Lost Blogging: from the Omo River Valley

Sometimes my notes disappear for a long time. It doesn't bother me much to have them sit unattended or even lost. From the writing point of view, if the note was to have prose value, it just allows for better editting. From the pedagogical point of view, if the note has a pedagogical purpose, it is true that almost no one learns something the first time they see it or write it down. And there is a certain strangeness to uncovering something a year or two past or older, a not unpleasant strangeness if it's not overcome by awkwardness. (Well, Aristotle's been dead a long time, so he can wait patiently while I change my mind about what I said about him.)

Usually the point is to polish them, if they're supposed to become journal entries, to embelish them with context and make out the rhythm of a full entry. It's not too infrequent that my point (there usually is one) is very short and I want to make it in a sentence or two. (I am reminded of the desire of my often-aphoristic dead German mentor to "say in twenty sentences what another would write a whole book on" -- I paraphrase this quote from memory -- good advice for philosophers.) But sometimes I think: These little sentences are just too cryptic. Who will know what they mean? If I had read them yesterday or the day before, would I know what I'm talking about? When I read them tomorrow, will I have an idea about what I supposedly meant? To be fair, do they really mean anything? If am I not understood, and there was something to understand, isn't it really my fault? (My "Gangasrotogati-living" dead German mentor, despite famously upset on this score, probably agreeing -- according to the proposition: man who uses Sanskrit in a passage about how he's not understood must be making a joke; I mean BGE section 27.) So I must draw out a verbal recording of mental context.

Dawn over the Omo River Valley

Anyway, not to tediously furnish yet another example of what I'm talking about in Sun-Drunken's most common bit of irony, but this entry was just supposed to be about a short, expository note to myself I found that I wrote last summer, in July or August, I'm not sure, that I figured I'd post with only a few fingerfehlers ("finger blunders") corrected. Editorial parentheses [...] in the original. (It's a compulsion.)

There's a BBC program they['ve] show[n] on CBC Newsworld called Tribe. It follows a Brit, Bruce Parry, on travels to see and live among various indigeneous tribes of the world. Once he went to live with the Nyangatom of the Omo River Valley, in Ethiopia, near the Sudanese border. The Nyangatom are proud [warlike] people living in ancient-style huts, drinking cows' blood in the daytimes, and wearing traditional clothes and raiments, with a few recent additions: t-shirts, AK-47's, and pierced bullet jewelry. There he was adopted by the village elder and made an honorary member of the Ibex, their corps of young fighting men. During the initiation ceremony they were harangued by their elder, who remarked that today's young men aren't like those who came before, that they laze around all day and can't protect their cattle, and drink too much alcohol. He might as well have added that civilisation is doomed for it -- but the Ibex warriors were quite keyed-up by it, and vowed to shoot and kill anyone who tried to steal their cattle, as the womenfolk sang a song about "Lokloram, the lion" (Bruce Parry's adopted name) and about how their enemies were afraid to cross the river.

Call it: From the

civilisation is doomed! because the youth are unruly

file, thinking of an (apocryphal?) ancient Sumerian (Akkadian? Babylonian?) text said to already have been making that argument. Of all the things I wonder about Sumer, the one I'd want answered most is about what it's like to live in a world that has no history.

(Insert externally-silent mental struggle about how much to amplify that remark in an already-burgeoning entry. I'll just leave a reference to the last sentence of the previous entry so we remember there's a theme being developed. Myth only counts as history at half-weight.)

Bullet-case earring?

Three quick remarks about the quoted text:

• Brackets on "warlike" because this is a word that comes as naturally as it sounds cheesy. It makes me think I've been deeply influenced by Zulus with tanks in Civilisation. I mean, people don't really talk like that, do they?


• Yes, I really wrote "womenfolk." I'm sorry. I swear that would never make it to the second draft, nor would the massive run-on final sentence. It's just a summary note to myself, damn it.


• Check out the similarity to the Wikipedia entry, whose current revision I note uses the word "warlike," with a placeholder for a citation (!), in the first sentence.
  

More Lost Blogging to come. I have a thing somewhere around here on airplane pictures which I promised back in December but actually dates to September. And I have a full Page-a-Day Calendar page of subject titles for Journal of a Lower-Division Grader I scrawled the last time I was marking papers.

Bruce Parry &c at the well

Pictures shamelessly borrowed fairly used from the BBC Tribe website.

Someone's birthday

Happy 66^th, Richard Dawkins.

Tiger-in-the-world

It turns out that Wikipedia really does know everything: take a look at the caption/description on this photo. Well, almost everything: take a look at the publish date. Not quite timely enough, Wikipedians.

(Refresh your memory of Sun-Drunken's longest-running joke, dating back to the beginning of October 2005. Not quite timely enough.)

* * *

This is a one-line joke, as it's meant to be, but the truth is I was a little impressed when I by accident stumbled on this.

(Seriously serendipitous accident: I was trying to fill out my state income tax return, which asks in part what municipality I'm in, and I couldn't find out whether I'm in Princeton Borough or Princeton Township. It's not as easy as you'd think: compare, if you feel strong enough to enter the bureaucracy, the bottom-left quadrant of this Borough map with my location on this Princeton University map -- select "Graduate College" from the dropdown. I think I cross municipality lines when I go to my bookshelf from my desk. Apparently the municipalities split more than a century ago, over a school board dispute, and two subsequent referenda to recombine them have failed. Alas, I don't get a vote.)

My native caution once led me to be suspicious of Wikipedia, but judging by how often I've linked to its entries from these pages you can tell my thinking has evolved. At first it was just the convenience and the breadth. Many of the math articles even seemed good. Over time the general quality seems to have jumped, and there appears to be a large collection of people working on scores of "Wikiprojects" to put the face of professionalism all over the site.

In the end it was the romance of the encyclopedia that converted me: the quest to summarise all human knowledge. A link to the Foundation article might be appropriate, but still more apt would be one to the Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition article. (Irony?). And if I went to fiction, I'd be more apt to link to this bio of Cordwainer Smith, whose book reminds me that while happiness is man's ultimate good, as Aristotle tells us, there is still a little more we'd wish for when we write the history of mankind.

Journal of a Lower-Division Grader: Introduction (and if you warned me,...)

"I despise your despising," spoke Zarathustra. "And if you warned me, why did you not warn yourself?""

There's something very dubious about work-related blogging. It seems to get people into trouble (cf. brief remarks here under "the end of credibility," or elsewhere at more length and erudition), for one thing. But more than that, and in its pervasity worse still, it seems all-too-often both unprofessional and morosely self-indulgent. How often do we read only glib snark cooked up from the catalogue of the daily travail? Endow it with vices and malfeasance beyond its station, and speak of it with the dryly clownish condescension of sufferance yielding to exasperation! But sad occasions are only sadder still when they command the service of powerful prose.

How often have I jotted notes on nothing-in-particular only later, a day, two days later, to find that I no longer had any interest in the subject? It is not that I am fickle or capricious, though perhaps I am. It's that the fundamental cost of all art, all media is viewer attention. The literature of forgettable pettiness only worths its price when it seasons itself with bile and hyperbole. It's the thing-of-the-moment that mistakenly universalises itself in a search for absent significance when it in truth has no such power. It's Guildenstern stabbing the Player King.

And it's really bad writing. Maybe not bad prose, maybe often not, but badly misspent. I think we ought to command better from ourselves. Call that a re-statement of our mission at Sun-Drunken.

If you remember the last time, or the time before that, or --, that I went on a tear immediately prior to doing, or while doing, exactly what I'd just railed against, I'm sure you know what comes next. It's not just self-conscious irony, the plainest special pleading, a seeking to convince the reader that really nothing wicked passes here by sending him through loops and whirls until he's too dizzy to figure out whether it's satirical or just crass. It was never the despising that was at fault. Returns are still being earned when Guildenstern furnishes his "art to creating suspense" with a "law of diminishing returns."

Here, however, Zarathustra interrupted the foaming fool and put his hand over the fool's mouth. "Stop at last!" cried Zarathustra; "your speech and your manner have long nauseated me. Why did you live near the swamps so long, until you yourself have become a frog and a toad?... Why have you not gone into the woods? Or to plow the soil? I despise your despising; and if you warned me, why did you not warn yourself?

"Out of love alone shall my despising and my warning bird fly up, not out of the swamp.

"... What was it that first made you grunt? That nobody flattered you sufficiently; you sat down to this filth so as to have reason to grunt much -- to have reason for much revenge....

"But your fool's words injure me, even where you are right. And even if Zarathustra's words were a thousand times right, still you would always do wrong with my words."

Anyway, when the preface puts the body of text into the smallest corner of its shadow -- it could be bad writing, or it could be the preface was the point.

* * * * *

Way-back-when at UBC I took a class in Euclidean geometry. After the midterm a friend told me a sad story about the grading of one of the problems. It had asked for a statement of some theorem or definition or thing like this. As always in Euclidean geometry a good diagram was central to the issue, and she had included a helpful exegetical diagram. Alas, the instructor had not found it so helpful.

"I didn't label it a circle," she explained to me at some length. "That's why he took points off. You tell me, what else could it be?"

Obviously I couldn't say. I'd labelled mine.

"He said, 'Maybe you thought it was an ellipse'! What? What?! When in this class have we talked about ellipses?"

Well, it wasn't the most circle-like circle. They're not the easiest thing to draw.

"When has Instructor-Man even mentioned the word 'ellipse'?!"

Never, of course; if you have neither co-ordinate geometry nor solid Euclidean geometry at your disposal, and this was a strictly plane-geometric class, it's a bother even to say what an ellipse is.

So she went to work on him again, but it didn't help. He was the kind of person who helps earn a reputation for eccentricity for mathematicians. (It's a math pun; click the link to convince yourself it might possibly be funny.)

In truth, although I wished I could back up the professor's take, I really couldn't figure it out. I dislike unlabelled diagrams as much as the next guy, but this ellipse business couldn't be a serious criticism.

I have since recanted my naivete. A term or two grading papers has given me a somewhat more storied perspective. My understandings about what other people might mean when they speak what they say or write what they scribble are no longer Earthbound -- heavy, constrained by the gravity of consequence. Rather they roam between the sky and the space which is beyond, fantastic, undreambound. It's the fog of the Nothing, of the confusion-of-being, of the not-understanding and the not-communicating. It's sadness on a page.

And that's why I couldn't give examples. It would take a callous knowledge-worker not to empathise. Or at least it would if the clever critters didn't try their damn'dest to dress it up. And yet, heavens guard us, maybe now and then I've only rouged it -- I am on a deadline.