Guilty Reading Pleasures

My boyfriend suggested yesterday that we watch the miniseries of Stephen King's "The Stand," because he liked the book. Since we've only been dating for a year, I was shocked by his casual confession of such a deep and personal flaw.

It reminded me of an NPR story from last summer, where legitimate writers, supposedly people of taste, revealed their guilty summer reading pleasures. Writer Joshua Braff admitted that he enjoys John Irving, and Karen Abbott confessed to drawing insight from "Destiny Times Six: An Astrologer's Casebook."

At the time, my reaction was to applaud the courage of these writers. We are all flawed humans, weak to resist the temptation of mysteries where cats help find clues. Why not admit the weird stuff we're into and try to live openly, relating to each other on a more honest and authentic level?

I'll tell you why not. Pretensions and affectations, elitism and snobbery allow us to create an image of what we want to be, and when we aspire to be the sort of people who read Tolstoy and Jose Saramago, with an occasional McSweeney's thrown in for comic relief, we affirm the value of good literature over bestsellers.

None of us is perfect, but when we publicly air our flaws to make them seem normal and acceptable, we as a culture, sink deeper into the abyss of "pop". If an NPR reviewer tells you it's okay to read romance novels, you no longer have to feel guilty about it, so what will your new guilty pleasure be? Reader's Digest condensed classics? Reading "Playboy" actually for the articles?

Go on reading your Anne Rice, my dears, but please keep it to yourselves.

Common "Knowledge"

I am always a little bit disturbed when I find out that a piece of common knowledge is actually false. Everyone knows that it's good to drink six cups of water a day and that Neil Armstrong said "One small step for a man, one giant leap for man kind," even though neither is true, and it's upsetting to have your strongly held beliefs shaken, no matter how trivial they may be.

We've all heard about the study where scientists poked electrodes into the pleasure centers of rats' brains so that they would be pleasantly stimulated every time they pulled a lever. We also "know" that the rats pulled the lever at the expense of every other activity until they eventually starved to death.

Not so. It turns out that the scientists, while they did conclude that the rats would have starved themselves to death, did not actually let the rats die. In a rare instance of psychologists not being as creepy to animals as they could be, they removed the electrodes before the rats starved to death. It's actually kind of sweet. But the important thing is that now you know, and your set of beliefs is a little bit closer to the truth.

Sorry, Jim Emerson

It seems that I was wrong about Jim Emerson. He's actually a pretty neat guy. He was responsible for the concept of today's panel, Argument Clinic: Why Discussion Fails, in which Jim Emerson, William Nack, and Tina Packer tried to explain the phenomenon of people whose beliefs cannot be altered by logical argumentation.

Scientists who don't believe in global warming, birthers, Fox News "journalists," millennial cultists, and a man who goes by Second Amendment Joe seem to become more entrenched in their ridiculous opinions the more they are confronted with logical opposition. This can be quite upsetting, and if nothing else, the panel made us feel a tad less alone in the belief that a "fair and balanced" interpretation of reality needn't necessarily account for the opinions of crazy people.

Tip: Quote Hitler at People

I have a new favorite technique for arguing, dear readers. It goes like this: An obnoxious person offers an opinion, and you quote Hitler agreeing with them.

For example...

Guy "When the government uses our tax dollars to pay for welfare, poor people have no incentive to find jobs instead of mooching off the system forever."

Me "As a Christian, I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice."

Guy "Who said that?"

Me "Hitler."

I am looking forward to using this technique on my anarchist friend, who likes to criticize the democratic process by saying that if people are not fit to rule themselves, we have no reason to believe they are fit to choose rulers. My response to this is "Sooner will a camel pass through a needle's eye than a great man be discovered by an election."

I do not suggest doing this to people whose company you enjoy. I am fully willing to admit that the technique is fallacious and irritating, but as Hitler would say, "I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few."

CWA 63

For as long as I can remember, Roger Ebert has attended CU's Conference on World Affairs every spring to host the Cinema Interruptus event, where he would screen great movies, pausing every few minutes to comment, discuss interesting points, and take questions from the audience.

No longer capable of speech, Ebert will not be attending this year's conference (happening next Monday through Friday). He will be succeeded as Interruptus host by a fellow called Jim Emerson, who has chosen A Serious Man as his debut film.

Now I like the Coen brothers as much as the next person, but I fear that, if Mr. Emerson takes A Serious Man as his starting point, it will only be a few years until we are debating cinematographic tropes in Eclipse.

It is only fair to note that Jim Emerson has hosted the Cinema Interruptus twice in the past. I did not attend but have been told that it was not entirely uninformative. Still, Ebert will be missed, and I can only hope that the pain of his absence will be mitigated by Friday's colloquium on Everything Sounds Smarter and Sexier with a British Accent.

Noncognitivism May be a Downer

It occurred to me just now that being a noncognitivist is perhaps not as much fun as I had hoped.

A noncognitivist believes that moral statements have no truth value; 'killing people is bad,' means something along the lines of 'don't kill people, it makes me sad.' This is appealing for many reasons. Noncognitivism allows us to avoid the messy question of what kind of fact a moral fact is while explaining why we generally want things to happen when we judge them to be morally good. It wraps up the entirety of ethics into a convenient little package as delectable as a tiny blue box from Tiffany.

However, I am also a determinist, and those who still believe in free will sometimes ask me "Don't you find it depressing to believe that everything you think and do was predetermined from the beginning of time?" I usually respond by saying "I think and do certain things because I'm a smart, educated person with the same basic preferences as any decent person. There's nothing depressing about that. What's scary is the notion that my beliefs and actions are not caused by something, that everything I do is random and meaningless and unrelated in any but a coincidental manner to everything ever. How can you free willers live with yourselves?"

You can see my dilemma. I do certain things because I have certain preferences, and I have certain preferences, because... I can't say "Because I'm a rational person;" for the most part, preferences can't be characterized as rational or irrational. Nor can I say "Because I'm a good person," since the word 'good' already refers to my preferences.

There is a physical cause of my preferences, but noncognitivism can offer no reason for them. This is a little bit sad. If you ask a moral realist "Why do you want me to jump in that pond and rescue you from drowning?" he will say "Because it's the right thing to do." If you ask a noncognitivist, all he can say is "DO IT."

Putting aside for a moment the relative persuasiveness of these arguments, it makes me sad to not have reasons.

Of course, there are many things which are both sad and true, and my preference for being correct still overrides my preference for being happy. I therefore remain a noncognitivist. But I sincerely wish, dear readers, that I could tell you why.

Return of the Toads

Something important has happened, dear readers. Something so important as to drag me out of blog hibernation after over a year and a half of ignoring you, which makes this very awkward and so should assure you of the extreme urgency of this announcement.

I'm sure you all remember the 80s cult classic documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, which educated us about the plague of toads that began taking over Australia when they were artificially introduced to an environment with no natural predators. It introduced us to the dangers of messing about in ecology as well as cool stuff to do with cane toads, e.g. feeding them cat food, swerving to hit them in your truck, and smoking them.

So you will be as excited as I to discover that there is now a sequel. Cane Toads: The Conquest is almost certainly an epic adventure punctuated by trenchant insights into human (and toad) nature. I have not yet seen the film, but rest assured that you will be alerted the moment it hits Netflix. And if you are friends with a high school biology teacher, ask him or her if you can borrow it.

Racist Soda Pop

One would suppose that a store named Giant Eagle would sell only the classiest of groceries, but one would be mistaken. Wikipedia has this to say about Cherikee Red:

"Most commonly found in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the soda is rarely found outside of these two states. Despite not being as commercially successful as other popular cherry sodas, it has a popular nostalgic value within the distribution region of Cotton Club bottling." 

When in Rome... ?

A Small Room and Big Catsup

After crepes yesterday, Trae and I spent the afternoon at the Carnegie museum. 

Having seen the Sistine Chapel, I am less struck by the art historical import of a mediocre Monet than I would have been a few years ago, but Trae, who was raised in Georgia, marveled at the thickness of the paint and took pictures of himself pointing at his favorite Rothko, reminding me of what it is like to be young.  

The collection of American art featured an impressive portrait by Sargent and a landscape by Kensett, my decidedly favorite luminist, but the highlight of the visit was 'Opera for a Small Room,' an installation by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. 

As my dear readers surely are aware, hermit shacks are some of my favorite things, and the afore mentioned small room is a plywood hermit shack with glassless windows through which viewers can peer to the soundtrack of opera interspersed with commentary, trains, hypnotism, and rain. The idea was conceived when the artists bought the record collection that once belonged to R. Dennehy from a thrift store in a small town in British Columbia. A plaque outside the gallery explained that Cardiff and Miller were curious about the seeming contradiction of a man from a small town listening to opera, so they created a fictional narrative and environment to explain it. I enjoyed their charming condescension towards the populace of rural Canada and found the installation to be engaging and likable. I have only

 two points of critique. 

First, we shall assume that the half gallon Heinz tomato can hanging in the center of the shack, displayed in the museum's Heinz Gallery was just a tasteless coincidence, but in a town where the population listens to the symphony in Heinz Hall and worships in Heinz Chapel, we may be in error by assuming that anything is too sacred to be used as a vehicle of catsup promotion. Second, the artists gave R. Dennehy no place to sleep. 

 On a different note, I am glad my dear readers have discovered that "blog" questions are never as simple as they appear. It is most probable that the last roll will cancel out the one before it, and it is also most probable that the last roll will add to the sequence. That is why dominance arguments are more complicated in infinite partitions.  

The Matter/Antimatter Tetrahedron Game

Category theory was abstract, mathy, and difficult, but at least I wasn't losing money studying it. 

This week we're learning game theory, and I've already lost fifty cents. Here's the game: 

You need an odd number of people, each with fifty cents to bet. Each person has a tetrahedron (google it, ignorami) with the sides labeled m+ (for mutron), m- (for anti-mutron), e- (for electron), and e+ (for positron). For ten minutes, roll the tetrahedron and list the particles that land on the bottom. As you go along, m+ and m-cancel each other out when they land next to each other, and e- and e+ similarly cancel each other out. E.g. if you roll the sequence 

m+, e-, m+, m-

the last two cancel, and it turns into 

m+, e-. 

Otherwise, the last roll is simply added onto to sequence. After ten minutes, stop and place your bets. Then do a final roll. Bet on whether most people's final roll will cancel out the previous roll in their sequence or will add onto the sequence. 

How would you bet?  

Pittsburgh Crepes

Ditching class isn't nearly as satisfying when you don't really need to be there anyway and are, in fact, going to great lengths to stay in school long after the less academically motivated masses have fled.

But let me tell you, dear readers, that if there was a Crepes Parisiennes within walking distance of Mount Holyoke, I would ditch class every afternoon, and it would be very satisfying indeed. 

Scary Things: A Partially Ordered Set

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the planes that crash in the mountains are always the tiny planes. The ones with two tiny seats on either side of the tiny isle and propellers on the wings.

Waiting for just such a plane at the Islip airport Sunday, the fortyish other passengers and I eyed each other appraisingly, trying to guess who would live and who would be eaten. We made our final picks as we climbed the stairs that folded out of the side of the plane and saw where people were sitting. The scrappy man in a suit jacket was old but seated next to the emergency exit. He lives. The couple in the front row, definitely going through the windshield. 

For an hour and a half, our seats vibrated like type-A massage chairs until the plane approximated landing by plunging and thrashing its way into Pittsburgh, and this is what I learned: 

Tiny planes are a field trip to the llama farm compared with category theory. 

 

 

Go to the Airport

I like traveling, and I like airports. You can shop at the airport, eat greasy food, and hang out, waiting for something to happen. In many ways, going to the airport is like going to the mall. But airports are better for the following reasons:
1. You can sit on the floor.
2. You get to take your shoes off.
3. You can eat alone at a restaurant without fellow diners assuming you've been stood up by your date.
4. You can be fairly certain that no one is carrying a bomb.
That is why we should all spend more time in airports. Thank you.

SEX and the CITY

I've been waiting for something of sufficient import to comprise the subject matter of my return to the "blog," but unfortunately "blogging" is like relationships in many ways, one of which is that you sometimes have to settle for a subpar subject. So.

I watched the Sex and the City movie this afternoon. I went for old time's sake, because I occasionally miss the vapid antics of my high school days, when I watched the show. Trae only made it to the scene where Mr. Big revealed Carrie's gigantic new closet, and all the girls in the theater gasped a simultaneous 'Woah.' He spent the rest of the movie in the mall bar, mourning the fall of western civilization, so I was on my own.

It was a bad movie. Obvioulsy. But even for a bad movie, it was bad. And it got me wondering what I, along with the sixty other twenty-something women in the movie theater, were doing watching a movie about the sex lives of forty-something women at four in the afternoon. Here's what I came up with:

As twenty-something women, it's important for us to feel like we'll always be this way. No matter how old we get, we'll always be sexy, smart, fashionable, and in the middle of some fabulously exciting romantic adventure. If we weren't able to believe this lie, we'd never have any fun. Who cares about designer shoes when you're confronting the inevitability of aging and death?

For years, while we were watching the show, Sex and the City helped us lie to ourselves. It helped us to believe that, twenty years in the future, we could be like Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte. And of course, anything farther in the future was beyond comprehension.

Sex and the City, the show, created a happy bubble of ignorance for it's viewers, and the movie shattered that bubble. When (SPOILER ALERT) Carrie married Mr. Big, it was all over. What can we imagine her doing now? What's left for Carrie? The movie ends with Carrie getting married, but the Sex and the City story ends with...

Carrie having sex with one man for the rest of her life, until age renders him impotent. He is too proud to admit to his problem, and she believes that her increasingly saggy posterior is the problem. When Carrie goes through menopause, she yells a lot, and Mr. Big wishes he'd stayed with his much younger third wife. When Mr. Big comes down with senile dementia, Carrie puts him in an assisted living facility and visits him every other week, until he forgets who she is. Samantha's cancer comes back, and she is the first to die. Then Miranda. Carrie gets knee replacements. She only wears sneakers with orthopedic inserts now, but sometimes she hobbles into her gigantic closet to look at all of the beautiful things she wore in her hayday around the turn of the century. On one such occasion, she trips over the tennis balls on the feet of her walker, falls, and is unable to get up. She dies, surrounded by her shoes, her beautiful babies, the loves of her life. Charlotte dies a week after Carrie's funeral, possibly of grief.

The last scene of the movie shows the four girls drinking their traditional cosmopolitans at Samantha's 50th birthday party. It's a feeble attempt at convincing us that things are really still the same. It's too late. By the end of the movie, we already know the truth. Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte are going to get ugly and die, and so are we. Sex and the City is not just a poorly written movie with insufficient character development and confusing transitions. It's an unwanted and unintentional reality check.