on the Myers-Briggs (again)

(via cnn dot com)

at least the Jungian system has some ideas behind it. unfortunately, he was also overly fond of quaternities as an intellectual icon. that sort of handicaps the empirical side of post-Jungian typology. there have to be exactly four functions, & two have to be opposites of the other two. and of course, a person has to be this way consistently (if not invariably), so that it can make sense to talk about psychological types as if they were phenotypes. not to mention what factors one's personal history can contribute. none of this is entailed by consideration of the functions themselves, as a scientific theory would require. in that sense it's an ideology.

      i think used with flexibility & a fair bit of intuition, they can help make sense of the infinite complexity of human personality. the truth is, it does have regularities. and i believe it is not only possible to recognize some of these particular patterns in individuals, the patterns even appear in fictional characters. unfortunately the use of this mapping-system has been taken over almost exclusively by a bunch of literal-minded people who think that to pigeonhole is to understand, & a lot more who never even bother to read the books before they start flinging the jargon around. maybe one day a more sensitive mapping (i like to say: "256 personality-types") will be devised, & that too will be a service to humanity--just as long as it isn't built into an app that types everyone you point your camera-phone at!

word-hoard

(pic by Ilene Meyer)

So they may have found Shakespeare's own dictionary. I know he used a lot of words, & even though the English language was probably at its peak then, there's a list of over 1700 words he either coined or was the first recorded user of. This set me to thinking how in writing classes nowadays, they tend to discourage writing with words the average reader might not know. They're going to just skip over them, we're told. I myself have always been willing to look words up, & in fact habitually try to use any new word the next chance i get. I learned whole pages of new words when i read Proust & Pynchon, for example; among poets probably Hart Crane or Auden most (with a special nod to Loy).

While neologizing has split off into a genre & a subculture of its own (one step removed from conlangs), & advertizers vie with scifi writers to see who can disrupt standard English vocabulary more, the poets have mostly not kept up. Two contemporary poets who have are Lissa Wolsak & Kristin Ryling; while Australian phenomenon Javant Biarujia spans the gamut from langue close to macaronics with a special emphasis on Joycean puns.

How many words does a writer need? Besides an unknown number of haphazardly assembled foreign-language dictionaries, from Albanian to Maori, I have as my main resource two unabridged dictionaries, Webster's Second (1934) & Webster's Third (1961), because each has words not found in the other. I've always wanted one of the multi-volume, regularsize-print OEDs--but have never had the money when i ever ran across one (e.g. $1000). The trouble with the latter, however, is its infusion of monkey randomness: it seems like every variant spelling of the centuries between, say, Chaucer & Johnson, has bloated the number of entries to the point where, as in Finnegans Wake, the distinction between word & not-a-word has vanished completely.

When the Internet spawned Google, nobody was gunning for encyclopedias & dictionaries; they just lost out in the info-melee that followed. So if you want to know about a word now, you maybe get an equal number of right answers & wrong answers, with only your reader's intuition to choose between them. Pre-Johnson days, again; & poignant that our store should hap upon a pricey replica of Noah's very own, 1828-vintage, just at this hour (i imagine a sect of dictionary-fundamentalists who hold this as their holy book, & refer to none besides). "But 'spite of thy hap, Hap hath well happed" (Wyatt). The Primordial Soup beckons.

in response to a diagram about different levels of abstract knowledge

what we can map are our ideas about knowledge, not knowledge itself. and our ideas are hierarchical. i remember when i was a kid i wanted to map part of a local park that had a creek running through it. after i had drawn it roughly all over, i kept going back & refining the shapes i drew, ever more closely to the shapes i could perceive. but i got to a point where i realized i could only continue the process on another piece of paper & a smaller scale... but what was i doing really? generating a certain line out of a three dimensional edge. following a cycle of look-judge-record, over & over. was my first map, or a master-map on the largest possible scale, more real than one of the small maps? was it somehow above them? was it necessarily a good thing that i could talk as if i had been over much of that space, when i had actually only traversed a small, narrow portion of it? --and was this knowledge of the park, or was it knowledge of myself in a measuring mood? it was the product of a dance between them. when the dance ended, i carried beyond it a sense of familiarity, perhaps enough to remember it later. what we like to call knowledge is mostly a very complicated set of interlocking topics: because what we want above all, is to be able to keep on talking about things as if we knew them, could know them & keep them by making maps of them. i think it is because we know deep down we will lose them, & that our very selves are nothing but another kind of map, drawn upon a momentary portion of the melting & solidifying earth.

I see dead people on Facebook

(via National Geographic)

I see dead people on Facebook. Sometimes they still post. It bothers me when i realize that i haven't been thinking of them very much. Then i think that one day my own Facebook page will be going on without me. Perhaps someone will happen upon that, & go back & read my living words.

one thing pretending to be another

(via Gwyneth Jones)

"Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede." --Chesterton

My wife alerted me to an unsuspected backlash to the Jared Leto Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club: from those in the trans community who resent the fact that this character was played by a cis-man. Some even comparing it to "blackface"... Now ordinarily i would say, Let a thousand ressentiments bloom; it's not like there's never any reason to feel oppressed there. But i would think, today, why not be more celebratory, what with even Texas on the road to marriage equality (it seems)--a place whose former motto might well have been: "Uganda, with Tacos." That was very much a sympathetic character. Remember Freebie and the Bean?

This puts me in mind of those who take umbrage at the increasing visibility of autistics in popular culture. They say: why not hire autistic actors, to do it right? I submit that there are two separate issues getting mixed up, to the detriment of both. One is job opportunities. I really think, in acting as in any other field, let anyone play any part. Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet, James Earl Jones played Lear (magnificently), any number of gay actors have been hetero heartthrobs in the Golden Age of Hollywood & after: simply remove the barriers that exist because of prejudice, & let talent prevail. It might even be considered more of a challenge to persuade when coming from a position of non-experience. Michael Douglas as Liberace? He was practically a poster child for straight male privilege--.

The other part is the war of images. A good case can be made that there is usually a sequence of increasingly realistic depictions of any minority, with what passes for convincing portrayal becoming seen as stereotypically demeaning to a later era. This does not mean that the pioneers' efforts were wasted. They were, after all, out there. Personally i do not feel that any onscreen character, even if it directly purports to show something that is part of my regular experience, is really about me or anyone else; it's a commercial product, & it's a fictive creation, in a genre-galaxy of other fictive creations. But many people do use these commercial products to form their ideas about the world, so therefore they are important facts, to be negotiated. Ending stereotypes won't end prejudice, yet when prejudice lessens, using them turns unfashionable. That's how progress is made.

Meanwhile I am looking at the words. If white playing African-American is "blackface" & white playing Native American is "redface" (yes, people do use the term), is cis playing trans "trans-face"? neurotypical playing autistic "aut-face"?--I could get out my collection of exonyms for this-- gay playing straight "straight-face"...? And what's the contrary of that--"true-face"? I have said before that reality television isn't reality, it's amateur acting. Being your real self comes from a long apprenticeship, an askesis, even, in which the self-lies of socialization are progressively removed. This has nothing to do with art, except for the artist's asymptotic journey toward more perfect expression.

"Shadow, not light, is the language of the sun." --George Murray, Glimpse (2010)

abavus niger

(Krull via darklyeuphoric on tumblr)

     "Nor do I care e'en to know an thou be white or be black."

               --Catullus (tr Richard Burton)

As a present for my birthday, one of my wife's best friends (Michelle R.) used her genealogical website memberships to do some research on my own ancestry. She has discovered that, on my mother's side of the family (from Louisiana), i have a great-great-grandfather (the Romans had a word for this: abavus) who was "a black man married to a mulatto"--though their daughter listed on the census as white. Which is funny to me, seeing as how i have so much Scandinavian ancestry (pure Norwegian on my father's side) & i sunburn very easily. But i really would be more surprised if anyone from Louisiana (or the Deep South generally) didn't turn out to have "mixed" ancestors somewhere.

Of course, the concept of race itself, as we now know (or ought to) has zero scientific basis. There are only traits. Still, because i am a word-junkie, i observe that the language contains terms for the various pseudo-mathematical combinations of "black" & "white", leftovers from when that mattered. I thought i would find out what the designation for 1/16ths black would be, & add "sesqui-" (1 1/2), for my 3/32nds... (The official Latin expression for this is: vncia & dimidia sextila & scripvlvm, according to the Latin fraction generator website. Not a useful locution, though they did provide a set of symbols, which i can't reproduce here.) Now i can--8/20--:)

                                    (via)

That proved no easy thing. There was a French writer of the 18c.: Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (thanx, Lauren!), & he apparently invented a racial taxonomy that differentiated combinations down to 1/128ths (over 7 generations), in his travel book on the pre-Haiti/Dominican Republic (the French western half of Hispaniola) (volume one here). The "free people of color" have an interesting history (written about by Anne Rice, among others, e.g. The Feast of All Saints) & include such writers as M. P. Shiel. An article on Wikipedia covers hypodescent, where i also learned that the 1/16th African (Moreau's "mamalouque" which he defines as ranging from 8 to 12/128ths black) was called mustefino or quintroon (i won't even consider hexadecaroon--). Which gives: sesquiquintroon. Nice reduplication there.

I see that these arcane topics are still wrixling some brows.

The deeper significance of this is twofold. First, Négritude--in the broadest sense, would be to acknowledge the Other in one's artistic practice, as much for Language poets to respect Cowboy poetry as for Caribbean francophone poets to adapt Surrealism to their post-colonial experience. And, though you may identify with one particular quartering of the rainbow, there will always be Others whose experience can enrich & enliven yours. Then, the concept of "passing" which exists in autism as well. --Undeniably useful, but is it right? For to benefit from privilege is to sanction the discrimination which is privilege's other face. Perhaps that day will come when the question whether one is neurotypical or autistic, & to what degree (counted in hemidemisemiquavers), will seem as ridiculous as to discriminate on the basis of ear length (long my favorite comparison).

Meanwhile...

lecture on the khazars