This Is Not a Frame - and Is

I have been meaning, for some time now, to publish this essay of mine, based on Foucault's This Is Not a Pipe, and Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe:

Enclosed in the framing essay is an earlier essay about Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics [Google Book link]. The poem that begins the enclosed essay was written while I was working as a missionary/English-teacher in Shukugawa, Japan, and the essay as a whole deals with epistomological and linguistic issues that I had begun wrestling with in my final year of high-school and which ultimately led me to convert to Orthodox Christianity.

Anyhow, without further ado, here is a link to a scanned PDF of the essay in question, "This Is Not a Frame - and Is". Enjoy!

How times have NOT changed!

I've been reading George MacDonald's The Princess and Curdie to my boys as a bedtime story whenever we are at St. John's House in Vancouver for the night, and tonight I ran across this passage. MacDonald's 19th Century fairy-tale description of a society in decay sounds eerily familiar...

At last river and road took a sudden turn, and lo! a great rock in the river, which dividing flowed around it, and on the top of the rock the city, with lofty walls and towers and battlements, and above the city the palace of the king, built like a strong castle. But the fortifications had long been neglected, for the whole country was now under one king, and all men said there was no more need for weapons or walls. No man pretended to love his neighbour, but every one said he knew that peace and quiet behaviour was the best thing for himself, and that, he said, was quite as useful, and a great deal more reasonable. The city was prosperous and rich, and if everybody was not comfortable, everybody else said he ought to be.

When Curdie got up opposite the mighty rock, which sparkled all over with crystals, he found a narrow bridge, defended by gates and portcullis and towers with loopholes. But the gates stood wide open, and were dropping from their great hinges; the portcullis was eaten away with rust, and clung to the grooves evidently immovable; while the loopholed towers had neither floor nor roof, and their tops were fast filling up their interiors. Curdie thought it a pity, if only for their old story, that they should be thus neglected. But everybody in the city regarded these signs of decay as the best proof of the prosperity of the place. Commerce and self-interest, they said, had got the better of violence, and the troubles of the past were whelmed in the riches that flowed in at their open gates.

Indeed, there was one sect of philosophers in it which taught that it would be better to forget all the past history of the city, were it not that its former imperfections taught its present inhabitants how superior they and their times were, and enabled them to glory over their ancestors. There were even certain quacks in the city who advertised pills for enabling people to think well of themselves, and some few bought of them, but most laughed, and said, with evident truth, that they did not require them. Indeed, the general theme of discourse when they met was, how much wiser they were than their fathers.

Good Quote

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Did you know you can fit 54 books in one of those large Rubbermaid containers?

I've been trying to clear some space in our little basement suite by packing some of my "haven't read this one for a while" books into boxes. Well, a box... So far I've only gotten one. The only problem with packing books into boxes is that they are less accessible in a box than they are on a shelf - conversely, the only problem with having books on a shelf is that they take up so much wall-space!

Anyhow, not wanting to lose track of these "books I haven't read for a while" that are packed away in Box 1, I've just entered them all into LibraryThing (at www.librarything.com). And, since it's so sad that these books have to languish away in a box, and simultaneously so cool to be able to list a random selection using a LibraryThing widget, I offer here a random selection of the books now stowed away in Box 1 (at least those that have cover pictures in LibraryThing):

Reflection

I am a modern monk, whose diet's meat,
not pulse, or low-cholestrol diet leaves.
I do not flagellate myself, but weep
for my own sins and pains and others' hurt,
results of both our first and further falls.
I am not walled within my lonely cell,
though oft I enter it instead of curse
the world's chaos, defying chaptered verse,
wherein I read, despite sin, all is well.
For as I read and write within these walls
and ponder our descent from flesh to dirt,
some pattern, sometimes forced, but always deep-
er than the eye at first perceives,
emerges, and the planned and Planner meet.

Edward Hewlett.

This is one of the last (and, in my opinion, best) of the poems I wrote before I became Orthodox and simultaneously became way too busy to write any more [good] poetry.

Pope Benedict's Conclusion

I was pleased to learn recently that the whole of Pope Benedict's much-maligned address at his meeting with the representatives of science at the University of Regensburg is actually available online. I rather liked his conclusion:

"Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.

Evidently the Muslims, given their violent, knee-jerk reaction to the pope's address (or at least to the 30-second media sound-bite version), have elected to decline his invitation to be reasonable.

Google Spreadsheets

There has been an awful lot of hype on the internet about Google's new online spreadsheet offering. Nicholas Carr's blog post on the subject, Google's Office add-on, comes the closest (IMNSHO) to actually getting it right.