will be unfamiliar to many educated people: analytic a priori, synthetic a priori (an empty class to Hume), analytic a posteriori (JS Mill’s mathematics, to some, although Mills may have not agreed) and synthetic a posteriori (scientific claims outside math).

Because “synthetic a posteriori” assertions such as “smoking causes lung cancer” and “mankind’s economic activity is producing greenhouse gas in the troposphere such that the planet is absorbing and retaining more of the sun’s energy, leading to runaway global warming, and, possibly, the ‘Sagan effect’ which would transform our climate to that of the unlivable climate of Venus in as short as a year or less” can be doubted as in “I rather doubt that smoking causes lung cancer” or “I doubt global warming” which statements are analytic apriori and as such true by virtue of their form.

Lawyers are trained to spot such assertions which must be admissible because true. The law bows to such assertions if made in a court of law by a lawyer in a nice suit, and while the PR men, the Mad Men, may not have majored in philosophy, they knew from the streets that doubt works.

The PDF is a hell of a read, especially if you like science fiction and virtual history. The original 1960s concerns about the environment and overpopulation inspired a spate of scary novels including Phillip “Generation of Vipers” Wylie’s “The End of the Dream”. These books caused many frightened people to get active in environmental causes over the last fifty years which may have delayed our doom.

The common mind delights in fictions like these. I used to, wasting hours at the library reading virtual future histories of nuclear war and environmental crash but never becoming active as a result. Whereas a 1983 TV program about a nuclear war inspired Dad to join Physicians for Social Responsibility. Its far more graphic and frightening BBC counterpart was Threads, available on You Tube for the very, very brave and strong of stomach; please don’t watch it if you’re not.

But we refused to listen to VP Al Gore and his far more factual warning in 2000, preferring several years of dirtbag pseudo-prosperity.

Learn logic, math and rhetoric to avoid being manipulated. Demand that your child’s high school incorporate the International Baccalaureate’s tutelage in critical thinking in which logic and rhetorical studies are used to expose false claims such as are made by global warming denialists; Texas recently forbad such material in its schools which is probably a recommendation.

Only French high schools world-wide teach philosophy, with its strong demand for critical thinking, and when “critical thinking” is taught in American universities, it is taught too often in the outdated Modernist register where the student is assumed to be in need of tutelage in doubt. This is true, but having destroyed foundations, the class (in logic or philosophy) should demonstrate new paths to knowledge.

Students must be required to at a minimum be able to read, check and understand proofs in logic and geometry, but ideally, she’d construct such proofs. Along with the usual crop of true believers who believe positive nonsense based on faith, or an overdose of comic books (“graphic novels”, indeed) and counterfactual TV, we have only slightly less devolved individuals who regard themselves as “skeptics” because they literally don’t understand the mathematics of exponential or “hockey stick” curves. These people have never constructed a proof and as a result they are “skeptical” children, lost in the wood.

20 May 2013: “Grace me no grace, uncle me no uncle”

First thing workout included 15 mn supine dancing and five minutes walking, which has been made somewhat easier by the taller walking stick given to me by physio. Congee (watery but with chunks) and an egg (down the hatch).

Reading Acts 1 & 2 of Richard II which include these marvelously creative lines:

HENRY BOLINGBROKE
My gracious uncle–
DUKE OF YORK
Tut, tut!
Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle:

The use of the nouns “grace” and “uncle” as verbs may be a Shakespearean innovation if I remember my Oxford History of English correctly but that book languishes in my deserted flat. It’s a strikingly modern retort to Bolingbroke here, the future Henry IV who’s broken his terms of banishment.

Richard II reads easily for it’s almost all in verse, typically elegant blank verse with couplets at the end of speeches but many internal and end-line rhymes in the speeches themselves. This reflects the historical and Holinshed Richard II who aspired to be an Italian, Renaissance prince who’d patronize the arts, in a cold and Philistine northern clime where everyone wanted him to be a stud like his grandfather Edward III, and never mind the arts. The unspoken fear of Richard’s actual magnates was the possibility that Richard might be queer as was his grandfather, unmentionably murdered with a lead enema.

This gives Shakespeare’s play resemblances to Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. Indeed, the plot lines parallel in that the downfall of the queer, and that of the arts patron, is a “death foretold”: both know that they are doomed. The difference being that Edward II claims a right that overrides his behavior, to be king, whereas Shakespeare’s character, like Henry VI, seems all too anxious to abdicate in favor of Hereford/Bolingbroke/Henry IV.

Note that all of Shakespeare’s history plays accurately identify the speaker by his current title or Christian name. Here Shakespeare uses Bolingbroke’s Christian name: but in Henry VI parts 2 and 3, and Richard III, Richard “Crookback” is not identified as Richard York: he goes from plain Richard, to Gloucester when his father is restored to Duke of York by Henry VI, to King Richard III after being crowned.

I checked the folio text (in the eText at the University of Virginia) and Bolingbroke is identified consistently as Bolingbroke, albeit abbreviated based on a variant spelling as “Bul.”…Bullingbrook?

Hmm. Clearly I need all of Shakespeare’s plays in formal grammar format, divided into software objects such as “block of verse”, “block of prose”, “stage” direction and so on. To this end I am using my newly available time in in retirement to key in the 1608 History of King Lear, and the 1623 Tragedy. I shall also write a blog post describing this project in more detail.

19 May 2013

First thing workout included 3 minutes aerobic dance standing up, 17 minutes supine angel aerobics and pull-ups. Lovely congee (white and fluffy) and the everyday Egg.

Acts 2 and 3 of Titus Andronicus: I do not like this play at all because of the absurd spectacle de l’Abbatoir in which Shakespeare tried his hand at appealing to the coarsest sensitivities of his audience, never to return after finishing this turkey.

Apparently, this play cannot be classed as a Roman play using a test that’s passed by the “real” Roman plays: the plots of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus are derived from Plutarch whereas the idiotic story line of Titus Andronicus is found nowhere but in Titus Andronicus: Shakespeare invented the plot my guess in cahoots with Robert Greene, possibly his evil spirit before Greene got sick and turned on Shakespeare in Greene’s “upstart crow” rant.

In terms of my continued interest in using set theory and other tools to classify Shakespeare’s plays in multiple ways, Titus may be sui generis…unless, of course, I simply change the rule for “Roman Play” from “story line is in Plutarch” to “set in Rome or Greece or Egypt under Roman domination.”

[Look for two forthcoming essays/blog posts: On Classifying Shakespeare's Works, and On Comparing Literary Texts Especially Shakespeare's Plays.]

“So, the sons of Tamara, queen o’ the Goths, black bint, they cuts orf Lavinny’s tongue and hands…”

Titus Andronicus is a bit more than an Homeric Nod: a Homeric Fart more like which at best exhibits Shakespeare’s skill at blank verse with one thought per line, blank verse resembling that found in the Henrician trilogy. Its latter-day popularity is attributable to the coarseness of audiences in cities today who always must be pandered to if they go through the effort of watching Shakespeare.

Give me an ounce of civet good apothecary to sweeten my imagination, as King Lear says. I have some easy to love plays coming up (Winter’s Tale, Richard II) and one more stinker (Troilus and Cressida) to complete this Grand High Shakespeare Re-Read and Massacree.

18 May 2013

20 minute workout: 17 mn supine, 3 mn standing: plan to increase standing & upright dancing gradually, taking the pain, to see if I can strengthen legs sufficiently to reduce the pain.

Congee (fluffy and good), yegg and the beginning of Titus Andronicus wherein the noble Titus makes two enemies.

Dream: I was traveling with the kids up a highway much like the Northwest Highway northwest of Chicago, or el Camino Real in Silicon Valley: four lanes of heavy, slow traffic and many small shops. We shopped for a computer. I then was shirtless and alone a Costco or Tesco kind of shop, looking at DVDs but the shop clerk and I after some fireworks fell in love.

My Oxford Collected Works is a mess as a result of my Grand High Shakespeare ReRead and Massacree. The spine on one side separating from the pages, the pages stuck together and stained with congee. But that’s what books are for. Fortunately my edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a much better bound Cambridge University paperback, for the Critique is the next Grand High Reread and Massacree. My favorite commentary on the Crtique, Adorno’s lectures, are also published as a quality paperback with excellent binding, in identical formats by Polity internationally and Stanford in the USA.

Able to give a well-received if impromptu talk this morning in the common room to several medical students on the patient as doctor Zero and a number of other topics. I was asked why I seemed so cheerful; it is hard to explain my sang-froid. There’s no point in getting depressed, I said, because there simply is no way of telling how long an individual prostate cancer sufferer has on earth.

Living until you are ninety nine, I said, is probably nonsense. Instead of a kindly and active grandfather, you are the scary guy at the Chinese wedding who smells like pee.

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was diagnosed circa the Chilean coup of 11 Sep 1973 with prostate cancer and died, some say of foul play, only 12 days after his friend Salvador Allende, the last truly constitutional leader of Chile, was probably assassinated. We never know when it’s time to go. We can take death seriously but with sang-froid.

Sen for the deid remeid is none,
Best is that we for dede dispone,
Eftir our deid that lif may we;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

William Dunbar

17 May 2013: Comments on Shakespeare’s Lowlife

20 mn supine workout first thing, a great white egg Congee with an hard-boiled egg, read act 1 of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

This play, not nearly as scintillating as the two “Falstaff” plays (Henry IV parts 1 and 2), contains my favorite Shakespearean lowlife, “Ancient Pistol”, where “Ancient” doesn’t mean “old”, rather the military rank of ensign (flag carrier?) roughly equivalent to today’s top sergeant, warrant officer, or second lieutenant.

Ancient Pistol appears only in Henry IV part 2 and Henry 5. He prides himself on being Falstaff’s friend but Falstaff and especially Mistress Quickly (Falstaff’s closest confidante) despise him as a blowhard. Whilst Falstaff thinks before he speaks (“what, is the old king dead?” when Pistol brings news, in H4 part 2, of the death of Henry IV) Pistol just runs his mouth (“A foutra for the world, and worldlings base/I speak of Africa and golden joys” at that same time).

Pistol is a miles gloriosus (braggart soldier) and he speaks “fustian”; Pistol is a crude caricature of Falstaff.

He is part of a four man group in Henry V and a three man group in Merry Wives.

In Henry V, after Falstaff dies, Pistol, the “thought leader” of Falstaff’s drunken followers, leads them into battle, or, more precisely, close, then away, to be beaten into the attack on Harfleur by Fluellen. The lads are: Pistol, Corporal Nym, Bardolph and Boy.

Nym is sly and resentful thinking he might marry Mistress Quickly after Falstaff’s death, for Falstaff was betrothed to Mistress Quickly…she gives good evidence for this betrothal to the Lord Chief Justice in Henry IV Part 2 in this charming passage:

“Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor”

Falstaff, in the Henrician trilogy, schemes to inherit Mistress Quickly’s carefully cultivated estate (a tavern in London) but when he dies, Corporal Nym and Pistol compete for Mistress Quickly’s hand and property; Pistol is the victor. Nym is apt to say “and that’s the humor of it” and other words that affirm what he has said. He’s probably slain at Agincourt: that’s what Branagh would have us believe although there are no words to that effect in Henry V; Branagh’s film shows Nym slain while looting a corpse.

In the Folio text of Henry V, there is a large amount of play text in the middle which is almost never staged and was not filmed by Branagh despite Branagh’s reputation for avoiding cuts. It includes the resolution of the dispute between a disguised Henry and Wiliams when Williams, in the night before the battle, mocks “Henry Le Roy’s” pretensions to “never trust his word after”, speaking of the King and much material about the relationship of Henry V and Montjoy far more subtle and gentle than presented by Branagh.

This material may have been a set of spare tires or cannilizable parts to be used or not depending on the requirements of specific performances which would undercut my vision of Shakespeare as an Ur-artist of the Romantic era who wanted to create complete works of art.

We know Pistol survives to turn “cutpurse” in England.

“Boy” is a young kid probably adopted by Mistress Quickly off the streets of London. His death is implied but not confirmed when in Henry V the retreating French, in Fluellen’s words, “kill the poys and the luggage” and Captain Gower says “’tis certain there’s not a boy left alive”.

In Pistol’s final speech alone, there is some self-hating self-knowledge whereas before there was just fustian. Would Shakespeare had more opportunity to develop this character beyond Merry Wives of Windsor.