Any of you guys read David Bentley Hart’s “The Experience of God”? Because I’m reading it right now and it’s making me SO MAD, arrrrgghhhh
Full review here. The beginning and end were taken (with edits) from my earlier tumblr post, but I added a whole bunch of stuff in between.
ordinalitis replied to your post “He (Evagrius) also said, “A monk was told that his father had died. He…”
How is that different than number the first
#1 is about this concept we have that goes by the name “dad joke.” #3 is just about the fact that it’s being told by a church father (not a literal father, and so not the sort of “father” that gave “dad jokes” their name).
He (Evagrius) also said, “A monk was told that his father had died. He said to the messenger, ‘Do not blaspheme. My Father cannot die.’”
(from Sayings of the Desert Fathers)
This is, in three distinct ways, a “dad joke”
1. A pun in the style typically associated with dads
2. A joke about dads
3. ???
3. A joke told by a (desert) father
(via shlevy)
He (Evagrius) also said, “A monk was told that his father had died. He said to the messenger, ‘Do not blaspheme. My Father cannot die.’”
(from Sayings of the Desert Fathers)
This is, in three distinct ways, a “dad joke”
François-Nicolas Chifflart - Queen Zenobia Thrown Into the Araxes River (1856)
(via didoofcarthage)
Too Like the Lightning is now out free as an ebook for the next three days (ends midnight, March 23rd) through Tor! So if you’re curious what all this is about, (like me) picked up a physical copy but would still like to have an ebook, or for any other reason want a free ebook, check it out!
(via matchazed)
Re-reading that Bouguereau thread and this paragraph, from one of my posts, stood out to me:
In my case there’s also the fact that my aesthetic sense actually likes imperfection, because I recoil from a lot of attempts to achieve “perfection” in the actual world. A world full of Bouguereau people would be a world where everyone spend a lot of effort making themselves look like Bouguereau people (via cosmetics and diets and being very careful to never get dirty or go outside when they look sub-optimal due or illness etc. etc.), even if this was very time-consuming or stressful or unhealthy. This would optimize one thing at the cost of various others, and my preferences are convex.
On the one hand this is clearly just true of me, and probably of many other people. On the other hand, it’s pretty bizarre when you really think about it, and makes it inherently difficult to describe what I actually want.
Like, if you take some set of qualities I like, and then ruthlessly optimize for them at the cost of qualities I don’t care about, eventually I will start liking the result less, because I don’t like things that look too much like the output of ruthless optimization. But of course, by some von Neumann-Morgenstern-ish argument, if my preferences are coherent, then whatever they are, you could in principle “write down” some (probably very complicated) function whose optimization does correspond to satisfying those preferences.
Is that all to the story – that I am “optimizing a function” after all, just one whose argmax doesn’t look like “what we imagine an argmax looks like”? Or perhaps my preferences aren’t “coherent,” in that they might eventually “catch on” to any ruthless optimization process, and change to wriggle their way out of the attempt? (I highly doubt this is true, but it’s cool as an abstract possibility.)
Going back to the first possibility: perhaps – oh dear – we need to introduce the concept of regularization into aesthetic theory
(it’s probably already there under some other name, but I don’t know what that name is)
alright kids strap yourselves in cuz’ it’s time to sit yourselves down and get ready to shut up and listen; we’re about to prepare ourselves to hold on to your shirts, sums and products, and get psyched for what’s going to happen when I blow your mind with the facts i’m about to prepare you to get ready to learn you a thing in your mind-brain; this is important and remember to check your seatbelt cuz we’re going to go on a wild ride and there’s no way back once you’ve started on your way down the rabbit hole of the sort of stuff people don’t talk about these things on tumblr so remember the buddy system cuz if you let go of that hand you just might get lost in the Deep Web without a tour guide (yours truly) so get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to get ready to
Global English is a thing of beauty; academics writing on EU law use infinitives, prepositional verbs, and abstract nouns in ways no native speaker would countenance, but which everyone assumes is normal because other people do it.
I desperately want examples
The verb form of “evocation” is “evocate.”
Lots of Institutional Nouns are capitalized in ways that aren’t unintuitive, but still look funny (Member States is a big one, I think this conforms with the EU’s own usage).
“Consist in” is really popular. Nobody seems to have heard of “consist of,” despite it being more common (IME) among native speakers.
So is “in respect to” instead of “with respect to.”
You get a lot of terrific usages that make sense, but are super un-idiomatic, and that on closer digging reveal the idiom of the native language of the writer, or an imperfectly translated word. Sometimes you can reverse-engineer these by, say, looking up the Spanish equivalent in Google Translate and finding an alternate English translation of it. Sometimes you just get a sentence whose meaning is clear but whose syntax is a horrible pretzel you have to unpack to make it work properly.
And of course the punctuation is all over the place because every language has its own conventions for things like commas, and nobody thinks to teach standard academic prose style when teaching foreign languages.
(This can also result in weirdly informal usages, phrases like, “so that means that there’s a big difference” where native writers of formal English would go straight to “resulting in a significant difference.)
My favorite today was a hypercorrection (hypertranslation?). Some thoughtful Spaniard, who recognized many of the patterns distinguishing our language from his own, wrote “specifically stablished” instead of “specifically established.” Perfectly logical! Also wrong.
All of it just reminds me–it’s really not our language anymore. It hasn’t been England’s language for centuries now. But it doesn’t even belong particularly to English-speaking countries anymore. Places where it’s the working language in a polyglot population, like the EU and India, are making it their own, and new and internationalized varieties of English suit the needs of their speakers, not the needs of Americans or Brits or Australians. English may hold its dominance as a global language for a little while yet, but it will be less recognizably English the longer it does so.
(via bulbous-oar)
Wrote 819 words of Almost Nowhere today – which is only like 1/5 to ¼ of a chapter, but writing at all means a lot in terms of momentum, and I’d lost my momentum for a bit there. Posting this in part to make sure I don’t lose it again.
One thing I keep thinking is that I’m being relatively uptight when it comes to this project – perhaps overly worried about keeping the level of “quality” (prose, continuity, that sort of thing) consistent, at the expense of the “fuck it, let’s do this” attitude which historically has been necessary to get my plots moving fast and my characters expressing themselves fully. This is always a balancing act. I’m always proud of each AN chapter after I’ve written it, in a way I wasn’t always proud of chapters in the earlier books, but aiming for that pride may be limiting.