Thanks, Zinnia, I am sure it will come as a shock to her that there are treatments for OCD, given that mysteriously OCD somehow continues to affect her life despite being treatable, I mean lol that’s weird right? also I bet she has not tried yoga, have you suggested that
holy fucking SHIT whatever else anyone thinks of the original article, how privileged do you even have to be to look at a price tag ranging from $20000 to $50000 from what I’ve looked at and a) go “There is that, but” b) then start talking about life-year bullshit
the only other place I ever hear this “adjusted life-year” stuff is around Effective Altruism, where it’s used in relation to the fact that poor people lose QALYs over all kinds of stuff that could be resolved if they had more money, which is why you give money to them. and we live in a culture where any kind of cost can be abstractly converted to money, where economic analysts convert the costs of climate change and war and genocide to price tags so yeah you could argue with anything that… poor people are wasting money by being poor, if they really didn’t want to be poor they could just stop wasting all that money! but jesus fuck what kind of Dickens villain would you have to be to do that.
I mean people these days usually go to college specifically because it will allow them to make way more money down the line, and go into incredible debt expecting to be able to pay it back with that money in the future, and there are still people who can’t afford college. you could probably do something like this with home ownership, not that I’d know, I’ve never really sat down to calculate that in terms of fucking QALYs because all I know is for the foreseeable future, I can’t afford a damn house
Wow, yeah
For easy reference, here are the tweets @baroquespiral is talking about. The first is a riff on the line from the original piece “[…] there are social and financial repercussions to transitioning that I cannot afford emotionally or financially”
I don’t understand why you think suggesting pursuing potentially effective OCD treatments is the equivalent of suggesting someone treat their OCD with yoga. There are a number of established treatments that can be effective and are not related to yoga. They have an evidence base that’s stronger than what you’re apparently trying to connote when you compare this to yoga.
Also, disability-adjusted life years are a metric used by the WHO and other public health organizations. The original poster made reference to the potential quantifiable repercussions of transitioning; I made reference to the potential quantifiable repercussions of not transitioning. This doesn’t really have anything to do with telling poor people to stop being poor or telling people to go to college and it’s pointlessly dismissive to characterize an established metric in this way.
My point was that someone with diagnosed OCD is likely to be aware of the standard treatments. As with many psychiatric conditions, the treatments are ineffective for some people, are only partially effective for others, and may not mitigate some symptoms as much as others. The fact that someone’s life is impacted nontrivially by OCD symptoms provides, in itself, very little evidence that they haven’t pursued treatment.
I’ve often seen people use “have you tried yoga?” as a stock example of unhelpful mental illness advice, and the yoga line was just a reference to that. I didn’t mean to suggest that standard OCD treatments lacked an evidence base, just that “there are treatments for OCD” is unhelpful mental illness advice.
I wrote more about the relevance of DALYs to this particular case here. I didn’t take @baroquespiral to be responding to the invocation of DALYs in itself – I think their point was that it looked like you were doing a cost-benefit analysis (DALYs are commonly used in calculating cost-effectiveness), and telling someone that the benefits are worth the costs is unhelpful when they simply can’t afford the costs to begin with. (One can be mistaken about the magnitude of the social costs, but “I can’t afford it financially” is a pretty solid barrier, no matter how good the other side looks.)
I just read something that mentioned JT Leroy, who I have never heard anyone talk about in many years, and TBH I’m kind of surprised that was an actual thing and not, like, a memory of a dream I had in 2006 that I had confused for a memory of real events
nope!
real thing; strangely interesting– i’ve been kinda interested in literary hoaxes for the past couple of years, and for some reason i’ve always found JT Leroy more intriguing than most of the similar lit hoaxers from the same time period. perhaps because he/she actually did/does have some talent for prose writing? perhaps because a lot of people seem to have realized, or at least suspected, there was a hoax going on, but kept up the front for months or years anyway, for unknown reasons?? i’m still not sure.
(disclaimer: yeah, i’m a little bit of a ghoul and a rubbernecker. sorry. it’s just the way i’ve always been, and i’ve never managed to stop or fix that tendency completely. :/)
Yes, for me part of what makes it interesting is surprise that she “got away with it” for so long – whether that meant literally convincing people, or putting them in situations where they couldn’t call her bluff, or getting people invested enough in the character that they wanted to play along with the fantasy, or whatever.
I mean, she would actually play the character on the phone for extended periods, sometimes even switching between JT and Speedie (the friend of JT’s she would pretend to be when meeting people in person), and has someone else, also a woman, pretend to be JT in physical interviews with reporters, while still playing him herself on the phone … it just sounded like she was taking way more risks than anyone would if they were really trying to pull off a hoax that would fool the media and everyone. Yet it worked – whatever that means – for a while
The other thing is that on the one hand it strikes me as manipulative and horrible – it seems obvious that she engineered JT’s story to have a lot of “inspiration porn” appeal, with him being a very young man dealing with very recent trauma by writing, and it seems equally obvious that they wouldn’t have been nearly as successful without that backstory. (How many edgy short story collections end up getting read by Madonna and Bono and adapted into films with real stars/budgets?) She was getting people emotionally invested in a character clearly meant to play on people’s empathy, but who never existed and couldn’t really benefit (not sure that’s the right word) from anyone’s actions or feelings. And yet, reading about it, it’s clear to me that she got really into the character and developed his relationships with real people in a way that went far beyond what would be necessary to keep a cynical hoax going (and indeed probably damaged the hoax’s credibility a lot), so there was something more going on than just exploiting people for a buck …
wow, i find that interview really interesting!
i also agree with your impressions– what’s striking to me here, which i don’t think i had quite fully realized/processed before, is how much laura albert seems to have been…acting from a really troubled, damaged place. i mean, i think she’s excusing herself/letting herself off too easily at a lot of points in this interview, and clearly she’s probably not a person whose word we should ever really take at the letter, but i did find myself believing that she did not invent this person/second life primarily to scam people, or with an eye towards garnering money and fame. and while her life may not have been as troubled as “J.T. LeRoy”s invented life, she sounds as though she has lived through her share of actual trauma and dysfunction– this isn’t a case like that of margaret seltzer. i’m inclined to think maybe the reason she chose that persona was less “oh, people will pay more attention to (and buy) my fiction writing if i pretend to be this really young, really really fucked up guy, people LOVE tragedy porn” and more that she wanted sympathy from people– sympathy and acknowledgement/validation of her misfortunes that she felt she wasn’t getting and could not receive as laura albert. (for example, maybe she made him a young teenager less so that the writing would seem super impressive in a way it might not coming from an adult in her late twenties, and more because she felt people would empathize more with a kid, see him as a clear, unambiguous victim, a good and innocent person in spite of having done and witnessed some really shady and harsh and upsetting things, etc.)
anyway, i’ve also discovered my new favorite example of the passive voice:
Today I’ve been reading about “geometric algebra” which seems very cool and possibly important, although it is also one of those academic concepts that hasn’t gotten much broad use outside of a small group of researchers who are almost creepily exuberant about how great it is, so maybe there is something wrong with it that I’m not yet aware of
The whole subject is just about something called the “geometric product,” which when applied to vectors (it can also be applied to other things) is just
ab = a•b + a^b
At first glance this seems like nonsense, because a•b is a scalar, and a^b (the wedge product) is a bivector, so how can you add them? Geometric algebra says “let’s just say you can linearly combine scalars, vectors, bivectors, etc.”
The combinations are called “multivectors” and the full algebra is over the multivectors (including the scalars and vectors), and you can take the geometric product of any two multivectors (the algebra is a ring where the geometric product is multiplication)
This produces some nice formulas, like for instance the projection of a vector v onto a unit vector u is familiarly
u(u•v)
and the “rejection” v - u(u•v), in GA, is just
u(u^v)
Moreover, if u is not a unit vector, well, in GA if uu != 0 (note uu is a scalar) then u has an inverse u^{-1} = u/(uu) and the projection and rejection are just u^{-1}(u•v) and u^{-1}(u^v).
More interestingly, the product ava^{-1} gives the reflection of v about the vector a, and the fact that a rotation can be generated by two reflections appears as the fact that you make rotations by doing this twice with vectors a, b: a rotation of v is abvba (with abba=1).
Most interestingly, you also have the property that some multivectors square to -1, which gives you complex numbers “where you need them” in the geometry without having to complexify anything. For instance if you have orthonormal vectors a,b, then ab = a^b, and so (a^b)^2 = abab = -abba = -1. This is kind of like being an “antisymmetric matrix” and indeed you can write a general rotation in the plane as e^(ab*theta/2). In the cases where quaternions work you see the algebra of the quaternions appear, but without any need to “apply quaternions to the problem,” etc.
I’m curious why this is not more widely used.
(Yes I know I should install MathJax, I will the next time I find myself making a post that looks like this)
The relevent word is “Clifford algebra”. They get used: my research might apply them to try to link a conjecture to some other conjectures. But I don’t know much about noncommutative algebra in general: commutative algebra has much sexier things living in it.
Right – I know that Clifford algebras are of some mathematical interest, but my sense is that the innovation of the “geometric algebra” folks is that they said “huh, if you write everything as a Clifford algebra over the real numbers, it turns out to be a very intuitive and notationally simple way to think about all the stuff that physicists do with vectors (and tensors and spinors).”
(David Hestenes, the developer of GA, says he was motivated by “the fact
that physicists and engineers did not know how to multiply vectors”)
Uh, this is the standard definition of the Spin groups. Maybe this just the mathematician’s professional code of everything is trivial.
Not sure I understand you – I am new to all of this. The spin groups aren’t the same as the Clifford algebra being used here, right? And the thesis below talks about the spin groups as groups of particular elements of that Clifford algebra (not all of them).
Anyway, in that sense a lot of mathematical physics is “trivial” – e.g. Hamilton’s introduction of Hamiltonian mechanics “just” rephrased classical mechanics in terms of a particular known mathematical structure, but in a way that added new power and insight, and so it was extremely important.
There’s a Ph.D. thesis here that goes rephrases a large swath of theoretical physics in terms of geometric algebra, claiming that in various places it illuminates structure or aids computation. You wouldn’t be able to replace the experience of reading the thesis with just saying, “okay, you know theoretical physics? and you know Clifford algebras? well, put the two together.“
So to define Spin(n) you take the Clifford algebra and take the unit group which the this talks about. Yes, it’s cool that sometimes this point of view can make physics more interesting, but it doesn’t mean we rename the objects.
With respect to Hamiltonian and Langrangian mechanics there are lots of problems easier to solve with one of them then Newtonian mechanics, because it’s easier to write down the equations. Furthermore proving properties like Noether’s theorem is easier, and then you can quantize Hamiltonians. Plus there is lots of math to be done with symplectic manifolds and chaos theory and things like Louiville’s Theorem.
Re 2nd paragraph: yes, and analogous claims are being made for GA (see the introduction to the thesis).
Today I’ve been reading about “geometric algebra” which seems very cool and possibly important, although it is also one of those academic concepts that hasn’t gotten much broad use outside of a small group of researchers who are almost creepily exuberant about how great it is, so maybe there is something wrong with it that I’m not yet aware of
The whole subject is just about something called the “geometric product,” which when applied to vectors (it can also be applied to other things) is just
ab = a•b + a^b
At first glance this seems like nonsense, because a•b is a scalar, and a^b (the wedge product) is a bivector, so how can you add them? Geometric algebra says “let’s just say you can linearly combine scalars, vectors, bivectors, etc.”
The combinations are called “multivectors” and the full algebra is over the multivectors (including the scalars and vectors), and you can take the geometric product of any two multivectors (the algebra is a ring where the geometric product is multiplication)
This produces some nice formulas, like for instance the projection of a vector v onto a unit vector u is familiarly
u(u•v)
and the “rejection” v - u(u•v), in GA, is just
u(u^v)
Moreover, if u is not a unit vector, well, in GA if uu != 0 (note uu is a scalar) then u has an inverse u^{-1} = u/(uu) and the projection and rejection are just u^{-1}(u•v) and u^{-1}(u^v).
More interestingly, the product ava^{-1} gives the reflection of v about the vector a, and the fact that a rotation can be generated by two reflections appears as the fact that you make rotations by doing this twice with vectors a, b: a rotation of v is abvba (with abba=1).
Most interestingly, you also have the property that some multivectors square to -1, which gives you complex numbers “where you need them” in the geometry without having to complexify anything. For instance if you have orthonormal vectors a,b, then ab = a^b, and so (a^b)^2 = abab = -abba = -1. This is kind of like being an “antisymmetric matrix” and indeed you can write a general rotation in the plane as e^(ab*theta/2). In the cases where quaternions work you see the algebra of the quaternions appear, but without any need to “apply quaternions to the problem,” etc.
I’m curious why this is not more widely used.
(Yes I know I should install MathJax, I will the next time I find myself making a post that looks like this)
The relevent word is “Clifford algebra”. They get used: my research might apply them to try to link a conjecture to some other conjectures. But I don’t know much about noncommutative algebra in general: commutative algebra has much sexier things living in it.
Right – I know that Clifford algebras are of some mathematical interest, but my sense is that the innovation of the “geometric algebra” folks is that they said “huh, if you write everything as a Clifford algebra over the real numbers, it turns out to be a very intuitive and notationally simple way to think about all the stuff that physicists do with vectors (and tensors and spinors).”
(David Hestenes, the developer of GA, says he was motivated by “the fact
that physicists and engineers did not know how to multiply vectors”)
Uh, this is the standard definition of the Spin groups. Maybe this just the mathematician’s professional code of everything is trivial.
Not sure I understand you – I am new to all of this. The spin groups aren’t the same as the Clifford algebra being used here, right? And the thesis below talks about the spin groups as groups of particular elements of that Clifford algebra (not all of them).
Anyway, in that sense a lot of mathematical physics is “trivial” – e.g. Hamilton’s introduction of Hamiltonian mechanics “just” rephrased classical mechanics in terms of a particular known mathematical structure, but in a way that added new power and insight, and so it was extremely important.
There’s a Ph.D. thesis here that goes rephrases a large swath of theoretical physics in terms of geometric algebra, claiming that in various places it illuminates structure or aids computation. You wouldn’t be able to replace the experience of reading the thesis with just saying, “okay, you know theoretical physics? and you know Clifford algebras? well, put the two together.“
Today I’ve been reading about “geometric algebra” which seems very cool and possibly important, although it is also one of those academic concepts that hasn’t gotten much broad use outside of a small group of researchers who are almost creepily exuberant about how great it is, so maybe there is something wrong with it that I’m not yet aware of
The whole subject is just about something called the “geometric product,” which when applied to vectors (it can also be applied to other things) is just
ab = a•b + a^b
At first glance this seems like nonsense, because a•b is a scalar, and a^b (the wedge product) is a bivector, so how can you add them? Geometric algebra says “let’s just say you can linearly combine scalars, vectors, bivectors, etc.”
The combinations are called “multivectors” and the full algebra is over the multivectors (including the scalars and vectors), and you can take the geometric product of any two multivectors (the algebra is a ring where the geometric product is multiplication)
This produces some nice formulas, like for instance the projection of a vector v onto a unit vector u is familiarly
u(u•v)
and the “rejection” v - u(u•v), in GA, is just
u(u^v)
Moreover, if u is not a unit vector, well, in GA if uu != 0 (note uu is a scalar) then u has an inverse u^{-1} = u/(uu) and the projection and rejection are just u^{-1}(u•v) and u^{-1}(u^v).
More interestingly, the product ava^{-1} gives the reflection of v about the vector a, and the fact that a rotation can be generated by two reflections appears as the fact that you make rotations by doing this twice with vectors a, b: a rotation of v is abvba (with abba=1).
Most interestingly, you also have the property that some multivectors square to -1, which gives you complex numbers “where you need them” in the geometry without having to complexify anything. For instance if you have orthonormal vectors a,b, then ab = a^b, and so (a^b)^2 = abab = -abba = -1. This is kind of like being an “antisymmetric matrix” and indeed you can write a general rotation in the plane as e^(ab*theta/2). In the cases where quaternions work you see the algebra of the quaternions appear, but without any need to “apply quaternions to the problem,” etc.
I’m curious why this is not more widely used.
(Yes I know I should install MathJax, I will the next time I find myself making a post that looks like this)
The relevent word is “Clifford algebra”. They get used: my research might apply them to try to link a conjecture to some other conjectures. But I don’t know much about noncommutative algebra in general: commutative algebra has much sexier things living in it.
Right – I know that Clifford algebras are of some mathematical interest, but my sense is that the innovation of the “geometric algebra” folks is that they said “huh, if you write everything as a Clifford algebra over the real numbers, it turns out to be a very intuitive and notationally simple way to think about all the stuff that physicists do with vectors (and tensors and spinors).”
(David Hestenes, the developer of GA, says he was motivated by “the fact
that physicists and engineers did not know how to multiply vectors”)
This paper (PDF) applying neuroscientific data analysis techniques to an old microprocessor is fascinating and worrisome (via SSC)
The electrophysiology lab I’m in is reviewing this paper at lab meeting next week. I’m excited in the “oh god this is going to be terrible” kind of way.
Update on this: Paper really misrepresents how these techniques are actually used, shows how useless bad neuroscience can be but doesn’t make any case for how prevalent bad neuroscience actually is, trivializes huge differences between the systems at play. Not worth getting worried about as-is, they should come back with specific popular papers that are actually analogous to the simulations they ran.
Also, this was a single paper running a blind analysis and they found the clock signal and CPU read/write lines, that’s actually pretty damn impressive?
Anyway, the common problem for most of the analyses presented is that there’s no sense of bringing in prior knowledge and choosing behavioral paradigms that are well suited to what you’re studying. Compare the completely random “let’s do tuning curves for pixel luminance across all transistors!” to “let’s see how this set of neurons connected to the eyes reacts to this stimulus passed in front of th eyes!”
Ah, that makes a lot of sense given what I remember of the paper.
The part of the paper I remember finding impressive was the part about the power spectrum. The authors claimed that it had some of the features that are usually considered interesting or revealing in neural power spectra. Does that part hold up?
“those creepy essentialist two-sizes-fit-all gender roles were totally good, except pure, passive, self-sacrificing femininity is the Light Side this time” is an attitude that continues to baffle me every time I see it, which is strangely often
let’s take as a given that the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine” don’t represent any innate inherent reality, and rather are social constructions. couldn’t someone be of the view that gender roles are artificial social constructions, but still be of the viewpoint that the qualities which have been arbitrarily grouped together to create the social construct of “femininity” are, on net, better than the qualities which have been arbitrarily grouped together to form the social construct of “masculinity”? this seems at the very least like it could be an internally coherent position for someone to take, regardless of whether it’s correct or not.
(mind you this isn’t a defense of the specifics of the linked posts, just a defense of the “self-sacrificing femininity is the Light Side this time” concept)
Sure, and I can imagine myself agreeing with some version of that claim. (Say, if reduction in violence turned out be far more important than any of the other ethical concerns in play)
The problems happen when one of these gender trait clusters gets used as a moral ideal, with the gender connotations intact, which – outside of some fantasy world where everyone suddenly becomes a (gender-conforming!) member of the Good Gender – is going to lead to widespread and avoidable suffering
can you elaborate further on what is the version of the claim which you can imagine yourself agreeing with?
what differentiates this hypothetical version from the current version which rubs you the wrong way?
specifically i’m not 100% sure what you mean by “when one of these gender trait clusters gets used as a moral ideal, with the gender connotations intact”
If you just list any two groups of traits, I can usually give you some rough answer about which I think is “better” overall. Given that I have existing opinions about various traits on their own, it would be kinda surprising if I couldn’t do this.
And I could imagine saying “masculine traits” are overall worse than “feminine traits” because the former may be much more conducive to people killing each other (and not even with moral justification, if such a thing exists, but in self-perpetuating cycles e.g. feuds). I have no idea if that’s actually the “right answer” there, but I can imagine reaching that conclusion.
But that’s only tangential to your actual question, I think, which is about where I start to get off the train.
Consider the following hypothetical social constructs:
Dextrals
Right-handed, hard-working, dependable, suspicious of anything fancy or clever, have nuclear families, are socially expected to have as many kids as possible, disapprove of gladiatorial combat
Sinistrals
Left-handed, lazy and untrustworthy, able to get by on capable of sudden and unpredictable bursts of ingenuity and craft, see childrearing as low status and as the sole responsibility of the mother, driving force of the gladiatorial combat subculture (whose combatants come from a despised underclass within sinistrals)
Now we can say a number of things about these.
First, if we just take them at face value without any attention to how they might have arisen historically, we can compare the two and try to come to some decision as to which is “better.” Here it looks like dextrals probably have the edge: maybe they’re a bit too conventional, the thing about kids is too restrictive, and it’s not like I care about handedness per se, but the sinistral attitude toward families and children is kinda fucked-up and I’d prefer to see the gladiatorial games abolished
But then one could also, say, move to a level of airy abstraction where “dextrality” and “sinistrality” are ideas or feelings or forces and mount a case for “sinistrality” over “dextrality" on this plane
But looking at it from another angle, the handedness aspect sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s not just that we don’t view handedness in this way in our world. It’s also that it’s the aspect of the binary most resistant to change, by far. (IRL, attempts to force left-handed children to become right-handed have a low success rate and are often traumatic.) It’s also apparent quite early in one’s life, where many of these traits only emerge clearly in adults.
So now we have this weird linkage between something obvious and difficult to change (handedness) and a bunch of other weighty, moralized traits. Let this play its course, and bam!
you have sad confused kids trying desperately to write with their non-dominant hand so they don’t have to grow up to (want kids or marriage / not want kids or marriage / be OK with gladiatorial combat / etc.)
you have attempts to force kids to write one way or another, you have people agonizing over whether it’s wrong to be distrusted just because they’re left-handed or whether instead they ought to align themselves with dextral culture since after all being trustworthy is good (aware nonetheless that they will never truly be a dextral)
you have the age-old question of how long it is OK to know someone before you ask to watch them write (or whether – as some radicals insist – one should simply never ask at all)
you have the restaurants and bars where everyone is done in a special way so that one never has to even hold a utensil or glass, and you have the people who wonder what their clientele has to hide
you have everyone growing up, knowing that the world is made up of dextrals and sinistrals, and that you may be one or you may be the other, but that the world is made this way and even those who want to escape bear the baggage of a life lived in that split world, as one thing and not the other one in every last social interaction
you have (oh god) the special and conflicted social role of the ambidextrous
you have a million dark nights of the soul for a thousand reasons
I’m not claiming that this maps in any way onto the existing gender binary (that would make the fantasy superfluous). And certainly this system has nothing precisely like sex vs. gender and nothing at all like being trans.
My point is that you get all of this nonsense the moment you hook up a typically lifelong, difficult-to-change biological characteristic to a whole galaxy of character traits.
And it might even be the case that “sinistral vs. dextral” is a useful spectrum if we chop off the part about handedness, that we could usefully/interestingly speak of sinistral and dextral temperaments, ways of life, the value of harmonizing the two, or the superiority of one to the other, or whatever. Maybe even in our world. But you get all of this “for free” if you discard the handedness part.
If you’re talking to people who know deep in their bones that they’re sinistrals and dextrals, there’s a huge amount of baggage that comes along with saying “I think dextral family values are good.” Everything gets fraught once your audience includes dextrals who don’t want families, or sinistrals who do, or to dextral-sinistral couples …
But if you just remove the world “dextral” and say “I think family values are good,” you gain so much, and what do you lose?
(Bottom line: IRL, the “linkage” is already in place, and framing one’s moral claims in terms of gender makes thing unnecessarily fraught in just this way)
“those creepy essentialist two-sizes-fit-all gender roles were totally good, except pure, passive, self-sacrificing femininity is the Light Side this time” is an attitude that continues to baffle me every time I see it, which is strangely often
let’s take as a given that the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine” don’t represent any innate inherent reality, and rather are social constructions. couldn’t someone be of the view that gender roles are artificial social constructions, but still be of the viewpoint that the qualities which have been arbitrarily grouped together to create the social construct of “femininity” are, on net, better than the qualities which have been arbitrarily grouped together to form the social construct of “masculinity”? this seems at the very least like it could be an internally coherent position for someone to take, regardless of whether it’s correct or not.
(mind you this isn’t a defense of the specifics of the linked posts, just a defense of the “self-sacrificing femininity is the Light Side this time” concept)
Sure, and I can imagine myself agreeing with some version of that claim. (Say, if reduction in violence turned out be far more important than any of the other ethical concerns in play)
The problems happen when one of these gender trait clusters gets used as a moral ideal, with the gender connotations intact, which – outside of some fantasy world where everyone suddenly becomes a (gender-conforming!) member of the Good Gender – is going to lead to widespread and avoidable suffering
i wonder: does anyone under 30 or 35 give a toss about Cerebus anymore? Once upon a time, if you were into “serious” (cough) comics, it was just something you had to contend with, along with Moore, Gaiman, Miller, the Hernandez Bros, Spiegelman/RAW, etc. But have a feeling that Dave Sim’s descent into apparent madness in the latter half of that book poisoned the well, and the impenetrability of the storyline didn’t help matters. To draw a weak parallel, it would be like a rock band that was huge in the 70s that now doesn’t even merit mention upon their unexpected reunion.
I assume @andrewhickeywriter is excited, or at least I hope it would make him excited. Tomorrow’s vote seems terrifying.
I’m… cautiously excited (though I’m 37, so not in the “under 35″ group).
Cerebus is, to my mind, the single greatest achievement in comics history. Yes, even the stuff after the effect of Sim’s mental illness became apparent. (That’s not me misusing mental illness pejoratively – Sim has talked in the past about being diagnosed with schizophrenia, and often discussed symptoms which match psychosis, and those symptoms have affected his writing over the years). Yes, even the (extremely small proportion) parts that advocate the inhuman, obscene, political views he later developed.
Sim is clearly still capable of moments of greatness – Glamourpuss is a complete mess, but a fascinating, often glorious, one – and possibly the constraint of trying to do something properly commercial will let him harness that greatness. Or possibly not.
Would I recommend anyone read Cerebus now? I honestly don’t know. There are enough good comics out there that it’s impossible to keep up with the good ones anyway, so why give money to someone who’s somewhere around the Vox Day area in political terms? But then again, it’s very, very hard to disentangle Sim’s politics from his illness. Does that make a difference? I don’t know.
But what I will say is that even at its worst, Cerebus (apart from the first twenty or so issues, which are crap – but that leaves 280 or so issues that aren’t) does things with the art-form that no other comic has ever done. Even the handful of issues that I find utterly reprehensible are utterly astonishing artistic achievements. And at its best (roughly Jaka’s Story through Minds, with the exception of Reads which is where Sim’s views infect the book for the first time) it’s work that has affected me more than almost any other art, in any medium, ever.
And that’s not the normal privileged-person-defending-problematic-fave thing, either. I am a privileged person, Cerebusis problematic, no question on both those counts, but… it’s not a Talons of Weng-Chiang style “if you can get past the racism it’s fun” thing. The good aspects are so good, and Sim’s worldview is so evil, it’s like… what if Hitler had become a painter instead, but had had Leonardo’s level of artistic genius? It’s the edge case to end all edge cases, the problematic fave to end all problematic faves…
I’ve only read bits of Cerebus here and there – tried to read linearly from #26 on a while back, got tired of it somewhere in Church and State, then dipped around a great deal in the later parts when I was writing/planning TNC, for obvious (?) reasons.
Anyway, the reason I’m reblogging this (besides being a good interesting post) is that people usually treat the long essays in the later Cerebus issues as merely a product of Sim’s decline, but I actually think a lot of that material is really good when he’s not writing about gender or contemporary politics.
The essays on Hemingway and Fitzgerald, for instance, are fascinating and display a level of passionate interest in the material that would be impressive on its own (i.e., if Sim was framing it as “I am a critic who writes about these authors” rather than “I am a cartoonist, and if I read and obsessively analyze an author’s entire oeuvre it’s just so I can poke fun at a caricature of him in my comic”).
(IIRC he read the Bible cover-to-cover, then converted, just because he’d originally wanted to write a Cerebus arc poking fun at Christianity and wanted to make sure he “did it right.” His essays on religion are … well, they’re definitely interesting, at least)
Anyway, I’d love to see some of the less political Sim essays rescued from the obscurity they currently languish in. If he were in the same frame of mind today, he’d have a well-known (in some circles) blog and there would be lots of recurring arguments over whether it was OK to link one of his legitimately good posts given things he wrote in other, not-good posts
“the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman”
There’s plenty of argument over what constitutes the first true novel; some scholars (who are not, to the best of my knowledge, some sort of patriarchal cabal; nothing says “soldier of the patriarchy” like appreciating Cervantes, I guess?) would even place the birth of the modern novel later than Don Quixote; both Madame de La Fayette’s The Princess of Cleves (late 17th century) and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (early 18th) get mentioned in this capacity a fair amount.
However, when we’re talking about “extended prose piece[s]”…nuh uh. There were a substantial number of works of novel-length prose fiction prior to Genji Monogatari, including traditions in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. The oldest one that survives in its entirety is Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, from nearly a millennium before Genji (ca. 150 CE). There are even older ones that only exist in fragmentary form, like Petronius’ Satyricon.
tl;dr: There are scholars who cite Genji as the first novel, but they’re not the majority in the academy (nor is the issue in general settled in the way this post claims), and no one whose beliefs don’t come entirely from feel-good tumblr posts thinks that it was the first work of long-form prose fiction.
Steven Moore’s book The Novel: An Alternative History contains a wealth of information about all the arguably-novels written before Don Quixote, although it errs on the side of over-inclusiveness, and Moore is very irritating in a number of ways (IMO). But there are a whole lot of these things
I think when you don’t see something as “political,” it’s only because the GIGANTIC MASS of politics baked into the situation just happen to land in your politics-comfort-zone.
The contributions of women have been overlooked and ignored for — well basically forever. Most people these days agree with this, at least somewhat. Many think we should be doing something about it.
It is nice to think that truth will win out, and there is a nice stable point of relaxed, natural politics, which is truth-first in an entirely comfortable way.
How naïve people are!
There is never a good stable point. So we have “pendulum swings” and “overcompensation” and so on. From that, we have pushback. Cuz of course we have pushback.
The pushback is political. To some it seems “needed,” to others “regressive.”
Round and round it goes.
When I talk about stuff like this, I like to hedge. After all, the term “novel” names a fuzzy region in thing-space, so you’ll never be able to say “this (and only this) is the ‘first novel.’ That is an unambiguous truth with which no one could argue.”
Instead I would talk about how “novel-ish” a thing is, and point out early examples that illustrate the growth of novel-ish-ness. Indeed, I would make an effort to foreground the work of women and minorities, in an open attempt to mitigate the centuries (and more) of efforts to background their achievements.
That said, there is no way to tell this story without including the achievements of white men. Obviously.
It is an unmitigated good that the works of historic women and minorities are coming into the foreground. It is foolish to argue about what the “first novel” was.
FWIW, many of the early novels mentioned in Moore’s book are by non-white people, and from cultures that (unlike the classical Mediterranean cultures) have not become part of the foundation of white western culture.
For instance, Moore has a section on Indian fiction, which starts with the now-lost Brihatkatha (written sometime between 200 BC and 500 AD) and the various extant adaptations of it, including one in prose (the Vasudevahindi, 6th century AD or earlier, written by a Jain), and moves on through other novels of the first millennium AD like the Vasavadatta (noteworthy for its extreme density of puns and double/triple meanings), the Kadambari (an intricate love story which even gets called “one of the earliest novels” by people who define “novel” much more restrictively than Moore does), and the Dashakumaracharita.
Also in Moore are sections on Arabic fiction, Persian fiction, Japanese fiction, and Chinese fiction. The chapter on Japanese fiction discusses several pre-Genji extended prose narratives (Utsubo Monogatari, Ochikubo Monogatari), while noting that none of them are anywhere near as brilliant or ambitious as Genji.
Almost all of the authors Moore discusses are male (when authorship is known), and I think it’s worth foregrounding Genji because it was such a giant leap away from its predecessors – within her culture, Lady Murasaki really did “invent the novel” in a nontrivial sense.
But I also think that “Lady Murasaki invented the novel” is a vivid, misleading image that distracts from the wider story here, which is that novel-like forms developed and evolved independently in numerous cultures, often in more gradual traditions with no single point of “invention,” and that most of these cultural traditions are still ignored by (what one might call) white western literary culture. It’s not like Lady Murasaki uniquely “discovered” something and we are all now following in her footsteps; there are early novelistic traditions in lots of places, many of which your local literature professor has probably never heard of.
“The novel” isn’t a thing you can trace linearly from Heian Japan to Europe (to later Europe, to even later Europe … ) It’s a global form.
