2002-09-09 10:00 (UTC+1)

On a mission in London

Up in London, I showed the nice Japanese nurse who's staying at my mum's how the Tube works and where Buckingham Palace is - out at Charing Cross station, through the big arch, along the pink road, big eff-off palace at the end, can't miss it - and headed off for some serious shopping.

On the way through Bond Street I called in at Chappel's (the finest sheet music shop in London), more for old times' sake than actively browsing, up and right to Grant & Cutler's Foreign Book Emporium, which relieved me of a not-insubstantial wodge of cash. (My new mission - which I have accepted - is to read each of the Harry Potter novels in a different language. French first, Swedish second, and I'll see how I feel then.) Even the best Foreign Bookshop in London doesn't really have all that much Swedish stuff, and the French stuff selection inevitably pales besides Amazon.fr, but it is nice to be able to browse properly.

Then on to Foyles', which appears to be trying to drag itself into the 20th century at last. Used to be the books in the Maths and Physics gulag, my once-upon-a spiritual home, were shelved by publisher and imprint ("Functional Analysis? Group Theory? As long as it's OUP, I don't care!") and they had a Soviet-style payment system where you handed the books to the local counter and got a bill, which you had to pay at a central payment desk, get the chitty stamped and return to collect your book. The stock is still bewilderingly erratic - I couldn't find any sensible linguistics, but I did find an anthology of modern poetry in Cornish and a computer-generated dictionary of proto-Algonquian.

A better bookshop for most academic purposes is the Waterstones' round the corner from the University of London (students') Union. Certainly for languages (except perhaps Cornish and proto-Algonquian), linguistics and philosophy. If I hadn't already spent too much money by then I could easily have spent far, far too much there.

And then there's the British museum: a week's worth of anyone's time, but a bit crowded on a Saturday so I forwent the ritual genuflection to the Rosetta stone and just had a trundle round the First Contact in the Americas exhibition, which tried to cram too much into too small a brain. If the point was the diversity of aboriginal cultures, it got made for sure.

And, since I was at my Mum's, I also had an opportunity to shift some boxes. My big sister has gone off to Russia again (hence the boxes), my li'l sister is still out in Japan, my Mum is off to France next week on holiday, and I will once again be the only family member in Britain. Sigh.

2002-09-06 15:09 (UTC+1)

Parents, eh? 'Oodavvem?

In a story which a better man wouldn't find funny at all, Mette-Marit's lamentable journalist father is now working for the Norsk skvallertidning Se og H�r.

The relentless tribulations which the world has visited on Desbladet's favourite prinsess have only deepened our affection for her, of course, but even so we are now willing to promise that we'll still like her, even if nothing bad happens to her for ages and ages. You can stop now, OK?

2002-09-06 13:57 (UTC+1)

I dag �r min f�delsedag!

Go on then: how do you say that in E-Prime, huh? "My birthday occurs today"?

Lest all this E-Prime bashing should lead you to think I'm unthinkingly in thrall to the hegemony of naive reification, here's a quote from Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics that I remembered (incorrectly, as it turned out) as a comment explicitly on Aristotle's law of self-identity:

Today [...] we see ourselves as it were entangled in error, necessitated to error, to precisely the extent that our prejudice in favour of reason compells us to posit unity, identity, duration, substance, cause, materiality, being.
[Twilight of the Idols, "Reason" in Philosophy 5]

I'm a big fan of Nietzsche's nihilist hysteria phase, even if the later Eternal Recurrence of the Same stuff gets a bit shrill and, well, repetitive.

And since, as Matt No-Sword specifically invokes the passive mood as a defect of style from which E-Prime might extricate the writer, here's an actual autobiographical vignette on the subject.

When I was doing my Master's degree they made us all do a Technical Writing class, and the teacher claimed that the pretence of objectivity implicit in the use of the passive had been largely refuted. I expressed doubt, and she lent me Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , probably mostly so that I would shut up and leave her alone.

It's a fascinating book (and very readable), but it didn't really prove her point, and to this day I still believe that the use of the passive to elide the role of the observer in descriptions of experiments is appropriate, but I'd call it "invariance under interchange of subjectivities" - the litmus paper still turns pink, even if your paradigmic commitments lead you to insist that it was the Pink Paint Pixie that did it.

(Don't roll your eyes at me, Varied Reader: it's my birthday, and I'm allowed to be boring and self-indulgent. Besides, I gave the Technical Writing teacher for first-year PhD students a lot more grief.)

In any case, it is calculated that two more months' of this sort of nonsense may be expected as the ideological fault-lines appropriate to a boatload of intellectuals are rehearsed. Outbreaks of frivolity, serving to lighten the tone, may also occur, although Giant Fire-Breathing Alien Space Penguins are not currently considered to be a significant threat. Princess coverage should not be substantially affected, and will remain at the levels previously outlined in the Service Agreement.

Family commitments and considerable inebriation, motivated by details of chronology, will ensue shortly, although it should be possible to accommodate this within the established frame-work of the weekend break.

2002-09-06 10:02 (UTC+1)

Babies are people, too!

Who's a clever little person, eh?
Who is, eh?
Aren't you a clever little person, mmm?

Via Languagehat comes an Observer story about how cognitive psychology has changed as a discipline since there's been an influx of women studying babies. ("Hello, I'm Alison. I do experiments on babies. No, wait: they're only psychological experiments. No, wait!")

In particular, there's evidence that one-month old babies are well on the way to a grasp of the phonology of their native language, and they're wired for recognising faces, and they have an innate sense of number. And this week motherese, the way people tend to talk to babies - Yes you do! Yes you do! Don't you, eh? - is Good, again. (Other weeks it's irrelevant or even counter-productive.)

Anyone who's taken LSD and seen faces appear in pretty much every textured surface can confirm that recognising faces is wired in really deep, if you need confirmation beyond cartoons. (I asked them, 'kay?) The innateness of small numbers is doctrine at Desbladet, too, so all hail the new Brainists!

The old Brainists, if you're wondering, were the nasty men in white coats who - surprisingly - seem to have been in an alliance with the wicked beardy cardigan-wearing sociologists in claiming that babies are born blank slates and spend the first year gurgling and smiling just to try out the muscles. Of course, the skinhead wing of the new Brainists is going to insist that IQ is innate, rich people are innately terrific and (if male) that cheating on your partner is only to be expected, but let's not tar the whole movement with the same brush. Yet.

2002-09-05 13:17 (UTC+1)

Thawwy - A book freeze unfrozen

I'm preparing for a long overdue freeze on buying books by, um, buying a whole bunch of books.

There's a new Oxfam bookshop just by the big bookshop near the University, which is itself distinct from the University bookshop. Charity bookshops in University towns are dangerous things: even at my most casual setting of "browse only" I came out with:

Hugo's Swedish in Three Months

Including four tapes for three quid? Sold!

Gimson's Introduction to the Pronunciation of English

Because I'm tired of American linguists hitting me over the head with the Trager-Smith phonemic analysis, not to mention the notation. I speak RP and I write IPA, and that's the way I like it.

Chomsky's Aspects de la th�ory syntaxique

It was spelled like that on the cover - I'm very observant. This has been there for a while, but since there's no linguistics as such at this university I seem to be the most likely donor of a good home to a book on English Universal Syntax, translated into French for your reading pleasure.

Mathematical Methods in Linguistics

One of those hilariously bad crumbs-from-the-table type books where they tell you some stuff (here set theory, logic, abstract algebra) that everyone knows, but make sure to stop before enough theory has accumulated so that any sane person could start to find it interesting.

You see what I'm up against?

2002-09-05 11:07 (UTC+1)

La Ph�nom�nologie

(It's like phenomenology only in French).

Interim Progress Report: One problem with reading books In Foreign is that I can't scan text the way I do in English. If I need to look back for whatever reason (and this is a philosophy book so there are plenty of reasons) I have to start reading properly (i.e., slowly) all over again. If I've learned nothing else, I've learned how important vgrep is to my English reading.

A related problem is that I can't find my place. I've had to start again from the beginning because my usual strategy of looking for the break between familiar and unfamiliar text doesn't work - it all looks like Foreign to me. I've learned my lesson: this time I'm using a bookmark. (Eye glassesand a bookmark: any more prostheses and I'll be an actual cyborg!)

More positively, this time through I'm understanding it better, and I'm enjoying the experience. It's still slow, but the frustration comes from the ideas more than the words.

It'll be a while before I'm in a position to spray paint cyberspace with my comical misunderstandings, though, so why not visit Amazon.fr's new Que sais-je? page and start plotting your own course through Francophone philosophy?

I'm just hoping I can understand enough of Merleau-Ponty's classic Ph�nom�nologie de la perception to have a phenomenologist in my alleged novel. (My new triumphant catchphrase - It's on the boat!).

2002-09-05 9:49 (UTC+1)

Exciting!

Apparently I'm named as a researcher in a grant application. (My official status is essentially that of hired help, so this is not usually the case.)

Exhibiting the professionalism and attention to detail for which I am rightly renowned I've just told our admin people that I don't know the title and year of my thesis off-hand, but I'll check the paperwork and tell them tomorrow.

2002-09-04 15:51 (UTC+1)

Did somebody blab?

Harper Collins, the US publishing house, popped by yesterday while I was blathering on about my proposed novel. Also, when I mentioned military language schools the US military turned up the same day.

Google is good, but it's not that good: I put it to you, Varied Reader, that we have an informer in our midst.

Some people might argue that the Internet - may It's routers' blinkenlights twinkle for all eternity! - is the most public place to put things in the history of the Universe; they would be completely right and I would love them to distraction for it: I don't find the background Googleflux even slightly perturbacious; it's the faster-than-the-speed-of-flux people who spook me just ever such a little.

Besides, they didn't offer me a book deal.

2002-09-04 12:45 (UTC+1)

Kunglig kunskap

I've been somewhat remiss on the antics of Vickan and Madde - I was busy: the world doesn't put itself to rights, you know! - but Expressen has got my back. Tack, Expressen!

It seems Vickan is doing practical stuff in the export trade in Paris and Berlin, Madde is doing office jobs in glossy magazines as part of her study of partying design and architecture, and the accompanying photo shows them looking beiger lovelier than ever.

2002-09-04 09:16 (UTC+1)

Help! I'm being stalked by a literary periodical!

The current London Review of Books has a long biographical article on Iris Murdoch, and an article on consciousness by Jerry Fodor. Since it's the LRB, Fodor is pretending to write a review of a book but that's really just a pretext to discuss his own opinions. That's not a criticism, though: that's what makes the LRB great, and any similarity to my own use of linkage to structure the ongoing Desbladet seminar on the contents of my head is purely intentional.

The universe is just a stick onto which the candifloss of my mind is wound: that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Unless, of course, I don't: Eternal Truth is notoriously a function of time, as I have mentioned before, although - how apt! - I no longer find that analysis satisfactory.

2002-09-03 13:46 (UTC+1)

Erratum

I forgot to mention this, but of course there'll be a Princess in the story - I ruled out a whole bunch of plots just because there was no way to incorporate one. Undoubtably, also, whichever one of the characters I cast myself as and the Princess will fall in love and get married and live happily ever after.

I may be devious, but I'm not subtle.

[ Update: Clearly the Princess must be Scandiwegian, and very beautiful, and it also seems very likely that she was previously betrothed to L�fstr�m's dastardly son who will accordingly do his malevolent best to thwart me the hero. ]

2002-09-03 10:27 (UTC+1)

Fevered pitch

Imagine The Magic Mountain rewritten by the bastard love-child of Jack Kerouac and Iris Murdoch, with an invasion of giant alien space penguins thrown in as a bonus.

That's the novel I'm going to write, I've decided. When I was 14 - the last time I wrote prose fiction, and that was only because I had to for school - I refused to use dialogue because I didn't know how to punctuate it. Now that I do, I fully intend to over-compensate. Plus I used to love all those Russian novels where people would just basically hang out bickering about the meaning of life, even if I found The Magic Mountain itself unreadably dull. (This is the Menardian school of rewriting, obviously.)

Magnus L�fstr�m, the Swedish herring magnate, gathers together an crack team of intellectuals to cruise to the Arctic to try to deal with the afore-mentioned penguins. It turns out that even he doesn't believe in the penguin menace (he's selected one specialist of each sex in a bizarre parallel to Noah's ark and is planning to start a colony of superminds on Sv�lbard [sp?]).

Even more bizarrely, though, the space penguins turn out to be real, and after initial hostilities (in which I kill off all the characters I'm bored with by then) the curmudgeonly field-linguist in the team manages to establish communication and it turns out that the penguins have come in peace, and are communicating successfully with an intelligence implemented in the form of herring migration patterns, to the immense chagrin of the analytical philosopher who is the wretched John Searle in very thin disguise.

Most of the book, though, will be taken up with the endless bickering and elaborate sexual intrigues of the characters as they potter slowly up the Norwegian coastline on a Hurtigruten ship, thus allowing me to combine Iris Murdoch's ear for dialogue with Kerouac's restraint and self-discipline and my own ability to formulate preposterous opinions. This is justified because the (fire-breathing, did I mention that?) penguins' space wings only work where the atmosphere is thin, which means that they control the stratosphere and make air access impossible.

Hands up anyone who still thinks there's the slightest chance this will be readable, given that I'll also need to up my average speed of prose production by an order of magnitude, with the inevitable implications that has for quality control.

Exactly.

2002-09-03 09:31

Whorfless

Sapir's wonderful book Language turns out to be online.

Here's a quote from Chapter 10 where he first gives the racists a richly deserved what-for, and then turns to a critique of what will later be described, bafflingly, as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that the structure of a language in some way affects the thinking of its users:

Nor can I believe that culture and language are in any true sense causally related. Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thought. It is difficult to see what particular causal relations may be expected to subsist between a selected inventory of experience (culture, a significant selection made by society) and the particular manner in which the society expresses all experience. The drift of culture, another way of saying history, is a complex series of changes in society's selected inventory of additions, losses, changes of emphasis and relation. The drift of language is not properly concerned with changes of content at all, merely with changes in formal expression. It is possible, in thought, to change every sound, word, and concrete concept of a language without changing its inner actuality in the least, just as one can pour into a fixed mold water or plaster or molten gold. If it can be shown that culture has an innate form, a series of contours, quite apart from subject-matter of any description whatsoever, we have a something in culture that may serve as a term of comparison with and possibly a means of relating it to language. But until such purely formal patterns of culture are discovered and laid bare, we shall do well to hold the drifts of language and of culture to be non-comparable and unrelated processes. From this it follows that all attempts to connect particular types of linguistic morphology with certain correlated stages of cultural development are vain.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is really due to Benjamin Whorf, and attempts to make it precise and at the same time not trivially false have so far not been notable for their success.

Via yami comes a link to the True Believers of E-Prime who think that Aristotlean metaphysics can be thwarted by avoiding the verb to be in English. Sigh.

Sapir's book, published in 1921, remains the most inspiring account of language I've ever come across. It's far better than anything Pinker has ever written at giving a sense of the range of stuctural possibilities languages can encompass, which is not all that surprising given that Sapir was a pioneering field linguist specialising in American Indian languages and arguably the first person to refute in detail the idea that "primitive" societies have "primitive" languages, while Pinker works in the Chomskian tradition, which has not been distinguished primarily for the range of languages considered.

2002-09-02 14:15 (UTC+1)

Oh.

Most of Desbladet lives in one big file which I have permanently open in an Emacs buffer. I just had wc count how many words this all comes to, so as to reassure me that the 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo is an achievable target.

It turns out, though, that this file of nearly 9,000 lines that I've been adding to almost daily since last December only amounts to a little over 50,000 words itself.

I'm still going to do NaNoWriMo, but it's clearly going to hurt.

2002-09-02 9:59 (UTC+1)

Winchcombe, igen

[ Update: Fixed the other link. ]

I went out to the Swedish pub in Winchcombe, again, and this time I figured I really ought to try the sm�rg�sbord platter.

In English the word "smorgasbord" has come to mean a kind of cornucopia of culinary delights, whereas the original Swedish word sm�rg�sbord, by contrast, tends to mean a table stacked with different kinds of cold fish. The irony is that to the Scandinavian mind this is a cornucopia of culinary delights. I, on the other hand, betray my Englishness in holding the opinion that there is a limit to the number of kinds of pickled herring that can usefully be deployed on the same plate, and that this number is not large.

There was also salmon and various cold meats and prawns and a few little (hot) new potatoes and stuff - it's a platter piled high with stuff, and if you're pining for the fjords it's probably the closest thing to heaven available in this country, don't get me wrong, but if you're not you would want to be fairly confident about your taste for herring before you start, is all.