7 31 2013: Sucks to be Me…sometimes…new complication in Cancer’s Journey

First thing supine workout with weights: about 300 moves (variable in time and intensity as in the dance, because I was listening to Ravi Shankar perform Raga Mishra Pilloo) for 20 minutes.

Chemo therapy day, at centre, weight is now 155 pounds: 70.5 kg! Yay!

Now need to stabilize weight gain so that it stops between 155 and 175. One MAD CHOC FREAKOUT on Sunday night and when I do chemo and can visit 7-11 at Queen Mary.

OK, here’s today’s bad news. PSA has shot up to 169, an unprecedented value since the start of this year. We need to retest 21 Aug no matter, and Dr at the Cancer Center, a fully qualified oncologist really urges the “jab” for hormone therapy, Leucoprolein. This is pricey in Hong Kong because the alternative is getting your balls cut off and leaving Mister Penis floating haplessly between two empty Tea Bags. Dreadful.

So I have to ponder staying exclusively on chem, or adding the best hormone therapy, either a wallet Hoover or else a dickstock, Dick, I mean a Dick chop for free.

Sucks to be me at times.

Rereading critical passages in Kant’s Critique.

B221-266 (second ed. pp221-266) concern impossibiity of ontological proof, which most phil majors will explain, correctly, as using “existence” as a “property”. But what’s fascinating is the way a GENIUS like Kant “kan” with such apparent facility (apparent in relation to the size of the problem) GENERALIZE a theorem.

Dig this, now:

The Genius hero computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra discovered in the 1970s that the so-called Pythagorean Theorem is actually implied by a far more powerful theorem. The Pythagorean Theorem only applies to right angled “right triangles”, and as Dijkstra pointed out a generalization allows you to calculate the values of any part of any triangle from small (<-2) sets of values.

Likewise, Kant's disproof of the Ontological proof is a specialization of a more widely effective thought-tool.

Kant's Refutation of Idealism follows from a generalization of the logic of the refutation of the Ontological proof.

In any Idealist argument, including not only the Ontological proof (for Kant regards Descartes, and not William of Ockham, as his primary source on the Onto proof, but also Descartes, one finds at least one type-confused "predicate" that allows the Idealist, whether William of Ockham, Descartes or Otto the Crazed Monk to transgress a type boundary. It's almost as if Kant was intuiting Bertrand Russell's intuition of a type boundary!

But unlike Russell, Kant had no precise road map that was for Frege developed by Peano…several years of new codification of what a set or a number might be. Kant had objects and concepts. Having been taught that they were different, Kant (like a spirited student in computer science who asks why "Kant" she calculate with a string-valued object or the contents in the form of specific machine language bytes both very good questions) showed how a thingamabob could be both but like many creative thinkers then came to grief when a transcendant property such as existence could not be an object. As far as I can tell Kant then set himself the task of learning which properties could act like empirical objects and which were transcend-ANT and how and why.

And now for something completely different

And now for something completely different. My PSA score has leaped up to 169 after steadily declining after chemotherapy was started. Doctor suggests we wait until a new measurement is made 21 August and that I get the (plus cost) leukocyte injection, against which the Grantham doctors who are, now l learn, primarily doctors and not specialist oncologists, STRONGLY counsel and advise. I shall get the injection however after a heart to heart with my trusted financial *vizier*, the BAZ and an opinion from Sasha Alexandrovitch.

One feels in need not only the BAZ. I could use a 400 pound Samoan Attorney as did Hunter Thompson in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and a 500 pound Fijian fitness guru whose client list included Manny Pacquaio.

I already GOT the lovely, talented and learned Doctor Susan Jamieson who puts one in mind of Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, who’s treated Mick Jagger, Elton John and GaGa.

Change Record

6 Aug 2013: Added this change record along with minor changes

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

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: “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.

14 May 2013

First thing workout (20 minutes supine dancing). A brown, fluffy congee: an egg with Maggi Seasoning: finished the Grand High Re-Read of Shakespeare’s King John. Another 25 minute workout at 9:45 in the physio room.

King John is a 12th century panorama with the best scenes being the piteous way in which Prince Arthur (the rightful but damned inconvenient heir to the throne) pleads with the common but naturally and ultimately noble Hubert for his eyes (Hubert having been dispatched by John to roast Arthur’s eyes in the charming High Mediaeval Era way). Then, perhaps unintentionally, Arthur commits suicide by leaping from the tower in which he’s immured.

And of course the Bastard, an illegitimate son of Richard Coeur de Lion, is the best-drafted character in the play, a sardonic but highly intelligent commentator or super-Chorus who often speaks in “aside” to the audience.

For John’s is a world haunted by the chivalrous Lionheart, who is to the 12th century world of King John as Edward III is to the 15th century: both are dead paragons besides which all are found wanting including King John in his eponymous play and Henry in in Henry VI 1/2.

Richard Lionheart and Edward III represent an ideal of masculinity innocently celebrated by lesser intellects than Shakespeare…who knew that such forms of masculinity, by necessarily creating resistance, are not the solution to governance. Shakespeare’s King John may be “ineffectual” if we compare him to some silly paragon (Edward I, Richard Lionheart, Edward III, Henry V) but his reign wasn’t the worst either.

Shakespeare clearly thinks highly of Falconbridge, the Bastard, an intellectual who would make the best king but is completely checked by his bastardy. The Bastard’s speeches are the best in the play: “sweet, sweet poison for the age’s tooth” to mean flattery, “commodity” (self-interest) and other lines that integrate didactic purpose with entertainment when the Bastard speaks “aside” to the audience with perfect form.

This Grand High Re-Read continues to profit because it’s like swimming with open eyes under the sea, or Clarence’s drowning dream in Richard III, witnessing “great anchors, heaps of pearl…a thousand men that fishes gnawed upon”: you notice things missing in performance, whether they be lines unduly cut or spoken by an actor who doesn’t know what they mean. I could never figure out the significance of Titania’s friendship with the changeling’s mother nor why the sails of merchant ships grew “big bellied” in watching a performance.

Turning to the project in which I use literary insights with insights from “object oriented programming”: I am writing an essay to document the project and ensure I know what I mean, and simultaneously trying to fit some sort of programming support, whether c++, Java or even Fortran, on a small hard drive on the MacBook Air.

I’ve installed Java. But will the sdk fit? I worry that no actual software development can be done on an Air and that I’ll have to do it on my Powerbook with the cracked screen. The Air’s hard disk is too small to hold xCode or even just the command line tools…unless perhaps I erase files like crazy, and am left with little file space.

I need to focus on the essay about what it really is to compare two texts: insights from object-oriented development show that it is not what we think. The difference file is probably a minimal set of changes needed to transform one text to the other, so discovering this set can be tricky.

13 May 2013

First thing workout (with pain in left hip), congee and an egg: have to go to Queen Mary for the monthly cancer status followup. Doc and I had agreed to reduce morphine and I may have to tough this extra pain out, or wuss back to the higher level.

At the Queen Mary cancer status meeting the doctor has confirmed that PSA (Protein Specific Antigen) level down to 6.5 although expressed in China as 65 without the decimal (need to check this).

Finished Julius Caesar: started King John, in the Grand High Shakespeare Re-Read and Massacree.

But HG Wells’ Outline of History is also good despite the way in which chap insists on calling Muslims “Moslems”, for his insights on Muslims-Moslems are fresh after 75 years and first rate. I read of the explosion of Islam and the overthrow of the Persians, chap named Rustum, end of Manicheanism, end of worship of Mazda.

Good, rousing, first-rate stuff as was Julius Caesar, which I’ve read several times after my seventh grade read-through of all of Shakespeare, for school and for pleasure.

11 May 2013: So rudely forc’d

Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced

– TS Eliot, The Waste Land

20 mn supine angel workout first thing, breakfast: congee, yummy egg, and the remains of a Starbuck’s choco muffin.

Finished Act 2 of Cymbeline in the Grand High Shakespeare Re-Read. Giacomo is a rat, for he steals a bracelet and memorizes the contents of Innogen’s room in order to win his bet with Leonatus Posthumus.

Innogen has a bad habit: one should never fold down the pages of books. Act 2 Sc 2 3-5:

Innogen
I have read three hours then. Mine eyes are weak.
Fold down the leaf where I have left. To bed.
Take not away the taper; leave it burning.

This neatly sets up the scene for Giacomo’s speech, for he finds her place, memorizes it and using the taper’s light memorizes the room. He doesn’t have to violate Innogen.

Change Record
12 May 2013 Added this change record
12 May 2013 Corrected date (month was incorrect)

10 May 2013: Up in a Dazzlingly Offensive Way

Up at 5:30 AM dazzlingly, offensively awake like a dose of liver salts or a plate of ham and eggs.

I have completed A Comedy of Errors in the Grand High Shakespeare Re-Read and Massacree. After Henry VI and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, if memory serves, this was the third Shakespeare play I’d read, in a thin Folger edition for 35 cents illustrated with a 1960s-vintage Retro wood-cut of the two Antipholuses meeting…if memory serves.

Next: Cymbeline, King of Britain, a long late romance with the greatest complexity of misrecognition that is unwound at the end in a clattering, almost algorithmic or recursive way, like Babbage’s Analytical Engine finishing a difficult linear equation. Cymbeline looks backward to the similarly complex, relative to scale, resolution of a Comedy of Errors. A rougher version of The Winter’s Tale tho’ writ later.

20 mn first-thing supine angel freedance. Might get extra food today or next week: conference with nutritionist over weight loss: poached egg, three cans Ensure instead of two.

“I say, Colonel Sokit Tomee, the men look like skeletons in a panto! A diet of yams is not going to build the Bridge! They need fish, rice and cigarettes!”

Cut to me up to me neck in sand and the men singing hymns.

In Which There Is the Can-Can

Up, feeling gloriously rested, workout first thing (20 mn supine angel). Waiting for congee, probably finishing Antony and Cleopatra in the Grand High Shakespeare Re-read.

Green tea, no caffeine.

I want this dramatic weight loss (down to 130 lbs/60 kg) to be a breakup of the cancer like ice at dawn and me pooping out the cancer cells, whilst on the battlements, my white blood cells caper, prance and mock the cancer cells while chucking rocks at them. But you never know.

Right you men, don’t cheer, the poor bastards are dying.

Those chairs in Queen Mary’s are truly wonders. As soon as the leg rest was adjusted all pain (the cancer-sciatic pain that has been radiating, off and down, from my left pelvis to me ankle, with sometimes the feeling that a Daemon is pounding my ankle with a cudgel: the wound pain from a bedsore over my L5 lumbar because the bedclothes scrape my butt) disappears.

Subjected the weight loss to a Combined Arms assault last night: a Snickers savor’d slow. A bag of M & Ms ate mostly one at a time. Finally, eight Lindt dark choco squares. All while reading “William Shakespeare: a Textual Companion” by the Oxford Collected Works editorial team. A wonderful text on the ontology and epistemology of editing (“there is” an UrText, being what the author wrote and intended: we may not know it or know that we know it completely but we can approach it and from this help readers understand Shakespeare).

Munch munch choco munch smear smear choco smear. So reading a book in bed in an estaminet in Paris once had the Abigail cleaning the room ask in panic:

Oh! Mon cher Monsieur, qu’est que c’est la, c’est la la merde, le poo poo?

Ah non (dits moi), oh no, ma cher, c’est la chocolat au lait Suisse, yum yum!

Ooooh merci-merci, mon cher Monsieur, c’est vraie, pardonnez-moi!

Cest’rien, ma cherie, mon choux qu j’adore,la plus charmants, doux est belle c’est vous de touts l’Abigails en Paris!

[We break into an Offenbach tune and a can-can]

C’est pas la merde c’est le chocolat!
C’est mon amour c’est pas cafe au lait!
C’est pas l’Oliphant c’est une billet de votre Femme!
You thought you saw an Elephant that practiced on a Fife!
Ho ho ho Monsieur, here is
A letter from your wife!
[Ta da da da da da data data da da data dar um de dum de dum!]

Change Record

9 May 2014 Spelling error correction

8 May 2013

Congee, Antony & Cleopatra. Tired, need to sleep: but had go to Queen Mary for chemo round three: will try to sleep at chemo center. No workout today except for wheeling my own wheelchair, since my morning assistant walks with a cane; wheeling my own wheelchair turned out to be strikingly aerobic and fun.

Because of cutbacks it is my responsibility to line up friends to accompany me to and from the chemotherapy center at Queen Mary Hospital and this is at times a pain. Of course, if I am only paying 100.00 hkd per day this goes toward increasing my contribution to the cost of care, which is only fair, given the unstinting care that’s been provided me since May of last year.

The chemotherapy seems slowly to do good while obstinately refusing to have significant side-effects except weight loss (?). Down to 59 kg/130 lbs wearing my fashion jeans but my cute abs are scored neatly by lines caused by excess skin over fat that’s disappeared. I am encouraged to eat everything and this situation clearly demands a combined-arms Snickers and M & Ms attack tonight. I will ask to be weighed next Monday 13 May at the Urology followup.

The next Grand High ReRead, after I finish the Grand High Shakespeare ReRead, shall be Kant’s Critique. Again I have read this already in an older, inferior translation. I have the Guyer-Wood translation from Cambridge University Press and a book of this importance should be read twice.

In retirement I would like to regain focus to read important and complex texts as well as write them. Since I have returned to practicing Catholicism (the rites bring peace and a remarkable freedom from fear) Kant justifies a bicameral way of thinking including a Modernist world view at the philosophical level fully consistent with Catholicism at the level of theology. I need to relearn how the “antinomies” make any aufhebung between philosophy and theology impossible, with the caveat that this is caused by deficiencies in our apparatus. Hard stuff, relieves butt pain.