stevengharms.com

I just finished Daniel Everett’s “Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes.” This work records his years spent living among the Pirahã, a small indigenous tribe of living along the Amazon in Brazil. Everett was initially sent among them to convert them to Christianity. The modus operandi of his support organization was to study the target civilization and then give them the New Testament in their native language. Therefore, Everett’s background as a linguist made him an ideal missionary. In the end, however, it was the Pirahã who converted him to atheism.

This reminded me of a story told to me by my AP English IV teacher in high school about a peer student who, the day before graduation, renounced his learning, renounced his faith, and left the seminary of Houston Baptist University. I was always struck by this story, about that point on the circle where you loop back around the other way to wherever you started’s anti-pole. To hear of the theme repeated, by a missionary no less, was a yarn I could not ignore.

“Don’t Sleep…” tracks Everett’s travel to the Pirahã village. The opening act covers the culture shock aspects of missionary work. He describes the hardships of life on the Amazon: malaria, caimans (carniverous reptiles who like some human flesh), anacondas, and a riverside-dwelling people who had, in the early stages, little compunction about killing him and his family when he threatened their access to the sugary liquor used as payment by riverside traders.

I classify this as travelogue. It’s fascinating, interesting, and ultimately paints the picture of a happy, clever, naughty, and loving people whose adaptation to their environment is a marvel to learn about.

An important finding in his study is that Everett discovers that Pirahã have an immediate experience bias. Simply, the Pirahã don’t talk about that which they have not experienced or which someone they know has not experienced. This extends into their language in fascinating directions: they don’t have terms for extended ancestors or those individuals’ beliefs, nor do they credit third-party knowledge. This bias as a taboo has completely shaped their world-view such that there is an immediacy to all utterance.

A simple point whereby to grasp the pervasivness of this taboo is that the Pirahã do not use relative clauses or indirect discourse (related linguistic concepts).

Consider: “Julia thinks he is happy” or in Latin, “Julia putat eum beatum esse,” or Dutch “Julia denkt dat hij gelukkig is.” In each of these languages something happens in that “what Julia thinks” bit. Latin changes the “He” to become “him” (“is / he” -> “eum / him”). Dutch inverts the regular verb order to push the verb to the end (“is” / “is”). In each of these cases something that cannot be directly interfaced with is encapsulated by Julia’s reckoning of it. This does not happen in Pirahã. The immediacy bias prevents utterances such as this.

Yet the Pirahã say: “He is happy. This is thought. Julia thinks this.” Come to think of it, maybe Hemingway was a Pirahã. There is an immediacy to each of these simple assertions where veracity can be ascertained. This kinda blew my mind. A language without indirection or subordination.

The extent of this bias is also shown in a different context, the Pirahã report things as either things experienced (I saw Bob in a boat fishing), hearsay (The women say Bob is fishing), or deduction (Bob, his bow and arrow, and his boat are gone, I bet he’s fishing).

Everett spends the second half of the book exploring how his research of Pirahã language fits against his profession as a linguist in academia.

I found the most fascinating chapter to be the chapter on recursion (I’m a programmer, what can I say) in the second half and how it was assumed to exist in all languages and to be a primary component of them (per Chomsky, undermined by Pirahã, contends Everett).

But what of what drew me to the story, the missionary converted? In some ways, it’s the logical conclusion of having worked with the Pirahã for thirty years enmeshed in a world with this experiential bias and the language that favors and advances it.

Dan’s translation of his encounter of Jesus is neither direct experience nor deduction, ergo it is would be in the hearsay register (Strike 1). Neither Dan nor his father had seen Jesus (Strike 2). The offer of the missionary was that Jesus was there to make them happy, but they already were happy (Strike 3).

Oh, and the night after they were told about Jesus, he appeared in their settlement, with a three-foot penis and proceeded to menace their women for sex (while they require “immediacy” dreams as well as supernatural beings do have a “real” place in their world! Think about the ramifications of that!). Needless to say the, to use a coined phrase, “come to Jesus” speech was not going the way the missionary planned.

The relevance of religion was absurd to them. Nature had been there, been good to them, as long as anyone could remember. The Pirahã don’t worry (didn’t even have a word for it!), they don’t fret, they don’t fear death, and seem to be completely happy with their lots and their culture where they talk about fishing, trysts, the river, and generally take care of one another.

I’m not about to propose some Rousseauan / Thoreauean paean to the noble savage, but unfettered by fear about a fate which no one has seen they seem very happy, healthy, and free from the decadent forks of ennui and malaise which seem to constantly drive the occidental to Paxil, Reality TV, and church.

This story is in the book. The book written by Dan Everett. This book opens the mind. The mind of Steven. The very one. Steven recommends the book. The book is by Dan Everett. The book is called “Don’t Sleep, there are Snakes.”

Update: Changed “things” to “thinks” per comment by Dev.

Marla… the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it, but you can’t.

From “Fight Club”

There are those people, those special, special people who as much as you find reason(s) to be repelled by them — their boorish talk, their penchant for racist assumptions, the way they treat special moments of your life as a roadbump on the way to saying what they wanted to say, the way they indiscreetly ogle women as you talk to them — somehow you just can’t excise their cancerous character from your life.

You damn them when you go home: “I can’t believe she said that, that snarky bitch” or “Did you see him talk the entire time to her D-cups?” and yet somehow, someway they fascinate us with their disregard for the rules. I’m pretty sure this has something to do with the power psyochpaths have among the general population, as an aside.

Making the curiosity cocktail all the more potent, occasionally, amidst all that slovenliness or booziness or smacking of gum or incessant smoking, is a silver beam of heroism, brilliance, style, or sex appeal that casts a glamour on you. “She donated how much to the children?” or “He saved the old lady by rushing her in his arms to the ER?”

You question your assumptions and hold on to a crumb of hope that they were really more like this good person and less like that hideous being you dislike. If only you could get more of that good quality and less of the other. Perhaps the only solution is to hang around them more so that you can see these great qualities. Yes, that’s right.

…And then that Jeckyll side comes back out and they infuriate and disappoint you anew.

I don’t know what the DSM-IV specification for this type of personality is, or what the specification is for the sucker who is mesmerized thereby, but it describes my relationship with the œuvre of Ayn Rand. She beguiles and then revolts me with a one-two rhythm befitting unto windshield wipers.

She has a seductive way of writing about the poetry of the industrial age. She describes coke being blasted in industrial funaces, burning crucibles of steel pouring golden, flaming liquified power as (handsome!) men in hard hats look on — square-jawed and draped in the sartorial perfection of the “Mad Men” era. And these titans, these thinkers, these doers, these über-beings bearing strong names like Howard, Dominique, and Dagny, they do great things and bend before nothing. They pay no mind to sycophants or reputation, they do what’s right by their own measure for their own benefit and don’t let any morality of bad faith “Bad faith (existentialism) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”) slow the locomotive of their own genius. Reading of their lives and their passionate existences can run a reader to the top of a lofty peak where s/he inhales pure air and see the sunrise of a better tomorrow.

But for these visions and vistas, for imagining Angelina Jolie as Dagny in “Mad Men” garb in the mini-series version, you may almost miss the philosophical system underneath that has some uncomfortable ends. State-run hospitals for, as Rand called them, “sub-normals” should be shut down. In her portrayals, female sexual fulfillment necessarily borders on hero-worship and effectively calls for her to seek to be overpowered. And those living through these contracting economic times certainly have reason to pause at Rand’s philosophy’s suggestion that a more deregulated economy is needed.

Like Marla from “Fight Club” cited above, in my teens I couldn’t shake this (sick?) fascination with Rand’s world. This lead to reading Rand’s non-fiction work and reading Barbara Branden’s memoir “The Passion of Ayn Rand.” Like an overoptimistic girlfriend, I thought that perhaps by understanding Rand’s history better I could find a way to get rid of those nasty bits and have her poetry without the nausea.

If anything, the biography made it harder to tolerate Rand’s reasoning lived as her own life. She would not give up smoking until she had lung cancer owing to “lack of sufficient evidence.” She forced her husband and her protégé’s wife to accept a open affair (I believe that’s called “open marriage” these-a-days) between her and the protégé, Nathaniel Branden. In later years, Her YouTube videos show a harsh, severe person who’s tolerance for dissent is non-existent and whose favorite tools for debate were refusal to engage, weeding out dissenting parties, and Soviet-style “disownments.” Amidst these character assassinations and purges she radiates a Nixonian aura of paranoia.

When I heard that a new Rand biography was in release I again felt that urge to visit Rand-land and see if an intrepid researcher had somehow found something that could make it all hang together for me. Heller’s biography is well-researched, revealing, and entirely compelling. Heller starts with Rand’s youth in Russia, where she sees the collapse of the Tsar, the rise of Kerensky, and the Bolshevik authoritarian crackdown and takeover. Heller also gives full consideration to Rand, née Rosenbaum’s Jewish identity. Her father’s business was seized by the Bolsheviks and she had to endure the debilitating “tolerance” edicts that ghettoized and marginalized Jews and generally used them as a source of money when the Tsar’s coffers ran light. Heller’s research into Rand’s mother (“a little bit pink”), a social climber and Communist collaborator explains the callow, infantilizing mother character so often present in Rand’s work. Rand’s female role model exploration is paired with an examination of the roots of her masculine paragon. Rand’s sexual / heroic / intellectual male protagonists (in Rand’s thought the intellectual man is the sexual ideal and is never separate from his own sense of heroism) derive from her favorite teenage books: French picaresques where dashing Western Europeans subjugate voodoo powers in darkest Africa, darkest India, or in the wastes of the lands of The Great Game. These facets of a tumultuous childhood full of idealistic reasoning and hero-identification help explain some of the wooden, absolutist characterization seen in her novels.

Heller’s research also presents how Rand was the benificiary of altruistic kindness of others. This is decidedly against the Rand ur-myth. Rand’s relatives in America shelter her, help her out, and provide her some of the opportunities that give her the chance encounters that net her a career in screenwriting. While it’s important to note that Rand never had anything handed to her and her own spark and initiative certainly were the core personality traits that allowed her to advance, she did not do it in a vacuum, an orphan struggling entirely unaided.

Heller’s presentation of the intellectual content of We the Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged all provide a fair synopsis of the philosophical underpinnings of the books and Heller deftly identifies and traces the thread of “a Romantic ‘sense of life’” that Rand considered the basis for living well and thinking clearly. Heller cogently presents this system and manages to do so without sounding awed or pronouncedly skeptical. She describes these ethical systems with the neutrality of someone explaining a catalytic converter and her restraint and balance is to be lauded.

After the zenith of Atlas Shrugged’s publication, the rest of the tale is anticlimax. The superstar, the public intellectual begins to be surrounded by sycophants and intellectual hollow men. Before long they make a world around her where everyone walks on eggshells, everyone agrees with She Who Must be Obeyed, and dissenters are cut loose of their social support system as a punishment for invoking her ire. While I’ll stop short of calling it a “cult,” the occasional insistence of breaking family ties, leaving spouses, or being forced to tolerate the sexual infidelities (“Hey there, Bob, Larry there is Suzy’s romantic ideal, so, uh, can you arrange to be home late on Thursday night? Don’t worry, it’s not infidelity, it’s her being true to her Romantic sense of life. Mm’kay?”) definitely shows a dangerous insularity.

It was only when I considered this third act that I understood Heller meant “the world [Rand] made” not as the world of the aspiring, selfish individualist portrayed in her writing, but the world of hollow toadies and purges. The world she made, indeed.

But where did this leave me in my quest to attempt to sort out this maddening woman’s writing? Heller helped me find roots in her thinking, continuity in her actions, and helped me see the person more as the person in herself minus the reverential apologia of the remnants of her circle. Rand was brave and right in many ways. She correctly limned Communism’s philosophical implications, she decried racism (as uncaptalistic!), she dared be an open atheist, she portrayed strong female protagonists more interested in careers than suburbs with children and iceboxes in the 40’s, she was pro-choice, and she dared bring discussions of “rougher” sexual desire to the popular mind in some ways heralding the identity politics coming in the 70’s and 80’s. But she was also a real, vital, person. A person who cherished rationality so dearly that the hint that she was irrational was a slap to the face. She was a person who clung so tightly to the syllogism that she couldn’t see her blind spots. She overused amphetamines. In short, she was a person of her times, a times a contradictory mess.

Accordingly her works reflect this person. The works are both sublime and horrific, hopeful and cynical, egalitarian and oligarchaïc. I think perhaps time and Heller have made it more easy for me to accept that beautiful work can have ugly side-effects and brilliant people can have tragic flaws. If anything, Heller presents us Rand in full human-scale relief, and I think the young Rand would have very much appreciated that.

First things first, this book combined several of my interests: grimoires, obscure Latin incantations, and a research topic that teases the boundary between the fantastick, the supernatural, and the 17th century. Gothick in its approaches, the book also features a mysterious key, a fallen garden, and the tetragrammaton.

In this, the book continues a trend that surfaced after “Tha da Vinci Code,” “The Rule of Four,” “The Historian”, e. al: a geek superans discovers a mystery, researches, comes to the boundaries of the rational and flirts with lethal danger.

In this “Physick,” the researcheuse is Connie Goodwin, a New England native, daughter to a spiritual healer mother of “free spirit” who has just passed her candidacy to the Ph. D history program at Harvard. As she is called away to tend her familial homestead in the vicinity of Salem, she hopes to begin research on her dissertation.

In another thread, the tale of Deliverance Dane, a Salem woman fated to be of the number murdered in the name of superstition during the witch trials, gives a view into the life of a woman of the age who is also a healer.

Through events unlikely, or preternaturally ordained, Connie discovers the end of Deliverance’s tale and works backwards against the aging of historical record, the tapping foot of her advisor, and sans the interest of her healer mother.

The strongest point, in my opinion is the view Howe gives us of a pre-scientific world. Many moderns are quick to judge those judging in the Salem prosecution, but fail to grasp that their world lacked a mode of parceling the unknown into manageable, nameable blocks of unknown. Working this into a popular novel is an achievement. Where the focus of the story is here, I feel it is at its strongest and deepest.

The characters operate within a fairly small world and thus the plot’s conclusion, thus, is telegraphed early, but it’s a nice enough yarn, so I was not overly irked. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel like I really got to know any of the characters with much depth (beyond the eponymous Mrs. Dane) and somehow that left me a bit unsatisfied.

This strikes me as a perfect “travelin’” book. If you’re catching the SFO to JFK this would be the perfect book — or better yet if your destination were Logan and Boston Towne.

When I was in junior high I read Stephen King’s Firestarter. The preface opens with the immortal opening line fram Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451:

It was a pleasure to burn.

This quote has such a promise of violence (psychological, physical, and otherwise) and pride in the destruction that the book is already filled with a great tension that does not release until the very final word — and this is by virtue of the very first sentence!

This image, from the forthcoming graphic novel interpretation of Bradbury’s work promises a great read.

During my blogging hiatus towards late April and Early May, I finished my fourth Latin class. During the class we covered the larger parts of Books I and II of the Æneid.

But we did not finish them. In a move that can only be considered arch-nerdly, I am reading the ending of these two on my own. In some ways, with several grand sunk, it seems like a very bad use of my funds to basically let all the knowledge leak out over the summer. On the other hand, couldn’t I be reading something else, something that doesn’t require a dictionary nearby?

Sigh.

So, I bought a 3-pack of those lovely brown-cardboard Moleskine mini-notebooks and am cruising through, picking up where we left off so that I can see what happens.

This is like that time when I was taking French III and we had read the first half of Patrick CAUVIN’s «Monsier Papa». What did I do on my flight to San Jose (that ultimately got me hired by Cisco)? Yep, I checked out the book from the library and read it on the plane.

Getting back into reading the Æneid was a bit of slow going, at first, but things started trucking along eventually and now I’m at a very critical point where Pyrrus encounters old king Priam (things don’t look to be too promising for old king versus son of Achilles).

As many of you may know I’ve been writing a lot. I mean a lot lately. One of the great things about being a humanities guy who knows high tech is that you know better ways than “email my gmail account a backup copy of this document that’s leeching my soul” to handle version control.

I used subversion.

A few weeks into my first project I became really aware of git, Linus Torvalds’ distributed version control system. My friends, the times that “getting interested in a new technology” has turned my KISS project into a monumental yak-shave is beyond count, so I resisted git. I even complained of people hassling me to shave that Yak.

Like Stimpy, people kept taunting me with the red, jolly, candy-like button of git.

History Eraser Button (Ren and Stimpy) - Free videos are just a click away

In the middle of this, I found the PDF version of Travis Swicegood’s Pragmatic Version Control Using Git. I decided that instead of a massive yak-shave, trying to piece together bits of web wisdom and screencasts, I would go a chapter a day on Travis’ book.

So, each day I scribbled notes from a chapter in my Moleskine:

Until I finished. Well, I’ll be humdingered if Travis’ book didn’t teach me git. I have to admit I was really scared by commands named “rebase” and flags like “—hard” (sounds permanent, you know?). Travis really focuses on the important parts of git:

1. Git is a distributed version control. This means you have the entire history versus the latest instance, like in Subversion
2. Git loves branches. Branches are great because they let you try things, foo-up fast, and then move on
3. When a branch becomes más macho, you may want to move it into the base. Instead of merging all those changes in, move in the finished product, that’s rebase.
4. Merging, by the way is like a staggered rebase
5. Remotes are like virtual branches, you can merge them into your local stuff.

There’s some subtleties around this, but walking out with these understandings, the basics of branch, commit, and clone really got me plenty far. I even set up a github project for Latin + LaTeX + Textmate utilities.

Travis also uses github to give you your “work at home” directories. That means if a chapter feels familiar to you, you can skim it until you feel like you want to work along. When you wish to do that, simply check out the code for that chapter and follow along. I like that the book is flexible and allows you to map your level of expertise in.

Personally, I didn’t miss the paper version (mostly because i make notes anyway) so having the PDF was sufficient. It’s definitely a good book at a reasonable price.

So, while I will certainly concede that Travis’ book is a yak shave opportunity, it’s a pretty tiny yak. Take it a chapter (< 1 hour to read each one) at a time and you’ll have a really great, new tool under your fingers in no time.

When I was in high school, I remember seeing this copy of The Stranger and being immediately blown away by the absolute weirdness of this stage troupe.

Aside: Does anyone know what group this is, who took the photo, what it’s about? I think it’s the Bantam edition.

I then proceeded to check the book out and I honestly can say I didn’t understand Mersault ( does anyone? ) and having read the book at least twice more and once in its native language, I’m still completely baffled by Mersault, his motivations, his identity. Mersault’s wedding plan, Mersault’s bliss over tablets of chocolate and cigarettes, his deadly flat attitude towards marriage, and ultimately his dispassionate choices standing on the sand.

As far as existential icons I prefer the doctor from The Plauge or Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment but there’s something about Mersault that haunts me - and it may be something to do with this cover.

After I got back from SXSW I needed some hard-core abandoning involvement in the world time. I had taken a peek at Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, which I had ordered some time back but had not yet read, and he first chapter managed to get me involved.

It’s a gothic story that had a hook that immediately engaged me. A shy archivist engages a famous, aged, literary master to write her biography. This task is slightly more daunting than usual because the author has achieved fame and renown for giving incorrect details to those who have asked to know her biography. She explains how their eyes change from demanding and seeking the truth, to wanting “the warm comfort of a fat lie”. The writer, Vida Winter, suggests that within the recent past she has been approached by a guileless man who plaintively had asked that she “simply tell the truth” and that the need to speak the truth, perhaps in conjunction with the disease that is eating her within, prompted her to make an honest go of it.

…but she needs the rigor of an archivist to hold her to telling the true tale, and not weaving the scraps of stories that she still has in her satchel into another façade to enchant, entrance, and mislead the hearer.

Good set up, no?

True to a Gothic tale there are secret gardens and a decrepit manse in Yorkshire, men slowly maddening in locked rooms, ladies carried away to the asylum, a fire, children of questionable birth and the mystery of what would happen if your sense of identity were bound in two, not one beings ( more common than one might think ).

In all, it was a very fine read where the Modernist experiment in unreliable narrators telling tales ( Mrs. Dalloway or Memento? ) was wrapped in another layer, having the character put the unreliable tale in a crucible and ask the reader to work with her to distill away the confusion.

I recommend it.

Letterpress: 1a. The process of printing from a raised inked surface.

source

I’ve watched it now three times and I find a great peace in the slow narration and accentation. Makes me want to visit the northeast again.

It reminded me of Jessie Ferguson’s installation hosted by Make magazine.

Reading this list I was put in mind of wanting to buy some of these texts. I have a great number of them already in paper-back, but was wondering where would I go if I were to want, say, a copy of the Republic in hardback? Or perhaps The Collected Aristotle?

I could see something like estate-sale staple, “The harvard classics”, but I always thought they were a bit too small and pretentious.

Is there some other ( insert: book ) solution?

Update:

The League pointed out the Everyman’s Library collection (which I had completely forgotten about). I remember when this came out because on BoingBoing there was a lot of fan-ism around the idea that for 2 grand you could basically have a collection of some of the finest works of the world.